School Daze

Though hardly less exercised about our current political situation than most of my compatriots, I rarely deal with explicitly political issues in these essays.  Most of us feel awash, if not drowning, in political commentary.  I have no special insight or authority in political issues.  Furthermore, most of my political ideas, which are often uncongenial to my family and friends, are unlikely to be of interest to a general audience.  But I sometimes make an exception regarding issues at the intersection of politics and education.  Do note in the first place that “intersections” are all the rage, and since I have spent most of what is now a long lifetime pursuing education as a profession as well as a private aspiration, here is an intersection I can perhaps occupy with some plausibility.

I begin with a possible factoid for which I have no solid source.   There are international statistics concerning student performance, presented in charts organized by nation states.  In terms of demonstrated ability in mathematics, American high school students apparently are tied with Italian students in twenty-eighth place.  If, however, you ask American high school students what country is tops in math education, a majority will answer “the United States.”  There is the man who knows he knows not.  Teach him.  There is the man who knows not, and knows not he knows not.  Pity him.

Within the last month we all got some very bad news.  Since it had nothing explicitly to do with disgraceful behavior by elected officials, the dysfunctionality of our legislative institutions, murder, mayhem, terrorism, or cultural vulgarity, this bad news was not prominently featured in our national press.  The bad news was that despite untold millions of dollars thrown at our public education facilities, and despite the substantial implementation of the so-called “Common Core” approach in our high schools, the actual test scores for English and math have on a national level either remained flat or actually fallen during the past decade.  The idea of the Common Core itself—which I champion at least with “two cheers” enthusiasm—has now been roundly rejected by the educational “experts” both left and right.

This is not really a left or right thing, however.  To force it to be yet another episode in the culture wars, or another aspect of racial politics, is actually to trivialize it.  The world is changing around us very rapidly.  The principal tasks of our public education system are two.  The first --not necessarily in order of importance—is to educate our young people to the point that they are capable of meaningful participation in our democratic political system.  The second is to prepare them for productive work that the real world is willing to purchase with adequate compensation to allow them to enjoy decent lives.  That we have been failing pretty abysmally at the first task should be at least hinted at by our current political regimes.  If a few phony ads on Facebook are enough to constitute “serious foreign interference in an American election,” the fragility of our democracy may already be approaching the fatal stage.  As for the contemporary workplace, it has changed dramatically from that of my young manhood, and unrecognizably from that of my parents.  High school Wood Shop and Home Ec are simply not going to cut it these days

The big gripe about the Common Core is that it is all about testing, which encourages “teaching to the test.”  I am no lover of academic tests.  And I suspect I have at least a soupçon of authority in the matter, as I have constructed and, God knows, had to evaluate, a very great many of them over the years.  There are often much better motivations for teaching and for learning than test preparation.  But the idea that tests, even bad ones, don’t actually reveal valuable educational data is pure poppycock.  For some years I was a member of the ETS committee that made up the Advanced Placement exam in English.  And while I acknowledge the sometimes risible extent to which our efforts were influenced by various “multicultural” enthusiasms, I never read a completed exam that left me in substantial doubt, within a menu of reasonably fine gradations, of the capacities of a student to do “advanced” work in English language and literature.

We can either honor that information or reject it on some other (probably political) grounds.  I have to say this for Bill DiBlasio, loathsome politician though he be.  He is capable of unsettling honesty.  When faced with the fact that black and hispanic students are grotesquely underrepresented among the admittees to the small number of elite high schools in New York City, his very straightforward solution is to get rid of the entrance exam.  That appears to be doable.  Supplying minority students with a quality primary school education that might prepare them for the exam on a competitive basis with their less pigmented colleagues is apparently not doable.

The crucial subjects in which American students are so conspicuously wanting on the international stage are the same subjects tested by the elite New York Schools: Math and English.  Math must stand for all the STEM fields, which are of ever-increasing importance in the “new” economy.  “English” must stand for all the arts of the old trivium—arts of literacy--reading, writing, and speaking well.  Though the STEM fields must claim a special priority, the skills of literacy remain indispensable for competent citizenship, not to mention a seriously fulfilling life.  I cannot presume to give advice about the math exam, but I can suggest a question that I think should be on the English test.  And if candidates know in advance that it will be there, so much the better.   The question arises in my mind for a somewhat curious reason; it was stimulated by comments I have heard or read in some of the currently abundant and polemical discussion concerning the pronouns appropriate to use of transgendered persons.  Advocated neologisms such as zee, shay, shim, they (singular) and zer are not without their cultural interest, and will perhaps offer the materials for a subsequent essay.  For the moment it is the concept of the pronoun itself that captures my attention.  So my hypothetical exam question is this: “What are the parts of speech in the English language?  Very briefly define their syntactical functions.”  One might suppose that asking an English-speaker that question is rather like inquiring whether an artist knows the primary colors, or whether a musician is familiar with Guido’s scale.  That is, the question asks for elementary, indeed foundational linguistic information.  But you might be surprised.  According to one report, published in the middle of the Iraqi war, only sixteen percent of American high school students, when presented with a world map, could find Iraq on it.

The Crown

Around here it is all about “The Crown”,  the terrific metonymic television series about Queen Elizabeth II recently launched into its third season.  It is brilliantly made, with superb acting by many people, including conspicuously Olivia Colman as the Queen.  (Claire Foy, who played the younger Elizabeth in the first two season, was also excellent.)  It is fully deserving of binge treatment, and if left to myself I would have probably finished off the series in a day; but that is not my spouse’s style.  The strict rationing is probably good for me, and certainly keeps Buckingham Palace in my unconscious thoughts throughout long days. 

 Queens au pair

This third series has a certain amount of particular interest for me.  It begins with the first premiership of Harold Wilson, immediately following my own years in Oxford.  I vividly remember many of the events its portrays, which are in my mind associated with the beginning years of my professional career.   Furthermore Wilson himself was a Jesus College man, certainly the college’s most prominent political alumnus, and he showed up there from time to time.  Also, it occurs to me that Ms. Colman somewhat resembles my mother in one of her distinctive facial expressions.  This invites me to participate in all the oedipal scenes involving Prince Charles a little more authentically.

PM Harold Wilson at the site of the Aberfan disaster

My enthusiasm for this show involves a kind of inner betrayal.  I have always been somewhat annoyed at the common American fascination with royalty and decayed aristocracy.  The enthusiasm of the Founders of our nation for republicanism was directly proportional to their loathing of hereditary monarchy.  But a decade had not passed until we were busy creating an ersatz aristocracy of our own, and we have never stopped. Think of all the seedy European bluebloods who infect the pages of Henry James novels.  Lord Grantham of recent “Downton Abbey” celebrity, is presented as a sympathetic character when in fact he is a jumped-up fortune hunter on Lend-Lease life support.  Once upon a time in this country Wallis Simpson was more admired by American women than Helen Keller.  But still…

I once personally met the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh.  I believe it must have been exactly sixty years ago, when we were all younger, and when Americans were a little rarer in Britain and consequently somewhat less despised.  It was in a reception line; the Queen merely gave us a wan smile, but the Duke made a conceivably witty remark concerning the inadequacy of British heating.

            As a medievalist, I have to say that English majesty has been somewhat wanting over the centuries.  It is mainly downhill after King Alfred, a man of fine moral character, whom any humanist must admire for his emphasis on education.  I also want to give high marks to Edward the Confessor, Henry V, Henry VIII, Elizabeth, Victoria, and George VI.  Needless to say, recognition of achievement is not in every instance synonymous with approbation of moral character.  But the incidence of royal mediocrity is quite high, as immortalized by Byron’s line about George III: “A better farmer ne’er brushed dew from lawn.”

It is quite odd, of course, to be watching an historical drama about people who are still alive and, if not quite kicking, at least still experiencing the motion of the molecules.  The actual Crown today is in one of its periodic states of crisis.  The Royals got a pretty good run out of their latest dynastic wedding, but now the bloom seems to be fading from the bush so far as Meagan Markle is concerned.  It seems not to have taken her very long to have exhausted her historical role as multicultural specimen and to have discovered that Buckingham Palace is not really much fun for a Valley Girl.  The Duke is ninety-eight and retiring, the Queen ninety-three and tiring; but everybody loves her to death and is understandably worried by the prospect of her moving on.   Prince Charles, entering his eighth decade of humiliation, a good deal of it elective, has decided at last to engage the full force of his septuagenarian vim and vigor.  Unfortunately one of the first tasks he must take in hand is sorting out his truly disgraceful younger brother Andrew.  Andrew was never a really close friend of Jeffrey Epstein, he tells us in a widely viewed interview that redefined moral opacity.  He seldom stayed in one of Epstein’s palatial homesteads more than three times a year.  And as for the woman who insists that he repeatedly bedded her when she was seventeen years old, it is all an inexplicable fabrication.  The photograph of him with his arm around her waist?  Photoshopped. 

            Since it’s a classic he-said-she said situation, we must perhaps give him the benefit of the lout.  But the fact is that she said it under oath and caution of perjury, and one is likely to arrive at a certain conclusion in pectore.  The whole episode is as sordid as it can be.   Its supporting co-star is Ghislaine Maxwell, tycoon’s daughter, socialite, dear friend of the Prince, best friend and lover of Jeffrey Epstein, and the most notable go-between or female pimp since Ovid’s Dipsas.   Dante’s Venedico Caccianemico is pursued through the Malebolge by “horned demons armed with heavy scourges”.  Ghislaine Maxwell’s pursuers are BBC reporters with microphones and video cameras.  That’s part of what is called changing social mores   It is no longer possible to pursue Jeffrey Epstein, hanged in his jail cell unhousele’d, disappointed, unaneled and, apparently, widely unknown.  Among the cast of hundreds who barely knew him are Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.  Prince Andrew is now under orders to keep such a low profile that, were it not for his Adam’s apple, he would have no profile at all. One of my favorite and probably spurious “quotations”—it has been attributed to many people from Gladstone to anonymous society matrons—involves a Victorian spectator’s reaction to a performance of Anthony and Cleopatra: “How very different from the home life of our own dear Queen!”   So one looks forward to the television treatment of all this in season eight or ten, but in the meantime it’s a real headache for the real Crown. 

The Chess Match of Life

Bergman's "Seventh Seal   :   Sir Antonius Block (white)-0     G. Reaper (black) +1

Among the many pleasures I anticipate for our forthcoming family Thanksgiving festival are a couple of chess games with our younger son, who is coming down from Montreal to spend a few days.  I am a halfway decent chess player and he a good one.  Neither of us is really good—meaning having achieved the official level of mastership; but we are fairly evenly matched—meaning that every now and then I am allowed to win.  We have been playing since he was a lad and have enjoyed our contests over many years.

Life is a trip, a journey into the unknown, a pilgrimage.  Life is a cabaret, my friend, also a bitch and more rarely a beach.   Sometimes our poets are more discouraging yet.  For Shakespeare, famously, we simply play out our lives.  “All the world’s a stage,” says Jacques in As Your Like It, “and all the men and women merely players.”  Macbeth is harsher yet: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / and then is heard no more: it is a tale / told by a idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing,”   Elsewhere it is not mere play acting but active playing.  For life, you see, is a chess match.

            Chaucer is our first major poet to whom was can assign a name, and his first major poem, usually called the “Book of the Duchess,” is an elegy for his great lady, Blanche of Lancaster, who died of the plague in 1368.  In it her sorrowing widower, John of Gaunt, is allegorized as a Black Knight.  Blanche, of course, is French for “white”; so you can see where this is going.  Fortune checkmates the Black Knight by capturing the knight’s queen, or fers, to use the word derived from Persian then in use by French-speakers.  This is all quite incoherent, of course, since the black and white pieces are adversaries.  But in none of the  several surviving medieval chess books does actual chess successfully compete with moral allegory.  Philidor, the father of modern chess theory in the middle of the eighteenth century, joked that his sons played chess as though it were a game of chance, the outcome of which is determined by caprice rather than by skill and strategy.  That seems to be the actual operating principle of the medieval chess moralists.

chess board, Paris, Bibliothèque National, MS fr. 9197

The biggest of the medieval chess poems known to me—and I do mean big—is a French work generally called Les Eschéz d’Amours—Cupid’s Chess, or Amatory Chess.  Its title has been assigned by modern scholars and should mislead no one into thinking it is an actual systematic chess manual.  In fact, it is a little hard to say succinctly exactly what it is about.  This late fourteenth-century work, one of several encyclopedic poems inspired by the thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose, is even now in the course of publication by one of my former students, Gregory Heyworth of Rochester University, and Daniel O’Sullivan of Boston College, editor of the indispensable Chess in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age.   While we await something like a truly comprehensive literary history of chess, O’Sullivan’s volume offers a good introduction to this fascinating subject.  Heyworth is the digitally adept creator of the brilliant “Lazarus Project”, which aims to recover with recently developed technological tools old manuscripts rendered illegible by time and abuse.  (The principal manuscript of Cupid’s Chess, in Dresden,  was fire-bombed with the support of your tax dollars in 1945.)  Though there remains much still to learn about this curious work, in its own day is was sufficiently important to attract a commentary nearly as vast as itself—a treatment generally reserved for authoritative Latin texts.  The commentator was one Evrart de Conty.  There is a knock-out gorgeous manuscript of this book in the national library of France, which you can view on-line.*

Among its many illustrations is an accurate diagram of a chessboard.  Many other medieval illustrations of the board gesture in the right direction but are inexact.   An actual chessboard has sixty-four small squares in the form of a large square.  The British Chancellor of the Exchequer is the officer who in the Middle Ages pursued his checkered career sitting before his spreadsheet made of color-coded wooden squares deployed in columns.  Exchequer was the vernacular for Latin scaccarium, “chess board.”

The real age of “literary chess” was the eighteenth century.  I have already mentioned Philidor (the musician  François-André Danican), whose brilliant Analyse du jeu des Echecs of 1749 was a literal game-changer.   After its publication one could hardly claim to be an intellectual without also being a serious chess player, and no serious chess player could be less than an intellectual.  One of Philidor’s profound maxims (“The pawn is the soul of chess”) was not without its political and revolutionary suggestions.  Diderot, Rousseau, every self-respecting philosophe sipped coffee over chess matches.  The Founding Fathers of our own nation might have perished from the terminal momentousness of the Constitutional Convention without the restorative recreation provided them by the little carved wooden pieces.  Jefferson was a keen but not particularly powerful player.

The greatest of early American chess moralists was Benjamin Franklin.  For a revolutionary, Franklin preached an awful lot of standard bourgeois morality of the “healthy, wealthy, and wise” sort that is so prominent in Poor Richard’s Almanack.  Among his minor works is a sententious short essay entitled “Morals of Chess”.  In it he writes thus: “The game of chess is not merely an idle amusement….For life is a kind of chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and evil events, that are in some degree the effects of prudence or the want of it.”  Specifically, chess has four special lessons to teach.  The first is foresight—anticipating the results of your moves.  The second is circumspection—keeping in mind the whole arena in which you are acting.  The third is being sure to play strictly by the rules, “as the game thereby becomes more the image of human life, and particularly of war.” But the fourth lesson is the most important: “We learn by chess the habit of not being discouraged by present appearances in the state of affairs, the habit of hoping for a favorable change, and that of persevering in the search for resources.”  This injunction must have been particularly useful to Franklin during the Revolution and his sometimes difficult assignments as our ambassador to France.  But I doubt that he ever had to try to honor it, as I had to,  while being mauled by his teen-aged son.

A happy Thanksgiving to all those esteemed readers who celebrate this holiday.
  

*in French, naturally, but lavishly illustrated

Singin' and the Rain

I have never quite understood boredom, by which I suppose I must mean extended periods of boredom, as opposed to the fleeting experience of a bad lecture or a committee meeting.  For the most part life has been a Heracletian fire, full of crackling rapid movement that has left me wondering what comes next.  Even retirement itself, which I expected to devolve in some pastel monochrome, has already been punctuated by a series of vivid, not to say garish episodes—some of them, admittedly, of the sort I could do without—that have been anything but boring.  No doubt this in part arises from the fact that aging makes many intrinsically simple and ordinary things rather complex and extraordinary, and consequently their achievement more notable.  In the twenty-third canto of the Inferno Dante conjures up a procession of the Hypocrites.  These damned souls can move only at snail’s pace, burdened down as they are with cloaks, flashy on the exterior, but actually lined with lead.  Perhaps I can find a more positive analogy in the sight of some of our young college athletes in training, burdened with heavy backpacks as they run up and down the long ranks of seats in the football stadium.  In any event, I feel leaden a good deal of the time.  When locomotion itself becomes a kind of ordeal, simply showing up can be an adventure.

On Monday night we went to a remarkable musical event in the University chapel—a performance of Georgian folk music by the Ensemble Basiani, the Georgian State Vocal Ensemble.  This was a male choir, thirteen strong, all dressed in traditional ethnic finery, sort of decorated black soutanes, over very elegant high black boots in supple leather.  The singing, which included both religious and secular songs, was amazing.  Only a few pieces included some kind of minimal instrumental accompaniment; the main instruments were deep, powerful male voices.  Georgian folk music is characterized by a lot of orchestrated noise—shouting, clapping, and a very distinctive kind of yodeling, sometimes supplemented by dance.  

But the seemingly mundane tasks of getting to and from the venue were slightly more than routine.  It was, in the immortal words of Bulwer-Lytton, a dark and stormy night, fraught with possible geriatric anxieties.  Driving visibility was poor; finding a parking spot demanded competition and an adrenaline flow.   Triumph in that arena left us still with a bit of a walk through a cold rain.  I was armed, but insufficiently; I couldn’t get my five-dollar umbrella open.  Every few steps of the way we would be overtaken by lither juniors.  This process was repeated in the return trip to the parking lot.  Now if age is daily presenting you with an anthology of petty quotidian reminders of your incremental geezerdom, it is only fair that it offer also some contrasting compensations.  It does that marvelously by giving you grandchildren.  A grandchild is not simply a child at one remove, or a smaller version of their own parents.  A grandchild is a unique blessing, a living symbol of vital continuity, a tolerant and ever-surprising companion, a rewarding student and so bounteous a fount of frank and uncomplicated affection, however undeserved, as to repair a souring view of human nature.

We have six grandchildren, five lovely girls and the most delightful little chap you will ever meet--all geniuses of course, all faster than a speeding bullet, each more powerful than a locomotive, and every single one able to leap tall buildings at a single bound.  Furthermore, you have to bear in mind that buildings are now considerably taller than in the heyday of Superman! Admittedly, the oldest “girl” is in her mid-twenties, beautiful and brainy,  and a high-powered executive in New York.  But  do not press me as to what, exactly, it is that she executes.  It’s one of these techie “platform” things that, so far as I understand, empowers other platforms.  In my mind it must be similar to Garrison Keillor’s National Organization of Organizations.  What really keeps me on my toes, I just realized, is not kefir or yoga; it is grandparenthood.  In a healthy familial setting grandchildren are like works of art as written about in Eliot’s great essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”  They recapitulate a respected cultural inheritance while applying, modifying, and expanding it through individual personality and experience.  They are teachers as well as learners.

The youngest of the grandkids, also female, has only arrived at the beginning of her schooling, though she  already radiates an executive aura.  Four of them live in New York, and the other two not so very much further away, in Montreal.  We see the New Yorkers very frequently and the Montrealers perhaps too seldom but still not infrequently.  We are rapidly coming up to Thanksgiving, which will involve the usual stuff-and-groan contest, and for a New York kid a leafy New Jersey back garden opening on a sylvan path to Lake Carnegie is as good as Camp Gitche Gumee any day.   All the grandkids will be there save Lulu who on her own initiative is spending a (high school) junior semester is Marseille in order to keep up with her French.  But I could feel her sitting next to me at the Basiani concert.  For right in the middle of it the golden youth of the Princeton University Glee Club briefly claimed the stage (i.e., the cathedral-like chancel steps) for a couple of beautiful numbers.  The talented director of this group, Gabriel Crouch, wrote thus in the Program Notes: “…[W]e’ve never come so close to a tradition which makes our own feel so…adolescent.”  According to Chaucer’s Miller, an exponent of the generational war, “Youthe and elde is often at debaat.” But on Monday night youth and elde were in harmony, or at least sweet and fulfilling complement. 

The ancient music of these Caucasian singers had another special balm for my geezerdom.  We were sitting in the second row of the nave, which, as the first row had been left empty, was in effect the very front.  I don’t know how large a Georgian expat community there is in central Jersey, but judging from the friendly personal exchanges between singers and audience members I’d say quite a few.  There is a subsidiary entrance to the chapel at the chancel level on its east side.  During an applause pause midway through, a group of three sodden late comers came in: a middle-aged woman, a very ancient woman in a wheelchair, and what I must describe as an ecclesiastical Gerontius.  They came to the front row immediately in front of us.  The man, though not in full ecclesiastical regalia, was obviously of some high order of Orthodox Christian episcopacy, in the autocephalous Church of Georgia.  His beard, though not quite so long as his full-length cassock, was perfectly proportioned to it.  He wore an elaborately embroidered tall, flat cap that puts to shame the one I bought in the Istanbul market.  He carried a beautiful stick, half cane and half crosier, topped with a large metal ornament in a material I took to be gold.  He was probably not much if at all older than I am, but he radiated the aura of Blake’s Ancient of Days.  He also radiated an unfeigned “child-like” joy for the music both of his foot-stamping, hand-clapping compatriots and the sober reticence of the American teen-agers in the Glee Club.  In that moment neither walking sticks nor wheel chairs seemed a very big deal.

William Blake, "The Ancient of Days"

You can hear a short piece by the Basiani Ensemble HERE: or their whole 2017 concert in Saint Petersburg HERE.

Searching for Jan Valtin

Retirement is something you have to feel your way into.  It took me about a decade to realize its principal point for my life: that there is precious little that I am actually obliged to do.   I realize that I spent a professional career largely defined by deadlines, due dates, and the prompt appearance at duly scheduled meetings.  Furthermore, I felt obliged, in order to “keep up” with my field to read a lot of poorly conceived and poorly written scholarship that dispirited rather than enlightened me.  Just as I shall never have to grade another final examination, I shall never have to read another book on Queering the Quest or Questing the Queer?  Artistic Obfuscation of the Sexual Subject in the “Chivalric” Poems of Reinhardt von Eisenbach.  I can spend my time reading Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha,” which is how I spent some happy hours during the last week.  Talk about multicultural!  Anyway, the unfortunate feeling of pressing obligation made its unwelcome though thankfully brief return last week.  This is how it came about.

Ten years ago I published a book, The Anti-Communist Manifestos, in which I studied the political and cultural impact in the United States and in France of four best-selling books of anti-Communist tendency.  Probably the least known of the four—although it had been the best-selling book in America in 1941—was Out of the Night by Jan Valtin (the pseudonym of a German sailor named Richard Krebs).    I hope it is not immodest to say that my book has played a role in animating a certain scholarly interest in Valtin/Krebs, a rather mysterious figure who claimed to have been a Communist espionage agent and who was accused by some enemies of being a Gestapo agent.  Together with one of the leading French historians of Communism, Guillaume Bourgeois of the University of Poitiers, I had planned to help organize an international scholarly conference devoted to him.  Serious illness has for the last year somewhat curtailed my activities, however, and I am unable just for the moment to travel to France to participate in my “own” conference.  Bummer.

But Guillaume had the idea that I might at least be present as some kind of spectral presence on a screen; I could send a short contribution by video.  In my professorial life I had naturally given video-recorded lectures many times.  But always I had behind me the technical resources of a university’s Audio-Visual Department or of the private corporation that was paying for the lectures.  Now I had to try to come up with something on very short notice.  I didn’t think my phone, even if I could miraculously learn how to use it, was the right tool for the right job.  How fortunate for me then that my elder son Richard is a sound-recording engineer, and indeed one of the best in the trade.  Sound engineers are not of course the same as videographers, but the two work together and complement each other.  As luck would have it Rich was briefly between assignments in distant parts and proved his filial affection by agreeing to help me out even at the expense of upending his family plans.  So I am grateful not only to him, but to a wonderful daughter-in-law and granddaughter, who tolerated the disturbance.

So on Monday afternoon Rich arrived at my house lugging a large, heavy, stoutly built box containing the state-of-the-art video camera he had borrowed from a brother in the trade.  Taken from this box and assembled, it was one of the most magnificent pieces of techie equipment I had ever seen.  Rich told me that it costs $50,000, of which the lens accounts for four-fifths.  I hope that this was hyperbole, but fear it probably wasn’t.  When it comes to a borrower or a lender being, I am a flat-out Polonian.  My mind was haunted by memories of the Maupassant short story of the lost borrowed necklace.  I was glad to get definitive word that Rich got the precious instrument safely back to Brooklyn.

I had spent so much energy fretting about how it might be possible to produce a video in forty-eight hours that I had given practically no thought to what I would actually say should we be able to find the necessary equipment.  But I did have a couple of hours to sit and think about it, and I was able to jot down a few notes, gather a few show-and-tell items, and stretch out a rather minimalist youtube presentation  to nearly half an hour.  The big question about Out of the Night, which must remain the fundamental written text for any study of Krebs, involves its historical reliability.  It was presented to the public as straight autobiography, but I have had to conclude that it is largely a work of fiction.  Like many novels it is enriched by the author’s personal experience, but as an “historical document”—the category to which its author and publisher assigned it in 1940—it doesn’t come close to passing the smell test.  One of the Irish bishops is supposed to have remarked of Gulliver’s Travels, at the time of its publication, that there were parts of the work he could not fully credit.  Let us say I have a similar reaction to Valtin’s book, though that is far from the reaction of many of its readers.  I pursued this theme, along with a couple of others, in my little talk; and although in the video my son Rich was not able to transform his paternal pig’s ear into a silk purse, he did come up with something surprisingly plausible.  What a great guy!

https://www.youtube.com/embed/60z3H0TNZcE

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.