Conversations

Walter Savage Landor (1775-1865)

            One of the things that keeps living languages alive is their accommodation of linguistic change, one feature of which is semantic change, that is, change in the generally accepted meanings of words.  In our tongue the process is particularly robust, and there is not the damnedest thing grumpy old English professors can do about it—except, of course, write grumpy blog posts.  If you frequently use dictionaries—as all intelligent readers do (a group necessarily including readers of this blog)—it is a good idea not merely to take notice of definitions.  Quite as informative, often, are etymologies.  These days any reader with a smart phone can have pocket access to the entire Oxford English Dictionary, the Rolls Royce of word-books, and thus, in effect, can read a mini-history of any word in our mother tongue.  Change being an immutable feature of the Heraclitean universe, if you will indulge the paradox, even dead languages undergo semantic change.  Imagine how Cicero would respond to a query as to whether one could find his declamations on Catiline'a conspiracy on video.

            So I am definitely on board with semantic change.  I also recognize the reality that the change is likely to exhibit ethical decay.  It was with more imagination than linguistic science that Sir Walter Raleigh derived the word world from wear-olde, that which “groweth worse as it groweth older.”  But many ordinary words like boor, knave and harlot began life without pejorative connotation.  Right now I am worried about the moral fate of the word conversation, which in its common usage means “oral exchange of sentiments, observations, opinions, or ideas.”  A crucial part of this definition is exchange.  Within the last few years I have noticed—first in academic-speak and then in the speech of ordinary mortals—a new meaning of the word.  We are getting more and more important conversations, long-overdue conversions, national conversations, and conversations we absolutely need to have.  In recent weeks I have participated, sort of, in several such conversations having to do with race and race relations in America.  They have varied considerably in quality.  The best of them were lectures, the less good harangues, but  none of them was a conversation—not if a conversation involves the significant participation of at least two people.  We may regard them as “imaginary conversations,” though not of the sort to which I now turn.

            Consider dialog(ue), another English word apparently yearning to breathe free.  The obvious meaning of this word is an oral exchange between two speakers.  I recently have noted that if an important conversation is important enough it may require that dialogue be turned into a verb.  “We have to sit down and dialogue about this.”  This usage may become common, though for the time being “dialogue” still retains a literary and more specifically theatrical suggestion.  But a good deal of ancient literary dialogue, including that of the drama, is not exactly what we would call conversation.  Imagined dialogues have more prominently been the vehicle of “important conversations” about politics, law, ethics, and religion.  Think about Plato, Cicero, and Boethius for starters.

            For dialogue you will recognize as actually conversational, you may have better luck with modern authors.  My latest delivery from the Library of America included three volumes of novels by Elmore Leonard, one of several recent authors I had thus far neglected.  The precision with which he captures the way certain Americans talk to each other is astonishing, though not less so than the ingenuity of his plots.  But only one author known to me actually built a literary career on imaginary conversations.  For that is the generic title—Imaginary Conversations—of several volumes of dialogues written by Walter Savage Landor.  There are many people for whom the name Landor (1775-1865) may be new.  He is, in my view, among the most important of little-known British literary figures.  His biographer Sidney Colvin, who in his youth knew him,  put it thus: “Few men have ever impressed their peers so much, or the general public so little.”  Landor was a brilliant man of enormous energy, and a very remarkable classical scholar, a large portion of whose poetical compositions were in Latin.  He was an advanced political thinker and a wellspring of personal virtues sometimes concealed by rebarbative impulses that repeatedly brought serious trouble upon him.  He was kicked out of various distinguished places, such as Rugby School, Trinity College, Oxford, and (in a sense) his family home and England itself.  He was a passionate supporter of the oppressed peoples of southern Europe, first the Greeks smarting beneath their Muslim Ottoman occupiers, then the Italians abused by their own petty Christian tyrants left around from the Middle Ages.

            He knew many of the giants of the English literary world over the course of a very long career.  (He published his last book sixty-nine years after he had published his first.)  Many of his most productive years were spent abroad, especially in Italy; and it was there in the 1820s that he undertook the enormous work of the Imaginary Conversations.  Years ago by luck I came into possession of the great edition of Landor’s English works, ten of the sixteen volumes of which are devoted to them.  He throws together unlikely conversation partners from many ages and civilizations, though the first he ever published (1823) featured Englishmen personally known to him: the poet Robert Southey and the great classical scholar Richard Porson.  The subject of their conversation was the poetry of Wordsworth—presumably his early poetry, given that Porson died in 1808.

            One imaginary conversation of particular current interest is that between the British parliamentarians Samuel Romilly and William Wilberforce (vol. 5: 126-138) supposedly in the first decade of the nineteenth century.  Both of these men, and especially Wilberforce, were animated by reforming zeal, and among the most burning issue on Wilberforce’s mind was the suppression of the slave trade, which (as knowledgeable European statesmen knew) was by constitutional arrangement to cease in the United States in 1820.  European slavers knew they had better make hay while the sun shined, incurring the disgust as well as the bitter opposition of reformers.

            I must say the slightest word about Landor as a poet.  One specialty of his was the four-liner, a kind of poetic epigram.  Two of those written in old age as he faced the abyss are likely to impress any reader in a similar situation.  The most famous, the supposed testament of an aged philosopher, goes as follows:

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife:

Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art:

I warm’d both hands before the fire of Life;

It sinks; and I am ready to depart.

The image of “warm[ing] both hands before the fire of life” is a beautiful statement of the enthusiasm with which he had thrown himself into so many causes, controversies, loves and labors.  And that now waning fire is the occasion of another of his mini-masterpieces, a strangely one-sided “conversation” the full meaning of which is perhaps clearer to the eavesdropper-reader than to the poet-participant.

Death stands above me, whispering low

I know not what into my ear;

Of his strange language all I know

Is, there is not a word of fear.

Is the Left Right?

            People who lack a scrupulous attitude toward history are prone to trivialize it with faulty analogies, a tendency especially prominent in the cavalier ease with which they invoke the name of Adolf Hitler, a leader in whom unspeakable evil joined with the arbitrary control of tremendous power in a fashion with few parallels in modern times.  Those parallels do not come close to applying to any American president, including the current one; and I have resisted the rise of Hitler-trivializing disguised as Trump-bashing.  Rapidly developing events of the last week, however, certainly have me thinking about Germany in the early ‘Thirties.

            I refer to street brawls in Kenosha and Portland in which Americans animated by political passion have gunned down compatriots.  Some years ago, quite by accident, I had to become an expert on a book called Out of the Night by Richard Krebs, pseudonym Jan Valtin.  You may well never have heard of it, but it was the best-selling book in this country in 1941.  It purports to be the autobiography of a German merchant sailor and Communist agitator active in the German, Scandinavian, and Belgian seaports beginning in the late ‘Twenties.  Its vivid, blood-curdling accounts of the murderous street fighting between Brown  thugs and Red thugs are undoubtedly founded in the direct reporting of actual experience.  And chilling experience it was.  “Valtin” reports the instructions received from  his Party boss, Heinz Neumann, as he sent his warriors into the streets:  “I want to see bodies!”  The command was obeyed in melees of red flags and swastika banners.  Well, we seem pretty far advanced in importing the model to the streets of American cities, with, no doubt, some pretty terrible people on both sides.

           

            But what are the “sides,” and are there only two of them?  I don’t know the name of the architect who determined the layout of the building in which the French National Assembly gathered in the late eighteenth century, but that person’s possibly unconscious contribution to modern political history was enormous.  For it was essentially the furniture arrangements in that auditorium that established the durable paradigm of the political “left” and the political “right”—a paradigm that despite its manifest inadequacy continues to hold sway over the minds of our politicians, journalists, and opinion-makers, who habitually use the terms with an undeserved confidence in the certainty of their meaning.  In general “left” refers to what is new and experimental, what is progressive in terms of its tendency towards explicit leftist goals believed to be desirable, and what maximizes the perceived needs and desires of social groups and classes deemed to have been unfairly retarded by other groups and classes unfairly possessing unshared resources and political power.  Leftists feel little constraint from historical precedents—at least from the ones of which they disapprove, which means most of them—and some would like to abolish history altogether.  (One of the lines of the Socialist “Internationale” goes “Let us make a blank slate of the past.”)  Conservatives, on the other hand, reverence what they take to be the tried and true, custom, tradition, inherited social and religious institutions of very long duration.  They are not blind to historical sins and  injustices of the past, but as they rarely espouse notions of human perfectibility they tend to avoid, when speaking of their ancestors, the historical opprobrium they would not wish for themselves.  “In seeking to add to the treasury of truths which comprise the capital acquired by the human race, we are the successors of our pious ancestors, who loved the good and the true in the form received in their time”.   So wrote Ernst Renan, one of the great radical intellectuals of the nineteenth century.  And he continued: “ The most distressing error is to believe that one serves one’s country in the calumny of those who founded it.  All a nation’s ages are the leaves in the same book.  The true progressives are those who begin with a profound respect for the past.”

            But how useful is the left/right paradigm?  I have come to the conclusion: not all that useful.  From the historical point of view the traditional oppressors of freedom of action, speech and thought would seem definitely to have been from the right: arbitrary rulers (Caligula), bigoted and obscurantist religious authorities (Torquemada), tyrannical bureaucracies (the Star Camber), and so forth.  These people were forever telling you what you couldn’t do, wear, make, write, say and of course, drink.  I am so old that I grew up in a dry county where the Baptists and the bootleggers joined in silent collusion to augment the social piety of the former and the bank accounts of the latter at the expense of some poor farmer who liked a beer now and then. But already among the French revolutionaries we get the tyrants from the left and the puritan Jacobins of the Committee on Public Safety.  Tyranny frequently comes under the promise of protection.  Lenin’s Cheka was “an organ of social protection.”  Both the Antifa extremists in Portland and the teen-aged gunman in Kenosha were in place—uninvited and unauthorized, of course—ostensibly in order to protect the public from the alleged dangers presented by rampaging racists on the one hand or vandals and looters on the other.  The mention of Lenin can remind us that the champion criminals of the twentieth century were brutal Marxist ideologues in Russia, China, and Cambodia whose accomplishment in human destruction, laid out in the statistics of The Black Book of Communism, make the achievements of the Third Reich in that department seem comparatively modest.  The most shocking display of the myopia of the intellectuals of the 1930s was the belief, still alive and well in today’s academic world, that there was a huge chasm separating Socialism under Stalin from National Socialism under Hitler.  Left?  Or right?

            Lord Falkland, a sort of hyper-Tory of the seventeenth century, uttered the following memorable principle: “When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.”  Whatever you might think of the doctrine, it at least invites the application of mental discrimination in the adjudication of ideas.  There are in our country things urgently in need of change, several of which are gathered within the slogan of “Black lives matter”.  There are suggested changes it would be lunacy to implement, such as “Abolish the police.”  It does absolutely no good either to conflate the two or to assign them to pigeonholes of left or right.

            We ought to be able to agree on some shared good ideas without violent controversy about ideas on which we do not agree.  Here the rediscovery of the Center is much to be desired.  Democratic government should aim to give everyone a voice but nobody a veto.  The good and the true as seen by the founders of our nation and enshrined in the Declaration of Independence seem good and true to me still today.  The fact that we have as yet failed to implement good and true ideas fully is a moral rebuke to us, not an exposure of the debility of the ideas themselves.  The situation actually presents an exhilarating challenge.  For if government of the people, by the people, and for the people should vanish from the earth, the tragedy would be much greater than it would have been at the time of Gettysburg.  For there are now three hundred more million Americans to be betrayed than there were then, and untold millions of others anxiously watching from beyond our shores.

The Puzzle of Fra Angelico

 Friar John of Fiesole, O. P., believed to be a self-portrait

            If you are so locked down that the only social event in your month is chemotherapeutical or ophthalmological, you find yourself searching for challenging things to do around home, especially on days too hot or too wet to move your molecules in the garden.  An excellent old friend, once my student and now my teacher, recently came to the rescue by loaning me two very high-quality jigsaw puzzles produced by a British outfit called Wentworth.  Obviously there has been a technological revolution in the manufacture of puzzles during the twenty years my back was turned.  Gone are the imperfectly die-mashed bits of cardboard with wounded, wobbly lobes.  These gorgeous things are works of art in and of themselves: cut by laser saws from slim sheets of strong hardwood with razor-thin precision.  There are no pieces that almost fit, only very tight fits.  This particular company specializes in what they call “whimsy” pieces.  For each puzzle they make a few intricately shaped pieces to correlate with the larger iconographic theme of the whole work of art or scene.  The laser control allows fiendishly precise cuts along color lines and other dirty tricks such as the suppression of right-angled corner pieces.  Finally, the printing process by which the image has been inked upon the wood is of superb quality.

            My friend Frank is among other things a medievalist, and the puzzles he loaned me were gifts given to him by his brother with his medieval (and Renaissance) interests in mind.  The one I tackled first was very much down my line: a panel from the fabulous “Silver Chest” or Armadio degli Argenti built to hold the sacred treasures of the Church of the Annunciation in Florence and painted by Fra Angelico around 1450.  Rarely are the containers of such objects more precious than the objects themselves, but this richly painted armadio is quite literally priceless. 

            Much of my own scholarly work has dealt with the cultural contributions of the medieval mendicant orders, and I have had a particular interest in the visual arts, especially within the Franciscan Order.  Fra Angelico got his nickname from the nearly supernatural beauty of his paintings.  His more conventional name was Brother John of Fiesole, and he was a member of the Dominican Order.  These two largest orders of friars, though sharing a great deal in common, were in a sense spiritual rivals, emphasizing different evangelical vocations.  The Dominicans might be said to be the more intellectual, their most famous theologian being Thomas Aquinas.

            There are complex theological ideas conveyed by the stunning chromatic beauty in Fra Angelico’s panels.  It was a common medieval belief that both words and pictures were conventional signs of communication, and both were extensively used by friar-missionaries, often with subtle interrelationships.  My late friend Michael Curschmann wrote many important studies of the commerce between text and image in medieval books and other artifacts.

            Fra Angelico’s design for the amazing coffer is that of a miniature art gallery depicting mainly a series of small, related scenes taken from the life of Christ.  The principal subjects of the particular side of the chest reproduced in “my” jigsaw puzzle are the Passion and its post-Resurrection sequence.  I think I detect in several of the small quadrants the definite influence of a famous fourteenth-century Franciscan work called the Meditations on the Life of Christ, and I may follow that hunch up with some serious scholarly research if I can ever get back to proper work.

            Just for the moment jigsaw puzzles are probably the appropriate mode.  The particular panel of the chest featured in the puzzle I put together is laid out in twelve sequential “scenes” in four columns of three-mini panels each intended to be read,  as one would the written lines in a book.  The specific layout is as follows:

1 VIA DOLORSA    2. STRIPPING          3.CRUCIFIXION      4.DEPOSITION

5. HARROWING     6.QUEM QUAERITIS?            7.ASCENSION              8.PENTECOST

                9.  and  10.       LAST  JUDGMENT        11. CORONATION           12. LEX   AMORIS                                                       

the puzzle completed

Beginning with Christ’s painful road to Calvary (1), the “historical” sequence ends with the mytho-poetic Coronation of the Virgin (11).  The Last Judgment is divided between two panels (9 and 10) as Christ sits in glory in his role as judge, with the saved souls to his right and the damned to his left, sinister in Latin.  The final mini-panel (12) is a theologico-pictorial tract of considerable numerological ingenuity.  On the shield of the female figure at the left we can read LEX AMORIS, the “Law of Love,” the concept that is the key to the scheme of the entire complex work.  The whole of this panel is a symphony of text and image, with each scene appropriately designated with texts from the Latin Bible.  The LEX AMORIS “scene” is mainly textual, but founded in the mystical meanings of two numbers, seven and twelve.  The most prominent pictorial element—perfectly chosen for a receptacle designed for sacred furniture—is a large and beautiful seven-branched candlestick or menorah.  The seven banners weaving in and out of its branches are devoted to the seven sacraments of the Church.  On the “north side” of the picture (taking the cross at the top, the vertical extension of the candlestick, as representing the east end of a church) we have twelve Hebrew prophets with their individual prophetic scrolls.  On the right (south) the common iconographic motif of the twelve apostles each with his written clause of the Apostle’s Creed.  This constitutes an allegorical claim for the spiritual continuity between the prophets and the apostles, and from Temple to Church.  The scribal banderoles  above and below the “Lex Amoris” are the only ones left blank.  What was the intended missing text?

 The "Lex Amoris" (12) with empty banderoles

            That is one of the puzzles generated by another.  A second is more personal.  I have a special, eccentric reason to be enthusiastic about Fra Angelico.  For many years I had a low-voltage friendship with one of the Princeton rare books librarians, Jean Preston, a manuscripts expert and a scholar extremely knowledgeable about medieval English literature.  Ms. Preston was a very unpretentious, modest, reserved English lady, of the sort sometimes unkindly called timid or even mousy, who walked quietly on her little patch of earth leaving no scuff marks in her wake.  I knew she had a small collection of what she called “treasures,” though I never was privileged to view them.  She retired shortly before I did, moved back to England, and took up residence in a small and unremarkable house in Oxford, where she died in 2006.  I had not been in touch with her since she left Princeton.  When her executors set out to deal with her few possessions they discovered they included several extremely valuable books and paintings, including two small panels by Fra Angelico.  Those two pieces alone went for about four million dollars at auction.  But that is only how the world assesses value.  I think Jean, like Fra Angelico himself, operated according to a different, higher standard.

from the domestic decorations of Ms. Jean Preston

Brown Revolution

 

 

A benevolence of Blackwells 

            Reading books on-line is uncongenial to me, but it becomes necessary if the book is not readily available in a nearby library.  And if you happen to be living in the middle of a medical crisis that has closed or severely limited access to academic libraries, that means virtually any book that is not already in your personal library.  So this past week when it seemed imperative to me to consult for a little light reading something entitled The Making of the Universe (Boston, 1914), I had to turn to the Internet.  There I found—from the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Radcliffe--a digitized copy of the book originally presented by its author to an old friend, bearing the following inscription: “Rev. Olympia Brown with best Christmas wishes from her longtime friend Antoinette Brown Blackwell.  Dec. 1914.  Elizabeth N.J.”   They were indeed old friends at that time.  Antoinette was 89, Olympia  79.    

            I’ll tell you about how the Universe was made another time.  Today I want to move to this week’s centenary commemoration of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.  To get there one might begin in 1848, a revolutionary year in Europe and the United States, although many historians have paid too little attention to the American side.  That is a pity, because whereas the European revolutions, which took part in many places on the Continent, all failed pretty ignominiously, that in America succeeded.  Admittedly, it took its own sweet time to do so.  On the nineteenth and twentieth of July, 1848, a small convention met in Seneca Falls, New York, with the aim of airing national women’s issues, including suffrage.  August 19, 1920 saw the final stage of the ratification of the constitutional amendment extending the franchise: seventy-two years later!  The date of August 19^th has other distinctions.  Happy Birthday, Joan.

             The “Seneca Falls Convention,” though not the first public discussion of its themes, claims its fame for its early date and the literary celebrity or future prominence of several of its attendees.  The more substantial political work really got moving at the first of the annual “Women’s Rights Conventions” (1850-1869).  The first meeting drew something like truly national representation, including such activist superstars as Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass.  But the only attendee of the initial meeting in 1850 still alive at the time of the 1920 election was Antoinette Brown Blackwell.  As an idealistic young woman she had once believed that women’s suffrage was so just, reasonable, and necessary that it would take no more than a year or two to achieve when raised in rational political discussion.   One recalls the line in John Brown’s final communication concerning his one-time belief that slavery could be abolished fairly easily.  “I had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.” 

            So far as I know there was no familial kinship between Antoinette Brown and Olympia Brown, or of either with a third Brown revolutionary just mentioned, John Brown of Osawatomi, who does not feature as a principal in this essay but who is hardly an insignificant figure.  What united the female Browns was an unflinching Christian vocation to religious ministry and to cardinal aims of political and social justice, meaning the fair and equable treatment of all: the abolition of slavery, the achievement of female enfranchisement, the ordination of women in the Protestant churches, and the amelioration of a huge national problem of alcohol abuse that left in its wake poverty, misery, and violence against women and children.  Every one of these causes ran headlong into the opposition of powerful and mainly male groups, and every one was principally animated by Christian religious conviction.  All of these causes save the last have been successfully “achieved” on paper; yet all remain works in progress.  It is apparently impossible to legislate intoxication away.  Prohibition was, to use a mild adjective, unsuccessful.  It still is.  Though alcohol abuse remains a major national problem, today’s prisons are filled not with the dealers and users of booze, but with those of narcotic intoxicants. 

             Antoinette Brown Blackwell (1825-1921) and Olympia Brown (1835-1926) both have claims to be the first American women to have been ordained to religious ministry in a mainline Protestant church.  The former was ordained in 1853 under the sponsorship of her local church, the latter in 1863 with the blessing of the constituted authorities of her whole denomination.  As is suggested by Blackwell’s dedication of her gift book, there was a warm relationship between the two, the older woman being a mentor and inspiration for the latter.  Though until recently unknown to me, Antoinette is very well known among scholars of American social history.  The Blackwell family into which she married was for more than a century a virtual training college for activists in virtuous social causes, especially though not limited to causes expanding the opportunities for women in American professional life, and particularly medicine.  It is virtually impossible to look into nineteenth-century social movements without encountering the Blackwells and their close associates such as Olympia Brown.  (Olympia, married to a man named Willis, continued to use her maiden name.)
 

             I knew practically nothing of this when I whimsically set off to check out some lady’s ideas about the formation of the Universe.  And when the topic mutated opportunistically to the history of women’s suffrage I did not sufficiently anticipate that everybody and her sister would of course be writing about this topic this week.  The Times had a very informative magazine supplement about it, but (in my opinion) a much more brittle and doctrinaire editorial (roughly “# Suffrage History So White”).  Most of us are convinced, I suppose, that the world would be ever so much better a place if everybody in it were exactly like ourselves in their unspotted political orthodoxy; but several of the Times’s regular editorial writers have made an art form of conveying such belief.  My own half century of historical study has convinced me that such study invites less the imposition of conformity than the appreciation of diversity—a word frequently trivialized in today’s campus discourse.

 

             In one of her books available on-line (The Sexes Throughout Nature, 1875) Antoinette Brown Blackwell, a serious student of science and especially of evolutionary biology, tries to link men and women both in their commonalities and in their differences, and to draw a bright line between nature and nurture.  This necessarily involved her in a trenchant though modest and respectful engagement with two intellectual giants of her day, Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer.  Though I lack the competence to judge, I know that few if any of the classics of nineteenth-century science have not undergone serious emendation, and that undoubtedly holds true both for Blackwell’s ideas and those of her sources.  But some spurious theory of innate male intellectual superiority (as opposed to diversity of evolutionary function and social conditioning) was always implicit if not overtly explicit in defense of the exclusively male electoral privilege and numerous other social arrangements.  Blackwell addresses both the nurture and the nature parts with elegance.  “[A]s highly complex beings women must be taught to exercise all their functions, that they may develop and strengthen all their faculties healthily and symmetrically.  A regimen of sofas must be as utterly demoralizing as would be a regiment of soft bread and milk, appropriate enough to the yearling baby…If anybody’s brain requires to be sacrificed to those two Molochs, sewing-machine and cooking-stove, it is not hers!”  Concerning the Nature part, she is pithy.  “Is it true that average women to-day are less versed than average men in abstract thinking, feeling, or acting?  Not in New England!”

Election Jitters

Dixiecrat delegates walk out of the 1948 Democratic Convention

            Every week or so I have a telephone conversation with my brother out in New Mexico.  It’s generally pretty basic.  We cover a limited number of subjects, mostly competitive complaints about the state of our health, the miserableness of our weather, and the God-awful mess in which our country wallows.  There is a certain invariable sign that our conversation is nearing its logical end.  That is when Rick says “I’ll tell you one thing.  I wish this stupid election was over.”  I can count on him saying that every time.  That sentiment is pure Marvin Fleming, our father, expressed in his exact words.  It takes me back sixty, seventy years.   It’s actually good to know that there are a few solid rocks jutting out above the swirling surface of the sea of change.  My father, dead only forty years, would have difficulty recognizing our world; but he would certainly identify correctly certain stupidities of the current political moment.

            It is questionable whether it is the election itself, as opposed to the electors, that is “stupid.”  If your vote is seriously susceptible to interference from Internet trolls, whether Russians or Martians, the problem does not seem to me to be Internet trolls.  A sizable proportion of the American electorate is either not interested in voting at all or insufficiently interested to expend even a modest effort to do so.  Many who do participate are what are now euphemistically called “low-information voters”.  It seems clear from the huge sums expended by both major political parties on brief television attack ads that professional experts consider them an effective method of political persuasion.   As Mencken is supposed to have said, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.”  And if he didn’t say that, he should have.

            On the other hand there are several features of the electoral process itself that invite the dreaded adjective “stupid.”  Fortunately, there is some evidence that at least some of the electorate is beginning to twig to their stupidity.  During the past week I have either read or heard spirited and intelligent criticisms of two of them—our time-honored, circus-like political conventions and the so-called “debates” among the contestants.

            In the old days, when methods of communication were inadequate for the quick conveyance of news and information over a continental area, national in-person conclaves were a natural phenomenon, which in a sense were of a kind with the operations of our national government itself.  Through the earlier decades of the twentieth century nominating conventions, though increasingly buried in a blizzard of sophomoric show biz, did perform some strenuous democratic work.  The chaihh recognizes the gentlelady from the greeeet state of...etc.  Credentials committees sorted out conflicting claims of authentic representation.  Passionate delegates decided hotly contested competitions requiring many tedious ballots to bring to a conclusion.  Delegates walked out to protest either the adoption or the rejection of certain proposed  party platform planks they passionately championed or opposed.  But with the rise and increasing importance of the primary election—which seemed such a good idea until the appearance of the unanticipated results—there’s nothing substantial for a nominating convention to do.  But of course they still have to do it hour after hour for several days running.  There is a tremendous expenditure of hot air and helium balloons, but the main upside would seem to be some overtime hours for some folks who could use it, the people who have to sweep up the debris from the Convention Center and adjacent streets.  The Covid crisis is likely to lead to a certain amount of unfortunate long-term social change.  Perhaps we shall all be wearing surgical masks until Judgement Day.  We ought to welcome a few beneficent changes, such as the silent demise of the political nominating convention.

            Of course, they may not go quietly.  Financially improvident city governments—many of them the proprietors of lavish and underutilized public arenas--will continue to proclaim their importance, as may the top echelons of the political parties themselves.  It seems likely that Mr. Trump considered the choice of convention venue a political act of some weight.  He appeared to be exercising his own weird southern strategy.  He started out in Charlotte, and when that didn’t work retreated four hundred more miles down the meridian, to Jacksonville.  When that fell through he simply gave up, but my theory is he still wasn’t quite far enough south.  I suspect that President Bolsonaro would have accommodated the Republicans in São Paulo.

            The debates are a different matter, actual debate being a necessary and appropriate aspect of democratic governance.  And both parties seem to regard them as a necessary exercise.   The Republicans are animated by vain hope while the Democrats tremble in plausible fear.  The Republican hope is that Donald Trump might after all rise to a complete and correct declarative sentence with a definable subject in grammatical agreement with a definable predicate.  The Democratic fear, of course, is that their candidate will reveal himself as an amiable gaffer who would have trouble keeping accurate score in a shuffleboard game in a Florida nursing home.

            Debate has a long and distinguished history in the progress of human intellection generally.  From the legal proceedings of the ancient Romans to the disputations of the Schoolmen to the oratory of the Whig and Tory parliamentarians the thrust and parry of argument and counter argument has been one of the principal methods of intellectual progress in important fields, especially politics.  In our own country think of debates at the Constitutional Convention or those between Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln.  To this very day speakers in the British Parliament continue to prove that the exchange of ideas can be at once raucous, witty, artful, and substantial.  But of course the journalistic events sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates are not debates They are difficult to account for from the generic point of view: serial press conferences perhaps, or sequential brags, but not debates.  All an audience remembers of them are theatrical moments, notable gaffes or put-downs.

            The first of the televised debates, that between Kennedy and Nixon, set the trend.  Though there was at least a feint at the engagement of ideas, savvy commentators immediately recognized it as a beauty contest that Nixon lost mainly because of the televised appearance of his five-o’clock shadow.  This debate also initiated another trend.  What the supposed debaters actually said would be subordinated to interpretations of what they had said offered by celebrity journalists.  Recent experience suggests that the deportment of candidates is less important than the deportment of the debate moderators—all of them journalists.  As is true of the conventions, there are of course whole industries lobbying in favor of the debates, and obscure educational institutions love to host them to boost their “visibility”.  But that they advance the cause of intelligent democracy is, let us say, debatable. 

Home, Home on the Range

 

          Among literary topics I should like to explore were I suddenly granted another lifetime is American literature orally preserved or written down in languages other than English.  There is quite a lot of it.  American Indian languages, which preserved a vast store of history, legend, poetry, and song in oral form were intensely and sympathetically study by early members of the American Philosophical Society, including Jefferson.  The Relations or scientific diaries of French Jesuits are fundamental primary sources of American historiography.  A book written in French by Alexis de Tocqueville is the classic of early American political commentary.  There were important and long-running periodical literatures in several European and Asian languages indispensable for students of American social history.  German was particularly important, but Yiddish is in a class by itself.  English versions of the classic stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer now necessarily find their place in the beautiful volumes of the Library of America, an enterprise devoted to the giants of our literature.

            I recommend Singer to Americans who on occasion try to find the lighter side of objectively distressing situations.  Is there still a lighter side to ours?  We face a pretty bleak landscape these days.  Just about everybody is sick and tired of the pandemic and its constraints.  Millions are unemployed and in financial crisis.  With good reason anxious parents fret about their pent-up children.  Half the country seems to have adopted the brittle moral censoriousness of a college campus.  There are occasional comic episodes, but they tend toward the sardonic.  A couple in a place called St. Johns, Michigan, run a bed-and-breakfast out of what appears to be a big, beautiful old Midwestern house from the Civil War era.  I won’t ask why it is called the “Nordic Pineapple,” but I deduce it has something to do with the Norwegian heritage of its proprietress, whose name is Kjersten.  That is surely the reason the establishment formerly sported matching Norwegian and American flags attached to its stately front pillars.  It does so no longer.  Righteous activists, ardent for racial justice but a bit wobbly on heraldry, vilified and hounded the proprietors for their blatant racism in the display of what they imagined to be the Confederate flag!  The ignorance, one might hope, is vincible—but probably not the woke self-righteousness it serves.

The "Nordic Pineapple" in pre-woke state

            On the day I encountered this grimly comical news snippet I happened to be reading Ole Rolvaag’s great novel Giants in the Earth, a pocket-epic glimpse of the Scandinavian immigration to the Great Plains in the decade after the Civil War.  (The Homestead Act had been passed in 1862.  This was in the days when we had a functional government capable of doing important things even in the midst of crisis.)  Rolvaag, who became a Professor of Norwegian at Saint Olaf College, published his book first in that language.  The English version (1927) pretty well put paid to the genre of the Romantic Western.  Rolvaag himself had not been an immigrant of the generation he treated in the novel, many of the episodes in which derived from the childhood experiences of his wife.  The band of struggling Nordic farmers who pushed their way from Minnesota into the huge solitude of the Dakota plains found little more evidence of the benefit of “privilege” there than they had in the hardscrabble life of the fisheries in the Lofoten Islands or in the reception center at Ellis Island.   As linguistically isolated from the majority of other widely scattered European settlers as from the even more rarely encountered native itinerant hunter-gatherers, their first assimilative struggle was material rather than “cultural”, an unrelenting existential contest against the vast emptiness, loneliness, and meteorological hostility of potentially fertile flatlands previously untouched by human agriculture.

 Professor Ole Rolvaag

            The hard life of the prairie pioneers is remembered in a family legend of my own, which came from my maternal grandmother.  Her maiden name was Harrington.  The Harringtons were English Baptists of the John Bunyan variety.  Although Dissenters (i.e., non-Anglicans) formed the primary demographic among the American revolutionaries, there was also a strong Tory strain among them.  “My” colonial Harringtons were staunch royalists as well as staunch Baptists, and they moved (“fled” being the verb often used) to British Canada as the revolutionary cause prospered.  They were part of a numerically significant migration.  But a century later, with the extraordinary industrial success of the northern United States, and especially after the Homestead Act, quite a few of them, including my infant grandmother’s family, returned to make a claim in the surveyed lands of the Kansas, Nebraska, and Jefferson Territories.  My grandmother’s family actually stopped in Dakota, but considerably to the west, I believe, of the setting for Giants in the Earth.  Early autumnal chills, presaging a severe winter, were already in the air by the time the sod house was finished.  Seven people lived in one large room.  Then the snows came, blizzard after blizzard.  There was a primitive jakes, set at a considerable distance from the house (English Baptists).  As blinding snows were a weekly, sometimes daily phenomenon, they had to lay out a lengthy rope-line guide to help find it.  One dark snowy afternoon a young adult uncle of my grandmother’s quietly stepped out of the house to relieve gastric distress.  His protracted absence was not noticed until darkness had fallen.  Tardy searches discovered the rope-line broken and footprints already completely obscured by heavy fresh snow.  They found the frozen cadaver only a couple of months later in the spring thaw; it lay well over a quarter of a mile from the house site.  I think I have somewhere earlier mentioned Michael Lesy’s remarkable book Wisconsin Death Trip (1973), based on a unique cache of glass negatives made by a nineteenth-century photographer in Jackson County, near La Crosse.  The only actual photographs of many pioneers, and especially children, are photographs of corpses.  I also recommend the autobiography of John Muir, among the greatest of true American heroes, who spent formative time on a Wisconsin farm in that same neck of the woods even before the Civil War.

            Such were some of our very own American giants in the earth.  From every race and creed, they have continued to reappear in every historical phase of immigration.  If you haven’t read Rolvaag, I would encourage you to do so.  His novel has no sex and practically no violence of the ordinary sort, although the Norwegians do have to deal with the criminal intentions of some Irish claim-jumpers.  What it does have is the bittersweet savor of agonistic life and the triumphs and defeats of universal human aspiration.

Olivia de Havilland

           As we look for a few anchors to hold firm the various parts of our lockdown days, we have raised certain of our Darby-and-Joan routines to the status of sacred ritual.  The subliminal plan may simply be glorified time-killing, but we find it useful if not indispensable to impose a sense of order and structure on our days.  A daily walk, weather permitting, sharing a mid-morning glass of chocolate milk, deploying our awesome powers on Alexa’s “Question of the Day”—such things are the coarse straw that gives some strength to the soft mortar of the day otherwise occupied by individual “projects,” reading, writing, and a good deal of dolce far niente.  Particularly important is the reading aloud of parts of the daily New York Times over breakfast.  This is a custom of long standing, but it now has become a felt necessity.  We can barely down a mouthful of Special K on those very rare days when the paper is late.

            We usually do a couple of Trump and/or important international stories, followed by the letters to the editor and selected op-eds.  This gives us the opportunity to bicker over, first, what we are going to read and, second, what we eventually have read.  I am still in “recovery” from cataract surgery, which was a great success in removing the cataract but, so far, less so in restoring serious vision to the operable eye; so on Monday Joan did most of the reading.  The op-eds and letters are normally on the antepenultimate and penultimate pages of section one, which when open for reading reveals the whole of the back page to someone sitting on the other side of the table.  Recently this page has been given over to a few short and moving biographies of typical or interesting victims of Covid-19, but this time, as I could see with my good eye, there was a “regular” but very long obituary of a single person not a pandemic casualty: the classic movie star Olivia de Havilland, who just died in Paris at the age of 104.  This had a special significance for Joan and me, because we “knew” her—meaning that we have been in a very large space in which she was present.

            When we were living in Paris a few years ago we became attached to the lively congregation of Trinity Cathedral, otherwise known as The American Cathedral, on the Avenue George V just across the river from where we lived, and two or three hundred yards up the road from the “living flame” of the Princess Di memorial.  Ms. de Havilland had at that point been a member for roughly fifty years.  By rough and ready estimate about forty percent of Anglicans show up in an actual church building only on Easter and Christmas, and nonagenarians are generally given a pass altogether.  But at Trinity Cathedral there was a tradition, established in time immemorial (probably meaning around 1952) that the sacramental validity of any Christmas Eucharist might be dubious if Ms. de Havilland, whose voice must have been even more impressive than that of the angels who made their announcement to the shepherds, were not the principal lay-reader for the service.  This detail is alluded to in the Times obituary. 

            But there was an aspect of all this not widely known.  The dean, talking out of school, told Joan that by the 1980s the situation had become a bit delicate.  Ms. de Havilland was a passionate supporter of the Palestinian cause; there were certain psalms she found it inappropriate to read.  Some of them, you must agree, are a little hard to swallow, such as the enthusiastic infanticide of the imprecation against the Edomites at the end of Super flumina, “Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stone”.  This is an extreme example, no doubt.  Hard cases make bad law.  Olivia de Havilland was not chary of going up against the powers that be, as evidenced by a successful lawsuit that went a good way toward taming the arrogance of some Hollywood studio moguls back in the day. 

            For many people I suppose, Ms. de Havilland will forever be associated with Gone With the Wind—a novel published in the year of my own birth and turned into a famous film three years later.  I long ago discovered that Americans are likely to put a naïve trust in cinematic versions of important novels when they ought to know there always is a big difference.   This was brought to my attention by one of my early English teachers, who for some reason took exception to the fact that in my book report on Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, I consistently referred to an important character, Sydney Carton, as “Sydney Colman”.  (In the old film I had seen, Carton had been played by classical Thirties heartthrob Ronald Colman.)  If Gone With the Wind is the first thing that comes to mind, Ms. de Havilland’s death may have come at an inconvenient time for her reputation.  I learned from the obituary that “The 1939 Civil War epic was briefly pulled from the HBO Max streaming service last month and returned with an introduction saying that the film presents the Georgia plantation at its center as ‘a world of grace and beauty, without acknowledging the brutalities of the system of chattel slavery upon which this world is based’.”

            I am not an expert in the history of American cinema, nor am I even a competent film critic.  Among other things that the pandemic has already proved is that I will watch almost anything on Nexflix.  Nonetheless it will be a pity, in my view, if the honor due to the memory of one of the great movie stars of the twentieth century is clouded by political passions of the moment; but such collateral damage is one of the less significant hazards of a current cultural moment hovering between promise and menace.  On the other hand it is going to be highly tedious if people whose job it is to facilitate the technical transmission of visual data appropriate the role of historical censors as well.  I have little confidence in their capacities in that department.  Be that as it may, the character played by Ms. de Havilland is one of the nicer inhabitants of Tara, so there is that.  I would preserve my wrath for Anthony Adverse, in which the actress also appeared.  The novel Gone With the Wind is plenty long, but Anthony Adverse, a runaway success of 1933, was even longer, nearly interminable indeed; and its Protean hero was for a time an actual slave trader.

           

            I am a pretty old guy.  The demise of a grande dame who was already an international celebrity before I learned to walk is a sobering event for me, and one that encourages meditation upon one of the great classical themes of world literature.  I imagine that Ms. de Havilland would have approved of the thirty-ninth psalm, “…mine age is as nothing before thee: verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity.”  Gone with the wind, so to speak.