The Buried Past

 

                                                 Alabama: a forgotten cemetery

            A saving grace of this generally unpleasant coronavirus lockdown, one that makes it more tolerable for us than for so many others we know, is that we have been able to see most of our children and grandchildren, those who live in New York City, on a fairly regular basis.  As the adults are abundantly occupied professional people with full agendas of their own, not to mention their own pandemic constraints, the filial piety manifested is neither unnoted nor unappreciated.  Our elder son Rich and his wife Katie, based in Brooklyn, have been able to make frequent escapes to their  gorgeous rural property about thirty miles northwest of us, near Frenchtown, and they regularly drop in on us in Princeton on their journeys to or fro.  They were here briefly on Sunday, with the sun still shining bravely if not entirely effectually for a well aerated and distanced backyard visit.

 

            I have mentioned their place in Kingwood Township before but not, I think, one of its most interesting features, a family cemetery dating back to the eighteenth century.  This appears to have been badly neglected by twentieth-century owners, but the headstones for some of their Huguenot predecessors from Revolutionary times are still clearly intact.  Rich and Katie were quite pleased when a special “grave expert” from (I think) the Hunterdon County Historical Society asked if he could inspect and record the graves.  He came during the last week, and much to Rich’s pleasure, this knowledgeable man took a keen interest in the site, spending several hours in serious clean-up and brush removal, leaving no fewer than seventeen gravestones, some with still legible inscriptions, exposed to view.  (In my own earlier survey, I had found only six.)  I regret that I have no photographs as yet, but even in its “wild” state it was an impressive sight.   My hope is that we can eventually enclose and protect the whole area with a low fieldstone wall.  There is some evidence at the site of a much earlier gesture in this direction.

 

            This local historian was a font of fascinating information, but not all of it was encouraging.  Private graveyards were apparently by no means uncommon in early America, especially but not only on the large properties of rural magnates.  Many of the old, large landholdings in the Delaware Valley survived more or less intact well into the early twentieth century.  There were 180,000 people in all of New Jersey in 1790.  By 1940 there were four million, by 1950 not quite five million, but by 2000 more than double that.   Most of the large old Jersey farms were sold and sometimes repeatedly subdivided, often for suburban residences.  Throughout the Eastern states subsistence farmers suddenly were besieged by developers.  It was standard practice to exempt burial sites from land sales in special clauses.  No matter how needy or greedy people were in unloading their ancestral acres, even those who (in a great line of Wordsworth’s) “would peep and botanize upon their mother’s grave” would not brazenly  face up to having sold their grandfather’s bones for the mineral rights.  But from the developer’s point of view it is quite unsatisfactory to have a protected and unowned pile of gravestones in the middle of their Tinkling Brook Luxury Estates.  Beginning in the 1980s, according to this expert, aggressive Jersey subdividers began simply bulldozing their way through the diminishing  back woods—metaphorically and sometimes literally—in the 1980s..  A landowner had recently denied the  grave historian  access to a small plot that he did not own but effectively surrounded.   Well, we’ve had roughly four centuries of practice trampling over Indian burial grounds.  The shoe has been on the other foot since the Tennessee Valley Administration began building large lakes in places long settled by Europeans.

 

            American family burial plots are not uncommon in most rural places, especially in places of early settlement.  We had some even in the impoverished Ozarks, and I have seen some fairly extensive ones in older parts of the Old South.  There are undoubtedly many small plots that have simply disappeared in the woods.  In old England, with its long-settled village and parochial systems, the normal, expected site of burial would be the churchyard.  There is now a transatlantic divergence in the meaning of the English term yard.  What Americans might call their back yard is in England the garden.  The two words, yard and garden, are obviously close relatives, the original Old English, like Old French jardin, denoting an enclosed and specially tended plot of land.  In England the word churchyard principally signified, and still signifies, the  burial place or cemetery associated with a church building,  as in Gray’s immortal “Elegy Wrote in a Country Churchyard”.  But even in old Christian times the dead could be buried, for a variety of reasons, in many other places.  The burial of the dead was one of the recognized acts of “corporal” mercy encouraging the establishment and upkeep of civic “Potter’s Fields” for indigents, travelers, unknown and unclaimed bodies found on the road, and so on.  Criminal executions, military deaths and epidemic disease often called for a variety of ad hoc arrangements.

 

            In colonial North America the burial customs of the new immigrants from  Spain, England, and France survived but with greater or lesser degrees of mutation and adaptation.  In our country, the radical Protestantism of large sections of the population broke cleanly with the traces of medieval mortuary customs still half remembered even in Puritan Anglicanism.  Furthermore, the old parish system presupposed conditions very different from those of frontier life, which is another way of saying that churchyards presupposed churches with stable, uniform congregations.  We see some of that development in New England, but not much in the sparsely populated countryside.  Family graveyards were common, and in populated places one sees also the growth of the civic public (or semi-public) cemetery, eventually aspiring to the grandeur of a Green-Wood in Brooklyn.

 

            That life is for the living no sane person would dispute.  Its spiritual tense is future—at least until it isn’t.  We spend a great deal of time in hope or apprehension pondering futurities—our own, our children’s and grandchildren’s, our nation’s, the future of food, medical care, race relations, classical music, whatever.  All this is done, however, beneath the shadow of a preterit destiny that becomes ever more importunate with advancing age.  In the midst of life we are in death—a beautiful line from the old burial service, and the English of a Latin liturgical hymn going back at least to the fourteenth century.  I do not regard it as the life-denying downer that many take it to be.  I take it instead to be a reverent and poetic statement of fact that recognizes our own participation in the universality of human life, which has an ending even as it had a beginning and a past as well as a prospective history.  Far from being macabre, a few carved stones in the south forty could be an encouraging reminder that your own animated vitality was not your personal invention.  It came as a gift and can be passed on as one.

Intransigent Transition

 

            One hesitates to try to make light of a situation that so many serious and substantial people quite seriously view as an unprecedented national crisis, but I at least would make a plea.  Eartha Kitt, an inventive popular singer of my college years,  at one point had a hit song that went “If I can’t take it with me when I go, I just ain’t going to go.”  Perhaps even some of those who enjoyed her song were not aware that Ms. Kitt’s theme, which she pushed with a kind of edgy irreverence, plays off the common doctrine of many of our most solemn religious and secular moral traditions.  The theme is summarized in the title of one of Dr. Johnson’s poems, itself an imitation of the Latin satirist Juvenal, “The Vanity of Human Wishes”.  According to Aristotle the fall from power, prestige, authority, and material sufficiency, allowed or encouraged by some moral blemish or transgression, is the very pattern of tragedy.  According to Boethius, supposed happiness dependent on the possession or enjoyment of what can be taken away, cannot be true happiness.  Returning to the realm of catchy popular music the Beach Boys reminded us that among such items are Thunderbirds.  Just at the moment we seem to have a problem with our President, Donald Trump.  Because Daddy—in the form of the American electorate—really has taken the T-bird away.

 

            Though by the end it seemed to me likely that Trump would lose, that was by no means an easily foreseeable certain outcome, the pre-election polls being mainly expressions of wishful thinking on the part of the liberal press.  What was perfectly foreseeable was that if he were a loser, he’d be a sore one.  How can anyone have been shocked, shocked by the President’s tantrum, which was perfectly predictable and had in effect been predicted by Mr. Trump himself?  I was more surprised by the number of sore winners.  It is no doubt always discouraging to feel that one is voting against something rather than for something, and a very large number of Mr. Biden’s votes must have been in that category.  It is much easier  to strike back indignantly at the flamboyant mendacities  of the aged impresario of “The Apprentice” than to burst with enthusiasm for the long-practiced mediocrity of an aged career politician who has been running for the presidency for forty years.  But the Democrats did win the presidency, and while the nature of the victory was not of the sort that can sustain arrogance, it was clear and decisive and  should encourage all of us to get on with the job.  Our press could help by concentrating on this aspect of the situation rather than on endless whining about the latest episode of presidential petulance.  Why should the loser’s losing be a greater story than the winner’s winning?

 

            Many wise commentators whose political wisdom far exceeds my own say that the reason is that Trump’s current posture is an actual existential threat to American democracy.  It is perhaps presumptuous to disagree with a whole college of experts, but I think they are selling America and Americans short.  It is true that political rancor and division within the land are acute.  A rancorous atmosphere has been spreading, and poisonous attitudes cultivated, for many years.  The President has been no small part of this, but he is not alone.  I am also prepared to believe that my personal innocence of Facebook and Twitter leave me ignorant of the dimensions of the “social media” aspect of all this.  One of my own sons, whom I would rank among wise men, tells me, gently, that I simply don’t know the half of what has been going on.  But I still think that if we are susceptible to being swept up in a Q-Anon plot, the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings

 

            Having reached this point in my essay, the Tuesday newspaper arrived with a banner headline: TRANSITION TO BIDEN ADMINISTRATION BEGINS.  As I am unlikely to get another chance to be prophetic, I’ll have to be satisfied with claiming this prophecy retrospectively.  Mr. Trump has shown no hint of graciousness, but in this context a mere whiff of realism may be satisfactory.  Perhaps he can view the results of the election as he has viewed his previous string of bankruptcies, as evidences not of personal failure but of the reluctance or actual inability of the common mind to appreciate great ideas and true genius.  And then there was the fortuitous and  malign intervention of the “Chinese virus”.  As for the President-elect, the entire nation owes him best wishes and moral support as he addresses major challenges affecting all of us, but who would envy him his job?  Apart from one well-known person, that is.

 

            Invitations to a universal and nonpartisan comity may seem preposterous under the circumstances, but if Lincoln could issue one in the middle of the Civil War we should not be shy of trying now.  And as a matter of fact certain important issues of general interest, free of the most obvious contaminations of partisan interest,  did emerge from this mess.  Would it not be a good idea, for example, at least with regard to the offices of president and vice-president, if we had clearly articulated uniform  national voting regulations and procedures worthy of a first-world country?  Specific aspects of the arrangements are less important than their impartiality, uniformity, and practicality.  For efficiency’s sake one would hope that state and local elections could fall under the same governance.  Next concern: income taxes.  This arises from the peripheral issue of the drama of Donald Trump’s tax records.  I am enough of a libertarian to doubt that anyone should be compelled to make public such private information, but also  sufficiently intelligent  to find the President’s stated reasons for refusing to do so laughably contrived.  But some records did become public, and the subject of wide public discussion.   I do not accuse the President of any illegality.  On the contrary, my fear is that his preposterous calculations might be entirely legal.  Legality would demonstrate the gross unfairness of a system rigged in favor of very wealthy people.  The architecture of this system—the moral equivalent of geographical gerrymandering--can only be the result of the effective intervention by special lobbies working on pliable legislators.  I hope that its prominent exposure might lead to some obviously desirable reforms, though if good sense will not move our congressmen, I doubt that embarrassment can.  What would embarrass many of them would shame a hog to death.

 

 

Hall-Mills

 

The unfortunate lovers

       

        I have lived in New Jersey for well over half my life, but I spent the first several decades in a kind of residential denial.  I lived there, but I could not face up to being from there on account of certain dumb prejudices about turnpike exits, oil refineries, and Atlantic City casinos.  I longed for the rural wilds of my rapidly mythologizing youth.  Very gradually, though, I have come to appreciate that New Jersey is one of the really interesting places on earth both in terms of its geology and its human ecology; and there are few places in the Ozarks more gorgeously placed deep in the sticks than my son’s old farm thirty miles away in Hunterdon County.

 

            Just at the moment I am focusing on crime in New Jersey, especially murder.  I don’t know that there is measurably more of it here than most places, but from the historical point of view it seems to me more interesting and pace-setting.  Not too many actual murders become the stuff of compelling literature after Shakespeare’s time, but one can think of Dreiser’s great American Tragedy or Meyer Levin’s barely fictional Compulsion before getting to masterworks of non-fiction like Capote’s In Cold Blood or Joan Didion on the Manson clan.  But in the recent Library of America anthology,* True Crime, the top homicidal century, the twentieth, is represented by no fewer than three all-time greats from central New Jersey alone.  Each of them received prophetically sensational news coverage.  I don’t know that this essay will be the first in a series, but let me begin with Hall-Mills.  Hall-Mills was not a piece of mind-dulling tax legislation, but a sizzling scandal and tabloid bonanza.  It may not have been “the greatest story since the Resurrection,” Mencken’s memorable characterization of the Lindbergh kidnapping case for which Hall-Mills was the journalistic warm-up, but at the time it was the hottest thing to hit central Jersey since Granny got her titty caught in the wringer.

 

            There are several Episcopal churches in New Brunswick.  One is large and ancient.  It was one of the official venues from which the Declaration of Independence was publicly proclaimed, and its churchyard preserves the remains of Revolutionary War heroes.  I know this church well, as my wife was its rector for a decade in the 1990s.  Another, St. John the Evangelist, dates from the Civil War and still holds on, though greatly reduced in size and entirely without the social glitz it appears to have commanded in the Roaring Twenties, when its rector, the Rev. Edward W. Hall, cut quite a figure in the old Dutch town.  Hall was married to a wealthy heiress of the old aristocracy, and in this instance figure-cutting included a red-hot and  insufficiently concealed affair with a woman named Eleanor Mills, choir member and wife of the church sexton.

 

            In September, 1922, a young man and his teen-aged girlfriend strolling along a secluded country lane west of town, came upon two corpses under a crabapple tree, eventually identified as the remains of the scandalous lovers just mentioned.  Both had been shot through the head, the woman three times.  Eleanor Mills had also had her throat slit and her tongue excised, though in Keystone Cops fashion the authorities failed to notice the lacuna!  The utter brutality of the murders had been superficially disguised by the arrangement of  the bodies in positions of restful, mild intimacy.  The police thought that the pages of love letters decorating the carnage possibly offered  a significant clue as to motive.  New Brunswick, whose police were first called to the scene, is in Middlesex County.  But the horror site, by presumption also the murder site,  was in Franklin Township, Somerset County.  While the Jersey authorities puzzled over jurisdictional issues incomprehensible since the time of James II, the hastily informed  populations of two counties gawked and trampled about the grim tableau gathering souvenir crabapple leaves and bloody shards of love letter and befouling the crime scene beyond forensic redemption.  It’s not the crime.  It’s not the cover-up.  It’s the constabulary incompetence.

 

The unusual suspects

            Nobody was convicted of the killings, and nobody absolutely knows for sure who dunnit.  One intriguing recent theory is that it was the Ku Klux Klan, vigilant guardians of public morality.  But…come on.  About the only theory at the time, and certainly the most probable one still, was that it was the work of or on behalf of the wronged blueblood wife, Frances and/or her peculiar relatives, two brothers--Henry Stevens and William (‘Willie”) Stevens and their cousin Henry de la Bruyere Carpender.   Ordinarily it would be obvious that anybody named Henry de la Bruyere Carpender had to have done it, or something worse; but he was never actually tried, and this time you would be safer putting your money on Willie Stevens, who in addition to being a most peculiar man who lived in a foggy thicket  somewhere along the spectrum, boasted credentials as an ace pistolier.  His chief, if not only regular employment, voluntary of course, was hanging out and schmoozing with the guys at the firehouse.  He seems to have been a man who covered some serious  inner darkness with the outward eccentricity of a trust fund simpleton.

 

            Sensational court trials almost naturally take on a theatrical cast, especially those dubbed by the press “the trial of the century,” of which there are seldom fewer than three per decade.  And hot pants in high places has ever been a guaranteed sell with the American people.  Midwifed by the press, the Hall-Mills trial, featuring the three aforementioned Stevens siblings, finally took place in 1926,   There are fascinating legal and evidentiary aspects of the case--the sadistic misogyny suggested in the overkill of Eleanor Mills, for example.   Just now my two principal interests in it  are somewhat eccentric.  The first has to do with the dramatic suburbanization of New Jersey in the middle of the last century.  Before World War II the murder site, a modest walk from central New Brunswick, was such rural and untraveled farmland that the bodies lay in place for the better part of two days before being discovered.  The old lovers’ lane is now overwhelmed with McMansions, fast food joints, and a heavily traveled highway.  I have seen a good deal of this happen while living here.  The second concerns a recurrent pattern of theatrical type-casting.

 

            All mysteries mystify, but many famous American murder cases in their dramaturgy strangely feature, in addition to the principals (beleaguered or defiant defendants, celebrity lawyers), what might be called a designated Best Supporting Actor.  Surely you will remember Kato Kaelen from the O. J. Simpson trial?  He became, quite literally, a household name, more familiar to most Americans than the names of their political representatives.  Where do the Kato Kaeilins of the legal world come from?  They are not in the pages of Blackstone.  The Kato Kaelen of Hall-Mills was the pig farmer through whose land the death-lane cut its path.  She had a name (Jane Gibson), but she lives in history as the Pig Lady.  The Pig Lady was eccentric and seriously ill.  By the time of the trial she had to be brought to the courtroom on a pallet.  Over two long investigations she provided the police with a great deal of testimony, contradictory and incoherent, but colorful and captivating.  With so much available, the prosecutors chose the best and forgot the rest.  Her tale was this: During a nocturnal mule-ride along her lonely lane in pursuit of “wagon noises” and suspected thieves, she had come upon the murder scene, illuminated by automobile lights, as the crime was happening, was about to happen, or had just happened.  Yes, she could identify the defendants, but she had hurried her steed along home when she realized trouble was brewing, or perhaps was already poured out in its second cup.  While she testified from her prone position her mother, a demented crone, sat prominently in the courtroom muttering “She’s lying…lying.” 

 

Testimony of the Pig Lady

 

            Wily Willie Stevens hardly batted an eye at this testimony, coolly treating it with the scorn with which he so obviously wanted it be be viewed.  Willie Stevens is perhaps the most remarkable  member of this varied dramatis personae.  In 1937 he was the subject of a fascinating New Yorker essay by James Thurber, “A Sort of Genius,” that recaptured my own interest in the case when I read it last week.  This was not at all Thurber’s normal line of work.  He was one of America’s great humorists, not a crime reporter, but here we find him strangely serious, though not a little sardonic.  He doesn’t say it in so many words, but it’s pretty clear that he thinks that Willie Stevens, so expert in convincing others of his own simple-mindedness, was indeed a genius—a homicidal one.

 

*True Crime: An American Anthology (350 Years of Brilliant Writing About Dark Deeds), ed. Harold Schechter (Library of America. 2008), 788 pages.  Thurber’s essay, “A Sort of Genius,” is at pp. 382-406.

 

Leafing and Loafing

 

 

 

            October exited these parts in a somewhat unpleasant manner.  The days already became short and dark even before we turned the clocks back.  Chill winds seemed to threaten a cold and early winter.  It was all the more delightful, therefore, as well as thematically appropriate, when the weather turned full Indian Summer just after election day—bright, crisp, sunny days with clear cool nights, extending over several days and still going strong as I write this.  The foliage has been particularly notable.  So much early cool and wet weather seems to have retarded for an extra week the tincturing of the leaves, but all of a sudden they have turned bright and are falling in profusion.  Along the gutters of most of the roads in our neighborhood are long leaf mountains waiting for the big, noisy trucks  to take them away.  A few days ago in the late afternoon we sat in the yard listening to the nearly silent scraping of dry locust leaves against the lower branches of the tree from which they floated down.  Half the leaves on a large tree must have fallen in half an hour.

 

            I lack a therapy dog, but a lot of the rest of my life is therapeutical, such as my recently acquired “happy light” and my daily walk in the mini-park across the street.  This spot, which I have written about before, is the former site of a graduate housing project dating back to the end of World War II.  The University removed all the buildings, but left the mature trees, which are numerous and varied.  Circling and criss-crossing along the old street grids, now looking nearly as ancient as the Appian Way, I do almost three miles in my daily perambulation.  For the past two weeks of cool weather, the local leaf-peeping has been superb, but in dry weather a fallen leaf soon shrivels.  The photo at the top of the post is of a batch gathered on Monday.  That is probably my last of the year.  Winter really is around the corner.

 

            Thinking about leaves in one way soon leads to thinking about them in another.  For an English professor one other way is particularly obvious.  Leaf is a very old word in our language, unchanged in its spelling (though not its pronunciation) for more than a thousand years.  And already in Old English it had the double sense of Latin folium—the leaf of a tree, the leaf of a book.  A third meaning was a shoot of any kind of vegetation.  Several factors account for the richness of the English vocabulary.  One of the most important is that we tend to have both a Germanic and a Romance word for so many nouns and verbs.  So far as leaves are concerned, the Latin folium (French feuille) has left many active progeny, such as foliation, folic acid (from green vegetable leaf), and portfolio.  Walking in the place just described with my young grandson before the pandemic, I came upon a happy linguistic epiphany.  He lives in Montreal and goes to a French school, and he sometimes throws in a French word if he doesn’t happen to know the right English one.  Walking past a lush patch of clover, his eyes lit up.  “Trèfle” he cried out in recognition.  I actually know that word in French, though only when he said it did I grasp its etymology—trefoil, (trois feuilles) three leaves.

 

            As noted above, the parallel botanical and bibliographical meanings of a leaf are already fully developed in classical Latin.  Of many materials used as surfaces for recording the written word, by far the most common has been vegetable stuff, leaves, bark, processed wood fiber.  Our very word for paper is the name of the papyrus plant of the Nile delta.  Specially treated animal skin is more durable, but also very expensive.  So we still leaf through a book, just as we may hope in our metaphoric life to turn over a new leaf to find a better way.

 

                                                                                     Walt Whitman

 

            Inevitably I had to go to a bookshelf and take down my copy of Walt Whitman.  I have never really thought too deeply about the title of his amazing masterpiece, Leaves of Grass.  There are leaves on trees and many other plants, but are there leaves of grass?  Surely the proper English term is blade of grass?  The word Whitman himself uses in the first lines of “Song of Myself,” the extraordinary first movement of Leaves of Grass, is spear: “I lean and loafe at my ease . . . . observing a spear of summer grass”.  Both of those terms (blade, spear) are military, referring to thinly-beaten and sharpened metal.  From the French side the relevant word is foil, as in a fencer’s sword.  Beaten tin or aluminum is tinfoil or aluminum foil; but finely beaten gold is gold-leaf.  Here the defining feature is thinness, just as it is with paper—or with a blade, a spear, or a leaf of grass.  In his substantial prose preface to his vast poem Whitman makes the explicit claim that his language is particularly suited for his national theme.  “The English language befriends  the grand American expression. . . . it is brawny enough and limber and full enough.”  

 

            Whitman followed many lines of work in his vagabond career, among them that of a trained printer.  Nineteenth-century printing was a large, expanding, labor-intensive industry in America.  He was not the only major American literary figure who made books in more senses than one.  Naturally he also had experience as a journalist and editor, and there are throughout his writings numerous passages in which his vocabulary reflects a printer’s expertise.  In “Song of Myself” he says somewhat cryptically that paper and types are unsuitable for the task he has undertaken.  What, then is suitable?  I believe that the answer to that must be leaves—leaves of grass.  There is a strange moment early in his book concerning a small child, presumably, like the poet himself, another “loafer” on the grass.  “A child said, What is the grass?  fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? . . . . I do not know what it is any more than he.”  But the leaves of grass, surely, are the copious and varied, indeed nearly encyclopedic materials of his vast panorama of the American land and the American soul.  The poems themselves are leaves, or woven from them.

 

            As a printer, too, he knew the specialized meaning of the borrowed Latin term folio (“in the [single] leaf”), meaning the largest size of printed book, made by printing very large sheets of paper folded only once, resulting in four pages , two recto and two verso, front and back, of formatted book.  This is not the format in which Leaves of Grass was actually printed, but it invokes the kind of maximalism the poet must have had in his mind in writing such a bold and abundant poem.  If you think as I do that too many of our poets today tend to shy away from great projects and grand designs, you might hope with me that more would take a leaf out of Whitman’s book.

 

                                                      a set of folios from my library--each volume about 18 inches tall

Scholarship Boys

 

Tomb of Archbishop Peckham in Canterbury

            As it is such a quiet week in the world of public affairs, I turn for my topic to the world of scholarship.  I must begin with a personal confession.  I enjoyed the privilege of a superb university education over a period of nearly a decade at three fine institutions without ever spending a dime.  What may sound like a boast is actually a cause of long-standing anxiety.  How many people have had a life’s career getting paid to do work that wild horses could not stop them from attempting?  That our country is in a perilous condition only the most foolish optimist could deny.  But I, personally, must be eternally grateful for the opportunities it has afforded me and so many others like me.  Beyond that, one is moved to  contemplate the extraordinary ways in which our civilization continues to advance through the generosity of philanthropists.

 

            One of the great men of the English Middle Ages, at least so far as I am concerned, was John Peckham, who became the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1279.  He died in 1292.  In the old history books one often encounters the phrase “an obscure youth”—or “a person of humble origins,” usually meaning a young person of such social insignificance that historians have been able to find few if any written records of his family relations or, often, of his very existence.  My own incipient scholarly ambitions suffered a terrible blow when, as a teenager, I read Hardy’s terminally offputting novel Jude the Obscure.  It is the story of a brilliant young man of great scholarly potential overwhelmed by poverty, the rigidities of class prejudice, and the “biological trap” of fatherhood.  We have lots of obscure and humble youth in our country today, but by the age of twenty practically every one of them has  amassed a documentary archive of census, school, and health records, however banal,  thicker than that which the Duke of Wellington could have produced in 1790.  Of Peckham we know practically nothing.  Given the fact that he became an eminent churchman, that paradoxically means we can safely surmise quite a lot.

 

            We suppose that he may have been born, probably around 1235, in or near the village of Peckham, now part of the city of Brighton on the Sussex coast.  But there’s another Peckham in Kent, so…In order to have a family name, you first had to have a family.  Otherwise you were simply from somewhere or you did something for a living.  The latter is where all our Bakers, Barbers,  Smiths, Thatchers, Farmers, and Fishers eventually come from.  Our guess is that John simply was born in Peckham, doubtless in common with numerous other obscure Johns Peckham.  We do know that his early education was at Lewis Priory, a rich and aristocratic Cluniac house very near Peckham.  This could have been obtained only through the patronage of a person or persons who recognized his extraordinary intellectual gifts.  He can hardly have been more than a child when he spent some time at the Franciscan friary in Oxford, and departed for the University of Paris, where he became the personal student of Saint Bonaventure and built his own brilliant academic career.  It was inevitable that he himself would become a Franciscan, and one of the ornaments of the Order during some of its most glorious decades.  Theologians tend to write books of theology, and Peckham wrote several.  But he was also a cutting-edge scientist of his time, the author of a book on optics, and a very fine Latin poet.  His Philomena (“The Nightingale”) is one of the greatest religious poems written by an Englishman.  Though he commanded the admiration of kings and princes, he was hardly a social climber.  They practically had to waterboard him to accept the highest ecclesiastical office in the land.  What he really wanted to do was teach and pray.   So here’s to the unknown benefactor who paid for a peasant’s upkeep at the Lewes Grammar School!

 

            Not all proletarian scholars turned out so saintly.  There is the famous instance of Eugene Aram (1704-1759) one of the more prominent murderers of the eighteenth century.   Aram was a lowlife genius born into the beautiful provinciality of the Yorkshire dales.  His special gifts, frequently found among famous autodidacts, were linguistic.  His life was full of hard knocks.  He knocked around England doing unsatisfying odd jobs but reading so widely and voraciously through the night that he soon felt qualified to open a small school back in Yorkshire, where he unfortunately also entered a disastrous marriage as a result of knocking up a local girl.  Aram, alas, had no benefactor, known or unknown.  Mainly on his own, working in the dead of night, he immersed himself deeply in ancient tongues, including Hebrew and the Celtic tongues of Britain.  This was not his only mode of moonlighting, however.  His involvement in a shady deal bordering on a heist eventuated in his commission of a murder.  He fled, and successfully hid out for some time on the Norfolk coast, but was eventually discovered, dragged back to Yorkshire, tried, convicted and hanged.  In the meantime he had become one of the most learned linguists in Europe.  His memorialist in the Dictionary of National Biography, Richard Garnett, the literary scholar, wrote thus: “It is hardly too much to say that had he enjoyed wealth and leisure he might have advanced the study of comparative philology by fifty years.”  He is remembered not in the annals of scholarship but in a creepy ballad, once much admired, by Thomas Hood, and in the novel Eugene Aram by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a prolific and  popular Victorian author from whom Snoopy plagiarized the great opening line It was a dark and stormy night…

 

            Watching the Downton Abbey series and now Victoria suggests to me that the high point of obnoxiousness in British snobbery, slowly maturing in its refinement from the time of King Canute,  probably arrived only with the turn of the twentieth century.  This is  a fact that makes the career of Sir Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge (1857-1934) all the more remarkable.  Budge was a genuine bastard in the days when bastardy was a disastrous social condition rather than just a nondescript insult.  His mother was the daughter of a servant in a hotel in Bodmin, in the West Country.  Presumably she knew who his father was, but as she wasn’t talking, the question stayed moot.  Compared with young Ernie, Jude the Obscure was a blueblood.  Budge was a shy, chubby kid who, at about the age of ten, developed an eccentric passion for the study of Hebrew, Syriac, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Assyrian cuneiforms, topics commanding only limited interest in the social circles of his peers.  By the operations of good fortune—I generally prefer the term Providence—Budge’s precocious erudition came to the attention of powerful patrons.  Having moved to London and taken up a humdrum job in the City, he generally spent his supposed lunch hour studying Assyriology in nearby St. Paul’s Cathedral.  Over time he became friendly with the composer John Stainer, the cathedral organist, who recognized the lad’s promise.  Stainer approached two of his political buddies, Gladstone and W. H. Smith, scion of the newsagent/bookstore chain, who bankrolled Budge at Cambridge and then helped him secure his life-long position in the British Museum.   

 

            Many curators and librarians of that age were the scholarly equals or superiors of chaired university professors, and Budge became one of the greatest Egyptologists of his time.  He was active in the field as archaeologist and entrepreneur of antiquities, and his publication record is prodigious.  I first discovered him in my own area of medieval religious history through his sumptuous edition and translation of the Syriac versions of the literature of the Desert Fathers.  I am even now in the process of rebinding for a friend his facsimile edition of the Egyptian Book of the Dead.  The study of those ancient civilizations that somehow captured the imagination of an obscure English schoolboy has of course moved on in the last century, and much of Budge’s work now seems quaint and outmoded.  That is the common fate of most scholarship, but should I (as I hope) ever return again to England, I shall continue to buy my newspapers and my Cadbury bars exclusively at W. H. Smith’s.

 

 

 

Dream Books

 

 

 

                                                                                      The Policy Player's Dream Book

            While on a recent Gothic streak I briefly revisited Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.  It was published when I was two, but has aged a great deal better than I.  What a story!  And what a great opening line: Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. Perhaps it is because my own dreams are so infrequent, so paltry, and so seldom remembered that I have made a subspecialty of literary dreams, in particular the medieval genre of the dream vision.  I was already thinking about dreams when the latest number of Cabinet: A Magazine of Arts and Culture arrived at our house.  Should this journal by some oversight not regularly grace your own coffee table, you should know that it is highly hip.  Though I try to stick to the pre-Copernican scene, it is hard to preserve one’s old-fogey credentials unsullied if young people play any significant role in your life, as is likely to happen with college professors and grandfathers.  The brilliant editor of Cabinet, Sina Najafi, was a college friend of my son Richard.  Later I met his likewise brilliant spouse, the artist Nina Katchadourian.  Cabinet has some other Princeton connections.  One of its principal editors is a brilliant historian of science here.  So, you grasp the recurrent leitmotiv: brilliance, if sometimes rather quirky brilliance.

                                                                                        Fat cows and thin cows?  Too simple!

            Each number of Cabinet includes several short essays devoted to a common theme.  For issue number sixty-seven it is “Dreams”.  Of several interesting articles, one devoted to the prominence of dream books and soothsaying in African-American popular culture captured my attention.*  The author has uncovered a small library of cheap dream manuals popular among a black readership in the nineteenth century.  I was struck by the essentially medieval character of the books described.  Dream “theory” underwent a huge paradigm shift with Freud and other modern psychoanalysts.  Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1899) tries to explain the dreaming process in terms of the oblique expressions of a unique and individual subconscious as experienced by a unique individual consciousness.  Dreams are deeply personal.  This is very different from pre-modern dreams, regarded as objective external communications not generated by the dreamer, though frequently requiring decryption.  They were messages from the gods or the God. In ancient Greek religions, people would sometimes sleep in temples, hoping thereby to “incubate” revelatory dreams. The Bible offers various examples of revelatory dreams, particularly with regard to the two Josephs: the vizier of Egypt (Genesis 41) and the husband of Jesus’s mother (Matthew 1 and 2).  As we shall see, Egypt was especially important for dream lore.

The Aesculapion of Pergamum in Anatolia, where ill patients tried to dream of cures

           

                     The great classical work on the subject is the huge Dream Book (Oneirokritikon) of Artemidorus of Ephesus, who lived in the second century.  Perhaps you can find a casual way to drop the word oneirocriticism, dream interpretation-- from Greek roots meaning “dream” and “judgment”-- into your next conversation with a work mate.  Artemidorus’s book is actually a kind of encyclopedic compilation, running to five volumes in its modern edition, of the earlier works, otherwise all lost,  by many experts in what was a popular genre.  Ancient dream books were generally practical reference works to be used for purposes of decoding.  What did it mean to dream of an eagle, gold ducats, or a meal of fermented barley?  The dream books could tell you—in a rather mechanical and brain-dead fashion.   A considerable increment of subtlety was added to the field of dreams a couple of centuries after Artemidorus by a Neoplatonist scholar named Macrobius, who wrote one of the more surprising perennial best sellers in European cultural history: A Commentary on the Dream of Scipio.  Macrobius’s great contribution was to draw distinctions and to provide categories.  To begin with, not all dreams were significant.  Many were nightmares sent not from the gods but (as Ebenezer Scrooge would have it) from “a bit of undigested  beef, a blob of mustard, a crumb of cheese.”  Of significant dreams there were several kinds, and they required learned distinctions.  Macrobius disdained the simplism of the old dream book.  Dream interpretation required learning, wisdom, and great skill.  Hence, in the high culture, the frequent connection of oneirocriticism with cutting-edge astrology and mathematics.  One thinks of Dr. Dee, Queen Elizabeth’s resident astrologer.   But there was always also a popular or folk level, usually associated with wizened crones or “witches”.  These are the distant posterity of Ovid’s vetulae (little old ladies), women of sinister fascination, go-betweens and abortionists.

             If dreams can be interpreted, they can be misinterpreted, with possibly fatal results.  We have, for example, the dream of the tyrant Croesus.  He dreamed that the god Jupiter washed him and that the god Apollo dried him off.  He thought this a wonderful harbinger of a well-deserved visit to the Turkish baths on Mount Olympus.  But his daughter Fanny, the local Cassandra, had a sounder if sadder interpretation.  Croesus was hanged from a gibbet.  Jupiter Pluvius drenched the dangling corpse with rain, and the scorching rays of Apollo the Sun dried it out.  The requirement of an expert exegesis, when a mistaken interpretation could have such dramatic real-world consequences, is what makes much medieval dream vision so interesting.  Misinterpretation can also be comic, as it is in Chaucer’s epic of chicken sex, the “Nun’s Priest’s Tale.”

            The popular “dream books” of which Vandegrift writes in so illuminating a fashion actually have very little to do with the tradition of Artemidorus and practically nothing at all with that of Macrobius.  They don’t even have all that much to do with dreams.  Nor, actually, am I convinced of any peculiar African-Americanness to be found in them.  Apart from their  obvious target audience, one of several non-traditional readerships of their time, they fit comfortably into a familiar category already well established in the eighteenth century.  Dream-interpretation very early became conjoined with various kinds of divination and soothsaying, especially when related to financial fortune: coming into or finding, money, lost objects, buried treasure, divining lottery numbers and winning horses or the like.  In America, especially, a lottery game called Policy commanded something of the huge number of habitual, addicted players  who today follow Power Ball.  The “dream manuals” combine folk superstition with the incipient format of family board games or fortune cookie slips in providing a diverting procedure for arriving at comforting “news”.  The mother lode of nineteenth-century folk divination was the hugely popular Oracle of Napoleon, the magic manual supposedly found by the Emperor in a pyramid—Egypt being since time immemorial the source of esoteric wisdom for European crackpots.  For Napoleon the Oracle was apparently indispensable for conquering the world.  It continued to provide lesser mortals (for only a dime!) with an ingenious way to tell their own fortunes by making recourse to its interrogatories, charts, and tables.  (You can find an amusing introduction to it here).  And since it was plagiarized from a learned Renaissance humanist steeped in the Egyptomania of his age, it still has the faintest whiff of an ancient bitter perfume.  I have written a little about this in The Dark Side of the Enlightenment.

 

One of dozens of cheap editions of Napoleon's Oraculum

            Seeking to ascertain knowledge of future events in the hopes of financial profit or other personal benefit—insider trading at the supernatural level, so to speak—has always been considered dubious from the moral point of view.  In his epic poem on the Civil Wars, Lucan presents his great Stoic hero Cato with a temptation.  An opportunity presents itself for Cato, while marching through the African wilderness,  to consult the oracle of Jupiter Ammon.  He could thus find out whether he will have success in battle.  But Cato is not concerned with whether he is on the winning side; he is content to be on the right side.  So he declines to visit the oracle.  Dante describes diviners as those who “would attempt to constrain the Divine will.”  But high mindedness from the high culture was entirely foreign to these proletarian pamphlets which, in feeding fantasies of the lucky strike and the big payout, served a purpose and met a demand.  Like blues songs or work shanties, they might serve to amuse, distract, or give transitory hope to some humble folk whose daily lives were filled mainly with hard labor, material difficulty, and limited horizons.   And after all we all do have to dream, and we all do dream.  Should you happen to dream that you went to Manderley again, I do have some practical advice.  Write that down, and then just keep on writing.  You may end up with a real dream book.

 

*Christopher W. Vandegrift, “Oneirocritica Afro-Americana,” Cabinet 67, pp. 77-86.