The Harvard Game

                                                    Duhhhh...
 

            The final weeks of Indian Summer have seemed particularly mellow this year, and I have enjoyed one particular aspect of them in a special way.  I make no claim to being a serious “sports fan”, but I continue to enjoy and admire certain aspects of Ivy League intercollegiate competitions.  Football is very big business in this country, and far too big a business in American universities and colleges.  There is something truly grand about American collegiate football.  My teaching career began at the University of Wisconsin, and I acknowledge what one must call the cultural awesomeness of a Big Ten Saturday afternoon.  Huge crowds, parking mayhem, industrial-sized marching bands in flashy uniforms, grotesque operatic renditions of the “Star-Spangled Banner”.  That is the model that defines professional football, as well, and seems to be the ambition of half the country’s high schools.  Once the dynamism of the American commercial spirit invades an institution, there is no turning back.  I never actually attended a Wisconsin game; but  you hardly needed to be at the stadium to know what was happening.  The whole city of Madison shook to the roaring of the crowd.  But here in the old Ivy League there are still some vestiges—and they are only that, vestiges—of the genuinely amateur and gentlemanly ambiance in which the collegiate sport was born.  As is well known the first ever recorded football game in this country was played on November 6, 1869, between teams from Rutgers and Princeton.  Handlebar moustaches are no longer the vibe, but it’s not quite the Dallas cheerleaders either. 

 

            It was probably about forty years ago that I served briefly on the university’s Committee on Athletics.  This was hardly a heavy assignment, and it had a great perk in the option to purchase season seats on the fifty-yard line.  So I secured two, and have renewed them every year since.  We are not talking a Notre Dame VIP box here.  A ticket costs about as much as a stadium hot dog, and may well taste better, though I have not run a test.  I used to make it to a game or two each year.  Since retiring I’ve done a little better, though the whole program was shut down for Covid.  In our socially constrained world, I make a bit of a thing of it.  The walk to the arena from my house is a tiny bit over a mile, approaching my huffing and puffing limit these days, especially when packing a nice lunch and a book or two in a cloth bag, as I like to do.  We used to have a small gang of retired faculty sitting together, but that play has been broken up by one thing or another, the main thing being the Grim Reaper.  I am now just another fish in the sea of students and alumni.

 

            If in retrospect the Harvard-Princeton game was declared to be the “game of the week” by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, as it in fact was, the explanation is to be sought in the curiosity of the play rather than in its uniformly high quality.  Princeton began bravely but ingloriously with a self-inflicted wound—a lengthy forward pass thrown with absolute precision to a Harvard defender.  But honors were pretty much even on this kind of thing, making for an exciting and suspenseful struggle in which, for a time, neither team seemed to be able to score a touchdown.  Would it be a duel of field-goal kickers?   After all there is presumably some reason the game is called football.

 

            The Princeton stadium has something of the sol y sombra features of a Spanish bullring.  The home team (west) seats grow ever cooler and shadier as the afternoon progresses, the visitors’ (east) side ever more bright and sunny.  So I did what I sometimes do on chilly game days—I moved over to the corner of the visitors’ side during the Covid-abbreviated halftime high jinx.  This would allow a quick exit when the game ended and warm sunshine until then.  There were maybe twenty of us scattered among a half acre of empty seats. I could not have known that my excellent view of the north end zone—not usually considered a desirable vantage point—would on this occasion be decreed by fate to allow me a superb view of all the important action.

 

            I forgive myself for not knowing exactly what happened from this point in the game, because as it turns out the officials in charge of it didn’t know either.  But early in the fourth quarter there was a sign from Heaven registered on the electronic scoreboard.  With thirteen minutes and thirteen seconds remaining in the fourth quarter, Harvard scored its single touchdown, evening the game score at thirteen to thirteen.  Now, that is a lot of thirteens, and it should have been enough to make everybody happy if wary.  When the score was still thirteen to thirteen at the end of four quarters, it should have been a tie. 

 

            My view of American popular sports harks back to a Golden Age around 1950.  But there are all these new rules, designed to pander to fans requiring non-stop drama and impatient with all ambiguity.   First, they sissified  baseball by coming up with the nutty notion of a “designated batter”.  The sudden death overtime innovations in football are even worse.  The tied teams compete, rapid fire, in simulating a post-touchdown conversion until one of them wins.  Now all gladiatorial combat is required to end in death, and as quickly as possible, since the fans still may have a long drive ahead of them.  My view is that sometimes there really is such a thing as a tied game between equally matched adversaries, a result bringing honor to two teams and disgrace to neither.  This truth, which is recognized in chess, the supreme game of all games, ought to continue to be recognized in football.  In short, I do not like these innovations, and yes, I know the “lightbulb joke” on this topic—a joke obviously easily adapted to any institution of the teller’s choosing.  How many Princetonians does it take to change a lightbulb?  The answer is of course three.  It takes one guy to change the lightbulb and two others to lament about how much better the old lightbulb had been.  But if you absolutely insist on new bulbs, make sure they are bright ones.

 

            Five, yes five overtime periods now played out at the goal line just beneath me.  Presumably some folks in the stadium knew what was happening, but I was not among them.  The decibel level of the shouting drowned out the PA system.  It was all quite satisfactory from the partisan Princeton point of view.  So far as I could tell. Harvard kept making winning plays only to have the referees decide, upon mature consideration, that they had in fact not won.  Harvard made a good kick.  Princeton made a good kick.  Then Harvard won again, except that somebody failed to notice that the Princeton coach had called for a time-out.  When the call was revised, the Harvard coach threw a hissy-fit—a bit of drama in itself worth the price of admission.  He threw his cap to the ground.  He stamped his little feet.  Princeton completed an end zone pass.  A Princeton defender knocked away a Harvard pass that would have evened the score.  I had no idea that the game was over, but a couple hundred Princeton fans concluded that it was and rushed onto the field in a victory frenzy.  Final score: Princeton, 18; Harvard, 16.  I began my bemused walk home.  I presume that large, fuming buses full of large, fuming football players, headed north on the New Jersey Turnpike in the direction of New England.  A day or so later Ivy League officials, with Princeton now at the league’s top,  actually re-read their new rules and discovered that under prevailing circumstances the crucial time-out had been inadmissible.  Oops, their  bad.  One for the books, but by that time the book had already been printed.  The stuff of legends.

 

 

Tough Nut to Crack

 

 

the shagbark

            The hardwood forest of Appalachia extends westward across the Mississippi in the deep woods of the Ozarks in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas where I lived long ago in what seems to me now almost another life in another world.  It was a world of trees.  The deep woods displayed a large variety of species.  Most prominent were various inferior oaks, and especially gnarly and knotty pin oaks, good for little more than firewood; but there were in those days still to be found here or there a few magnificent remnants of the old growth.  There was still a good deal of ash, and other trees of beautiful shape.  When it came to real hard wood, however, I always thought of the hickories.  This was before the era of the chain saw, and doing battle with a hickory from one end of a cross-cut was an Olympic event.  My uncle’s barn was mainly used as a hayloft, but one aisle of it was given over to the kind of heavy metal bric-a-brac that goes unsold at farm auctions, and to several piles of “special” lumber being saved indefinitely for “special” projects that somehow never came to fruition.  The collection included a stack of tall, thick hickory posts that had been curing since before the year of my birth and had the weight of stone and the feel of steel.

            It is the hardness of hickory wood that makes it so good for baseball bats and tool handles.  In olden days it was used ox yokes and barrel staves.  Andrew Jackson came by the moniker “Old Hickory” for personality traits not all of us would admire.  Its use in infantile chastisement is remembered in several relics of our popular culture, such as—

            School days, school days

            Dear old golden rule days.

            Readin’ and ‘ritin’ and ‘rithmetic,

            Taught to the tune of the hickory stick…

                                                                                    though in my parts usually called a hickory switch.

            There are many varieties of hickory (family carya), all of which so far as I know produce edible nuts.  The whole family of carya are first cousins to the Juglandaceae (walnuts).  The hickory nut with which you are probably most familiar is the pecan.  It is native to the American South, where it has been developed as a cultivated crop.  However the seed produced by the shagbark hickory (the carya ovata) has a deliciousness all of its own.*  That is the good news.  The bad news is that it is a herculean task to get the meat out of the shells.  The Ozark natives of my youth—folks who would eat with relish nearly anything edible that could be shot, trapped, hooked, plucked, picked, gathered, or simply found dragged in by the cat—mainly regarded the hickory nut as more work than it was worth.  But of course they were not retired professors with time on their hands.

 outer shells

            There are many varieties of hickories, and some variants among the shagbarks themselves, that are pretty common in the backwoods in many parts of America, including suburban Mercer County, NJ.  About four years ago I wrote an essay about harvesting local black walnuts.  But somehow the hickory nut did not re-impress itself on my consciousness until fall arrived this year when, on one of my walks around lake and canal towpath I was quite literally struck by one of them in its descent.  Sir Isaac Newton is supposed to have been seized with a Great Idea on a similar occasion.  I was seized by a small one.  Why should I not start gathering a few hickory nuts on my frequent constitutionals? 

            The real woods around here must be opulent in nut trees.  Unfortunately, I am rather unsteady on my feet these days.  I don’t mind going into real woods if someone else is with me.  My son Richard and I have pursued chanterelles together over some very iffy terrain.  But a serious fall far from the beaten path might prove injurious to my remaining health, so that on long solo walks I need to follow a more or less established footpath with a more or less even and visible track.  Even with this drastic restriction though, I am finding a bountiful nut harvest, some of it even along paved roads.  So I trudge along, cane in one hand and nut bag in the other.  It appears that the effect this sight has on anyone who chances to see me is roughly that inspired by the samphire gatherer in King Lear.  (“Dreadful trade,” says Edgar.)

            The nuts of the varying species vary in size and construction, and I will take any that look promising or even possible; but the best and most numerous are the shagbarks.  The shagbark, like its black walnut cousin, has a double shell.  You can see the construction in some photographs taken this week.  The outer shell, which offers a kind of preliminary protection, is roughly spherical and about an inch and a half to two inches in diameter. Its thickness, though variable, is roughly that of a walnut and has a similar sturdiness, something like thick cork. The color on the tree is a garish green, but this fairly soon turns brown or blackish as it lies on the ground.  The ball is seamed in quadrants that, like postage stamps in a perforated sheet, are fairly begging to be dismantled.  Many nuts, especially those falling on hard earth from a considerable height, crack apart when they hit the ground.  One commonly finds the pristine nuts scattered loose beneath their tree.  Even those with outer shells that do not self-destruct present no serious resistance to rodent teeth.  But then the real fun begins.  The small, lightish-brown inner shell, which guards the meat, is the original tough nut to crack.  What else could you expect from the toughest wood in the forest?

 inner shells

            The inner shell has roughly the contours of a walnut, only about half the size or smaller, meaning that the meat of the interior is even more tightly constrained and difficult to break free of its amazingly strong latticed carapace.  The shell is nearly invincible.  It will explode beneath a hammer blow, but only one so forceful as to smash the edible part of the nut to smithereens in the process.  Stout pliers, of which the only nutcracker I have is a feeble derivative, do nothing.  Fortunately, I do have one tool that does work: an old cast iron book press intended for use in bookbinding.  “Who breaks a butterfly upon the wheel?” asks Pope; and the answer is that I do.

            Free food!  I admit that were you to cost out my labor at minimum wage, hickory meat would probably cost out at roughly seventy-five dollars an ounce.  I can’t be sure because I haven’t gotten my first ounce yet.  I keep eating it as I go.  But as I have tried to remind my spouse, who thinks I am nuts to engage in the enterprise, what is important here is to remember that it is the journey, not the destination.  I wonder if there is any good samphire gathering to be had in these parts.  In fact, I wonder what samphire is.

*I am no botanist.  For technical terms I rely on a book indispensable to anyone interested in Ozark flora: Julian A. Steyermark’s Flora of Missouri (Iowa State University Press, 1963.)

Whose Pronouns?

 

                                   Lady Grammatica from the Hortus Deliciarum

 

            Professor John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University, is one of the more recent and more engaging arrivals to the Op-Ed page of the New York Times.  While his interests are not confined to linguistic topics, his treatment of them has a refreshing precision within the context of the increasingly imprecise prose of the paper’s news stories.  McWhorter’s essay is called “In Praise of New Pronouns”.  Its principal subject is the growing use of the plural pronouns they, them, and their with singular subjects.  This development is somewhat similar to the long-established colloquial use of the second person as an indeterminate.  “To make an omelet, you take your eggs and…”  The they/them phenomenon is of course related to heightened social sensitivities concerning transgendered persons, a subject that has in a relatively short time become prominent and controversial.  McWhorter makes the point that it is the natural tendency of language to change, and he finds this change helpful.  I would point out that much of linguistic change is as mysterious as it is constant.  Lexical change is the easier part to grasp.  New words are constantly being added by invention or taken on permanent loan from other languages.  Our language in particular owes a great deal to its magpie tendencies.  American English has been as generous and welcoming as our immigration policies.  Word meanings mutate, expand, fall away.  Some words disappear altogether.  Changes in grammatical usage, generally gradual, are also constant.  Most mysterious of all is phonological change—that is, changes in the pronunciation of the spoken language.  Although we lack such evidence as modern sound recording can now ensure, we are pretty confident that we have reconstructed the English sounds of five hundred and a thousand years ago.  The differences are, to put it mildly, dramatic.  If we know some of the what of phonological change, the why remains largely speculative guess work.  But trying to understand linguistic change is different from trying to coerce it.

 

            Monday’s paper had several letters responding to McWhorter’s column, which garnered general praise if not uniform agreement.  I hope it is possible to continue to talk about this topic in a rational and courteous way, as he does.  People generally seek to accommodate the reasonable desires of their neighbors and fellow citizens, and I would hope to do so on an individual basis whenever possible.  But the radical impositions suddenly imposed by fiat upon long established languages—such as those imposed on French by the Jacobins or on Russian by the Bolsheviks—are not encouraging models.  It is worth thinking about.  Note in the first place that it is by no means all pronouns that are proving problematic.  Debaters often say that while their opponents are allowed to have their own opinions, they cannot claim their own facts.  The “pronoun controversy” is not unrelated to the opinion/fact calculus.  That is, are pronouns more along the lines of facts, or of opinions?  When people announce “their” pronouns, it is a very limited pronominal repertory, only the personal pronouns, and not even all of them.  The first-person pronouns enjoy a relative clarity and a relative freedom from controversy.  Even people who are often of two minds about things are likely to use the first person singular when speaking of themselves.  Exceptions are rare and reserved for a few very special cases.  The Queen of England gets a royal plural (“We are not amused”), and perhaps also people suffering from dissociative identity disorder (DID), previously known as multiple personality disorder (MPD)—but only if in possession of the appropriate form signed and notarized, from his/her/their shrink.  I have from experience discovered one other exception: health-care workers involved with geriatrics.  “Time for our bath”.

 

            What all the fuss is about is the third person singular forms of the gendered personal pronouns: he and she.  These were pretty mysterious words long before the invention of gender theory.  What its speakers have called “English” is a very old language that has undergone such radical mutations that its earliest surviving written texts are unintelligible to all native English-speakers but a few experts who have made a special study of them.  Old English (roughly the state of the language before the Norman Invasion at the end of the eleventh century) was highly inflected, maintained grammatical gender in its nouns, and had a quite complex verbal system.  The nominative third-person singular pronominal forms were he (masculine), heo (feminine), and hit (neuter).  Where, then, did she come from?  That is actually a bit of a mystery.  If you are into Good Reads, I recommend the article “she” in the Oxford English Dictionary.  I lean to the belief that it was through influence from the definite article (se, masculine; seo, feminine).  In the personal pronouns the s appears only in the feminine nominative.  She has her own pronoun, as he has his.  But perhaps I am influenced by my Portuguese Duolingo course.  In Portuguese the gendered definite articles are in certain circumstances used to mean her, him, or them as well.

 

            Actually, most of us habitually do choose some of our own pronouns, and without much comment from others.  As an English professor the ones I have found most  embattled are the relative pronouns: who, whom, whose, which, and that.  There may still be some general agreement concerning the use of who and whom at the theoretical level if not in general speech practice. but that and which seem to be losing the grammatical roles once assigned to them.  Many influences led me to my life’s work, but two of them were public school teachers, one in Taft CA and the other in Mount Pleasant TX, who loved the English language and the grammatical conventions of those who spoke and wrote it well.  As late as the 1950s one of those conventions was to be pretty religious about using that when introducing restrictive clauses and which when introducing non-restrictive clauses.  But the rule, which is generally useful, is not one that commands blind obedience.  You get the idea.  These days most of us do pick and choose more or less as we please.

 

            But some who revel in breaking free of the restraints of grammatical correctness want us to succumb to the shackles of political correctness.  Language must serve many functions, but one of the most vital is to talk about the empirical world as we actually experience it.  There are limits to the extent that the social experience of the centuries can be coerced or abolished.  Hence I speak of and enjoy a beautiful sunrise or sunset.  Even I have enough elementary astronomy to know that the description of observed reality is not the same as a scientific one.  But linguistic innovation leading to manifest absurdity is of limited utility.

           

            Imagine that you are the sole witness to a crime.  You saw a violent incident on the street.  Two people seemed to be arguing.  One of them pulled out a gun and shot the other one to death.  You are absolutely confident in what you saw, and that you would be able to help the police identify the killer.  In the police investigation, the following dialogue ensues.

            Police Investigator: Can you describe the perpetrator?

            Witness: Yes, about six four, two hundred and twenty-five pounds, three-piece suit, receding hairline and thin, graying hair, probably about fifty years old.  Caucasian.

            Police Investigator: Man or woman?

            Witness: Certainly.

            Police Investigator: No, I mean was it a man or a woman?

            Witness: Dunno.  It all happened so fast I didn’t have time to ask for their pronouns.

It is an old legal adage, or at least used to be, that hard cases make bad law.  That is perhaps why linguistic change has, on the whole, been slow and consensual, rarely abandoning common sense.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Lot of Parking

  

 

            Now that I get out and about a bit more, I begin to appreciate the extent to which my old employer, Princeton University, has continued to be on the move despite the constraints of the pandemic.  We aren’t waiting on any infrastructure bill.  Bulldozers everywhere pave the way for new voyages of restless minds or, in some instances, simply pave the way.  One of the most profound educational insights ever uttered—usually if uncertainly attributed to Robert Hutchens, Clark Kerr or some other legendary prexy of the last century—involves the disparate priorities of major stakeholder groups within a university.  “All the undergraduates are interested in is sex.  All the alumni are interested in is football.  The faculty are chiefly interested in parking.”  You see, there is a reason those people make the big bucks: educational vision.

            I joined the faculty here in 1965, and in the years since, and particularly during the years since my retirement in 2006, there are many noticeable signs of expansion: more buildings, more gazillion-dollar machines required by Big Science, more faculty, more programs and research centers, and many more administrators.  There is a carefully measured and integrated expansion of the student body underway.  I think I have figured out the algorithm behind it.  For each additional five students you need one new dean.  For each fifty new students you need one new Vice President for Whatever.  And of course all these people, and the necessary additional new ancillary staff bobbing in their wake, do need somewhere to park.  This is a good news/bad news sort of situation, and of course the two are inextricably entwined.  I’ll begin with the good news, because it is just across the street from my house.

            A couple of years ago I wrote  about what I call Butler Park, several acres immediately across the street and until a few years ago the site of an ancient housing project for graduate students dating from the 1940s.  Though all the houses were removed, the grid of streets was left untouched, and can still be found on Google Maps, which have not yet caught up with the university architects.  The housing was originally intended for married veterans, and most of the streets were named for top WW2 brass.  (Look, e.g., for King Street, Princeton NJ—Ernest King, of course, Chief of Naval Operations—but Devereux, Halsey, or Eisenhower will also get you there).  Butler Park is now a great place for a gentle walk, the general vibe being something like walking though a long decayed and romantically overgrown archaeological site or a Claude Lorraine painting.

            Meanwhile, the campus parking crisis had become acute.  The most dramatic of various steps taken to address it was to construct another multi-storey parking garage.  The rub here was that the site chosen for this new building was already a heavily used parking lot.  This meant that until new construction was completed there would be a significant net loss of parking spaces available.  Sometimes you must be cruel to be kind, but  something would have to be done on a temporary basis.  And not too far away the old Butler tract still had its grid of war-hero blacktopped streets, admittedly decaying and sprouting weed patches, along which cars had once been parked and along which even more could be parked with a little ingenuity.  A couple of weeks of quickie road repair, including the conspicuous delineation of hundreds of parking spots in bright white fresh paint, and the job was done!  We couldn’t even mumble, “Not in my back yard,” as it is in our front yards.

           
            Though I used to walk to work each day, it’s a good half hour walk.  There is no denying that this is remote parking.  No status symbol is more potent in the American university than one’s parking spot, and to be relegated to such an obscure assignment is instantly to be rendered low man on the totem pole.  It is an inconvenience with a tinge of insult, and the Vice President for Something or Other has done her best to palliate its impact on staff morale.  Very frequent mini-shuttles speed you to campus from this temporary lot.  In the morning hours you never have to wait more than seven minutes.  Even so, seven whole minutes?  Another vice-presidential brain-wave addresses this problem.  Next to the principal shuttle stop the University has parked for the duration a large, visually conspicuous Food Services truck under the supervision, during morning hours, of an amiable and experienced Food Services professional.  You can sweeten your potential seven-minute wait with a cup of coffee and a pastry (doughnut, cherry Danish, cheese turnover, or bran muffin on some kind of rota).  And it’s free!  Future potential is bright, but I have so far actually used the shuttle only twice.  On most days, however, I have been happy to consume a coffee and Danish, as my habitual long morning walk ends quite near the food truck.  So far as I can tell, no small print prohibits my initiative.  I estimate the goods and services offered by the Tiger Truck at maybe five bucks, max.  And that’s on the inflated scale devised by Starbucks and Gulf pirates.  My most recent trip on the free shuttle was to get a free flu shot offered by my former employers followed by a free chocolate donut.  The ease with which these mini-entitlements could buy my approval perhaps augurs the fate of a pending political package of three trillion in freebies.

 

            That’s the good news such as it is.  What, then, is the bad?  I fear it is the new parking facility itself.  It will not be the ugliest building of the year.  Sometimes you have to settle for an honorable mention.  But it is huge, brutal, and looming.  Many more people than will ever park in it will have to look at it.  It will be the landmark of the southeast corner of the campus.  This is as it must be.  There is no room here for my romantic aesthetics.  The University is responding to an urgent need.  Form follows function, and the function here is to service our national thralldom to the internal combustion engine.  But the parking garage is in a very prominent place.  I cannot complain with the philosopher Joni Mitchell that they paved paradise to put up it up.  That was done years ago by the folks who built the macadam-surfaced lot from which the new multi-tiered expansion is rising.  It is very much to the institution’s credit that its new construction includes no plans for a supplementary pink hotel, though  it is perhaps too bad that we have lost the old Fitzrandolph Observatory.   But that little edifice was already an eyesore, a decrepit relic of the Little Science of the 1930s.  Per aspera ad astra, indeed.  I think that’s supposed to mean Through hardships to the stars!  Sometimes hardtop has to do.

 

Carleton Beals and Populism

Carleton Beals

There are several ways of meeting people quite apart from shaking hands.  You can develop a sense of knowing a speaker, a musician, an actor whom you have never met and probably never will meet in the flesh.  One of my favorite ways of meeting people is through books.  That is how I just got to know Carleton Beals (1893-1979) better.  Beals was a journalist, popular historian, and radical political activist with a special expertise in Latin America, and we first “met” around 2008 when I was working on some political writers of the later twentieth century.  Our intermediary was Leon Trotsky.  By the end of the 1930s Trotsky, who had been exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929, was unequivocally at the top of Stalin’s hit list.  The master fiction of the Moscow Show Trials of 1936 and 1938 was that Trotsky had been at the center of a vast conspiracy to overthrow Communism in Russia.  The trials, which provided the background for Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon, were Stalin’s means of destroying all real or potential rivals.  Though the charges against the Old Bolsheviks were fantastic, Stalin was sure that western radical intellectuals “would swallow the whole thing,” as he put it. 

 

            In this view he was largely but by no means entirely correct.  I will say parenthetically that while Trotsky had of course been a  mass murderer too, his penny-ante efforts in this field were so far outstripped by Stalin that he could seem a semi-saint to that comparatively small group of internationalist Marxist true believers who broke with the Red Tsar.  Thus “Trotskyism” was much more than a mere annoyance to Stalin.  It was a potential challenge to his hegemonic ambitions.  By now the exiled Trotsky was living in Mexico, where he was in due course assassinated by an NKVD agent, in August of 1940.  But before that happened, while the Spanish Civil War was still raging, a group of anti-Stalinist leftists had put the Moscow Trials themselves on trial in a propaganda coup.  A “People’s Tribunal” went to Mexico to investigate Trotsky’s alleged treason against Socialism.  The tribunal interrogated Trotsky at length and, after a good deal of mock legal deliberation, declared him not guilty.  The head of this blue-ribbon tribunal was the eminent, widely respected American intellectual and educational guru John Dewey.  Other members had been chosen for their expert knowledge of international progressive and revolutionary movements.  One of them was Carleton Beals, a journalist-adventurer who was neither a Stalinist nor a Trotskyite or indeed any kind of Marxist at all.  He was a Populist who had established himself as an expert on the Mexican Revolution and on radical movements in Latin America generally.  But he had felt moved to resign from the tribunal after only a few meetings.  His colleagues had been offended by the “antagonistic” questions he had been putting to Trotsky.  He had asked him, specifically, whether there had been any attempted Bolshevik meddling in Mexican politics in the 1920s.  That seemed a fair question to put to the Apostle of World Revolution, but it was not appreciated  by Trotskyites.

 

            What an interesting guy, I thought.  But I forgot all about him until, in my hopeless quest to understand what has been going on in our own American politics in the previous and current presidential administrations, I stumbled upon one of Beals’s many books roughly forty years after its author’s death.  It is called The Great Revolt and Its Leaders: The history of popular American uprisings in the 1890’s.*  Few book titles are more precise in their identification of an author’s subject matter.

 

            The book, though breezily written and journalistic in its temper, is based in extensive research.  Its broad subject is Populism.  The terms Populism and populist are common enough in current journalism, but used today with such imprecision as to render them functionally useless except as vague markers of elitist disapproval.  But around 1900 Populism was a thing, a real political party, the animating force behind important thinkers and writers, the vital spirit of influential newspapers, a vibrant expression of a genuine though now nearly vanished interpretation of the American democratic ideal.  History is replete with sad admonitions, but it also presents us with the clear evidence, if only we will accept it, of the dramatic amelioration of national and world problems which in the past rendered our ancestors virtually helpless.  During the last few months serious authors have claimed that the political divisiveness of Americans is at an all-time high, that the gap between rich and poor has never been greater, that racial injustice and antagonism could hardly be worse, and that juggernaut corporations exercise upon us a uniquely novel and malign tyranny we are incapable of resisting.  If you believe any of these things, as I myself have been wont to do, I suggest you read The Great Revolt.

 

            Beals was born in Medicine Lodge, Kansas, in 1893.  His father was the editor of a leading Populist newspaper.  His grandmother was the celebrated feminist warrior against alcohol, Carrie Nation.  He summarizes his book thus: “The middle western and southern revolt that came to a head out on the plains in the grim gay 1890’s was the last gasp of the dying frontier.  Two great systems—frontier America with its free lands and egalitarian democracy, and the new industrialization with its private property and the exploitation of the individual—met and clashed.”  It is “the story of that paradoxical grass-roots revolt of a dying agricultural system.”

 

            Beals is a great story-teller, and his stories center in the remarkable personalities of those he identifies as the “leaders” of the varied attempts to defend or restore the ideals of individual agency and egalitarianism they believed to be the essence of the early republic.  Their efforts ranged from the formation of farmers’ unions, to warfare against the gold standard, to quixotic political action such as that of Coxey’s Army, an early paradigm of the “march on Washington”.  Beals’s subjects include important thinkers like Henry George, author of Progress and Poverty, powerful if now neglected writers like Hamlin Garlin, but also a wide range of politicians, including some whose bombast often exceeded their effectiveness, such as William Jennings Bryan.  Mostly they were themselves men and women inured by years of brutal physical labor.  They were fighting against the mighty power of the trusts and the combinations, the railroads, unscrupulous land speculators, the industrial extractors of oil and mineral wealth, an increasingly rapacious “financial industry,” and the capricious cruelties of natural agricultural disasters.  Giants in the earth, indeed!  It is the special gift of certain writers to be able to honor the comedy that resides within the tragicomedy of history without devaluing the tragedy.  Carleton Beals was of their number.

 

 

*Carleton Beals, The Great Revolt and Its Leaders: The history of popular American uprisings in the 1890’s (New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1968), pp. 367.

 

Arc-en-Ciel

 

 

            We returned to America last Friday, landing at Newark just before 5:30 and arriving home shortly after darkness had fallen.  To the extent I had thought about it at all, I suppose my intention would have been to pursue a blog topic other than our French idyll.  I did have a few possibilities in hand, but the tenor of our final two days in Salernes, and particularly an allegorical experience on the Thursday following my last posting, has made me change my mind.

             By the very end the wonderful house party had been reduced to Joan, me, and our host Andrew.  The general sense of an impending ending was heightened by the unusual weather on Thursday.  The day was heavy with clouds, and there were occasional faint sprinkles.  The gloom was exacerbated by a  disconcerting experience of the day before—the day, in fact, when I published the previous post.  In order to board an airplane we were required to present evidence of negative results on a very recent Covid test.  Many French pharmacies offer the tests—free for French citizens with a carte vitale (national health insurance card) and twenty-five euros for visitors without one—and we had scheduled ours for Wednesday afternoon.  But there had been a goof-up in the scheduled time (made by me), and when we got to the town square about 4:30 I was told that we had missed our appointment, probably for everything and probably forever.  Nowhere is the bureaucratic spirit more vibrant than in France.  And as a general rule of thumb the less actual power possessed by the bureaucrat, the more rigorously is that power imposed.  But I threw myself upon the mercy of the pharmacological court, who at length allowed that, absolutely exceptionnellement, if we returned in an hour, at a time reserved exclusivement for vaccinations, we could get a Covid test.  This involved another imposition on our host, who had to drive us back and forth again, a short distance but still a drag.  When we showed up, nobody was being vaccinated, though one other woman did get a Covid test, as did we too.  That was the entire commerce of the “clinic hour”.  But since it was so late in the day, it would be impossible for us to get certified results until the next day, the very eve of our departure.   That would be cutting things a bit fine.  We were certain that we were Covid-free, but….

            By the time we got back to the pharmacy on Thursday afternoon, a light rain had begun.  The moment I entered the building the sprinkle transformed to monsoon.   Our host later told us that not in thirty years had he seen such a local cloudburst.  It took me only five minutes to negotiate the printing of our certificates.  I had assumed the findings would be negative, and they were.  But by now I was a prisoner in the Pharmacie du Cour, which was toward the sloping bottom of the town square.  Water at least four inches high was cascading down the street.  In places it was already flooding the sidewalk.  The storm drains, if there were any, were clearly overwhelmed.  I had no hope of exiting without being drenched.  The meteorological enormity was of such a scale as to temper the attitude even of the resident bureaucrat.  He pressed me to stay until the inundation subsided.  His assistant found an envelope that might offer some protection to our precious certificates.  I did eventually make it to my host’s car, the roaring flood halfway up its tires.  I felt a bit like a latter-day Jean Valjean in the Bagne at Toulon.   

  

         Andrew then gingerly drove to the higher ground of the road back to his house.  Driving even a short distance in that downpour was a significant feat, but he effected a safe return.  Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the deluge ceased entirely.  We had our necessary travel document, but the blackened sky and my soaked shoes, which would present a challenge in packing my suitcase, indeed the general effect of the sudden gloom of the violent storm altogether,  were hardly auspicious omens for our last hours of holiday.  But then a little miracle cheered us up.  A few rays from the sinking sun pierced the cloud cover, and in the dark, distant view looking down from the verandah, the changing beauty of which we had been admiring all week, there appeared the most extraordinary rainbow I can remember seeing in my long lifetime.  For a few moments I was sure that I could discern all seven of its colors.  I had not too long before been instructed in their sequence by my seven-year-old granddaughter Hazel, who has them memorized: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.

            Now the rainbow, as treated in the myth of Noah’s flood, is among the most prominent of biblical “signs”.  I was a little older than Hazel when I realized with a start that the bow part of rainbow alluded to the curved shape of the ancient archer’s weapon, an archer being a warrior armed with a flexible wooden arcus (arc in French).  I thought it pretty cool that the Flood story featured both a k-ark and a c-arc.  A happy philological accident.  The story of Noah’s flood, and its reflex of the drowning of the Egyptian army in the Red Sea, have a long and rich history in the development of Christian iconography.  In our literature the range runs at least from Dante’s Divine Comedy to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time.*

            Friday turned out to be a very long travel day.  It started at 8:30 in the morning, local time, when the car for the airport picked us up.  Only fifteen hours later did we touch down in Newark.  What we had signed up for as a direct flight from Nice to Newark had been altered by the carrier, La Compagnie.  Their pilot first flew to Paris to take on more passengers.  We didn’t have to change planes; but the flight to Orly and the ground time spent there did considerably prolong the trip.  It also added a bit of excitement and mystery.  Before the additional passengers were allowed to board, a squad of very serious policemen, at least five or six, came in and conducted a thorough and aggressive search.  Its object was not clear, but it appeared to be a what rather than a who.  They pretty well ransacked the overhead storage lockers and the interstices of the bed-like Business Class seats.  I cannot really sleep on airplanes, but I can drowse anywhere.  When I do so my mind often fills itself with visual images, as though in a slide show or an art history lecture.  One image in particular kept recurring: a bright rainbow illuminating a French hillside and the dark sky above it.

 

 

*While I was drafting this little essay the sad news of the death of an old friend and colleague, Albert Raboteau, reached me.  Al was a distinguished professor of religious studies and the one-time Dean of the Graduate School here.  Among his other important scholarly work is his remarkable book A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History, which in part deals with the early African-American interpretation of the relevant biblical texts mentioned here.  Requiescat in pacem.

 

             

Salernes

         

In premeditating the possibility of posting a blog essay from a rural hideout in southern France, I had anticipated imaginary difficulties of a technical kind.  Nothing of the sort has arrived, but I do face a problem of a different kind—at least if I want to deal with a contemporary personal situation.  For what has made the past week so delightful for us—slow-paced relaxation beneath monotonously sunny skies, featuring a lot of gab with old friends—is not in itself a topic with a lot of intrinsic narrative pull for the general reader.  I suppose I had vaguely imagined the possibility of a sophisticated journalistic piece of comparative pandemicology in which I delineated the prevailing but subtly differentiated ways in which the Covid crisis is affecting two modern, industrialized nations one on either side of the Atlantic.

 

            That would involve actually knowing something about those things of course.  Since the principal strategy we have adopted, in common with most other sensible people, is to avoid all possible empirical experience of Covid, I actually know very little about the granular scene in America and virtually nothing about it here in Provence, where we have been hiding away from it, and most other things, on principle.  However it is possible to conduct some primitive research even from the hermetically sealed interior of a limousine speeding along the highways.  On our way from Nice to Salernes we saw a good deal of graffiti, especially in and around Draguignan, encouraging us to “de-mask” and to recognize vaccination for the sinister violation of our liberty that it really is.  So it is clear that some of the unhelpful hostilities of our own national experience flourish here as well.  There is no (enforced) masking in interior spaces, though many people at an open market in the town square did in fact wear face-coverings.

 

            We did not come here to spend time at weekly markets, however.  Our situation is closer to that of those gentlefolk in Boccaccio’s Decameron who flee the Plague ravaging the city to the comparatively safe rustication of a rural village.  Our Fiesole is called Salernes, a modest inland town in the Department of Var.  Our host, at whose commodious country house we are staying, is a very old and dear friend from Oxford undergraduate days more than sixty years ago.  After a long and varied career as father in a remarkable family, captain of industry, entrepreneur, volunteer executive in higher education, and cultural philanthropist, he now spends most of his time in a beautiful historic house in Sussex.  But he has several times welcomed us to Salernes for late summer visits, often with other guests as engaging and interesting as himself.

          

            This year’s house-party has had its special character, partly because it has been for all of us a long-deferred respite from the pandemic, and undertaken by all only with some difficulty and a little apprehension.  For a time, travel restrictions for the three countries involved—France, Great Britain, and the United States—seemed to be in weekly flux.  Adding to the sense of a movable feast is the fact that people have come and gone at different times.  We have been as many as twelve, but are now down to six, and for our last few days will be but four—Joan and I, our host Andrew and his delightful partner Lee.  So the week we have already spent has had its variable rhythms, crescendos, climaxes, and diminuendos.  

 

            The classic literary mode for introducing groups of people brought temporarily and fortuitously together long antedates Chaucer’s famous catalogue of his pilgrim-narrators in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.  My smaller number perhaps more closely approximates what we memorably find at the beginning of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where the narrator and his auditors are old friends brought together in the confines of a cruising yawl—probably only somewhat larger than the paved veranda on which we have spent most of our shared hours, reading, eating, and above all talking.  The males in four of the six couples were classmates at Jesus College, Oxford, around 1960.  The other two men are the host’s younger engineer brother, who has lived for many years as an ex-pat in Cleveland, and the husband of one of the host’s business colleagues back in the day.  The six women are conspicuous for a wide range of professional and artistic experience and achievement.  So there has been a good deal of shared experience and ancient friendship, seasoned, however, by some serious diversity of cultural attitudes and political views.  In academic terms there were some people more oriented toward the sciences, and some to the humanities.  Thus we have had ample raw materials for the most conspicuous pleasure of our stay, its nearly unceasingly rich conversations.

            As you know, the word companion derives from Latin words denoting a person with whom you break bread.  And it is not without significance that a minor genre of our literature—Table Talk—has preserved the meal-time conversations of such worthies as Dr. Johnson, Coleridge, and G. B. Shaw.  Many of our conversations, while less pontifical than these classics and hardly aspiring to publication, fall into this genre.  This means that the pleasure of conversation was often compounded by the pleasure of French food, much of it produced locally in the world’s finest market gardens.  And of course one must not forget the French wines, most of them local and of modest price but ample supply.  As lubricants of significant conversation, they are probably unsurpassed.  As is well known, and immortally expressed by A. E. Housman, “…malt does more than Milton can, to justify God’s ways to man”.

 

            As a group of vaccinated elders—several of us even boosted--we have been following a regime of shared or communal isolation.  It does not satisfy anybody’s strictest rules.  There are the comings and goings, and of course a minimal amount of masked commercial contact, though less even than at home.  But we have been very cautious.  A medical expert whom I trust has assured me that it is “virtually impossible” for anyone—vaccinated or not—to contract the virus while properly masked in the open air.  The open air of Provence is particularly appealing.  And although the two-hour lunch and three-hour dinner have been prominent features of each day, there have been many other pleasures.  We have had some nice country walks, solitary or shared, and an occasional al fresco beverage in the town square.  Later today we are scheduled for the test that will allow us to fly home.  So that is the report to date.  We look forward to our final two days here.