Under a Cloud

           

            There is a natural tendency, exacerbated by the commercial requirements of journalism, to inflate the importance of current events.  Each day, after all, must have its headlines.  Sound history, on the other hand, demands retrospection.  Another way of saying this is encapsulated in Francis Bacon’s well-known saw that “Truth is the daughter of time…”  Nonetheless it would appear obvious that the Russian assault on Ukraine is a major world event with long-term repercussions that, however unpredictable at present, are likely to be of historical significance.  Nonetheless this will probably be the last essay I shall devote to it.  I wish I could say that is because the violence seems headed toward some kind of satisfactory termination, but it does not.  I simply have no unique or authoritative ideas.  The press is full of more expert opinion than one can read and far too much amateur emoting than one wants to read.

 

            We keep hearing that since the end of the last global war we have been living in a “rules-based world”.  How this differs from any other period in history is not clear.  After all, the Law of the Jungle is a rule of sorts.  Perhaps Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is slightly more subtle than that, but not much more.  The “rule” he has violated—that big fish do not have license to gobble up any smaller fish of their fancy—would seem to be a fundamental requirement for world peace.  But here it is in conflict with another unstated rule that must be honored to preserve the peace: the rule that one must not provoke big fish.  The big fish, of course, are those armed with atomic bombs.

 

            This is a subject on which it is far easier to bloviate as an olympian critic than to suggest any practical course of action.  When I say God help those world leaders, and especially our own, who have the awful responsibility of responding to Putin’s aggression, it is in a truly prayerful sense, not one of condescension.  But it cannot be wrong to ask questions about our national defense policies when their coherence or current relevance becomes questionable.  Our policy with regard to nuclear weapons has been a defensive one, based on the idea of deterrence.  Postulated when the “nuclear club” was much more exclusive than it is today, it rather sardonically adopted the acronym MAD, standing for “Mutually Assured Destruction.”  Practically speaking, the policy enshrined our belief that not even the evil men in the Kremlin, capable of perfidies yet unknown in world annals, would be so crazy as to launch an attack guaranteed to lead to their retaliatory destruction.  The MAD regime makes it possible for nuclear states to adopt an official or tacit “No First Strike” position, and that offers some psychological comfort.  But it offers no absolute moral guidance.   Quite apart from the fact that the nuclear club long ago abandoned exclusivity, with each increase in its membership actually diminishing rather than expanding security, there are problems with the policy’s intellectual no less than its moral coherence.  It is essentially the policy many of us deride we hear it from the NRA: the only force that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.

 

            The policy adopted by the Biden administration, and presumably shared by all of our EU allies, is that we cannot honor Zelensky’s repeated pleas for the establishment of a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine because that would make Putin really mad, mad enough perhaps to….you know what.  So we—meaning those world forces trying to support Ukraine and repel Russian aggression—cannot use one of the most effective military means of doing so.  Thus Putin’s unused nukes are to him highly useful, while ours are useless to us.  President Biden has not, however, completely ruled out any direct confrontation with Russian forces by NATO.  The special circumstance Biden correctly cites is that Ukraine is not a NATO member, and that we are therefore under no treaty obligation to come to its defense.  That is indeed a significant fact, not a mere Jesuitical distinction.  I suppose it means “But if you start in on Latvia, Putin, you’re in big trouble.”  Not that the crushing economic sanctions are only small trouble.

 

            But one of the dictionary definitions of appeasement is “to buy off (an aggressor) by concessions, usually at the sacrifice of principles.”  Putin was already able to gobble up a few choice pieces of the old USSR real estate, including the Ukrainian Crimea, without much serious complaint.  Dictators have shown a tendency to pay more attention to what their adversaries actually do than to what they say.   They note when  “red lines” consistently fade away into pale chalk marks.  One of Stalin’s favorite ripostes, when timorous subordinates hesitantly suggested that this or that policy might arouse complicating reactions by governments “in the West”  was “They will swallow the whole thing!”  The extraordinary thing about it was that he was almost always right.  It’s pretty clear that Putin in a slightly different metaphorical sense wants to swallow the whole of Ukraine.  Should our policy be one of peace at any price?  If not, what is our price limit?  After all the second World War was avoidable.  Many maniacs have headed large armies over the course of the centuries, but none has been so maniacal, to the best of my knowledge, as to insist on achieving through the expenditure of large sums from the national treasury and large casualties in their military forces what they could get by simply demanding it.  If the Western powers had been prepared to accede to all of Hitler’s demands and all of the expansionist ambitions of the Japanese Empire, there need have been no war.

 

            History both leads and misleads.  Thoughts of the Second War come naturally to me because my earliest memories are from those years, and the world in which I grew to adulthood was darkened by its shadow—the so-called Cold War.  The “problem” of Russia has thus been a constant of life.  The collapse of the Soviet Union would appear in the long run to have changed the world less than one would have expected.  We speak of the “lessons of history,” but the lessons are sometimes opaque.  In our changed, inter-wired world Mastercard may prove to be mightier that Migs.  That remains to be seen.  And will our own weary, waning, and increasingly incoherent country be able to refresh itself in what Lincoln once, in another difficult time, called “a new birth of freedom”?

 

 

                       

Patriotism

 

 

 

            A term commonly used in the Soviet Union for World War II was the “great patriotic war”.  Stalin, with his back to the wall, found that most of his subjects were far more enthusiastic about fighting for Mother Russia than for international Socialism.  For strategic reasons he even relaxed for a period his hostility to the Orthodox Church, which had continued through violent persecutions to be a source of Russian national identity.  No good deed goes unpunished.  Now Vladimir Putin, a Russian nationalist and super-patriot who hobnobs with the Patriarch and probably has never in his life talked about the international proletarian revolution, is getting a dose of his own medicine.  It turns out that Ukrainians really love their country too.  What is the source of all true patriotism?  Surely it is the love of locality, locality invested with a transcendent ethical as well as sentimental value.  One of the first poems ever to thrill me is by Sir Walter Scott: “Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land!  Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,  As home his footsteps he hath turn’d, From wandering on a foreign strand!”  This was all about some place I didn’t recognize called Caledonia, wherever that was.  Not long afterward our teacher introduced us to the once-famous short story “The Man Without a Country” by Edward Everett Hale.  (He was the nephew of the guy who gave an endless harangue at the Gettysburg battlefield dedication for whom Lincoln was supposed to serve as the warm-up band.)  The story is the patriotic tear-jerker of all time.

 

            I am thinking about the nature and various meanings of patriotism not merely on account of current world events, but because of two personal cultural encounters of the week, one with Jan Yoors and the other with Franz Schubert.  This is probably an equation with at least one unknown.  Yoors (1922-1977) is hardly a household name, but one of my favorite fellow Flemings.  Born in Antwerp, he made his adult career in New York as artist, tapestry maker, photographer, and author before dying too young.  At the age of 12, in 1934, with the blessings of his pre-hippie artistic parents, he joined a band of Rom “travelers” (gypsies) passing through Flanders with whom he mainly lived for several years in their wanderings.  He entered fully into their cultural cocoon.  He learned their cryptic language.  Fully accepted, he went native.  In 1967 he published a fascinating book (The Gypsies) in which he recounts his youthful experiences.  I feared I had lost this book, but just discovered it with great relief while cleaning up a closet, and I immediately reread its opening chapters.  Young Yoors was not merely setting off on a strange adventure.  Official Nazi racial policy toward the Roma was similar to that toward Jews and had similarly horrifying results.  He would soon be heading toward the maelstrom, and he wrote about that in a second book.  He loved his adoptive family and recognized their many virtues.  But he was utterly clear-sighted about their cultural habits—including petty thievery, confidence trickery, and mendacity—that so often brought down upon them the hostility of conventional society.  They were a people utterly without patriotism for they had no geographical patria, a tribe of eternal wanderers.  Their “identity” resided in cultural factors unrelated to any concept of locality.  The murderous Nazi policy was primarily based in bunkum racial theory, but their notorious want of “Germanness” was also a factor.

 

            A couple of days after this rereading we were at a concert featuring the pianist Mitsuo Uchida and the tenor Mark Padmore performing songs by Beethoven and Franz Schubert.  The Schubert was the complete “Swan Song” series, which I had never before heard in full.  The words of the first seven poems of this work were written by Ludwig Rellstab, apparently an important figure in the world of early nineteenth-century German music but previously unknown to me.  Rellstab wrote them with Beethoven in mind, but they were later passed on to Schubert.  One of them is called “In der Ferne” (“Far Away”), about a disappointed lover trying to flee his sorrow.  In its English translation by Richard Wigmore it goes like this: “Woe to those who flee, who journey forth into the world, who travel through strange lands, forgetting their native land,  spurning their mother’s home, forsaking their friends:  alas, no blessing follows them on their way!  The yearning heart, the tearful eye, endless longing….”  In this song the language dealing with the exile is more censorious than consoling.  The issue is by no means one merely of temperament, homebodies versus rolling stones.  It is fraught with moral significance.

 

                                                                    Jan Yoors and adoptive family
 

            Curiously, perhaps, the issues raised here in a secular and political context—what might be called an ethical interpretation of residential locality--have their parallels in the medieval religious culture I have spent many years studying. The issue was the question of Christian “perfection,” the ideal of the monastic life.  The theory of asceticism was that in voluntarily denying the common desires of human nature—material comfort, sexual gratification, free agency—the monks and nuns freed themselves to be available for higher or more “perfect” spiritual experience.  Their models were biblical, but susceptible of ambiguous interpretation.  One great image of “religious” life was the Hebrew Exodus.  But is the Exodus story one of hard, dangerous, and protracted travel or one of establishing a glorious settled kingdom in a Promised Land?  What might be called the political Zionism of Exodus and the Hebrew history books has its metaphoric or spiritual parallels everywhere in the prophets.  The relationship between the literal and the figural remains an issue in Jewish theology to this day.  In the early Christian writings in Greek there is a definite spiritualization of pilgrimage and homelessness.  “Let us go forth therefore unto [Christ] without the camp, bearing his reproach.  For here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come.”  That is a mystical and millenarian idea that has its secular, political analogue in the Dust Bowl ballad of Woodie Guthrie, “I Ain’t Got No Home in This World Any More.”  Remember why the English words travel and travail are kissing kin.  In actual fact the “open road” of pilgrimage could be the same ordeal it is for refugees today.

 

            The legendary lives of the earliest monks, the so-called Desert Fathers, are epics of peregrination and dismal squats in desert places, caves, and the abandoned lairs of wild animals.  This is plain living and high thinking at the possibly fanatical level.  The fantastic biographies of the “wandering saints,” most especially Athanasius’s super-best-seller Life of Saint Anthony, fired the imaginations of thousands of religious idealists, but could provide no viable model for actual mass asceticism.  Mass asceticism required considerable material organization and support, kitchens and dormitories, arable land and endowments.   The great Victorian historian W. E. H. Lecky, author of The History of European Morals (1869), expressing the nationalist sentiments of his time and place, has the following choice remarks about St. Anthony.  “A hideous, sordid, and emaciated maniac, without knowledge, without patriotism, without natural affection, passing his life in a long routine of useless and atrocious self-torture, and quailing before the ghastly phantoms of his delirious brain, had become the ideal of the nations which had known the writings of Plato and Cicero and the lives of Socrates or Cato.”

 

            As early as the fifth century Augustine was denouncing circumcellions, or religious wanderers.  The prologue to the Benedictine Rule, by far the most influential ascetic legislation of the Western Church, attacked so-called gyrovagi—those who “wander around in circles”—the idea of the circum and the gyro being essentially identical.  A not bad translation of the strange word gyrovagus might be gypsy.  Monasticism in the Benedictine tradition was based in residence in a fixed locality, “stability of place”.  Indeed, metaphorically the monastery was often called a “prison”.  In the later Middle Ages a parallel controversy arose around the new orders of mendicant friars, especially the Franciscans.  One of the early tensions within that order was between those who claimed strict “evangelical” poverty—those who thought they could own literally no property, especially fixed domiciles—and others more accommodating of the old Benedictine idea.  The refusal of mendicants to stay in one place is a wide-spread trope of the abundant anti-clerical literary satire of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.  Like the wandering lover in the Schubert Lieder, and like the gypsies, the religious wanderers, having no earthly patria, lacked also patriotism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reporting the War

 

                                                          The "famine child" memorial in the Ukrainian capital
 

            Some world events, such as the violence now happening in Ukraine, are of such gravity as to seem to demand our total attention.  That at least is how I feel as I sit down to write my weekly essay.  It would be nearly irreverent to talk about anything else.  At the same time, I am keenly aware that I cannot possibly have anything useful to say.  Most people want to see themselves as original thinkers; but when it comes to fast paced and rapidly changing events in distant parts of the world of which we are ignorant, what possibly useful independent thoughts can we claim?  It does seem obvious on the face of it that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is terrible, unjustified, murderous.  Furthermore, given the nature of the governance system in Russia, it seems justifiable to place most of the blame for the crime—if not all of it—on Russia’s despotic leader, Vladimir Putin.  At least, that has emerged as the “Western” and especially the American consensus.  This view is held with such confidence that the authorities of the Metropolitan Opera feel justified in suspending a Russian opera star who, though she in fact condemned his war, was unwilling to submit to the compelled speech act of a plenary denunciation of Putin.  “‘It is a great artistic loss for the Met and for opera,’ Met General Manager Peter Gelb said in a statement Thursday. ‘Anna [Netrebko] is one of the greatest singers in Met history, but with Putin killing innocent victims in Ukraine, there was no way forward’.”  One possible way forward might be for Mr. Gelb to read Max Eastman’s Artists in Uniform: A Study of Literature and Bureaucratism (New York: Knopf, 1934), a classic account of the dismal effects of compulsory Soviet “correct thought” as imposed on the artistic life of a large nation. We do not need cultural commissars in this country, nor can we defend democratic values in Ukraine by trashing of the Bill of Rights in the Lincoln Center.  I witnessed a more appropriate initiative by the musical establishment on Sunday afternoon at another concert of the Princeton Symphony Orchestra.  Before proceeding to the second half of the concert, which was Stravinsky’s “Firebird Suite,” the maestro invited the audience to stand for the playing of a short and unfamiliar piece not listed on the program: the Ukrainian national anthem, a noble composition that was greeted by the audience with enthusiasm.

 

            But one battle at a time.  The horrors of Putin’s war are real enough, even if everything we (or at least I) know of them has come from news reports of varying authority.  For me that means principally the extensive coverage to be found each day in the New York Times, and the (partially) eye-witness accounts on offer each evening in lengthy segments of the PBS News Hour.  Such “mainstream” news outlets have many small tributaries in social media platforms.  Indeed presentation of the news has over recent years itself surreptitiously become part of the news, and there is frequent reference in it to the importance and debatable import of an avalanche of private cell phone photographs and Tiktok and cell phone videos in which the virtual world is now buried.  There is good news and bad news in the technological developments that allow anyone on the spot with a phone to be a reporter.  You often have to take it on faith that the the photograph of the bombed-out building you see was actually taken in Ukraine rather than in Iraq or Afghanistan.

 

            Western nations will not send their troops to fight in the hot war of bombs and bullets, but they have a chance of winning the information war.  Truth is still war’s first casualty.  According to reports many Russians, perhaps even most of them, have been so successfully disinformed by their government clique that they believe there is no “war” in Ukraine, only a police action to mop up “Nazis”.  But Mr. Putin’s efforts at obfuscation have been considerably frustrated already by the clever tactic of American intelligence agencies, which have been publicly predicting with awesome accuracy the actual course of his aggression.  And it appears that the energetic coverage offered by the Times is in part an unadvertised act of reparation for a nearly century-old journalistic crime of its own.

 

            As I discovered when I was writing about the Ukrainian whistleblower Viktor Kravchenko in The Anti-Communist Manifestos, the Soviet history of Ukraine is among the most tragic in an anthology of national tragedies.  Having spent the later 1920s concentrating mainly on the hammer, Stalin was by the early 1930s ready to turn his full attention to the sickle.  He set out on a disastrous program of agricultural collectivization.  Ukraine, the “bread-basket of the Soviet Union,” got his special attention.  He was particularly determined to rid the land of the kulaks, the successful and mildly entrepreneurial smallholders who were the backbone of the region’s comparative agricultural prosperity.  In the Soviet leaders’ Marxist view, and in their rhetoric, these family farmers were a “class” of exploiters and “parasites”, roughly equivalent to the American Robber Barons.  Stalin, as ever, was prepared to use extreme measures.  The Russian cities needed grain, and Ukrainian peasants had some.  Armed Communist gangs were sent through the villages to confiscate it.  Very often they plundered any personal and household movables they could carry as well.   In 1932 and 1933, in what Ukrainians call the Holodomor (roughly “Terror Famine”) millions died.  The precise number is disputed, as is also the question of the precise degree to which the famine was chiefly the result of conscious punitive policy as opposed to gross bureaucratic incompetence.  Both were certainly involved.  Some have questioned the view of the anti-Communist historian Robert Conquest in his book Harvest of Sorrow that it was an intentional genocide specifically directed against Ukrainian identity, but that is in effect a political quibble.  The Ukrainian famine was a horrendous disaster of huge dimensions largely engineered by a regime at war against its own people.  But what did Times readers know of it?  The answer is: nothing.  They did know about the production numbers claimed by the Politburo for the Five Year Plan.  They did know all about the Long Beach earthquake of 1933, in which more than a hundred people lost their lives.

 

            The Times’s long-serving bureau chief in Moscow—their man on the spot virtually since the revolution—was an Anglo-American fellow-traveler named Walter Duranty.  His attitude toward the inevitable episodes of unpleasantness characteristic of police states was summed up in a pithy saw: you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.  The omelet, of course, was the utopian socialism even then being cooked up by the Red Czar.  Duranty was one of the most famous foreign correspondents in Russia, probably the most famous.  His journalistic practice was summed up in one of his book titles: I Write As I Please.  For my research I had to read not merely his books but several about him, one of which is a very funny contemporary novel (Winter in Moscow, 1934) by Malcolm Muggeridge.  More straight-forward is S. J. Taylor’s Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times’s Man in Moscow, though I might argue with the subtitle.  “Stalin’s Man at the New York Times” might be more accurate.

 

            I am not an advocate for the periodic attempts to strip Duranty of his Pulitzer Prize posthumously.  If you believe as I do that facing up to history does not require erasing it, various forms of currently fashionable iconoclasm have little appeal.   And having led in the creation of a nuclear world, America must be wary of that world’s constraints.  But there is a difference between a no-fly zone and a no-lie zone.  The Western press has a great opportunity, and I think also a responsibility to demonstrate the effectiveness of the power of truth-telling and free expression in the course of world affairs.  So far it seems to be doing an excellent job, with the Times leading the way.  Let the pen be mightier than the sword.

 

Betsey Stockton

 

 

            This week’s essay, inspired by a current book* but making no claim to be an adequate review of it, concerns two remarkable American teachers born about a century and a half apart into very different social realities, but sisters united in their signal contributions to the education of young people in the town where I live.  The subject of the book is Elizabeth (Betsey) Stockton (ca 1798-1865), the apparently mixed-race daughter of an African-American slave and an unknown Anglo father, the newborn being by the law of the day the chattel property of the mother’s owner, who was Robert Stockton, a prominent Princeton citizen and a cousin of a signer of the Declaration of Independence.  The biographer is Constance Escher, recently retired from a long career as a teacher of history in the Princeton public schools.  Connie Escher is personal friend of ours of long standing, and the mother of a close childhood friend of our own youngest child.

                                                    Constance Escher (photo: Town Topics)
 

            Nobody was lucky to be born a slave, but some few born slaves had better luck than others.  Betsey Stockton was sent to the household of Ashbel Green, a Presbyterian divine and later President of the College of New Jersey (Princeton University).  He and his family recognized the youngster’s remarkable abilities and fostered her secular education and her religious interests, which were pronounced.  She became a kind of surrogate daughter and sibling in the family, but her labor could still be commodified and rented out, as it commonly had been also for ostensibly free indentured servants.  It was necessary that de facto manumission become de jure for her to undertake her life’s work as a missionary and teacher.  Stockton’s long, varied, and fruitful career—better described as a vibrant religious vocation, as the animating force of her life was the love of Christ—is the subject of Escher’s book.  The historian has sifted judiciously through a large body of primary materials, some only fragmentary and suggestive, but others of amplitude.  Among the latter are substantial contemporary journals kept by Betsey Stockton and her Princeton missionary colleague Charles Stewart.  Any contemporary reader of nineteenth-century domestic documents—such as the letters written by ordinary soldiers featured in Ken Burns’s Civil War series--is likely to be amazed by the excellence of the writing.  Stockton’s prose is fresh, uncluttered, clear, to the point.  Since the same can be said of Constance Escher’s, her book offers as much delight as it does instruction.  I encourage you to seek out a copy of it and read it.  This essay is not a proper account of it, merely tangential ideas it encouraged.

 

            Female life expectancy in America at the time of Stockton’s birth was perhaps forty-five years.  She lived to be about seventy, and crowded into that time half a century of missionary ministry and teaching in Hawaii, Canada, and her hometown of Princeton.  Perhaps some readers will be disappointed that the liberation she was most interested in was spiritual liberation.  Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?  Chattel slavery, a grotesque social manifestation of the “body of death,” does not make a prominent appearance in her recorded thought.  But she lived and worked among black and white abolitionists and ministered to people of color in disparate parts of the world.  The degree of social liberation she had experienced she found in education, and it was that gift she spent her life imparting to others.  Yet there are several moments in her story where racial issues are raised.  There is one very telling passage in the book that both Joan and I found particularly striking.

 

            Among its other attractions, Stockton’s story can claim a place in the literature of American seafaring, resonating for me especially with Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast (1840) and Melville’s Moby Dick (1851).  In November 1823 Stockton, together with her white spiritual brother and sister Charles and Harriet Tiffany Stewart, sailed from New Haven bound for the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) on a grueling five-month voyage involving the “double” crossing of the African cape.  Betsey Stockton’s account of the terrifying storm-tossed seas of Cape Horn is reminiscent of that of Camões in the Lusiads.   The Portuguese poet objectified his fears in the invented mythological giant Adamastor;  Stockton located hers in her own timorous heart, a gloomily Presbyterian “bottomless sink of sin.”  But there was plenty to fear in the material world.  The harrowing fate of the whaler Essex, which had been sunk by an irate whale in 1820, was still in the news.  (This was usually called the “Essex disaster”; but perhaps whales just did not like being shot at with harpoons?)  Six or seven weeks out, approaching the west coast of Africa, the missionaries' vessel happened upon and conversed with a Portuguese slaver.  Stewart, an ordained Christian minister obligated by the Law of Charity, practically exploded in his Journal: “Surely, if anything on earth calls for the righteous judgment of God, it is the prosecution of the slave trade; and sooner or later, the retribution of a just avenger must fall on those who thus make the heavens to echo the moanings of the bereaved, and the rich earth with the tears and blood of the enslaved.”  That was written three years after the Missouri Compromise and thirty-five before John Brown’s prophecy of 1859: "I...am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed, it might be done."  Betsey Stockton died on October 25, 1865, and was buried in Cooperstown NY, next to her beloved spiritual sister Harriet Stewart.  One reasonably hopes that she had read in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural eight months earlier the equally prophetic words: “Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-men’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn by the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether’.” 

 

            The constant here, sadly, is the spilling of blood.  That is the world’s way.  It was not, however, Betsey Stockton’s way.  For her and her intimate companions the blood once shed long ago and far away was forever sufficient.  Her weapon was literacy.  If swords could be beaten into plowshares, why not pen nibs as well?  On this day, Ash Wednesday, a day on which we are invited to ponder the deep sinks of our own imperfections as fellow human beings are terrified, injured, and killed in wickedness by other fellow human beings, that is perhaps a thought worth pondering.  In any event, it is one brought to my mind by the extraordinary story in Escher’s engaging book.

 

  

 

* Constance K. Escher, She Calls Herself Betsey Stockton: The Illustrated Odyssey of a Princeton Slave (Eugene OR: Resource Publications/Wipf and Stock, 2022), pp. 197.

[ISBN pb 978-1-7252-7544-7; hb 978-1-7252-7545-4]

 

 

 

Old Friends

 

            We have just enjoyed another major victory over Covid.   On Friday afternoon we took a Lyft into New York to meet up for a restaurant meal with a couple of old friends normally resident in Austin TX.  We then spent the night at our daughter’s apartment.  Though she herself happened to be in Abu Dhabi at the time, she was a spiritual presence at this reunion with friends whom she has known since she was a child.  Her apartment house is at the northwest corner of Washington Square Park.  On Google Maps it is identified as “Eleanor Roosevelt’s Home” though she hasn’t lived there in a while.  The restaurant where we met our friends, North Square, is about a hundred feet away, so our total pedestrian travel within the City was maybe a hundred yards.  But it still counts as a pandemic triumph.

 

            I have not read Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield since, I think, 1957 when I was an undergraduate, and it was presented to us as the greatest English exemplar  of the “novel of sentiment” and therefore something a student of literature ought to read.  I don’t remember much about it except that I did actually like it, despite its, well, excessive sentimentality.  So far as the story goes, I remember a sort of a combination of the Book of Job and the Perils of Pauline.  The novel has one quotable, or at least frequently quoted, line.  One of the vicar’s sentimental saws is this: “I love everything that is old; old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines.”  The old times and old manners are frequently omitted, simplifying the phrase to old friends, old books, old wines.  This pretty well encapsulates the probably natural  conservative impulse of age.  I am not big on wines, old or new, but I make up for that in my enthusiasm for old books and old friends, and especially the latter, a finite and necessarily diminishing cohort.  Among the dearest of this group are Jim and Hester Magnuson.  Their names  have appeared many times in these essays over the years.

            We met Jim in the late 1960s, when he must have been in his later twenties and I in my earlier thirties.  A playwright and novelist, he had won the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton, an award given “to artists and writers of exceptional promise to pursue independent projects at Princeton University during the academic year”; and the program’s administrators were trying to find him a place to live on campus.  I was at that time the young master of Princeton’s only residential college, still regarded as an uncertain experiment and populated largely by people with a principled objection to the “Bicker” system in which upperclass social life was given over to a number of private selective clubs and dining halls.  The college was full of individualists, odd-balls, members of racial minorities, and others united by dissatisfaction with the traditional social options on offer from the university.  We felt we were pretty cutting edge.   Jim moved into a dorm and soon was an active presence in college life.  He built a “black box” theater in the basement, wrote several plays, some of which he staged and directed, and generally became an indispensable cultural figure on campus.  His fellowship was renewed a couple of times before he moved on to his distinguished career as Director of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, which is among the few best MFA programs in the country.  He headed the program for twenty-three years.  There is no absolutely representative example of his own work, but for a good romp I recommend his novel Famous Writers I Have Known.

 

            He was at Princeton long enough to form enduring friendships with many students and faculty.  For us one particularly intense and “bonding” experience involved a couple of summers of hardcore camping and intense labor in the backwoods of Marion County, Arkansas, where we—my young family and a group of student friends--began building a wilderness cabin on a wild forty acres I had bought.   This plot later became by forced purchase a part of the land included in the nation’s first National River—the Buffalo.  So it now belongs to you.  In retrospect we all regard it as an epic, nearly mythic adventure.  All this antedated Jim’s marriage to his future wife, Hester, who has likewise become a close friend over the years.  She is a member of a prominent family in Mississippi.  (Her brother is a former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities.)  We could have used her country chops in the Ozarks.  A good part of the enjoyment of long family friendships is following the careers, at least by occasional glimpses, of your friends’ offspring.  Jim and Hester have a dynamic medical daughter and an academic-legal son of bourgeoning reputation, so that finding out the latest about “the kids” is always pretty stimulating.

 

            Our meeting at the North Square was wonderfully mellow and only slightly comic.  My daughter, though in Abu Dhabi, did not relax her Covid Watch.  New York City had just, in theory, relaxed most of its restrictions, but she had arranged that we be seated in the solitary cool of a sidewalk cabana.  We enjoyed good views both of the overheated diners within and of the chilly passers-by on Waverly Place.  This allowed us to invoke, almost convincingly,  the Goldilocks Principle of the Pleasing Mean.  We didn’t actually have any wine, old or new, opting instead for the mulled cider.  There was a certain amount of discussion of old books—and certainly some of new ones, principally Jim’s.  But it was the old friends quotient that was over the top.  If you can imagine My Dinner with André lightened up by the absence of André, you get some sense of the occasion.    A full battery recharge, so to speak.  Few meaningful meetings are all cakes and ale, of course.  It is sometimes easier to see in one’s contemporaries the aging that one is perhaps reluctant to see in oneself.  We are all on the wheel, and the wheel does turn, though slowly. 

 

            We returned, feeling replete and mellow, to our evening’s rest, followed by a jolly breakfast moment with our son-in-law Zvi and our granddaughters Lulu and Cora.  The Lyft driver on the return trip was a well-turned-out fellow, well-spoken in fluent English, perhaps in his mid-forties.  He had attached to his rear-view mirror a mass-produced rosary and a small photograph of a handsome adolescent lad.  He told us that he lived in Bayonne and that his son of fifteen was in school there.  A few times during the hour-long ride he had brief conversations with someone—I believe his wife—in Arabic.  As he was helping us out of his car in our Princeton driveway, I asked him if he were a Coptic Christian.  This question—based in a pretty simple deduction on my part--had an electrifying effect on him, rather as though I had informed him that he had the winning lottery ticket.  We had a brief conversation, perhaps the first of its kind held on that tarmac, concerning the Coptic community of Hudson County NJ and my very small knowledge (in their English translation) of the Letters of Saint Anthony of the Desert.  A few hours later I got a bells-and-whistles text message from Lyft.  I was instructed to rejoice, as I had just received a five-star rating from one of their drivers!  My first and only.  I shall never again hail a ride without being sure there is a copy of the Vita Antonii in my bag.

 

Death Notices

 

 

One of William Blake's Illustrations for Young's Night Thoughts

            Does every ying require its yang?  Last week I was glowing with optimism inspired by a musical concert.  This week quite by accident, I found myself nagged by “night thoughts,” to use the gloom-and-doom term featured in the title of Edward Young’s famous poem of the mid-eighteenth-century, wildly popular on both sides of the Atlantic.  The poem is all about death, a topic the mind may naturally, though by no means necessarily unhealthily, turn to when one gets old.   Young surely inspired Emily Dickinson’s great (and mercifully shorter) thanatological masterpiece “Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers”: Safe in their Alabaster Chambers/Untouched by Morning/And untouched by noon/Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection, /Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone. If “rafter of satin” doesn’t creep you out, what would?  Well, what might do so could be the brief introductory essay by Martin Malia, the great Soviet scholar, in The Black Book of Communism, in which he sadly, dispassionately, offers a comparative glance at the numbers of people murdered by Nazis for the crime of their race and the number murdered by Communists for the crime of their social class.  In searching for a bibliographical reference, I inadvertently stumbled upon Malia’s enormous estimates of the hecatombs.

 

            During the Covid pandemic the daily actuarial reports of which Defoe writes in his Journal of the Plague Year are now features of the nightly news.  Certain publications have actually made printing history with their innovative “visuals”—charts and graphs conveying complex information in fine detail.  Though still penny-ante when compared with the political murders of the last century, world-wide Covid mortality has been horrendous.  In our country alone the deaths approach a million.  But equally horrendous also are some other disturbing statistics.   In a recent squib on the PBS New Hour the Covid announcement was supplemented by the news that drug overdose deaths in America last year topped 100,000, slightly exceeding the 95,000 “alcohol-related” ones.  For a particular reason I shall come to later, it will be the alcohol ones I will be pondering  most deeply in this post, but only after mentioning two other categories in which our nation is on the leadership board: vehicular deaths and gun deaths.

 

            In recent years there have been about forty thousand traffic deaths and forty-five thousand “gun-related” deaths in the United States annually.  The term “gun-related” may seem more oblique than necessary, as the “relationship” between the gun and the dead person is actually pretty clear.  A projectile fired from the former has effected the death of the latter.  With regard to highway carnage, we seem to have come to an unstated social consensus that it’s just awful, but whacha gonna do?  There's a price to doing business.  Some of the casuistry over gun deaths is perhaps animated by the fear that we might actually do something to stop them, but will perhaps feel less inclined to do so if we know that about half of all the gun-dead shot themselves quite intentionally, and that perhaps none of the children shot in their strollers were “the intended victim”.

 

            As it happens, I was encountering these gloomy statistics on the Monday and Tuesday of last week while I was still on the high of the symphony concert that I wrote about in my last post.  But blog day was followed immediately by chemotherapy day-–hardly an ordeal any more but still unpleasant enough and laden with intimations of pathology not improved by my recent contemplation of catalogues of macro-mortality.  Illness can complicate your view of many subjects, including some, like narcotic addiction, on which I might have thought I had a firm and unassailable view.  But if you are feeling really lousy and somebody gives you a pill that more or less instantly makes you feel really great, it may make you stop and ponder a moment.  How many Opioid deaths begin in such apparently simple fashion?

 

            Trying to read anything very serious while surceasing sorrow by medical infusion is a lost cause, so I often take a book of short stories to infusion.  This time it was one of my two thick volumes of Mauppasant: inexhaustible, and many of the stories really short.  Picking among them at random I found myself reading one called “The Baptism”.* This turned out to be a mistake.  The story begins with an old navy doctor taking a drink of cognac with a friend or friends.  He proposes a toast to “that charming poison…seductive murderer, and destroyer of people”—alcohol!  He suggests they have probably read Zola’s recent L’Assommoir (1877)—one of the most terrifying of many fictional treatments of the social disaster of alcoholism—but have they ever seen, as he has, the effects of alcohol introduced by the French and the English on the native populations of their colonial territories?  Or, he might have added, the laboring classes of their own native land?   Because that is what his brief tale concerns.  Years ago, he spent time over Christmas at an old family property in the countryside of the Breton coast.  Living on the place was a peasant who with his wife and sister-in-law looked after things.  The wife has a baby, and the proprietor was asked to stand as godfather.  Oh,  and also to front the parents money for the priest’s fee.  On the day of the baptism the January weather is freezing, and the priest is late in arriving.  Nonetheless, to the doctor’s horror the peasants insist on honoring their folk custom that the infant be kept stripped naked until the sacrament is performed.  The priest, moving at the speed of a “sacred turtle” shows no concern for this dangerous barbarity, his concern being the extortion of another five francs from the godfather.  The ceremony finally over, the parents and most of the baptismal party go off to a tavern to celebrate—meaning, for them, getting blind drunk.  When the alcohol runs out, they drink lamp fuel.  By next morning both babe and mother are dead.  It is just that abrupt,  Maybe I have read something more depressing.  Possibly Eli Wiesel’s Night.

 

            Why do the Breton fishermen drink themselves to death?  Because, the narrator says, when drunk they no longer see the foam atop the storm-tossed waves, only the waves themselves.  In a similar way the sweated textile workers of Britain’s Industrial Revolution found that “gin is the quickest way out of Manchester.”  There have been great medical advances in the use of chemotherapy, but I believe a basic paradoxical strategy remains: fighting fire with fire, the calculated administration of selected poisons.  This must be a rather delicate business, and probably never wisely self-administered. For Maupassant’s peasants the pain of daily life must have been very great indeed.  Yet certainly the coal-oil treatment was worse than the disease.  We speak of combating cancer and battling Covid, but two hundred thousand annual deaths from the self-administration of supposed palliatives suggest some huge cosmic snafu.  Death is a universal certainty and needs no extra help in performing its work.  Our catalogues of mega-deaths recording the operations of disease and natural disasters need not be swollen further by the depravity and folly of our species.

 

             

 

*I later discovered that Maupassant has two very different stories, with very different tones,  by the same name—“Le baptême”.  The shocking tale I describe is his second, from 1885 .  The first (1884) is tender and affirmative in its attitude to peasant life.

New Worlds

 

 

I came out of the weekend boosted by a nearly forgotten optimism.  Last Sunday afternoon we attended a full-scale performance of the Princeton Symphony Orchestra in Richardson Auditorium, a large, elegant, and acoustically superb concert hall on the Princeton campus.  Among the cultural treasures of the town in which we have lived for more than half a century now is the PSO.  This is a very high quality group of community musicians founded about 1980 by the late Portia Sonnenfeld.  It is in a sense the Town Orchestra as opposed to the Gown Orchestra of student musicians.

 

            Sunday’s concert was not strictly speaking the first live music we had enjoyed during the pandemic.  The inventive director of the Princeton University Concert Series, which brings musical artists to Princeton from all over the world, had earlier managed to arrange some very small, meticulously socially distanced events that we were able to attend.

 

            Those were imaginative and welcome palliatives.   But Sunday’s event was different in kind, a real concert, with lots of people sitting next to one another in the permanent fixed seats of an auditorium.   A spokesman for the orchestra  prefaced the musical performance with a few words of welcome, noting that this was the first time in two years the orchestra had been able to perform in Richardson, fulfilling the shared desire of players and audience alike to be able to come together in proximity in pursuit of a pleasure all shared.  The enthusiasm of the applause that greeted his remarks revealed a striking intensity of emotion in a usually restrained demographic of classical music lovers, many of us on the antique side.  Everybody in the world is fed up with Covid and the often vacillating and incoherent measures adopted by political authorities to address it.  Everyone was masked, of course, and we had to present vaccination credentials to gain admission.  There was no reckless hugging or backslapping.  But “symphony” means a joining of sound, and there was plenty of that both from the audience pit and the stage.

 

            To this audience of the music-starved, any performance would have been a treat, but in fact the quality of this performance was very high.  The two principal pieces played were of superb quality: the violin concerto of Sibelius, and Dvorak’s “New World” symphony.  And in both, for differing reasons,  I was able to find reassuring refutations of the heavy gloom of the pandemic.  Music is called “the universal language” with good reason.  Though like any language it must be learned  in order to achieve its fullest eloquence, the mode of its communication transcends the cultural boundaries within which all the world’s spoken tongues are necessarily confined.  Yet at the same time every piece of music  is a cultural artifact bound up like all such artifacts in historical particulars and local and temporal specificities.  And if simply being able to join in the truly social event of a musical concert felt like an act of self-liberation, the music we heard was of a sort to invite the mind beyond—or perhaps through—an aesthetic experience to an intellectual one.

 

            I am not certain that I had ever heard even a recording of the Sibelius violin concerto before, but I am unlikely ever to forget this live performance.  Though I am married to an excellent amateur violinist I could not identify the great professional players of the moment, except that one of them has to be the young soloist on the stage that afternoon, Alexi Kenney, a handsome, svelte, lithe fellow in his twenties whose bow is indistinguishable from a magic wand.  Of course a concerto is a symbiosis; and here the orchestra played its coequal role perfectly.  In contrast to the soloist, the concert’s conductor, Kenneth Bean, has the build of a football lineman.  His affect was one of precise and encouraging steadiness rather than of theatricality: he supervised a perfect team.   It was as though Bean and Kenney, animated by the spirit of  Sibelius, became a trio of benign pied pipers, recalling us all from two years of pandemic torpor.

 

 

            It has been said that the greatest example of American symphonic music was composed by a European, Antonin Dvorak.  We had the opportunity to ponder that paradox after the intermission.   The natural tendency of nineteenth-century European immigrants to America to stay in their familiar cultural clusters, not infrequently exacerbated by the disdain or hostility of anglophone “nativists” whose immigrant forebears got here a little earlier, created for a time odd linguistic islands throughout the plains and backwoods of the Middle Border, one such being the Czech community of Spillville, Iowa.  The much-travelled and cosmopolitan Dvorak might be a cultural lion in New York, but even citizens of the world can get homesick.  It was more practical to visit Spillville than Slovakia.  At the time of the Columbian Exposition of 1892, America had reached a new level of self-confidence, not to say obnoxious chauvinism.  But in Boston and New York the cultural mavens still tended to look toward London, Paris, and Berlin.  Emerson had delivered his famous talk on “The American Scholar” in 1837.  America had become a force in the international literary world through Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Mark Twain.  What of American music?

 

            That question is still being answered, and brilliantly.  At a time of such political doubt and darkness one treasures the light all the more.  And here Dvorak’s ideas continue to inspire.  Part of his greatness as a musician was an extraordinary versatility.  Music like all art is an intuition but also an expression, and music in its expressive aspect expressed something real, human life.  Among Dvorak’s most thrilling works are the Slavonic Dances, based in what is perhaps the most elemental form of music, that of folk.  Too few American cultural arbiters of the nineteenth century actually realized the artistic claims of democracy.  There were some Walt Whitmans of the visual arts.  Surely there should be some of music.  I Hear America Singing.  Dvorak astonished many and probably offended a few others by insisting that classical music in America should honor its own particular indigeneity, its “nativeness”, and especially the rich body of African and Afro-Carribean song that he had discovered here with such excitement.

 

                                         Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904)
 

            His own great monument to this idea was his ninth symphony, the “New World Symphony” (1893).  More precisely he called it “from the New World,” as he thought of it both as an announcement of and a gift from this extraordinary and still new place.  We might call it the “Spillville Symphony.”  Its haunting theme, a “folk” theme, is indefatigable but never itself tiring.  Is our country still an extraordinary new place?   There is plenty of reason for doubt, even despair.  Yet each day in the news I see terrible reports of people drowned in their desperate attempts to reach our shores and others willing to set off on foot from Lima on a thousand mile walk through the Darien peninsula to the difficulties and dangers of the trek toward the Rio Grande.  The testimony of the wretched of the earth has its own peculiar eloquence.  I left Richardson Auditorium feeling not merely personally liberated but comforted by a larger, inner hope.

 

                                                      Spillville IA, 1893
 

Music , Dvorak (Antonin), Covid liberation