Lord Leverhulme's Shelf Life

            You have probably had the experience while shopping of stumbling upon the perfect necktie or coffee pot only after you have bought and paid for another.  The phenomenon is well known to writers as well.  Indeed, it is something of a rule of thumb that a researcher will find the perfect ornament for his argument only after he has made it.  In a recent talk at the American Philosophical Society I touched briefly upon the catastrophes that befell London in 1665 (the Plague year) and 1666 (year of the Great Fire).  These events launched an epidemic of apocalyptic terror among the general populace, and an orgy of superstition that one would more easily attribute to the Age of Savonarola than to that of Newton. (See, after buying of course, The Dark Side of the Enlightenment, p. 53.)

            My personal home library, though considerably downsized, is still too large for the space available, and far too many of my books must be double parked, as it were.  The truth is that I no longer remember where many of my “back row” volumes are stored.  Last week when I took down some volumes of Browning for blog-related purposes, I found lurking behind in the dark recess my long-missed set of the principal works of T. H. Huxley, the Victorian biologist, and a great scientific popularizer of his day.  His ferocious defense of the theory of evolution earned him the nickname “Darwin’s bulldog”.  He also coined the concept of the intellectual “agnostic.”  The book I plucked out was the first volume of his Collected Essays (1892), with the general title Method and Results, and the first essay within it (not counting a brief but most interesting autobiography) is entitled “On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge”.  It happens to be a talk or “lay sermon” first delivered in the year 1866, and Huxley seized the opportunity of the date—precisely two centuries following the London disasters alluded to in my first paragraph—to emphasize the progress made by the scientific mind in freeing itself from superstition.  How elegantly some plundered sentences from Huxley might have stiffened my own much less competent talk.

            But that was only the beginning of what I got from stumbling upon one of my own books.  In recent months I have been in close touch with my old Oxford friend Andrew Seth.  Andrew is now a writer of books in the field of business history, a subject on which he may be presumed to know whereof he speaks, as he is a retired CEO of one of his nation’s business giants, Unilever (Britain).  The founder of the vast commercial empire of which Unilever Britain is but one modern fiefdom was William H. Lever (1851-1925), who in one of his lesser roles unifies the disparate, not to say incoherent, elements of my story so far.  My own edition of the works of “doubting” Thomas Huxley once belonged to this man.

            I have no memory or where or when I bought them.  I can see from my bookplate that they came into my library in the 1970s, but it is the bookplates that were already in the volumes that are of interest.  Lever’s career, while extraordinary, in one sense typifies the biographical pattern of a number of Anglo-American captains of industry.  "Rags-to-riches" overstates it, but points in the right direction.  He was born in Bolton, in the north of England, the son of shopkeepers.  (Like Margaret Thatcher’s parents, they ran a modest grocery store).  With a brother he founded a firm, imaginatively called Lever Brothers, that after a while gained an international strangle hold on the soap market.  The rest is history.  There can be few twentieth-century lives in the Anglo-American world that Lord Leverhulme didn't touch.  I retained from my childhood years none of the wonderful old Irish ballads my grandfather used to sing—strange versions of “Barbara Allen” and “The Golden Vanity” among them—but my head is still cluttered with a pre-television soap jingle written by the Lever Brothers’ ad men:

            Singin’ in the bathtub, singin’ for joy,

            Singin’ the song of--Life-Boy.*

            Singin’ in the bathtub, cuz I know

            Life-Boy really stops B. O.

William Lever was a serious practicing Christian, a business innovator, and a Liberal politician.  The photograph at the head of the essay shows him in the ceremonial regalia of the Mayor of Bolton--that office being one of dozens of civic responsibilities he undertook at various times.  He was something of a utopian social reformer.  He became one of the most munificent philanthropists of the twentieth century.  The continuing good works of the Leverhulme Trust are of a kind and scope  that Americans perhaps more easily associate with the Carnegie, Ford, Guggenheim, and Mellon Foundations—among numerous others.

  





          The career of Lord Leverhulme—Hulme being the family name of his wife—can be traced through the bookplates in my volumes of Huxley.  There are three of them—the first on the inner board, the second and third on the recto and verso of the fly leaf.  He began (1) simply as W. H. Lever, Thornton Manor, Thornton Hough, Cheshire.  But when he was knighted in 1911 he naturally recorded his new style (2): Sir W. Hesketh Levert, Baronet.  He came up with a fine cock-a-doodle-doo heraldic device and a suitable Latin Motto: Mutare Vel Timere Sperno—I disdain to change course or be fearful.  When he was elevated to the peerage (3) a couple of elephants with Tudor rosettes joined the rooster, for the former humble Mr. Lever was now a Viscount, “Baron Leverhulme of Bolton-le-Moors.”  For the past several decades, the book has been back in the hands of commoners (4), and any commoner with his own printing press can make his own baronial bookplate.

all bookmark photos by Joan Fleming

            It says something about British culture that a soap baron would amass a splendid general library, or that one of his modern successors should take up the writing of business history in his retirement.  I am not sure one would find many parallels in this country. 

 Life-Boy flanked by Life-Dad and Life-Mum

*The brand was of course Lifebuoy, but my mind’s orthography insisted on Life-Boy.  Anyway buoy, supposing it might have been in my spoken vocabulary, was pronounced boó-ee in my parts.

           

Murder into Art

A passage in Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield has become a familiar adage: “I love everything that is old; old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines.”  Two items in that catalogue—old friends and old books—have gained a particular significance in my life.  A good deal of my daily reading, accordingly, is re-reading.  And sometimes, without my conscious planning, a pattern emerges.  In the past couple of weeks the theme might be called Murder into Art, though I was strangely slow to apprehend it.

 Dreiser

            I’ve had on my bedside table for the past couple of weeks a copy of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925).  It’s a book I like to dip into now and again.  Only in middle life did I come to appreciate Dreiser, when I read his remarkable “Trilogy of Desire”.  If you are interested in understanding American capitalism, I know of nothing better.  Sister Carrie is a masterpiece, too, but there is a depth to An American Tragedy that makes me return to parts of it repeatedly.  It revels in moral ambiguity, and in its exposure of the limitations of human agency. 

Don't go near the water

           Its anti-hero Clyde Griffiths is a young man of ambition and ability but of limited social capital.  He gets his working-class girlfriend pregnant.  She demands that he marry at the very moment that  a far more desirable sexual and social opportunity appears in his life.  Clyde plots to break free by murdering his knocked-up factory girl in a fake boating accident.  After hundreds of pages of legal and courtroom stuff that walks a fine line between the riveting and the tedious, he is convicted and executed.   Dreiser “based” the novel in an actual murder case in Herkimer County, New York, in 1906, in which one Chester Gillette was convicted of having drowned his pregnant girlfriend Grace Brown.  The case had been a sensation, and Dreiser researched the voluminous journalistic literature with meticulous care.  His fiction frequently transposes the “historical reality” with extraordinary fidelity, down to textual details of the betrayed girl’s pathetic letters.  Yet he morally confiscates his material.  It is one of the brilliances of the novel that Clyde might actually be “innocent.”   Art imitates life, but enjoys (or simply takes) liberties that, if we are willing to play along, change everything.

Browning

            Another long and challenging book I found myself coincidentally rereading makes that claim explicitly.  It was probably in the summer of 1860 that Robert Browning stumbled upon a curious old book in a Florentine flea market.  Because of the color of its aged vellum binding, it would come to be known to literary history as the “Old Yellow Book”.  The Old Yellow Book was a unique anthology, or perhaps dossier, of pamphlets concerning a sensational murder case in Rome at the beginning of 1698.  Count Guido Franceschini was charged with the homicide of his estranged young wife Pompilia and her parents, Pietro and Violante Comparini.  Franceschini was found guilty and beheaded; his four plebeian henchmen were hanged.

The Old Yellow Book--now at Balliol College

            Most of the pamphlets are legal documents, written in the repellent technical Latin of the lawyers, prepared for Franceschini’s trial.  But if you have the learning and the stamina to make your way through them—and Browning had lots of both--they tell a story, or rather several stories.  There is a mismatched married couple—an arrogant and brutal aristocrat joined in an arranged marriage with a thirteen-year-old girl.  There is the girl herself, practically a cipher, but a template of pathos.  There are the girl’s shadowy and grasping parents looking out for the main chance.  There is a worldly young cleric with a penchant for abused young wives.  From every signature fold of the Old Yellow Book rises the faint sickly sweet smell of a Roman society and a Roman Church at an exquisite moment of decay.

            From this unique, antique scrapbook Browning drew the materials for what most people consider his masterpiece—the long, complicated, and very difficult poem entitled The Ring and the Book.  The title expresses by way of metaphor Browning’s theory of the relation of “art” to “truth”.  A fine goldsmith making a ring must stiffen his pure gold with a firmer alloy to make it strong enough to withstand his hammers and incising tools.  Once the desired form is achieved, however, he burns away the alloy in an acid bath, leaving the ring perfect and pure.  For Browning the Old Yellow Book was the alloy, the story he made from it the perfect ring.

            In the latter years of his life, and for decades following his death in 1889 Browning commanded the celebrity of a rock star.  There were Browning Societies both in England and America, with many flourishing local chapters.  So great was the poet’s vogue only a hundred years ago, and so highly regarded was this poem of his, that the Old Yellow Book itself was reproduced in facsimile and also in English translation as one of the volumes in Everyman’s Library—a collection designed to publish the thousand books deemed most necessary for an educated English reader.

            But I own neither the facsimile published by the Carnegie Institution (1908) nor the translation in Everyman’s Library.  What is on my shelf might be called the New Puce Book.  This is a 1970 reprint of The Old Yellow Book as translated and commented upon by John Marshall Gest for the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1925 (same year as Dreiser’s novel).  John Marshall Gest (1859-1934) was an eminent Philadelphia attorney, later a judge, and a rare specimen of a now probably vanished Anglo-American type: the lawyer/man of the letters.  It’s still very much worth reading The Lawyer in Literature (1913), which gathers together several of his studies of individual writers.

            This time I actually read Gest’s commentary on the Old Yellow Book.  He is a Browningite, but no Browningolator.  He waxes indignant at the poet’s goldsmithing procedures, and his flippant attitude towards musty Latin briefs.  As a legal historian he finds them fascinating, particularly in their casual assumptions concerning judicial torture, and he rather debunks Browning’s versions of the characters in the drama.  Of course when history battles with poetry, poetry is bound to win.  Murder becomes more respectable when it is Art.

The Admirable Crichton

  

 He knew it all

          On the assumption that my views of the Ferguson grand jury or the resignation of the Secretary of Defense would command about as much enthusiasm among my readership as those of the anointed punditocracy have stimulated in me, I shall take up the compelling subject of the Admirable Crichton.  If you have heard of the Admirable Crichton at all, which may be unlikely, it is probably in connection with J. M. Barrie’s once-famous play of that name (1903).  The Admirable Crichton is an imaginative satire on the theme of the British class system, sort of a combination of Downton Abbey and Lord of the Flies.  It is rather brilliant, but now probably hopelessly “dated”.

            Barrie’s “Crichton” is an imaginary butler in the stately home of a limousine liberal peer, the Earl of Loam; but his name alludes to an actual if shadowy historical figure of the sixteenth century, the Scotch polymath James Crichton (ca. 1560- ca. 1583).  Youthful genius too soon cut down is one of cultural history’s recurrent tragic themes.  Think of John Keats, “one whose Name was writ in Water,” dead of consumption at twenty-five.  Closer in spirit to the original Admirable Crichton, and indeed a probable biographical model, was the great Renaissance occultist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), although he made it all the way to thirty.  Pico knew everything there was to know, and so did the Admirable Crichton.  The laudatory adjective must be understood in the sense of the Latin admirabilis—that which inspires wonder, something marvelous.

            Young James came of good stock.  His mother was a Stuart of the Stuarts, and his father was for a time under the reign of Queen Mary the Lord Advocate of Scotland.  The youngster studied the trivium at Perth before going on to take a precocious baccalaureate degree at Saint Andrew’s.  At the age of eight Crichton’s eloquence in his native vernacular was compared with that of Demosthenes and Cicero.  By fifteen he knew “perfectly” Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic (presumably classical), and Syriac; and commanded native conversational fluency in Spanish, French, Italian, “Dutch”, (i.e., German, Deutsch), Flemish, and, oh, “Sclavonian”.

            That was the mere beginning of Crichton’s admirableness.  He was also a champion athlete, a horseman, a fencer, a dancer, a singer of rare voice, and the master of most known wind and string instruments.  His St. Andrews professor, Rutherford, a noted Aristotelian commentator, judged him to be one of the leading philosophers of the era.

            The cultural ties between Scotland and France were particularly strong, and it was quite natural that the adolescent Crichton, having sucked Scottish erudition dry, should move on to the College of Navarre at the University of Paris.  Here the young Scotsman cut a broad swath, though according to his jealous fellows his arenas of greatest activity were the taberna and the lupanar, rather than the lecture hall.  Young Crichton did like the ladies, who in turn found him most--admirable.

            Unfortunately our sole source for the more dramatic episodes in Crichton’s short life is Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromartie, the mad philologist and English translator of Rabelais.  This worthy is given to exaggeration and even, perhaps, fabrication; but I reckon we can credit at least sixty percent of his testimony.   I am now in a stage of life when I know less and less about more and more.  How attractive to me seems the age of the Renaissance, when aspiration to universal and encyclopedic knowledge was at least plausible.  Crichton decided to emulate a famous feat of Pico della Mirandola’s.   He had posters printed up declaring that on a day six weeks hence, at nine in the morning, in the main hall of the College of Navarre, he intended to present himself to dispute with all comers all questions put to him regarding any subject.  He had these put up on all the appropriate notice boards and church doors, before disappearing into the red light district to prepare himself for the contest.  His adversaries had to quit laughing when on the appointed day Crichton appeared as advertised and bested the greatest local experts in grammar, mathematics, geometry, music, astronomy, logic, and theology.

            The Crichton Show, having conquered Paris, moved next to the Italian peninsula.  The young Scot performed memorable feats of academic disputation first in Rome and then in Venice.  There he became fast friends with the famous scholar-printer Aldus Munitius, who is a credible witness to some of his more amazing intellectual performances.  One of his specialties was the off-the-cuff invention of Latin hexameter verse suitable for any emergent occasion—Virgiian Stand-Up, so to speak.

Rigoletto: not so funny

            It is perhaps ironic that the Admirable Crichton met his death at the hands of his own tutorial pupil Vincenzo da Gonzaga, the son of the Duke of Mantua, a spoiled wastrel who was nearly his own age and perhaps also his unsuccessful rival in love.  One night during Carnival Crichton was set upon in the streets of Mantua by four masked youths.  Very Italian this, and very Renaissance: you may remember the street brawl in Romeo and Juliet.  Or you have seen Rigoletto?  With superb sword play Crichton disarmed them all and forced them to show their faces.  One of them, their leader indeed, turned out to be Vincenzo!  Thinking then that it was all a jest, Crichton surrendered his own sword to him in semi-mock obeisance.  Vincenzo, drunk and humiliated in front of his friends, took it and ran him through.  I suppose there are less noble ways of passing from this vale of tears than being killed by a jealous lover; but this brute Vincenzo was as Awful as Crichton was Admirable.  There is textual uncertainty whether the Admirable Crichton was twenty-two or thirty-two when a rapier blade went through his liver.  Either way, it seems an awful shame, and a great waste of admirabilitas.

Penelope Fitzgerald, Morrisian

The current number of the New York Review of Books* has an important article about the English novelist Penelope Fitzgerald.  A major contemporary writer who started publishing her fiction at the age of sixty would be an object of interest under any circumstances, all the more so with the recent appearance of an engaging biography by a major literary scholar, Hermione Lee of Oxford.  We know a little bit about this.  In a recent post I mentioned some of the excellent lectures we heard at the Oxford “Meeting Minds” conference in September.  One I didn’t mention was Hermione Lee’s account of the subject of her book—an account sufficiently engaging to induce Joan to buy a signed copy afterwards.  Explaining the further dimensions of her interest will require digression.

One day in 1975 I was in the office of my late friend and colleague Carlos Baker.  As we chatted, he was “going through his mail,” meaning setting a few things aside for later attention and throwing rather more things directly into the wastebasket after the briefest of glances.  One of the pieces that fluttered unheeded toward the circular file caught my printer’s eye.  It was a piece of two-color work on high quality paper, obviously letterpress.  I dived for it and retrieved it.

It was an announcement by the William Morris Society of Great Britain of their intention to appoint a Resident Fellow of the Center in Kelmscott House, Morris’s old “town” residence in Hammersmith, London.  The duties of the Fellow would be vaguely to “supervise work” and to give a series of several seminars on some aspect of William Morris’s life and work.  The emoluments would be (1) free housing for fellow and fellow’s family in elegant Georgian mansion on the Thames, and (2) an honorarium of £1000.  The deadline for receipt of applications was, as I remember, about a week away.

Kelmscott House, Hammersmith, viewed from the Thames

Nothing ventured, nothing gained.  Any amateur printer knows something about Morris.  I also knew a little about the Victorian interest in the Middle Ages.  So, I sat down and in about as much time as I now spend on a blog essay, wrote up a barely plausible proposal for a series of seminars on “Morris and Medievalism.”  I suspect that my proposal was successful because it was the only proposal, but I don’t second-guess Providence.  Thus came about one of the happiest years of our family life, and one that had a formative influence on our two older (and then only) children.

The life we knew at Kelmscott House would supply the matter for a dozen blog essays and probably a substantial comic novel.  The house was indeed an elegant Georgian mansion, but it was in a semi-ruinous state.  Its maintenance requirements far outstripped the resources of the underfunded William Morris Society, which may explain why its trustees not too much later sold it to Faye Dunaway!  The William Morris Society itself was a barely stable compound of William Morris enthusiasts, including Communists, book arts people, fantasy literature fans, and little old ladies who loved “Willow Leaf” wallpaper.  There were several other Morrisian and pseudo-Morrisian students living in various parts of the house, and an odd couple of ancient family retainers of “the Stevensons”, the previous freeholders, squatted unseen but not unsensed in the bowels of the cellar.  But my subject today is Penelope Fitzgerald.

Morris had set up the Kelmscott Press in the large cellar floor of the house, and it was there that the immortal edition of Chaucer was produced.  Morris’s friend, the great book-binder T. J. Cobden-Sanderson, lived next door.  Sir Emery Walker the typographer was right around the corner.  But that was then.  Now there was practically nothing left of the press except for one of the original Albions and a few banks of commercial foundry type.  This was enough, however, for me to be able to offer to the public a short course in elementary techniques of letterpress—thus satisfying the “supervise work” clause of my fellowship.

The typography shop, Kelmscott House, circa 1975

A housewifely type named Penelope Fitzgerald showed up at my seminars.  It was probably good that one could not tell from her timid manner that she had just published a biography of Morris’s great friend Burne-Jones and that she almost certainly knew more about my topic than I did.  It was only when she appeared for the sparsely attended printing “lessons” that we got to know her a bit.  I say “a bit” because we were wholly unaware of various important things happening in her life just as our paths crossed.  According to Lee’s biography 1976 was the year her husband died (we never heard word of a husband) and that she began the rampage of fiction writing that would make her posthumously famous.

I think there is still extant somewhere in my vast but sadly undisciplined “archives” one copy of my handsome little brochure entitled Morris & Mediaevalism, a Bibliography, printed by me and Penelope Fitzgerald at Kelmscott House.  Supposing I could ever locate this item, and supposing that people might credit my account of its origins—both probably suppositions “contrary to fact” in legal lingo—it might be worth a little money.  It would be worth far more, though, as a souvenir of our brief friendship with the bright, odd, self-effacing lady who would before too long command a major literary biography by one of England’s most distinguished literary scholars.

*Alan Hollinghurst, “The Victory of Penelope Fitzgerald”

Madisonian Musings

        

The American Philosophical Society, with atmospherics

         I had a most enjoyable experience this past weekend as a guest speaker at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.  This venerable academy, the nation’s premier intellectual “club”, was founded by Benjamin Franklin and other worthies in 1743.  In its early years practically all the great names of the Revolution and nascent Republic were members.  Jefferson was president of the Society at the same time he was President of the United States.  The APS has a beautiful building in Philadelphia Old City, just a stone’s throw from Carpenters’ Hall, the venue of the meeting of the first Continental Congress.  The Academy maintains an important library with many unique holdings.  One area of special strength is American Indian history and culture in the period of the first two centuries of European contact.  The society’s Latin motto is Nullo Discrimine, from a line in the first book of Virgil’s Æneid in which Dido, Queen of Carthage (“Tyria”), welcomes the sea-born foreign refugees from Troy: “Trojan and Tyrian shall be treated by me with no distinction”.

            Philosophy had a rather capacious meaning in the eighteenth century, and the Society defines its purpose broadly as “promoting useful knowledge.”  Such knowledge is of many kinds, and the several talks were somewhat disparate in character, with topics including the physiology of gustation, the history of cookbooks, Sephardic music in Brooklyn, and early protocols for making treaties with Indians.  Useful knowledge can also be aesthetic.  There was a poetry reading by Rosanna Warren of the University of Chicago.  Three young string players from the Curtis Institute of Music performed Mozart’s “Divertimento” in E-flat major (K. 563).  There is not a lot of music for string trios, and this was the first time I had heard this marvelous piece live.

            The penultimate talk—my own being the very last—was by Jack Rakove, an American historian from Stanford, among whose many achievements is the edition of the Writings of James Madison for the Library of America.  His provocative title was “James Madison’s Dilemma—and Ours”.  Oversimplifying only grossly, the shared dilemma is what to do about an aging constitution, and the solution is to change it.  Rakove was speaking four days after a national election that had in unequal proportions anesthetized and electrified the nation and continues to monopolize journalistic punditry; yet so clear was his intellectual focus on the subject at hand that by no wink or nod did he reveal his personal political preferences.  He did, when questioned, suggest what he regards as fairly obvious imperfections in the Constitution.  One of them was the electoral college, which can defeat the fundamental democratic principle of voting equality.  A second was life tenure in the Federal judiciary, instituted to preserve the judiciary from politicization and now guaranteeing that political motivation plays a prominent if not principal role in judicial nominations and confirmations.

            For probably obvious reasons James Madison is the Favorite Founding Father on my campus.  We call him “the first Princeton graduate student.”  After taking his baccalaureate degree here in 1771, he stayed on for some post-graduate study under John Witherspoon, college president and Signer of the Declaration.  Nonetheless, I realized in a flash that I have read too little Madison.  Both he and Jefferson (among others) fully recognized the experimental element of the republican venture and assumed that Americans would learn from their experience and act upon it.  That means they would change the Constitution when it needed changing.  Jefferson at one point seems to suggest that the document should be rewritten every twenty years or so.  Contemporary America seems to regard it as an untouchable sacred text.  I have a theory about this: the pseudo-sacrality of the Constitution has waxed as the sacrality of the Bible has waned.  But never mind.

 Statue of John Witherspoon on the Princeton campus

            When I got home I fetched my Madison down from the shelf and poked about a bit.  Very soon I came to the following.  In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, dated from Philadelphia on March 27, 1780, Madison expresses his alarming opinion that at no previous moment of the Revolution has the situation been more dire.  “Among the various conjunctures of alarm and distress:…Our army threatened with an immediate alternative of disbanding or living on free quarter, the public treasury empty; public credit exhausted…Congress complaining of the extortion of the people, the people of the improvidence of Congress, and the army of both; our affairs requiring the most mature & systematic measures, and the urgency of occasions admitting only of temporizing expedients, and those expedients generating new difficulties.”  Although this makes mere “gridlock” sound venial, it would be difficult to characterize the American government’s performance of the last several years more succinctly than does that final phrase.   But Madison himself tops it with this zinger: “Congress from a defect of adequate Statesmen more likely to fall into wrong measures and of less weight to enforce right ones…”

            I ask you in all candor, and entirely without partisan inflection, whether you can point to any member of Congress whom you would identify as a Statesman, let alone an “adequate” one?  The population of the United States is now roughly a hundred times what it was in 1780.  The voting franchise has been hugely expanded since that time.  What we now count as the first Congress didn’t meet until 1789.  How is it to be explained, then, that in and around this pathetic group of Continental congressionals of whom Madison is complaining there were probably twenty undoubted Statesmen?  On the other hand, no current member of Congress is a slave-holder, either.  The only Africans covered by Nullo discrimine, unfortunately, were Carthaginians.   So there is gain, and there is loss.        

Ruby's Hallowe'en

The most effective licensing procedure is self-licensing, so I am granting myself permission to indulge in an unapologetic essay in paedolatry—a neologism conveniently covered by the same license.  It means “kiddie-worship”, of course.  Given the number and adorability of my grandchildren, and in light of the remarkable restraint I have exercised in slobbering over them in public, I have commissioned myself to write a little essay about Ruby Dixon Fleming’s first active Hallowe’en at the age of one year and eleven months.

            Ruby appareled herself—one could hardly use the word disguise—as Ms. Liberty, the “mighty woman with a torch, whose flame / Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles.” Ruby is on intimate terms with the real Ms. Liberty, a near neighbor who brazenly rises next that part of the “golden shore” of New York harbor a scant distance from the Dixon Fleming household on Coffey Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn.  Ruby had set out with a splendid torch of “imprisoned lightning” crafted of tissue paper and a flashlight by her cunning mother; but she set it aside in the excitement of her first candy-grab.  This was her initiation to Hallowe’en, and she may not have fully grasped the finer points of theory, such as that one gathers one’s treats from the house-residents rather than from the paper sacks of the other kids.

Some of us need no mask to scare little kids

            Your average gray, straight, male Episcopalian geriatric who owns two suits and speaks in, like, complete sentences may at first feel a little self-conscious when dropped among the young and the hip of waterfront Brooklyn.  I have the impression some of these people may not have voted for Mitt Romney.  But Hallowe’en on Coffey Street dissipated my secretly held worries that they constitute a potentially revolutionary force intent on undermining the Establishment.  The thing is, if you own or are buying a house in Brooklyn today, you are the Establishment.  Once one moves beyond the first impression born of possibly odd attire, a more family-friendly, community minded set of real estate stake-holders would be hard to find in the dullest suburb of Houston.

         Variations on a theme   / the splitting headache

        Indeed they probably would not be found there at all, because Red Hook has preserved (or created anew) a vital sense of neighborhood from the rapidly vanishing American past.  The anodyne anonymity of suburbia is definitely not the vibe.  Still, nobody seems to know just who organized the Trick-or-Treating.  Photocopied notices simply appeared announcing that traditional Hollowe’en activities for very young Red Hookers would concentrate on three blocks of one of the neighborhood’s longest unbroken residential stretches  (including by chance Ruby’s own house) between five and five-thirty.  If you build it, they will come.  I haven’t seen a critical mass of trick-or-treaters at my house in Princeton in about twenty years.  We’re lucky to get a pitiable trickle, but there in Brooklyn a tide of kids in the toddler to pre-teen range, together with at least an equal number of parents and other supervisory adults, ebbed and flowed along the street in carnivalesque spirit.  The costumes, including those of many of the elders, were great.   There were sidewalk highjinks galore.  Mikhail Bakhtine would have approved, but so would T. S. Eliot.  Here was a richly imaginative event exhibiting the union of “tradition and the individual talent,” skillfully orchestrated chaos riotously fun and at the same time comfortably safe and wholesome.   And to think that the star of the whole show was our own blond-haired, blue-eyed, torchless Lady Liberty!

Lazarus breaks free, crosses finish line 

  Weird White Female seeks freshly manufactured Monster for possible matrimony   

   

 I was not present to see another recent manifestation of the Red Hook spirit.  But Rich and Katie provided me with some photos.  Two years ago the neighbors would have been able to celebrate Hallowe’en only in rowboats or diving bells.  In the wake of Hurricane Sandy (29 October 2012) the whole place was prime “Section A”, among the hardest-hit sections of the city—under water and actually under order of evacuation by Mayor Bloomberg.  This year, to mark the second anniversary of their spunky civic comeback, the locals mounted a spirited allegorical pageant, the Barnacle Parade, in which the grimacing villain Sandi was once again bested by the super-hero Sanito, as I would name the personification of the New York Sanitation Department, the city’s unexpected saviors two years ago.  I don’t know whether there were any literary scholars on the Parade’s planning committee, but there may well have been.  Perhaps Red Hook will be the cradle of the Next Big Thing in Theater.  It was exactly such secularized “morality plays” in the late Renaissance that ended up giving us Shakespeare!

 The Barnacle Parade: Sanito versus Sandi

            For dear Ruby and the other youngsters of her neighborhood the Hallowe’en highjinks on Coffey Street in 2014 may become a part of that substratum of childhood memory that, depending upon its positive or negative thrust, goes so far to vindicate Wordsworth's claim that “the Child is the Father to the Man”.  Surely these will be memories of delight.  But even happy memories come in different shades and tones.  So long as our English language and its literature live on, genuine glimpses of the old Christian culture will not be entirely expunged.  What does the word “Hallowe’en” mean?  It means “All Hallows Eve”.   Hallowe’en is the vigil of the Feast of All the Saints (Old English Hallows, as in “hallowed halls” or “this hallowed ground”), a day of reverent remembrance.  All Saints’ day is November 1^st, and it is followed by All Souls’ Day on November 2^nd--a generalized memorial of all the dead.  In several European cultures, including the Castilian imported to the Hispanic New World, All Souls’ Day (Día de los muertos) became the more prominent of the two.  I just saw a newspaper article about the complicating influence of Hallowe’en on the traditional Mexican customs of the Día de los muertos.  Sitting there on a Brooklyn stoop, passing out Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups from a rapidly depleting basket in my lap, I missed none of the fun.  Yet my mind did turn intermittently to some of the faithful departed, and especially my grandparents James and Cora Louise, Samuel and Dell, as I hope that Ruby’s, seventy years hence, might turn for a moment to memories of her grandparents.

Photo credits to Ambrogio Bergognone, Katie Dixon, Rich Fleming, and Joan Fleming 

Texting Women

 

Richard de Fournival, a learned French author of the fourteenth century, says in the preface to one of his works that there are two ways of teaching and learning, by word (parole) and by image (painture).  Certainly one of the most engaging aspects of many medieval books is the relationship between their words and their images.  Another way of thinking about the relationship is that of text and context--what goes "with the text".  My own doctoral dissertation studied that relationship in scores of manuscripts of the Roman de la Rose—a book read by practically everybody in the Middle Ages, and by practically nobody today.

I have been thinking about the marriage of parole and painture for a somewhat whimsical reason.  In the past couple of weeks as I return to a new and more intensive routine of research and writing, I have moved out of my home study and back into the library, where I still have an office.  There are gains and there are losses in this move.  I’ve had to give up the leisurely spousal sharing of coffee and newspaper, and the pleasing option of being able step away from my desk at will and out into the beautiful autumn landscape forty yards away.  On the other hand I am now surrounded by millions rather than mere hundreds of books, and since there is nothing else to do than read or write, I tend to get more accomplished.

Still one has to get up now and again for calls of nature or simply to move the molecules a bit.  Throughout the day I take five-minute mini-walks through the miles of open stacks in the Firestone Library, sometimes plucking from a shelf some random book that catches my eye.  Last week I found myself reading up in odd moments on the Klondike Gold Rush and the British naval action against the French fleet at Mers el Kebir in 1940.  Those are two different subjects in case you are groping for the elusive connection.

  ISTI MIRANT STELLAM : "These guys are looking at the star"

On Monday the book I picked up from some oversize shelves was more along my beaten path: the elaborate coffee table edition of the Bayeux Tapestry by David M. Wilson (New York: Knopf, 1985).  This book has very large color photographs of every inch of the tapestry, which is many inches (it is sixty eight meters long).  As you undoubtedly know the tapestry, which is named for the Norman town in which it has been preserved, is a huge eleventh-century embroidery that delineates in image and in word the background and history of the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the triumph of the Norman Duke William, the death of the English King Harold.  I perhaps should say it provides a version of these events as determined by a Norman propagandist.  History is written by the victors, and in this instance the victors have needled the vanquished in a particularly brilliant way.

The glory of the tapestry is undoubtedly its pictorial wealth, particularly in the many scenes dealing with battle and seafaring.  The astronomical phenomenon now known as Halley’s Comet appeared in the skies of 1066, and it was of course later taken as the presage of some great disaster or triumph, depending upon the side of the Channel from which it had been viewed.  It is recorded in the tapestry.  But there is also a running written text.  The large majuscules of its simple sentences suggest the Dick and Jane genre—or in this instance the Ricardus et Joanna, as it is in very easy Latin.

It’s a Man’s World that the tapestry depicts, but it is to women that we are indebted for possessing it.  There is elegance in the union of pictorial and narrative meaning in this textile, for the word text, like textile, derives from the Latin word texere, to weave (past participle textus).  A story is a cloth of words.  We still talk about spinning a yarn, and there are other verbal memories of the connection.  We may lose the thread of some complicated story.  The literal meaning of clew (clue) is thread, a filament to be followed from confusion to resolution, as Theseus followed Ariadne’s thread out of the labyrinth, or as Sherlock Holmes follows it to the solution of the crime.

Weaving was women’s work, and there are many literary examples of female textual/textile cleverness.   A famous classical instance will readily come to mind: the ruse devised by Penelope, wife of Ulysses, long-absent and presumed dead by many, to keep her suitors at bay.  Penelope has no desire to remarry, but under pressure she promises to become available when she finishes weaving the elaborate tapestry on which she is engaged.  After hours, and out of sight of the slavering aspirants, however, she picks apart each day’s work, so that the project never advances.  Eventually her long-absent husband Ulysses returns and deals harshly with his would-be successors to the conjugal bed.

A second example, much gorier, is the legend of Philomela (the nightingale) from Ovid.  Philomela was brutally raped by King Tereus, the husband of her sister Procne.  He was supposed to be fetching her home by sea for a family reunion.  Attempting to cover up the crime, Tereus then has Philomela’s tongue ripped from her mouth so that she will not be able to report the crime to her sister.  However Philomela is able to convey the necessary information to Procne in a wordless text, an X-rated, historiated tapestry.  Procne wrought a revenge upon her husband too hideous to report in a family blog—and of course way beyond my own weaving skills.

Philomela's Loom of Doom : Sir Edward Burne-Jones

But the great weavers of the late Middle Ages, I take some pride in reporting, were the Flemings.  Most people’s favorite character in Chaucer is probably the Wife of Bath, than whom a more textual lady would be hard to find, as she is made up, quilt-like, of brilliantly recycled and recombined squares from the Bible, Ovid, and Jean de Meun.  One of the first things we learn about her is her textile prowess:

Of clooth-makyng she hadde swich an haunt   [talent]

She passed hem of Ypres and of Gaunt. 

Ypres and Ghent were two of the great wool centers of the Flemish heartland.