Free College (continued)

I want to spend a second week’s essay on the question of “free college,” as it is at least possible that someone might not have been satisfied by the answer I gave last week.  To recap, I suggested that the solution to the “student loan crisis” was to upgrade the quality of American free primary and secondary education to its level in, say, 1900, when my grandmother was teaching school in Salida, Colorado, and when a high school diploma was a significant credential.

            Deep down everyone knows that there is not really such a thing as a free lunch, just a lunch that somebody else has paid for.  Certainly Senator Sanders knows that.  When he talks about “free tuition,” he really means tuition that has been paid, through the federal government, by people who buy and sell stocks and by “millionaires and billionaires” generally.   Senator Sanders’s suggestion has initiated a useful conversation, rather sloganish for the moment, but full of potential.  What it has not done is led to the public recognition of a crucial fact about American higher education in its present imperfect and unreformed state.  That is that many of America’s leading liberal arts colleges and, without exception, all of its most famous private universities, are already complex charitable institutions.   Over the past century and more they have effected a dramatic redistribution of wealth, and an alchemical transformation of financial to social capital.

            I know.  It’s a little awkward, not to say hypocritical, for me, personally, to argue against “free college” seeing as I had nine years of it.  Four years of undergraduate college were paid for by George F. Baker, an obscenely wealthy banker who died before I was born.  Then I had three years at Oxford thanks to Cecil Rhodes, a much reviled British imperialist.  I don’t actually know who, specifically, paid for my doctoral education.  The fellowships bore the names of famous scholars in whose memory or honor the donations had been made.  What came as a perceived gift rather than as a perceived entitlement animated in me an almost joyous sense of responsibility to repay as best I could in such coin as an education creates.

            There are not too many large aspects of American life which the rest of the world still acknowledges to be the best to be had.  Our political institutions and personalities are not much to brag about.  The shared physical infrastructure vital to a continental country is mediocre at best.  We can hardly boast of our court system, our penology, our primary education, or our mass transportation.  But one thing the world still rightly admires is American higher education.  Its greatest strength is its diversity, if that word has not yet been misused into meaninglessness.  There is every kind of college and university you can think of, including incidentally a few free ones.  Before one buys into a radical revision of educational financing, it might be a good idea to try to clarify some fundamental educational goals—beyond the implicit desirability of college degrees for all. 

            The Sanders plan would make public institutions tuition free.  “In fact”, says his website, “it’s what many of our colleges and universities used to do. The University of California system offered free tuition at its schools until the 1980s. In 1965, average tuition at a four-year public university was just $243 and many of the best colleges – including the City University of New York – did not charge any tuition at all. The Sanders plan would make tuition free at public colleges and universities throughout the country.”  This statement has some accuracies, but it doesn’t take into account the dramatic rise in real educational costs of the last half century and the huge growth in the number of potential students. That a proposed system founded in a supposed universal right could surpass the social achievements of our erratic meritocracy—even if the astronomical amount of money needed were as readily gathered into a strong box as written into the plank of a political platform—is far from obvious.

There is not a major university in this country that is not already entangled in ambiguous financial relationships with the Federal government, principally though not exclusively in the realm of Big Science.  I say “ambiguous” because such relationships have both good and bad outcomes.  On the one hand they enable a level and ambition of research that would otherwise be impossible.  On the other they have the potential to distort institutional mission, and there always follows in their wake a distracting level of bureaucratic red tape.  Governmental over-regulation is not a figment of the tortured Republican imagination but an inevitable reality of an ever-burgeoning bureaucracy.  The more that college becomes “free” in Bernie Sanders’s sense—meaning the more the intermediary bursar of actual educational costs is a federal bureau—the clunkier, more intellectually constipated will be the operations of our institutions of higher learning.

Should College Be Free?

 The Old High School, Mount Pleasant Texas*

Like most American citizens, I have a certain interest in national politics and in the political campaigns that are so much in the public news in these long preliminaries to the general election nine months from now.  And like most people I have opinions, sometimes strong opinions, about the issues and candidates.  As I am not an expert in political science, I rarely can claim any greater authority for my opinions than those of any other attentive and reasonably well-informed observer.  This year, however, American higher education, or at least the financing of higher education, appears likely to become a seriously debated issue.  I devoted my professional life to higher education, so that if I have any claim to professional competence, this might be the field in which to attempt to deploy it.

            There are really two questions here.  Should college be free?  And what would be the effect on American higher education if college were free?  The latter is in my mind as important as the former, but I must leave it for another day.  The issue of the moment is “free college”, and it has arisen not in a context of educational theory but in the face of economic reality.  A college education is expensive, and many young people have burdened themselves with crippling debt in order to achieve it.  Senator Bernie Sanders, one of the two men who must be credited with making the tone of this presidential campaign unlike any other I can remember, wants to solve the problem by making public institutions tuition free.  His argument in a nutshell is this.  In today’s economy a college degree is essentially a required entry-level credential for the adult workforce.  Its role corresponds to that of the high school diploma in earlier generations. 

            This is true, but we need to ask “why?”  The conventional answer is that our world has become much more complex and demanding, more high powered and high tech, than that of our forebears.  The real answer, in my opinion, is that the quality of our secondary education has deteriorated badly—in many parts of the country disastrously--since the time of our forebears.  We have in this country a virtually uncontested consensus in favor of universal, free education; since 1918 it has been a mandatory universal requirement.  However we no longer seem to have the consensus that free public education ought to be good enough to create an educated citizenry in a state system competitive with those of other leading nations of the world.  My parents were high school graduates, and proud of it.  They considered themselves privileged.  Many of their peers had dropped out of school at the first legal opportunity on account of limited capacity, disinclination, or cruel economic necessity.  My parents, though faced with large financial challenges and the social upheaval of a world war, could read and write, and never ceased to do so.  If like me you have ever taught a college “freshman composition” course you may find that claim incredible.

One of the reactions shared by many of the first viewers of the Ken Burns serial on the Civil War, in which contemporary documents were frequently cited, was amazement that the private letters of so many of the common soldiers, not one in a hundred of whom had experienced “higher education”, were beautifully written and rhetorically powerful.  At what Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference did Indiana farm boys learn to write like George Eliot?  The answer is: a village school.  Some years ago, when I was reading the memoirs of W. T. Sherman, I was struck by his brief account of his early education in a schoolhouse on the Ohio frontier in the 1830s.  This education had supplied him with sufficient mathematical and engineering training, by the age of fourteen, to work on a surveying crew prospecting the path of a proposed new canal.  On the humanities side, “We studied all the common branches of knowledge, including Latin, Greek, and French.”

The last year for which I was able to find complete statistics was 2012.  In that year there were 17.7 million students in undergraduate degree programs in the United States.  That is roughly five percent of the national population.  Of these 13.4 million were in public institutions.  There were 4.25 million in private colleges and universities including the (to me) staggering number of one and a half million in for profit colleges.  This represents a very large proportion of the cohort of high school graduates in this country.  That is, there are not too many young people who graduate from high school but who do not go on to college.  Most people don’t even think of the high school diploma as a respectable terminal accomplishment.

I am not so naïve as to think that reclaiming the lost standards of American secondary education would be easy.  Perhaps it would not even be possible.  But with all due respect to Senator Sanders, whose intelligence, sincerity, and idealism I greatly admire, I think it would be both more sensible and more politically practical to try to direct the huge financial resources needed to the free education we already all believe in, than to apply it to a revolutionary new program of massive “social promotion”.  You should not have to go to college to learn the names and functions of the parts of speech or to solve an equation with two variables.

I first grasped the depth of the hole we were in back in the Seventies when I found myself, in my early forties, at a large undergraduate musical party with hundreds of young people mildly lubricated with alcohol and cannabis.  The music was very loud and for the most part very bad.  But the DJ put on the Paul Simon song “Kodachrome”.  At its opening words, the crowd went wild.  “When I think back/On all the crap I learned in high school/It’s a wonder/I can think at all.”  I could tell that the enthusiasm arose not merely for a song they liked, but for sentiments they shared.  High School was crap.  And of course I had to think back myself.  What I remembered chiefly were two rather conventional and unglamorous middle-aged ladies in Texas, one of whom had taught me the subtlety of the “formal conjunctive adverb” while the other led me to grasp the sheer genius behind the periodic table of elements.  I wondered then and wonder now whether in my highfalutin university I myself have ever taught anything so effectively.

*photograph stolen from an engaging, stumbled-upon, and apparently defunct blog entitled "Exquisitely Bored in Nacogdoches" (http://exquisitelyboredinnacogdoches.blogspot.com/2007_03_01_archive.html).

Reflections on New England Democracy

          I awoke this morning to learn that “New Hampshire has spoken.”  Fortunately, unlike most of the candidates themselves, New Hampshire spoke sotto voce, not nearly loud enough to disturb my slumbers.  Indeed to say that New Hampshire spoke is to indulge in the classical rhetorical figure of synecdoche—the one generally known as “the part for the whole”.   My rough-and-ready extrapolation from the newspaper charts is that approximately thirty-seven percent of New Hampshire spoke (sort of)—that is, thirty-seven in one hundred of a population about that of San Antonio. 

            Still, given the anemia of our national political participation, that is a not unimpressive number.  The victories of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump were not merely decisive but crushing.  And to be clear, as scornful as I may sound, this essay is more of a confession than an indictment.  For I have followed all the primary events slavishly in the newspaper and on the PBS “News Hour”.  I have attended to most of the so-called debates on the Tube, and digested column yards of posterior analysis and exegesis.  My attention has been bi-partisan, though this year the Republican “debates” have been more interesting than the Democratic “debates” rather in the way that Paradise Lost is more interesting than Paradise Regained--simply because of the raw materials of the two poems.  Milton’s politics were intense but from our point of view perhaps somewhat incoherent.  Although he was a spokesman for a revolutionary regime, and even an apologist for regicide, the actual operations of his imagined divine government are autocratic in the extreme.  On the other hand democracy of a sort does characterize the political operations of the demonic world.  Milton invented the word Pandemonium—a place bringing together all the demons—as the name of the diabolical congress or parliament in which the fallen angels meet to cook up their plot.  It is the raucous character of their debate that accounts for the meaning of the word pandemonium in ordinary discourse. 

            In the shouting match of the last Republican forum the governor of my state, Chris Christie, seems perhaps to have pulled off a successful kamikaze attack on the S. S. Marco Rubio.  Rubio is not exactly dead in the water, but he is listing noticeably, at the bottom of the mediocres, and (humiliatingly) just below Jeb Bush, who is in the middle of the mediocres.  Does anyone still read Matthew Arnold these days?  I am thinking of Sohrab and Rustum, the oriental tale that reverses the archetype of Oedipus Rex.  In this one it is the father who unknowingly kills the son.  Mr. Christie himself is way out ahead of his fellow single-digit also-rans, but the world is rarely impressed by a sixth-place finish.  It worked for Dante Alighieri*, of course.  But I knew Dante Alighieri.  He was a friend of mine.   And, Mr. Christie, you are no Dante Alighieri.  Please return immediately to New Jersey, where we languish for want of executive direction.

            Tremendous amounts of money have already been spent on these preliminaries.  It is hardly worth saying that the money could have been put to better purposes, because that is true of so many of our expenditures, public and private alike.  But the figures are staggering.  In the Iowa contest Jeb Bush received 5200 votes, less than three percent of the total votes cast and about one tenth the number secured by the “winner”, Ted Cruz.  It is hard to assess precisely how much money the Bush people spent in achieving this result because “the Bush people” include both the candidate’s official campaign workers and the administrators of an opulent Political Action Committee technically independent of that campaign.  The published figures I have seen range from a low of $2800 per vote to a high of $5200. It is probably closer to the latter than the former, though either end of that spectrum would seem to me to deserve the exclamation point that is so ludicrous in its collocation with “Jeb”.  Whatever became of the frugal good old days of the ward bosses, when you could secure a vote for a bottle of whiskey or, at most, a Christmas turkey?

            There is little faith left in what is usually called the “conventional wisdom”.  How could there be?  Wisdom itself has become so unconventional.  But I am at last vaguely apprehending what people smarter than I have noticed for some time, and that is a fundamental congruence between what superficially seem like such starkly divergent candidacies as those of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.  You cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs.  Unfortunately the hard part is not the egg-breaking but the omelet-making.

*See Inferno 4.102

           

In Canada

            On Monday we flew to Montreal, where our younger son and his wife are both university professors, and where our youngest and third from youngest grandchildren have both been growth-spurting like mad during the months since I last saw them.  It is necessary for grandparents to be indispensable, or at least that they be allowed plausibly to seem indispensable.   All our children, bless their hearts, cooperate with this need.  The rationalization for this particular trip is convincing enough.  Luke must be away for several days at a conference in California, so that there is a genuine role for the grandparental Helping Hand.  At the same time it is clear that introducing two more large and sometimes slow-moving people into such a busy scene has its social ambiguities.

            I don’t claim to know Montreal, but I like what I see when I come here.  In fact I have liked most of what I have experienced in Canada over the years, mainly limited though it has been to lecture engagements and academic conferences.  Canada is a very large country with a relatively small population, most of which lives in a narrow band near the American border.  So you have a very big ship making quite a chop for the not so big ship in its wake.  I have always been aware of the cultural anxiety that the situation induces in many Canadians, who insist upon a distinctive Canadian “identity” for which I see little support in actual historical experience, and label as “Canadian” cosmopolitan virtues shared by the international intellectual community.  While I was in graduate school, a professor at Toronto named Northrop Frye was unofficially crowned the reigning monarch of English language literary criticism.  Frye was indeed an impressive and stimulating critic of literature, and he could teach you to see things in texts you hadn't seen before, but I never was able to grasp the distinctively “Canadian” character of his insights about the Bible or William Blake often claimed by his compatriots.

            I don’t think that, for all the obnoxious forms of provincialism emanating from the United States, one would encounter a parallel attitude in America.  Once when I was chairman of the Princeton English Department I got a letter from my counterpart at the University of Toronto.  The preëminence of Toronto in Canadian higher education is very marked and has no parallel in the United States, where Yale vies with Chicago and Chicago with Stanford and so on.  In this way Canada is more like European countries than it is the United States.  Anyway this man wrote to tell me that his department was the beneficiary of some targeted largesse of the Ford Foundation.  They would now be able to accomplish their long desired hope of expanding their offerings in American Literature.  Did we have at the moment any outstanding Canadian graduate students in the field whom we would choose to nominate for faculty positions in Toronto?  Here we had American money eventually deriving from an icon of American capitalism in search of American-trained scholars expert in American literature.  But no Americans need apply!  It was the law.

            My limited experience in Canadian Academia is that this strain of cultural sensitivity is at times not far from a form of anti-Americanism.  I don’t want to make too much of a single unpleasant immigration officer at the airport.  Of course I could be being oversensitive myself, but we know that sometimes paranoids do have real enemies.  And arriving on the day of the Iowa caucuses might not be strategic.  I was not looking forward to having to defend the results of the Republican race, should I be stopped on the street and forced to deliver, since I had assumed the inevitability of a Trump victory.

            Donald Trump did not win the caucus, however.  Ted Cruz, a native of Calgary, Alberta, prevailed.   One of the charges American conservatives have often made against the current administration is that of constitutional impropriety.  Their criticism of the more liberal members of the Supreme Court is that the justices too often indulge in allegorical interpretations of the Constitution that mock the document’s clear, literal sense.  Well, the first section of the second article of our constitution reads thus: “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.”  It may yet take some fancy literary criticism to resolve all this.

            I hope the Canadians recognize that indefinable kinship of Cruz and Frye.  I see it pretty clearly, but then I have more than trace elements of Canadianism myself.  Though raised in a sod house in the Nebraska Territory, my paternal grandmother, née Herrington, sprang from a family of colonial English Baptists who fled to Canada rather than bow their necks to the tyranny of the Jacobin putsch more commonly known as the American Revolution.  They went no further than Windsor, Ontario; but a miss is as good as a mile.  My grandfather Fleming, a jingoist of the old school,  cast scorn upon his wife’s loyalist forebears, but what can you expect from an Irishman and an anti-English bigot?

The Blizzard of Sixteen

I try not to talk about the weather very much, but you may have heard that the central swath of the eastern United States has just experienced a major snowstorm: the Blizzard of Sixteen.  In various places such as in the stalled cars along the turnpikes in Kentucky and Pennsylvania, the problems were serious.  Here in Princeton we got only twenty-three inches, and the gale-force winds were only “occasional”.  Still it was a lot of storm.

I want to call it a “perfect storm”.  But that phrase has come to mean a collocation of various kinds of badness, whereas I mean something like the opposite.  For us, in our particular situation, it was about as good as a crippling storm could be.  It conveniently fell on a weekend when neither of us had travel obligations.  We both had contemplative tasks that invited a hunkering-down attitude.  The electrical power, which has several times in the past succumbed to lesser assault, remained unbroken.  We had no commissary shortages, and we were perhaps above all hearth-ready.

The Big Weather of recent years featured back-to-back hurricanes (one of them the infamous Sandy of 2012, preceded a couple of years earlier by a production more local, though hardly less violent) that flattened many trees on the common land south of our house.  The house itself narrowly escaped being mauled by a large collapsing linden.  There were a couple of upsides.  The first was that the far too large resident deer population, having lost a significant part of its forest cover, was for a time somewhat reduced—a development welcome to gardeners.  The second was that there was suddenly available to anyone with a chainsaw and a modicum of stamina an abundance of excellent firewood—oak, maple, locust.  Over a couple of summers I worked my way through several cubic yards of this windfall, creating two very large and carefully constructed piles of split firewood.  This has been seasoning under tarps and really would have been ready last winter, had there been any such event.  Just as I was concluding that this year some of it is needing to be burned before it decays, my excellent next-door neighbor virtually forced upon me half a truckload of split hardwood he had bought from a commercial dealer but decided would be more than he could use.

When last week the weather mavens turned hysterical concerning an impending blizzard, I chalked it up mainly to hype but figured that enough of a winter event might be on its way at least to allow us to have a fire or two.  So I hauled up a cord or so of my neighbor’s largesse, along with a goodly pile of kindling made from hardwood flooring scavenged from a dumpster a while back, and arranged all this conveniently along the backside of the house.  When I say “conveniently,” I mean that you didn’t even have to exit the house to get to it—just open a sliding window and reach out.  It was all under an overhang, but for safety’s sake, in an untypical moment of forethought, I covered it with a ratty gray tarpaulin.

Beginning about noon on Friday, with no snow actually falling but with all the other country signs shouting its imminent arrival, we started a generous fire in the hearth and kept it going during practically all our waking hours until Monday morning.  We sat around the fire for hours, with a stack of books and lap-tops at the ready.  We read aloud.  We played several spirited games of Boggle with the new set that appeared at Christmas.  We ate our evening meals against a background of flickering flame.  We talked.  Joan played the violin.  I wrote the final deathless paragraph of an essay I had been writing.  From time to time we would look up and out to gauge the progress of the increasingly silent snow.  Automated “emergency” phone calls from the police telling us to keep off the streets and mass emails from various institutions telling us that it would be useless to try go to the University or to church were unnecessary but tidy endorsements of decisions too obvious to have to make anyway.

On Sunday morning I woke up to a huge, cold moon eventually followed by bright, crisp sunshine.  Now we would have to pay for our winter idyll, as it would take at least half a day, working in sensible spurts punctuated by sensible, age-appropriate intermissions, to dig out the driveway and sidewalks.  I had positioned shovels, like the firewood, at the ready.  As I was somewhat grudgingly putting on my boots in preparation for battle I heard loudish mechanical sounds somewhere nearby, probably at a neighbor’s.  But when I put my head out it was Luis Chavez and his uncle.  The noise was that of a snow-blower, and it was blowing snow out of my driveway like crazy.  My intermittent relationship with Señor Chavez is not easily characterized.  It would need its own post, maybe its own blog.  Am I employer, employee, banker, friend, advisor, or “other”?  He keeps me guessing.  I hadn’t seen him in a while.  I supposed he was back in Guatemala, leaving me safe from the immigrant menace but snowbound and with little hope that Donald Trump would show up and dig me out.  He had a big smile.  So did I.

Thomas Sgovio

Some writers I have met think of the books they have written as their children, and even speak of them in such terms.  Given the effort a book takes to nourish, the high hopes with which it is launched into the world, not to mention the sober adjustments with which those hopes must eventually be aligned with reality, it is a plausible way of thinking.  I myself have a different paradigm: that of childhood friends, old schoolmates, or one-time neighbors from a far-away place you once lived long ago.  With a few of these people you may maintain a life-long relationship of sorts; but for the most part it’s out of sight, out of mind until now and then there is a chance crossing of paths in an airport that draws you up short.  Then what you say is “We must have lunch” while what you are thinking is “My God, do I look like that?”

A few years ago I published a book entitled The Anti-Communist Manifestos, for the composition of which I had to read widely in the political history of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.  Having gone on (or back) to other things, I don’t think much about those materials these days except when prodded by periodic public efforts emanating from our intellectual class to exonerate Julius Rosenberg or beatify Dalton Trumbo or undertake some such other annoying good work.  A few days ago I had such a strange encounter when by accident I stumbled across some of the Kolyma drawings of Thomas Sgovio on the Internet.

Perhaps not a household name?  Thomas Sgovio, an artist, was a first-generation Italian-American born in Buffalo in 1916.  He died in Arizona in 1997.  It was what happened in between that was so interesting.  Around 1900 his father Giuseppe emigrated to America from impoverished Apulia, settling in Buffalo.  Like his more famous fellow pugliese, Nicola Sacco, Giuseppe Sgovio was a political radical, a Communist agitator.  In the mid-30s, just as young Thomas was graduating from the arts high school in Buffalo, the government moved to deport the father.  The Sgovio family, like so many others in similar situations, opted for the Workers’ Paradise. Once in Russia, Thomas enrolled in the Art Institute, where he developed his skill for three years before running into the buzzsaw of the Yezhovschina (Stalin’s Great Purge).

The architects of Kolyma: Nikolai Yezhov and friend

 

Thomas Sgovio, like untold thousands of others, was shipped off to the goldfields of Kolyma in the remotest tundra and taiga of Siberia, where a para-universe of dozens of slave-labor camps became first the torture chamber and then the graveyard for millions.  The horror of the Jewish Holocaust has come to be typified in a single place name: Auschwitz.  That the name of Kolyma remains comparatively unknown is one testimony to the vestigial reluctance of some academic historians to see very much in common between Hitler and Stalin.

"Frostbite"

The experience of Kolyma beggars the imagination.  It began with enclosure in a cattle car for a month or more, the time needed to haul the convicts to Vladivostok on the Pacific.  Then the horrors began in earnest.   Grotesquely overcrowded slave ships hauled the prisoners for more than a thousand miles across the frigid Sea of Okhotsk to Magadan, the port nearest (but not very near) the camps.  The political prisoners were subjected throughout the voyage to constant abuse and/or neglect by their warders, and to the unceasing reign of terror exercised by desperate gangs of actual criminals.  I shall not try to describe what has been so well described by eye-witnesses.  Kolyma was often a death sentence, but the numbers involved were so large that there were survivors, some of whom wrote books.  I recommend two in particular: Elinor Lipper’s Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps and Eugenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind.  Both authors were intellectuals, well-educated European Communists, the one Swiss, the other Russian; and Ginzburg in particular is a fine writer.  You can find excellent historical treatment in Anne Applebaum’s Gulag and in Robert Conquest’s more focused Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps.

"Wood Detail"

Thomas Sgovio was not an intellectual.  His touching autobiography, Dear America! Why I Turned against Communism, brought out by an obscure publisher in 1979, is not well written.  It is hard to find, and in any event has become prohibitively expensive on the second-hand market.  I do not own it.  But it would draw tears from a stone.  Sgovio exited Kolyma only after the death of Stalin, though even then his ordeal was by no means over.  Even at that time the official position of all Western Communist parties, a position shared by many other leftist intellectuals, was that there was no system of forced labor in the Soviet Union, and that rumors to the contrary were vile lies and anti-Soviet propaganda.  It was only with the publication in the West of the first volume of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in 1973—nearly twenty years later!—that the truth came to be generally acknowledged, sometimes grudgingly.  So long had a purity of political belief been able to withstand the cataract of evidence that appeared in the wake of World War II.

Though not a great writer, Thomas Sgovio did leave another kind of memorial of his experience: a trove of paintings and drawings done from memory and now archived by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.  The truth is that he was not a great visual artist either. After all, his only formal training had been in “Soviet Realism”.  But his work is not without its power.  Some of his pieces circulate in the art market and show up from time to time on eBay.  I wouldn’t want one on my living room wall, but they ought not be consigned to our cultural amnesia either.

Stately Home Hopping

 Glamis Castle

Among the high points of a recent cinematic rampage, during which I saw more first-run films in a fortnight than I am used to seeing within a three year period, Michael Fassbender’s Macbeth was conspicuous.  Filming Shakespeare is a tricky business.  Far too many directors try to compete with Shakespeare rather than to amplify him with the technical magic they command; but here I found a nearly perfect symbiosis of word and image, as well as superb acting in two of the hardest roles ever invented by genius to test talent.  The camera could present as powerfully as the Bard himself the harsh topography and even harsher built environment of that ancient Scotland of the poet’s imagination.  The Glamis Castle of the Fassbinder film is a dark and gloomy heap of Pharaonic ashlar set in a wilderness of moorland.  The film gives generous license to the imagination, but mine was drawn back only as far as the winter of 1959.

 Marion Cotillard, Michael Fassbender in cinematic Macbeth

            When I arrived in Oxford in the autumn of 1958, England was in the last stages of a postwar austerity that had lasted more than a decade.  There was still bomb damage to be seen in London.  Other vestiges of the war mentality included a popular pro-Americanism that seems amazing in retrospect.  There were several institutions, including a very active English Speaking Union, designed to keep fresh the spirit of “Hands Across the Water.”  One particular organization whose bounty I enjoyed was the Dominions Fellowship Trust.  This charitable organization was the interwar brainchild of two formidable grandes dames, Lady Frances Ryder and “Miss Macdonald of the Isles”, who though she operated out of a house in Cadogan Square in London, was a prominent member of the Clan Macdonald of Sleat from the Isle of Skye.  The original brief of the DFT was, I think, to extend hospitality to students from the Antipodes temporarily resident in British universities.

            During World War II the focus changed to Allied military officers, especially American and Canadian airmen in need of rest and relaxation between harrowing bombing missions.  The DFT coordinated a network of big houses in England, Scotland, and Ireland, whose civilian owners graciously offered hospitality to their Anglophone comrades in arms.  The war ended, but the Dominions Fellowship Trust continued.  The focus was once again foreign university students, and especially Rhodes Scholars.  There are very long vacations between Oxford terms.  I suppose the thinking was that the closest thing to a shell-shocked bombardier was an American undergraduate faced with a plateful of Spotted Dick.

            I was invited by Warden Williams of Rhodes House, who had been the general officer in charge of intelligence for Montgomery in his duels with Rommel in North Africa, to look into this scheme of stately home hopping.  I suggested that I’d like to make a specialty of Scotland.  This very much pleased Miss Macdonald of the Isles, who interviewed me personally, and sent me off for R and R at huge and frigid piles of stone belonging to her most trusted Trusters all over Caledonia.  My special friend and frequent hostess was Betty Sitwell of Lennel House of Coldstream, Berwickshire.   Betty was some kin to the famous and famously eccentric literary Sitwells.  We really hit it off, and there was always a table full of Evelyn Waugh characters talking about things I didn’t understand, laughing at jokes I didn’t get, and gossiping about people I had never heard of—all of which made me feel very important indeed.  I regret that as the years passed and I succumbed to Real Life, I lost all contact with Betty Sitwell.  The carelessness of youth is simply mind-boggling.  Much later I learned that Lennel House had in 1995 become a continuing care facility. I also enjoyed the hospitality of a wonderful house called Shewglie in the minor metropolis of Drumnadrochit, practically atop Loch Ness.

Lennel House, Coldstream

            But the anecdote around which this post is built began at a house I no longer remember very clearly, except that it was near Arbroath, on the Scottish east coast.   It was a rather Jamesian place with two permanent residents—an elderly, wealthy widow woman and her equally elderly servant woman.  One day my hostess asked me if I wouldn’t like to visit Glamis Castle, where the Queen spent a happy childhood.  Within seconds of hearing my affirmative response she was on the phone talking with her friend the Countess, at Glamis Castle.  That would be the Countess of Strathmore, who at that time was a delightful red-haired Irish woman who was, I was told by the gossipy servant, considerably younger than her husband the Earl, whom she had met when he was a hospital patient and she a nurse.  (Think of Tom, the Irish chauffeur at Downton Abbey).

            My stay at Arbroath fell in the winter vacation, when at that latitude darkness descends at about three in the afternoon, and our tour of the nooks and crannies of Glamis required the use of several “torches” (flashlights).  The inchoate, rapidly changing shadows contributed significantly to the creep factor as the red-headed Countess, who was in great shape, raced us, puffing, through turrets and stairwells and dungeons.  Now in coarse historical fact most of these buildings at Glamis dated from the seventeenth century.  Furthermore the historical Macbeth had nothing to do with Glamis Castle any more than he had much to do with most of the stuff in Shakespeare.  As usual, Shakespeare was getting his material from Holinshead, who was a stern moralist rather than an even vaguely accurate historian.  Still, I was prepared to see the ghost of Banquo at the top of every breathless flight, and perhaps even Macbeth himself muttering “…I know I am the thane of Glamis; but how of Cawdor?...”

Lady Frances Ryder, founder of the Dominions Fellowship Trust (National Portrait Gallery, London)