Grandchildren

 

                                   John Henry                 /              Hazel

 

            We have six grandchildren—real ones, I mean—in addition to an indeterminate number of imaginary ones on whom this essay may briefly touch if I have time.  The grandchildren range in age commodiously from twenty-eight to seven, one full twenty-one- year span of childhood by the old legal reckoning.  Five of them are of the female sex, including both the eldest (Sophia) and the youngest (Hazel).  The plethora of granddaughters has been for me a special blessing.  In my family of birth there had been only sons, three of them.  The faint mysterious hint of a daughter, stillborn when I was two, a shadow and another sorrow is a mother's hard life, was barely even a spectral presence.  I regard the tutelage provided by so many highly accomplished girls and their mothers a special gift of my mature years.

 

            I have somewhere a little pewter plaque with the following assertion: “Happiness is Being a Grandfather”.  Not too long ago at the bottom of the yard in one of several now long-established weed beds, I stumbled upon a similar ensign claiming that particular little plot to be “Granpa’s Garden.”  You are surely familiar with the genre, which is widely to be found in its various forms on bumper stickers, belt buckles, sweatshirts, and coffee mugs throughout the land.  Call me a snob.  I ordinarily recoil from outsourcing proclamations of my sentimental life to the indentured rhymers at Hallmark cards or the proprietors of Interstate rest-stop tchotchke-sellers.  But the relationships between grandparent and grandchild actually does provide an opportunity for felicity sufficiently potent to overcome even the saccharine annoyances of American commercialism.

 

            Just at the moment we are enjoying a Covid-delayed visit from the Montrealers—that is, Luke and Melanie and their two kids, John Henry (8) and Hazel (7)—our only grandson and our youngest granddaughter.  I suppress political commentary in this blog, and so will not comment upon the combination of personal self-righteousness and practical incompetence with which the smarmy Canadian Prime Minister has supervised the pandemic in his land, leaving much of his unvaccinated population in lockdown behind a closed border.  Personal opinion.  In any event, it has been a long time since we have been able to visit with this family, and we are reveling in the opportunity.  The first thing that strikes one is that kids do grow.  Furthermore, their mental and ethical growth is as notable as their dramatic physical expansion.  They get more and more interesting and delightful.  They move from cute to acute.  They become great companions.

 

         On Monday, Luke and I set out with the two kids on what I think of as my “regular” walk.  Later on their mother Melanie, taking a slightly shorter route, caught up with us about half way along; we then proceeded together.  This is a hike of approximately three miles, most of it through lovely sylvan glades above the lake and along a short section of the Delaware and Raritan Canal.  Though they spend a lot of time in the great outdoors of Québec, John Henry and Hazel are of course city-dwellers for whom the zoological opulence of suburban New Jersey might as well be the Serengeti.  We set out with the conscious intention of cataloguing the animal and bird life we saw on the walk, and in the first five hundred yards we were able to record chipmunk, deer, groundhog, rabbit, and squirrel.  The birds were too numerous to count.  One special treat came when, looking down from the height of a cliffside path, we could clearly see four or five turtles, some of them quite large, sunning themselves on the trunk of a dead tree fallen into the water.  I was disappointed only by the absence of the cormorant that often joins them.  For the kids, the permanent interest of the natural beauty is at the moment complemented by the diminishing remnants of the cicada phenomenon of which I wrote in a recent post.  Everywhere along the beaten forest track are hundreds of the little holes from which the critters have emerged in their prehistoric exoticism.  The little corpses of the thousands which have briefly fulfilled their last full measure of procreative devotion lie scattered promiscuously everywhere, sometimes in such numbers as to create unpleasant whiffs of decomposition.

 

            Walking along the canal paths, we pursued a somewhat eccentric mission.  Our house has a small atrium, with its own tiny pond and turtles, through which a short path leads from the glass door to my study to a wooden exterior door on the other side.  I am trying, very slowly, to cover this path with a layer of the white sea pebbles to be found throughout this part of Jersey in much of the topsoil and practically all gravel.  I try to pick up a small bag full of these pebbles on every walk.  If I had enough grandkids, we could do it on an industrial scale!

 

            Yesterday was the hottest day of the year to date, both broiling and muggy.  I wasn’t feeling all that great, and I probably should not even have undertaken such an ambitious walk under the conditions.  I was soon huffing and puffing badly, and finding it difficult to carry on.  My son Luke was sensitive enough to intervene.  When we were a couple thousand yards from home, he suggested that he run home and fetch a car, while the rest of us await his return, sitting in the shade on the abutment of a bridge over a little creek.  I agreed with relief; I am gradually having to accept such necessary humiliations.  Young John Henry, not yet nine years old, was a little distressed on my behalf and tried to pretend that he, too, needed the relief.  Partly because my only grandson and I are both named John, and partly because a fragment of a recent sermon came to mind, and partly because I seem to specialize in bizarre patterns of thought, a certain Bible text text (John 3:30) leapt to my mind.  It is one that identifies John the Baptist in some well-known medieval and Renaissance paintings, including the unforgettable Isenheim altar-piece: Illum oportet crescere, me autem minui (“As he grows greater, I must grow less”).  Volumes of puzzling medieval exegesis were devoted to this puzzling verse, but I finally understood what it means, or at least what it means to me.  It is a simple truism of biological and historical life.  And a very comforting one at that.  Our vital continuity is that of our posterity.

 

            All grandparents probably think that their grandchildren are superior beings.  I certainly do.  I refer, of course, to my real as opposed to my imaginary grandchildren.  Many of my readers will be puzzled by the very concept of imaginary grandchildren, though I suspect that several of my fellow seniors will know immediately what I refer to—a grift vaguely related to the “Spanish prisoner,” the “Nigerian entrepreneur,” and various telemarketing schemes involving aluminum siding, ornamental plaques, or John Wayne memorabilia.  Not too long ago the AARP featured it in their popular “Geriatric Scam of the Week” feature.*   I got my first call about five years ago, then two or three more each year since.  I picked up the landline and said “Hello”.  The immediate response, in a youngish adult male voice that I might place as originating somewhere along a line from Beaumont TX to Morgantown WV, was interrogative: “Grampa”?  I didn’t think so, as my only grandson at the time was about three.  “I think you have the wrong number,” I said, utterly without effect.  “No, Grampa,” he said.  “It’s me.  I ran into some trouble, and I need a little help.”  After a few more confusing remarks, I simply hung up.  But at length--by the fourth or fifth such call-- I had grasped the concept and developed my own little line of dialogue.  “I’d love to, but thing is, George, Butch double-crossed me on that last delivery, and the cartel is after me.  Watching every move I make.”  That was pretty good, I thought; but I could do better.  I finally settled on “I’d love to help you out, Sonny, but I spent my last damn dime bailing out Granny.  Possession with intention, initial hearing in about a month.  I was actually hoping to  borrow a little something from you.   And, honest, this time I’ll pay you back.”  If you are simply trying to round out your scumbag credentials, breaking into the alms boxes in impoverished country churches is all well and good; but prostituting the impulses of grandparental love really is beyond the pale.

 

 

*https://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/info-2018/grandparent-scam-scenarios.html

 

 

Small Latin, Less Greek

 

 

                                                       Small Latin

            I had never come across the name of William Nicholas Selig (1864-1948), an important but mainly forgotten figure in the early history of the movie business, until a few weeks ago; but he was clearly a man of parts.  As is very frequently the case, my fleeting discovery of Selig was tangential to my ruminations on a couple of disparate bits of information that had crossed my consciousness at more or less the same time.  The first was an announcement coming out of Princeton University that in the future undergraduate concentrators (majors) in the classical languages and literatures would not in fact be required to undertake formal study in either the Latin or the Greek language.  This particular development has been the subject of a good deal of comment in the national press, where it has been connected, correctly, with many other “equity” initiatives undertaken here and elsewhere and supposed to address racial inequities in various aspects of higher education.  I have now been retired from the faculty for some years, and I was not in any event a member of the Classics Department.  My reactions to the announcement, aside from astonishment, are probably predictable, but of no special relevance to today’s topic anyway.  So I proceed immediately to the second bit of information—or in this instance perhaps, speculation.  It concerns Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan playwright.

            Marlowe was definitely a mysterious character.  That’s not too unusual for espionage agents, and Marlowe seems to have been one, among other things. Most famously of course he was the author of at least two extraordinary plays, as well as several less extraordinary, and some fine poetry.  Many scholars think that he had a part in the writing of some of the plays of his contemporary, Shakespeare.  He would appear to have been a rather naughty fellow, whose possible sexual proclivities and probable religious unorthodoxies are of the sort to fascinate contemporary scholarship.  What is definitely known—or at least I thought was definitely known—was the manner of his death.  He is supposed to have been stabbed to death in a violent quarrel in a house, possibly a public house or tavern, in Deptford on London’s South Bank on May 30, 1593.  The speculation which I encountered was that his death was actually staged.   According to this theory the coroner’s report of the supposed event—which an eminent Shakespeare scholar discovered in the archives nearly a century ago—was but one element in an elaborate ruse designed by shadowy but politically powerful personages.   They needed to secure for their asset Marlowe a most original kind of cover by disappearing him.  Activating a sleeper agent is child’s play compared with activating a dead one, which was their eventual goal.  In hiding, the supposedly defunct Marlowe continued to write plays, but of course they had to be attributed to other probable Shakespeare collaborators or ghosters such as Greene and Peele.

            This isn’t exactly Q-Anon, perhaps, but it did remind me that a few of the better conspiracy theories I have encountered flowed from the pens of my fellow literary scholars.  That’s how I happened brush up against the name invoked in the first sentence of this essay, that of William Nicholas Selig, one of the first moguls of the film industry.  Things often come together in very strange ways.  One of Selig’s pet projects, around the time of the tercentennial of Shakespeare’s death in 1913, was a plan to make a series of films of the Bard’s plays.  In this effort he felt moved to launch a lawsuit against George Fabyan (1867-1936), the heir of a textile tycoon and a pioneer of military cryptography.  Fabyan and Selig were actually old buddies, as well as fellow “cards”, as they used to be called.   An example of Fabyan’s cardism is this:  in 1905 he published a bound book of a hundred empty sheets entitled What I Know about the Future of Cotton and Domestic Goods.  Yes, blank pages!  Get it?  What a card.  As a cryptographer he had swallowed both hook and sinker of the main line of the “Bacon cypher”, the phantasmagoric “proof” that Sir Francis Bacon was the actual author of the plays that a hoodwinked world had for three centuries attributed to some theatrical nonentity called Will Shakespeare.  Selig was probably burnishing his own credentials as a card when he sued Fabyan on the grounds that Fabyan’s expert opinion threatened the reputation of Shakespeare and therefore of the prospective profits from the planned series of filmed plays.  Coverage of the lawsuit made great press for both men.

            What most Shakespeare scholars today call the “Baconian heresy” had a good run.  For at least half a century a lot of serious and consequential people maintained that since Shakespeare could not possibly have written the so-called plays of Shakespeare, somebody else must have done it, and that somebody else must have been Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626).  There would be a lot to talk about here, but my particular interest in this essay is not the who but the why.  Why was it impossible that Shakespeare could have written his own plays?  Answer: Because those plays are full of learned lore, and he was a commoner who had not gone to university!  More particularly, because he did not know Latin.  That is, the Baconians regarded Shakespeare with what in today’s lingo is sometimes called the soft bigotry of low expectations.  If you are convinced that either by nature or by nurture a fellow is incapable of doing something, you are unlikely to credit the fact that he has actually done it.

 

                                                           Large Latin

            The Baconian heresy really got going in mid-Victorian times, but it had had some seventeenth-century preparation.  In an introductory poem in the Shakespeare first folio (1623) the Bard’s great admirer Ben Jonson, himself deeply steeped in the classical tongues, famously marveled that a writer with “small Latine, and lesse Greeke” could have written such masterpieces.  By the time Milton wrote “L’Allegro” (1645) Shakespeare has progressed, or perhaps regressed, to the role of rustic vernacular prodigy, in contrast to the erudite classicist Jonson.  One of the things that L’Allegro the “cheerful man” likes to do is to take in a comedy at the local theater: “Then to the well-trod stage anon,/ If Jonson’s learned sock be on, /Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child, / Warble his native wood-notes wild.”  Here Jonson’s own classical learning—the sock being an erudite allusion to the footgear of comic actors on the ancient Greek stage—is contrasted to Shakespeare’s supposed naively gorgeous hillbilly English.   As a matter of fact Shakespeare’s small Latin was probably bigger than that of even some Princeton classics majors of yore, the ones who actually studied Latin, let alone those of our brave new future.

            There is probably still a general consensus among institutions of higher education on both sides of the Atlantic concerning their fundamental two-fold mission: the preservation of “old” knowledge on the one hand, and the search for and discovery of “new” knowledge on the other.  The recognition that there is such a thing as new knowledge necessarily implies pedagogic and curricular change as well as continuity, guaranteeing that there will in perpetuity always be some vanishing good old days for alumni to lament.  One of Princeton’s nineteenth-century alumni crises came when the faculty struck from the list of required prerequisites for application for admission to the place a demonstrated competence in ancient Greek. Many alumni were sure that civilization as previously recognized had ended.  The faculty, however, were merely acknowledging the reality of the expansion and increasing democratization of American public education.  Princeton students could do their Greek after arriving on campus.

 

 

Academic Vintage

                                                                     Cassiciacum

            In the year 386 the young Augustine rusticated for an extended period with various friends and family members at a large country house at Cassiciacum, a bit north of Milan.  There he spent a good deal of time praying, reading, writing and discussing books and their ideas, often al fresco, walking along the field paths or seated amid the shade of the vineyards.  This was one of the more consequential vacations in western cultural history.  I can’t go into all that now, but I can confirm the reality of literary seminars conducted in vineyards—a feature of the story I had been inclined to regard as poetic license, along with his sitting under a fig tree to read the Epistle to the Romans—because I just participated in one.

 

            On Saturday last, chauffeured by two good friends from New York, we made our way to the Unionville Vineyards in Ringoes, N.J., where the son and daughter of our recently departed friend and mentor, the great Dante scholar Robert Hollander, had arranged a Dante seminar in memory of their father.  There were I suppose about twenty-five of us, some family members, but mainly old students of the maestro and alumni of his own legendary summer seminars taught for many years in a Tuscan castle.  Our leader was Dr. Frank Ordiway, one of his brilliant students of the 1980s, and a great expert on medieval Italian writers and the Latin classics.

 

                                                      Unionville NJ

 

            The Divine Comedy is a long poem (about 14,000 lines) divided into three long sections, one devoted to each of the “three kingdoms” of the imagined afterlife—Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Heaven (Paradiso).  These long parts are called in Italian cantiche (singular, cantica.)  Each cantica is subdivided into smaller units called cantos, of which there are a hundred in the whole poem—thirty-three in each of the two latter cantiche, and thirty-four in the Inferno, with the very first canto acting as a kind of introduction to the whole poem.  As you can see, a canto’s average length is about 140 lines.  There is a vast body of secondary criticism devoted to Dante, especially in the form of essays that are meditations upon or explications of one of the hundred individual cantos.  Frank chose this mode; the particular canto of his choice was the thirtieth of the Purgatorio.  We began in the Hollander fashion with a viva voce reading of the whole canto, both in Italian and in the English translation.  The Italian reader, Jennifer Borghi, who holds joint American and Italian citizenship and has lived for years in Italy, is an opera singer to boot; the English reader was Katherine Charles, an English professor at Washington College.  The high level of the bilingual elocution was a harbinger of Dr. Ordiway’s presentation and the student discussion it stimulated. 

 

            In my experience people are likely to make one of two mistakes in reading Dante.  The first is to assume that you can simply sit down and read his poem as you would a newspaper op ed or a detective novel.  You can’t, at least not with pleasure and comprehension.  The second is so to quail before the “otherness” of the poem--with its elaborate and perhaps fantastic structure, its huge and promiscuous catalogue of historical, biblical, and mythological personages, its relentless literary allusions, its obscure historical references, and the strangeness of its religious ideas—as to give up in despair.  It was Mark Twain who defined a great book as “a book everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” This is another way of saying that good reading, however pleasurable, sometimes involves real work.  I am ready to guarantee that you really do want to read this poem—but you could probably use some help.

 

            Dante certainly needed lots of help himself.  I refer to Dante the literary character, the first-person narrator of the poem, a man lost in a dark wood, up the creek sans paddle, as the story begins.  Fortunately three heavenly ladies, aware of his situation, conspire to rescue him.  What he needs first of all is good guidance—moral and literary—and so a guide is enlisted.  Who could be more qualified to lead a befuddled Florentine through a Christian epic than Virgil, the greatest poet in the pagan Latin literary tradition?  Well, lots of people, you might think, but you have to get used to surprises in this poem.  By historical misfortune, Virgil himself lived “in the time of the false and lying gods”.  Tough luck.  He is eternally doomed to the Underworld, suburban Hell, so to speak, Hell’s high-rent district, a place without the more sensational torture chambers, but also entirely without hope.  Yet he can guide another toward a goal that he himself could not achieve.

 

 

            There is a difference between leading toward and leading to, a difference dramatized in the canto carefully chosen by Ordiway for our discussion.  Virgil apparently can get Dante no further than 62.5% of the way toward the Beatific Vision, by my reckoning.  In the thirtieth canto of the Purgatorio Virgil abruptly disappears, and his A-Team replacement, a heavenly lady named Beatrice, takes over.  It is hard for a reader not to find cruelty in this passage.  By this point in the poem Virgil has saved Dante’s bacon more times than a reader can remember.  He has taught, guided, comforted, encouraged and literally carried him through intellectual and physical terrors nearly impossible for us to grasp.  Virgil now simply vanishes from the poem.  Dante is given all of six lines to express his distress—a distress for which he is immediately reprimanded by his new and superior guide.  Onward and upward!  Ultreia!

 

        So there we were, seated in a vineyard in a wide circle of folding chairs, thinking and talking about all this.  In speaking of the suddenly absent Virgil, Dante the pilgrim had called him “the sweetest of fathers.”  We were gathered at event convened by a son and a daughter to memorialize their distinguished father.  In Germany, where they virtually invented the modern Ph. D. degree, scholars reverently referred to their doctoral supervisors as “Doctorväter,” doctor-fathers.*  I have heard the leader of our seminar use that term of his old teacher, as I myself have used it of mine.  Analogies are comparisons in which some elements are alike and some unalike; but I believe all of us there grasped the particular poignancy of an extraordinary passage of poetry that invoked at once the sadness of irreparable loss and the promise of continuing vitality offered by great poets and their great interpreters for generations yet unborn.  All of us gathered there in that grassy circle were aware that we had had to say goodbye to a trusted guide and mentor.  But no more than Dante himself had he left us comfortless.  There was a whole warehouse of happy memories; and we were after all reading our text from the bilingual text of the Divine Comedy "in a verse translation by Jean Hollander and Robert Hollander.”  It was a considerable dantisa of the seventeenth century, John Milton, who perhaps said it best.  “A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”

 

 

 

*In the contemporary scene the term should be recognized as parental rather than exclusively paternal.  There are of course  doctor-mothers, one of the most notable being Beatrice, Virgil’s supererogator.  On that one, Dante was approximately seven hundred years ahead of the Pope.  

 

 

The Literary Life

 

Among the social issues that have become prominent over the last few months, especially in the wake of the “Black Lives Matter” movement, have been those relating to crime and punishments, policing and penology.  Such terms as “mass incarceration,” “the new Jim Crow,” “defunding the police,” and many others have become part of a common vocabulary by no means limited to activists of the progressive movement.  But I have also been bemused by developments in the literary world.  Literary intellectuals have played a huge role in shaping public attitudes, at least elite public attitudes, on such questions.  For example a little book published by Victor Hugo in 1829 (The Last Day of a Condemned Man) has been credited with starting the long, slow eradication of the practice of capital punishment in many parts of the world.  There now seem to be new developments on this front.

 

            In 1981 a career criminal named Jack Abbott published a very successful book entitled In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison.  The “beast” of the title was a metaphor for the machinery of incarceration that in one form or another had controlled most of the thirty-seven years of Abbott’s miserable life up until that point.  The crimes that had put Abbott in prison were numerous and varied, but once incarcerated he had put a capstone atop them by murdering another inmate.  His literary career was most unusual.  He had been discovered, aided, promoted, and sponsored by the literary superstar Norman Mailer.  Abbott had learned that Mailer was working on his own extraordinary account of crime and punishment, the book that became The Executioner’s Song.  This is his genre-bending true crime journovel about Gary Gilmore,  a murderer with a profile strikingly similar to Abbott’s.  Both men were incarcerated in Utah, and Gilmore would become the first American to suffer capital punishment after the supreme court reinstated it after a legal hiatus.  Abbott had written to Mailer to tell him that he (Abbott) would be a better source about the actual gritty circumstances of prison life than Gilmore himself.  Mailer went for this, adopted him as a kind of demi-monde protegé, engaged in correspondence with him, worked for his early release, and played a major role in the publication of his letters.  Six weeks after being paroled, and the very night before a review of In the Belly of the Beast appeared in the New York Times, Abbott stabbed a young man to death at a Greenwich Village eatery: a review to die for, so to speak.

 

                                         Normal Mailer with press clipping

            Abbott’s groupies naturally included some Hollywood celebrities, notably Susan Sarandon.  The aggrandizement of authorial criminals and thugs by the cultural elites has its own history, part of which I have touched upon in one of my books.*  I called it “chain-gang chic” in imitation of Tom Wolfe’s wonderful title Radical Chic of 1971, an account of Leonard Bernstein’s famous fête for the Black Panthers.  Jack Abbott was a brutal sociopath and a proven menace to society, but his gratuitous snuffing out of a promising young life received a strangely muted condemnation among the intelligentsia. The post-homicidal reviews did have more reservations about the writing.  On the whole people seemed more inclined to criticize Mailer.  So far as I know, Abbott suffered no reproof from his publisher, Random House.  Only a successful wrongful death suit by his victim’s family kept the killer from profiting handsomely from the book’s healthy sales.

 

            Mailer died at eighty-four.  Philip Roth was ten years younger than Mailer and died at eighty-five, thus extending the rarely acknowledged New Jersey dominance of American letters by a whole decade.  It is now Roth who has become obliquely central, so to speak, to the cultural crisis of literary criminality.

 

            Not that there is the slightest suggestion that Philip Roth did anything criminal.  He was a really great writer and, some of his friends continue to maintain against mountains of plausible published evidence, also an amiable chap.  I never met the man.  We have no criminal statutes against vanity or self-regard, or none should scape whipping; but one may still regard his near obsession with his reputational legacy as extreme.  No one is more likely to be aware of the importance of the big literary biography than a big New York writer, and Roth was the biggest.  His strategy was to select a biographer to his liking, and to privilege this person with exclusive access to a mammoth archive of carefully preserved documents, many of them unique, and to make himself available for innumerable lengthy interviews with this person alone.  The resulting book would necessarily have an unchallengeable depth and authority.

 

            A biography of such a major literary figure achieved under such circumstances had a very good chance of bringing its author both fame and fortune.    One supposes that many a writer would have liked to toss their hat into the ring.  In the end the person graced with the assignment was Blake Bailey, a one-time schoolteacher and seasoned literary biographer of high reputation.  Published by Norton, Bailey’s door-stopper sized Philip Roth appeared to the generally expected high praise a few months ago.  According to Cynthia Ozick in a lead review for the Times book supplement, it is a “a narrative masterwork both of wholeness and particularity, of crises wedded to character, of character erupting into insight, insight into desire, and desire into destiny.”  I haven’t read the book—but, Wow!

 

            Yet with the buzz about the book, the trouble started.  Me Too for Bailey too.  Women came forward—that is the canonical somber phrase—women came forward to accuse the biographer of sexual misbehavior in days of yore.  This was not trivial stuff, especially as some of it related to his time as a teacher of young girls.  But so far as I know none of the charges came supported by contemporary police reports.  Bailey has denied all accusations vehemently and categorically.  He remains entitled to a theoretical and high-minded presumption of innocence; but this is one of the circumstances in which fireless smoke is rare.  Norton, the publishers of the book, nearly a guaranteed best-seller and money-maker, did something extraordinary.  They withdrew all support for it, cancelled plans for future print runs, and announced the title would go out of print.  It makes me feel better about their merely having remaindered two of my own titles!

 

            This is a remarkable cultural development.  So far as I know no reader of Plutarch, Seutonius, Vasari, Casanova, or Boswell had implied definite moral requirements for a biographer.  Probably a good thing, too.  Remember that Jack Abbott stabbed a man to death on the eve of a glowing Times review that his publisher, Random House, happily used to boost the sales of his book.  By rights this should have nothing to do with the reputation of Philip Roth, who has been dead for three years.  Not too much happens “by rights” these days.  I don’t know whether “sex-obsessed” is a fair characterization of Roth’s fiction, but he sure put fellatio on the literary map.  Many of the charges of swinishness raised against him—and they are many—relate to alleged misogyny and sexual boorishness.  One of the chief hostile witnesses, if I can call her that, is his long-time girlfriend and short-time wife, the actress Claire Bloom.  Concerning Roth’s attitudes toward women and behavior with them, her memoir of their marriage is pretty devastating and unfortunately very convincing.  The sea of troubles that has swept over his biographer is also plashing up over the memory of the dead author.  Nasty as it is, the suspicion that Roth may have chosen his biographer partly in the knowledge, belief, or hope that a like-minded masculist would have a more indulgent attitude toward certain recurrent patterns of his life than would the neo-Puritans has been aired.  To fret about what one’s biographer will say is a rarefied worry reserved for those few expectant of biographies.  To them we may cite the noble opinion of Cicero: fame is the shadow cast by virtue.  But as literary biographies get longer and longer, I would hope that a reader’s stamina in slogging on to page seven hundred might be regarded a sufficient demand.  Conducting a preliminary moral investigation of the biographer’s biography can surely be left to the realm of supererogation.

 

           

*The Anti-Communist Manifestos, pp. 149-150.

 

Eça de Queirós

 

                                                                  J.-M. Eça de Queirós (1845-1900)

            I am facing a serious decision with regard to my Duolingo Portuguese course, which I first reported on some months ago and have been following with a fair degree of attentiveness since.  The circumstances are unusual.  My original aim was to move beyond my semi-mastery of the highly Latinate Renaissance language of Luis de Camões in order to be able to attempt some modern authors.  For years, teaching Chaucer I was focused on helping students look backward through their contemporary English to understand an earlier form of the language.  Linguistic time travel is usually retrograde in this sense.   Here the task has been very different—that of an Elizabethan schoolboy wanting to read Henry James or William Faulkner, perhaps.  This is a somewhat perverse approach, but it has pretty well worked—pretty well.  I deduce that most of the people using Duolingo are young folks, who are principally interested in achieving a fluency sufficient for the corporate offices and discos  of contemporary São Paulo.   Such students understandably might have a greater interest than do I in video games, running shoes, speed dating, electronic gismos and other such topics as loom large in the “literary” materials provided by the on-line course, a series of increasingly demanding mini-stories, very good, engaging, and amusing of their kind. 

 

            Needless to say these are not Henry James, but I think, perhaps arrogantly, they have been enough to send me timorously off on my own.  It is probably rare for an octogenarian literature professor to be making his first discovery of a really great novelist who has been dead for more than a century, but that is what I am doing.  By more or less general agreement the great Portuguese novelist of the nineteenth century was José Maria Eça de Queiroz (or Queirós after orthographic reform), who died at the age of fifty-five in the year 1900.  So with considerably less equipment than that possessed by a Brazilian elementary school student I have undertaken to read a novel by perhaps the greatest writer of a modern language currently spoken by about two hundred and fifty million people.   And what a novel!--The Relic (1887).

 

 

            The plot of The Relic is brilliant but pretty simple.  The financial future of a worldly young man named Teodorico Rasposo, an orphan descended from a once grand family, is riskily dependent upon a hoped-for inheritance from the elderly maiden aunt who has raised him and whose cloying, ostentatious, and formulaic Catholic piety he  hypocritically imitates in hopes of staying in her good graces.  In 1875, when he learns she may be contemplating leaving her fortune to a religious order, he takes a desperate action to impress her with his religiosity.  He undertakes a pilgrimage to Jerusalem on her behalf with the aim of securing a precious religious relic: in the event a DIY Crown of Thorns!  Eça de Queirós was himself a kind of Teodorico, not an orphan but a bastard child without notable worldly prospects

 

            There is a major tradition in early Spanish prose fiction of the picaresque novel.  The pícaro is a bad-boy, anti-hero type, a scamp, an attractive scoundrel whose outrageous escapades engage the reader in a kind of narrative schadenfreude.  The greater Teodorico’s ethical outrages, the greater the reader’s enjoyment.  Eça toys with this tradition and exploits its comic  potential, but his intellectual concerns are serious and contemporary.  Both as an artist and an “ideas man” he seems to me the peer of predecessors and contemporaries to whom he was sometimes considered even superior: Dickens, Zola, Flaubert, Tolstoy.

 

            The Relic is in a certain sense an anthology of narrative genres.  I have already mentioned its allegiance to Hispanic picaresque tradition. Eça’s comic range, however, includes the subtle as well as the thigh-slapping.  The satire, though mainly directed toward the stultifying conventions of Iberian society, reaches out in many directions.   Teodorico’s unforgettable travel companion, an erudite German archaeologist named Topsius, is one of those who would peep and botanize upon his mother’s grave and the pedantic quintessence of modern Teutonic science.  As the story of a pilgrimage to then exotic parts, it is also travel literature of a high order.  The Jerusalem it describes, as that depicted more famously by Pierre Loti some years later, is a sad and grubby Ottoman outpost in the unfriendly desert, little more than a watering hole and a souvenir factory.  The novel would be highly satisfying if it did no more than present the reader with several vivid character placed in convincing dynamic relationship, but it has and achieves higher ambitions.

 

            The extraordinary modernity of the thought of Eça de Queirós is revealed in an utterly unexpected passage of narrative experimentation at the center of the book.  He has to be described as a realist—as real as Flaubert, as real as Zola, and a good deal realer than Dickens.  But in the midst of the novel, at what one could expect to be the culmination of the “travel plot,” he suddenly abandons Thomas Hardy for Jules Verne.  One does not know whether to describe what happens at the center of The Relic as science fiction, time-travel, or authorial mental breakdown.  Suddenly the picaresque travelers find themselves, jokeless, in the Jerusalem of Jesus of Nazareth—in fact at the time that the capital trial of Jesus of Nazareth is to be conducted.  And just as the Jerusalem they visit is not that city lauded in the psalms and centuries of Christian hymnody, neither is the Jesus on trial the man-god of two thousand years of Christian theology.  It is at this point that The Relic became for many conventionally minded conservatives a deeply controversial work of blasphemy rather than simply a racy comedy.

 

            By the middle of the nineteenth century the countries of the Iberian peninsula were long since imperial has-beens, politically moribund, intellectually feeble, culturally stultified.  In both the Roman Church in its most reactionary forms continued to wield oppressive cultural power amid great wealth.  For many, little seemed changed since the time of Voltaire, who had memorably treated Portugal as a bastion of obscurantism, bigotry, and the Inquisition.  As they sadly surveyed their native wasteland, men like Eça de Queirós sought their inspiration abroad: Germany for science, France for art, England (where he lived for several years) for political liberalism.  They often adopted explicit anti-clerical positions.  I want to work on this more, but I already am pretty certain that he intended his extravagant, fictional life of Jesus to contribute to a scholarly tradition that was shaking traditional European  fideistic Christianity to its foundations.  This work had been done not so much by Darwin or natural scientists as by theologians.  In 1835 a German pastor, David Strauss, published his blockbuster The Life of Jesus Critically Examined.  This demythologizing biography, in its English translation by Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), had enormous influence in England.  In the Portuguese novelist’s youth the French historian and patristic scholar Ernst Renan published a yet more popular Life of Jesus in 1863.  And at least one like-minded radical Italian journalist, Petruccelli de la Gattina, had produced a model in fiction, a sizzling fantasy biography called The Memoirs of Judas (1867).

 

            My method of approach borrows from the Latin-teaching techniques of Renaissance Jesuits.  There is more than one English translation of The Relic, but the best is by a fine Hispanist, Aubrey Bell, who first published it in 1925.  I read this through carefully and keep it close at hand.  After that is the slow business of collated paragraph after paragraph, with frequent consultations of the Novo Michaelis Dicionário.  Duolingo has given me a surprising and probably false confidence about basic linguistic structure, but the lexicon is overwhelming.  Eça de Queirós has an enormous vocabulary, and his realism does not eschew ambitious lyrical moments.  His world is one of the horse-and-buggy (and the camel back) across a large ocean from the coffee shops and rock concerts of Rio.  But even with all the barriers of time and water it comes across fresher than The Pickwick Papers, fresher and a good deal funnier.  And it does take one’s mind off coronavirus.

José Maria Eça de Queirós, The Relic: a Novel, translated from the Portuguese by Aubrey F. G. Bell, preface by Harold Bloom

Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2012

ISBN 978-1-933227-35-1

 

 

 

 

 

 

All the Buzz

 

 

            I had little difficulty in choosing this week’s topic, which was in fact nearly inevitable.   It was all the buzz around here, and it had already been bugging me for several days when over yesterday’s breakfast table Joan excitedly pointed out a terrific article in the “Science Times.”  It had the possibly misleading title “Your Invitation to Party Like It’s 2004”.  She read most of it to me aloud.  The supposed partygoers were “seventeen year” or “Brood X” cicadas rising by their millions from the warming earth just as their parents had done in 2004 and their grandparents had done in 1987 and their great grandparents had in 1970—the first year in which the big red-eyed bugs had come to my attention.

 

            The past week around here was already one marked by certain events of parochial interest.  In addition to the attenuated excitement reported in my last post the period included my eighty-fifth birthday, a family gathering to observe it, and the first restaurant meal and first “in person” religious service (al fresco, of course) I had attended in living memory.  Several millions of flying, chirping, staggering, creepy-crawling, messily mating hyper-bugs showed up to help us all celebrate the easing of pandemic restrictions.  The “millions” is of course an extrapolation.  I can attest to no more than several thousand in the immediate vicinity of my front and back doors.  But as I write this within an enclosed room in an enclosed house I can hear the unceasing hum of  what must be a truly vast chorus.

 

            The story of the cicadas is the story of our greatest literature, though presumably a few hundred thousand years older than the invention of writing.  The first words of the great medieval romance of Tristan and Iseult are these: “My lords, if you would hear a high tale of love and of death, here is that of Tristan and Queen Iseult…”  If you don’t have Anglo-Norman romances at your fingertips, think of the “Liebestod”, the final movement of Wagner’s treatment of the same story.  Denis de Rougemont wrote a once famous book (Love in the Western World in its English translation) explaining the inescapable connections between eroticism and death, but you can save a lot of time and just look at the cicadas.  Love and death are about all they do, and that very briefly, if you don’t count seventeen years of preliminary and subterranean root-sucking.

 

            Gardeners may of course from time to time find evidences of their generally hidden existence.  Occasionally in turning over a spadeful of garden soil I have discovered a pasty colored wingless thing without visible carapace that you might at first mistake for an oversized slug.  These are called nymphs—very sexy name.  But Nature’s clock is ticking and when warm weather arrives you begin to see not merely the fledged cicadas but the little holes in the earth from which they have emerged.  They do fly, but rather awkwardly.  They appear to favor the creep,  and to judge from the hundreds that make their way to our new patio, they are partial to warm, flat stone.  But they are very thick as well in certain shrubs and, especially, in the trees in which they elect to deposit their eggs.  One such tree is the large old oak in our front yard.  I reported in an earlier post the planting of some young trees at Richard and Katie’s place in Kingwood.  We now fear that planting seedlings in the seventeenth year might not be such a great idea!  The egg-layers seek out “pencil sized” twigs according to the forestry gurus.

 

our oak tree

 

            The most evident traces of the cicadas, their abandoned semi-translucent shells or body-masks (exoskeletons), are rather ghoulish.  The insects land especially on vertical wooden surfaces such as tree trunks or wooden furniture or house sidings, wriggle free, and leave the exoskeletons behind, often in apparent defiance of gravity.  The strength of the grip of the tiny claws is nearly incredible.  I have repeatedly cleared the patio with a powerful leaf-blower, which has sometimes been insufficient  to dislodge them from their imperceptible purchase on the flat bluestone!  Then we accidentally learned a more drastic way of clearing the field.  On Sunday we had a belated birthday lunch on the patio, and my granddaughter Sophia and her boyfriend Raymond brought their dog Bambi.  Though the most friendly, mild-mannered, and unaggressive  thoroughbred you’ll ever encounter, Bambi really went to town on the cicadas.  I can only hope she didn’t have any tummy trouble on the ride home.  I believe the protein content of these flying worms is not insignificant, and I hear reports of a rise in their consumption by humans.  It probably would not take too many incidents to make a rise.  Once in the spring of 2004, at the X-bugs’ last appearance and shortly before my retirement, I was walking one day along the back of the building housing the Daily Princetonian.  A group of student journalists, many of whom I knew, were cavorting about; and one of them called me over.  He had a challenge for me.  Would I dare eat a cicada smeared in heavy chocolate sauce?  How could I lose face before my own students?  So I chomped down.  It was really good—tasted sort of like chocolate.  But one such feast is perhaps sufficient for a lifetime.

 

            According to the “Science Times,” their survival strategy is primitive but effective.  They simply reproduce in such extraordinary quantities that there are not in the world enough dogs, cats, rodents, birds, undergraduates, motor vehicles, or size twelve shoes to gobble up, smash, or squash any number of discernible statistical significance.  They do have some serious threats, not all of them fully understood.  There seems to be a mystery about their significant decline on Long Island, for example, though one probable cause is ecological change in the botany, especially an increase in invasive species.  In Princeton they have been more numerous in long settled parts of the town, where it has been many years since bulldozers dug out basements and house foundations.

 

 

            My first experience of the cicadas took place in 1970, when I was one of the ceremonial marshals in the Commencement ceremony.  These were revolutionary times—the Kent State massacre had taken place at the beginning of May—and the emphasis was on Revolution.  One of the honorary  degree recipients was Bob Dylan, then twenty-nine years old but long since a cultural superstar and anti-war “icon”.  There was a very fancy outdoor lunch thrown for the dignitaries on the sumptuous lawns of Lowry House, an elegant historical mansion used to house the President of the University.  Unfortunately the cicadas also found the ambiance agreeable.  The first course, already on the tables when guests took their seats, was a rich gazpacho.  Several of the bowls had been further enriched  with a drowned or flailing cicada.  One soldiers on.

 

 

            Bob Dylan later wrote a song about his experience at Princeton.  It is called “Day of the Locusts”—errant from the entomological point view, but spiritually apt in other respects.  The song speaks of “the man standin’ next to me” whose “head was exploding” with potentially messy results for the narrator.  This is what we call poetic license.  To the degree it is possible to make historical identifications of products of the poetic imagination, this man was Neil Rudenstine,a senior administrator and the future President of Harvard.  It would in fact be hard to find a less flapable or explosive fellow.  Dylan is a genius and a great poet, but even Homer nods and “Day of the Locusts” is not “Blowin’ in the Wind”.  It is, however, the only work of a great artist for which I was present at the birth, and thus has a special significance for me.  Poor Bob Dylan.  Our birthdays are only four days apart, and I am ahead of him by a mere five years.  We were lucky enough to be able to have lunch on my actual birthday with a dear old friend, Dale Allen, of the Great Class of 1970.  Dale is a real naturalist and ecologist who spent his career with the Trust for Public Land in his native Florida.  He and his wife Karen had come up to New Jersey to visit some of her relatives, to bike around on a few interesting trails, and—of apparently equal importance—to see the cicadas.  As one of the graduates of 1970, he remembered both his classmate Bob Dylan and the X-brood of cicadas vividly.