Still Digesting

In a desperate attempt to increase the readership of my blog I have taken to reading it assiduously myself. Reading my own prose as though it were that of someone else is not entirely a novel experience. The combination of a memory softened by longevity plus the longevity itself—I have been publishing stuff of one kind or another for half a century now—has on occasion led to the following weird experience. I am reading some ancient academic essay, and it begins to seem vaguely familiar. Furthermore I agree with the central idea—pretty rare. Could it be that I have read it before without remembering it? Answer: No. I wrote it before without remembering it.

I could well remember writing “Difficult to Digest”. After all, I wrote it only eight days ago. But I felt suddenly uncertain about one of the claims I had made, concerning Sender Galin’s pamphlet The Truth About Reader’s Digest.

"Garlin's pamphlet has become a rare item,” I wrote, “…so the dime pamphlet now goes for at least twenty-five bucks when you can find it.” Was that really true? Perhaps the market had changed since I had to shell out big bucks to get a second copy, having mislaid a first copy (still missing in action) somewhere on my desk. I immediately checked with the indispensable abebooks.com. There were, world-wide, three copies of the Garlin pamphlet available. The first was priced as I supposed it would be in the thirty-dollar range. A single bookseller, Juniper Books in Boulder CO, however, had two copies at the incredible low price of $7.50 each! Now I was aware—and indeed I had reported both in The Anti-Communist Manifestos and in “Difficult to Digest”—that Mr. Garlin spent the last years of his life in or around Boulder CO. I immediately speculated that these two copies probably were a part of the nachlass of old Sender Garlin himself, and that Juniper Books was not entirely aware of the value of the treasures for which they had become brokers.

I snapped them up as fast as my large fingers could beat out the appropriate key-strokes, and they have just arrived. My proclivity toward what my wife calls “excess” was richly rewarded. In the first place I discover that there were at least four different printings of the pamphlet in 1943, of which I now own three. (Indeed, I may own the fourth as well, if only I can find it.) Better yet, one of these copies is signed by the author: “To a poetic organizer, Martha Millet [/] Sender Garlin”.

I don’t know, of course, whether he ever actually presented Ms. Millet with the book, or why she returned it to him if he had done so. Martha Millet was a minor Communist poet of the 1930s and 40s. Garlin uses the word "organizer" as a technical term. The job of an "organizer" was to assemble a Party cell or prepare the "masses" for political action. When the Communists disappeared, "Party organizers" were replaced by "community organizers". This is simply an etymological curiosity, not a political statement concerning any particular president of the United States. I presume that the phrase "poetical organizer" is itself somewhat poetical. One of Millet's poems (“Women of Spain”) is still to be found in anthologies of literature dealing with the Spanish Civil War. She was also one of the radical poets anthologized in a once-celebrated book entitled Seven Poets in Search of an Answer. These seven are nowadays pretty obscure. They included Alfred Kreymborg, whose testimony—along with that of other eminent Communists like the artist Rockwell Kent and Congressman Vito Marcantonio-- adorns the back of the other printing of the pamphlet I just bought. Kreymbourg pulls out all the stops in praising The Truth About Reader’s Digest. “One of the most important documents of the age. Every American should read it.” Nobody ever said that about An Introduction to the Franciscan Literature of the Middle Ages! The name of a third of the seven poets may ring a bell with some of my readers: Joy Davidman. If you don’t recognize the name, think “Mrs. C. S. Lewis”. Yes, Lewis's second Joy, supplementing the more spiritual version of of his pre-marital autobiography, Surprised by Joy! Scholarly investigations, like other mysteries of life, have the fascinating habit of turning back upon themselves. If you want to see what I mean, check out the “Recent Writing” section on the web-site.

Difficult to Digest

My number one son Richard, the formidable blogmeister of “A Brooklynite on the Ice,” drew my attention to what he thought may be a blogable item for a geezer like me in the form of an AP story headed “Chapter 11 Plan Cedes Reader’s Digest to Lenders”. From his point of view the story has to do with the preposterous nonchalance with which American corporations now file for bankruptcy. The very word “bankruptcy” used to reverberate with the terrors of the charnel house. American captains of industry now declare bankruptcy with about as much drama as they down an aspirin tablet. But Rich also knew that I had some interest in Reader’s Digest as an index of popular American culture and especially in the magazine’s role in the formation of the anti-Communist consensus of the 1950s. I touch on this subject in several places in The Anti-Communist Manifestos. It’s a little hard to believe that a journal with five and a half million readers is going under. Why, that’s even more readers than "A Brooklynite on the Ice" commands! But it’s certainly a falling away from the glory days of post-War, when it had a paid circulation of more than seventeen million monthly copies. Reader’s Digest was launched in 1922 by a husband-and-wife genius team, DeWitt and Lila Wallace. This pair was sufficiently famous to have commanded a Time magazine cover at one point.

It was the admirable Robert Hutchins who made the memorable quip about popular journalism in America. We have two great magazines, he said: Time, for people who can’t think, and Life [the great precursor of modern photo-journalism], for people who can’t read. He might have added, “and Reader’s Digest, for people in between, those who have trouble with disyllables.”

The basic idea, simple and brilliant, anticipated the Internet in certain ways. Reader’s Digest would gather and “condense” interesting articles from the whole range of American journalism.There are numerous books about the Reader’s Digest, which must be regarded as a phenomenon unique in the annals of publication. Academics love "the masses" in principle; practice proves a little more difficult. Many scholars seem to think that there must be something morally dubious, and certainly politically incorrect, in a journal read by so many millions of their compatriots. The fullest study is probably John Heidenry’s Theirs Was the Kingdom: Lila and DeWitt Wallace and the Story of the Reader’s Digest. Full does not, alas, always mean accurate. Unfortunately, on the one point which most interested me (Jan Valtin’s publication of “American Dawn”) this book turned out to be woefully errant. Joanne Sharp’s Condensing the Cold War: Reader’s Digest and American Identity has the virtue of revealing its simple (not to say simple-minded) thesis right up front. The implication here is that the Wallaces were the grandparents of the vast right-wing conspiracy.

From nearly its very inception the Reader’s Digest was the magazine that left-wing intellectuals loved to hate, and they have been constant in their disdain. They couldn't stomach its combination of saccharine patriotism, hick religiosity, and fantastic financial success. As I wrote in my book “As late as 1982, Susan Sontag caused an uproar among progressives by suggesting that 'the émigrés from the communist countries we didn’t listen to, who found it far easier to get published in the Reader’s Digest than in the Nation or the New Statesman, were telling the truth.'” In the 1950s one recurrent theme was the battle of the FBI against domestic Communism. The magazine's tendencies are memorialized in an imaginary joke title of a typical article of the 1950s: "I Slept with a Bear for the FBI, and Found God."

I first encountered this curious political bias when I was writing about Whittaker Chambers. Chambers had first been introduced to a Communist Party meeting in the 1920s by a strange character named Sender Garlin. This man was a Communist Party apparatchik for many decades. He only recently ended his days as an elder statesman of the progressive community of Boulder, Colorado. In the 1930s , Garlin and Chambers worked together on the Worker, the newspaper of the American Communist Party. In 1943 he published a dime brochure entitled "The Truth about Reader's Digest". What that "truth" was was spelled out in a prefatory letter by the famous novelist Theodore Dreiser. "Just now, from reading your booklet, I gather the publication's true attitude and import. It is all so fascinatingly sly, and to my way of thinking, criminal--since plainly it labors to belittle our chief and most valuable ally, and to forward the desires of the capitalistic group in this country that seeks--and has sought from the very beginning--to establish money-plenty and money-authority for the few as opposed to poverty and slavery for the masses here as elsewhere on earth."

"Sly" is not the first word that comes into my mind with regard to the magazine. Most Digest articles had all the slyness and subtlety of a hydrogen bomb or perhaps the Bubonic Plague. One of my heroes, Max Eastman, who enraged the Left by moving from being editor of the Masses in the 1930s to being a frequent contributor to Reader's Digest in the 1970s, put it thus: “Writing for the Reader’s Digest while not exactly an art, is a highly specialized craft. The magazine is largely concerned with the life of ideas, but as it is addressed to some 50 or 60 million readers—the actual copies printed number over 17 million—the ideas have to be presented with a self-explanatory simplicity. I have learned this craft by thinking of myself as a teacher when writing essays of this kind for the Reader’s Digest.”

Garlin's pamphlet has become a rare item, in large part no doubt because it features three line etching caricatures--of Franco, Charles Lindbergh, and Jan Valtin, who happened at that moment to be the CPUSA's fascists du jour--by the brilliant Communist artist William Gropper. Gropper is particularly "collectible" at the moment, so the dime pamphlet now goes for at least twenty-five bucks when you can find it. I, alas, have had to chase down two copies. It's a thin little thing, and I lost the first one somewhere among my books. Let me heirs be put on notice. By the time they find it, it's bound to be worth a C-note. This Gropper cartoon called "May Day" gives a good idea of Gropper's power and economy of line.

What had particularly enraged Garlin was the fact that the Reader's Digest was prominent in the promotion of the Communist renegade author Jan Valtin (real name Richard Krebs). The Wallaces had "digested" bits of Valtin's famous anti-Communist "autobiography" Out of the Night, and undoubtedly helped increase its circulation. To make matters worse they then published in the May 1941 number Valtin's essay entitled "American Dawn"--one of the most fantastically successful pieces of American boosterism ever penned. "American Dawn" is the story of a repentant ex-Communist who longs for nothing more than to be allowed to become a good American citizen. It worked wonders in helping Krebs to get around very serious immigration problems. At that point the magazine was being distributed in just over four million copies, but the Wallaces were worried that that might not be enough. So they had 750,000 copies of the article made up as offprints for free distribution. I was able to track down on eBay a copy of the original issue in all its dull typographic respectability.

Gold for Geezers

ABOVE the oracular cave at Delphi, we are told, was inscribed the fundamental atom, or perhaps even quark, of all wisdom: NOSCE TEIPSUM, “Know thyself!” For some reason the Greeks thought it cool to write their mottoes in Latin, just as the Romans often opted for Greek. But whether in Latin or Greek (γνῶθι σεαυτόν, if I am provoked to a display of pedantry) the injunction to self-knowledge has a long and venerable history in the western philosophical tradition.

Self-knowledge is of course the hardest of all knowledge to obtain. “O wad some Power the giftie gie us,” wrote the immortal Robbie Burns, “to see oursels as ithers see us!'” Most of us are pretty good at some things, and not so good at others. But what a rare ability it is to have a clear and accurate view of which is which. In fact the more things we are good at, the more lively is the danger that we will think we are also good at vaguely related things. For example, I am pretty good at eating. Indeed modesty alone keeps me from saying “very good”. Eating is logically connected with cooking, but it would be most rash of me, and even rasher of you, to suppose that my prowess at eating implies an equal prowess at cooking.

National political developments of the last month have encouraged me to think about the Delphic injunction with regard to our much-admired president. Barak Obama is a very able politician. In fact he is a superb politician. But even though he is very good at most things political, he is not, alas, very good at all such things. Contrast, for example, the lavish praise that has greeted the “Cash for Clunkers” program with the controversy and dramatized divisions ignited by his Medical, well, Whatever. I speak thus irreverently only because the Democrats seem to have abandoned what was formerly called their “Health Care Plan” in favor of their “Medical Insurance Reform”. I am not sure I like the switch, because I am a man with a prostate; and if I have to be in the hospital I’d prefer being treated by a doctor rather than an insurance agent. I can hang out with any number of insurance agents at the Rotary Club.

Still, there does still seem to be, camouflaged amidst the Delphic obscurity, an actual medical dimension to Health Care/Insurance Reform. The trick is figuring out what it is. There is light-hearted Saturday program on NPR (“Wait, Wait—Don’t Tell Me!”) in which one of the segments tries a contestant’s ability to pick from three preposterous stories the one that (in addition to being preposterous) is an actual news item. President Obama has assured me of three things: (1) he will give health care insurance to about fifty million currently uninsured people; (2) this change will have no effect on my own personal medical arrangements unless I want it to, and (3) nobody making less than a quarter of a million dollars per annum will be asked to pay a penny more in income taxes to pay for the program.

The problem is to figure out which one of the three highly popular possibilities could conceivably be true. I have no intention of going to a Town Hall Meeting, and I certainly will not foam at the mouth if I stumble into one by accident; but as an Obama voter I do have to inquire whether lobotomy will be a precondition for my support of the president’s good intentions?

The question Mr. Obama should be discussing with Messrs. Rahm and Alexrod, not excluding of course Speaker Pelosi, is how to make the Health Whatever as attractive as “Cash for Clunkers”. The popularity of “Cash for Clunkers” has nothing to do with the free lunch aspect. It is the intellectual elegance of the concept. Toward the beginning of the last century one of the European governments, concerned with the frequency of fatal railway accidents, established a commission to look into the matter. The commissioners soon discovered that by significant proportion most people killed in railway accidents had been sitting in the last car of the train. In a flash the elegant, cost-free solution to the problem flashed through the mind of the chief investigator. The commission would recommend that in future the last car be removed from all trains. Voilà!
A clunker: $4500 max

That’s the kind of thinking that has made “Cash for Clunkers” such a success. The beauty of it is that the model can be applied to the Medical Whatever at the slight cost of a few modest adjustments of vocabulary. Everyone agrees that the killer cost in health care is geriatric medicine. But “geriatric medicine” is merely a euphemism that may disguise rather than identify the problem. Let’s call a spade a spade. The real problem here is geezers. First they get old. Then they get sick. Then they expect to see a doctor. Give them an inch, they take a mile. The suggested plan to create a special group of thanatological shrinks (commonly called the Kevorkian Corps), while undoubtedly well intentioned, is actually an inadequate response. The health care crisis demands something more fundamental. The solution is obvious, though it may at first seem a little startling. Eliminate the last car on the train. Get the geezers off the road in the same way you are getting the clunkers off the road. Give the program a snappy title: “Grants for Gramps,” perhaps, or better yet “Gold for Geezers”.
A geezer: $450 max

Tragic, to be Blunt

Among the last week’s news stories that most captured my attention was the announcement by the British Library that the manuscript of Anthony Blunt’s memoirs, deposited there in 1984, has been released to public availability after the twenty-five-year temporal buffer to which the library authorities had agreed at the time they received the document. Such waiting periods are not uncommonly applied to controversial materials that have the potential to cause distress or embarrassment to living persons or even cause legal difficulties for those who publish them. But such arrangements can be unfair in another way. The gossip of a dead man, after all, now beyond all power of direct interrogation, may be more dangerous than that of the living.



Most of us, I suppose, would be more in favor of virtue if we could postpone having to face virtue’s inconveniences, preferably indefinitely. Saint Augustine had famously prayed, “Make me chaste, O God, but not just yet!” Anthony Blunt and hundreds of others have said in effect, “I want to be truthful and straightforward, but of course not right now.”

Blunt was a most distinguished art historian. As director of the Courtauld Institute (the art history department of the University of London, so to speak) he greatly advanced the cause of academic art history not merely in Britain but wherever his many distinguished students extended his influence throughout the world. As the socially upper-crust conservator of the Queen’s own private collection of paintings, a function he performed so satisfactorily as to earn him a knighthood, he was a star of modest magnitude in the BBC’s night sky of television public intellectual luminaries. But Blunt was several other things as well. He was most notoriously a Soviet spy and a traitor to his country.

The Internet is already abuzz with Anthony Blunt, and I presume to add to the chatter only on account of two accidental circumstances. The first is familial, and it suggests that the "six degrees of separation" theory is far too conservative. My brother-in-law John Newman, a distinguished architectural historian and the current editor of the well-known series on The Buildings of England, was for some years Blunt’s junior colleague at the Courtauld Institute in London. He greatly admired Blunt as art historian and academic administrator and was of the view that the public rhetorical violence that followed upon Blunt’s tardy public exposure in 1979—which Blunt in the newly released memoir apparently says drove him to contemplate suicide—was in large measure sanctimonious and unreflective. John’s opinion is not one I would dismiss lightly. Furthermore, among our personal friends is a woman who (I learned many years after first meeting her) is a blood relative of Blunt's. A second circumstance tends in another direction. I happen to be in the process of publishing a book (The Anti-Communist Manifestos, with an official release date less than a month away) in which I touch upon the thought processes that led many able and accomplished western intellectuals to invest their deepest allegiance in the unspeakable tyranny of Stalinist Communism. In preparing this book I had to read literally dozens of autobiographies, confessions, apologies, explanations, or reaffirmations of an unrepentant defiance written by 1930s and 40s Communists. I have of course not yet seen Blunt’s memoir, though it is bound to be in bookshops nearly as fast as computer keyboards can clatter, but from its characterization in the press it appears likely to fall into a familiar self-serving genre.

I mention Blunt in The Anti-Communist Manifestos only in passing. What I say of him specifically comes in a discussion of the social myopia that kept American and British authorities from exposing damaging Soviet espionage in a timely manner. The Cambridge spy ring should have been shut down in 1940 if not before. “Unfortunately,” I write, “one of the spies, Anthony Blunt, a sort of British Alger Hiss, whose extraordinary distinction and public reputation made the very thought of his disloyalty impossible, was one of the foxes overseeing the operations of the MI5 henhouse.”

The parallel between Blunt and Hiss, while imperfect, is apt. Neither man was an open Communist, and Blunt was not a Party member at all. Anyone familiar with the patterns of Communist espionage and front organizations of the period will recognize the practical insignificance of this fact. Communist sympathizers and some actual Communists were often more useful to the Party if their allegiance was not explicitly known. Hiss and Blunt also shared the arts of practiced liars. Blunt lied about his espionage for as long as he could, through several incompetent security inquiries. Hiss continued to lie until his dying day, even after he had been found guilty of lying by a jury of his peers.

A point frequently encountered in histories of the Nazi regime concerns Mein Kampf, Hitler’s autobiography, which he published in his late thirties. The point is that all the horrors of the evolving regime, though European observers usually reacted to them as developments wholly unpredictable if not actually inconceivable, are clearly adumbrated in Mein Kampf. Mein Kampf was not an obscure book. On the contrary, it was a huge best seller in German-speaking countries, and widely available in translated form in the other major European languages. Hitler’s plans were quite clearly spelled out in the book, but the foreign service professionals in Whitehall and the Quai d’Orsay paid no attention to it. The author of such a book couldn't be serious.
During the research for my book I encountered a sort of minor league Mein Kampf published by Anthony Blunt in 1937. Actually, it's only a short essay; but nobody who read it and took it seriously could have possibly been surprised when Blunt turned out to be the "Fourth Man". George Orwell said that there had been more lies published about the Spanish Civil War than any other event in history. That was undoubtedly hyperbole, but it is certainly true that in the late Thirties a lot of famous people published a lot of stuff they later regretted. One well-known example is Auden's poem "Spain", which the poet later spent several years trying wish away or to revise retrospectively. In 1937 the (at that point) Communist poet C. Day Lewis edited a volume of essays entitled The Mind in Chains. The title referred to the supposed state of things under capitalism. Essays by various hands addressed the fields of education, literature, art, drama, cinema, music, and so forth. In a fascinating introduction the editor began with the mythical chains of Prometheus as developed by Shelley and ended with the metaphoric chains of the conclusion of The Communist Manifesto. "Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to win." The authors were not all Communists--according to Day Lewis they represented the full socialist coalition of the Popular Front--but they shared one fundamental assumption. Western capitalist society was either actually dead or near death. Hence the essays followed a roughly similar format: a description of current capitalist sterility, followed by a blueskying projection of a future socialist vitality. What "vitality" seemed to mean to all the writers was the Soviet Union--yes, the Soviet Union of 1937! "The Mind in Chains could never have been written were it not for the widespread belief of intellectual workers that the mind is really in chains to-day," wrote Day Lewis, "that these chains have been forged by a dying social system, that they can and must be broken--and in the Soviet Union have been broken..." Day Lewis seems not to have read or credited Max Eastman's Artists in Uniform: a Study of Literature and Bureaucratism (1934), in which the ex-Communist editor of the Masses had made an empirical study of the actual state of art and literature under Stalin. As for Blunt, artistic uniformity seemed to be the artistic goal.

Certain changes will inevitably take place in the forms which artists use to express the ideas of the classless society. The conception of a painting as a unique private possession will disappear....The easel painting, which was the particular art-form evolved at the time of the Renaissance when art became essentially private, will become of secondary importance, and instead mural painting will be developed in a form suitable to the decoration of the communal buildings devoted to the culture and recreation of the workers. But it will still, of course, be true that people will want something to decorate the walls of their houses, to which large scale murals are not generally appropriate. This need will probably be satisfied by the creation of what may be called publishing firms of painting, whose function it would be to commission originals in order to have them copied in large quantities by some process of colour printing....By this method the idea of the unique original with great scarcity value would be avoided, and the original itself would probably be kept in the state museum as a help in the training of other artists. In this kind of production much of the process will be mechanical and the same will probably be true of many other kinds of painting. [120-121]

It is fascinating to learn from one of the great art historians of the last century and the future Surveyor of the Queen's Paintings that the art of the socialist consummation so devoutly to be wished for would consist chiefly of post office murals and the polychrome print rack at the National Gallery souvenir shop. When Blunt turned out to be the infamous "Fourth Man" incredulity trumped consternation in the British press, but no one who had read the essay entitled "Art Under Capitalism and Socialism" need have been all that surprised.

Political belief should never be criminalized, even if that belief is invested in the benignity of the international criminal conspiracy that was the Comintern. But ideas do sometimes have consequence, and active participation in criminal conspiracy is not an exercise of a civil right. In what he came to call the greatest mistake of his life, Anthony Blunt became a criminal and a traitor. Like so many others he sought to justify his actions on the basis of high political and moral principle. The political principle was "anti-fascism," the moral principle "personal loyalty to one's friends." He apparently never pondered the incoherence of the two principles.

A certain quotation from E. M. Forster has become de rigueur in discussing the Cambridge spies. Forster was another Cantabridgian, though of one generation older than the spies, another genius, another (with Burgess and Blunt himself) tortured and furtive homosexual. In a provocative essay Forster had written: "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." What was already an arresting apothegm later took on an aura of prophecy when it turned out that Anthony Blunt had indeed made that choice. And here was something extraordinary. The same man who in 1937 was articulating a Marxist artistic theory in which the individuality of the artist and the particularity of subject were to be made entirely subordinate to mechanical reproduction and the satisfactions of the "workers" took as his highest moral principle, one that trumped any larger social obligation, loyalty to a coterie of highly privileged personal friends. Here was a tragedy much larger than politics, one that would require a Shakespeare or a Goethe to probe.

Triumph at Baker's Basin

According to one cynical view the two secrets of a happy life are, first, to identify genuinely modest goals and, second, to cultivate very low expectations in their pursuit. In other words, “Dream the possible dream.” From this point of view my past week must be judged a succès fou. I succeeded in having my pickup truck inspected and validated by the State of New Jersey.

The general experience of NJMVD Inspection Station at Baker’s Basin used regularly to be described as an imaginary supplement to Dante’s Inferno. Many residents of the state suspected that the system was secretly controlled by the garage owners’ and auto mechanics’ lobby—there must be one—since many people were willing to pay almost anything for a private inspection that would relieve them of the necessity of a personal visit to Baker’s Basin. My first happy

Baker's Basin (Mercer County NJ) Inspection Station before recently instituted reforms

surprise was that the place itself had shaped up measurably since I was last there four years ago. The geography is still vestigially infernal. You have to drive around three sides of the Quaker Bridge Mall to reach the station, though if you go early that mainly involves lapping empty parking lots. But once there, things weren’t so bad. In fact, they were pretty good. It used to be like a Black Friday shoe sale. You are now funneled, in single file, into an automated gate, where you pick up a ticket stamped with an accurate time of arrival: in this instance, 9:31.
Baker's Basin (Mercer County NJ) Inspection Station since Jon Corzine became governor. Note coordinated pastels, which invite the motorist to make contact with his/her own inner inspector...

There were fewer than a dozen cars distributed among no fewer than five inspection alleys. By the time I got to the head of my line there was nobody at all in either of the two left-hand lanes. An inspector in one of those alleys beckoned in my direction, but when I started to react he yelled out, “No, not you—you,” pointing to a late model Acura driven by a bejeweled matron behind me. “Your vehicle,” he said, shouting to me again, “is too old for my lane.” Snappy repartee in such a situation is not easy, but I tried. “You sure know how to hurt a guy’s feelings,” I shouted back. I thought the remark had been drowned out by the Acura sweeping around and past me, but he surprised me with a good humored answer: “Sorry about that”.

The purportedly ancient vehicle which I presented for inspection is a 1993 Ford pickup truck. Now something fifteen years-old is, generally speaking, not exactly venerable. For instance, would you really like to have a fifteen-year-old give you a colonoscopy? Would you seek the meaning of life from a fifteen-year-old metaphysician? Would you really be impressed by a firm that boasted that it has been a "purveyor of sweetmeats to the royal household since 1993"? My truck, though fifteen years old, has been driven less than 100,000 miles, and it has been scrupulously maintained from the mechanical and safety points of view. On the other hand, its exterior, especially the bed and tail-gate, naturally display the cicatrices of serious industry. This is of course entirely as it should be.

What a 1993 Ford pickup should never look like (except perhaps in 1993).


What a 1993 Ford pickup should always look like.

The commonly encountered phrase "a beat-up pickup" is a pleonasm. Every pickup should be beat-up. That is what pickups are for. Those grotesquely pristine things you find parked in front of franchise restaurants in shopping malls are not real pickups. But, alas, some folks in New Jersey, and particularly the state inspectors, simply don't get it.

For nearly two decades they have been doing their level best to get "older vehicles" off the road. They say so quite openly. This policy, executed under a bogus claim of ecological consciousness, ministered to the sloth and incompetence of Detroit and the greed of lending agencies, contributing to the results we have recently had cause to deplore. If the vehicles Detroit makes are junk, they soon end up in the junk yard; but it's an ill wind that blows no one some good, in this case the duly certified usurers who loan the motorist the dough for the next expensive piece of junk.

More than twenty-five years ago I noticed a dramatic change on America's highways: the virtual disappearance of the jalopy. The kind of vehicle that most male 'teen-agers of my generation once bought on monthly installments with their paper route money, then lovingly rebuilt, then endlessly drove around the courthouse square of a Saturday

The Joad-mobile from John Ford's version of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Soviet authorities arranged for mass showings of this movie in Russia, claiming that it gave an accurate picture of the realities of typical family life in America. They had to abandon the program quickly when the factory workers reacted with amazement and jealousy that an ordinary American family could be so prosperous as to own a car.

night--that vehicle simply no longer exists. The loss to our culture is not slight. In 1936 the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset published a famous book, The Revolt of the Masses, in which he used a now classic characterization of modernity through the image of the internal combustion engine. Throughout the western world, he wrote, millions of people have become utterly dependent upon a machine whose basic mechanisms are mysterious to them. The point is an excellent one, and truer today than then, especially when we think of the cybernetic sphere; but it was lost on me when I first read Ortega's book because of the ineptitude of the the specific example offered. When I was growing up there wasn't a fourteen-year-old boy in Baxter County who couldn't take apart and reassemble a Chevrolet of the same age. For both sexes erotic initiation involved the negotiation of the steering wheel of an old Plymouth. I was left wondering about whatever could be wrong with little Spaniards. No more. I haven't seen a kid working on his car in about twenty-five years. The video game addict is the unworthy successor to the shade-tree mechanic.

At the inspection station you have to wait in a little bullpen from which you can watch the inspectors at work on your vehicle as it moves slowly down the lane. Mine moved much slower than the others. My guy was nice enough, but he became obviously frustrated by his inability to fail me. Yes, the horn works; the lights all work; the windshield wipers are actually new. If you get a reasonably tuned Ford engine with tight cylinders and correct time, it will not emit culpable emissions whether it was made in 1939 or 2009. Brake equalization is a little tricky, but if it's really out of whack a driver will know it and have it remedied before showing up at the DMV. It just about killed the guy, but at 10:02 am he had to to plaster this on my windshield:


HOW vainly men themselves amaze
To win the palm, the oak, or bays,
While limping numbers tell the score:
Oh seven three, oh four six four.

Uncles and the Present Perfect

We just spent a delicious Fourth of July holiday that turned out, in an unexpected way, to be a nearly complete family gathering. Zvi and Katy arrived a few days ago from Paris, with young Lulu and Cora very much present. (Sophia is for a while at an upscale photography workshop in Ireland—a boondoggle passed off as “preparation for the Bac.”) Luke and Melanie naturally drove over from Philadelphia. This meant that only Richard would be missing. He, I knew, was in Atlanta crating up his photographs, prior to driving to Massachusetts via North Carolina and Brooklyn.

It had not occurred to me, though it had to Rich, that an itinerary indentured to the I-95 corridor would inevitably bring him very near our house. He called with the news that he could make a brief meal stop, and Joan, who answered the phone, conspired with him to double the delight by making his arrival a surprise. At least I had no inkling he would be appearing, nor did his adoring young nieces Lulu and Cora. They had already been given the disappointing news that Uncle Rich would not be there. In fact, since they had asked about this more than once, they had been told more than once.

I don’t know whether the Fourth of July is an official “family” holiday; but ours was at least an informal one, and before it was over I had occasion to meditate on the appropriateness of one of our old national emblems—Uncle Sam. Supposedly Uncle Sam came about because of the importunities of anthropromorphism and the need to fit the pre-existing initials U.S., but there’s more to it than that. Brother Sam, Cousin Sam—they wouldn’t do. In Hamlet’s famous remark about his stepfather Claudius—“A little more than kin, and less than kind”—we are reminded of the double nature of family relationship, in which the ties of blood and those affection are by no means identical. “Of all my wife’s relations,” my father used to say, “I like myself the best.” The primal memory of blood is fossilized in our word cousin, which really means “of one blood” (con + sanguinis), which is why the word is used so often in Renaissance drama of any blood relative, sometimes to our confusion. The distinctive feature of the closest of all relationships, the marital relationship, is that though it is the creator of the blood bond, it is not itself one. In fact many societies have taken elaborate care to keep the marital bond and the blood bond separate. The old Anglican prayer book had an elaborate Consanguinity chart, summarizing the consensus of medieval canon law, allowing marriage between partners at the fifth degree of consanguinity (first cousin, once removed) but no nearer. The old country phrase "kissing cousins" refers to those kinsfolk sufficiently distant to lust after safely.

The animus here is a primitive fear of incest, which exists in most cultures and is immortally enshrined in the western cultural tradition at the very birth of tragedy, in the story of Oedipus. Faithful adherence to the consanguinity charts was intended to obviate the Theban unpleasantness. One of the great lines of world literature is taken from one of these charts: Tom Jones’s horrified realization that unknowingly he may have been in bed with his own mother. “Incest!” he cries out in alarm, “—with a mother!” That is perhaps the most telling indefinite article in all of English literature.

The blood relationships are all different, often in indefinable ways. We all of necessity have a similar pattern of biological forebears. Almost everybody has had the experience of parents, and most of us of grandparents. But we may or may not be brothers or sisters, uncles or aunts, nephews or nieces, cousins. I had brothers but no sister; but I realized how much I had missed only much later when, as a father, I closely observed the interaction of brother and sister within my own house.

My more severe disadvantage has been in the realm of uncledom. I had two terrific uncles, especially my Uncle John, for whom I was named. He was my father’s elder brother, and those two remained close until the end of their lives. Between the two of them they taught me all the arts and crafts of country life, not a few of which turn out to have a surprising relevance in the New Jersey suburbs. The more important instruction was informal; they taught me about brotherhood and friendship.

Before I got married I didn’t think much about what kind of a father I would become, but I spent a good deal of time imagining my avuncularity. Here Fortune dealt me a blow. It isn’t that I have nobody to be uncle to. I have two splendid nieces, one of them an expert in primary education, the other an intellectual property lawyer, both of them as well busy mothers in their own right. But they are Englishwomen, separated from me by a wide ocean, and I was able to make only occasional and usually highly formal appearances in their young lives. There wasn’t much opportunity for me to teach them how to repair a hay-bailer. I was for a time worried that something similar would happen among my own children when they began going international in a serious way, but if you get to be sufficiently international you also make the effort to keep in frequent communication.

The relationship between nephews and nieces and maternal uncle was particularly strong, and it had a special character, in that the uncle was the particular mentor of the nephew and the protector of the niece. This relationship probably developed in early warrior societies in which male mortality was high and widows and orphans numerous. There are many allusions to this situation in our earlier literatures, where it not infrequently is the occasion of irony. In Beowulf King Hygelac, the emblem of the brittle warrior code at the tragic heart of the poem, is the brother of the hero’s mother. In Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, which considerable complicates the narrative situation of Boccaccio’s Filostrato, its ostensible source text, turns Pandarus into Criseyde’s uncle. The obvious purpose of this detail is to heighten the awfulness of his sexual treason against her. In one of the most haunting and mysterious of the Troubadour poems, Arnaut Daniel’s sestina Lo ferm voler the strangely rhyming impediments to the lover’s enjoyment are the ongle and the oncle, the metaphoric fingernail of the spying gossip, the watchfulness of the guardian uncle.

Well, the Fourth was a beautiful day. The usual family high jinx were in train, with central headquarters, as always in the kitchen. I was doing a little intermittent, desultory work in the garden when little Cora came running out to me in a paroxysm of excitement. “I have seen Richard,” she blurted out. She did not say “Richard is here” or even “I just saw Richard in the kitchen”. I probably would have intuited the whole plot in an instant if I had heard either of those sentences. But “I have seen Richard” was so formal, so literary, so clearly at odds with the normal syntax of a four-year-old, that I just stood there befuddled for a moment. There is a special dignity in the present perfect tense, a solemnity. “He hath loosed the awful vengeance of His terrible swift-sword.” Now there is an absolutely indispensable hath. It just wouldn’t do to say, “He loosed his vengeance.”

It finally dawned on me what “I have seen Richard” had to mean, and, standing as I was in a garden, I at the same moment realized why little Cora’s sentence was so arresting. Her words were nearly identical to those of Mary Magdalene who had gone to visit a dead body and found instead a living man. “Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news, ‘I have seen the Lord’” (Luke 20:18). She had at first mistaken the risen Christ for the gardener! This beautiful anecdote is the literary source of one of the great subjects of medieval and Renaissance art—the so called “Noli me tangere”.



Although little Cora has already mastered some of the Hebrew prayers for the Sabbath meal, she is not yet truly a Bible scholar. So I do not claim to find here a conscious quotation. What I can and do claim is a very particular love of a niece for her uncle. She was as delighted to see Richard walk into the kitchen as Mary had been to stumble upon her risen Lord. Joy doesn't get much more intense than that.

John Locke and the Argentine Connection

“Why,” my wife asked me “is Sarkozy’s picture on the front page?” Casual error not infrequently becomes the occasion of deep insight. The front page photograph was not of Nicholas Sarkozy, but of Mark Sanford of South Carolina, and it went with a headline reading ENDING MYSTERY, A GOVERNOR SAYS HE HAD AN AFFAIR. That was a revelation of some interest, though not as much as the realization that Sanford does sort of look like Sarkozy. And note how close they would be in an alphabetical listing....



Who is who?



When I realized it was Sanford, not Sarkozy, I immediately thought about the time my car was stolen in New Jersey while I was in Italy.

The logic of all this will be clearer to you if you are a reader of Laurence Sterne, whose immortal Tristram Shandy has a lot of fun with Locke’s views of the “association of ideas”. The crucial association here is that linking oddball southern politicians with Argentinian bombshells. You see, Mark Sanford, the governor of South Carolina, was supposed to be taking a lonely hike along the Appalachian Trail in order “to recharge after the stimulus battle.” Well, actually he was supposed to be being the governor of South Carolina, but the Appalachian Trail was a plausible alternative. It turns out he was actually having a dirty weekend recharging after the stimulus battle with his Argentinian girlfriend in Buenos Aires. So now Mark Sanford can’t be president, because anybody who lies about walking the Appalachian Trail has for sure lost the tree-hugger vote.

The “Times” had a big story about all this, but as so often they missed the most important thing about it, which is the trend, the pattern. Oddball southern politicians compromise their chances of becoming president through involvement with foxy Argentinian women. Recall the late




Wilbur & Fanne at play









Representative Wilbur Mills (D-Ark.), who in his day was the powerful chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. (“Powerful”, incidentally, is an adjective de rigueur any time the Ways and Means Committee or its chairman is mentioned in the national press.) In 1972 Mr. Mills ran for the Democratic nomination for president, garnering thirty-some votes on the first ballot, before being somewhat outdistanced by George McGovern. But after the fiasco of the McGovern campaign Mills seemed to some plausibly placed for actual viability should the Democrats ever revive. Unfortunately in the wee hours of October 9, 1974, the Washington Park police stopped a car to alert its driver that he ought not to be driving with the lights off, as the night was dark. The driver was Wilbur Mills. Mr. Mills was manifestly drunk. His face was somewhat disfigured by superficial wounds that appeared to be the results of a stimulus battle he had just had with his front-seat companion, a most attractive woman of fiery Latin mien several decades his junior. This lady took flight and leaped into the nearby Tidal Basin.

When plucked from the water she turned out to be Annabelle Battistella, alias Fanne Foxe, a strip-tease artiste even better known as the Argentine Firecracker—a name based partly in her nationality and partly in the details of her art.



Foxy Fanne Fox on the job











That, alas, was the last we heard of Wilbur Mills as presidential candidate. My uncle John waxed gloomy. “Now they will never elect a President from Arkansas,” he opined with authority. That was the year Bill Clinton was entering his political career.

Ah, yes, you ask, but what has any of this to do with the theft of my car? Answer: everything. I am from Arkansas, and I used to visit family members there regularly. While there in the summer of 1972 I picked up, for what I thought might be its novelty value, a bumper-sticker that said “Yea, Wilbur!” This message, though conveying significance to proud Arkansas natives, proved highly puzzling to the residents of Princeton, NJ, where I live, partly because people there simply are not named Wilbur and partly because by the time I got the car back there nobody could remember the names of any candidates but McGovern and Nixon. One of my colleagues, puzzled by the bumper sticker, asked me if it were an advertisement for a restaurant.

For part of the academic year 1972-73 we were in Italy, at Grottaferrata near Rome. I was conducting research at the Franciscan Library of the Collegio San Bonaventura there, working on a book that eventually became An Introduction to the Franciscan Literature of the Middle Ages. While we were out of the country we loaned our aging Ford, including its bumper sticker, to our friend Jim Magnuson—now the exalted director of the James A. Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, but then a young playwright and novelist on a visiting fellowship at Princeton. During the school vacation Jim was sharing an apartment with an undergraduate Canadian hockey player named Ralphie, who sometimes used the car. One day Ralphie, driving along Nassau Street on his way back home after doing the week’s grocery shopping, had a strange encounter. A wild-eyed young man wearing what was later described as “a kind of mechanic’s uniform” rushed up to his car and climbed into the front seat. He needed help, he said. He was in town to view the Simon Norton exhibition at the art gallery, but he had just learned that his wife, who was either in Jersey City, Newark, or New York, and who was either sick, having a baby, or very recently deceased—all of these possibilities appearing in alternate versions of the story he rapidly, nervously, and incoherently spilled out to Ralphie as he twirled the dial of the car’s radio in apparent search of breaking news—desperately needed help, pronto. Could Ralphie drive him to New York?

Now Ralphie was—and no doubt still is, in his undisclosed location—a nice guy, a gentle soul in an athlete’s body. He would go the extra mile, or even fifty-three miles, as was now proposed. But there were frozen peas and ice cream in the grocery bag, and he must first briefly return to the nearby apartment to deposit them in the freezer. He parked the car near the apartment, leaving the young man and the car key in the Ford. He deposited the perishables and took a moment to write a note that perhaps still exists buried within Magnuson’s increasingly valuable literary archive. It said: “Dear Jim, had to go to NY to help a guy out.” Upon returning to the parking lot, he was amazed to find neither the Ford nor the nervous young man who had been in it. Both were at that very moment heading in the direction of Route 1.

The story the young man had told Ralphie was part truth and part fabrication. He was an inmate in a state penal institution. There was no wife, no baby. The true part is that he was in Princeton to view the Simon Norton Exhibition. That is called progressive penology. He was making an escape from a post-Exhibition lunch to which he was being treated, along with other incarcerated art lovers, at the Annex Restaurant.

Reporting this audacious crime to the police proved a little taxing. Like many deep thinkers, with minds forever voyaging on strange seas of thought alone, Jim and Ralphie were sometimes unobservant of the dull details of quotidian life. They had not noticed, for example, the make or model of my car, let alone its license number. At first this threatened to impede the police investigation; but the records of the Motor Vehicles Division suggested that they were looking for a 1961 Ford Galaxie. Its color was recorded as “green”, though in fact the




elements had by then given it a kind of tie-dyed appearance. Jim strained to remember useful clues which, the moment he recalled them, he would telephone to the police. He had recently completed a run of his play on the theme of David and Goliath. “In the trunk,” he was able to tell the state police lieutenant, “you ought to find a kind of tiger-skin loin cloth and a big slingshot.” This was, indeed, information that might prove useful in confirming the identity of the car once found, but the officer was hoping for something more. “Any exterior indicators?” he asked. Jim thought hard. “Well,” he said, “it has a Wilbur Mills for President sticker on the rear bumper.” “A what?” The police found the car within six hours. In fact the car was actually missing for a considerably shorter period than was Governor Mark Sanford.