Naughty Pleasures of the Aging Parents

Among the numerous benefits of having an all-star daughter—a topic touched upon in this space a couple of months ago—is that the APs from time to time have the use of a Manhattan apartment. So it was that for the first part of the week-end just past we were able to throw ourselves with abandon into a cultural orgy of the sort possible only in a few of the world’s great cities. It took me most of a lifetime to overcome my hillbilly prejudice against New York; but I now practically froth at the mouth with the zeal of the convert.

The Opera House: Brookly Academy of Music

On Thursday night we trundled via the number six line over to the Brooklyn Academy of Music to view an amazing production of Henry Purcell’s amazing opera, The Fairy Queen (1692). The title, like most things about the piece, seems designed to confuse. The subject matter is not that of Spenser’s Faerie Queene but of (parts of) Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, which supplies also the dialogue. You remember—the queen of the fairies, Titania, gets some magic love pollen in her eye and falls head over heels for the country bumpkin Bottom, who has himself acquired a donkey’s head through similarly mischievous magic.

William Christie: Musical Genius

The conductor was the brilliant William Christie with his famous early music group “Les Arts Florissants,” which usually hangs out in Paris. I have a recording of one of his earlier versions (Harmonia Mundi 901308.09); but the difference between the live performance and the two CDs is approximately that between taking a shower in the buff and taking a shower in a raincoat. Seldom have I realized so clearly how much the architectural and decorative magnificence of a theater and the imaginative dramaturgy of a director actually control the musical experience of opera.

The original audiences of baroque opera didn’t have a whole hell of a lot of other claims on their time, and this rambunctious production ran just under four hours. (So much for the “two hours’ traffic on our stage”.) About a third of the audience never reappeared after the intermission, which began roughly at the two-hour mark. Most of the early leavers probably simply succumbed to artistic fatigue—it certainly couldn’t have been boredom--but a few of the younger and more suggestible ones may have been inspired to hurry home by a remarkable scene, of which old Purcell must be found innocent, featuring a dozen or more gigantic copulating conies. I won’t even try to explain…I guess you just had to be there.

We managed to catch what must have been the night’s last train out of Brooklyn, and as we ourselves were for the moment living the life of Restoration or Queen Anne aristocrats we were able to recoup in leisurely fashion on Friday morning. Indeed I even did a little of what I laughingly call “work” in the Bobst Library of NYU while Joan tracked down some hiking gear to be used on her next stage of the Compostella pilgrimage later in the spring. We then headed north to the Metropolitan Museum where, by two sets of unique circumstances, there are two concurrent, once-in-a-lifetime exhibitions in the medieval galleries.

Alabaster Mourner

The Musée des Beaux Arts in Dijon, housed in the old palace of the Dukes of Burgundy, is one of the great provincial museums of France. It has been closed down for a period to allow for a major renovation. This unique circumstance has allowed its most precious treasure to go on an American tour. That treasure is the collection of exquisitely carved alabster “mourners”, each, with the exception of a child-chorister, about sixteen inches tall, created to decorate the tombs Philip the Bold (1342-1404) and his son John the Fearless (1371-1419). Tragically little of aristocratic funerary art of medieval France survived the ideological fury of the Revolution; but these extraordinary pieces escaped. They originally decorated the bases of the actual ducal tombs; in the Met they are displayed in amazing ensemble as a long and lugubrious liturgical procession of mourners. They will be in New York until late May, then later in Saint Louis, Dallas, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Richmond. For many, it will be the chance of a lifetime.

The Riches Heures interrupt this blog with a most important announcement.

Some books are so precious that they have rightly been removed from the inspection of any but a small number of professional scholars and curators. Such are many of the most famous medieval books of hours, especially those executed by the brothers Limbourg. Even if you happen to be in that elect number of professionals, you are no more capable than any ordinary reader of examining more than one folio opening at a time. Only with the aid of photographs have students been able to study the often copious illustrations of medieval books in a comparative manner. A remarkable circumstance—like the temporary closing of the Dijon Museum never to happen again in the lifetime of any living person—has led the Met curators to unbind their greatest manuscript treasure, the “Belles Heures” of the Duc de Berry. This fabulous book usually resides at the Cloisters, the medieval “colony” of the Met way up at the top of Manhattan. But for the moment its meticulously disbound and uninjured sheets, which will of course, like the Burgundian mourners, soon be put back together in an improved and renovated housing, are available for viewing as individual sheets. This is the only known book entirely executed by the Limbourgs; and even they will never have had the opportunity to view it as you can—provided you hurry.

Not to be outdone, the Morgan Library, owner of the fabulous “Hours of Catherine of Cleves” has metaphorically taken a leaf out of the Met’s book—meaning that they literally took a hundred or so out of their own. The paintings of the disbound Cleves Hours, spaciously distributed throughout one of the Morgan’s most elegant galleries, are there for all the world to view. A recently produced facsimile of the whole book—extraordinarily accurate in its reproduction both of the parchments and the binding—lies open for general handling. Facsimiles of this quality now cost more than Mr. Morgan once paid for many of his sumptuous originals; this one is invaluable in giving you a sense of the engineered whole of the magnificent original parts displayed throughout the gallery. We did that on Saturday morning before having a tasty bite of Thai food on Thompson Street. Then, deeply grateful to two Catherines, we headed back home. Any more excitement so intense might have thrown my pacemaker out--if I had one, that is. But you can eat only a pound or so of fudge at one sitting. Had I known that retirement would be this great, I might have forgone the preparatory decades spent working.

A joyous Passover and blessed Easter to Catherine of Cleves and all our readers

Medievalissimus

There are certain jobs that have always seemed to me from a distance to be rather dreadful, especially ones involving cars. For instance I have shuddered at the thought of being a toll collector on the New Jersey Turnpike or an inspector for the Division of Motor Vehicles. Then one day at an open-air flea market I fell into conversation with a seller of antique tools whose regular job was sticking his wand up peoples’ exhaust pipes in some DMV shed in Hunterdon County. This highly intelligent fellow described his job as “fascinating” and “educational”. “Every day,” he said, “there’s something new.”

Some academic medievalia

The truth is that unless you have done a job, it’s not all that easy to imagine what it’s actually like to do it. For nearly half a century I was a professional scholar, and I soon discovered that few people outside the guild of professional scholarship had an accurate view of the nature or rhythm of my work. I use the word “guild” advisedly. The university is one of the modern social institutions most visibly connected with its medieval origins. We see this in terminology—doctors, masters, degrees, deans, sabbaticals—in the funny academic regalia in which we strut around on ceremonial occasions, and in the very expensive architectural penchant for cut stone and ogive arches. No feature is more “medieval” than the system by which professional scholars perpetuate their craft by what is still essentially apprenticeship, and safeguard its supposed mysteries and standards through complex procedures of accreditation. The rigor of medieval pedagogy is perhaps suggested in the common iconographic image of the school master as a man with a whip. Things are less violent now, but every professional scholar must be profoundly aware of his place as the student of great masters who have gone before him and of her obligation to a generation of intellectual progeny who will succeed her.

A medieval professor

I have just returned from an academic meeting at Yale University that gave me cause to meditate both upon ancestry and posterity. If all college professors are a little medieval, there are some among them who are very much so: the medievalists, natch. And in my retirement I have a job that must surely compete for the title medievalissimus. I am the Orator of the Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America. The Medieval Academy is just what it sounds like. The Fellows are its most distinguished senior members, strictly limited in number and elected by arcane guild protocols designed for elite self-perpetuation. One of my colleagues (who is one) calls them simply The Old Guys. The Orator has two jobs. The Orator delivers brief obituary memorials of recently defunct Fellows and slightly more expansive encomia or laudationes of new Fellows to be inducted.

To prepare even brief obituaries worthy of famous old scholars is no easy thing. Some of these people were actual friends or acquaintances. Others have been known only through books or library catalogues. Still others have built up stately edifices of learning wholly outside my competence. The experience is genuinely humbling, and even for people who have been to me but names, genuinely personal. Two years ago I attended a reunion of the Sewanee class of 1958, fifty years out. I had a great time, and I wrote about it somewhere. One private experience was particularly moving. Sewanee is a hamlet set upon a beautiful mountaintop. Its old graveyard is hardly a stone’s throw from its new library. In it are buried many of the great people of its institutional history, from its impoverished post-Confederate refounders to some of its most generous contemporary benefactors. On one of the reunion days, as the rising sun blazed through autumn foliage, I took a solitary stroll through the cemetery. I walked quite literally among the dead professors whose awesome civility, whose love of literature, whose seemingly miraculous erudition and wisdom ignited my own ambitions to master the craft. I have something of that feeling in my role as necrologist.

The old cemetery: Sewanee, Tennessee

My other role, to welcome newly elected Fellows, is more exhilarating and less plangent—less plangent, but perhaps no less poignant. The genre of the “citation” or the laudatio (praise) will be familiar to anyone who has ever seen the formal presentation of an award. The traditional laudatio at the Fellows’ session of a Medieval Academy meeting is reasonably elaborate. It takes about five minutes to read and even then, so accomplished are the scholars being inducted, it often can barely touch upon all aspects of their distinction.

This year there were six new Fellows, and I will tell you about two. If you have not already deduced the principle of selection, I’ll make it explicit presently; but do bear in mind that I am talking about the newest of “The Old Guys”. The first is Anne D. Hedeman, Professor of the History of Art at the University of Illinois. She has done groundbreaking work in the study of medieval book painting. A particular focus of her scholarship has been the aristocratic book culture of early humanism. It may be hard for us to imagine a world in which its most powerful men and women thought that commissioning and owning splendid books was an excellent exercise of their magnificence. Anne Hedeman knows their world intimately, and she has introduced thousands to it through her lectures, her books, and her crafted museum exhibitions. If you’re going to be out on the West Coast next winter, do take in the Getty Museum show called Imagining the Past in France: 1250-1500, of which she will be the co-curator.

Professor Anne D. Hedeman

The other is James J. O’Donnell, Professor of Classics at Georgetown University, and Provost of that institution. Professor O’Donnell is one of the world’s greatest authorities on Saint Augustine, who just happens to be the most important intellectual figure of the entire Middle Ages. O’Donnell has among much else published the definitive edition of the Confessions of Saint Augustine, which is among the three or four most important books in medieval literary history. This just scrapes the surface, of course; but then there’s the Provost bit. This is a nice medieval title for a job that—depending upon the institution involved—demands the energy and capacities of either the CEO or the Chairman of the Board of a major industrial enterprise.

I have chosen them for purely exemplary purposes. Both of them were “my” undergraduate students at Princeton in the early 1970s. And if you don’t think that makes me feel proud, think again. You see in my line of work there are The Old Guys and the really Old Guys. And the important ones are those yet to come.

Professor James J. O'Donnell with Old Guy

The Dark

This week was all about the weather. Here in central New Jersey we had terrific storms that have left in their wake dramatic devastation. Many roads were made impassable by floodwater or fallen trees uprooted by hurricane-like winds. Arboreal debris is scattered everywhere. The big wind and rains began on Friday and continued, with some intermission, for more than two days. Our electrical power was cut mid-morning on Saturday. Much of Princeton Township didn’t get it back until Tuesday afternoon. We were luckier. Ours returned on Monday afternoon, after two highly instructive days, and especially nights, that offered much food for thought.

I have spent much of my adult life trying to imagine with some particularity the actual texture of human life in the Old World, before modernity. My particular focus has been the European Middle Ages; but I use the term Old World for a much more vast expanse of time that in no small part of the world continues to this very day. I have tried to convince my students that much of what makes our own world so very different from that of Homer or Dante or Milton is of quite recent origin. The “alterity” of the past—a fancy historical term meaning, roughly, differentness—is everywhere connected with often forgotten changes in material culture less than a century old. Our ancestors no more than three generations back could intuitively and naturally understand things in Chaucer that today need tedious footnotes to explain.

One example I have used is that of animal husbandry. The Old World was overwhelmingly agricultural. Most people lived in intimate association with the land, with its crops, and especially with the animals on which they depended for food, clothing, and labor. Cows, sheep, pigs, poultry—these were the necessary and ubiquitous extensions of human community. There is a big difference between a milk cow or a porker shoat and a family pet, the only domestic animals known to most Americans, and only to some of them at that. People in the Old World typically demonstrated an attitude toward animals, as well as a detailed knowledge of their characteristics, very different from our own. Some years back I read that an ordinary farmyard chicken had been placed in the Bronx zoo. I suppose, in fact, that the vast majority of living Americans, despite a huge national consumption of what Frank Purdue is shameless enough to call “chicken”--have never actually seen a barnyard full of squawking poultry. But Chaucer had seen many such barnyards. His story of the rooster Chaunticleer and the hen Pertelote in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale absolutely assumed that you have too. Otherwise all the chicken singing, all the chicken sex, and above all the chicken oneiromancy loses half its humor. (Even at fifty percent power, it’s still a scream.)

A yet more dramatic example, perhaps, and one more relevant to my recent weekend, was the experience of the dark. When the sun set in the Old World, people were in the dark. They perforce “went to bed with the chickens”, in a phrase still used in rural communities. Most could afford no candle or oil lamp; for a few there might be at best a faint glow from the expertly banked embers of a hearth fire. Practically nobody in our modern world is in the dark they way that everybody then was in the dark. I mean really in the dark—no circuit breaker, no flashlight, no matches, no blue cell-phone glow, no vaguely lucid penumbra of distant city’s lights. The electrification of rural America was still in progress in my youngest days, spent on an Ozark farm where the only nocturnal illumination came from kerosene lamps. And that was in the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt! There was electricity in the little town six miles away, and among my earliest memories was the awe of first seeing a Christmas tree decorated with lights. The social revolution that came with electricity is enshrined in one of the obiter dicta of the last century’s most famous revolutionary, Vladimir Lenin: “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.”

Two rather scary, stormy nights illuminated only by a couple of candles and flickering hearth flames reminded me how utterly and unthinkingly dependent we are on we so blithely call “energy”. The experience reminded me, too, of what must necessarily be for us the diminished power of the recurrent images of light and dark that everywhere thicken and enrich our early literature.

Think, for instance, of the opening scene of the Divine Comedy. It presents us immediately with a an uncertain and fearful wanderer:

Nel mezzo del camin de nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
Che la diritta via era smarrita.

Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood
for the straight way way was lost.
(Hollander and Hollander)

The very thought of this dark wood is so fearful to the narrator that (he says) even death itself is hardly more frightful than its memory. Now it is obvious that the scene is "allegorical". The pilgrim is morally "lost"; his indecision and fear are obvious elements of an infirm moral condition that the poet presents as the large problem to be addressed in his poem. But the justest image the poet can find, and one he knows will have a universal resonance with his readers, is the image of darkness. What "perdition" means is being lost in that hellish realm described by Milton as "darkness visible."

Another great poet of the Old World, two centuries later, seems at times nearly obsessed with the dread power of darkness. I refer, of course, to Shakespeare. There are literally hundreds of moral images of light and dark in his plays, but no scene is more pregnant nor more horrible than the murder of Desdemona (Othello, V, ii). Othello is a Moor, his young wife Desdemona the daughter of a Venetian senator. A racial theme is not entirely absent from the play, but it is incidental and decorative. A modern historical predicament of which Shakespeare could have had no inkling usually distorts contemporary productions of the play at the expense of its actual and universal moral themes.Othello is a great military officer but also a jealous fool pitifully manipulable by Iago, who persuades him of his innocent wife's infidelity. What he himself only too late comes to see as madness drives him to murder her. In one of the most terrifying moments in our literature Othello, carrying a candle, enters his sleeping wife's darkened bedchamber. Understanding his remarkable soliloquy requires a little philology. The principal meaning of "light" in early English was not abstract but concrete. It meant candle or lamp.

Yet she must die, else she'll betray more men
Put out the light, and then put out the light:
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister
I can again thy former light restore,
Should I repent me: but once put out thy light,
Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can by light relume.

The first "light" is of course the candle; but the second "light" has a double valence. Othello principally means by it Desdemona's life. That is the "light," impossible to "relume", that he will extinguish. But it is also the light of his own reason, the deiform faculty that the Old World believed was the image of God in humankind. Shakespeare is distant from Dante in some superficial ways. On the essence of moral reality they are twins. They naturally turn to the same powerful images already ancient in the Scriptures. "The light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended [overpowered] it not," writes Saint John. Pick up any book published by the Oxford University Press. Look at the logo, which they still have not quite had the moxy to discard: Dominus illuminatio mea, "the Lord is my light."

For Goya, "the sleep of reason produces monsters". In perhaps the most famous of his terrifying Caprichos a whole dark world is invoked by sinister night birds and a cat--an animal believed in the Old World to be able to see in the dark. For a couple of nights, lying in a cold bed at nightfall, suddenly deprived of every distraction and comfort brought by electricity, listening to the wind howl through trees that I reasonably feared might at any moment be felled upon my roof, I briefly had a few Old World moments.

Reading "The Politician", by Andrew Young

Many years ago a cynical senior colleague, Professor Famous, noting with displeasure several scholarly books lying open or bookmarked on my chaotic desk, gave me the following advice. “There are two kinds of professors. Those who read books, and those who write books. The ones who write books are the ones who get ahead.” Though in my scholarly career I persevered in my perversity of trying to chew gum and walk at the same time, I have without realizing it fallen into Prof. Famous’s pattern when it comes to blogging. I do read one blog religiously. The inspirer of my blog was my number-one son Richard and I continue to follow his bizarrely named but invariably rewarding “Brooklynite on the Ice” (http://www.antarcticiana.blogspot.com/).

There are two important Richard Flemings in my life, but only one of them is my son.

Rich is a man of parts—writer, world-traveler, craftsman, humanitarian, linguist, disk jockey, “chronic relaxationist”, recording engineer. If only he would master the épée and the fourth declension I could call him a Renaissance man. One of several features of antarcticiana I propose to emulate is the free-lance book review. Every so often Rich mounts a post entitled “Reading [Whatever Engaging Book He’s Been Reading].” Since he reads a lot of interesting books, this is one of his blog’s best features.

I rarely buy a current best seller, even at 40% discount, but I had been fascinated by the hype surrounding this one and trundled out to Barnes and Noble. Unfortunately “Reading The Politician, by Andrew Young” will concern a lousy book about really lousy people; but in a sense the lousiness is the whole point. You probably already know that The Politician is a “tell-all” memoir, an exposé of the presidential candidacy of John Edwards, which crashed and burned in the pages of the National Enquirer, when reporters from that supermarket tabloid cornered him in the men’s room of a fancy Beverly Hills hotel where he had gone in secret to visit his New Age girlfriend and their recently arrived “love child”.

Let me face my first digression manfully by saying that this term (“love-child”) is ridiculous. All children are, or should be, love-children. The way you make babies is by making love. Now that nearly forty percent of all American babies are born to unwed mothers could we not usefully revive the technical term bastard? Being a bastard never impeded Don Juan of Austria. Do you really think a “love child” could have won the Battle of Lepanto? Leonardo da Vinci, love-child? Alexander Hamilton? Lawrence of Arabia, for Heaven’s sake?

Though the sexual stuff fuelled the story and the TV interviews, it is actually less sleazy than a good deal else in the “Edwards saga”—a book-jacket phrase coined by somebody who’s never read a saga, obviously. John Edwards was prepared to do anything, and I do mean anything, to become President of the United States; but volition is not the same thing as capacity, and he was incapable of exercising good taste in women or in fast-food restaurants, which appear to have been the two dynamos of his cupidity. The four hundred dollar haircuts, the five million dollar house (“Thorstein Veblen Hall”) are proclamations of entitlement rather than sheer vulgar iniquity. I began this book thinking that Edwards must be a contemporary version of Willie Stark in All the King’s Men, a southern politician in whom there struggled some great and fascinating complexity, a tragic irresolution of ends and means, a noble moral vision mired in the bog of American political reality. But that was an insult to Willie Stark. It’s hard to give political hypocrisy a bad name, but John Edwards managed to do it.

John and Elizabeth Edwards are foul enough for a whole mini-series, but the really creepy people in this book are their enablers. I had never before heard of Fred Baron or Bunny Mellon. Had you? Fred Baron (now departed) was a super-rich Texas lawyer, the “King of Torts,” the Rainmaker’s Rainmaker. Mr. Baron thought it would be a very good thing for the world, beginning with the trial lawyers, if John Edwards (a kind of Subaltern or Cadet of Torts in his own right) were to become President. Or Vice-President. Or Attorney General. Whatever. To this end he was willing to make available his private jet, his Aspen mansion, and several hundreds of thousands of his superfluous dollars so that Rielle Hunter could disappear from the public view for a season while she had a baby. “Bunny” Mellon (Rachel Lowe Lambert Lloyd Mellon), the widow of my own benefactor Andrew Mellon, is a celebrity horticulturalist who is older than God and twice as rich. She was much smitten with John Edwards and thought it a pity that the press was hassling him about four hundred dollar haircuts and other political necessities. So she arranged to supply him, off the campaign books, several more hundreds of thousands of dollars, no questions asked, and certainly none answered. A good deal of this went to assuage Ms. Hunter’s difficult accouchement.

John Edwards (Il Penseroso) Fred Baron (L'Allegro)

To your worries about the undue political influence of corporations you might now add some concern about the undue influence of filthy rich individual meddlers and entrepreneurs. One has to assume they exist, in actuality or in potential, behind all major candidates. Then there are the true apparatchiks, the “political strategists” and professional “campaign workers.” I was interested to learn, for example, that David Alexrod, the unelected expropriator of my granddaughters’ lunch money, is a retread from the Edwards campaign.

But Creep in Chief is the author, Andrew Young himself. Even for a North Carolina lawyer he exhibited a breathtaking moral opacity. Never letting his eye stray from the main chance—the possibility of becoming a scullion in the household of Pharaoh on Pennsylvania Avenue--he served John and Elizabeth Edwards with a mind-boggling constancy. He was just a guy who couldn’t say “no”. Much of his demeaning vassalage was exercised in the presence of his wife and young children. He became famous for agreeing to claim paternity of the “love child”; but this was one of the nobler and more interesting of his tasks. The stuff that makes the reader cringe is the lickspittle domestic servility, the fetching of sandwiches from Arby’s or trying to score a Play Station at Walmart’s.

Young is forthright in stating his motives for writing the book. They include the obvious. He needs the money, since he is now “unemployable”. Edwards promised him the moon. If the moon weren’t available, he’d have to be content with a mere constellation—the executive directorship, for life, of a philanthropic foundation to be bankrolled by Bunny Mellon. By the end of it all his best offer was a positive letter of recommendation!

As usual Shakespeare said it best, in some famous lines from King Henry VIII. Old Cardinal Wolsey, after a hundred fetch-and-carry missions to his own Renaissance Arby’s, was shafted by the king. Things were rather more serious in those days, as they turned you over to the tender mercies of the headsman rather than those of the paparazzi. But Wolsey got it:

Had I but served my God with half the zeal

I served my king; he would not in mine age

Have left me naked to mine enemies.

Nor, of course, encouraged him to write a “tell-all” memoir.

Dangerous Reading

Blog day has arrived, and once again I have been so preoccupied with life as to have neglected art shamelessly. If you will forgive a comparison between things minute and things much greater, I once again I find myself in the situation so frequently faced by Dr. Johnson in the eighteenth century. Johnson was one of our language’s greatest journalists, and one of the very first Englishmen to earn a living almost entirely from his writing. Journalism used to have something to do with journals, and journals (as any graduate of French 101-A) will know, has something to do with jours (days). To digress only a few steps more, it should be obvious that our word journey must be a cousin to journalism, a journey once being the distance one could walk in a day.

In any event Johnson always faced deadlines on a weekly basis, and he often faced deadlines on a daily basis. Whether weekly or daily, however, his modus operandi was unchanged. He would often begin writing his pieces only when the printer’s devil arrived importunately at his door to pick up finished copy to take back to the shop.

Thus I begin. The entry will be anecdotal, as so much great journalism has been over the centuries. I have a very clear idea of the subject matter, but I am at a loss for a title. Three possibilities: (1) “Physics and Fatality”; (2) “When Inanimate Objects Animate”; or (3) “How Harriet Beecher Stowe Gave Me a Fat Lip”. Of course the readers of this blog, being a highly select group, are probably capable of coming up with something better; and I invite them to do so.

First, however, a literary quiz. How many of you recognize the following dialogue from an opening scene of a great twentieth-century novel? If by any chance you have not read this great book, I advise you to do so soon.

"Annushka has already bought the sunflower oil, and has not only bought it, but has already spilled it. So the meeting will not take place..."

Mikhail Bulgakov

Here’s a hint. The speaker is actually the Devil, well disguised, of course, and travelling under the name of “Woland”; the person he is addressing is a somewhat Faustian Soviet literary critic named Berlioz. Berlioz has no idea what Woland is really telling him: namely, that he, Berlioz, will very soon be decapitated. How could he know? He has no idea who Annushka is, not that it matters, and he rarely if ever contemplates the fashion in which an oleaginous substance might modify the wonted friction of a shoe sole against a pavement. No, Belioz’s mind is fixed not upon the fatality of physics but upon flimsier literary matters.

Indeed so was mine, a few days past, when I set out to recover a striking passage I half remembered reading in Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days. It was the story of a nurse attached to one of the Union hospitals in the Civil War.* This woman died and, by her own request, was given a military burial among the men to whom she had ministered.

I keep my volumes of the “Library of America” on two of the upper shelves of a tall bookshelf in the dining room. I have them organized according to a private system, roughly though not slavishly chronological, with occasional thematic medleys. One of these is the Civil War, which happens, at the moment, to be center-right on the very top shelf, barely accessible even to my long reach.

The space allotted is finite; yet the admirable productions of the Library of America continue to appear. The results, in my household, are a very tight fit and even some double shelving. I had to pull rather hard to release the Whitman volume from its crowded spot between General Grant and Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe—or, as it turned out—between a Rock and a Hard Place. I had to pull so hard, in fact, that three books came out of the shelf, but only one in my hand. With the lightning reflex and native athleticism of my vanished youth I was able to catch Grant in my left arm and hug him to my breast. This left me, with both hands full, helpfully cooperating with the descending novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe, still in their strong and sharp-cornered box, by presenting my face to its full impact.

Harriet Beecher Stowe is most famous for having written Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book that had a tremendous impact on American public opinion concerning chattel slavery. It was with reference to this book that President Lincoln, upon being presented to the author, is supposed to have asked the following question: “Are you the little lady who wrote the book that started this great war?”

“Little lady,” indeed! Let me tell you, this “little lady” gave me a fat lip. Don’t mess with her. She’s deceptive, like the Monty Python rabbit. Next time I’ll take my chances with General Grant.

*She was 'A lady named Miss or Mrs. Billings'”. See p. 754 of the Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, as I eventually did, following emergency first aid.

The Lays of the Land

Laying out the Presidential Plan, wherein lies a recycled blog

“Well, our bill has been laying on the table for months. If the other side has ideas, the American people deserve to hear them.” In such feisty terms did a leading Democratic politician describe the state of play of the alleged “health care debate”. I voted for President Obama. As an English professor my hopes for the new administration were more eccentric, but also more realistic, than those of many of my fellow electors. I was not taken in for a moment by the promise of change I could believe in; what I did hope for was presidential grammar that I could tolerate.

There has been, happily, marked improvement. How could there not have been? One might wish that at some point during his elite education the president had learned that the first-person pronoun “I” (among his favorite words, after all) is a nominative form, and that he really ought not to use it as the object of transitive verbs or in such prepositional phrases as “for Michelle and I”. But this is a venial sin, and compared with his predecessor, who appears to have assigned the theory of the complete sentence to the same category of dubious hypothesis as that in which global warming might be found, Mr. Obama is a dignified speaker.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for his “spokespersons,” as they are now called. Mr. Gibbs is particularly inarticulate; but I entertain the dark suspicion that there is not a person in the White House who can distinguish between the verbs lay and lie. How well I remember the witticism of Mrs. White, my ninth-grade English teacher. The bill is laying on the table, indeed! Whenever one of us uttered a Gibbsism she shot back: “Hens lay. Politicians lie.

It’s a lost cause, but now and again I still fight back. Some time ago, under doctor’s orders, I underwent a “stress test” at an “imaging center”. The purpose of the test, apparently, is to gauge the functioning of the coronary arteries at a time when the exercised heart is beating rapidly. That part of the test, involving a simulated trot up a 14-degree slope on a treadmill, presented little difficulty. The real “stress” was elsewhere. First of all a nurse sticks a horse-needle into the crook of your arm. I am used to nurses who have difficulty finding the right vein. This one was challenged to find the right arm; but he eventually achieved the desired conduit for injecting what the doctor himself, who now arrived on the scene preemptively annoyed, called “the radioactive stuff”.

“This may feel a little cold in your arm, but it has no side-effects and no after-effects. Lay down on the table,” (pointing) “legs that way”. Perhaps if Dr. Goodscalpel had said the magic word “Please” my professorial resistance would not have been engaged; but he didn’t. “Lie,” I said. “Please lie on the table.” He took on an expression in which grumpiness contested the field with dull incomprehension. “Lay is a transitive verb,” I explained. “You pick something up, and you lay it down. Chickens lay eggs. ‘Lay down your arms, and come out with your hands up.’ That sort of thing. Lie is intransitive. ‘Amaryllis lies upon her fragrant bed of myrtle.’” That is a pretty far-out line under the best of circumstances, but if the only Myrtle known to you is your wife’s cousin it apparently becomes kinky as well. But all he said was “Lie, lay—what’s the difference?”

I had of course, just explained the difference; and society should be concerned that a man who finds it inconsequential is licensed to pump me full of “radioactive stuff,” let alone reorganize all of American health care. Distinctions in the lay/lie word families are not insignificant, as I then tried to demonstrate by pulling out my one famous author story.

W. H. Auden, circa 1959

One evening in 1959 the great poet W. H. Auden was in my rooms at Oxford. He was slightly drunk, and indeed spilled most of a bottle of port over four volumes of my Cambridge History of English Literature. (Purple stains of such provenance somewhat removed the opprobrium of the words “Cheap Edition” that were actually gold-stamped on the books’ backs.) Mr. Auden also autographed my own cheap Penguin edition of his collected poems and made a few corrections in the printed text, leaving me with a “rarity” that only increases in value as his fame grows. These very poems, he told me, had very recently been translated into French. “How do you like the translation?” I asked. “For the most part it is exshellent,” he slurred. “I have found only one serious mistake…” He paused for effect. I effected. “Yesh…I had used the perfectly fine old American expression a good lay…”

“And…” I asked.

“And it is rendered as un grand poème!”

“What’s your point?” asked Goodscalpel.

A Marked Man

No place of grace for those who avoid the face

No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice.

T. S. Eliot, ‘Ash Wednesday’

I suppose there are many things to say in favor of Greenwich Village, but just at the moment I have one in particular, and it is this. A conservatively dressed, elderly white man walking down Bleeker Street at nine o’clock in the morning with a large, sooty cruciform smudge on his forehead attracts no attention. None at all. Zero. In fact the facial decoration fits in surprising well, considering that it lacks any hint or gleam of metal.

Still, it is a little disconcerting to have to walk for ten or fifteen blocks in that condition, houseled, aneled, but unabluted, so to speak; and I was relieved to get to a washbasin. The Ash Wednesday liturgy is perhaps no more paradoxical than most religious rites, but it does have a fiercer irony. First a priest reads out a passage of the gospel in which Jesus says some hard things about people who make an ostentatious display of their religiosity, as, for example, by praying loudly on street corners or by hiring a guy to walk in front of them blowing a trumpet as they hand out quarters to homeless street people.

I pause to note that this part is actually rather comforting, just as I have always found comfort in the second of the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt make no graven image.” Because, by God, I never have made a single graven image, not one! Nor have I ever hired a guy with a trumpet. But the next thing Jesus says is really harsh. “When you fast, don’t be like the hypocrites. They disfigure their faces so that people will know that they are fasting.” Having gotten that one out of the way the priest then dips a thumb into a pot of powdered black ash and then, with a kind of disfigure-eight motion, smears it all over your forehead while offering the following cheerful advice: “Remember that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.” You then get to go out and wander around among your fellow citizens as a marked man.

It is probably my tendency to hypertextuality, an undue sensitivity to the authority of the written word, that has caused me, ever since I was a child, to head for the soap and water as soon as possible. Many of my co-religionists seem to have no difficulty reconciling the ashen face with the gospel text. In fact, by the time I got on the train to leave New York this morning there were smudgy folks all over the streets of Manhattan, and quite a few in Penn Station. Some people, indeed, apparently feel no self-consciousness about it at all.

This photograph, I know, looks like one of those contests dreamed up by the New Yorker in which you are asked to supply an appropriate caption for a blank cartoon. Mine would be: “I was born in Scranton. Everybody in the family was a coal miner.” It is actually the vice-president of the United States hard at work, as always, on behalf of ordinary working Americans.

The reminder of one’s dusty nature is doubtless salubrious, but if you are of an age at which you are pretty sure that the large mound vaguely to be discerned on the horizon is the dust heap, it can be a bit of a downer. As a society we have pretty much decided that Mardi Gras is great so long as it doesn’t have to be followed by a Mercredi des Cendres; and we have applied that notion, disastrously, to our economic life. I had in fact come to New York for a fortuitous Mardi Gras meal of sorts. I am a member of a peculiar and old-fashioned club, the only purpose of which is to hold monthly dinner meetings at which the members, dressed in dinner jackets or elegant gowns, sit around a circular table having elevated conversation. We happen to meet on the third Tuesday of the month. With the exception of myself and one or two others who seem to have been elected by typographical error, it’s a very distinguished and erudite group, and last night’s conversation was particularly lively and enlightening. Young Shakespeare, too, as he knelt in the Stratford parish church, would have been told “dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return.” His greatest tragedies demonstrate how well he appreciated that sentence. But he knew also another truth, to which he had his Sir Toby Belch give amusing voice: “Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?”