Agricola Suburbanus

Despite all the annoying Turnpike Exit jokes, they call New Jersey the “Garden State” for a very good reason, the reason being the rich fertility of its soils.  Most people don’t think of the state as a particularly fluvial place, but in fact it is a network of medium and small waterways that have for eons been banking up flood plains obviously designed by God to be truck gardens.  The divine plan has not yet been entirely frustrated by “developers” hawking macmansions—only mostly frustrated.

            In my back garden the vegetables are on the march as though in audition for important roles in a Stephen King novel.  The tomatoes, somewhat stunted by a premature heat wave as they were being put in, are only now beginning to ripen.  Very few are presenting themselves as early candidates for even a red ribbon, but they do promise succulence.  The other ingredients of the ratatouille, however, and especially the squash, are astonishing in their profusion and in the speed with which the fruits appear and expand.  I put in two kinds, an ordinary green zucchini, and a yellow “summer” squash (both cucurbita pepo).  I always forget just how large these plants grow in rich soil, so that I now have considerable trouble treading among them to gather the harvest.  This must be done on a daily basis to get them at their young and tender best.  I will now also be harvesting the green peppers (capsicum anuum) and eggplant (solanum melongena) on more or less the same principle.

            Fruiting is all about the sexual reproduction of the plants, which in squash is done in a particularly spendthrift fashion, with each individual vine producing enough seed-filled fruit to produce, with agricultural help, a thousand offspring.  But agricultural intervention can arise from differing motives—as suggested by our phrase “nipped in the bud”.  We have only recently discovered just how delicious is the squash flower, very lightly battered and delicately sautéed: squash family planning with a gastronomic reward.  Of course every form of the squash is delicious—roasted, grilled, baked in casserole, blended into a scrumptious soup.  My young neighbor Anna, a high school sophomore, shared with me her great recipe for zucchini bread—if you can called a baked good with two cups of sugar in it anything but “cake,” that is.

            One of the peculiarities of this year’s growing season has been the combination of extremely hot, dry periods, and occasional downpours.  We got a real sousing on Saturday afternoon, when at least five inches of rain fell over a period of about three hours.  There were the usual phenomena of flash flooding in these parts—roads under water, cars drowned in underpasses, popping manhole lids, and the intermittent collapse of various parts of the electrical grid.  Wind had blown the metal cover off the top of our fireplace chimney, so that we got a gallon or two of sooty water oozing into the living room; but we were on the spot and combatted it successfully.  Later I received an email from the University Librarian with the alarming news that my office, which is in the library, was inundated, with a so-far undetermined loss of books and papers.  I went over and checked the office out the next day, but it was practically empty, most of the books having been removed to a special drying room (which sounded good) and the most badly damaged to “Conservation” (which didn’t).

I suspect the aberrant rainfall pattern accounts for the very poor performance of the wild raspberries this year.  We still have many jars of last year’s jam.  This year I haven’t been able to beat the birds to enough berries to make a single pie.  I went out for a final try just before dinner the day after the big rain.  There is an historically rich spot across the street, not fifty yards from my front door.  I thrashed about long enough to get wet and scratched before giving up.

What you lose on the roundabouts you make up for on the straightaways.  Returning the short distance from the berry canes empty handed, my pessimism confirmed, I had to cross before reaching the street a patch of moist greensward.   The grass, over which the University’s mowing machines had passed but a few days ago, was already in need of cutting once again.  In this grass I stumbled upon a scattering of small white blobs, so insignificant that I spotted them only when I was walking among them.  It was a colony of infant field mushrooms (agaricus campestris).  About half were still in the button stage.  Those that had opened had caps about the diameter of a nickel and the thickness of a dime.  Their gills, which in older specimens would have been a rich dark brown, were still a pastel pink.  They had probably sprung up that very dawn following the drenching.  Joan was just about to prepare the first course: sautéed zucchini flowers.  I was just in time to add the baby field mushrooms, fresh and fresher.  A great combination, for which I intend to file a patent.

Summer Visitors

two visiting grandchildren

The best part of the summer is rapidly approaching, the part during which the five youngest of our grandchildren are likely to be about the grandparental homestead, sometimes en masse and sometimes in discrete family groups.  The brevity of their infancy is underscored by the fact that our eldest grandchild, the college graduate, is now pursuing an exciting professional career on the West Coast.  This makes me especially conscious of the wonder of young childhood, and especially eager to attend it, to pay close attention to it, as it unrolls before my wondering eyes.  Of the many palpable blessings of retirement none is more prominent than its attendant emancipation from the awareness of having to make a living, the goad to “getting ahead,” whatever that absurd phrase might actually mean.

Just at this moment the two Montréalers, as we call them, are briefly with us.  They are actually on their way to South Carolina and their maternal grandparents.  They will travel with their mother, while their Dad, our son Luke, hangs out with us for a week and luxuriates in the anthropology holdings of the Firestone Library of Princeton University.  Then we’ll see the kids again for a day or two on their way back home.  By then our two “Washington Squarers” will also be here.  We hope, too, that a fifth, Ruby the Brooklynite, also somewhat daringly known as the Red Hooker, will be able to make an appearance during that time.

Though it has been a relatively brief time since we saw the Montréalers, the signs of their mental and physical growth are dramatic.  Hazel turned two fairly recently, just about the time I was turning eighty.  However I have not been able to observe the terribleness of her twoness, so much spoken of by her parents.  (The awfulness of eightyness is another matter, and on prominent display daily).  Her verbal skills have improved dramatically in the brief period of a couple of months, and to her increasing mastery of the spoken word she is adding a certain prowess in bel canto.  At her play-group she has been strangely indoctrinated by her Filipina minders, so that she arrived here burbling out a quite recognizable version of  “O, Canada!”.  Those are the only two words of the anthem she has so far mastered, and this means that she and her grandfather are at exactly the same level.  However, I am apparently wrong in believing that its tune is identical with that of “O Tannenbaum…”  She reacts adversely to my attempts without, however, being able to supply me with more positive guidance.  Her elder brother, John Henry, only days away from his fourth birthday, is now quite the lad.  He has a delightful temperament (most of the time) and a distinctive sense of style that manifests itself in a sailcloth fedora hat and a penchant for really bad Knock-Knock jokes—not that I wish to imply the possibility of a good Knock-Knock joke.  He now talks a blue streak, and in his conversation one finds many intimations of his two professorial parents.  Just the other day he correctly used the subjunctive in an introductory contrary-to-fact clause: “If I were…”

As somebody who spent many formative years out in the deep woods of the Ozarks I think of my current suburban circumstances as pretty unexciting and conventional.  But for the young children who visit us here the back of our house, which features a dense bamboo patch and opens onto several acres of dense woodland with a pleached path leading down to a lake, the place has all the remoteness of the little house on the prairie and the exoticism of Camp Olgagaloka.  And we have the wildlife to back it up.  Deer are abundant and likely to show up anywhere—especially at the fence line of my tomato patch.  Groundhogs—identified by John Henry as beavers (more Canadian brainwashing, I presume)--prefer to be inside the fence.  But there are also innumerable squirrels, rabbits, and chipmunks.  Occasionally a fox appears, holding out its tail as stiff and unmoving as a hunting dog.  There are birds galore including some interesting and brilliantly colored ones.  If you step outside you couldn’t escape birdsong even if you wanted to.  Nocturnal raccoons make a mess of the garbage bins once or twice a month, and there is the odd opossum now and again. All of these creatures are for these children potential sources of a Wordsworthian infantile delight that confirms all my deepest religious instincts.  Amazingly, perhaps, their favorites are the two box turtles—Chloë and Hector—resident among the lush woodruff and impatiens pots of our home’s internal atrium.  John Henry and Hazel look for them the first thing in the morning and say goodnight in their direction as they head off for bed.

two resident turtles having a morning swim

 

The Old Latin Mafia

            It is the occupation of scholars to read widely among books and essays read by very few other people in the preparation of their own studies destined to be read by even fewer.  This is not a cynical remark, let alone a bitter one.  But it is salubrious to have something like a sound assessment of the cosmic importance of what one is doing.  I embraced such a life with enthusiasm, and I continue to pursue it even now, ten years into retirement, at my own rather leisurely pace and according to my self-indulgent timetable.  Earlier this month I sent off the completed manuscript of a book about my favorite sixteenth-century Portuguese poet, leaving me free to move on with my work on monastic Latin poetry of the post-Carolingian period.  Keep your eyes on the list of best-sellers.

            Of course I do make a gesture at keeping up with more “relevant” matters.  I read stuff in the New Yorker, and sometimes in the New York Review of Books.  I am a faithful devourer of the daily Times, and most days I read an anthology of contentious current political commentary on RealClearPolitics.com.  But the truth is that my chances of finding something of really sustaining value in these venues is not particularly high.  The odds that I will find something captivating in any random run of old scholarly journals are better by a ratio of about eight to one.  In the course of my current work I just re-discovered such a gem, an essay by Walter Ong entitled “Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite.”*  I last read it forty years ago.

            Walter Ong (+2003) was an American Jesuit professor expert in the history of rhetorical theory and practice, particularly in the European Renaissance, and most particularly of all in the works of Petrus Ramus, a great scholar murdered in the infamous Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of August, 1572.  In his essay on the study of Latin, Ong took an anthropological approach—quite an unusual move for a literary scholar at that time.  For more than a thousand years the chief business of primary education in Europe was to teach young boys to read, write, and speak Latin with such proficiency that, as slightly older boys, they could pursue higher education in that language.  The task was herculean, and the methods employed draconian.

            The process of achieving Latin proficiency was a combination of brutal hazing ordeal, practical training, initiation rite, and bonding experience.  It was vaguely like Marine boot camp on Parris Island, only several years longer in duration.  The male youth of some Amerindian tribes were required to dangle unflinching for long periods from flesh-hooks piercing their breasts before being admitted to the hunt.  Today we are told, certain gangs of criminal youths require their candidates for admission to commit a murder.  Such was the general vibe among Latin-learners.  When they emerged proficient they were members of a select guild, an “in” group.  The ability to toss off a Latin bon mot made you one of the chaps.  In the 1840s a British military commander in India, Charles James Napier, is alleged to have informed his superiors of his successful pacification of the region of Sind with a one-word message: “Peccavi.”** You had to be one of the chaps to get it, but then they were all chaps, the battle of Waterloo having been won, after all, on the playing fields of Eton.

            One incidental point made by Ong is the necessary connection between the teaching of Latin and corporal punishment: reading and writing and ‘rithmetic, taught to the tune of a hickory stick, indeed.  Part of the standard iconography of the medieval and Renaissance classroom is the master’s rod of correction or whip made of twigs.   Ælfric of Eynsham, an English abbot and schoolmaster at the end of the tenth century, wrote a little Latin primer in the form of a dialogue between master and pupil.  About the first question the master asks is “Are you willing to be beaten in order to learn Latin?”  The answer—admittedly only qualified in its enthusiasm—is yes.  “It is better to be beaten than not to know Latin.”

            This sort of thing went on pretty well for the next millennium.  A certain scene in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which I first read as a freshman in college, is seared into my memory.  The presentation of the book’s protagonist, named Stephen Daedalus, is largely autobiographical, and many details obviously recall the author’s own experience of Irish Catholic education at the end of the nineteenth century.  The reason I remember one particular scene so vividly is that its principal victim, a school-chum of Stephen’s, is named Fleming.  The scene is a classroom.   Fleming is already being punished for poor work by being forced to kneel in the middle of the classroom when the Prefect of Studies, a kind of Jesuit Inspector-General, arrives impromptu.

The door opened quietly and closed. A quick whisper ran through the class: the prefect of studies. There was an instant of dead silence and then the loud crack of a pandybat on the last desk. Stephen's heart leapt up in fear.

—Any boys want flogging here, Father Arnall? cried the prefect of studies. Any lazy idle loafers that want flogging in this class?

He came to the middle of the class and saw Fleming on his knees.

—Hoho! he cried. Who is this boy? Why is he on his knees? What is your name, boy?

—Fleming, sir.

—Hoho, Fleming! An idler of course. I can see it in your eye. Why is he on his knees, Father Arnall?

—He wrote a bad Latin theme, Father Arnall said, and he missed all the questions in grammar.

—Of course he did! cried the prefect of studies, of course he did! A born idler! I can see it in the corner of his eye.

He banged his pandybat down on the desk and cried:

—Up, Fleming! Up, my boy!

Fleming stood up slowly.

—Hold out! cried the prefect of studies.

Fleming held out his hand. The pandybat came down on it with a loud smacking sound: one, two, three, four, five, six.

—Other hand!

The pandybat came down again in six loud quick smacks.

—Kneel down! cried the prefect of studies.

Fleming knelt down, squeezing his hands under his armpits, his face contorted with pain; but Stephen knew how hard his hands were because Fleming was always rubbing rosin into them. But perhaps he was in great pain for the noise of the pandybat was terrible. Stephen's heart was beating and fluttering.

—At your work, all of you! shouted the prefect of studies. We want no lazy idle loafers here, lazy idle little schemers. At your work, I tell you. Father Dolan will be in to see you every day. Father Dolan will be in tomorrow.

Then Stephen gets similar treatment.  At the time I knew precious little Latin.  Also, I didn’t have the slightest idea what a pandybat was, though the context suggested I was better off left in ignorance.

*Studies in Philology, volume 56 (1959): 103-124.

**Peccavi means “I have sinned”.

Solace by Anecdote

For those who love their country, a group that I believe includes the majority of my compatriots, we have fallen upon hard times.  The naively patriotic celebration of the Fourth of July characteristic of my years in elementary school is a thing of the barely memorable past; but most of us nonetheless have a benign awareness of a holiday that arrives with the really hot weather and legitimates if it doesn’t actually require firing up the backyard grill.  This year, however, the associations most likely to stay in the mind are those of racial tension, racial violence, and an endless outpouring of hasty opinion, ludicrously referred to as a “conversation”, that coheres only in the utter certainty of each contributor concerning the correctness of the views expressed.

Is the nation doomed to endless racial discord?  If your perspective is that of hour-to-hour, day-to-day, week-to-week, it might well seem so.  But education, and education’s important enabler, advancing age, might suggest something more hopeful.  Among the more politically incorrect attitudes one can express on an American college campus is that in the long run things have improved dramatically and are continuing to improve even now.  The thing is, which are you going to believe: “studies” by politically partisan sociologists or your own lying eyes?  If you elect to go with your own eyes you are of course going to be dependent on the “anecdotal” evidence of your personal experience, a social-scientific no-no.  Even so, as Galileo once remarked, anecdotally, eppur si muove.  My anecdote will concern my fiftieth high school reunion, which took place quite a while ago, in 2004.

            My years of public primary and secondary education were disrupted by my father’s peripatetic work, which took him for relatively short stays over wide swaths of the South and West.  In my junior year (1952-3) the family relocated, briefly, to a small oil refinery town in East Texas.  That is where I graduated from high school, though my family had already moved on again, and I was boarded with friends.  This town had a sizable black minority, with which I had practically no contact whatsoever.  The schools were racially segregated, and the black high school, separate and palpably unequal, was out of mind as well as out of sight.  Otherwise the place was pretty much like the “Anarene” of Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show, though a bit larger.  I hated it, and I loved it.

I graduated in the late spring of 1954.  The date that the Supreme Court ruled in the case of “Brown vs Board of Education” was May 17, 1954, three days before my eighteenth birthday.  The issue was hotly debated among my peers, and the decision approved of by but a few.  I went off to college in Tennessee, an act already culturally transgressive.  Within months I had fallen out of correspondence with my two or three closest high-school companions, people I would have thought would remain bosom friends for life, and who under less remorseless geographical circumstances almost certainly would have.  Every “now” has its “fierce urgency,” and never more so than in the years of youth, so crowded with novelty, challenge, and opportunity, and so bereft of steadying perspective.  One thing led to another.  I went abroad for further study.  I married a foreigner.  I began a family and a career “in the East”—like Jay Gatsby!  I never returned to Texas, except much later, to give lectures in urban academic settings.  But the long reach of the Class of ’54 Planning Committee tracked me down, and I had no hesitation in signing up for the Fiftieth Reunion.  I flew to Dallas and rented a car.

I had a ball, but I want to keep the focus on the racial theme.  The town had probably doubled in size.  There was a big new high school.  I could not even find my old house or church.  I remembered many, perhaps even most of the classmates who showed up; and I was forced to contemplate the unequal ways in which age ravages men and women.  There were a couple of professionally impressive classmates.  One had been the head of the Texas Wildlife Commission.  Another was married to the former lieutenant governor of the state!  But we were as lily-white a group as we had been when we stumbled across the stage in 1954, only maybe now calla lily gray.

Public secondary education in Texas is, generally speaking, an extension of the football team.  Naturally the reunion was built around the Homecoming game, and attendance at it was naturally de rigueur.  The Reunion Class had special seating, and we were repeatedly mentioned by the announcer on the loudspeaker.  I personally was singled out as “the only Rhodes Scholar to come out of Titus County”.  The stands went wild.  I’d be being disingenuous if I denied being tickled pink.

But I want to tell you about what was happening on the field.  What was happening on the field was the home team’s largely black backfield running, passing, and punting to the enthusiastic applause of a seriously interracial crowd.  Then there was the half-time “show”: a really challenged wind section and about three dozen high-stepping majorettes in satin and sequins, though mainly leg.  I could not fail to note that many of them seemed to be Latinas.  I don’t remember much of a Hispanic population in this place fifty years ago.  That seemed to have changed.  Fifty years earlier the ne plus ultra of social success and “popularity” for high-school males was prowess on the gridiron.  For high school females it was being in the cheerleaders’ peep show.  I saw no evidence that that had changed, but a lot else had.

Beaumes-de-Venise

It is the natural tendency of the elderly to remember events long distant in time, and their prerogative to remember them with approval and affection.  The discussion surrounding the “Brexit” vote in Britain has been remarkable not merely for its copiousness and its volubility, but in the peculiar fact that so much of it has been turned over to the losers’ unflattering comments on the intelligence, good faith, and moral probity of the winners.  Most of the articles I see are of the genre “Voters fail to elect Smith”.  But since it was Jones who actually won, it might be good to hear a little more about Jones from Jones’s point of view.  I was surprised and alarmed by the Brexit vote myself; but it strikes me as absurd to conclude that more than half of the British voting public, and way more than half the villagers of the English countryside, are racists, xenophobes, Islamaphobes, phobophobes, etc.  Sometimes the dogs just don’t like the dog food on offer.

The blessings of membership in the European Union may not seem omnipotent to those with long memories.  In 1962, newly married, we set off for the libraries of Europe, where I hoped to examine as many manuscripts of the Roman de la Rose as possible before settling down somewhere to write a doctoral dissertation about them.  Our original thought was to find a place in Spain—at that time still pretty primitive, and certainly inexpensive.  But to shorten the story we found ourselves at the Syndicat d’initiative (Tourist Office) in Avignon.  We asked if they knew of any rural hideouts in which we might hide out, cheap.  The lady handed us a mimeographed list of places available under a brand-new scheme dreamed up by the French government with the intention of helping a depressed agricultural economy--called The “Gîtes ruraux de France” (country hideouts).   On this list was one rental property in a tiny village with a wonderfully romantic name: Beaumes-de-Venise, four miles north of Carpentras, fifteen miles northeast of Avignon, midway betwixt two famous wine places, Chateauneuf-du-Pape and Gigondas.

We went there.  The whole village was made out of stone indistinguishable in color from the mountain on which it rested.  We found the family with the gîte—we were their first clients—a couple of clean, well-lighted rooms in one of the ancient ruins.  Thus began an idyll of several months during which we roamed through orchards and hillsides sweet with the odor of wild thyme, Joan mastered Provençal cookery, I produced a dissertation, and we began the production of our first child.  Beaumes-de-Venise was a pretty dusty and threadbare place.  Our ancient Citroën Deux Chevaux fit right in.  At least a quarter of the old village residences were abandoned and boarded up.  Mangy ownerless cats wandered at will through the hillside ruins and caterwauled in the night.  An imperfect sewer system last renovated about 1670 made its presence known when the breeze shifted. The place still had a town-crier!  “Le poissonier de Carpentras sera sur la place vers les onze heures” in a booming voice.  The fish-monger from Carpentras will be on the town square about eleven o’clock!  When the guy realized Joan was English he insisted on getting some smoked haddock from somewhere or another, at a shocking price of course.  The Euro was still forty years away.  The currency was the recently instituted “new franc”, though everybody still talked, confusingly, in “old francs.”  Since the revalued NF replaced 100 OF, the numbers got very big very quickly, giving the air of a Monopoly game to the most mundane commercial exchanges.  It was a bit of heaven on earth.  You only realize how hokey books like A Year in Provence or Under the Tuscan Sun are when you have actually spent some time in Provence or the Tuscan sun.

We were hooked on Provence and happily returned as soon as possible, but for reasons I lack the leisure to explain we did not actually visit Beaumes-de-Venise again for about forty years.  When we did, we found the place was utterly transformed.  The Age of De Gaulle was done, that of the European Union vibrant.  The dust was gone.  The cats were gone.  The whiff of the drains was gone.  There were no more ruins.  They had all been bought up and tarted up by rich Belgians, Danes, and Germans whose flashy BMWs and serious Volvos clogged the charming old pedestrian lanes, now newly paved.   You could probably buy our old gîte—provided you had three quarters of a million euros, that is—at the spanking new realty place.  The general air was that of a movie set or theme park.  The village’s own fine wine is a muscatel, which in “our” day was advertised by a single home-made billboard that belonged in a Folk Art Museum.  Now there was a large and thriving Vinicole Cooperative that does a land-office business.  Englishmen drive up in Bentleys and leave with a few cases of Côtes-du-Rhone for their country cellars.  You can get a bottle of Beaumes-de-Venise muscat in any decent sized grocery store in Paris.

What sane person could fault such progress or fail to praise its attendant prosperity?  What, exactly, is so very attractive about stray cats and whiffy drains?  Is one lamenting the vanished dusty cobblestones or one’s own vanished youth?  We parked our car and strolled about a bit.  We spent an hour or so on one of our once favorite walks outside the village proper amid the ruined old terraces.  Here the vineyards had been abandoned along with all traces of active agriculture.  Here and there were fig trees heavy with unpicked fruit.   No sheep walked here any more.  Did anyone?

Bligh Bond and the Brexit

 

Bligh Bond

A funny thing happened to me as I sat down to write my contribution for the rapidly expanding Brexit Anthology of Sore Losers.  His name is Frederick Bligh Bond (1864-1945).  Bond was a prominent English architect of the Edwardian period.  Among his collateral forebears was Captain Bligh of Bounty fame, whose amazing feat of seamanship had continued to thrill the youth of Britain long into the Victorian period; and he usually called himself simply Bligh Bond.  I first encountered Blight Bond many years ago when I consulted his book on old English rood screens, written in collaboration with another notable character named Bede Camm.  That was probably forty years ago, and I had forgotten all about him when—in connection with the book I have just completed—I consulted another of his collaborative works: Studies in the Apostolic Gnosis (1919).  This is a quite brilliant and quite mad book; but it is certainly a must-read for anyone interested in the number thirty-seven, which I happened to be at the time.

Glastonbury: the old...

Now you may be aware of the fact that the Brexit vote took place on the Thursday of the week of the Glastonbury Festival.  Glastonbury is an ancient ecclesiastical site in the far west of England.  The Festival is a sort of annual Woodstock, somewhat moderated and cultivated to meet appropriate British specs.  Its origins go back a century.  Its popular music dimension, now prominent, dates from about 1970.  The Festival is a magnet for contemporary British youth.  Pundits soon began noting that while Dionysian British youth were busy making music and love rather than money or war, they were not voting in the referendum in which their dour, uptight Apollonian elders were dooming them to a return of the Fifties and, possibly, the inconvenience of visas for the beaches of Ibiza.  Hence the forced marriage of Glastonbury and Brexit in the tortured journalistic mind.

...and the new

Part of the hokum surrounding Glastonbury is its imaginary connection with ancient Druidical rites and prelapsarian ecological mysticism, now joyously revived between rock band sets.  As I discovered, Mr. Bond bears some responsibility for this.  As a medievalist I was quite aware of its less sexy but actual ancient Christian associations, and I was even vaguely aware that what had put the place back on the map were dramatic archaeological operations in the early part of the twentieth century.  I was unaware, however, that the director of the excavations was Bligh Bond, and even less aware of the extraordinary scientific principles by which Bond was guided.

Bond was the son of the head of Marlborough School, by whom he was privately and no doubt strenuously educated.  Throughout his early adult life he combined public professional success as an architect with a private quest for religious mysticism which, by the end of the century, led to his immersion in Spiritualism.  This interests me, perhaps because one of my first publications, based on a graduate student seminar paper, concerned Browning’s dramatic monologue “Mr. Sludge the Medium,” for which I had to do considerable research into Victorian Spiritualism.  Bond combined his eccentric version of Anglo-Catholic practice with table-rapping spiritualism in a way that could cause alarm among two groups.  The particular mode of spiritual discourse through which he came to communicate with the Other World was “automatic writing”, a system by which the departed were supposed to hold converse with the living through the mediation of a specially gifted amanuensis.

At Glastonbury, which in legend had been the site of a pilgrimage made by Joseph of Arimathea, were the remains of an important Benedictine abbey that had been especially rich booty in Henry VIII’s campaign of ecclesiastic spoliation.  The site had then been used as a quarry for centuries.  The challenges to the archeologists, who in 1907 set out under Bond’s direction to study the site, were enormous.  One great puzzle was the location of an important chapel (the “Edgar Chapel”) that was clearly referenced in ancient documents, but now utterly vanished.  The chapel had been finished shortly before the Dissolution by Abbot Whiting, who had been martyred as well as dispossessed.

Where should they start to dig?  Architectural parallels suggested the likely spot, but Bond was doubtful and turned to the Spirit World.  Through the good services of a trusted medium-scribe, a former naval officer named John Allen, sixteenth-century monks began a vigorous correspondence with Bond in early Modern English and Church Latin.  The spirit papers included an actual hand-drawn architectural plan, with the surprising location of the obliterated chapel clearly marked. This invaluable document was signed “Gulielmus Monachus” (roughly, Bill the Monk).  Bond dug.  He found the missing chapel.  The rest is history: the discipline of Supernatural Archaeology was born.

from out of the blue, a blue print

Believers believed, skeptics were skeptical.  The former included the great neo-Gothic architect Ralph Adams Cram, creator of the Princeton University Chapel among other magnificent piles.  The latter included the Anglican theological authorities in charge of the Glastonbury dig, who eventually fired Bond out of embarrassment.

It seems to have been the Great War, which seared the sensibilities of so many among the European elites, that pushed Bond over the top, if you will forgive the license.  One of his books, The Hill of Vision, is a collection of automatic writing from members of the “Company of Avalon” and other sage otherworldlings with advice as how to avoid any repetition of the great catastrophe.  In the late Twenties Bond went to America where he became for a time the educational director for the American Society for Psychical Research.  He was ordained a priest, then in short order consecrated a bishop, in the Old Catholic Church.  Mired in multiple controversies, he returned to Britain, retired into obscurity in North Wales, and left an unpublished dossier of spirit-communications from his ancestor Captain Bligh.

Doing Horace One Better

            Among a thousand unforgettable images in the Divine Comedy is one in the nineteenth canto of the Inferno in which the pilgrim Dante likens himself in simile to a mendicant confessor at the execution of a murderer.  “I stood, like the friar who is confessing a treacherous assassin that, after being fixed, recalls him and thus delays the death.”  There is a ghastly glimpse of social history behind these lines.  The punishment for hired assassins in medieval Florence was to be asphyxiated, and in horrible fashion.  The condemned man was stoutly affixed to a post and placed head-first in a hole to about his waist.  The executioners then filled the hole with loose earth.  The criminal has made his confession and received his absolution.  But to hold death at bay even for but an instant, he “remembers” an unmentioned sin, and calls the friar back.

            The prospect of annihilation is a powerful stimulus to the narrative imagination.  A great work of world literature, one that most readers will know and love, exemplifies the point.  I mean the Arabian Nights, also known as the Thousand Nights and One Night, an ancient compilation and a treasure house of great old stories like “Sinbad the Sailor”.  The rather gruesome premise of this collection is that a pathologically jealous eastern potentate each night takes a virgin for a bride.  In the morning, in order to give her no opportunity to betray him, he has her executed.  Eventually they run out of virgins—all too easily done, even in conservative circles--but a particularly clever young woman, Scheherazade, daughter of the vizier, volunteers.  In bed, she tells her new husband an intriguing story—but breaks off before its denouement.  The potentate decides to allow her a second night to complete the tale.  This she does, but immediately begins, but only begins, another.  Once more the fascinated husband grants her an “extra” night—and so it goes for 1001 nights, by which time he is permanently hooked or booked.

 

Ferdinand Keller : Scheherazade and the Sultan  (1880)

          Neither from the sexual nor the existential point of view are my circumstances so dramatic as those of Scheherazade, but they are not without a certain parallelism.  I am finally, within a very few weeks, having to submit the copy for a long “finished” book.  I think it’s a good book, and certainly one I have worked hard on, but I realize I have been doing almost everything in my power—such as writing two other books in the meantime—to avoid letting it go. 

I had a good college friend—now many years dead, alas—with whom I used to discuss possible life plans.  He had an excellent one, though it went unfulfilled.  Step one was to marry a very rich woman.  Step two was to get a bathrobe and a pipe.  He could shuffle around the house endlessly in the bathrobe.  If asked what he did, exactly, the answer would be “I am writing a novel”.  An occasional puff on the pipe would seal the plausibility of the vocation claimed.  “You see,” he said, “to be a writer you don’t actually have to publish anything.  All you have to do is be writing something.”

I do have a permanently unfinished novel, but it hardly counts among the half dozen or so unfinished scholarly books.  The thing is that writing leads to more writing, while finishing something leads to a void, awkward questions, snarky reviews.  I also note, thanks to the little device provided by Google, that this is the 364^th weekly essay on “Gladly Learn, Gladly Teche”.  Since there are seven days in a week, and fifty-two weeks in a year—well, even I can do the math in my head.  I am just about to complete seven years of weekly blogging.  And I also recall that my very first essay, in addition to being way too long, was in part devoted to Luis de Camões and to the book that I even then had been working on (off and on) for the first three years of my retirement.  So that makes a full decade of purposeful delay, meaning that I have surpassed the famous advice of Horace in his “Art of Poetry” that you should wait nine years (…nonumque prematur in annum…) before releasing your manuscript from the desk drawer in which it has been moldering.  But I have achieved this through honest sloth without recourse to the active nocturnal sabotage practiced by Penelope.

  "Penelope Unraveling Her Work at Night" by Dora Wheeler (1856–1940)