Fact and Counterfact

“Here’s the thing,” says one of Hillary’s more likeable apparatchiks, “We can spend years pondering why American voters can be dipshits or we can take advantage of it.”  I won’t tell you what the particular dipshittery is here at the end of Curtis Sittenfeld’s hip and witty counterfactual novel Rodham, except that it is brilliantly hip and witty.  It is not really possible to play “spoiler” to a narrative already preemptively spoiled by fifty years of actual history; but authorial ingenuity always commands respect.  Here’s the thing.  I don’t read many contemporary novels.  I know I must be missing a lot of really good stuff, but the finitude of one’s reading life demands the application of some rational principle of selection.  If there is still a buzz about a book twenty or, better yet, two hundred years after its publication, I feel more confident about investing my rapidly diminishing time in it.  But I just had a birthday, and my spouse gave me a copy of Rodham, and I have been reading it with pleasure and admiration.

In giving me a copy of this particular book, Joan had her reasons.  She knows that I have a certain semi- or pseudo-connection both with the writer and with her subject—the imaginary lives of Bill and Hillary Clinton.  Not that I know Curtis Sittenfeld even through her earlier books, let alone in person, but it so happens that I knew both her father and her brother when they were at Princeton.  Both of them, in addition to being memorable students, went on to become splendid community-minded movers and shakers, and I am inclined to suppose that the entire family is notable for talent and achievement.  I do have a personal connection with the Clintons.  I am among their most intimate five hundred thousand friends.  President Clinton and I are both Rhodes Scholars from Arkansas, though not contemporaries at Oxford, the president being just ten years younger than I.  I was once their guest at the gubernatorial residence in Little Rock, and from that experience I have a couple of minor Clinton anecdotes.  They cannot live up to the ones the whole world knows about, let alone the frequently X-rated ones imagined by Curtis Sittenfeld, but they are not without their instructive or amusing aspects.  The anecdotes, however, are stolidly factual and thus fall outside the remit of the day, which is the counterfactual.

Very early in the Trump administration, perhaps even on its opening day as I recall, Sean Spicer, the White House Press Secretary, started a huge brouhaha with several confidently announced statements, including the claim that the crowd gathered on the Washington Mall on the occasion in Mr. Trump’s swearing in on January 20, 2017, was the largest in American history, period.  Photographs taken at the swearing in of President Obama in 2009, which were readily available for purposes of comparison, seemed to many in the sighted community to cast doubt upon the accuracy of this assertion.  Very soon thereafter Kellyanne Conway, the presidential porte-parole, while locked in argument with the journalist Chuck Todd on the news program “Meet the Press,” explained that Spicer’s characterization of the crowd size was not an untruth but an “alternative fact”—alternative, that is, to the fact that the Obama crowd was manifestly larger. 

I do wish that there were more serious students of literature in the corridors of the state—and here I refer to the state in its shallow no less than in its deep forms.  Kellyanne Conway has not to this day escaped the derision brought down upon her by alternative facts.  The pettifoggers of Foggy Bottom cannot be expected to appreciate so elegant a concept.  Perhaps she should have used the more common literary critical term exemplary fiction--that is, a story the moral truth of which is not constrained by prosaic and vastly over-rated reality.  I have spent a lifetime reading such works.

All fiction, after all, might be considered as constructs of alternative facts, not simply because it is not “true” but because it has to choose among alternative untruths.  Tess of the d’Urbervilles might after all alternatively been Tom of the d’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure could even more easily been Judy.  But how about Hillary Rodham?  Certainly, she is a real person?  Would she still be Hillary Rodham if she had dumped Bill, if she had indeed become President Rodham?  Read Sittenfeld’s book and let me know.

“Counterfactual” or “alternative” history is hardly a new thing among novelists.  (According to some historians I know, it is not a new thing among historians either.)  What if John Wilkes Booth’s pistol had jammed?  Is it not reasonable to assume that we would live in a much more just country today?  But on the whole, our American novelists have preferred pessimistic “counterfactuals” to optimistic ones.  They are especially big on imagined fascist takeovers.  I think particularly of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935) and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. (2004), both of which reimagine American political history of the 1930’s.  In the first of these a coded version of Louisiana Governor Huey Long, and in the second an enhanced delineation (as in “enhanced interrogation”) of Charles Lindbergh get their authoritarian mitts on the levers of American power, with predictable results.  The predictability is a problem.  In my view it finally condemns two very fine novels to a kind of political conventionality if not triviality. 

The masterpiece of the genre in my opinion, and by any reckoning a truly extraordinary novel, is Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle (1962).  Lewis and Roth may make you shudder and wonder; but Dick will make you think.  Dick had the dubious fate of being regarded as a “science fiction” writer.  That is not wrong, exactly.  He wrote many shelf feet of science fiction, not only out of his life-long interest in it, but because he could sell it.  Most people probably know about him on account of the movie “Bladerunner”.  I probably would never have read him if the Library of America had not published him.

As the novel begins, the fascist take-over of America has already taken place.  In fact there are two fascist take-overs.  The victorious Axis Powers of 1947—the German Third Reich and the Japanese Empire--have treated the American continent rather as Germany and Russia had treated Poland in 1939.  The Germans have occupied the eastern seaboard and the Japanese the Pacific rim.  The ostensibly unoccupied center of the continent (essentially today’s “flyover country”)  is a tenuous “independent” state and buffer between the uneasy Axis allies.  The counterfactuals of these arrangements are brilliantly inventive, but that’s only the beginning.  The “man in the high castle” is a writer living in Wyoming, part of the American Vichy or Neutral Zone, and the author of a counterfactual novel (The Grasshopper Lies Heavy) in which America defeats Germany and Japan in World War II.   So you have a counterfactual novel in which a counterfactual counterfactual novel plays a prominent role.  Any confusion engendered by the necessary breathlessness of this summary will vanish when I tell you that Dick was quite erudite, and that reading his book requires at least superficial knowledge of the nature and uses of the ancient Chinese I Ching, or Book of Changes.  Indeed, “Book of Changes” would be a pretty fair subtitle for any counterfactual novel like Sittenfeld’s or Dick’s.  In its weirdness, furthermore, the I Ching is perfect for brief daily readings in time of plague.

Bambuseaephagy, or the alimentary consumption of bamboo: a brief report

My last post concluded with the intention of eating some steamed bamboo tips gathered from my back yard.  That happened, and I yet live.  The good friend who (appropriately distanced) shared my mess declared it to be “about as tasty as a water chestnut”—a judgment that redeemed with its candor what it lacked in enthusiasm.  I later consulted a couple of Malaysian internet videos and discovered the superior mode of dressing and cooking the bamboo.  It should be seriously boiled for quite a while in some kind of yucky rice-water.  A second lunch thus prepared—though in New Jersey tap-water, our indigenous  yuck--was crunchier and sweeter, and from the tactile point of view closer to crisp asparagus or parsnip.  As for taste, kind of like a water chestnut; but it’s got to be absolutely loaded with vitamins.

Bambusoideled

We remain digital ingenus, and we learned only this week, and by accident, that Alexa has a “question of the day” for the general amusement of her large clientele.  We then had to check the day’s question out, of course.  It turned out to be a soft pitch, and we were able to knock it out of the park.  “What,” Alexa wanted to know, “is the fastest growing plant?”  The answer is bamboo (Bambuseae), as we have good reason to know.

We moved into our house, the only one we have ever actually owned, just over thirty years ago.  It is a largish modern rectangular house with a flat roof (bad idea) and a glass wall on the back looking out into natural beauty (good idea) and a path through woods down to the lake a quarter of a mile away.  I can rightfully call it “architect designed,” since a Professor in the Architecture School designed it.  I think we are the third owners of the house, and will almost certainly be the last.  The edifice and its occupants seem on track for simultaneous collapse.  The man who built the house must have had been a spiritual Californian.  At any event, he put in a few bamboo plants among some massive and carefully strewn boulders on the west side of the property.

These plants had become a dense grove by the time we moved in, and within two more years they had surrounded the aforementioned boulders, creating within our larger garden a kind of mystery zone perfectly suited to entrance small grandchildren.   The mature bamboo is a beautiful thing to behold both in the pattern of the leafing and in the fascinating segmentation of the small circular trunk, which have presented an inexhaustible subject for classical Chinese and Japanese painters.  The leafy tops of these giant grasses (as they are technically classified) dance and bend with the breeze, creating a strange sensation of violent motion tethered to a graceful solidity.  In heavy or icy snow their tops may bend all the way to the ground; and since many are thirty feet tall, that means roughly a third of the way across the whole back lawn.  Quite soon we had to lay down an imaginary red line beyond which we were prepared to fight back.

The appearance of the roots is skeletal, like yellowish-green human finger bones, but of seemingly infinite length.  They shoot out underground in a straight line, every now and again barely breaking the surface to expose an inch or two of serpentine loop.  It is along these shallowly subterranean and rapidly advancing roots, stronger than Antaeus in their earth-grip and virtually ineradicable, that the new vertical bamboo shoots spring up.

Giving the bamboo its inch, which allows you to enjoy the beauty, is very difficult.  For it wants its mile, or rather unlimited mileage, which can ruin your garden in very short order.  So far as I can tell there are only two solutions.  The first is to construct subterranean containment walls deep enough to block the advance of the roots.  My son in Brooklyn, a great bamboo aficionado,  lucked into this solution.  The old house he bought in Red Hook had most inappropriately in its small back yard a small cement swimming pool that looked as though it dated from the ‘Fifties (maybe the 1850’s).  He transformed this ugly and useless thing into a huge flower-pot in which a beautifully tamed bamboo copse now thrives.  I recommend this elegant solution both for the perfection of the results and for its inexpensiveness—once you have amortized the cost of building the pool, of course.   The situation is not unlike that attendant upon Bo-Bo’s discovery of roast pork in the famous essay by Charles Lamb.  But underground containment is not a possibility for us.  We are not dealing with a patch but a forest, and the only answer for us is an annual draconian slaughter of the offspring.

            Each year in early May, usually before the tenth, the bamboo starts sprouting.  One day you see nothing; the next long straight lines of shoots pop up everywhere adjacent to the bamboo groves, in the lawn, in the flower beds, already two or three inches high the first time you notice them.  From that time on, you can practically watch them grow, ever more phallic in appearance—sometimes two or three inches overnight.  The really spectacular growth comes later, after they reach three or four feet, but by then the stems at ground level are becoming tough and woody, dark green in color, and difficult to cut easily.  You can also hear them growing—intermittent, squeaky, slightly railroadish sounds coming out of the dark of the spring night.  The young plants are cunningly made, covered in very tight overlapping paper-like wrappings, which they gradually shed as they climb ever upward.  In this they are like vegetable snakes.  They await their Stephen King to exploit the incipient horror of it all.  Cutting them to the ground in their sprout stage is only the first step.  They are likely to return in a year, but in a spindly state.  A second attack usually does the trick, and a third always does.

            This year’s campaign has a new twist.  Bamboo is of course edible, but I have never had confidence that our variety would be.  On Monday, however, I had a revelatory experience.  Our private lot abuts fifteen or twenty acres of “common land” shared by all the houses in the neighborhood.  Scattered throughout these acres are several other lush bamboo groves.  Just beyond my southern stone boundary wall is a large field.  As I was working at the bottom of my lawn,  I was surprised to see in this field a large black SUV with New York plates.  This was a most curious sight, and also highly suggestive of transgression.  Only large lawnmowers and heavy tree-care machines ever appear on the common ground, through which there is no actual vehicular road.  A private sports-utility vehicle could not have been more out of place on one of the great lawns of Central Park; but I go with the flow.  Later I saw two young, maskless Chinese women, both carrying heavy bags filled with the severed tips of bamboo sprouts, coming out of the woods.  In thus identifying them, I refer not to nationality, of which I have no knowledge, but to the probable national origin suggested by their physical appearance, the language they were speaking, and the vegetable loot they were hauling.  When they saw me, and realized that I had observed them, one of them dropped her heavy bag and both ran toward the SUV.  Then a middle-aged Chinese man appeared from I know not where, scooped up the discarded bag, and also rushed to the vehicle.  The guilty conscience needs no accuser.  Hand in the cookie jar doesn’t do justice.  You would have thought I had stumbled upon a major heist in progress at the First National Bank.  The black car took off at as high speed as risk of breaking an axle in rough terrain would allow, across the field, through a bumpy vacant lot, and then (out of sight to me) to a paved road and successful escape.  It seems clear that these desperadoes were unaware that my attitude, should I have been capable of one other than astonishment, would have been of gratitude for the their help in controlling the Green Menace.  I also concluded that if the Great Bamboo Sprout Caper was worthy of the automotive drama of The French Connection, we must have some pretty great bamboo sprouts.  So I set aside a promising bunch from my own back yard, and I’ll steam some for lunch tomorrow.

with thanks for several photos by Joan Fleming and Lulu Fleming-Benite

Socially Distanced

We are in a demographic more likely than many others to tolerate more or less equably the enforced social isolation of the past two months.  We are far from being social butterflies.  Our greatest sense of “crowd” deprivation comes from the cancellation of the program of musical concerts to which we subscribe.  But there is also a highly enjoyable periodic dinner, what we call the “Dinners for Six,” that we now have to forego—or, rather, “virtualize”..

To explain this dinner I call upon the talented Peter Arno, the nom de plume of Curtis Arnoux Peters, Jr., the artist who established the tradition of great cartoons for which the New Yorker magazine is justly famous.  Roger Angell, another New Yorker stalwart, called him “the magazine’s first genius.”  He was not primarily a political cartoonist, but he did come up with some memorable pieces on political themes.  The cartoon above appeared in 1936.  I cannot say I remember enjoying it at the time.  That was the year of my birth, and though I am sure that I must have been precocious, I was probably still bogged down in Junior Scholastic.  Nineteen thirty-six also initiated the second term of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency.  FDR has long since enjoyed political beatification, and most Americans regard him as a figure semi-divine.  Arno’s cartoon reminds us that he was once highly controversial.  A quartet of the New York upper crust are passing by the open window of some of their peers.  “Come along,” one of the women shouts out in invitation to those in the house.  “We are going to the Trans-Lux to hiss Roosevelt!”  The Trans-Lux was an art deco movie theater at 52^nd and Lexington, and cinema programs in the good old days usually began with News Reels devoted to more or less current events, including presidential appearances.  The cartoon satirizes moneyed fat cats, of course; but it preserves an anti-Roosevelt attitude held by millions at the time.  Conservatives liked to call him “a traitor to his class.”

Though the parallel is not exact, a Dinner for Six is a little like a group trip to the Trans-Lux.  The “six” are three couples of very old friends.  We all share a number of interests in common, and though there is a certain amount of difference in our political views, there is probably a good deal more agreement.  Fairly early in the Trump administration we found ourselves sufficiently alarmed by the state of things that we decided to have regular meetings at roughly six-week intervals to discuss the latest developments.  These discussions focus in the main on the White House—to such a degree that an alternative term for Dinner for Six is “Trumpian Dinner”.  The actual dinner is an important part of the Dinner, if you follow, and we rotate among our private houses and share the preparation of an entrée, a salad, and a dessert on a regular rota.  Heaven forfend that we should get competitive on the culinary aspects; but I can say that everyone sets a pretty high standard.  The meals themselves, accordingly, are memorable.  We do not actually hiss the President, but we do subject his deeds and his words to sometimes frankly censorious review.

Since we are very old friends, and since there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in half of anyone’s philosophy, and thus endless fruitful topics of conversation, we sometimes take rather a long time arriving at the Trumpian theme, and one evening we came close to never getting to it at all.  But we invariably end the evening with predictions.  There is always something cooking, after all—the Mueller Report, impeachment, the latest hiring and firings, portentous developments pregnant with the apparent likelihood of effecting dramatic change.  Our predictions, which are actually written down to be recalled at the next dinner, are mostly wrong and even if not exactly wrong, rendered more or less irrelevant by the time of the next meeting by other unforeseen developments.

We are continuing our conversations “virtually”, but if you take away the food you do risk losing an important part of dinner.  That essential etymological element of companionship that I so often mention—the sharing of bread—is lacking in the virtual and socially distanced world.  I have been trying to clarify in my mind just what it is about the current situation that is so off-putting.  Such reflection is probably an idle enterprise.   There are many disturbing aspects, some quite serious, others merely annoying; and the scene changes significantly from day to day in response to accidental and trivial circumstances.  But one constant is the unnaturalness of social isolation.  We are built not for isolation but for community.

Read the Virus Away

Picasso

Meekly accepting our assignment among the highest risk group in a pandemic has meant accepting a social isolation so nearly complete as to leave us struggling to impose structure on our days and to find meaning in activities that might unkindly be called killing time.  The most socially redemptive of these is reading.  There’s always been a lot of that in my life, but this takes it to an altogether new level.  It has also made me think in a slightly new way—this after a long career of being an English professor—about the social role of stories and story-telling.  It is as though my whole library had been picked up and moved into a brightly lit cubbyhole between two of the departure gates at Newark Airport to compete with racks of hard candy and potato chips.

The illusion of large swaths of uncommitted time stretching out before me is one of the more curious aspects of the medical house arrest in which we find ourselves.  One knows, of course, that it is an illusion, that actually the circumstances are an emblem of vulnerability and mortality rather than leisure, but it encourages the adoption of mad projects, such as reading all of Don Quixote in Spanish.  Mind you that is an aspiration rather than a guarantee.  It’s a book of half a million words or so, and my Spanish, though a little better than minimally functional, struggles with the richness of Cervantes’s vocabulary and the frequent obsolescence of his constructions.

As a character Don Quixote is a man who has been made mad by books, or at any rate whose madness has been made all the madder by them.  Art is supposed to imitate life, but Quixote reverses that.  The knights errant of the endless romances in his library take over his life, creating a work of genius frequently described as “the first novel.”  That characterization is not uncontested, and I have simultaneously been reworking my way through another claimant to the title of “first novel,” the Latin prose narrative of Apuleius of Madaurus.  Apuleius was a north African Roman writer of the second century.  The general cultural milieu of his circumstances and training in rhetoric and Platonic philosophy inevitably invites comparison with that of the young pagan Augustine two centuries later.  Only a few of Apuleius’s writings have survived, but one of them is a masterpiece.  It is The Metamorphosis, a picaresque narrative about the adventures of a young man supernaturally transformed into a donkey.  What happens to him in his donkey state is scarcely to be believed, and certainly not to be put down before you read the last word.  The book was known in translation to the English Renaissance  as The Golden Asse, a title of ribald amusement to my fellow undergraduates in the college course in which I first read it.

We professors are prone to make extravagant ethical claims concerning the benefits of reading fiction carefully, and I can hardly abjure  a high seriousness that kept food on my family table for so many years.   But these competing first novels suggest something less grandiose.  The purpose of stories seems first of all to be entertainment and distraction, and the recompense of the story-teller has more to do with bread than with philosophical celebrity.  The narrators of the tales in the Decameron, one of our earliest and best collections of tales, are motivated by the desire to take their minds off the plague and think of something less serious.  Six hundred years ago Boccaccio placed them in the fictional situation that we are today living through in reality.  Though I and others are capable of finding ingenious moral meanings in those tales, they are presented first and foremost as pastime and entertainment.  Scheherazade, the genius narrator of the Arabian Nights, has an aim more urgently practical yet: indefinitely deferring her execution!  The monarch Shahryar’s draconian response to his wife’s infidelity was—after disposing of her--to marry a fresh virgin every night and remove her, permanently, the next morning.   But he got hooked on Scheherazade’s brilliant narratives, and always wanted to hear just one more day’s life-extending installment.

With sea shanties and work-songs of other kinds toilers sought to dull the monotony and physical exhaustion of hard labor.  Travelers, especially, were story tellers.  Travel (with its obvious connections to the two different senses of French and English travail) was arduous work, and often dangerous.  Medieval pilgrims undertaking serious journeys were compelled by canon law to make out their wills before departure.  They well might not be coming back.  The Golden Ass of Apuleius begins with its narrator Lucius on a tiring business trip on horseback.  His destination is Thessaly.  On the road he overtakes two travelers arguing.  Lucius can hear the one accuse the other of having told outrageous tall tales.  It is precisely far-fetched narrative that Lucius seeks as palliatives for the rigors of the journey, and certainly what he delivers in his own right.  As a matter of fact, ancient travelers—and their medieval counterparts, mainly pilgrims—gained the reputation of extravagant fabulators.  The parallels with the framing premise of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are quite marked.  The Canterbury pilgrims agree to participate in a tale-telling contest, the prize for which will be a meal at a wayside inn.  Lucius proposes a very similar arrangement.  Story-telling, traveling, and sharing a meal form a fundamental social nexus.  Remember the literal meaning of the word companion—one with whom you share your bread (panis).

“All men by nature desire to know”, as Aristotle’s Metaphysics famously begins.  “An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer seeing (one might say) to everything else. The reason is that this, most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things”.  But for the Greek philosophers the desire for true knowledge was quite different from idle and indulgent curiosity.  Curiosity is regarded by most of us today as a plus, but do remember that it killed the cat.  In the Latin moral vocabulary, both classical and Christian, the word curiositas is deeply ambivalent.  If we can believe Saint Paul the Greeks and especially the Athenians had an insatiable appetite for hearing about the new and the strange.  “Now the Athenians in general and the foreigners there had no time for anything but talking or hearing about the latest novelty” (Acts 17:21). 

Apuleius’s narrator Lucius would seem to be an honorary Athenian.  When he hears one of his prospective new companions accuse the other of telling “absurd and monstrous lies,” he becomes all ears.  “Such is my thirst for novelty that I said, ‘Please let me share in your conversation, not because I am one of those curious ones, but I am one who wants to know everything or at least most things!”  That curiously qualifying phrase has to be a nod to Aristotle, but its literary-critical import is hard to pin down.

There is an explicit invocation of Aristotle in the first narrative chapter of Cervantes, which deals chiefly with his hero’s literary pathology.  The old don struggled with the vapid purple passages of his beloved romances, “although Aristotle himself would not have been able to understand them, even if he had been resurrected for that sole purpose.”  Don Quixote “had filled his imagination with everything he had read, with enchantments, knightly encounters, battles, challenges, wounds, with tales of love and torments and …had come to believe that all these fictitious happenings were true; they were more real to him than anything else in the world.”  That’s one hell of a fix in “real life,” but, boy, does it ever make for an absorbing story.

Masque of the Dread Slime

So people are doing all sorts of novel things to distract themselves, raise their spirits, avoid thinking about unpleasant realities, or simply kill time during the novel virus pandemic.  One of the things they are doing is to begin answering almost any question asked of them with the word so.  “So we’re just sitting here cooped up like everybody else, but…”  To be sure this aberration long antedates the current plague, of which it is, however, one of several linguistic analogues.  It is far from clear what part of speech so is in such constructions, though it clearly cannot be an honest conjunction.  I’d have to side with Miss Ihrig, my elementary school grammar teacher.  Words like hence, thus, then, yet, moreover, still, and so (when so means therefore) are not conjunctions.  They are formal conjunctive adverbs….So so has about as much of a claim to be at the head of that sentence as a razorback hog has to unemployment benefits, but let it pass.  I suppose I should be grateful that it isn’t Like.  “Like, we’re just like sitting here like just cooped up…"

Living in effective isolation as we do, we have been largely unaware of hip ways to kill time.  With us it has been mainly reading, video binging, and continuous, protracted tournaments of games of skill.  Well, some skill.  We completed one cribbage tournament, and are now well into a Boggle tournament.  Modesty forbids me from reporting who won the first or who is ahead in the second.   In my last post I described a vehicular birthday party in which we had participated, little knowing (as I later learned from numerous emails) that the genre was already well established and perhaps even “trending”.  This past weekend we had a somewhat similar experience.

"American Gothic" by Grant Wood and by the Goths themselves

Our daughter, a major executive hunkered down in a Manhattan apartment--from which she conducts a wide variety of business, including large electronic staff meetings, with virtual virtuosity--thought it might be a morale booster for her hard-working team to sponsor a staff competition in another trending amusement that I shall call the photographic tableau vivant.  The idea here is to get yourself photographed in a pose that invokes a famous painting.  I thought that this, too, was an original and promising idea.  Left to my own devices I would have chosen the posture of Goya’s “Maja desnuda”.  It’s a case of type casting.  But I didn’t have a choice.  Katy apparently wanted to win her own competition, and she thought she had in her two parents the raw materials for an unbeatable rendition of Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.”  O wad some Power the giftie gie us/ To see ousels as ithers see us!   The photography was effected on Saturday.  On Sunday I saw in the Times a mention of the new sport, including specifically a posed version of “American Gothic.”

I have now had the opportunity to see the results of the contest, which are very impressive.  While I think we could reasonably be described as remaining competitive, the standard was extraordinarily high, and we would have been lucky to show or even place.  There is a downside to hanging out with very smart people.  But very wisely the Authorities decided to invoke the Dodo-bird verdict from Alice in Wonderland: “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.”  Out of family pride I will point to one other outstanding entry, the “portrait” of one of my delightful granddaughters (Lulu Fleming-Benite) as orchestrated by her likewise delightful and slightly younger sister (Cora Louise Fleming-Benite).

Alice Neel portrait / Lulu Fleming-Benite (by Cora Louise Fleming-Benite)

A few weeks ago I praised Queen Elizabeth’s pep-talk to her countrymen.  In it she identified three qualities that in her opinion could help see her country through the crisis.  One of them was good-humored resolve.  Of course she actually said “good-humoured”.  That good-humoured resolve might be the contemporary British version of the old stiff upper lip I will regard as one of the more benign evidences of the international impact of American culture, for I have thought that hilarity in the face of difficulty is more an American thing. 

The playful, puckish  quality clearly discernible in mobile birthday parties and photographic  tableaux vivants could serve us well if extended throughout the lively arts.  I think particularly of the arts of the stage.  One of the secrets of success shared by creative artists of all kinds is the ability to see and to exploit usually unnoticed similarities among disparate data.  What is the characteristic icon of our shared situation?  I would say it is the face mask.  Throughout our country skilled volunteers sit at their sewing machines turning out masks by the gross, many of them works of art.  When our dear friend Elizabeth Billington Fox of La Crosse mentioned to us that she was among these Singer Sister heroines we were shameless enough to beg a pair for ourselves, and boy are they beauties!  The William Morris motif is a graceful homage to the year we spent at the William Morris Centre in London.  And what strange accoutrement of costume do we associate with the ancient origins of our theater?  The mask, of course.  Spell that masque, and you will immediately grasp the connection.  The Renaissance masque was a usually short interlude on a mythological, political, or especially moral theme, almost always played by amateurs.   E. A. Poe took a pioneering step toward a pandemic masque in his great short story “The Masque of the Red Death.”  But in that one, unfortunately, the pathogen triumphs.  I want to commission one in which it loses, something along the lines of Milton’s Comus.  This is a dramatic allegory of chastity in which an otherwise unnamed “Lady” triumphs over the charms, blandishments, and even the date-rape drugs of Comus, god of wassail, revelry, and sexual promiscuity—the dramatic antithesis of social isolation indeed.

 

 haute couture masks by Elizabeth Billington Fox

 

Surely some talented reader of this blog could come up with a brief Masque of the Dread Slime.  The cathartic potential for the national audience would be boundless.  In the medieval mystery plays the audience was given license to vociferate execration against any of Satan’s brood and other unpopular characters like Judas and Herod.  Who could be more unpopular than Corona Virus?   Not even Cruella de Vil.  There is a contemporary analogue in our elder son’s Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook, where each year a street pageant commemorates the community’s hard-won victory over Storm Sandy in 2012, with Sandy represented by a scary float not much different from a medieval hell’s mouth.  It seems that these days the trending epithet for a really, really awful person is scumbag, replacing the once preferred slimeball.   That would probably be different if more people knew that the principal meaning of the Latin noun virus is “slime”.

A Moving Celebration

Julie Denny, Birthday Lady

The national slowdown demanded by the medical situation is fraying a few nerves around here like everywhere else, but what I am mainly impressed by is the imagination and good cheer on display among so many imaginative and cheerful friends.  One of these people is a splendid lady named Julie Denny, with whom our friendship dates back about five decades.  It was through church that we first met her and her late husband, Harry Clark, a brilliant macro-Mensch who had done graduate work on Dickens before taking up a creative career in advertising.  They had two delightful boys—Toby and Gregor--real originals who, so far as I could tell, didn’t march to anybody’s drummer.  But how could I predict they would one day launch a birthday party start-up?

There followed a period, which my faulty memory cannot precisely date, during which our friendship was put into a kind of cold storage.  First this family moved away from Princeton to build a dream house somewhere in New York State near the Connecticut line, so that we were only in Christmas card touch for several years.  (Bad news for us.)  But then Harry and Julie returned to Princeton, and we picked up our friendship as though there had been no decade-long hiatus.  (Good news for us.)   But we are born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward, and very sadly Harry died, far too young.  All of us who knew them grieved, but also marveled at the courage and resilience with which Julie absorbed the blow, determinedly carrying on with her skillful professional work as a counselor/mediator while  expanding her volunteer work with worthy social and cultural organizations in our area.  Among many other valuable skills, she has a rare genius for friendship and a flair for cooking, often joined together in delightful dinner parties of which we have been the beneficiaries.

Of course, the years do go by, and it so happens that just last week a highly significant birthday rolled around for Julie Denny.  For the largely youthful readership of this blog such an event and its spiritual freighting can hardly be imagined, though well captured in a New Yorker cartoon I once saw.  Two grumpy geezers are sitting in stuffed chairs at their club, and one says to the other: “You know, eighty is not the new anything.”  Alas, too true, yet its arrival absolutely demanded festivities which, at first glance, seemed absolutely prohibited by social responsibility; and if any single concept defines the Julie Denny Circle, it’s Social Responsibility.  The dilemma must have seemed particularly acute to the aforementioned boys and their families.  High Noon.  Gary Cooper.  Whether to choose twixt love or duty?

Well, it turns out that the boys are no longer around.  While I was busy with the Lesser Ambigua of Maximus the Confessor, they were approaching the Middle Age from a different point of view.  They are highly competent professionals who share the manifestly heritable impishness, wit, dramatic flair, and inventiveness characteristic of the Clark-Denny ménage of my own comparative youth.  Gregor, abetted by his brother Toby, came up with a brilliant idea.  They couldn’t organize a birthday dinner for their mother, so they organized a parade!  This required the email collusion of several of Julie’s friends.  The idea was that at four in the afternoon of her birthday an automobile convoy of such people would drive by her house with posters, banners, flags, noise-makers, and any other appropriate accoutrements we could think of.  I thought of camels and elephants, but it turned out that the Philadelphia Zoo is ruled by the same uptight social distancing requirements as we are.  So cars it must be.

The ideal place for this convoy to bivouac was a nearby elementary school with a broad circular drive designed to make it easier for parents to drop off students or pick them up.   Better yet was its suitability for mustering a parade of automobiles.  Even had the event not fallen on a Sunday, as it did, the place would have been deserted by gubernatorial decree.  By the time we got there to take our places in the formation there were at least a dozen vehicles ahead of us.  According to a report we got later from somebody or another, the caravan when fully formed had more than forty cars.

 

The convoy forms....                                       

             ...and passes in review

 

We snaked through a few quiet blocks of tidy suburban houses, astonishing some masked strollers, who well may not have seen another car in motion all day, to the celebrity’s house.  By I know not what ruse she had been lured to her front lawn just as the first cars arrived.  Fortunately for posterity one of her good friends who is a videographer had also appeared.  Gregor’s concept proved brilliant.  Progress was slow but steady, intermittent rather in the fashion of a traffic stream going through an Easy Pass reader.  Drivers and their passengers shouted their safely distanced greetings through opened car windows.  Now and again a car would stop and someone would quickly deposit a safely distanced gift in its fumigated packaging on the front lawn.  Bells rang, scarves waved; I think I heard some singing.  Julie appeared to be pixilated.  And thus the convoy went around twice without anybody rear-ending anybody else

This event happened last Sunday afternoon.  Sunday afternoon is usually about the time I start trying to dream up a blog topic for Wednesday.  Of course, recognizing plausible topics is not identical to writing essays.  The actual writing is usually a Tuesday night sort of thing.  My role-model here is the great Doctor Johnson who never even began to write his periodical essays until the boy from the printer’s shop was at his door clamoring for copy.  But there conceivably could be some people who might not consider their personal birthday party, however artistically conceived and executed, the proper object of a public retrospective.  So on Monday I ran the idea by the birthday lady herself.  I gained her gracious permission to proceed, so long as I could guarantee that the piece would not go, well, viral.  Among the few promises I can conscientiously make about this blog, fortunately,  is its continuing obscurity.  In the course of our conversation I did drop the hint that I could use some photographs, if she happened to know of any, which led to an embarrassment of riches that I cannot adequately acknowledge.*

As I am dependent entirely upon photographic evidence I can give no full account of the tributes presented to this worthy woman.  Hiram, King Solomon’s admiral, every three years brought to his sovereign from Tarsus a shipload of “gold and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks.”  I presume Julie will have received her well-deserved share of such good things, but I am certain that she scored at least one gift more precious yet.  You can consult my recent essay “The Tissue Issue”.

*I am grateful for photographic help from Gregor Clark, Eliot Daley, Elyse Pivnick, Anne Seltzer, Marna Seltzer, and probably others whose names are known only to God.