Piratical Publishers

The catch phrase “Publish or perish” is perhaps heard less frequently in the digital age than it once was, but one of the anxieties of younger scholars is the necessity of finding a press willing to publish their work.  I sometimes try to comfort such people by putting things into historical perspective.  The modern author, it is true, must find a publisher; the medieval author’s first task was to find a dispensable sheep.  Earlier periods of book production are much on my mind just at the moment because of a recent happy experience. 

Last Sunday saw the annual Dinner of the Friends of the Princeton University, a group to which I have belonged and in which I have played various small roles for many years.   There are not too many joint causes that are so uncomplicatedly benign as support of research libraries.  One classic definition of the role of universities—the preservation of old knowledge and the creation of new—would be difficult to pursue without well tended libraries.  It is true that we are experiencing a dramatic revolution in “print culture” generally, one that is driven by rapidly changing digital technology.  This is a dynamic process, not easily predictable, and it is uncertain where or when we shall emerge from it.  I recently met my first young literature professor who makes it a point of pride to own no actual physical books.  I think he’s nuts, but he may represent the shape of a future in which the word “librarian” is as likely to invoke ideas of computer science and of artificial intelligence as of Bodoni bold and card files.  Our group of Friends includes scholars, students, antiquarians, connoisseurs and collectors, print historians, and digital nerds in several categories.

Such diversity of bibliographical expertise presented me with a problem in my modest role of trying to help the leader of our group secure an engaging after-dinner speaker for our annual banquet.  Perhaps I should say it would have presented me with a problem were it not for my good luck in having been friends for the last half century with Robert Darnton.  Darnton, one of the great historians of the Enlightenment and the Revolution was my long-time colleague here before he was lured away by Harvard to be the director of their library system, a task to which he devoted the last decade of his official working life before his recent retirement.  In the meantime, among his prodigious scholarly production that has been recognized with prizes and awards too numerous to mention, are several important works dealing with book history, the history of printing and of publishing, and in general the many roles played by books and writers in the creation of the modern intellectual world.  You can see a bit of what he has been up to by visiting a fascinating website he has created.

   

                                                                            Robert Darnton   

Darnton’s topic, to which he has devoted one of his recent studies, was French book piracy in the era just before the Revolution.  He uses the word “piracy” to denote a variety of publishing practices that we would regard as very shady or simply outright theft of intellectual property.  Copyright law, especially international copyright law, is a relatively new thing in the Age of Printing.  Students of English literature will be familiar with the outrage of various important British writers of the Victorian era victimized by freebooting American printers and publishers.  Before the Revolution French books were published not by any legal “right,” but by the privilege of the King.  In one of his prefaces to his history of the Revolution, Jules Michelet contrasted medieval attitudes toward religion—centered in the idea of divine grace and favor bestowed upon an undeserving, punishable, and often punished mankind—with the idea of equable justice as a right emergent among intellectuals and future revolutionaries.  Like so many other aspects of governance in the ancient régime, the feudal relic of the royal privilege of publication advanced the maximal interests neither of those readers who turned to books for instruction nor of those who turned to them for delight. In the literate circles of Europe, as any reader of War and Peace knows,  the French language occupied the international role now played by English.  But the King of France was not yet the King of Everywhere, as Napoleon apparently set out to be, and dubious pamphlets actually manufactured in a Breton cellar might still gain traction by falsifying their place of publication as Amsterdam or Vienna, sometimes to the confusion of modern bibliographers.   In the “ordinary” commercial French book market there was a definitely dog-eat-dog spirit and a competition to get books thought or already known to be likely market successes into print as quickly as possible.  In this stampede the book’s actual author and whatever contractual arrangement had already been made usually played no part whatsoever.  The motive for the publisher was manifestly crass: to maximize the bottom line.  A small army of pirates scoured the printing houses of Europe for promising material to steal and put on the public market as quickly as possible.  If in your mind’s eye you picture all the old printers as noble humanists holding a newly discovered manuscript of Cicero in one hand and the platen-lever in the other, think again.  Darnton explained how ruthlessly “big business” and financial the publishing industry actually was.  Once a book left the printer’s shop it was fair game for the pirates, who specialized in cheap reprints swiftly produced and efficiently, if sometimes clandestinely distributed throughout the market.  Nor did the pirates always wait until a book was already in circulation.  The true industry leaders sometimes had paid spies in their competitors’ printing shops who could supply them with valuable “market research,” sales reports, and actual purloined proof sheets of promising materials in the process of manufacture.  By this means, Darnton said, an enterprising pirate could on occasion get his stolen “product” on the market even before the original had appeared.  The evening left me feeling strangely reassured: our current anxieties about fake news can perhaps be somewhat assuaged by historical precedent.  This was not one of those after-dinner talks one must consider primarily as a tax to be paid for the enjoyment of the crème brûlée.

A Story by Willa Cather

 

Willa Cather (1873-1947)

At last I find occasion for a “trigger warning”.  Though I aim at “general interest” in this blog, I must indulge myself from time in a rather “academic” post.  Such a time has come, so if this is not your sort of thing I suggest you follow Chaucer’s advice and simply turn to another page.  What is “literature”?  The question is more difficult than it might appear.  Among the dictionary definitions is “printed material,” any printed material.  The best literature on septic tanks recommends plastic baffles.   More commonly the word implies a positive aesthetic judgment.  Literature means writings having excellence of form or expression and expressing ideas of permanent universal interest.  For me, a work of literature is traditional—meaning that it is aware of earlier written works with which it engages in a spirit of respect or competitive contestation without recognition of which a reader must necessarily have but a limited view of the work.  Thus practically all of Roman literature imitated earlier Greek “models”.  Dante in his Commedia is “imitating” Virgil, who at the literal level is the pilgrim’s guide for most of the poem.  And Dante obviously “influences” the many writers of Renaissance epic.

This past week I have read for the first time a number of the early stories of Willa Cather.  By any just reckoning Cather is one of our greatest twentieth-century writers.  I was particularly impressed by her story “‘A Death in the Desert,’” published in 1903.  To this story I shall in a moment return, but I must first note that I find a decisive shift in her writing after the first World War, especially in the great novels My Ántonia (1918) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).  These are novels still clearly linked to a classical tradition, and by the time of her death in 1947 she had fallen somewhat into eclipse.  It is one of the ironies of the perversity of current academic fashion that her critical reputation was reanimated by an unwarranted attention to her lesbianism.  The obviously more important wellsprings of her art, which I have rarely seen mentioned, were classicism (she was a Latin teacher) and Christianity (she was a fully engaged practitioner and active member of the Episcopal Church in its frontier outpost of Red Cloud, Nebraska.)  But when it comes to English departments, one must these days be content with what scraps are on offer.

Perhaps the most important character in “’A Death in the Desert’” is a famous and deeply self-absorbed American composer named Adriance Hilgarde, who makes no direct appearance in it.  Adriance, who has had a great success in Europe and is on the verge of a crowning triumph in Paris, has a much more ordinary brother, Everett, who so annoyingly resembles Adriance in physical appearance that Everett is constantly being mistaken for him.  There is a third major character, Katharine Gaylord, an aging singer, a very old associate of the Hilgarde brothers.  Katharine is dying of tuberculosis in a ranch house in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where (following the standard medical advice of that age) she has retreated in the vain hope of regaining her health.  As the story begins, Everett, one of those nice guys who always finishes last, travels from the East by train to the wilds of the West to comfort the doomed woman.  Her dying is protracted, and the two share many intimate conversations.  She recounts her hopeless and unrequited love for the Olympian composer.  “It was not the first time that [Everett’s] duty had been to comfort, as best he could, one of the broken things his brother’s imperious speed had cast aside and forgotten.”  Everett in turn, rendered incautious by the pathos of the moment, confesses his own long-standing passion for Katharine—a revelation that startles, indeed shocks her.  Then she does die, and Everett, as he is departing Cheyenne is mistaken for his brother by a visiting German singer with whom he crosses paths in the train station.  Now that is about as Henry James as you can get without being Henry James.  Indeed, a valid criticism of the early Cather is its excessive “Jamesianism”.  But James is not the only great writer with whom Cather engages.

She puts the title of the story in quotation marks because it is an actual quotation.  It is the title of a (once) well-known poem by Robert Browning.  Browning is among our hardest and most philosophical poets.  That is probably why he is so little read today.  Few of his dramatic monologues are simple, and this one is no exception.  But his death in the desert is that of Saint John the Evangelist, the last living literary eye-witness of the ministry of Jesus Christ.  What will become of Christian faith when the last personal witness of the Christ-life is gone?  Among the complex issues the poem raises are questions of truth, the authority of written texts, and grounds for belief.  I believe that for Browning, one of the prominent issues he had in mind was the nature of Scriptural authority, a subject that had among intellectuals been pretty well revolutionized—to the dismay of many conventional Christian believers--by the so-called “Higher Criticism” of the nineteenth century.  Cather’s story is not a theological treatise, but it explores the relationship of art (in this instance, music) and truth in a manner in which James and John strangely cooperate.  I suspect that no one ever reads a serious writer “completely,” but it is always worth the try.  And, certainly, there is as much danger of over-reading a subtle work than of under-reading it.

A major theme in Henry James is the spiritual freshness of the new American character in the context of the ambiguous sophistication of the old European societies.  So far has the world moved on since 1881 (publication of Portrait of a Lady), say, that the idea of the comparative spiritual wholesomeness of Americaness may seem mind-boggling.  But it is was major theme of our early national literature, elaborating the ancient subject of the moral superiority of simple, rural life to the dangerous sophistication of urban cosmopolitanism.  But the drab, dreary, and often sinister side of supposedly heroic pioneer life, and the small- town legacy of that life, likewise became an important American topic.  You see it famously in Sherwood Anderson, much admired by Cather.   Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize on the strength of it.  It is pretty much the essence of southern Gothic in parts of Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Carson McCullers.  It is not infrequent in Cather herself, and conspicuously in The Troll Garden, the early collection of short stories that included “’A Death in the Desert’”.

Willa Cather was not merely a great writer, but a conscious creator of literature as I defined it at the beginning of this short essay.  The title of “’A Death in the Desert’” is, I suspect, a lapidary ornament.  The masons who built the great medieval cathedrals sometimes placed beautiful stone ornamentation in parts of the building invisible to those who worshiped in it.  The idea, I think, was that God could and did see it.   It was a kind of redundant luxury, a work of pious artistic supererogation.  No reader needs to see the meaning of Browning to her sad story—presuming it really is there--but if you do see it, it is likely to increase the already opulent pleasure of the reading experience.

A Few Words about Elitism

I first heard the word “elite” in a somewhat unusual context.  My Aunt Heartz always seemed to me an exotic figure.  Before the War she had spent time in the Philippines with her military husband, and her house was filled with rattan furniture.  She also had a portable typewriter in which she took pride.  One of its most desirable features was that it was an elite, not a pica.  That was long before I had any technical knowledge of type and printing, but this elite typewriter produced text in approximately ten point, whereas the more standard office model pica was twelve point.  What elite meant to my aunt was something like stylish or elegant—definitely superior, a cut above.

Well, I have heard a great deal more about the words elite (adjective and noun) and elitism in the years since then.  Much of it has been censorious.  That is probably because I spent upwards of half a century teaching at one of the world’s most elite universities listening to my administrators and colleagues gas on about how terrible elitism is.  So let me say a few words in its defense.

People do not want to be “elitists” for good reason.  They do not want to be stuck-up snobs, reveling in their supposed superiority to supposed inferiors.  We want to be egalitarians—believers in the proposition put forward in our Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal.*  That all are “equal” is a very nice thought, but the moment one expresses it, one must realize the ways in which it is not true as well as those in which it is.  The equality of “all men” will not be found in their height, weight, physical dexterity, mental acuity or other accidental features, which in their composite entirety tend to define what we think of as individual identity or “personality”.  We mean that all men have ethical and political equality, that all have “equal protection under the law,” and (if we are religious) that all have certain rights endowed by God.  That is the essence of the matter.  When Robbie Burns writes “My love is like a red, red rose,” he is not trying to convince us that his girlfriend is bright vermillion of hue or that sharp spines protrude from her limbs.  No, he is claiming that she shares the essential aesthetic and moral attributes of “rosiness,” whatever they may be.

It may be impossible to impose effective economic coherence upon the egalitarian ideal.  The radical anarchist claim that that is the case cannot be refuted by reference to any known political system in today’s world, certainly.  Modern democracies have done a poor to fair-to-middling job at best, but they have been able to achieve even this only on the basis of elitism—that is, on some form or another of representative government.  The English word elite is very easily traced through its immediate French source to its Latin origins.  Elite means elected, chosen, picked   If you exercise any conscious sense of preference in the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the friends you make, the partner you marry, indeed if you make any choice among plural possible options, you are practicing elitism.

            All this is to say that you are being discriminating or practicing discrimination, another word likely to cause anxiety to many well-meaning people and therefore one perhaps deserving  a brief philological mini-lecture of its own.  Discrimination involves making a judgment or decision in relation to alternative possibilities.  One such distinction is between guilt and innocence.  Our word crime derives from the idea that a fact  has been ascertained by a certain kind of discrimination or judgement.  But discrimination can be practiced on the basis of both sound and unsound criteria, and those judged unsound have changed dramatically in the age of democracy.  It is the fear (and history) of using unsound criteria that spooks many people today.  For effective purposes the word discrimination as it is mainly used in your newspaper refers to racial discrimination.  Usually it is a fairly easy empirical matter to discriminate between a man and a woman, and between a black person and a white one.  But that discrimination is a matter of personal identity which, according to our Constitution, is politically irrelevant.  Though it has been very different in the not distant past, race-based discrimination is now legally authorized only in various “affirmative action” programs, where its operations are often highly opaque and contested.  In such programs, incidentally, the elitist program is often even more articulate than it is elsewhere.

            It is probably too late to save the word elitism or to use it in a benign sense.   Not too many words can survive the suffix ism.  There might yet be hope for discrimination, which is, from a certain point of view, the method as well as the goal of all education.  The cultivation of discriminating taste, the discriminating consumer, a discriminating mind—all these  are still positive concepts for most of us.  The value of discrimination is not limited to the purely aesthetic realm—concluding that King Lear is more worthy of your sustained attention than a Harlequin romance.  It is discrimination that advances our civilization in the material and practical realms as well.  The engineer who is expert in the strength of materials will discriminate between pre-stressed concrete and braided steel cables by applying expert knowledge to a specific situation.  Just as we would avoid shoddy construction materials in building our houses we should strive to avoid shoddy thinking.  And there’s another most interesting word, shoddy.  Its principal meaning as a noun was woolen stuff made from picking apart old rags.  The adjective soon followed.  It is akin to tawdry, the kind of stuff you could pick up cheap at Saint Audrey’s fair on October 17, the late medieval version of the Dollar General Store.  If we do not want our minds to be cluttered with the shoddy and the tawdry we are forced to become elitists through the operations of discrimination.

*And as an elitist, I am impatient of the philological ignorance than cannot recognize in this eighteenth-century usage the generic sense of all men as human kind.

Nobler in the Mind

            I am not “on” Twitter, as they say, or might say, one is “on” crystal meth.  One would think that artificially enforced economy of space would stimulate clarity of thought and elegance of expression.  Brevity being the soul of wit, one would suppose that the Land of Twitter would sparkle like a Restoration comedy.  It is the purpose of artificial literary constraints, as in the sonnet or the clerihew or the double dactyl, to encourage ingenuity.  But the twittered obiter dicta of our celebrities, and especially our presidential celebrity, do little to confirm such an expectation.

Twitter was involved in the first of two “free speech” incidents that caught my attention in the last week or so.  The first was the flap caused by Daryl Morey, the General Manager of the Houston Rockets in the National Basketball Association, who, with regard to the political demonstrations in Hong Kong, tweeted a poster image reading “Fight for freedom—Stand with Hong Kong.”  Unfortunately, “fighting for freedom” is not merely meaningless but a losing business plan if your real goal is to extract as much money as possible out of China, as Mr. Morey soon discovered.    He immediately—though still too late—hit the delete button.  “I did not intend my tweet to cause any offence to Rockets fans and friends of mine in China,” Morey wrote in a Twitter post on Monday morning. “I was merely voicing one thought, based on one interpretation, of one complicated event. I have had a lot of opportunity since that tweet to hear and consider other perspectives.”  One of those perspectives came from the basketball superstar LeBron James.  James’s opinion is that Morey is insufficiently “educated” on the complex issue of political discontent in Hong Kong.  James himself is very well educated on that score.  He knows exactly which side of his bread is buttered.  This is an observation, not a criticism.  American citizens still have the right to express themselves as they wish, if they are prepared to face the possibility of reactive twitter storms themselves.  And as our President has apparently decided that our State Department professionals are useless to him, basketball professionals may be as satisfactory substitutes as are available for the articulation of foreign policy.

The other episode was more strictly literary.  In fact, it was very literary, as it involved the Nobel Prize in Literature.  As you may know there is a bustling industry devoted to the manufacture of fancy cultural “collectibles”—presidential plates, busts of movie stars, flasks and decanters celebrating the world’s great vintages—that sort of thing.  They are usually sold through magazines catering for “seniors” with the suggestion that they “can only increase in value,” though one generally finds them resurfacing not in museums but in flea markets along the interstate.   There is also a bibliographical dimension to this trade, finely made books (often of English or American classics) offered by the Folio Society or the Franklin Mint at a considerable price.  And a couple of times in second hand shops I have come upon a large collection of fancy books called the “Nobel Prize Library” or something like that.  Each of the many volumes contains the best-known or most plausibly representative work of a Nobel laureate in literature.  Several things struck me as I rapidly surveyed the post- War volumes.  The first is the achievement of American writers, which has been considerable.  The second was that there were many winners whose work was quite unknown to me, and even several of whom I had never heard.  My ignorance was a bit awkward.  I am, after all, supposed to be a professor of literature.  I am afraid the same thing happened this year, when the recently  announced winners (there are two) were Peter Handke and Olga Totarczuk.  Olga who?  I should have known, but I didn’t.  Actually Totarczuk’s prize was a kind of “make up” for 2018, when a scandal among the Nobel judges aborted that year’s deliberations.

But my unfamiliarity with these authors did not last long.  Indeed I first heard of the prizes from an outraged statement protesting the judgment of the Nobel committee by the current president of PEN America, Jennifer Egan.  PEN stands for something.  It originally stood for “poets, essayists, and novelists”—or “creative writers,” as we used to call them, before it finally sunk in that the phrase creative writer is a pleonasm like power politics or food nutrition.  But PEN also stands for something in an ethical sense: “PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write.”  I can go with the flow.  It is all the rage these days for scholars, academic disciplines, critical approaches, and literary theories to “stand at intersections”.

Peter Handke is an Austrian writer of conservative political cast.  Olga Totarczuk, a Polish writer of fiction and a public intellectual.   The main complaint concerned Handke, who had defended the actions of the disgraced Serbian politician Slobodan Milosevic.  Handke had gone so far as to offer a eulogy upon Milosovic’s death.  While I share the conventional view that Milosevic was a bad hombre, the man did die of natural causes during the protracted course of a trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, presumably while still enjoying the assumption of innocence.  The criticism that has been leveled at Totarczuk is apparently based on her willingness, indeed stated pleasure, of sharing the prize with Peter Handke.  Jennifer Egan, a fine American writer and the current President of PEN, issued the following statement: “We (that is, PEN) are dumbfounded by the selection of a writer who has used his public voice to undercut historical truth and offer public succor to perpetrators of genocide.”   Now, remember that the motto on the PEN website is “Freedom to Write.”   Remember also that PEN admonishes us to “defend free expression, support persecuted writers, and promote literary culture.”   Finally, remember, as the Nobel committee itself was provoked into pointing out, the Nobel Prizes in Literature are given in recognition of literary achievement, not on the basis of political orthodoxy or heresy, let alone conspicuous zeal for the intersection of literature and human rights.  Time was you could be a Stalinist toady and gulag pooh-pooher and a prize-winner.  And as far as “historical truth” is concerned, truth is that no small number of the world’s great writers have been swine—swinishness, alas, being a not uncommon feature of the “human condition” that is the subject of great literature.

Blowing the Whistle

It is said that the only major Christian doctrine that is empirically verifiable is original sin, which is confirmed by the experience of parenting.  It is further supported by linguistic history, which reveals the tendency of the meanings of simple nouns to deteriorate with age, rather like the portrait of Dorian Gray.  Just look up such words as villain, boor, or harlot in the OED to see what I mean.  Fortunately there are still a few distinctions between art and life.  For example, playing second fiddle is regarded as a slightly subordinate occupation, whereas blowing second whistle is about as good as it gets, whistleblower-wise.   At least this is what I surmise from the journalistic excitement revealed in such headlines as “Second Whistleblower Comes Forward!”  The utterly depressing nature of what I shall call the continuing Ukrainian “revelations” forces me once again to eschew the substance of a major political crisis and to wander about in its philological periphery.

For the news is bursting with much admired whistleblowers.  The current whistleblowers in the Affair of the Ukrainian Telephone Call, though their actual identities remain so far unknown, and are meant to stay that way, are being called “heroes”.  I am a little leery of calling conscientious good citizenship “heroism”.  Why one should be called a hero for testifying truthfully in exposing malfeasance on a matter of great political significance, or why such a person would have to be protected by a Whistleblower’s Protection Act, needs some explanation.

The explanation is to be found in the social odium surrounding the word informer. When I joined the Princeton faculty in 1965, there was still a mandatory meeting for all new faculty to be instructed in the elements of the Princeton Honor Code.  This compact, which all incoming students had to sign, affords students the right to unmonitored final examinations in exchange for their signed pledge that they have not cheated on the exam and the sworn obligation to report any instances of cheating by others of which they became aware.  It is similar to dozens of other such compacts at other institutions.  An elderly dean, very much Old Princeton, made the presentation.  When he asked “Any questions?”, there amazingly was one.  A smart-ass young French mathematician expressed the opinion that he saw but dubious honor in an arrangement requiring you to be an informer against your mates!  The dean actually sputtered.  Here was a perspective never previously encountered in his seven decades.  “Young man,” he replied, “the Princeton Honor Code is based on universally acknowledged moral principles, which anyone can accept, be he Christian, Catholic, or Jew!”

This unusual ecumenical claim notwithstanding, the English language is rich in its colorful vituperation of tattle-tales, also known as snitches, squealers, stool pigeons, grassers (British), rats, finks, and the combinatory ratfinks.  The refusal to blow one’s whistle has won high praise in odd places.  Here is Richard Nixon, caught on his White House tapes, praising the traitor Alger Hiss. “You know the great thing about—I got to say for Hiss.  He never ratted on anybody else.  He never ratted!”  So far as I know, the term whistleblower had to be imported from the domain of field sports for lack of any extant affirmative term.   It is so new that standard usage has not yet decided whether it’s a compound word like pipefitter, or a hyphenated one (whistle-blower, apparently the emergent journalistic choice).   And as to its exact meaning, so much depends upon situation and context—on who is the truth-teller, what truth is being told, and to whom.   Was Daniel Ellsberg a whistleblower, or an egomaniacal blabber-mouth?  How about Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning? 

Whittaker Chambers, super-snitch

I mention Hiss as he was the occasion, more than ten years ago, of my own realization that in the popular mind “bad” informers outnumber “good” ones about ten to one.    I was at an academic conference entitled “Alger Hiss and History”.   You will recall that the heart of the “Hiss case” was the testimony by the government witness (informer) Whittaker Chambers that Hiss, a darling of liberal New Dealers, had been a Soviet spy.  Today this is a fact scarcely doubted by any serious historian.  But on that day it dawned on me only gradually that out of about 450 mainly academic participants gathered in the auditorium of the NYU Law School, I was perhaps one of ten who believed that Hiss had been a covert Communist and that Whittaker Chambers had been a generally truthful witness.  For as the ancient seer Cassandra so tragically discovered, the zeal of many ostensible seekers after truth is satisfied not by the truth they hear but by the one they want to hear.

It is possible that you never will have heard of the most famous whistleblower of the modern era, partly because he may never have existed but mainly because, well, it’s all so unpleasant.  His name was Pavel (Pavlik) Morozov, and in 1932 he was a young peasant living with his parents on a farm in the Sverdlovsk Oblast of the Soviet Union.  This was in the mopping up period of the forced collectivization of agriculture in Russia, the same period that a thousand miles to the south witnessed the engineered famine in Ukraine, called the holomodor.  Central Party policy was to extract as much of the grain harvest as possible from its rural producers in order to be able to feed the industrial workers in the cities.  The confiscation was ruthless, often leaving the farmers themselves starving and lacking even sufficient grain to reseed the fields.  Resistance was widespread and ingenious as the peasants attempted to secrete some grain for their own necessity.  But resisters, who were called “hoarders,” saboteurs, wreckers, and “hooligans”, were treated with utmost severity—usually summary execution or the gulag.  Young Pavlik knew that his father had stashed away a couple of bags of grain.  He  was a Pioneer (Communist Cub Scout),  and he saw his socialist duty clear before him.   So he blew the whistle on his old man.  The Checkists came running and sorted the matter out in their customary ballistic fashion, rendering Pavlik an orphan but also an exemplar of social responsibility.  Some of the other adult peasants, criminal reactionaries, took another view of the matter, however.  A gang of them waylaid the boy and murdered him.  After the authorities sorted that one out, Pavlik was declared (posthumously) a “Hero of the Soviet Union.”  (That is one of the reasons I hope we can be satisfied by calling witnesses to our President’s derelictions merely upright citizens.  We don’t really need any more Russophilia at the moment.)  His story was told in song and story.  For a long generation of Soviet youth his exploit became a compulsory subject of political meditation by all junior students.  Hundreds of statues and other monuments were erected in his memory.

 

Pavlik blows the whistle

Autumn

 mellow fruitfulness

In 1919 the Dutch scholar Johan Huizinga published a highly influential “crossover” work of medieval history entitled Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen—better known to the world at large through two translations of 1924, Herbst des Mittelalters in German and The Waning of the Middle Ages in English.  Seventy years later a new English edition appeared, this time entitled The Autumn of the Middle Ages.  With Huizinga’s famous book clearly in mind the Dutch-born theologian and historian Heiko Oberman, who spent much of his important career in this country, in 1963 published a book about a late medieval theologian (Gabriel Biel) entitled The Harvest of Medieval Theology.

You don’t need to be a serious Germanic philologist to note that the Dutch Herfst and the German Herbst (the common terms for the fall season) must be kissing kin of English harvest.  So they are.  They are Germanic equivalents of Latin autumnus—another word we also use in an English form.  I raise the matter of the book’s first and still by far best-known translation not out of pedantry but because it captures the ambiguity of the season, of this essay, and of my mood.  Is autumn a waning or a waxing, a depletion or is it an abundance?  Huizinga’s book seems to deal at once with phenomena of cultural decadence and of exhaustion on the one hand, and on the other to point to new attitudes and thought patterns we usually think of as belonging to the “Renaissance.”

I had occasion to ponder certain ambiguities of the calendrical season during this past week of perfect Indian Summer.  It has been almost supernaturally clear, crisp, and calm, with several days cloudless.  Yet the days are shortening perceptibly, and the foliage has withered on the grapevines, almost as if by command.  The mellowness of plenitude presages the inevitable morbidity of the approaching winter.

Many poets have written about seasonal change, and written about it well.  But I find myself each year returning with mixed pleasure and plangency to Keats’ ode “To Autumn”.   It’s only about thirty lines long, but, his own achievement, and English poetry as a whole, would not be the same without it.  Keats probably wrote this masterpiece in the last week of September, 1819—that is, almost exactly two centuries ago.  This is an inference to be drawn from a letter to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds in which he comments on the mellow beauty of stubble fields, an image also prominent in the poem.  He was staying briefly in Winchester enjoying what in retrospect would prove to be his final days of good health.

Though I praise the poem so highly, many students find it hard going.  A two-hundred-year-old poem is likely to exhibit a few distracting conventions and some poetic diction, thees and thous and so forth, uncongenial to a contemporary reader.  But an important purpose of education is to combat provinciality, including that historical provinciality so brazen in our culture, and such an ironic feature of academic “multiculturists”.  The central image of Keats’s poem is the personified season, a rustic laborer “sitting careless on a granary floor” with “hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind / Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep, / Drowsed with the fume of poppies…” combining the abundance of harvest with the narcotic somnolence of a prospective hibernation.  I have always taken this personification as feminine, but my wife Joan, who demurs, drew me up short by pointing out to me there is no textual certainty of this conclusion, and some linguistic and sociological counter-indication pushes against it.  Latin Autumnus  is usually masculine, sometimes neuter; male agricultural workers can have long hair and probably usually do.  So perhaps androgyny is a conscious artistic aim.  In any event, as people age—at least if I can judge by my own experience and that of contemporaries—the advent of autumn becomes ever more portentous and solemn.  The relation of the year cycle and the life cycle, always just below the surface, becomes obvious and articulate.  Two weeks past I learned of the death of one of my oldest friends, a man I met as a fellow college freshman in 1954, a date that will seem practically prehistoric to the vast majority of the world’s residents today.  Keats was living at his own historical cusp, but he still lived in a primarily agricultural world.  He had seen real reapers, and he knew, as we hardly can, the intimate relationship between his daily bread and the threshing-floor in the granary. 

So much of what separates us from our vanished past is of recent invention, especially electrification and the vast increases of mechanical power.  We have to the greatest degree possible cast aside as encumbering restraints of the diurnal and seasonal distinctions for which the human race was trained by long millennia of evolution.  Your recent ancestors “went to bed with the chickens,” as the saying was, that is, when it got dark.  There was no easy artificial way to erase the distinction between night and day, or to defeat the heat and humidity of summer or the chill of winter.

Above all, human life was in many ways linked to the larger patterns of the agricultural cycle.  In visual terms this connection is often beautifully illustrated in the old calendars, with their “labors of the months”—as well, of course, as in an entire season called “the harvest”.  But the germination of grain, the staff of life, involved its own paradox, and one that brings together the most elementary forces of life and death.  “Truly, truly, I say to you” says Jesus, "unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and

October, from the Très riches heures of the Duc de Berry 

 dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”  (John 12:24)  He is there speaking in a mysterious way of his own proximate death, and of all human death for that matter.  I shall not presume to interpret mysteries except to acknowledge that human life, if allowed to run what we usually call its “natural” course, will arrive at its ambiguous autumn, a time both of waning and of harvest.  Keats—though his own life was just about to be cut off so prematurely—heard a special dignity in autumnal “music” when compared with the upbeat “songs of Spring.”  As he looked out over the rose-tinted stubble field from which the fruit had been gathered and safely stored against the dearth of winter, he listened.  “Then in a willful choir the small gnats mourn / Among the river sallows, borne aloft  / Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies…”

The Sicilio-Ukrainian Gambit

The Great Gate of Kiev is a striking piece of music by Mussorgsky, and must be differentiated from the rapidly emerging narrative of Kiev-Gate, which is not so great.  Yes, I reluctantly return from the sun-drenched plains of philology to the murk of the political arena.  This essay is all jealousy and sour grapes.  It involves Ukraine, and specifically my missing out on the gravy train of scuzzy Ukrainian money that has been enriching so many of my fellow citizens.  Ukraine, or as we used to say in the very old days “the Ukraine,” now an independent country, is that large part of the dissolved Soviet Union that was once called the “breadbasket” of the old Russian heartland, the place where Stalin and Krushchev, in refounding the agrarian economy on sound socialist principles, bumped off all the “millionaires and billionaires” of the day (i.e., the kulaks, some of whom owned as many as two pigs) and starved several million people to death.  I am no Soviet expert, but I did have to look into all of this while writing about the Ukrainian defector, Viktor Kravchenko, one of the important authors I dealt with in The Anti-Communist Manifestos.

Kiev-Gate is a rapidly developing story, but here are the principal players so far.  I’ll begin—solely for purposes of dramatic contrast--with my only strong card,  Marie Yovanovitch (Princeton class of 1980), former Ambassador of the United States to Ukraine, an honorable professional who got canned for being honorable and professional.

Next comes Paul Manafort (former chairman of Trump’s presidential campaign, current prison inmate), perhaps best characterized as greedy, meretricious, and felonious.  Then we have former Vice-President (and current presidential candidate) Joseph Biden, whose curiously jovial incompetence is in this instance somewhat marred not by any criminality, as suggested by Trump, but by a suspicion of disingenuousness deployed in favor of his son Hunter Biden, Washington lawyer and sometime expert consultant in that branch of the olive oil business known as natural gas.   Then you have the principals: Donald Trump, who has behaved like a Mafia thug; Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolf Giuliani, once mayor of New York, whose public statements have been incoherent to the point of borderline insanity; and Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine, who may by now regret moving from theatrical comedy to that form practiced by politicians.  

As I assess things, the current Ukrainian flap involves outrageous behavior by Donald Trump, sleazy behavior by Hunter Biden, and dumb behavior by Joe Biden; it recalls earlier criminal behavior by Paul Manafort, formerly Trump’s campaign manager and now an inmate in prison, where, perhaps on holidays, he may be allowed to wear his Ukrainian-financed $15,000 ostrich leather sports jacket.   However, the current episode as it is being revealed is so obviously damaging to Donald Trump that folks don’t seem to notice that it is not really very good for Joe Biden either.  I don’t know whether there are any actual olive trees in Ukraine, but the olive oil business is clearly thriving there.  Lest my reference be obscure, I refer to memorable testimony before a congressional investigating committee made by Frankie Pentangeli in Part 2 of The Godfather.  The aspect of the olive oil business most relevant to our emerging story seems to involve natural gas monopolies, pipelines, exclusive franchises, and the potential legal liabilities of the oligarchs who have appropriated them.   These are matters that require a lot of expert advisors, or “consultants”—and not just any old consultant either.  Some journalists have hinted that on the face of things, Hunter Biden lacked the expertise needed to advise oligarchs about gas pipelines and such, but that is all nonsense.  This man had been, probably for more years than he could remember, the son of a prominent American career politician, and one who had at length arrived at a mere heartbeat’s distance from the Presidency itself.  And that is the kind of expertise likely to be useful in the olive oil business.  Any random engineering  graduate of Georgia Tech or the Bauman Moscow State Technical University can bring you up to date on pipe specifications.  This needs something special.  This needs Hunter Biden.

 Now, look, I’m a civil libertarian.  Live and let live.  It is not technically illegal to be named “Hunter Biden”.  In fact, “Hunter Biden” would be a great name for a character in a Fitzgerald novel, Amory Blaine’s roommate perhaps. But if your father’s political persona is that of Joe Sixpack from Scranton, PA, the name may raise just the slightest degree of cognitive dissonance.  On the other hand, “Hunter” may be preferable to “Fredo”, another literary allusion likely brought to mind by the circumstances.

In my part of the socio-cultural landscape, where political opinion generally runs all the way from A to A’, I have for the past four years struggled to maintain a broader view.  All attempts to enforce fair-mindedness, however, have been overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of our President’s behaviour.  Common or garden variety Washington sleeze, while often odiferous, cannot compete with constitutional high crimes and misdemeanors.  As this post is being published Nancy Pelosi has announced a formal “impeachment enquiry”.  That’s a serious step, and certainly one she has been reluctant to take before now.  The promise of the White House, for what it’s worth, is to release a full transcript of the telephone conversation between Presidents Trump and Zelensky that has been at the center of the speculative outrage.  Have your whistle ready at hand.

As in Shakespeare’s history plays, the most poignant villains are the hangers-on and henchmen.  Giuliani is not a man without accomplishments.  He was an effective comforter-in-chief to his traumatized city in 2001, since which time his speech has consisted primarily of tripartite sentences featuring a noun or two, a verb with luck, and the indispensable phrase “Nine-Eleven”.  In this he is now being imitated by Joe Biden, except that Biden says “Barack Obama,” or, when really closing in for the kill, simply “Barack”!  But whereas Biden merely sounds foolish, Giuliani is truly demented, his speech both violent and incoherent, not to mention mendacious of course.  One supposes that his assigned task was to transmit to Zelenksy an offer he could not refuse, but it is possible that he failed to transmit one he could even understand.