Butler Park

I have just returned from a medically mandated mile’s stroll through the min-paradise across the street from my house, and I am thinking that even war might have an upside.  The end of the Second World War and the rapid demobilization of large numbers of men from the Armed Forces inevitably caused certain disruptions in American higher education as it did in so many areas of our national life.  Many colleges and universities had lost a sizeable part of their normal cohort of male students to active service.  Many others had diverted important segments of the scientific research toward the War effort, or actually become the homes for specialized programs born of military necessity.  By the end of 1945 these institutions were faced with the challenge of returning to an imagined “normal” while at the same time honoring the special needs and circumstances of returning veterans.  Provisions of the “G. I. Bill of Rights,” passed by Congress in an anticipatory gesture in 1944, would considerably increase America’s college population, especially at state institutions, but there was an impact within the Ivy League as well.

At Princeton there had been many young men who either left campus to serve or deferred admission to do so.   They were now wanting to return—older, more mature, and (in a fair number of instances) married.  The Princeton authorities were almost prepared to cope with the challenge of comparative maturity in the student body, provided it was kept at a reasonable level, but married students had them flummoxed.  Where were these people to live?  There was a trustee emergency, there was a faculty Task Force, and there was the Butler Tract.  Beyond the fringe of the campus, and at that time practically beyond the town itself, was a goodly chunk of empty land, hustled for the University by a devoted alumnus named Butler early in the twentieth century, and upon it the University built a small village of modest frame row houses in which to shelter its married heroes.  The tract lay along the east side of South Harrison with two township streets, Sycamore on the north and Hartley on the south, defining it.  Within the tract itself the new housing was laid out along little roads named Devereux, Eisenhower, Halsey, Marshall, and King—and if you don’t recognize those names, you need a refresher course in American military history.

 gone but not forgotten

This was in 1945-46, and it was officially designated “temporary housing”.  The brief glut would run its course within five years; new on-campus dorms would be built.  But….as the Graduate School expanded, and as more married graduate students appeared on the scene, Butler morphed into “Graduate Married Housing”.  Wildly popular.  And then, after about twenty more years…the town of Princeton was well on its way to join the Upper East Side, Georgetown, San Francisco, and a few other select beauty spots in a race for the title of Most Unaffordable Place on Earth.  The Butler Tract was, in turn, the greatest rental bargain in town.  By 1988, when we moved into a house across Hartley Avenue, trying to control get-rich-quick subleasing deals had already become a nightmare for the University real estate office.  Thus about the year 2010, when the University had built a compensatory lavish Graduate Housing complex lakeside, the authorities announced their intention of razing Butler to the ground.

But by now Sycamore Avenue to the north was well populated by town NIMBYs who had enjoyed seeing their $75,000 houses advance to the statutory Princeton million.  There were Concerned Citizens, letters to the editor, lawyers.  There were tedious meetings where an architect from the university subjected herself to the mau-mauing of “stakeholders” animated by a dark hermeneutics of suspicion.  I was never a NIMBY.  After all, what was being proposed was going to be in my front yard.  But the large majority of my fellow stakeholders didn’t believe for a minute the University’s promise that for the foreseeable future the tract would be left open parkland.  One overwrought lawyer prophesied that even if they did keep their promise, the fate of the Butler Tract would undoubtedly be that of the blighted ruins of Atlantic City: tent encampments of the homeless, and crack dens.

                                                                                                                                               

            Slow forward through tedious consultations and the enrichment of various lawyers.  The University of course “wins”, shrouds the site with eight-foot high blinders, and engages in a year of nearly parodically environmental-friendly demolition.  Month after month.  What seems like thousands of truckloads coming and going, but about as discreetly as Mack trucks go, or for that matter, come.  Eventually they take the fences down.  Dis-ap-point-ed! Except for the old military streets, their sidewalks, and their street lights—all preserved and functional—it looks like any other bulldozed stretch of Route One awaiting its shopping center.  But then various agricultural machines arrive and do their things.  In the spring the whole place explodes with healthy grass and literally thousands of wildflowers.  A herd of deer takes up residence in a large open field.  Many of the old trees reveal a previously unnoticed magnificence.  Well-equipped professional grounds crews show up periodically to mow and tend the peripheral swaths of flourishing lawn.  At night the street lights still illuminate the silent sidewalks with a comforting glow.  The park area is blocked off from vehicular traffic but is absolutely open to cyclists and walkers, large numbers of whom immediately begin marching around it with evident pleasure.  And these are the kind of people who do pick up their dogs’ poop--mostly.  Among them are many geriatrics, pregnant women, convalescents and other unconventional hikers.  Since I am among the last group I have not yet dared to penetrate to the most distant center of the field of daisies, but I already doubt that I shall find a crack den when I finally do.  I recognize many of my smiling fellow walkers, mostly my neighbors.  Some of them reside on Sycamore, and their already overpriced houses have just gotten another little realtor’s goose on account of their “proximity to a beautiful park.”

The Little Foxes

Many years ago, knocking around in my pickup truck, I came upon some abandoned garden allotments that seem once to have been a part of an abandoned apartment complex.  The fencing had long since been removed, and heavy equipment had been driven around the place, ripping up some cinder blocks and railroad ties used for making raised tomato beds and leaving the detritus, along with some bent and ruined Home Depot metal garden stakes, in an ugly pile.  One memory of the garden remained: a straggly Concord grape vine broken and desiccated in its main branch, but still sustaining five or six scrappy colonies of green where smaller branches had fallen to the ground and taken root.  I cut the umbilical cords on the most promising of these, dug it out by the roots, and took it home.  From that propagation I now have in my yard at least a dozen vines, two of them huge and arboreal, the others more or less trellised,  Sometimes my granddaughters and I make grape jelly, though in recent years it’s been all about the wild raspberries, and the birds usually get the grapes.

Now there is a verse in the Song of Songs (2:15) that has had a certain significance in my academic work.  In the King James Version it is this: “Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.”  In medieval Christian exegesis the “vineyard” was widely taken to be an allegorical representation of the Church.  The little foxes spoiling the vines were therefore a figure of the heretics who troubled the Church.  So widely was this allegory accepted that various actual “heretics” started tocall themselves “the little foxes”.  I would occasionally mention this curiosity in lectures.  But of course the danger of concentrating on an allegorical sense is that the literal sense may be forgotten entirely.

Our back yard is something of a wondrous menagerie, which is one of the reasons it so delights young children.  Rare is the summer day in which one does not see deer, squirrels, rabbits, chipmunks, groundhogs—all in addition to birds in abundance and variety.  This year, since I have had temporarily to abandon cultivating my vegetable garden at the bottom, animal life is more abundant and more bold than ever.  The “garden” itself, of course, is rapidly reverting to Stage Two Jersey Jungle.  And on the adjoining open common ground new bird and animal life is becoming more abundant.  On a couple of occasions a small flock of wild turkeys have paraded past the gap in the liminal stone walls.  And foxes, of which there have always seemed to be at least one happy family,  now seem more numerous.  Indeed, one can rarely walk about the Common Ground without spotting a fox.  We now suspect that a foxy family has taken up residence on our own property, or very near it.

The other day Joan called me to the windows at the back.  Look, there is a fox walking along the stone wall!  And so, indeed, there was.  The wall is quite a long ways off, and the fox was obviously still a juvenile, but there was no mistaking the pert manner and the ramrod horizontality of the tail that is so characteristic of a fox on the run,  But the attitude of this critter was more like a fox on a runway—at a fashion show.  This fox was walking along the top of my stone wall as though it were I-9.  Later on I spotted an adult fox on the open lawn at the bottom of my neighbor’s contiguous property.  There is a memorial bench about seventy-five yards out into the Common Ground.  I sometimes sit on it, and look up from there to the back of my wall; this big fox was simply sitting there, Fido-like, looking back at me.  Later still, I finally got the gumption to bushwhack my way into the temporarily abandoned garden to reclaim a couple of tools.  There I found a mysterious shallow pit, apparent evidence of some barely begun or abandoned mining operation.  But even then I didn’t put it all together.

What I am calling the “garden” is pretty well fenced in against deer, and for decorative purposes I have some of my grapevines trellised against its upper reaches, with the leafing tendrils beginning at about five feet from the ground.  On one side, where the wire fencing comes close to the abutment of the stone wall, the vines are already heavily fruited with still very under-ripe grapes.  Well, a couple of days ago we looked out to see that our young fox was not simply promenading along a wall.  He (or she) was standing on it, using it as a ladder to get at such of the green grapes as were reachable from the corner of the wall abutment.  The little foxes spoil the vines!  I was able to confirm this later by an on-site investigation, which revealed evidence of a few ravished green clusters.  In a flash of further biblical insight, I grasped also the meaning of the small-scale mining operating in the fallow tomato patch: “Foxes have holes, and birds have nests…”  But it was from an ancient secular writer that I took my comfort: Æsop.  I couldn’t really resent the vulpine foraging.  Those must have been very sour grapes!

One Father's Fathers Day

In my birth family the celebration of Mothers Day was distinctly muted, and Fathers Day got no notice whatsoever.  No specific and coherent argument was raised against it, but it was neither a traditional religious holiday nor a national patriotic one, and it just never became an actual thing as opposed to a convenient excuse for the Western Auto Store to advertise its tire sale.  I do remember one linguistic debate as to whether the proper form was Fathers Day, Fathers’ Day, or Father’s Day—all three of which appeared in a single tire advertisement.  A little anthropological research will soon reveal a probable connection of days dedicated to both mothers and fathers with various medieval Christian religious observances.  When I married an English woman, I became aware of Mothering Sunday.  I thought Mothering Sunday was a very cool name and almost certainly must have had something to do with the medieval cult of the Virgin, although in Britain it had become thoroughly Protestantized.  Fathers Day does have some antecedents in various festivals honoring Saint Joseph, though if its development had been a little more orthodox in terms of Catholic theology it would have been called Step-Fathers Day.  We find a related problem in the elaborate forty-two step genealogy at the beginning of Matthew’s gospel, though that has provided us with many marvelous artistic renditions of the beautiful “Tree of Jesse.”  In any event, it was only when both of our sons married delightful southerners, one from South Carolina and the other from Tennessee, that I started getting due acclaim for my relatively commonplace achievements as a progenitor.  I must say that I now find it very pleasant indeed to have salutes to my paternity coming in each year from various parts of the world.  Usually.

But this year the experience was doubly enriched by becoming, in effect, Granddaughters Day.  For an aging couple with shrinking social horizons we still seem to manage a fair number of conflicting obligations or opportunities.  Last week Joan spent several days at a kind of music camp with other members of her string quartet.  This is an annual event, scheduled months in advance, and it is rather intense.  Meanwhile our eldest granddaughter, Sophia, has a birthday just about now.  As it happens, so does her boyfriend Raymond.  So a plan developed.  There would be a joint birthday party for this winsome couple, very low-key, which would consist of a visit to check out their elegant and newly moved-into Brooklyn apartment, followed by dinner at a local eatery of repute, Frankie’s on Court Street.  The only fly in this fragrant ointment was the fact that Joan, still fully occupied with music making, would not be able to attend.  Thus it was decided that I would go to New York alone on Saturday evening.   And since travel is a little problematic for me these days, I didn’t want to try to go and return on the same day, and so elected to spend Saturday night at my daughter’s place on Washington Square, also the home of the two delightful younger sisters of the Birthday Girl.  So a grandfatherly clean sweep, of sorts, overnighted into Fathers Day.

The door-to-door transportation offered by the hail-riding companies is what makes such things possible.  It is expensive, of course, but not prohibitively so on an occasional basis.  This was my first unsatisfactory lift from Lyft.  The driver was an Arabic-speaker, a cheerful and voluble Egyptian, whose only certain word, or rather letters of English, was “GPS”.  His name was Ram, which had rather confused me, as I briefly expected the arrival of a Dodge Ram.  This seemed a little odd, but I am a nouveau uberite and Johnny-come-lately lyfter, and I would not have minded so long as I got to sit in the cab rather than the truck bed.  However Mr. Ram was actually driving a four-door Ford, which I had missed in the fine print.  But he had never before driven it or any other vehicle to New York, and his trusty GPS directed him by unconventional paths.  He was also a nicotine addict.  His first ploy was to offer me a cigarette in the utterly vain hope that I would collude with him in what was, I am sure, a breach of a cardinal rule of his employment.  But there was no collusion.  So censorious was my mien, indeed,  as to drive him to desperate measures.  When we got out on what might be called the open road, he began a program of surreptitious vaping.  It is not easy to vape surreptitiously, especially in an automobile.  The attempt required having both front windows wide open while operating the air conditioning at full blast.  Traffic was treacherous across Staten Island and onto the Verrazano.  Mr. Ram neither spoke English nor appeared to comprehend it in either spoken or written form.  I concluded that my best course was silent prayer rather than vehement remonstrance.  As we bumper-to-bumpered over the bridge he became visibly animated by the spectacular views, especially the glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, and waved his phone wildly with his right hand taking many photographs.  Altogether during this trip he may have had both hands on the wheel forty percent of the time.  But, as you are now my witnesses, I did live to tell the tale, to see Sophia’s nifty apartment, to have some transgressive calamari, and then to spend most of Sunday sedentary or actually prone on a luxurious couch at my daughter’s place.  Occasionally she, my son-in-law, or a granddaughter would briefly stint from their labors long enough to offer me a hot drink, or a cold one.  Eventually I was roused to a bowl of delicious tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich.  Now and again I read a few pages of something, or listened to a pod cast on my phone.  If you want to cosset a father on Fathers Day, you can forget the neckties and the cuff links, assuming that you’ve ever heard of a cuff link in the first place.  Just let the old guy lounge around on your couch for the day exuding his indeterminate fatherly aura.  Eventually it will occur to him that, as compared with Mr. Ram, he has had a pretty soft life.   He should count himself lucky that the paternal task of keeping bread on his children’s table never required him to drive around Cairo all day armed with only three words of possible Arabic: Alhambra, Aljazeera, and  al-GPS.

A Short Story by John O'Hara

John O'Hara (1905-1970)

The short story is not an American invention, but American writers at least since the time of Poe have developed it with a special inventiveness.  There was not a lot of fiction on the dusty shelves of my boyhood home, but there were more volumes than I could believe by O. Henry, who, I thought, must be the most famous and productive writer in our country.  Many years later I learned that there were many people—including the kind of people who grew up in big houses in Fairfield County with real libraries before going to school at St. Paul’s—who never heard of him.  I am not sure I ever heard his name mentioned in forty years of conversation with learned colleagues in my English Department.  But he was big in my early reading life.  O. Henry (it’s a pen-name, of course), who died before the beginning of World War I, was a master of the “surprise ending”.  The influence of De Maupassant is pretty obvious, but I hadn’t even heard of him at the time.

The genre is called the short story for a reason.  It has to do whatever it is going to do—or not do—fairly quickly.  In the short story the not doing part can be quite as important as the doing.  Think of the masterpiece by Henry James, “The Beast in the Jungle,” in which nothing happening is what happens, unforgettably.  Quite often the reader doesn’t get a subtle short story in a single reading.

I have recently been reading in a collection of stories by John O’Hara, who virtually dominated the fiction pages of the New Yorker when I was in college.  O’Hara does have a few “surprise endings,” but they are generally prepared for by what I shall call the unnoticed middle.  A couple of nights ago I read one of his gems, “Appearances”.  This story appeareded in 1962 in a collection, one of the few of his stories  not first published in a magazine.  Admittedly, I was nodding; but when I got to the end while I was sure that something had happened, I could not tell you exactly what.  O’Hara is the chronicler of the middle classes of the Main Line—meaning roughly the stretch of the Pennsylvania Railroad from Philadelphia to Boston, with emphasis on the former—during the years of post-War affluence and social malaise.  His natural peers are Updike and Cheever, but he has a sadness all his own.  His themes are perhaps the usual: mortality, adultery, alcohol, missed opportunity, inescapable pasts.  Several of those themes were in “Appearances,” but determining what it was about would require a second reading.

The mode of “Appearances” is third-person narration, but its principal character is one Howard Ambrie, middle-aged nondescript bourgeois living comfortably with his wife Lois on Long Island.  The couple have just returned in their car from some evening event.  We learn early on that their recently divorced daughter, a teacher, has temporarily returned to the family home.  The first part of the story details a conversation, or perhaps an argument,,  between Howard and Lois.  At issue is whether Howard plans on the following day to attend the funeral of somebody named Jack Hill.  Hill, we learn, was a friend of Howard’s for fifty years, though the closeness of the friendship is questioned in subsequent dialogue.  Jack’s bereaved widow, Celia, is likewise an old family friend.  Lois is rather shocked to hear that her husband does not intend to be at the funeral, and especially shocked at the reason he offers.  He has scheduled a game of golf he doesn’t want to miss.  After a certain amount of revelatory bickering, however, he does agree to go to the funeral after all.

The rest of the story takes place in the daughter’s room, where she is visited first by her father and then by her mother.  We quickly learn that the daughter—and the divorce triggered by her sexual impropriety--is relevant to whatever is or is not happening.  She seems to be an only child, and has an apparently frank and open relationship with both her parents; but the eavesdropping reader soon discovers that the intimacies of her parental communication are delicately compartmentalized.  In what seems a careful deference to the daughter’s agency and independence, her father has chosen not to inquire too closely into the details of the extra-marital affair with an unnamed married man that doomed her marriage.  His hopes are now for the future, and for her prospects for a second marriage with a doctor she has been dating.  “This time,” he advises her, “you ought to have children right away…It might have kept you together, Amy, a child.  We had you the first year, your mother and I.” 

Not surprisingly, the daughter is quizzical: 

“’Father, you’re practically implying that if you hadn’t had me…’”

“ ‘I know what I’m implying,’ he said.  ‘And I know you’re no fool.  You know it’s often been touch and go with your mother and I.  You’ve seen that.’”

The main literary theme here, I suppose, is the familiar one of the reduplication of pathologies within families.  But O’ Hara is an absolute master of middle class vernacular.  We don’t quite know Howard Imbrie’s place in the great scheme of things until we listen carefully.  As we learn in the story’s first line he lives in a house with a “porte-cochère,” and he presumably would never say “Me and my wife went to the movies.”  But he does say “…with your mother and I.”  As grammatical solecisms go, this one is no big deal; but it serves as what I have called as “unnoticed middle” for its story—unnoticed by me, at any rate, on first reading.

Imbrie bids his daughter goodnight and leaves the room.  But the mother soon enters it, asking her daughter, “What was that all about?”  Now we discover that the intimacy of mother and daughter, at least so far as the subject of “Appearances” is concerned, is more along the lines of a conspiracy.  But even in revealing what the reader must already be suspecting concerning the man to be buried on the morrow and the Prodigal Daughter, O’Hara deftly uses the heart-to-heart between Amy and her mother to bring out further sad limitations and bigotries that seem perhaps to come with the porte-cochère.  The author does this all in about three thousand words.  Just between you and I, this is no mean trick.

Sir Gawain ad Quadratum

On Monday I awoke to a beautiful spring day, and with intellectual prospects to match it.  My project for the next little bit is the polishing of an essay about “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” a wonderful poem by the only medieval English poet who can be regarded as Chaucer’s peer both in his manner and his matter.  Unfortunately the works of the anonymous “Gawain-Poet” are even less known to general readers than the poetry of Chaucer.  The Gawain-Poet wrote in the old alliterative style and in a difficult Midlands dialect replete with unfamiliar words, many of Scandinavian origin, that found no permanent home in Modern English.  Even so, many people know the outlines of the mind-boggling story: a beheading contest initiated by a ferocious green knight who appears on horseback (horse also green) in King Arthur’s dining room.  Needless to say beneath the exciting surface story lurks a complex moral allegory.  Sir Gawain, who rather rashly puts himself forward as the champion of the Round Table, undergoes a series of related tests, though critics can agree neither on what the tests test, exactly, or on what grades to assign Gawain for his efforts.

The Gawain-Poet was a learned theologian, with a sub-specialty in architectural mathematics.  All of his poems are “numerological” in structure, a feature of especial importance in his conception of this great romance.  If there is a single key number it is five.  The poem is composed of 101 stanzas, each ending in a five-line "tail", and  with a total line count of 2530.  The stanzas vary in length, but they average jut over 25 lines each.  The interior of Gawain's shield bears a private devotional image of the Virgin.  Its exterior is decorated with a pentangle, or five-pointed star, the moral meaning of which is developed by the poet at some length.  One thing the poet is covertly conveying is that he has constructed his poem ad quadratum—an architectural term I shall explain in a moment.

The once-magnificent medieval cathedral of Trondheim (Niardos) in Norway was by the middle of the nineteenth century in very bad shape.  The Norwegian government decided, out of national historical rather than religious piety to restore it, and in this regard they sponsored an architectural competition to come up with a plan.  It was in this context that a quasi-mystical architectural scholar, Fredrik Lund (1863-1943), undertook through archival study and on-site investigation to attempt to discover the precise original plan of the building.*  Though still regarded as kooky by many sober architectural historians, his book is full of golden nuggets strewn among the pyrites.  Ancient Latin architectural manuscripts speak of building ad quadratum.  The verb quadro meant to square or give regular shape to, and a quadrum was a square or other regular rectangular solid, in masonry a precisely squared stone.  But Lund deduced that by the technical phrase ad quadratum the master masons meant construction according to certain precise geometrical principles of proportion deriving from ancient Pythagorean mathematicians and visually evident in surviving examples of the sacred architecture of both the Greeks and the Romans.  It included prominent exploitation of the “line of beauty” or “golden ratio” mathematically achieved in an irrational number (now known as phi, 1.16803…) by the procedure of division of a line in mean and extreme ratio.  Concrete manifestations of phi exist throughout created nature, and are closely related to the spatial representations of the famous numerical “series” identified by the thirteenth-century Italian mathematician, Leonardo Fibonacci: the “Fibonacci numbers”.

            Though the literary applications of architectural harmonies are necessarily limited, obviously artistic use of the golden ratio is found in many places in ancient, medieval and especially Renaissance European poetry.  It is an artistic commonplace.  But I think the Gawain-Poet took matters a step further, recognizing in the pentangle a “natural” and universal emblem of artistic harmony and, by extension, moral order itself.  “The temple was supposed to be the material image of the mystery of existence” writes Lund.  “Its proportioning was therefore established according to an irrational measure, in an ascending, harmonic, geometrical progression, from the unit to the totality as this progression appears in the pentagram, which was the symbol of the harmonious system of the Cosmos, the masterpiece of the universe”.   The master builders knew, as the Gawain-Poet knew, that the geometric construction of the pentangle within a regular pentagon would unleash cascades of ascending visual harmonies corresponding to the mathematical laws within which they are based.  According to Lund’s theory, the architects’ ascending harmonic, geometrical progressions in stone were structural in both concrete and ideal expression.

            In the Christian era, Scriptural exegesis joined with Pythagorean number theory to form a single stout cord of meaning.  The poet tells us that the pentangle was devised by Solomon, builder of the biblical Temple, as a “token of truth”.  The poetic connection between stone-masonry and the philosophical quest would eventually become widespread in the secular world through the Free Masons of the Enlightenment.  Such theories were “esoteric” not because they involved magic or the supernatural, but because they dealt with an inner knowledge of Nature possessed only by a learned few.  Every Christian could claim the protection of the Virgin, whose image adorns the inner face of Gawain’s shield.  The pentangle is inscribed on its outer side, its public side so to speak, and like Gawain the reader must come to know its deeper meaning by trial and error.

            Few of us when invited to examine the delicate loveliness of a nautilus shell, are likely to think, “O, sure, 1.16803 and all that.”  A normal response is the enjoyment of thrilling beauty.  In like manner only the leaden hand of an intrusive literary analysis could encourage a reader to a mathematical first response to Gawain.  What the reader sees is a beautifully crafted, brilliantly plotted, structurally precise, suspenseful and action-packed story.  As its “meaning” is debated by the romance’s characters themselves, the reader surely has no obligation to have a single fixed opinion.  But whether in the nautilus shell or in the construction of the poem, there is a there there.  According to Shelley, poets were the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.”  But the medieval poet could rightly hope to surpass even that grandiose claim.  The medieval poet could claim to participate,  in howsoever small measure, in the artistic activity of the divine Creator of all things visible and invisible.

* Fredrik Macody Lund, Ad Quadratum: A Study of the Geometrical Bases of Classical & Medieval Religious Architecture  (London: Batsford, 1921)

Memorial Day

On Memorial Day this year we enjoyed a delightful pot-luck supper organized by an old, generous, and endlessly hospitable friend, who had gathered a group mainly of elderly familiars of many years.  Of course one always “does” something on Memorial Day weekend, but it rarely is to focus consciously on our nation’s dead warriors.  More prominent in our thoughts is the opening of the pool.

Now that practically all the “greatest generation” is gone I think it might be time to include within our memorializations a fuller recognition of the many thousands of veterans who survived the war in a sense more technical than actual.  That is, I think a very large number of men, and then by inevitable process their spouses and children, should be recognized as long-term casualties of war.  I think this when I reflect on the three members of my own family—my father and his two brothers—who fought in the war.  None was killed or seriously wounded; but I have concluded in retrospect that all three were significantly impaired by the experience.  They did not give up their whole lives, but enough of them to show, enough to earn a kind of spiritual partial credit in our national memory.  Details here are not particularly important.  They varied with every one of the war’s participants; certainly they were different for the three brothers who have this week been so much in my mind.  But the imposition of protracted trauma on so many of our young men for so extended a period left the whole country wounded in a fashion I am only now, three-quarters of a century later, able to realize.

Of course in presuming to judge in such matters, I have to be aware that there are many kinds of wounds including, perhaps especially including, those inflicted by parents.  The only thing more difficult to assess honestly than one’s own parenting is that of someone else.  There is usually a naturally loving relationship between grandparent and grandchild.  Certainly the unique joys of being a grandparent are great enough to survive being the stuff of bumper stickers; and most kids love their grandparents.  Even were there no piety, there should always at least be prudence.   Hence I try to assess my own forebears with the forbearance I will require, and certainly must hope for, from my own posterity.  Of course I loved my grandfather Fleming, and have a few jovial memories of him.  But when from the vantage point of my own old age I really reflect upon the way he treated his children, and more especially the way he treated his wife, I have to conclude that he was a hard man, the product of a hard life.  Its precise details were not within the public domain of family discussion.  The high point of his life, after which all seems to have been some kind of decline, came early.  He had been a recruiting sergeant in the Spanish-American War of 1898.

He regarded this conflict as “the real end of the Civil War”.  His argument was that it provided young (white) Southerners the chance to reintegrate with the United States, and join as fellow Americans with their old regional adversaries in the common cause of whipping “tyrants”—as their grandfathers had in the Revolution.  For years I believed that that was an adequate account of our national episode of belligerence with the sorry remnants of a cancerous Spanish empire in its third century of rapid decline.

He and his wife were a rather odd couple.  She was oppressively religious and dutiful.  If he ever darkened the door of a church, I was unaware of it.  They were the parents of seven children, four sisters and three brothers.   My own father, Marvin, born in 1906, was the middle son.  He was always very close to his elder brother John, for whom I was named, and who remained a lifetime inspiration to me.  The youngest son, Wayne, was significantly younger than his brothers, but all were of an age to be overwhelmed by the Depression along with their father and practically all of working America.

To this day the Depression plays a larger role in our national pathologies than we may recognize.  In this regard, the world war, horrible though it was, actually takes on an ambiguous cast.  The New Deal struggled to get us out of the Depression, but the war really did get us out.  What was true 0f the nation was even truer of the individual lives of its men.  The war offered purpose and authorized agency that the economic malaise of our national life could not.  But it also so distorted the lives of many of those who fought it, and so disturbed the moral rhythms of the country to which they returned victorious as to make them in large measure strangers in a strange land.  In its aggregate, a national trauma of this size was different in kind rather than in degree from the experience of Vietnam, large as that was, or from our continuing “low visibility” conflicts prosecuted by voluntary professionals in Iraq, Afghanistan, an who knows where next.  That distinction, however, can hardly comfort our contemporary casualties.

All three of the Fleming brothers were enlisted men.  John, who never rose above the rank of seaman, served on LSTs, including at Anzio, where his ship suffered many casualties.  But the only military thing he talked about, endlessly and somewhat boringly, was the awesome sight of the port of Plymouth on the eve of the Normandy invasion.  My father and Wayne were both petty officers.  My father fought all the way from the Battle of Midway to Okinawa, and he did not want to talk about any of it.  Wayne may have had it the worst.  He was a sergeant in a tank crew in some of the most desperate fighting in the northern advance from Normandy.  He had seen unspeakable things, which in rare moments he did nevertheless manage to communicate, sort of.  His closest friend had had his head blown off, I believe literally, while fighting next to, or at least near to my uncle.  He told me the worst thing about war was its smell, the stench of rotting, swollen cattle carcasses in every field and along every roadway in France.  I do not think he ever entirely escaped that stench for the rest of his life.  Who could?

Israel Potter

Spasms of virtue have been a curse in my life, sort of like the grand mal seizures suffered by epileptics, only we don’t call them grands bons.  One came upon me a couple of weeks ago.  It occurred to me that though the clock keeps ticking, I still had never read Melville’s Pierre, or the Ambiguities.  I was determined to read one or the other of them.  I am prepared to allow that, as existential crises go, this one is pretty rarefied.  I realize that there are probably many quite sensible people prepared to meet their Maker without having ever read Pierre, or the Ambiguities; but they may not be retired professors of English.  So I metaphorically girded my loins and reached for the relevant volume of Library of America.

There are some strange summer mornings in the country, when he who is but a sojourner from the city shall early walk forth into the fields, and be wonder-smitten with the trance-like aspect of the green and golden world.  Not bad, I guess, but I still had 140,000 words to go.  Then God sent me a message.  I actually nodded in my easy chair, just for a millisecond, and the book fell from my grasp, closing as it dropped into my lap.   When I reopened it, somewhere toward its thick middle, it was fortuitously at the title page of a completely different novel: Israel Potter, His Fifty Years of Exile.  I am not sure that I had even heard of this title before, but as though responding to the command of some invisible power, I abandoned Pierre Glendenning in favor of Israel Potter.

Israel Potter is an historical novel—sort of.  When it appears as a Netflix film it will be prefaced by the claim “Based on a True Story”.  But modern sociology teaches us that the superstructures erected atop even firm foundations may be rather rickety.  Here’s the story, the rudiments of which Melville found in an obscure autobiography, dictated by or ghosted for its author in the 1820s.  Israel Potter was born into a pioneer colonial family in what is now Vermont somewhere around 1750.  Youthful disappointment in love led him to flee his rustic family farm in favor of the life of the loner-adventurer.  He first became a trapper, following the life of the Canadian mountain men.  Later, he went to sea, a part of the burgeoning merchant marine industry that was a mainstay of the New England economy from early times.  In June of 1775 he was conveniently in port in Boston when the Battle of Bunker Hill went down.  If he didn’t personally fire the shot heard round the world, he still played no mean part in those famous early encounters with the Redcoats.  As the Revolution got serious, the Continentals desperately needed a navy.  They were facing the greatest naval power the world had ever known.  So Potter, an experienced seaman, became an American sailor.  Very soon his vessel was captured by the Brits, and the whole crew shipped as prisoners back to England.  In England this was thought of as “military recruitment.”  There were not all that many young men who truly volunteered for the life of a common sailor on a man-of-war in the service of King George.  But Potter was a hard case, and thrown into chains.

This is where the possible historical part wanes, and the unquestionably novelistic part takes off.  The rest of the book is the account of repeated escapes, recaptures, narrow scrapes, marvelous adventures with famous men, and decades of proletarian misery as a fugitive in the dark Satanic mills of industrial poverty.  Potter was finally repatriated only in 1826, arriving in the Back Bay of Boston on the Fourth of July.  Nobody remembered him, certainly not the American government, which denied him a pension “by certain caprices of the law.”  No one ever knew (save Melville), the details of Potter’s service as a secret diplomatic courier between radical sympathizers in Britain and Ambassador Benjamin Franklin in Paris, that he had served as chief lieutenant to John Paul Jones in that madcap admiral’s most desperate exploits, including the combat with HMS Serapis in which a saber slash across Potter’s chest joined with the signs of an ancient wound at Bunker Hill to render him the “bescarred bearer of a cross,” or that he had witnessed the disgraceful treatment of the American hero Ethan Allen in his British captivity.  So far as I know he never met the infant Abraham Lincoln or Sojourner Truth, but otherwise it was pretty much a clean sweep of our early notables.  Particularly memorable is the “portrait” of Benjamin Franklin in his Paris rooms.  His American contemporaries practically idolized the man, to whom they always gave the honorific “Doctor,” and whom they regarded as a combination of Rousseau, Kant, and the great naturalist, the Compte de Bouffon.  Here is Israel’s account of his first glimpse of the great man: Wrapped in a rich dressing-gown—a fanciful present from an admiring Marchesa—curiously embroidered with algebraic figures like a conjuror’s robe, and with a skull-cap of black satin on his hive of a head, the man of gravity was seated at a huge claw-footed old table, round as the zodiac.  It was covered with printed papers; files of documents; rolls of MSS.; stray bits of strange models in wood and metal; odd-looking pamphlets in various languages; all sorts of books; including many presentation-copies; embracing history, mechanics, diplomacy, agriculture, political economy, metaphysics, meteorology, and geometry….

Israel Potter is one of Melville’s minor works.  The funny thing about minor works, though, is that you first have to have some major works against which they can be judged slighter.  Everything about the great writer is here, especially his fastidiously researched details, his wit, his keen sense of narrative, and his boldness of symbolic conception (Israel in the brick factories of Egypt being one particularly brilliant touch).  But the thing that struck me most is the book’s enthusiastic patriotism.  Melville was no political patsy or company man.  One of his themes is the unseemly haste with which Americans were already able by mid-century to forget their revolutionary origins.  His sense of irony never grows dull from periods of long disengagement.  But for him the American Revolution was irrevocably about human freedom, and those who won it were the champions of the whole human race.  This was still the national consensus expressed in the Fourth of July celebrations of my own early years.  You won’t find much like it in the editorial pages of our opinion-makers today.  Of course there is still the minor problem of Pierre, or the Ambiguities.