Pro-Ambivalence

As I write this, the Governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam,  is struggling to keep his job as his own top political party leaders, backed by a vast army of bien pensants with Twitter accounts, are demanding his resignation from office.  His alleged offense, no small one even when it was committed some decades ago, was to engage in some stupid high jinks now regarded as so hateful to God and man as to render their perpetrator unfit for elective public office, utterly and in perpetuity.  I am not a Virginian, and until recently I could not have recognized this man’s name if it were on a multiple-choice quiz.  Nor did I ever suppose that medical students assemble yearbooks, let alone ones that would embarrass your average Alabama high school.  Yet as it happens, by the time the story of the appalling photograph was surfacing, I had actually seen Gov. Northam in a television clip responding to questions about an abortion rights bill under consideration by the State Legislature.  He was saying that he approved of the measure, and that it would indeed allow, under certain circumstances, infanticide.  He didn’t use that word, and I don’t think he actually meant what he did say.  I doubt that he actually accepts the necessity of infanticide.  But that is what he said, and the only likely reason he said it was that he wanted to demonstrate his progressive bona fides to his party allies.   Not that I believe that infanticide is progressive or that people who call themselves progressives generally do either.  But the two episodes—abortion interview and the flap about the photograph—are not unrelated.  It now appears that Northam was “outed” with regard to the now infamous photograph by somebody outraged by his extraordinary remarks about the abortion bill.

Ordinarily I would avoid such a dispiriting subject as the abortion question.   It is a topic that invites passion and outrage and nearly guarantees the exacerbation of ill will with only the slimmest chance of advancing comity and ethical clarification.  It will continue to do so as long as we continue to act as though “Pro Life” and “Pro Choice” are not inadequate slogans but definitive adversarial categories like skins and shirts or Guelfs and Ghibellines, tribes or teams to one of which each of us gives our unqualified support.  There actually is an American consensus on the issue, but one unsatisfying to the righteous appetite for certainty.  Most Americans are “against” abortion.  Most Americans are “against” the criminalization of abortion.  This means that most Americans are ambivalent about an issue concerning which strident voices are demanding certainty.

What is progressive in the development of civilization is the abandonment of barbarity, not its continuity.  Some brutal practices of Antiquity are rarely remembered, but they do show up in myth, legend, and literary texts.  The motives for infanticide were many, but their common denominator was the social or economic inconvenience or potential long-term military or political threat posed by the child to living adults.  The “exposure” of unwanted infants—dumping them to die in some desolate place—was not uncommon in the Greco-Roman world.  You don’t come to be raised by wolves, even if you are Romulus and Remus, under ordinary circumstances.  The voice of the Hebrew exile in the beautiful psalm Super flumina anticipates with pleasure the prospect of dashing the skulls of Edomite children against the stone walls of the city.  C’est la guerre.  In medieval penitential texts there is frequent mention of something called “overlying”.  In peasant households several people might sleep in the same bed.  Babies were not infrequently stifled in the night, asphyxiated by the weight of heavy adult bodies, leaving moralists suspicious that many such mishaps were not in fact accidents at all, but acts of postnatal birth control.  Unless we wish to imagine widespread depravity, and deny any natural bond of love between parent and child, such episodes were evidences of a terrible desperation.           

In fact our literature, which is after all supposedly an “imitation of life,” has been on the whole perhaps more truly enlightening than street demonstrations and counter-demonstrations.  Among modern writers few are grimmer than Hardy, and Hardy’s grimmest moment is probably in Jude the Obscure, in which a child, believing that his father’s life chances have been blasted by his need to support a family, murders his two junior siblings and hangs himself, leaving the chilling note: “Done because we are too many”.  It is impossible to absorb the horror of the deed without considering the horror of its motivation.  Hardy was not the first to believe in a malign biological trap in which the sexual instinct was and forever would be a generator of tragedy for large swaths of the human race.  Dreiser actually put that word in the title of one of the great novels of the last century, An American Tragedy, closely based, of course, on a “real life” criminal case.  One of my recent posts concerned Farrell’s Studs Lonigan.  In it the “biological trap” is but one factor in a world that seems expressly designed for the destruction of its pathetic anti-hero.  But surely you don’t need to “shout your abortion” or acquiesce, as Governor Northam did, in the idea of “abortion” on the delivery table to avoid returning to that world.

Old Teachers

 

 Richard Hooker with injudicious bird

 

Motivated by mere curiosity, the other day I plucked from one of my shelves a fat book with a spine so faded that I could not make out what was printed there.  It was the first of two volumes of The Works of that Learned and Judicious Divine Mr. Richard Hooker (Oxford, 1850).  These books have been in my library for more than fifty years.  I bought them for a song in a second-hand shop in one of the English coastal towns in what now seems like another world.  Yet clearly I had too long neglected the judicious Hooker, for I had forgotten, if I ever really took it in, that this edition included a reprinting of his charming short biography by Izaac Walton.  From an early page of Walton I learned that the fair flower of Hooker’s genius, who sprang from an obscure family in provincial Exeter, might well have wasted its sweetness on the desert air had it not been for the perspicuity of a talent-scouting primary teacher.  This teacher recognized his ability, nourished it, expanded it, and set Hooker on his road to the university and scholarly celebrity.  Walton writes thus: “This good schoolmaster, whose name I am not able to recover, (and am sorry, for that I would have given him a better memorial in this humble monument dedicated to the memory of his scholar)…”

The Unknown Teacher had been a cog in the great machine of meritocracy humming away behind the flashy front of Tudor aristocracy, discovering the odd Dee here and the odd Shakespeare there.  The passage set me to thinking first about my own role as a teacher.  I would estimate, conservatively, that over my career I must have personally interacted with about twenty thousand students, and with perhaps with twenty percent of that number in some substantial or significant way.   I am not expecting that future archaeologists will find a tombstone reading “Hic jacet So-and-so, olim pupil of the Judicious Fleming.”  Yet surely there must be among so many one or two who…. But even a moment’s reflection made me realize that this line of thought was premature, and that before I could fantasize about my role as teacher I had long-standing debts still unacknowledged from my days as a student.  So I take the occasion to remember two particular people, both of them public school teachers in California, probably in different semesters of the fifth grade; and as it happens I do recall their names.   Indeed, I could never forget them.  I had a math teacher named Mr. Schwab.  He was tall, dignified, rather formal yet friendly and accessible.  He showed us the elegance of numbers and the absolutely objective, impartial magnificence of mathematics.  He lifted the veil from the tedious “word questions” in our work book about whether Jim, in pursuing his unlikely profession as picker of grapefruits, should choose to be paid at a fixed hourly rate or at a piece rate per grapefruit, given that as the day progressed and Jim grew more tired the quantity of grapefruit picked decreased at a rate of four percent an hour, and…Anyway, behind all this was a large, beautiful, crystalline edifice of thought, the music of the spheres, the universal appeal of which was irresistible even to me, a hater of grapefruit.  Mr. Schwab made me, and made me feel, pretty good at math, though even his method could not blur the eventually decisive distinction between pretty good and really good.  This took place in a very unpleasant corner of Contra Costa County called Richmond. 

Two weeks into the second semester my parents had dragged me to a little town called Taft in the San Juaquin Valley.  Our living conditions in Taft were slightly more salubrious than those we left behind, though the only time I ever heard Taft mentioned in later years was as the site of a race riot.  I think this might have been in an essay entitled “Kern County: California’s Deep South”.  In Taft I was inserted in medias res into the English class of one Miss Ihrig, a plain woman of uncertain years who wore no-nonsense shoes and, I suspect, was pretty devoid of nonsense in other aspects of her life as well.  She was less than effusively politically correct when it came to Okies and Arkies, even those who had enjoyed brief coastal acculturation in the cesspool at Richmond.  But she knew just about everything there was to know about English grammar and seemed possessed of the noble if absurd notion that the children of Taft, Okies and Arkies included, might also at least approach that blissful state.

Miss Ihrig believed that the beginning of wisdom was a command of the eight parts of speech, which she forced us to master with their bells-and-whistles elaborations.  She was particularly big on the formal conjunctive adverb.  “Words like hence, thus, then, yet, moreover, still, and so (when so means therefore) are not conjunctions,” she told us, as though warning us off venereal disease.  “They are formal conjunctive adverbs.”  Formal conjunctive adverbs were practically open invitations to the semi-colon, the most elegant of our points of punctuation, though also the one demanding the keenest authorial judiciousness.  She was also great at diagramming sentences.  Many of my classmates chafed, but I grasped behind it all wonderful symmetries like those that Schwab found in the Golden Section.  Today you cannot count on people under thirty even to know what a part of speech is.  Brilliant freshmen with pyrotechnical test scores show up on college campuses today unable to link two sentences together, let alone tell you what a subordinate clause is.  What used to be called “Remedial English,” slightly dolled up in the raiment of current cultural fads, is now a standard introductory requirement in Ivy League institutions.  But just at the point when I should be searching out the perfectly worded periodic sentence of conclusion, you must not get me started.  I’ll go quietly, thinking happily of Mr. Schwab and Miss Ihrig.

Studs Lonigan

I often praise the Library of America, the great collection that is bringing together the bountiful harvest of our national literature in beautiful editions that are also probably the greatest bargains in today’s book market.  Purposefully working through the list, even a professor of English discovers that writers who once were just names—Sarah Orne Jewett, say, or Lafcadio Hearn—are in fact geniuses so remarkable that one’s previous ignorance of their works will now seem calamitous, perhaps semi-criminal.  I am having that experience just at the moment as I work my way through the approximately thousand pages of James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy.

Only in my eighties have I found the stamina to take on this rather long story of the rather short life of an Irish-American kid growing up in the Chicago tenements but a century ago.  Its arc is that of The Rake’s Progress without the satire or of the Portrait of Dorian Gray without the mysticism.  All the major forces in young Studs’s life—his family, the Roman Catholic Church, the seriously bad-boy ethos of the neighborhood gang with whom he hangs out at the pool hall—are resources manifestly inadequate for his flourishing ; yet his self-destruction, however inexplicable and unexplained, is volitional, indeed almost perversely purposeful, and seemingly inevitable.  Farrell, perhaps like Thomas Hardy, seems to locate it in biology.

Unsatisfied lust has been the principal sexual experience of young men in our western societies, and even today anyone who sets out to write a competent Bildungsroman needs to bear that in mind.  So far as I am concerned that is one of several crises of the contemporary novel.  They have plenty of unconvincing sex, but there is little convincing lust.  It’s hardly worth describing life in a repressive society if you can’t examine repression.

In the first place, Studs is a product of a lace-curtain Irish domestic regime as fully constrictive as anything in Kate O’Brien or Joyce’s Dubliners.  Yet the lower middle-class narrowness against which he ostensibly chafes actually directs his concepts of decorum, with inevitably catastrophic results.  Young Lonigan longs to be a good Catholic.  Nothing is more fundamental to understanding his character than the sincerity of that desire—unless it be its triviality.   So he genuinely honors his brittle concept of  “good girls”, just as he despises the young whores with whom he finds furtive and unsatisfying gratification.

            There is a very brilliant chapter in the second volume (Young Manhood) set at Christmas, 1922, the year in which Studs has reached his majority.  It is close to the exact center of the whole work.  The Lonigan family Christmas Eve is ruined by a horrible squabble around the hearth, and Studs storms out for a night of dissipation—an old-fashioned word, but one fully justified by his old-fashioned loathsomeness.  Yet Farrell presents this so brilliantly that, despite the appalling behavior of the young anti-hero, the reader must grant him a certain measure of sympathy.  An all-nighter of cursing and quarreling, of tough-guy posturing, mindless drinking, and brutal lubricity in a “can house” (brothel) ends with a narrow escape from the police, a sprained limb, sleepless exhaustion, a raging hangover, the sickening implications of having missed midnight Mass, and a doomed resolution of immediate reformation as he sets off for the Christmas morning High Mass at his parish church.

The church is mobbed, and by accident of the crush he finds himself jammed into a crowded pew next to an unknown attractive young woman in a squirrel coat, a complete stranger.  This woman, whom he dare look at only with feigned indifference and sidelong glances, becomes an instant sexual obsession whose power overwhelms the formulaic rote prayers and mental acts of contrition that are the thin substance of his actual spiritual resources.  His fantasies concerning her will prey upon him for weeks and months.  The intensity of his carnal desire is matched only by its fatuousness.  Farrell’s is usually described as a late exponent of literary “naturalism,” the unsentimental and perhaps unliterary realism of Zola and such American masters as Frank Norris, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Theodore Dreiser.  Certainly the grittiness of Studs Lonigan, its inexorable sadness and utter lack of sentimentality, and the bleakness of its author’s own materialism, justify such a classification.  But most surprisingly it is here engaging, quite possibly accidentally, with an ancient romantic trope in which the extravagance of erotic desire is expressed in terms of its pseudo-religious character.  For church is virtually the canonical place for amatory trolling.  In the Ars amatoria (Art of Love) wise-ass professor Ovid teaches that the temple is an excellent place to pick up girls.  It is in a temple that Troilus, victim of an attack by Cupid, is stunned by the fairness of Criseyde.  And it was in the church of Santa Chiara in Avignon that the hottest of the red-hot lovers, Francis Petrarch, fatally raised his eyes from his prayer book and beheld in a distant transept the unattainable beauty of Laura.  Art imitates life, which reciprocates by reduplicating art.  Respectable Samuel Pepys does not fail to record in his famous diaries his favorites genres of sexual predation, of which the “church grope” is perhaps his favorite sub-specialty.

            The world of Studs Lonigan is precisely one lifetime away, my own.  The book dates from 1935, I from 1936.  Yet the world that it describes and scandalized is now vanished.   The novels were banned in Boston and charged with an obscenity now nearly invisible; their remorseless delineation of fifty shades of brutal racism, on the other hand—that was simply the way things are.  If you are among those who think that “things never change,” you might want to read this brilliant book.  But it’s neither for the faint of heart nor for the heartless.

Princeton in the Great Fear

Immediately following the storming of the Bastille in July of 1789 there spread throughout vast areas of rural France a mass delusion known to historians as “the Great Fear”.  Its acute phase lasted about three weeks.  Rumors were rife that brigands were marauding through the countryside plundering villages, burning crops in the fields, and killing peasants.  The grapevine typically claimed that the violence had already reached such-and-such a nearby village and was now headed “this way”.  You can perhaps imagine the actual social consequences of such widespread panic—or perhaps you cannot.   Suffice it to say they were considerably more revolutionary than the attack on the Bastille itself.

I am not particularly good at correctly predicting results of such things as athletic contests and political elections, but I do have a nose for codswallop and hogwash that many of my peers seem to lack.  I well remember when just about Thanksgiving of 1987 I saw a report in the Times of the supposed kidnapping and sexual torture of a young woman named Tawana Brawley in Wappinger Falls, NY.  I knew immediately that the story had to be a hoax—an obvious conclusion arrived at only much later and most reluctantly by the mainstream press, and only after having contributed generously to the creation of a horrible episode of racial tension and having promoted the Rev. Al Sharpton to his tenured position as race-hustling political guru among the American punditocracy.

Toward the end of last week several urgent messages from various centers of social gravitas in our upscale community of Princeton, NJ—the Y, the public library, the mayor’s office, the University’s “Tiger Alert” service—appeared in my email and, I supposed, in the boxes of many others..  They informed me that on the proximate Saturday, maybe even the next day, white supremacists were planning a hateful march through the center of our little town.  Not to worry, however.  The police were prepared to protect us.  Plans for emergency street clearings and special parking restrictions had already been put in place.  I had never before heard of the fascist entity sponsoring the march--the New Jersey European Heritage Association—but an instant’s Internet research confirmed the existence of such a sadsack sodality, or at least the existence of a website featuring a photograph of a pregnant blonde and a lament for the comparatively anemic Caucasian birth-rate in America.  White Supremacy, while no laughing matter, is nonetheless ludicrous.  Conspicuously absent, however, was the announcement of a March on Princeton, or indeed on anywhere else.

I already was beginning to have vague intimations of that Tawana Brawley feeling as I set out to discover the evidence triggering our very own local Great Fear.  Of course a sizable political demonstration in the center of a bustling town, whether by white supremacists or the PTA, but especially one requiring police supervision at least as vigilant as that for the 10K “Turkey Trot” at Thanksgiving, would normally require prior planning.  According to the mayor’s communication, no application had been made by the NJEHA or anybody else for a permit to march or demonstrate on this particular Saturday; but (and here the plot took a sinister turn toward the passive voice) fliers announcing a proposed march had appeared in the town.  Anonymous, but appeared.  How to assess the threat?  Hume’s argument against miracles is an argument from probability.  Is it more probable that a man walked on water or that the report of his having done so was mistaken or actually fraudulent?  To my mind, the proposition that White Supremacists were going to have a political rally in Princeton, NJ, was a priori less probable than—well, than most ways you could finish the sentence.  But Xeroxed fliers pushed me over the edge, as they might have done to others who have spent forty years on a college campus observing the potential for mischief inherent in anonymous fliers.  In 1708, wicked Jonathan Swift published a flier predicting the imminent death of an annoying astrologer named Partridge.  Nothing Partridge did thereafter could convince the public that he was not in fact dead.  They wanted him to be dead, and they had seen his death predicted in a flier.

No pasarán!  Palmer Square, Princeton, N. J., 12 January 2019

The White Supremacists were no shows, but there was still a pretty impressive counter-demonstration, presuming that one needs no actual demonstration to counter one.  I was not there, but I got the following report from Tiger Alert: “More than 500 people chanting and holding signs marched around the square for more than an hour this afternoon.  They went ahead with their demonstration even though the white supremacist group did not show up.”  The racists were presumably back lurking under the bridges with the rest of the trolls, waiting for the Billy Goats Gruff.  There may not have been such a flap in these parts since October 30, 1938.   On that evening CBS transmitted a drama, a version of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds adapted for radio by the genius of Orson Welles, that convinced its listeners that hostile Martians had landed at Grover’s Mill, practically in spitting distance of the Princeton campus, and that they were headed “this way”.  Old Mrs. Skillman, my landlady in graduate student days and an eye witness, told us all about it.  No counter-attack, but lots of people apparently took refuge in the Catholic church two blocks east on Nassau Street for a hastily initiated prophylactic novena.

These Childish Things

Not too long ago I found at the back of a drawer filled with miscellaneous junk one of my old pocketknives.  I hadn’t seen it, or any other boy’s pocketknife in years, and it started me down a path of remembrance of things past that is becoming for me a familiar itinerary.  How very different were the “old days” of even a single lifetime!  A fortnight ago it was Christmas.  Because of the diverse travel plans, housing arrangements, commissary assignments, and social priorities of the three families of our adult children, our Christmas morning gift exchange was, by common-sense general agreement, a scaled-down event to be achieved as modestly and expeditiously as the presence of several small, excited children might allow.  But even if one stuck with the “one gift” policy, which not everyone did, our sitting room was soon overflowing with piles of hastily removed crumpled wrapping paper, and the carpet already littered with unprepossessing bits and pieces of brightly colored plastic, constituent parts of various games and gizmos designed to ignite a temporary excitement among their recipients and, in the longer term, swell the trade deficit with China.

I remember no plastic from seventy years ago.  Our infantile amusements were, for the most part, self-designed and their implements home made.  We actually made our own sleds, skis, and wheeled carts.  Living on a run-down farm mainly consisted of fixing broken things and making do with what could be whittled out of ash and cedar blanks.  A corner of the barn was always full of old metal rods, gears, and wheels patiently awaiting their inventive recycling. Nor was this phenomenon limited to the economically marginal in the American sticks.  I don’t read a lot of political biography, and seldom long retain much of it when read; but I do remember a small detail from an autobiography of Harold Macmillan, who had been the British Prime Minister during my Oxford years.  He had been born in the final years of the nineteenth century.  The style of his upper-crust upbringing—a straight line from a nannied nursery through Eton to Balliol College, Oxford—avoided ostentatious displays of affluence; but the family was quite comfortable.  He makes the point, nonetheless, that as a growing lad he and his peers always made their own toys and rarely saw a store-bought one.  My Uncle John, though not an Etonian, shared this spirit.  One day he found a cache of old iron horseshoes under a chicken shed he was repairing.  That same day between dinner and sundown he had created a horseshoe pitch that gave pleasure for the next thirty years.

Most toys needed wooden parts, and this is where the pocketknife came in.  I am not talking about the portable workshop that was the old Swiss Army knife, nor some sturdy, potentially lethal Opinel.  I mean a fifty-cent flat piece of gun metal, three or four inches long and clad in faux antler, possibly sheathing but a single blade of high quality carbon steel that would accept, through patient honing, a super-keen edge and hold it.  All cutting tools had to be kept sharp, but the goal for a pocketknife was a blade that could effortlessly slice though a piece of notebook paper.  Everybody whittled, all the time—except when honing the blade with an Arkansas stone, also carried in a pocket.  You got to be quite good just by eyesight at shaving things straight, and to a fairly fine tolerance.

The knife itself was a toy.  Can I be writing these words? I am a modern parent of hyper-modern parents who carefully read all warning labels, ingredient lists, expiration dates and allergy alerts.  But we boys once played Mumblety-Peg endlessly.  Mumblety-Peg was like Country Ham.  All aficionados of it knew its exact rules with dogmatic certainty, and no two sets of rules agreed.  Essentially it was a game of considerable skill involving precision in knife-throwing at a defined or imagined target on the ground.  Often the thrower adopted a contorted bodily posture to create a novelty feat that his competitor in the game had to match.  The knife-throw could also have a role in another all-consuming pastime—“keeper’s” marbles.  This term meant in theory that you actually took permanent possession of marbles won; but the natural justice of childhood, unlike the avarice of its elders, rebels at the obscenity of monopoly.  So what it meant de facto was the endless ebb and flow of the supposed booty among the various participants.  Anyway, going in for the kill in a defined “marble circle” might involve the expert sectioning of the circle by knife-throw.

“Gender roles” were not nearly so fixed as our contemporary academic theorists would have you believe.  Most “motion” games—Kick the Can, Simon Says, Red Rover, and so on—were generally played by all.  The total cost for the equipment for these games was zero dollars and zero cents.  Hopscotch was primarily but not exclusively a girls’ pastime; but the kingdom over which girls ruled most awesomely was that of the skip-rope.  As Joni Mitchell says, you don’t know what you’ve got til it's gone.  I’ve lived in my present, pleasant neighborhood for thirty years now.  Never once have I encountered on its broad sidewalks the traces of a chalked hopscotch grid.  Nor anywhere, in the last half century, have I seen the vernacular choreography, as precise as that in any Hollywood review, of agile children leaping, seemingly without effort, in and out of a maelstrom of rapidly whirling rope.  Out comes the doctor.  Out comes the nurse.  Out comes the lady with the alligator purse.

Abandoned Women

Dido and Aeneas, alfresco in Rome

Over the holidays I watched one of the free Netflix offerings, “The Little Hours,” which is an intermittently amusing pseudo-medieval comedy loosely based in Boccaccio’s Decameron.  It got me thinking about the importance of horny nuns to the European literary tradition, and the problems that tradition raises for the current search for the “authentic female voice” in our early literatures.

            Before you had nuns you had widows, the most influential of whom was the Carthaginian queen, Widow Dido.  Though committed to the memory and ashes of her murdered husband Sychaeus, she immediately feels a hormonal stirring when Aeneas rides into town.  (He washes up on the beach, actually.)  In one of Virgil’s great lines Dido confesses to her sister Anna: Adgnosco veteri vestigia flammae (iv. 23) “I recognize the signs of the old flame.”  Here is the ancient origin of the still current phrase old flame; but note that in Virgil it means not a particular old boyfriend but eroticism itself.  But there is such a thing as spiritual eroticism as well.  Near the end of the Purgatorio the pilgrim Dante, sensing the proximity of Beatrice, says to Virgil: Conosco i segni dell’antica fiamma.  Virgil would surely have recognized one of his own greatest lines, but it is precisely at this point (Purgatorio xxx, 48-49) that Virgil has disappeared from the poem like a whiff of smoke.  “Types and shadows have their ending,” as the Pange lingua puts it, “for the newer rite is here.”

            Dante’s “use” of Dido, which is enabled in part by the linguistic closeness of Latin to his Florentine vernacular, is particularly brilliant; but any European who could read knew Dido’s tragic history.  After indulging in a torrid sexual affair with her—which she called a “marriage”—Aeneas dumped her and sailed away to do his boy thing (founding the Roman Empire).  Crazed by love, Dido committed suicide.  Thus she became literature’s most famous abandoned woman—and abandoned in the double sense of giving herself over completely to passion and of being scorned by a faithless lover.  This literary version of the “abandoned woman” was given its classical expression in Ovid’s Heroides, a collection of the imaginary letter exchanges between famous abandoned women and the jerks who shafted them.  Prominent among them are the purported letters of Dido.  For a thousand years pre-pubescent boys had Latin drills based in the erotic language of the fourth book of the Æneid.  Augustine writes about it.  So there is a great deal of the “voicing” of abandoned women, and all of it written by males, and all of it deriving ultimately from the male schools of classical Antiquity.

Abelard and Heloise, from a MS of the Roman de la Rose

      

Fast-forward to the first half of the twelfth century.  In general the social conditions of women have not changed dramatically since Ovid’s day.  It’s still a man’s world.  But Christianization has created at least one very important innovation in this regard: the female religious house.  In the thousands of nunneries of medieval Europe tens of thousands of women live by votive principle in single-sex communities having as little commerce with men as is practically possible.  In these houses there are often important functions, “leadership roles” of teaching and administration, of financial management, of artisanal crafts that perforce have to be undertaken by women.  From this situation arises a paradox.  A form of life seemingly designed to demand maximal denial of, and impose maximal constraints upon its followers in fact enables many women to flourish in ways that would never be open to them in the world beyond the cloister.  This is particularly true, perhaps, in the sphere of letters.  Virginia Woolf famously yearned for “a room of her own.”  In the Middle Ages it was fairly easy for a woman to get one, if it was a cell.  So we get a Hrotsvitha, the learned tenth-century canoness of Gandersheim, and the author of erudite Latin dramas on the model of those of Plautus and Terence.  In the twelfth century we get the polymath genius Hildegard of Bingen, a Benedictine nun who was among other things a poet, a musician, a scientist, and a speculative theologian.

            This brings us to one of the most celebrated literary episodes of the Middle Ages, and back to horny nuns.  I refer to the famous dossier of “correspondence” between Abelard and Heloise.  Concerning this famous dossier I am a heretic, for I do not believe that Heloise’s letters are any more “real” than Dido’s letters in the Heroides.  This is a blog post, not a scholarly essay, and I shall not argue the case.  I freely admit that my heresy, which has proved on more than one occasion to be life-threatening when raised in the presence of feminist scholars, is a distinctly minority view; but I have to call them like I see them.  One of Heloise’s great lines to Abelard is this: “Even if I could be Queen to the Emperor and have all the power and riches in the world, I’d rather be your whore.”  That is one horny nun, and in its level of abandonment the “authentic voice” sounds to me like that of Ovid.

            Be that as it may, the Abelard-Heloise correspondence had a huge fictional posterity.  It is not going too far to see in it a precursor of the epistolary novel, which became so prominent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with writers like Richardson in Pamela and Choderlos de Laclos in Les liaisons dangereuses.  The horny nun also became a staple of the love literature of those centuries.  The most famous of a dozen examples is probably the Portuguese Letters (Lettres portugaises traduites en français) first published in Paris in 1669.  The purportedly “authentic voice” of the letters was that of a jilted Portuguese nun named Mariana Alcoforado.  The actual author was a French libertine and Ovid-reader named Gabriel de Lavergne, sieur de Guilleragues.  Another male fantasy, actually.

Christmas with Yuri and Lara

This year’s family Christmas preparations involved troop movements and contingency planning at a degree of complexity in comparison with which the Normandy Invasion must be regarded more along the lines of a trip to Trader Joe’s.  I was merely a grateful observer of their expert execution by others.  The Montreal contingent arrived on Saturday night.  Joan had brilliantly snagged six last-minute bargain seats for the production of “A Christmas Carol” at the McCarter on Sunday. Everything went like clockwork including not merely the timely conversion of Ebenezer Scrooge but—mirabile dictu—even parking at the theater!  Next day, the Christmas Eve feast at Kingwood was a culinary tour de force by son Richard and an epic success, followed by a second when we whisked all the little ones off to the statutory church pageant featuring live manger animals and classic Christmas carols.

By then I had already undergone a strange catharis in no way formally connected with the holiday, yet still somehow useful for it.  Every life, however humble, must have its Eureka moments.  For me one came in my fifteenth year when the Modern Library edition of The Brothers Karamazov came into my hands.  I felt I had never before read anything so strange and wonderful.  Some of the exotic flavor, I would later learn, derived as much from the translator Constance Garnett as from Dostoyevsky; but no matter.  Here was this vast world of obsolete titles, puzzling patronymics, “degrees of frost”, visionary monks, and thirty different kinds of horse-drawn conveyance--and from its center vivid moral issues shining forth as bright as klieg lights.  I went on a reading jag: more Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Gogol’s Dead Souls.  This must have been in the year 1951, height of the Cold War, the year of Whittaker Chambers’s Witness.  Gray-faced Russians in bad gray suits were throwing tantrums at the UN.  The Rosenbergs were on death row.  How could  Alyosha Karamazov have morphed into Andrey Vyshinsky?  I knew that if I ever wanted to get serious about this interest I would have to learn Russian.  I surprised myself with the realism of my decision.  I would not get really serious, but I would nonetheless continue to indulge my Anglophone Russophilia.  Otherwise, what’s the point of literary translation?  At Sewanee there was an old guy named Eugene Kayden, an economist but also somehow an expert on Russian poetry, and he helped me.  It was from him I first heard the name of Boris Pasternak.

On Saturday afternoon our “Montreal family” set off in the direction of Princeton.  I tend to get sleepy pretty early, but I was determined to be awake when they arrived.  So I did something to guarantee that I would not nod off.  I slid a DVD of “Doctor Zhivago” into the reader on my computer and settled in for a couple of hours of intense emotional immersion.  I take the probably heretical view that Doctor Zhivago is a good novel, but a great film.  Book and film need to be regarded as quite separate, though obviously related, works of art.  My opinion is that just about everything in Lean’s film is perfect.  I watch it about once in a year or eighteen months.  You cannot make caviar a daily commonplace.  It always made my eyes tear up.  This year I just let it rip, a solitary weeper in a darkened room.  The term “tear-jerker” was invented to try to shield us from the embarrassing reality of our own emotions.  If you can without weeping watch the scene in which Lara departs by horse-drawn sleigh from Varykino, leaving Zhivago to do his far, far better thing—well, you probably should make an appointment for a general physical check-up.

Is there a “tragic sense” of history?  I have studied enough of it to know that mostly it is a record of intense human struggle against formidable enemies: want, disease, ignorance, “natural” disasters and the unnatural ones launched in the darkness of the human heart.  This may be a grim view, but it seems to me the one upon which the Christmas “message” is posited.  And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.  That is the “comic sense” of history, and the one that keeps me from despair.  Be this as it may, no reader of Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy is allowed to doubt that “there are tears in things”—as Virgil has put it, nearly two thousand years before them.  But there are degrees and styles of tragedy.  The tragedy of the political pathologies of modernity is on so colossal a scale as to beggar the imagination.  Only comparatively recently have I read the historian Martin Malia’s extraordinary book The Soviet Tragedy; but I had much earlier seen its central truths foreshadowed in Dostoyevsky’s Devils (The Possessed) and delineated in the twentieth-century pages of Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.   What David Lean’s “Doctor Zhivago” does with unmatched brilliance is to exemplify a vast intercontinental disaster through the private grief of two compelling characters worthy of Dickens or Victor Hugo or any of the great nineteenth-century heirs of the Romantic tradition.  It was only accidental that, this year, it also served as my version of keeping watch by night.