Generational Thought

ABRAHAM BLOEMAERT: Allegory of Youth and Age

 “Youth is a wonderful thing.  What a pity to waste it on the young.”  Google as you will—through Mark Twain, Wilde, Shaw and Alfred E. Neumann—you’ll never find a reliable attribution of any of the numerous variants of this “quotation,” which after all expresses a commonplace that, perhaps in less witty form, must have occurred to every sentient person above the age of forty.  Chaucer puts the matter more succinctly, and more brutally: “…for youthe and elde [old age] is often at debaat.”

            I haven’t been back in America long enough to figure out what happened in my absence; so I must be reduced to talk about what I discovered on the way over.  At the end of the Open Skies gangway at Orly airport, just at the spot where a flight attendant usually stands ready to tell you that the bag you are pretending is a carry-on isn’t and must after all be checked, there was instead a table laden with assorted newspapers and journals.  These are “free” in the sense that they are among the petty perquisites, such as a little plastic pouch of such accessories as earplugs, an unusable toothbrush, and the world’s smallest tube of Colgate toothpaste, designed to help you rationalize spending an extra eight hundred dollars on Business Class. 

It was going to be a long flight.  One can never count on airline movies, even the large menu offered by the high-tech individual viewers, and the prospect of eight uninterrupted hours of Henry James intimidated even me.  Joan snagged the International Herald Tribune.  In a final gesture of Parisian pretension, I grabbed Le Monde.  Our choices eventually led to a commodious congruence of thought, though an unsettling one.

The Trib republished David Brooks’s recent column entitled "The Modesty Manifesto".  In the weekend magazine of Le Monde was a spirited interview with Raymond Aubrac, now ninety-six years old.   I’ll deal with Brooks first, but before touching upon his essay’s content I have to say that of the many popular columnists whose work I regularly read, Brooks seems to me consistently to muster more genuine ideas per square column inch than any other.  I shall avoid the obvious invidious comparisons, except to say that there is a difference between an idea and a predictable opinion, however artfully repackaged.

The main idea in “The Modesty Manifesto” grows out of the observation that Americans tend to be rather full of themselves—and perhaps on the basis of insufficient data.  Hence it might be a good idea to cultivate a little humility.  Brooks suggests that this is particularly true of young people.  “American students no longer perform particularly well in global math tests,” he writes.  “But Americans are among the world leaders when it comes to thinking that we are really good at math.”  You have probably seen some of the abundant and embarrassing data behind this observation, which any college professor could corroborate with telling anecdote.

Since Brooks is a “political” commentator, he naturally has a political point, and one worth thinking about--in my opinion.  He suggests that an habitual “enlargement of the self” may be related to Americans’ extraordinary contempt for the historical compact of the generations.  “Every generation has an incentive to push costs of current spending onto future generations.  But no generation has done it as freely as this one.”  There are few things more shocking than our national fiscal situation; but one them surely is that there is not a currently seated elected official of any stripe prepared to talk about it in a serious way.

Lucie and Raymond Aubrac: youthe

Brooks is an allegedly “conservative” thinker.  Raymond Aubrac, a life-long leftist and long-time Communist, is one of the official heroes of the French Resistance.  Yet at thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic I found in them a certain meeting of minds. Together with his recently deceased wife Lucie he was active in the Vichy zone, where he ran afoul of the notorious Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo “Butcher of Lyon”.  Probably all popular national histories lapse at certain cardinal moments into mythology; our own certainly does.  But as I learned while conducting research for The Anti-Communist Manifestos, few historical topics have been more thoroughly and intentionally obfuscated and mythologized than the French Résistance.  In the immediate post-War period in France there was not a closet in the land sufficiently capacious to hold the surfeit of skeletons.

               The history of clandestine operations is necessarily murky; and clandestine operations in which international Communism played a significant role are the murkiest of all.  Unsurprising the heroism of the Aubracs has not escaped the suspicion of revisionist history, but that is largely irrelevant to what I found striking in this interview: a certain generational theme.  Aubrac begins by saying “When you get to be seventy-five, your opinions concerning the present and the future no longer interest anybody.  By way of compensation, people start asking you about the past.”  

Lucie and Raymond Aubrac: elde

Aubrac seems to resent that reality, and given the fact that I am now seventy-four and ten months I cannot say that I blame him.  For though I have made a profession of studying the past, I do have fugitive thoughts about the present and the future myself.  Furthermore I am not convinced that they are necessarily inferior to the one implicitly advanced by many of my juniors seated in the halls of Congress: “What, me worry?”  There’s no doubt about the attribution of that quotation.  It really is Alfred E. Neumann.

 

“What, me worry?”

Republic of Letters

 







in re...

THE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC

versus

            the COMTESSE DE LA FAYETTE

“They order, said I, this matter better in France.”  That’s the opening sentence of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), a book that did as much as any to establish “travel writing” as a great literary genre.  That alone would make it a relevant epigraph for this expatriate post.  The sentence is furthermore an appropriate introduction for an essay concerning an aspect of civilization better ordered in France, indeed.  I mean the dignity of a national literature.

            Here in Paris the month began with a notable publishing event: a new edition of Les liaisons dangereuses of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos in the prestigious “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.”  Laclos was a military officer and spare-time writer of the late eighteenth century.  He published Les liaisons dangereuses, perhaps the most famous of all epistolary novels, in 1782.  Fame (or infamy) was immediate.  Depending on one’s perspective the book was revolting pornography, brilliant psychological insight, or probing social critique.  When Laclos departed the scene in 1803 he had certainly achieved the whimsical aspiration of Hilaire Belloc:

            “When I am dead, I hope it is said, ‘His sins were scarlet, but his books were read’.”  

            You have probably read it yourself--or seen the Stephen Frears film (1988) of the Christopher Hampton dramatic adaptation with Glenn Close, John Malkovich, and Michelle Pfeiffer, which captures the work’s moral essence without challenging an audience with unfamiliar literary conventions.  

 Can you spot the dangerous ones?

            The point of this essay is not, however, the work itself.  What interests me is its exemplification of an essential difference between literary culture in France and America, a difference so marked that I can propose an analogy only by hypothesis, a what if sort of a thing.  What if one of the great trade publishing houses in New York were to bring out a magnificent edition of (say) Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, or some other classic work of early American literature already available in fifteen competing paperback editions and anyway generally regarded by our educational authorities as too difficult, too boring, or too monocultural for today’s students?  A book elegantly bound in thin leather-covered boards and printed on bible paper, with two Prussian blue silk marking ribbons?   An edition including in addition to Hawthorne’s relatively brief text a learned critical apparatus of about five hundred pages?  Imagine further that with realistic hope for commercial success the book be put on sale for a brief period at $50 as an early-bird special, before the price is jacked up to $65 for many more years of expected sales.   Imagine finally that the new edition be widely noticed not merely in specialized literary journals but in the major newspapers.

            You have to conclude that in France “they” take literature seriously in a way that “they” simply do not take it seriously in America.  And here’s another example.  The echo chamber of French intellectual life is if anything even more monophonic than in America.  If all the Republicans on the Yale faculty could dance on the head of a pin, all the Sarkozy voters teaching Sciences Humaines at Paris IV could probably have a picnic on the point of a needle.  But the parallel reaches an abrupt limit, as a recent political episode involving a work of even earlier French prose can demonstrate.

            In 1678 a brilliant writer named Marie-Madeleine de la Fayette (Madame de la Fayette, or Lafayette) published, anonymously, La Princesse de Clèves, an historical novel set in the Valois court about the middle of the sixteenth century.  The Princess of Clèves is a beautiful and virtuous young woman forced by conventional expectation to marry the Wrong Man, who then finds herself falling deeper and deeper in love with the Right Man.  There’s nothing more fraught than a love triangle, and the author’s delineation of this one is a masterpiece of emergent sentiment.  La Princesse de Clèves is usually reckoned an important book for the development of psychological fiction.

            In France, as everyone knows, there is a large civil service.  One important group among civil servants are the attaché(e)s d’administration—roughly “administrative secretaries.”  Most of us are familiar with the highly competent mid-level “assistant” who actually runs the show for the appointed or elected “leader”, but in France there’s an actual job description.  Now President Sarkozy seems just as determined as President Obama to “win the future”.  In fact he was talking about it first, and he seems to think that winning the future for France might involve scraping the sclerosis out of the arterial system of the national bureaucracies.

            Some time ago President Sarkozy came upon a copy of the civil service exam devised for aspirants to the qualification of attaché d’administration.  He was amazed to find therein a question about this seventeenth-century novel—a question placed there, in his opinion, by “a sadist or an imbecile”.  How often, he wondered aloud, are you likely to discuss the Princesse de Clèves with the lady at the Post Office counter?

            Any literature professor can be indignant at the philistinism of a remark that indicates so thorough an ignorance of or disdain for the ideal of a liberal education.  But an American professor may not make it that far, having already succumbed to stupefaction at the evidence of a popularly elected politician who has read the Princesse de Clèves, even if he didn’t like it.  The implication that the local postal clerk might have read it is too radical even to entertain.

            The reaction to Nicolas Sarkozy’s off-the-cuff literary criticism was not limited to academic departments of literature.  There was a national reaction.  La Princesse de Clèves is a fine novel, but it’s really subtle.  Most of the action is mental.  It lacks the in-your-face sex of Les liaisons dangereuses.  It was perhaps fading a bit in the French national consciousness.  President Sarkozy changed all this.  There was an immediate spike in sales.  At least two publishers fast-tracked new editions.  Round tables of television pundits discussed Madame de la Fayette’s masterpiece.   At various places in the land there were public marathon readings.  Le Monde opined that among the President’s most conspicuous achievements to date was the “salvation” of La Princesse de Clèves.

 Volumes of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade: Read your heart out

They order this matter better in France.

 

Penultimate Polka in Paris

an apartment in Paris, at a semi-undisclosed location, outside and in

the bloguiste's lair (Photo credit: the bloguiste)

            I am now in a position to take up a Parisian narrative, though it will not be life-threatening in its level of excitement.  I managed with the help of a brief nap to get through Tuesday so as to begin Wednesday in synch with a tolerable sleep rhythm.  Joan and I began the day with the most fundamental necessity of Parisian life—reanimating our expired French cell phones.  This is an experience I could recommend to anyone needing to get his French stereotypes up to speed very quickly.  We were confronted with great economy of time by the shop that was not yet open, the shop that was open but incapacitated by a machine that didn’t work, the arrogant queue-jumper, the je m’en fiche employee, and a few other generally unadvertised aspects of local life.

     The Reading Room of the American Library Paris in its normal configuration 

       It was all smooth sailing after that, and has been ever since.  On Wednesday night I was scheduled to give (and in fact did give) a talk at the American Library about my book The Anti-Communist Manifestos.  On such occasions the Reading Room is miraculously turned into a small lecture hall.  That was a jolly event as the talk was well received and I saw several old friends and met a number of interesting new people; but it features in this blog post only in a tangential way.

            Shortly before we left America I was struck by a newspaper article that reported the controversial decision of the editors of a premier scientific journal to publish a paper about ESP.  I have a vague, untutored interest in the topic, and I also had the occasion once in my professional life to witness the intense hostility with which many scientists react to it.  The phenomenon of coincidence particularly intrigues me.  I am fascinated by Arthur Koestler’s The Roots of Coincidence: An Excursion into Parapsychology, which attempts a kind of “scientific” explanation.  A few months ago I published a little essay about one of my Parisian coincidences, and I must now report a second.

            It was mid-morning as we walked home triumphant from the phone shops, and we decided to drop into a small café for a small midmorning coffee.  It was a place in which we had never before set foot, in our neighborhood but sort of out of the way therein.  I think that “nondescript” is probably not overselling it.  Only two of the tables were occupied, one by three French workmen on break, the other by a graying couple, side-by-side, speaking softly in American English, sharing a computer.  In my experience 3/2 is a not uncommon linguistic ratio in public eateries here.  We would have tipped the balance except that Joan, whose French is superb, decided she would phone an old French friend of ours with a short-notice invitation to my talk.

             I took advantage of the moment to visit the facilities, so I didn’t hear her conversation, but as I was passing the Americans on my return the man addressed me, tentatively.  He apologized for intruding, etc., but he couldn’t help overhearing my wife on the phone, etc., and it was all rather unlikely, but they were already planning to come to my talk that night, mainly because he was a graduate of the Princeton English Department (class of 1959)!  They were, and indeed in fact still are Gerry and Joanne Dryansky, a husband-and-wife team of expat writers, not without a certain celebrity in the local cultural scene.  Gerry’s thesis advisor had been the great R. P. Blackmur, and he of course knew many other faculty giants of my own early days.

            They did come to my talk, and we had some further conversation then.  We’ll hope to see them again during our brief stay here.  That should be easy, as they live very nearby—directly across the street from what I’ll call our “regular” apartment (currently rented out), and less than a hundred yards down the road from my daughter’s more magnificent establishment, where we are staying at the moment.

            Gerry Dryansky was interested to hear of our temporary abode, for he knew the building of old.  In his days as a journalist in the early Seventies, he covered the filming of Bertolucci’s celebrated Last Tango in Paris (1972).  If you want to see what I mean by “celebrated” read Pauline Kael’s New Yorker review—accurately described by one cinema historian as “the most famous film review ever written by the most famous film reviewer ever”.  The subject of this film is far beyond me, but I can briefly report on its content.  It’s about an aging American loser (Marlon Brando) and a nubile French nymph (Maria Schneider) who have lots of sex (anonymous, as in they don’t know each other’s names) in a spacious but seriously underfurnished Paris apartment.  In the film’s most famous scene the sex is unconventional in nature, requiring for its accomplishment the aid of some dairy-product lubricant.  The dialogue is beyond unconventional; it may best be described as post-linguistic.

Schneider with chapeau, Brando with mattress: to each his own

            And, apparently, all this happened right here in my daughter’s building.  For all I know in the very room from which I now report it to you!  You can understand the headiness of it all for a mere medievalist.  Gerry Dryanski was writing articles of the now familiar genre “The Making of Last Tango,” so he was in and out of this part of the set repeatedly.  He reports that the leading lady reeked of marijuana much of the time.  The leading man, who was too important to learn lines, made them up as he went along, aided by home-made poster-board teleprompters pinned up here or there.  In the film, the apartment is supposed to be in nearby Passy, and the opening scenes feature the Passy bridge; but the interior shots were apparently done here.  And I learn all this simply because of all the greasy spoons in all the towns in all the world I walk into this particular one.  Speaking of grease, I suppose there is no fear that any butter stains can have survived the repeated sanding  of the hardwood floors over the decades.  But at least it was in the dining room.

Exegi monumentum aere perennius

Even groggy and sleepless I was glad to land in Paris this morning, and for many reasons, beginning with the bright sunlight.  The air is still bracing, but there’s a hint of the vernal in the quality of light.  However, I doubt that my jet-lag would make compelling reading, so I shall have no actual Parisiana to report until next week.  The weather of our last few days in Princeton was unsettled: deep snow and deep freeze followed by a chill, soiled thaw and two days’ gusty wind that blew off the chimney lid and brought a tree down across the electric lines.  An early riser, I had a pre-dawn Ravenesque experience.

On Sunday in the dawning early, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore--
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my garage door.

There was, however, no mystery about it.  “Bird thou never wert,” said I to myself.  I knew it had to be Sir Thomas Bullen.  He always knocks creepily at the back door when rattled by the wind gusting into the carport.

We have lived in our nondescript modern house in our faculty ghetto for only a couple of decades.  For nearly as long we rented a huge and decadent Victorian mansion on University Place.  The vastness of the house, its obvious opulence of storage space, and its proximity to the campus and student dormitories encouraged graduating seniors of our acquaintance—usually within half an hour of discovering that there was no way they could fit all their possessions into the parental vehicle that had come to fetch them—to seek to borrow, always on a temporary basis, of course, a square yard or two of our available attic.  Naturally we never heard from any of these people again.

                           Student self-storage facility on University Place (artist: Annabelle Filer)

Mainly this didn’t matter, since what they had left behind—boxes of plastic plates, large, stuffed animals, broken lamps, jars of petrified peanut butter, and mildewed organic chemistry textbooks--would have embarrassed the organizer of a self-respecting yard sale in Lawton, Oklahoma.  But sometime in the late 1970s, one guy—and as I have long since forgotten who, I can but hope against hope he might read this post and reclaim his property—left Sir Thomas Bullen.

Sir Thomas is a very large (six feet by two feet, eight inches) brass rubbing, framed and glazed.  When our rooms were thirty feet long and twelve feet high he was barely tolerable as an indoor ornament.  But ever since we moved to our bungalow more than twenty years ago he has had to hang in the open air of our carport, near what we call our back door, gently rapping, rapping whenever a norther blows.  His longevity under these circumstances must be regarded as approaching the miraculous.

                                         The Fleming carport boasts (inter alia) a 1990 Toyota, a 1998 pendant We-no-nah, and a 1540s Bullen

Sir Thomas Bullen himself lies buried in St. Peter’s church in Hever, in Kent.  You may recognize him more easily under the alternate spelling favored by historians when writing of his more famous daughter, Anne Boleyn.  The good news, which Sir Thomas did not live to appreciate fully, is that he was the grandfather of Gloriana, the great Queen Elizabeth I.  The bad news is that he was Henry VIII’s son-in-law. 

He appears to have been a thorough-going swine.  In the DNB James Gairdner, author of the still magisterial Lollardy and the Reformation in England (4 vols., 1908) wrote thus of Bullen’s meteoric rise in the early 1530s: “There cannot be a doubt that not only his elevation to the peerage, but several earlier tokens of royal favor besides, were due to the fascination his daughter had begun to exert over the king.”  That is perhaps as close as an Edwardian gentleman-scholar is likely to come to the blunt truth that Sir Thomas had pimped out his daughter to great temporary advantage.  He behaved disgracefully in other ways too.  Thomas Wolsey’s downfall was probably sealed by Henry’s irrational fury at the cardinal’s failure to secure papal sanction for an annulment so that he could dump Catherine of Aragon.    When Wolsey died in disgrace, Bullen celebrated by commissioning for the amusement of his house guests an after-dinner pageant depicting the cardinal’s soul being carted off to hell.  That is what is known as “moderate Anglicanism”.  Mercifully for Sir Thomas, he died shortly before his daughter Anne was beheaded by the Calais hangman in May, 1539.

One of the many blessings of this life for which I give thanks at the weekly Eucharist is that my brother-in-law John Newman—who after all might have been  a used car salesman or a proctologist like other people’s brothers-in-law—is instead an eminent architectural historian, the general editor of the “Buildings of England” series, and the author of its two volumes on Kent.  So take my absolutely second-hand word for it that Bullen’s monument is “one of the finest C16 brasses anywhere.”  (vol. I, p. 309).  I shall go further.  I shall claim that this rubbing of the monument is the finest to be found hanging in any garage on three continents.

A signal feature of the Bullen/Boleyn brass is that it shows the defunctus in the full regalia of a knight of the Order of the Garter.  According to one expert there are only five “Garter” monuments in all Britain.  (Another claims six).  One can clearly read the Order’s famous motto: Honii soiit qui mal y pense (“Shame on hiim who thinks eviil about iit”).  Unless historians are simply pulling our leg, the it in the motto is King Edward III’s horsing around with the Duchess of Salisbury’s garter.  

Medieval alloys are not indestructible, and repeated abrasion, however respectful of motive, has degraded many old monuments.  For this reason brass rubbing is now rarely allowed in British churches.  You have to go to a “Brass Rubbing Centre” (BRC) where, for a fee, you can rub away to your heart’s desire at various fakes or replicas in durable modern epoxies.  Somehow the old thrill is gone.  Fortunately the antique market is, well, brazen in its spirit of innovation.  When a copy of something gets old enough, it takes on bragging rights of its own.  What we have hanging in our garage is indubitably a genuine secondary antique—a pre-BRC rubbing of one of the most important funerary monuments in the Isles.  These are highly collectible.  Any chance at all that the owner will read this and come collect it?

Old Friends, Old Rivers

Some famous books would be justified by the brilliance of their titles alone.  One such is Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River (1935).  Should you have to choose between the title and the book, I have to advise you to go for the former.  Though Wolfe’s life was brevis, his art was longa indeed, perhaps excessively longa.  Isaac Watts, who lived twice as long as Wolfe, was considerably more succinct in literary expression.

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.

            This post will be about time and rivers, the utility of Christmas letter exchanges being merely a supporting theme.  But first I must effect for my readers a breathless introduction to two old friends.
 Oxford    

 

                                                                                         



                                                                                                     Montpelier

 


                                                                                                                                                                                         





                                    

BRIDGES TO AN ANCIENT FRIENDSHIP

Among the thirty-two American Rhodes Scholars who “went up” to Oxford in the autumn of 1958 was Charles Fish, a recent graduate of Northwestern, though elected through his home state of Vermont.  We were both from rural backgrounds, and both students of literature; and we fell into an easy friendly relationship, though we didn’t actually hang out much together in Oxford.   Chuck, as I then called him, was at Hertford College, with its wonderful faux-antique “Bridge of Sighs” spanning New College Lane.  I was at Jesus, in the Low Rent District.  We both submerged ourselves in Oxford life, but later resurfaced and reconnected in graduate school at Princeton.  Fish began there in the fall of 1961, and his reports were among the encouragements leading me to join the program the following year.  He had by then married Eleanor, and I spent my first night in Princeton under their roof.  Life later took us in different directions.

Now think of the late 1960s: Vietnam War, SDS, Back to the Earth, hippies, yippies, and the Democratic Convention of 1968.  The Flemings, including two small children, are spending their summers encamped in the deep backwoods of the Arkansas Ozarks, ostensibly building a log cabin above the wild Buffalo River.  They have joined together in an intensely bonded mini-commune with a small group of undergraduate friends, including a handsome and accomplished Floridian from the Class of 1970, one W. Dale Allen. This man loved the wilderness, worked like a dog, preached the green gospel; often of an evening he stood atop a crag in the wilderness playing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” on a flute!

Once again life moves on, and we are out of touch for years at a time.  Fleming sinks ever deeper into the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  The Fishes have removed to Vermont where Charles has been a professor, a dean, a house restorer, a real-estate manager, a writer.  Dale has returned to his native parts, but he has never abandoned his bliss or the public good.  He has, indeed, made his career working for the Trust for Public Land. 

Two streams of old friendship converged at Christmas in the annual exchange of news.  In a coincidence obviously worthy of more than a blog post, I discovered that these two long-lost friends—one at either end of the American East Coast—have been working to celebrate, preserve, or enhance our precious but threatened American rivers.

Author Charles Fish (in what I very much hope for my sake is an older photograph) with book jacket (in an indubitably quite recent  photograph)

 

I have just finished reading, with the keenest of pleasure, Charles Fish’s published account of his efforts: an elegant book entitled In the Land of the Wild Onion: Travels Along Vermont’s Winooski River (2006).  The Winooski flows through northwest Vermont, and mainly in a northwesterly direction, debouching into Lake Champlain in the general vicinity of the Burlington campus of the University of Vermont.  Not long before that it meanders through Fish’s boyhood home in the village of Essex Junction.  In its time the Winooski has performed the confused tasks assigned to so many of our rivers its size: it powered mills, watered cattle, flushed away the filth of riparian civilization, not least that of Montpelier, the state capital.  At some places it is as fresh as a fisherman’s daydream, at others boxed into concrete culverts like a storm sewer.  Fish covered every inch of it, apparently mastering along the way an impressive amount of history, woodcraft, hydrology, sociology, ichthyology, soil conservation theory, and industrial archaeology.  His true forte is human ecology—interacting with the people who go with the river, so to speak.  Fish is an expert in American literature, and his deft writing recalls some of our best naturalists—Thoreau, John Muir, or Wendell Berry, perhaps.  (Lest the high seriousness threaten to intimidate, I should add that his actual navigation sometimes recalls Jerome K. Jerome.)  A wise man once said: “All true patriotism is founded in the love of locality.”  I recommend this beautiful and patriotic book.

The Winooski may be new to you, but everybody knows about the Suwannee River of northern Florida.  That’s because Stephen Foster knew about it.  Well, actually, he knew the name, which, when mispronounced as a disyllable, served his metrical purposes. It rose in his imagination as the perfect emblem of the sentimentalized Southland, in which chattel slaves were picturesque accent details of his musical folklore, like the Italian peasants in Victorian watercolors of the Baths of Caracalla. The actual river rises in south Georgia, then meanders and loops through some Florida counties, through the state capital (Tallahassee), finally opting for a southwestward flow to the Gulf of Mexico.

There are many indicators of increasing antiquity, some more deniable than others.  It is impossible not to notice that my own former students are now retiring after long careers.  In his retirement Dale Allen hopes to return to a project long ago conceived but suspended midstream, as it were. The Suwannee’s banks have probably supported human communities for thousands of years, and certainly far back into the pre-Columbian period.  It has experienced many of the vicissitudes of American “development,” yet its surrounding wilderness has cushioned it from others.  The Suwannee is constantly refreshed by a large number of pristine springs—one of its most fascinating features.  And though long stretches of the river banks were heavily logged, much of the resultant “waste” came into the possession of the state and is now reforested with a formidable second growth.  It is in these riverside forests that Dale Allen intends to continue his life-long amateur project of finding, reclaiming, or refining wilderness hiking trails.  The Suwannee is already famous as one of the world’s great paddling rivers; Dale Allen wants to see it famous, too, for it walkability, one of the nation's memories of Paradise.   So, you see, it isn’t just pompous blather when I claim many former students are making the world a better place.

 

Recreational map of Florida's Suwannee River

Dale and his wife Karen are traveling in Panama at the moment, and he lacked the time or vanity to send me a current digital photograph.  I can offer you only this example of the platonic decay of forms, a shade of a shade.  You can see why the Philosopher-King would brook no artists in the Ideal Republic.  But Dale did tell me that his project was at least in part inspired by those long-ago summers on the unspoiled Buffalo, which, on March 1, 1972, became America’s first National River, including within its permanently preserved precincts Prince Fred’s Knob, the mountain on which we so mightily labored.

 Marion County, Arkansas, ca. 1970.  W. Dale Allen horsing around with the Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor in United States History and the College at the University of Chicago (Photo credit: Matthew Brady)

         

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A SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT.  Mr. Richard A. Fleming, alias They Say It’s a Cold World, currently birding his way through Viet Nam, has a particularly engaging cluster of recent blog posts at antarcticiana.blogspot.com.

Varietal Onions for Fun and Profit

VARIETIES OF ONIONS (from left to right): Oliverian, Satirical, Vidalian

You doubtless remember Mark Twain’s cynical definition of a literary classic: a book that everybody wants to have read but nobody wants to read.  Now and again when my writing seems stalled and my “official” reading is insufficiently compelling, I pick up something of that sort from a convenient shelf.  Yesterday it was the Modern Library Book of Famous Ghost Stories.  I am not a great ghost-story reader.  Once you have read The Turn of the Screw and maybe some Arthur Machen or Walter de la Mare there doesn’t seem to be much adult literature in the genre—though I’d welcome the advice of other readers.  However, the classic ghost tale I had been putting off for the last half century, known to be in this anthology, was the long story or perhaps novella “The Beckoning Fair One” (1911) by Oliver Onions.

It is indeed a great story, and worthy to be mentioned (as it often is) in the same sentence with James’s masterwork.  It is in some ways reminiscent also of the widely anthologized classic of early feminism: “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  I’ll say no more, as Onions and his story offer the occasion rather than the subject of this post.

We all have at least two vocabularies—an ear-vocabulary of words we learn from hearing and use in our speech and an eye-vocabulary, usually much larger, that we can understand in our reading.  In a literate society, the eyes have it.  Many novice readers pronounce the word quay as though it rhymed with say rather than see, and that is creeping into educated speech. Most people know the word for a pottery oven: a kiln.  But if you pronounce the final n, as most of us now do, you have allowed the eye to conquer the ear.  Oliver Onions (1873-1961) fell victim to this phenomenon.  His surname since time immemorial had been pronounced Oh-NIGH-unz in the language of speech, but most people knew him only from the eye-language of the printed page and thought it was UN-Yunz like, well, you know the famous southern writer of romantic tear-jerkers, Vidalia Onions.  Oliver Onions had his name legally changed to George Oliver.

Not so his more courageous contemporary kinsman, Charles Talbut Onions (1873-1965), the great philologist and one-time editor of the O.E.D., still living and venerated in the Oxford of my day.  He knew how to pronounce his name, and so did some others.  When I once referred to the compiler of A Shakespeare Glossary in vegetable fashion, I got a quick correction from my future father-in-law.  I try to find a lesson in most of life’s experiences, but this one stumps me.  I suppose the lesson might be this: although there are few Englishmen named Onions, those born in 1873 were particularly durable.

The central character of “The Beckoning Fair One,” Paul Oleron, has taken an apartment in a badly haunted house.  It was a part of Onions’s account of the things that go bump in the night—italicized by me below--that caught my attention.

Here, quite apart from such recognizable sounds as the scampering of mice, the falling of plaster behind his paneling, and the popping of purses or coffins from his fire, was a whole house talking to him had he but known its language.

Say what?  Purses?  Coffins?  My resident Englishwoman was as nonplussed as her husband, and that meant it was time to get serious.  To get serious in such a context means to consult the inestimable Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.  Alas, even that gushing fountain ran dry on such subjects as fiery purses and burning coffins.  Only tardily did it occur to me that to demystify one Onions might require the expertise of a second; so I turned to

The word coffin proved a dead end, so to speak; but then at purse (sb. I, 5) I found gold: “a fragment of live coal starting out of the fire with a report; regarded as a prognostic of good fortune (1766).”

            Even in this oil-addicted Age of Hot Air almost everyone has had the experience of sitting near an open fireplace from which a small projectile fragment has alarmingly popped forth with a bang.  That is why folks less tolerant of singed carpets than we use fire-screens.  An old English superstition, which apparently reflects the vestiges of ancient fire divination, held these errant embers to be omens.  The vaguely round-shaped ones were purses, and were good omens.  The rectilinear ones were coffins.  I probably don’t have to tell you what kind of omens they were.

            Folkloristic augury was common in the old world, and applied to many aspects of material life.  Even with the advance of the tea-bag (a miniature version of the fire-screen) we sometimes talk of “reading the tea leaves.”  A floating leaf fragment in your cup meant you should expect to encounter a stranger—if hard to the touch, a man, if soft, a woman.  Since I don’t want to spoil “The Beckoning Fair One” for you should you happen not yet to have read it, I’ll say no more.  Anyway, it’s not as though I needed to draw you a picture.

 

Annals of Academic Infighting

My adjustment to the productive tranquility of retirement has been nearly painless.  Just now, however, breaking news from California (where else?) has me as it were awash in nostalgia for the good old days of infantile political intrigue, backstabbing and simple bar-room brawling—otherwise known as “departmental politics”--in the ivied Halls of Academe.  Perhaps there is opportunity here to branch out in my writing?  Let me pitch my idea for a three-part TV mini-series entitled The Stakes So Small, taking my title from a hoary academic Q&A joke:

Q: Why is the infighting in Academe so fierce?

A: Because the stakes are so small.

Malmesbury Abbey: John the Scot's Last Stand

Episode One: The demise of John the Scot, or how “Rate My Professor” worked before the days of the Internet.  The scene : the grammar school, Malmesbury Abbey, in present-day Wiltshire, England.  The time: ca. anno 875.  John the Scot springs a pop quiz on his novices, with unhappy results.  John the Scot is my favorite medieval philosopher, for the obscurity surrounding his person is perfectly matched by the incomprehensibility of his doctrines and the opacity of the modern scholarship devoted to him.  We call him John the Scot because his name was Erigena and he was an Irishman; that’s the way it works in my field.  Erigena was one of the great intellectuals of the ninth century.  (Yes, I hear the clown at the back of the class asking who the other one was.)  He was unusual in that he knew Greek, and spread it pretty thick around his writings.  So he called his most famous work the Periphyseon, which is rendered in Latin De divisione Naturae.  But the choristers didn’t want it in any language.  They wanted to render John the Scot instead, and they stabbed him to death with their sharp-pointed writing tools.  John, who had had a rather monochrome life, thus achieved a most stylish death.  Unfortunately the account of the historian William of Malmesbury may actually be about another John the Scot, as there were lots of people who were not named John and who were not Scots.

The stilus was used to write upon wax tablets.  It could make a deep impression on a philosopher.

Episode Two: The birth of the modern Democratic Party.  The scene: telegraph office, Salem, Massachusetts.  The time: May, 1910.  Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton University, and Andrew Fleming West, dean of its nascent graduate school, are both sons of the manse.  Furthermore, they are of that stripe of Calvinist who, while firmly upholding the doctrine of the Total Depravity of Mankind, is pretty sure that he himself, personally, has never made a mistake.  They have been warring for a decade about where the residential buildings for the Graduate School will be placed once the money is found to build them.  Wilson wants to build in the heart of the undergraduate campus.  West insists on a site some hundreds of yards distant atop of mound of earth with aspirations to become a hill.

 

Woodrow Wilson with Andrew Fleming West behind him.  He should have watched his back.

Both cite unassailably high-minded reasons, but West has just won.  Over many years he has assiduously cultivated a real estate tycoon in Salem MA (Isaac Wyman, Princeton Class of 1848).  Wyman’s dear old granddad had fought for our freedom at the Battle of Princeton (1777), and West has successfully insinuated the thought that building a memorial Gothic dining hall somewhere vaguely in the vicinity, or at least direction of the battlefield would be the best possible use of the Wyman fortune.  West has just hotfooted it from Wyman’s funeral to telegraph the news back to Princeton:  Wyman, naming Andrew Fleming West as executor, has left a bequest of millions provided the money is spent as West directs.

 

General Washington points to the site of the future Graduate College

The reproof is too much for Woodrow Wilson to bear.  He must find a new job, and the rest is history.  In the good old days the Democratic Party had done quite well, thank you very much, bearing the standard of Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion, though branching out occasionally to pioneer powerful political machines in the burgeoning great cities of the Republic.  When the Rebellion turned out rather badly it became the regional party of the Solid South, State Sovereignty, and Segregation.  Woodrow Wilson began to change all that.  He was one of the first American politicians to make a religious virtue of telling other people and indeed other nations how to live their lives.  They have not stopped since.  That is why ethanol production, which might be classified as a scam midway betwixt itinerant aluminum siding contracting and three-card monte, has been hailed as an ethical insight roughly comparable to the categorical imperative of Immanuel Kant.

Episode Three.  A sea of troubles and irrational numbers.   The scene:  Santa Susana Hall, home of the Mathematics Department, California State University (Northridge),  December, 2010.  As this is a current event, I must count on readers to supply their own allegeds or allegedlys as liberally as needed.  The star of the episode is an algebraic geometrician who, though in fact a binomial, will here and for obvious reasons be referred to simply as Professor Ρi. Professor Pi has been conducting a dispute with his colleague Professor Phi in a neighboring office.  Custodians report repeatedly finding, on their early-morning rounds, suspicious puddles of acrid-smelling liquid pooled at the base of Professor Phi’s office door.  It seems possible, shockingly so, that in Shakespearean terms "the gilded puddle which beasts would cough at" might in some way be related to the ongoing quarrel, Pi/Phi.  Acting upon these suspicions, innovative campus police take bold action.  They install a closed circuit security camera that scans the moistened hallway. 

 According to reports, “[ Pi] was captured on videotape urinating on the door of another professor's office on the Northridge campus. School officials had rigged the camera after discovering puddles of what they thought was urine at the professor's door”.

In the state of California performing an irrational number on a mathematician’s door is not felonious; but Professor Pi is nonetheless in plenty of hot water, so to speak.  He faces two misdemeanor charges.  Even such baleful episodes of academic animosity as this one may advance the cause of science, however.  The Northridge campus police , for example, seem to have raised the concept of peer review to an altogether new level.  On the whole, however, your bloguiste is quite happy in his retired state, and to be laboring in the solitary calm of his home study.

and that's just for starters...