The Grandeur That Was Rome

As is well known good books and good friends go well together, and one of my oldest friends recently put me onto some really good books.  The old friend is a Sewanee classmate from the class of 1958—meaning a friend of more than six decades.  Not everyone likes to see his name even in distinguished public places, but I can with semi-discretion identify him as Maurice and tell you that, like me, he spent a long career as a professor of literature.  He is a highly cultivated and well-read man.  The books are a set of historical novels by the English writer Robert Harris.  Harris’s titles have sold millions and received just and widespread praise, but I had never heard of him.  Too deeply immersed in medieval arcana, no doubt.  His fiction has an extraordinary range, but a favorite subject is ancient Rome.  After a somewhat febrile start in which I began in scattershot fashion reading episodically in four or five of his books, I’ve settled into a reasonably logical plan: working through Imperium, the first volume of a trilogy devoted to an imaginary biography of the Roman politician and writer Cicero.  Harris’s brilliant idea is to present the book as the biography written by Tiro, one of the roughly fifty slaves in Cicero’s household.  It is a known fact that this man became Cicero’s tutor, friend, and amanuensis; but there is still a lot for Harris to imagine and exploit.

 Marcus Tullius Cicero

            Imperium in its broad Latin sense means “the supreme administrative power, in Rome exercised by…certain magistrates and provincial governors.”  Cicero was aiming for the consulship, and he got there.  The first section of Imperium deals with the historical incident that really put him on the Roman political map—his prosecution of Gaius Verres, the governor of Sicily.  Our current crop of “tough prosecutors” running for the Presidency might learn a trick or two here.  Then again our contemporary corrupt politicians, even in some of the more sensational kleptocracies of Africa, are pikers when compared with the more accomplished despots of Antiquity.  Verres was cruel and ruthless.  He was a thief, a liar, an extortionist, and a mass murderer.  Lecherous as a goat, he simply took any woman he wanted.  He was a connoisseur of fine art, which he plundered shamelessly both from private individuals and from temples and civic buildings.  Nor were all of this man’s evil deeds primarily of a private nature.  Sicily was the breadbasket of proletarian Rome.  Through his avarice he managed to reduce wheat shipments from the island roughly by half.  Yet since he was liberal in dispensing bribes from his vast fortune, and since most of the noble Romans were all too bribable, Cicero looked forward to no slam-dunk.  He triumphed on the basis of an amazingly thorough criminal investigation, brilliant courtroom strategy, and his usual unmatched speaking ability.  I should also mention his eye for the main chance.  We are not dealing with Atticus Finch here.

            Harris’s gripping presentation of this trial emboldened me to do something rash.  I actually went to my bookshelves, where I have a pretty complete set of the Mondadori edition of Cicero’s short individual works, and have been reading around in the fifth book of second part of Cicero’s address as supposedly prepared for his flaky jurors.  Yes, in major Roman trials, the prosecutor usually had an opening statement a few days long followed by the real stuff, which could take rather longer.   Those parts were called the first and second actiones.  Verres indeed hoped to run out the clock and get a new judge, but Cicero outsmarted him.  Ordinarily you don’t simply pick up a forensic gem by Cicero and start reading it as though it were a true crime novel, but I almost felt I could do so after reading Imperium.

            I also felt I needed a broader context, and for that I turned to the relevant volume of my English translation of Theodor Mommsen’s classic History of Rome.  I try to forgive myself for failing to keep up with current books on the basis of having read some very good old ones.  Mommsen was an extraordinary scholar and a great writer, one of very few non-fiction writers to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1902).  The translator of my edition, William Dickson, was a Presbyterian divine, classicist and librarian with the sonorous English chops of Mommsen himself.

Mommsen loved his subject, and he knew, as all good historians do, that the past must first be judged by the standards of its own creation.  Indeed, a proper and objective understanding of those standards is among the historian’s most difficult tasks.  But the cruelty of the ancient world was hardly less notable than its grandeur.  It was necessary for the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to foster a fantasy of the ancient Roman state, which was built actually upon the grossest forms of oppression and slavery.  The word “republic” has for us a noble ring, but it has generally proved a grotesquely hollow one from Cicero to Nicolae Ceaușescu.  Harris the novelist gets inside this system, neither masking nor sensationalizing it.  His hero, which is to say the hero of the slave-savant Tiro, Cicero, is fully of it.  Here is Mommsen’s summary of the moral state of Roman society roughly around the time of Cicero’s march to the consulship:  “…morality and family life were treated as antiquated things among all ranks of society.  To be poor was not merely the sorest disgrace and the worst crime, but the only disgrace and the only crime: for money the statesman sold the state, and the burgess sold his freedom; the post of the office and the vote of the juryman were to be had for money; for money the lady of quality surrendered her person as well as the common courtesan; falsifying of documents and perjuries had become so common that in a popular poet of this age an oath is called ‘the plaster for debts.’  Men had forgotten what honesty was; a person who refused a bribe was regarded not as an upright man but as a personal foe.”*

Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903)

The view of most of us about the fall of Rome, supposing that we had one, is probably some form of the thesis of the great work of Gibbon in the eighteenth century.  Gibbon was not unaware of the internal corruption, but for him the real villains were external barbarism and the rise of Christianity, for him symbiotic plagues.  But there is another, and from my own historical perspective, a sounder one, summarized in an obscure technical essay I came across years ago.  One of the problems of aging, alas,  is the dulling of memory.  I often remember something I have read, but forget where I read it.  In any event believe it was the great Dominican classicist André-Jean  Festugière who pointed out that the doctrine of radical Christian love “revolutionized a world that Socrates and Cicero had barely touched”.  Be this as it may, the period of acute imperial decay chronicled in Gibbon’s own brilliant prose antedates that period.  That it can be so brilliantly reimagined by Robert Harris is rather thrilling.  Even for a principled historical novelist, who tries to honor established fact, the heart of invention remains imagination.  So I am on to further volumes.

*Theodor Mommsen, The History of Rome, trans. W. P. Dickson (London, 1894), vol. v, 390.

Dirty Money?

            Two recent news items have come together in my mind and forced me to think about the idea of filthy lucre.  The first is actually an anecdotal report from a friend of mine who recently spent some leisure time in Greece.  Through a friend of a friend she was invited to join a crowd of the glitterati for a day or two’s island-hopping aboard a huge and expensive yacht belonging to an international celebrity.  Among their hops was an island where an even richer guy has developed a commercial playground offering a kind of permanent “spring break” venue for Euroyouth: a sort of Coney Island as designed by the Magus—thousands of scantily clad, boozed up kids “dancing” in a shallow pool.  The second episode, this one prominent in the press, was the effort by protestors to force the Louvre to remove the name Sackler from the wing of the museum the Sackler family largely financed.  Some of the Sacklers, who have been huge philanthropic donors, especially to museums, have amassed a fortune in the pharmaceutical business on the sales of Oxycontin.

            Is there such a thing as “dirty money”?  The term “filthy lucre” is after all biblical.  Milton called gold the “precious bane,” or poison.  There is a long history of very rich people with troubled consciences trying to make symbolic restitution through charitable bequests.  This practice has undoubtedly on more than one occasion been encouraged by the charitable recipients.  One of the great gems of Italian Gothic art is the Arena Chapel in Padua, famous for its Giotto frescos.  This building is also known as the Scrovegni Chapel.  The Scrovegni family was alleged to have made its fortune out of usury.  Usury was the lending of money at interest.  Though now called “the American way of life”, it was regarded in the thirteenth-century dawn of contemporary banking practice as a horrible sin.  It is believed that a Scrovegni heir undertook the chapel project in hope of expiation of the sins of his sire.  The Franciscans, whose iconography provides the decorative scheme of the chapel, were particularly ferocious in their denunciation of usury.  Somewhat later in the fourteenth century Chaucer’s venal friar encourages money gifts as actual evidence of repentance.  “For unto a povre ordre for to yive”—thus does the poet ventriloquize the friar’s thoughts—“is signe that a man is well yshryve”.  There is a very fine Victorian church in a small city in the southern English Midlands.  It has a proper ecclesiastical dedication to some saint or other, but it is known locally as “Phipp’s Fire Escape”, Phipps being a local beer baron who had bankrolled the new building in response to charges from Temperance agitators that he was largely responsible for the scourge of working-class alcoholism in the area. 

filthy lucre in an old Dutch misericord

            At least two distinct questions are raised by these anecdotes.  One of them—can financial contributions to worthy causes expiate the unworthy means by which the money was accrued?—is a theological question I lack the competence, no less than the inclination, to approach.  The second, fully relevant even in our relentlessly secular age, is this: Is there such a thing as dirty money?  This seems to me by no means a question easy to answer.  We might begin in the manner of Aquinas by arguing that there must be dirty money since, in the account of Judas’s betrayal of Jesus, the ecclesiastical authorities refused to accept for the Temple treasury the thirty pieces of silver thrown down by the repentant Judas because it was “the price of blood”—literally the statutory financial recompense for manslaughter.  The consensus of early philosophers and theologians alike, however, was that things, inanimate objects, were morally indifferent.  A knife could be used to cut a loaf of bread or to cut a man’s throat—the morality of the action was determined by the use to which the knife was put and the human volition animating that use.  The ecclesiastical authorities who would not put “the price of blood” into the Temple treasury were willing to use it to purchase land for the burial of paupers.

            Here the examples of my opening paragraph become relevant.  I presume that neither yacht owners, nor playground developers, nor the manufacturers of Oxycontin have done anything illegal.  But whereas the most conspicuous private consumption of the super-rich elicits at worst private disgust, the public philanthropy of the Sacklers becomes the occasion of international protest.  As an avid museum-goer, one of whose favorite venues is the Sackler Museum of Asian Art in Washington, I am extremely grateful to be able to see, along with any other interested art lovers, beautiful things that I would never have the opportunity to see were they to be monopolized by rich collectors.  The Sacklers could have spent that money on a yacht or a Greek island, or probably a small flotilla of yachts and a small archipelago, for their own private use and enjoyment.  There would have been no protestors in Paris, or, I dare say, anywhere else.  The public use to which they put a large chunk of their private fortune seems to me unequivocally to be preferred, from the moral point of view, to any number of private uses they could have chosen.

An unpleasant thought from the Scrovegni Chapel

            There were huge intellectual changes between the time of the Scrovegnis and the beer baron Phipps.  But even in Victorian times many people believed in a version of the Last Judgment, and acted upon that belief.  They sought a “fire escape” through conspicuous public good works.  By the time of Jay Gatsby,  one of our earlier and distinctively American start-up legends for whom a strange romantic yearning has replaced traditional morality, protocols of social snobbery might make one eager to conceal the sources of one’s wealth, even if they were legal.  "I was in the drug business and then I was in the oil business. But I'm not in either one now."  Still I find it hard to credit the idea of dirty money.  I have a few twenty dollar bills in my wallet.  I have no idea whether their last temporary users were stick-up men or sex traffickers.  Obviously, I hope not, for aesthetic reasons if no others, but the bank-notes themselves are indifferent tokens in a conventional sign system.  They have no moral status independent of the use to which I put them.        

The Arkansas Toothpick Test

Earlier in the year, the legislature of my home state passed a resolution making it official.  The Bowie knife is the official state knife of Arkansas.  I actually didn’t know that there were official state knives, but in this instance the legislative effort was fully justified.  The nickname of the Bowie knife has for at least a century and a half been “an Arkansas toothpick.”  In 1837, at a session of the House, in the middle of a debate concerning the taxation of wolf pelts, the Speaker stepped down from the podium and, using this implement, stabbed a fellow representative to death.  While one can hardly take pride in such history, one can and must find some comfort.  When I hear about “unparalleled political polarization” or “unprecedented refusal to seek legislative compromise,” I can subject the evidence to the Arkansas Toothpick Test.  So far nothing that has happened or not happened in the admittedly disgraceful 115^th and 116^th Congresses—public approval ratings ranging between nine and thirteen percent—has passed the Toothpick Test.

I try to apply the Toothpick Test also to the increasingly numerous incidents of supposed “constitutional crisis” in our political reports.  We are in that huge swath of the North American continent that is just emerging from a ferocious heat wave, and I had for a couple of days a slight viral something or other that I dare not offend by taking lightly.  Luke and his two kids, accompanied by their older cousin Cora, left for Montreal Saturday morning, and enabled by General Motors refrigeration engineers, reached their destination safely before nightfall.  Settling into a Sunday indolence I dignified as therapeutic, I spent a long while reading the “Weekly Review” section of the Times.  Almost all of the actual Op-Ed pages are taken up with blistering denunciations of President Trump and/or the entire Republican Party.  There is nothing very new here, and that is the point.  The New York Times, by any rational judgment one of the world’s great newspapers, has become as partisan, repetitive, and fulminating as all the rest of the national press.  The Times is of course “left.”  Many other voices are on the “right”.  They shout at, and about, each other.  The PBS “News Hour” sort of continues its brave façade of impartiality, but with increasing difficulty.

I have discovered that there is a great deal of chatter on the Internet concerning the question of civil war--whether one is possible in current America, whether it has not already begun.  Not all of the chatter is entirely loony.  Our actual Civil War of the 1860s, which was by no means without its ideological complexities, was motivated with a certain clarity.  It was sectional and closely related to the distinctive economies of North and South and in particular the southern agrarian economy and the institution of slavery that enabled it.  A very large part of the wealth of the southern states was in human property.  The Framers of the Constitution had notoriously attempted to accommodate the institution of slavery without exactly enshrining it.  Political unity, however attenuated, was a goal so desired as to enable a kind of cosmic wishful thinking, from which one might say we have not yet entirely broken free even today.

The comparative clarity of 1860 is gone today.  Today’s war-gamers generally speak of Blues and Reds, but these groups are by no means identical to our two main political parties which, we are forced to note, have in a sense exchanged valences from the Old Days.  The differences between the groups are still to a degree regional, but by no means cleanly so.  Economic, social, educational, and cultural disparities and divergences play a major role. The role of race, so prominent in popular rhetoric, is actually rather opaque.  The salient differences between 1860 and now are dramatic, and include the following.  Our populated territory is now huge.  Its population is huge.  It is also about eighty percent urbanized.  Comparatively few Americans today have any direct role in their own food production.  There is a vast armory—hundreds of millions of guns—distributed among the population.  All sections of the country are dependent upon cooperation with others, but this is particularly true of the cities, which in gross generalization tend in their political organization to the Blue, often dark Blue.  Were there (God forbid!) an actual new civil war, such factors could preclude organized armies in uniforms and most other things we think of when we think “war”—most but the horrors, that is.  And they reveal large advantages for the Reds.

Several political commentators have spoken of a metaphorical “civil war” already underway.  But the violent political discourse of past few years has invited even some of my intelligent and knowledgeable compatriots to imagine not metaphors but frightful realities.  I should have thought that one 1858 was sufficient for our nation.   The Impossible, it appears, perhaps isn’t after all.  We are perhaps closer to the discourse of the Arkansas Toothpick than I had imagined.  Toothpicks remind me that today’s unpleasantnesses begin with an early dental appointment; but just as soon as I get back I intend to watch the appearance of Mr. Mueller before his congressional inquisitors.  On PBS.

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Stamp-ede

      

 Some raw materials

          Like most of the other good things in my life, my involvement with the “arts of the book” was a serendipitous development.  In the early years of my teaching career at Princeton I found myself charged with the leadership of an undergraduate residential college.  We sponsored social events, visiting lecturers and other gatherings that we advertised chiefly through broadside posters.  We had a modest budget, and printing costs seemed very high to me.  I had the thought that if I went over to the undergraduate typography lab I might find the equipment and the instruction that would allow us to make our own posters.  One thing led to another, and by 1970 Joan and I were the proprietors of a private press and the new best friends of several aspiring poets.

            It is but a short step from printing sheets for a book and binding them in a finished form.  Though I never aspired to be an “art” binder, I did master the basic techniques tolerably well.  I bound the hand-painted copies of one of my own scholarly books, now a valuable rarity.  More friends appeared—little old church ladies with disbound family Bibles, undergraduates with over-read copies of the favorites of their childhood, Winnie the Pooh or Le petit prince.

I took up the challenge of odd-sized remnants of binder’s board, especially as that commodity kept increasing in price.  So I developed a lively trade in coasters, religious votive images, and place mats.  We have Chaucer place mats, Giotto place mats.  For my son Luke, an admirer of Chagall, I made a set of Chagalls.  Like most other American boys of my generation I went through an early phase of stamp-collecting.  It went nowhere, and I soon lost interest; but it meant that like most other boys of my generation I continued through adolescence and early youth to have somewhere among my stored possessions a few hundred worthless but panchromatic postage stamps from the thirties and forties.  I made a particularly successful table decoration cum trivet covered in stamps; and it is still usable, if barely, after twenty-five years.  The idea behind this was originally etymological.  While living in Italy for a while in the seventies I came to appreciate what I should have grasped in English from the Stamp Act—namely the eventual identity of printing and stamping.

The original prototype after decades of bearing the weight of hot casseroles 

About fifteen years before that we had inherited a mighty if moldy antique dining table—total surface with all leaves in about twenty-five square feet.  Eventually, in consultation with my granddaughter Sophia, then aged about nine, it was agreed that what that table needed was a huge protective cover made of triple sheets of heavy binder’s board and covered with lacquered postage stamps.  So I began buying up junk stamps at yard sales and on eBay, where they used to sell by the pound.  The stamps piled up, but the work of art never quite did.   "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?”  Sophia, who recently celebrated her twenty-sixth birthday, is now a high tech exec resident in the trendiest part of Brooklyn and Living the Life.  Twenty-five square feet of pasted stamps is no longer high on the agenda for her either.

But it just so happens that at the moment Luke and Melanie, accompanied by young John Henry and his even young sister Hazel, have been visiting us from Montreal.  We have had many happy high jinks, including a brilliant stay at the beach alluded to in my last non-post.  Melanie has now had to return north on pressing domestic business, but Luke and the kids are here for a few days more.  Casting his eye upon the original and by now very well-worn postal “trivet,” Luke came up with a brilliant idea.  How would it be if, when he takes off for Montreal on Friday, he were to have among his luggage a set of six brand-new postal table mats—a surprise gift for Melanie?  We have so many stamps that each individual mat could be “thematic”, reflecting Melanie’s feminist, ornithological, historical, and archaeological interests.  There is a lot of work involved in such a project, especially when undertaken under time pressure; and we agreed there must be a division of labor.  Luke generously volunteered to be the “ideas man”.  That is, he will identify the six themes and select the roughly hundred stamps for each mat.  Once the idea has been achieved, there is the scut work.  Funny thing, that.  My job is to glue the cut boards to the proper thickness, prepare the flour-and-water paste, apply the pasted cover papers to the dried boards, and see to it that they dry under pressure so as to remain absolutely flat.  My genius son will then tell me which stamps to affix (with a watery paste).  I presume I shall also be responsible for going to Home Depot to get some polyurethane and to Jo-Ann’s Fabrics for some kind of spongeable backing.  Remember, these things are made to have food spilled on them.

That this can be achieved within three days seems unlikely.  I have no photographs of the finished articles to mount with this post.  But with a little luck I might be able to add one or two during the next week.

Away from My Desk

When I was a student at Oxford so many years ago, all undergraduate teaching in the Arts was conducted by the magnificently inefficient “tutorial method.”  The student actually wrote a weekly essay on an assigned topic and then read it aloud to the tutor.  The tutor responded on the spot with verbal criticisms, usually an amalgam faint praise, withering criticism, and engaging if irrelevant commentary on the latest news, the comparative claims of certain eighteenth-century composers of the second or third rank, or the pleasures of “stalking” (whatever that was) in Scotland.  Of course not having an essay, though a fairly frequent occurrence for idlers, was simply not done.  A wastrel friend of mine, finding himself in that predicament, claimed that he said the following to his tutor: “Last week, an essay; next week, an essay.  This week, copious notes.”  Well this week I’m going to be at the beach with my grandkids.  Having left my own devices, I’ll probably stalk a seashell or two,  Allow me to wish some similar pleasure for you.

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!