Nice Guy Finishes First

Jim Magnuson

The years bridging the Sixties and the Seventies, which were turbulent ones on many American college campuses, were for me full of fun, adventure, and expansive experience in my role as the young master of an undergraduate residential college in my university.  Several of the students I came to know well then have become life-long friends.  But no friend of that Golden Age came to mean more to me and my family than did the writer James Magnuson, who spent part of that period in Princeton on a writing fellowship and for a time was the official “Playwright in Residence” of Wilson College.  Jim and, later, his wonderful wife Hester, then later still two splendid Magnuson offspring, have been enriching our lives for many years.  Friends so close have naturally popped up from time to time in my blog essays, but the gravity of the moment demands that I write one in which Magnuson is the subject.

For we just returned from a weekend on the campus of the University of Texas in Austin where we participated in the festivities marking Jim’s retirement from the University, where he has been the Director of the James A. Michener Center for Writers for more than two decades.  Literary fashions are fickle, and reputations fleeting.  Nonetheless almost everybody will recognize the name of James Michener (1907-1997), an extraordinarily prolific, popular, and (in the present context by no means least relevantly) financially successful writer of the post-War years.  Without him my generation would have been bereft of hearing Ezio Pinza and Mary Martin singing “Some Enchanted Evening,” but the country is even more deeply in his debt.  Mr. Michener donated many millions for several important cultural and educational endeavors.  One of these, the James A. Michener Center for Writers, has allowed the University of Texas to develop and maintain one of the nation’s premier programs for the Master of Fine Arts in Writing.

James A. Michener (1907-1997)

Money can enable a promising academic program, but it cannot achieve its success.  Success also requires vision and the rather mysterious quality of “leadership,” a thing not always boisterous or self-asserting.  Writing of the art of the great sculptor Pygmalion, Ovid dropped a wonderful line: ars adeo latet arte sua, “with his art he conceals his art.”  I deduce that Jim’s palpably effective leadership of the Michener Center has often been of the self-concealing sort.

We attended two major evening events.  At the first, an informal outdoor barbecue dinner held in the warm twilight of a Texas spring evening, a series of old students and colleagues spoke movingly about what Jim’s professional example, his generosity of spirit, his unfailing good humor, and his personal and professional wisdom had meant to a whole generation of aspiring young poets and fiction writers.  We heard more of the same at a second dinner, closer to the lines of the state banquet, where the guest list appeared to bend more in the direction of faculty colleagues and old personal and professional friends from many venues, distinguished deans, institutional trustees, benefactors and well-wishers from the amazingly rich cultural scene that is contemporary Austin.  In the testimonial remarks there was wide stylistic diversity but an underlying and unifying harmony.  An intruding alien who knew nothing about universities, writing, or writers might have mistaken the event for the culminating episode of a reality show called World’s Nicest Man.

Of course since it marked the retirement of the Director of a Writing Center, there was certain eavesdropped chatter in the room of books forthcoming, prizes runnered-up, movie contracts likely, publisher’s advances advanced, who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out.  Even in the purest of academies professional schools value professional success, of which there has been much on display at the Michener Center during the Magnuson years.  But it is only in Alice’s Wonderland that all must have prizes.  I was impressed by my brief conversations with several students unlikely to achieve authorial fame but conscious of the independent values of the study and practice of writing itself.   They cherished Magnuson for his wise and good-humored guidance, advice, encouragement and perhaps above all his example of perseverance in the hard, inglorious, sometimes tedious loyalty to the craft of writing.  As my author, Chaucer, puts it: The lyf so short, the craft so longe to lerne.   

In his own lovely after-dinner remarks, Jim quoted a (to me) rather mysterious obiter dictum of Henry James about serious writers: "We work in the dark--we do what we can--we give what we have.  Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task.  The rest is the madness of art."  It was not the first time I have known him to invoke this gnomic gem.  Should you wish to sample Jim's own substantial body of work as a novelist over half a century, you could do worse than begin with something fairly recent, Famous Writers I Have Known (Norton, 2014).  To encourage you in this direction, I direct you to a brief radio review of the book on NPR.  In Famous Writers you will find Henry James again, and in a somewhat startling context.  At the satirical level, the book shares something of the genius of Randall Jarrell's classic academic novel Pictures from an Institution, but since it is set in a (wholly imaginary) Writing Program in Texas we learn a lot about the (probably actual) ambience in which its author labored for so many years.  It was our honor to be present at the honoring of so fine a friend, so fine a man.

Voices of the Page

Every stage of life brings new pleasures along with its new challenges, even senectitude, which on the whole is more on the challenging side.  One of the pleasures of a financially adequate retirement is that it allows us to play at a doll’s house version of being Patrons of the Arts.  We are officially designated Friends of most museums within a hundred-mile radius, and we give token financial support to numerous other cultural and educational institutions.  On Friday night we attended a local fundraiser for People and Stories/Gente y Cuentos, a group that “believes in the power of literature to change lives”—a mission statement most literature professors can get behind.

            For us this fundraiser was not hard duty.  It began with a low-key supper party given by a board member, a delightful friend who is also a superb cook, the other guests being amiable and interesting conversationalists.  Then it was off to the Nassau Club for further socializing and a reading by Richard Ford, a prize-winning author of considerable eminence, and a very nice fellow to boot.  He’s the right man for the job in more ways that one.  He has a fine southern voice, strong and audible but not domineering.  I knew about his niceness first hand, as I had a few encounters with him many years ago when he was settled in Princeton for a while.  And even though a crowded fund-raiser was hardly the occasion to puff at the embers of a tenuous acquaintance lapsed for at least three decades, I could inwardly bask in something of the satisfaction of the man in that Browning poem who “once saw Shelley plain.” 

 Richard Ford, writer and reader

            I happen to be a lover of the short story, which is naturally the genre of choice for “People and Stories,” and I had correctly anticipated that we would hear a couple of good ones.  In fact we heard precisely two: one by John Cheever, the other by Ford himself.  There was a salient connection between them.  They shared a title (“Reunion”) appropriate for their shared narrative situation and setting, a brief meeting of two men in Grand Central Station.  In Cheever the principal characters are father and son.  The narrator is Charlie, the teen-aged son, a child of divorce, who by pre-arrangement is meeting up for lunch with his long-absent father during a fortuitous layover between trains.  Ford’s story is both a beautiful homage to Cheever and a free-standing gem on its own.  And how classical, and how literary is that!   Everybody knows what “writing” is, but not everyone knows about “literature”.  Literature is artistic writing consciously engaging with other artistic writing, as Virgil engaged Homer, Dante engaged Virgil, Milton engaged Dante, and most English poets since have bobbed about in Milton’s wake.  In Ford’s “Reunion” the Grand Central encounter is a chance one between two men of middle years, their first meeting since in an indeterminate but not distant past the discovery of the Narrator’s adulterous affair with Man Two’s wife had precipitated unseemly fisticuffs, marital dissolution, and (possibly, but only possibly) increments in self-knowledge.

            There is probably general agreement that Cheever is one of the all-time great masters of the short story.  I certainly think so, even if I hold that John Updike is even greater.  It took me a while to warm to either of them.  Their cognate fictional social worlds of the East Coast bourgeoisie, as circumscribed as the world of Jane Austen and to me equally foreign, was hard for me to credit until I had absorbed a few years of encountering their offspring in Princeton classrooms and taken out my own subscription to the New Yorker.  Cheever and Updike are both gone, but not forgotten.  I have the Library of America editions of both on my shelves.

John Cheever (1912-1982)

            Many centuries ago even private reading was done aloud, and early writers sometimes call words “the voices of the page”.  Almost any good piece of writing is magnified by being read aloud.  Dramatic literature demands it.  Our literature was born in orality, the word spoken or sung, the word heard and engaged. Modern technology is perhaps returning us to a bardic culture in which recitation is scarcely subordinated to composition.  My wife, a voracious reader, does her reading mainly through earbuds.

            What happens in Cheever’s “Reunion”?  Practically nothing, and a very great deal.  A young lad who barely knows his father, yet yearns for connection to him, has a ninety-minute opportunity for connection between his trains in and out of the city.  The father will treat him to lunch.  But though they enter four different restaurants, there is no lunch.  What there is is a display of the father’s character so appalling, so awful, and so economical that the embarrassed reader learns in three pages what would require ten pages of discursus to lay out.  This is mostly achieved through the invented spoken words of one character. The mother never appears, but you intuitively grasp the essence of the marriage and the inevitability of the divorce.  You don’t even need to be told by the young narrator what in fact you are told in the story’s first and final lines: “that was the last time I saw my father.”

Though I did not remember having read Cheever’s “Reunion” before, I had a dim sense of déjà vu—or was it entendu?—while listening to Ford read.  When I went to the Internet in search of a text, I discovered a possible explanation.  There is actually a New Yorker podcast of Ford reading the story.  In fact, I take it he has made something of a set piece out of tandem public readings of the two “Reunions”.  You don’t need to take my word for it.  You can hear it for yourself.

Strings That Bind

The Takacs Quartet

I am perhaps too taken with accidental cultural congruences, and too eager to impose a nonexistent meaning upon them.  But I pass on the following anecdote for what it is worth.  The Princeton University Concerts, which under the leadership of a dynamic young woman named Marna Seltzer have in recent years reached a new level of imaginative excellence, has this season sponsored an extraordinary treat for local music lovers.  The Concert Committee brought to our community the superb Takacs String Quartet, who gave public performances of all of the Beethoven quartets.  I had to miss a few, but I was at the final two sessions last week to hear five of them—an extraordinary experience.

About the same time I quite accidentally re-encountered in my reading an old acquaintance, Joseph Blanco White (1775-1841), author of a poem now hardly known but highly praised in its day.  Coleridge is supposed to have said that it was the finest sonnet in our tongue.

Mysterious Night! when our first parent knew

Thee from report divine, and heard thy name,

Did he not tremble for this lovely frame,

This glorious canopy of light and blue?

Yet 'neath a curtain of translucent dew,

Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame,

Hesperus with the host of heaven came,

And lo! Creation widened in man's view.

Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed

Within thy beams, O Sun! or who could find,

Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood revealed,

That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind!

Why do we then shun Death with anxious strife?

If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life?

   

 Joseph Blanco White

         Now this man Blanco White was quite remarkable.  He had been born in Seville in 1775 and raised in a Hiberno-Spanish enclave of persecuted Irish Roman Catholic exiles.  His mercantile father, whose surname was White, added the Castilian doublet.  The brilliant son Joseph, or José Maria, was raised as a Spaniard.  The Church offered the best chance to pursue education, and he became a priest.  However, he inwardly revolted against the stultifying neo-Scholasticism and ignorant authoritarianism of Iberian Catholicism as typified by the Inquisition.  Along with a few free-thinking clerical friends, he had gained access to some forbidden books by French Enlightenment writers.  When opportunity arose (in the chaos of the Napoleonic invasions and Peninsular War) he fled to England in 1810.

            In England Blanco White became an object of sympathetic fascination, a man whose exotic background, intellectual abilities, and personal amiability alike won him influential friends and patrons.  He slowly came to embrace Anglicanism in a minimalist, nearly Unitarian form, and he was invited into the conclaves of the learned.  In particular, he was taken into the senior common room of Oriel College, Oxford, where he never felt at home but became friends with several of the intellectual movers and shakers of the age.  Most importantly, perhaps, he became intimate with Richard Whately, the logician.  Whately eventually became the (Anglican) archbishop of Dublin, meaning that Blanco White could return to the homeland of his Romanist forebears as a Protestant chaplain!  He eventually lapsed, or perhaps relapsed, into effective agnosticism, and repented of whatever mild claims for “Transcendence” might be lurking in his famous sonnet “To Night”.

            Now Oriel College, in the 1830s, was the chief seedbed of the Oxford Movement (sometimes called the Catholic Revival) in the Church of England.   The Established Church of the eighteenth century has been characterized as “the Tory Party at prayer” and “an admirable extension of the Police Force”.  The Oxford Movement effectively shifted the Church’s center of gravity in the direction of a recovered pre-Reformation sacramentalism and liturgical seriousness and away from evangelicalism on the one hand and mere civil religion on the other.

               Blanco White met Whately at Oriel, but his greatest friend there (for a while) was the young John Henry Newman, later (1879) “Cardinal” Newman, and later still (2010) the “Blessed” J. H. Newman.  Another close associate was Thomas Mozley, Newman’s one-time student and intimate friend, who late in his life published Reminiscences, Chiefly of Oriel, and the Oxford Movement (1882), wherein I discovered the following fascinating information.  Blanco White was a keen violinist and an enthusiast for Beethoven, who had died only in 1827.  Newman had played the violin since he was a boy.  According to Mozley “Blanco White would seem to have thoroughly initiated Mr. Newman into the mysteries of Beethoven.”  Before Newman converted to Rome, he converted to Bonn.

 John Henry Cardinal Newman (portrait by Millais)

               Mozley continues: “…but one person, I remember, played Beethoven as no one else, Blanco White. I don't know how he learned the violin, but he would seem to have inherited a tradition as to the method of playing him [Beethoven]….Night after night anyone walking in the silence of Merton Lane might hear his continual attempts to surmount some little difficulty, returning to it again and again like Philomel to her vain regrets….”  With Reinagle, an Oxford musician, “Newman and Blanco White had frequent trios at the latter's lodgings, where I was all the audience.... Most interesting was it to contrast Blanco White's excited and indeed agitated countenance with Newman's sphinx-like immobility, as the latter drew long rich notes with a steady hand."  Thus for a season Beethoven joined in concert the most famous  Roman Catholic convert in England with its most celebrated apostate.

Purgatory Postponed

            Yesterday, before the Northeast Corridor shut down quailing in anticipation of a major blizzard, I was supposed to teach the second scheduled class in a six-week course on the Purgatorio of Dante Alighieri.  I shall hope to be able to get around to that next week. The venue is the Evergreen Forum, which is an admirable local “continuing education” institution encouraged by the Princeton Senior Center and mainly organized by highly competent volunteers.  My less reverent name is “Geezer College,” as most of the students are approaching my own age, and a few have already reached it.  Though it has courses—indeed an impressive array of them—it is a college without degrees or credits.

            Dante’s Divine Comedy is indispensable but not easy.  The meaning of divine in the title is theological.  As for comedy, that is an obsolete literary term for a narrative depicting a happy triumph over difficult and dangerous circumstances.  Of the more usual modern sense of absurdity or risibility there is little in Dante; but he does tell the story of a man who starts out in danger, fear, darkness and ignorance and ends up enlightened in awesome joy and a sea of dazzling photons.

            The poem’s structure is careful.  It has three long sections of roughly equal length devoted to the “kingdoms” of hell, purgatory, and heaven.  These sections are called in Italian cantiche (singular cantica).  Each cantica is divided into smaller divisions called cantos, averaging about a hundred and forty lines each.  The total number of cantos is 100: 34 in Inferno, 33 each in Purgatorio and Paradiso.  If we regard the very first canto as a kind of general introduction to the whole poem, a plausible accommodation, you find a wonderful tidiness of both trinitarian and centuple structure.

            I am often asked to identify my “favorite” cantica.  Certainly the Inferno is easiest of approach.  It is the logical place to begin the poem and by far the best known part among the general educatied population.  I am actually of the opinion that the three cantiche ascend in greatness as the pilgrim-narrator himself ascends.  Moral aspiration is often talked about in medieval texts in terms of a tripartite hierarchy.  Think of the “three lives” as personified in Piers Plowman: Do-well, Do-better, and Do-best.  That would mean that Paradiso is the “greatest,” but it still might not answer the question about “favorite”.

            Oversimplifying madly I think of the distinctive genius of the Inferno to be its geographies, that of Purgatorio its people, and that of Paradiso its ideas; but that is probably a personal idiosyncrasy.  Physical setting, human character, and extraordinary ideas are everywhere throughout the whole poem.  There is, however, one way in which the Purgatorio is imaginatively distinctive.  The descent into the Underworld is one of the “conventions” of the classical epic.  Even if Dante had not amazed us by importing Virgil as the second or third most important character in the Commedia, there’s plenty of textual evidence that the sixth book of the Aeneid (in which the hero visits the underworld) was ever in the Italian poet’s mind as he wrote.  Furthermore, visions of Heaven, though not quite a dime a dozen, are very common in Christian monastic literature, where they often derive from the “vision” of the Heavenly City in the Apocalypse, the final book of the Christian Bible.  So here, too, Dante had an established tradition to follow or to knowingly depart from.  But when it came to Purgatory, he was pretty much flying solo.

            The doctrine of Purgatory is not biblical, nor did it emerge as a consensus in the early Church.  The medievalist Jacques Le Goff, in a book called The Birth of Purgatory, dates it no earlier than the late twelfth century—that is, less than a century before Dante was born.  We may regard the doctrine as a requirement of developments in high medieval theories of the penitential economy, the practical system of salvation through the sacrament of penance.  Though salvation was open to all, most human lives—with the exception of those of a few heroically saintly ascetics—were so sullied that no soul could expect to move from deathbed to the presence of God without first getting in spiritual shape in a penitential Boot Camp.  What would this look like?  Dante’s imagination never failed him.  He saw a mountain with an ascending spiral ramp, the circling of which contracted the higher the pilgrim ascended.  You might say that as things got harder, they got easier, somewhat in the fashion of a cardiac stress test.  The mountain culminated not in a sharp peak but in a small plateau—upon which rested the Garden of Eden!  Many readers are probably familiar with the painting in the cathedral at Florence in which Domenico de Michelino gives a visual rendition of the Mount of Purgatorio from the early fifteenth century.  Joni Mitchell did something similar in song nearly five hundred years later: “…and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden..."

 

Scientia et Virtus

 

Most people with some professional connection to American higher education probably know something about Middlebury, one of the country’s more distinguished liberal arts colleges.  Its lovely campus dominates an overgrown Vermont village, itself something of a gem, laid out along Otter Creek in the Green Mountains—a little more than halfway up the state on the left-hand side, if you’re thinking in map terms.  The school commands a national reputation primarily on the basis of several summer schools in which foreign languages are taught intensively and effectively, and for a Writers’ Conference famous among the nation's would-be scribblers.  I happen to know the place better than I might because for about fifteen years I spent most summers there on visiting appointment as a member of the Bread Loaf School of English.  Bread Loaf is the name of a mountain roughly seven miles up from the village itself, site of a one-time summer colony with a huge old hotel and a huge old barn that are now the center of the School.  Though the teaching was intense and the work exhausting, I have only happy memories of those summers, including memories of fruitful colleagiality with several Middlebury faculty members.

Accordingly I was very distressed to learn from press reports that Middlebury College was recently the site of an outrageous episode of illiberal intellectual thuggery masquerading as high-minded and “progressive” political action.  Using the proper administrative channels and receiving the appropriate administrative blessings, student members of the campus chapter of the American Enterprise Institute had invited Charles Murray to the campus to give a public lecture relating to aspects of his recent and much discussed work Coming Apart.

Charles Murray is a widely published and widely read sociologist and political theorist of definitely conservative tendency.  His work has been highly controversial because of its numerous offenses against liberal orthodoxy and, especially, because his most famous book, The Bell Curve, allegedly dabbles in pseudo-scientific racism.  In that sentence the most important word is the adverb allegedly.  He is not a college professor, but he does have a Ph. D. in political science from M.I.T., for whatever that might be worth.  He has been a fellow at various conservative “think tanks”, and is presently at the American Enterprise Institute—the organization with which his undergraduate hosts at Middlebury were affiliated.  Murray is notably more renowned, productive, and intellectually influential than any political scientist at Middlebury College or most other educational institutions; but it is doubtful that he or any other soi-disant conservative thinker could ever get a job there.  That is a simple reality of American academic life, and it is what chiefly accounts for the rise of the “think tank culture” that has provided many conservative scholars and thinkers with a quasi-academic setting in which they can work with a certain sense of  intellectual community.

 There was of course no idea in anyone’s mind of hiring Mr. Murray.  The more obvious and burning question at Middlebury appeared to be whether such scum could be suffered to stand and deliver before a lectern for fifty minutes to people interested in hearing him, or whether on the whole it would not be preferable that he be forbidden to speak, be shouted down, drowned in insults and obscenities and infantile chants.  Accounts of controversial events doubtless vary with the dispositions and predispositions of their narrators.  But somebody at the event made a video of the whole thing.  The production values are not particularly good, but it gives a definite sense of what happened.

The forewarned Middlebury College authorities were not entirely clueless.  The president, Laurie Patton, attended and gave a little pep-talk about the ideals of liberal education.  I do not know President Patton, but I wish her well.  In her unsuccessful preliminary remarks—unsuccessful in that they failed entirely to prevent a scandalous episode that will be a long-lasting stain on her institution’s reputation—she said a number of good and sensible things.  She said one or two really stupid ones as well.  After ritually but cravenly assuring the crowd that she disagreed with Murray (about what?—the man was not allowed to utter a public word) she went on to praise the “brilliance” of every precious student at Middlebury and to thank them for coming.  The protestors then released their brilliance in the form of a bedlam of repetitive chants such as “Racist, sexist, anti-gay, Charles Murray go away!”  Another was “Your message is hatred; we will not tolerate it.”  Murray, no stranger to student protest, had to credit at least the novelty of the anti-gay charge.  And of course to identify his undelivered “message” as hatred required mind-reading, which I suppose is a kind of brilliance.

The speaker’s party eventually withdrew to a supposedly safe broadcasting bunker so that Murray might give his talk via CCTV.  There he calmly, courteously, and urbanely soldiered on with a sort of off-the-cuff mini-lecture through muffled bangings and raucous fire alarms.  A partial recording preserves enough of his comments to allow an intelligent person to adjudicate their degree of capital heresy.  It was only after the whole thing was over that protesters physically attacked (by jostling, man-handling, and car-rocking) the speaker and his faculty “conversation partner,” sending her off to the hospital with a minor injury.

The Middlebury College Latin motto, a noble one, is so simple that you don’t need an advanced degree to get it: Scientia et Virtus.  On the old college seal—very recently changed to accommodate the global aspirations of the institution--this motto curves in a semicircle atop an open book.  I had many opportunities to study its Protestant iconography during lengthy graduation ceremonies at the Bread Loaf School.  The book seems to be strangely radiant.  I supposed it was sending off rays of, well, knowledge and virtue. But maybe they are just burning it.

 Past and present

Improving the Proofing

I see that this is the 399^th in a series of weekly blog essays that began on June 13, 2009.  Time sure flies when you’re having fun.  Only rarely do I look back at this now sizable archive, and then mainly to fix in my mind the approximate date of this or that event or experience of the past eight years.  That is the motive that led me to review the title of my very first blog post: “Of Columns, Communists, and Camões”.  The “columns” part of this catchy title was pretty obvious, since my claim about the blog was that it would be the continuation of an earlier newspaper column.  As for the Communists, I was just then publishing a book entitled The Anti-Communist Manifestos.  Finally—and this is the punch-line of this shaggy-dog paragraph—I was seriously projecting a book devoted to the Portuguese poet Luís de Camões.

            I do not know how fine my mill wheels grind, but I can certainly boast that they grind exceeding slowly.  This past week has been spent with the proof sheets of Luís de Camões: The Poet As Scriptural Exegete.  I would appear to have prosecuted this project at a rate of about a word an hour for the last eight years.  If the center holds and the creeks don’t rise, an eager world can expect this important contribution to Camonian Studies in June or July, just in time to take to the beach.  I have not done any proofreading in rather a long time.  Readers of the blog will already sense that I am not particularly good at it.  Only the fact that Joan has given the once-over to most of the essays keeps the mechanical quality at any acceptable level.  Readers not infrequently draw my attention to more or less egregious flaws found on unjoaned pages.  The kinder ones do it through my private email address.

            As a matter of fact—and this is not special pleading—it is much easier to proofread something written by somebody else than something of one’s own.  We tend to see not what is actually on the proof sheet but what we want to see there or what we think we remember writing.  Although the early printers boasted that their new technology allowed authorial correction in proof, in actual fact their professional proofreaders were usually underemployed arts graduates who failed to get tenure in a reputable academic institution.  They were called “correctors to the press,” and they were generally erudite Latinists with a tolerance for execrable handwriting rather than “independent scholars.”

            The learned body of correctors to the press had their own informal guild, and they worked zealously if not always successfully to keep howlers out of publications destined for the erudite.  Some developed theories of proofreading.  The earliest handbook known to me on this subject (Leipzig: apud Michaelem Lanzenbergum, 1608), the work of a corrector named Jerome Hornschuch, is entitled, in Greek,  Orthotypographias.  If you know what an orthodontist or an orthopedist does, figuring out what an orthotypographer does is a piece of cake; and, fortunately, once you get beyond the title the rest of the book is in Latin.

“The proofreader [writes Hornschuch] should scrupulously avoid giving himself over to choler, to love, to sadness, or indeed yielding to any of the lively emotions….Especially should he shun drunkenness, for is there an individual with vision more deranged, or of greater degree of stupidity, than the idiotic corrector who transforms Ranam into Dianam and Dianam into Ranam?”*  (A rana is a frog, whereas Diana is the goddess of the hunt, so that such a metamorphosis would be out of bounds even for Ovid.)  I pretty much meet the standard.  The lively emotions exist for me largely in memory, and I coddle my liver.  But I still cannot proofread my way out of a wet paper bag.

I take comfort from the fact that some of the world’s greatest scholars have been notorious for their orthotypographical ineptitude.  My own great master D. W. Robertson, Jr., in his engaging little book on Medieval London, mentions a certain church where the devout John of Gaunt sometimes went to play.  That is, however, child’s pray compared with the howler from which a keen-eyed referee of my current manuscript rescued me.  In a passage in which I was attempting to praise the late Vasco Graça Moura, a versatile Portuguese man of letters and traditionalist defender of the peninsular Lusitanian tongue, I wrote that he “was himself very much a Renaissance man: lawyer, politician, poet, pubic intellectual…”

Oh, well.  I once read a book about the literary scene in Edwardian London.  One of the most prominent English men of letters of that period was Edmund Gosse, perhaps best known today for his remarkable autobiography Father and Son.  This author featured prominently in the book to which I refer, which was something of a festival of typographical errors.  The library copy I read had pasted into it a list of “Corrigenda”—that is, “things to be corrected,” errors caught only after the book was printed.  It began with the most poignant corrigendum I am ever likely to read: “For Goose, read Gosse throughout.”

*translation from the delightful pamphlet The Corrector of the Press in the Early Days of Printing (1922), by the great American bibliographer Douglas McMurtrie.

An Existential Doubt

We just had a great weekend that included an overnight visit from old friends abetted on the meteorological front by an unexpected premonition of spring.  There were a couple of memorable meals and lots of good talk.  Joan and I capped it off by attending a “National Theater Live” filming of Shaw’s Saint Joan in a terrific production with a brilliant rendition of Joan by Gemma Arteton.  The weekend also included one curious incident, beyond that of the dog in the night, that is.

Shortly before nine on Sunday morning I was driving toward church with our friend Susan when my clunky old flip-top cell phone rang.  Now my cell phone seldom rings, and practically never while I am driving.  On the rare occasions that does happen, I practically never try to answer it.  But this time there was an unusual convergence of circumstances that encouraged me to do so.  There was to begin with an ideal place to pull over and stop; secondly, I actually knew where the phone was and that I could easily reach it; third, I believed that the likely caller was my wife, who had forty minutes earlier set off to the hospital to see another close friend who (we had learned) had been taken there the previous night with a heart scare.  So I pulled over and answered the phone.

However, the caller was not my wife but my daughter in New York.  The conversation went like this—

J: Hello.

K: Dad?

J: Hi, hon…

K.  I’m very glad to hear your voice!

It is always nice to feel appreciated, but this was a slightly odd remark, given that she rather frequently hears my voice without commenting upon the fact and, as I thought I remembered, had done so quite recently.  Heard my voice, I mean.

            But there was an explanation.  She had just received an email from an eminent medievalist, a colleague of hers presently resident in Oxford, expressing her condolences upon the occasion of her father’s death, and soliciting suggestions for possible authors of a memorial notice to be published in Speculum, that best-selling quarterly organ of the Medieval Academy of America.   The rumor of my demise, which I must characterize as grossly exaggerated if not flat-out fake news, had in fact originated at Academy headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.  That Sunday was very busy, and by the time I broke free the rumor had been apologetically retracted quite without my intervention.   I felt no desire to make further inquiry into it.  However, I continued on to church with an augmented appreciation of my continuing existence and received Communion with an augmented sense of gratitude.

            “It must have been some other John Fleming.”  That’s the best the medievalists could come up with by way of excuse.  John Fleming is not a common name.  On the other hand, it is not exactly what you would call an unusual name either.  At all points of my career there have always been two or three other John Flemings out there helping to besmirch or to burnish my reputation.  One of them was the pre-eminent rare book dealer in New York.  I never met him.  He operated out of baronial offices on East Fifty-Seventh Street, where he had become wealthy flipping Gutenberg Bibles and Shakespeare First Folios.  He was supposed to have chopped up one or two precious medieval manuscripts in order to maximize profit by selling the individual illuminated pages.  It is hard to believe that so cultivated a man could be guilty of so philistine an act, and I report rather than affirm the accusation.  What I can say with more confidence is that several manuscript experts in the medieval field were no less certain that John Fleming was a vandal than that I was John Fleming.  I have reason to believe that misprision once cost me a place on the ballot of the New Chaucer Society!  But sometimes what you lose on the roundabouts you can make up for on the straightaways.  There was a prolific British art historian named John Fleming, who often collaborated with his life partner Hugh Honour.  Several times when I was about to give a guest lecturer or participate in a conference panel the presider or introducer attributed to me, with glowing commentary, one or more of the important books produced by this couple. 

This is, however, the first time I had been credited with another man’s death.

Descartes’s best known contribution to philosophy is sometimes called simply the Cogito, Latin for “I think”.  You can arrive at certain grounds for belief in your existence simply by thinking about it.  “I think; therefore I am”; for even if the mode of that thought be doubt, it requires an extant mind to do the doubting.  So on this one I elect to go with the Cogito.