The Tissue Issue

Medieval philosophers and moralists in the Platonic tradition used a strange Latin phrase to describe what they took to be the disorienting deceptiveness of the empirical world.  They spoke of the regio dissimilitudinis, often translated into English as the “land of unlikeness”.  In the land of unlikeness moral reality is strangely deformed.  Our wounded human nature often seduces us into desiring what is actually bad for us and generally behaving in self-destructive ways.  A passage in Paul’s letter to the Romans—“For the good that I would I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do”—was frequently cited in this regard.

            This appears to me to be related not merely to Plato’s myth of the cave but to the “mind/body problem” of modern secular philosophy; and quite apart from any theological super-structure, “land of unlikeness” seems a most evocative term to describe the strange world that we have suddenly been thrust into by a frightening pandemic.  I read this in the Times: “An Arizona man and his wife ingested a fish tank cleaning additive made with the same active ingredient as chloroquine phosphate, which President Trump has referred to as a ‘game changer’.”  The result was a definitive change in the man’s game.  He died.

            Less lethal though scarcely more comprehensible has been the run on toilet paper.  One of my first illuminations of the opacity of the regio dissimilitudinis into which the coronavirus was leading us was a journalist’s photograph of the bare shelves, only recently laden with cubic yards of toilet paper and paper towels, of a stripped Walmart.  According to the article it accompanied, two women had engaged in an unseemly battle over the last megapack of Charmin.  Nature red in tooth and claw!  My own unseemly response to the unseemliness was to rush immediately to Amazon.com.  Items temporarily unavailable!  My ancestors got along perfectly well with corncobs and the pages of old Sears catalogues for this sort of thing, but, but….I then recalled an anecdote that suggested there was something particularly American at work here.  It will take a couple of paragraphs of needed context.

And when she went there, the cupboard was bare

When I was a student at Oxford sixty years ago, I enjoyed the benefits provided by an extraordinary service organization called the Dominions Fellowship Trust.  I believe that it no longer exists, and I have not been able to come up with much information about it using the techniques of quickie research.  But it had been active during World War II in a “hands-across-the-water” sort of way to offer comfort to American and Commonwealth airmen—especially volunteer fighter pilots and the bomber crews who flew on thousands of missions beginning with the Battle of Britain and, later, the massive American bombing raids on the German heartland.  These men were offered invitations to spend recuperative leave in various country houses scattered about the British Isles, including several of the Downton Abbey variety.  The war ended, but the Trust continued for a time to operate.  Its administrators, seeking high and low for suitable surrogates for shell-shocked ball turret gunners, came upon Rhodes Scholars.  They were from America and the Commonwealth nations, and by all appearances some of them were pretty shell shocked.

The vacations at Oxford are ample—three eight-week terms are punctuated by two vacations of six weeks and the “long vac” of the summer.  There was more time for foreign travel than money to sustain it, and I personally enjoyed numerous gratis baronial rustications, including one at Glamis Castle, famous in Macbeth.  But there was one place to which I made return visits, at Coldstream, in the extreme south-east of Scotland near Berwick-upon-Tweed.  It was a modest country estate belonging to a collateral branch of the Sitwell family, to which the famous siblings Edith, Sacheverell, and Osbert (none of whom I ever met) belonged.  I became quite friendly with my hostess, Elizabeth (Betty) Sitwell—at least to the degree that a youth from Arkansas and a middle-aged eccentric English grande-dame can be friends.

England at the end of the ‘Fifties had not yet entirely emerged from the rigors of wartime austerity.  I rarely found myself in an adequately heated room or house.  Cramped, chilly bathrooms were the national specialty, and most plumbing features struck an American as archaeological.  The default toilet paper in many domestic as well as all public toilets was something called “Bronco”—packaged in small and apparently impermeable and anti-absorbent waxed sheets.  I never did grasp the engineering design concept.  I suppose it was slightly better for its designated purpose than Saran Wrap, though not by much.  The bathroom of my quarters in the Coldstream mansion, on the other hand, was quite magnificent.  The toilet paper was real, American, on rolls, and abundant.  There were always no fewer than ten unopened rolls in clear sight in a little cabinet.

I eventually became sufficiently comfortable with my hosts to raise these somewhat forbidding topics in conversation.  When I jokingly congratulated my hostess on her American toilet paper she told me the following story.  Her late father, an industrialist, had been great friends with some American counterparts.  When war broke out in 1939—at first without notable hostilities—there was a large Anglophilic movement among the upper crust of New York moneyed society to demonstrate solidarity with France and Britain, especially the latter.  The wife of one of Sitwell’s American industrial buddies was particularly zealous in organizing these efforts.  This lady was sure that there must be many indispensable items—coffee, sugar, chocolates, woolen underwear, Pall Mall cigarettes?—that wartime conditions would soon render difficult of access.  Could she ship some of these items?  The thing was, the Sitwells didn’t really need anything. They lived in a stately home and burned forty tons of coal every winter.  But the New York benefactor was importunate, and the father, to be diplomatic, suggested that the charitable lady herself pick out a few things “of the sort you think most necessary.”

Time passed, and the Sitwells forgot about the whole thing. Soon they really did have other things to think about.  In May of 1940 the “Phony War” ended with the German blitzkrieg through Belgium into France.  By the beginning of June the shocked Brits were desperately evacuating Dunkirk.  One day a few weeks after that a telephone message informed the Coldstream mansion that a freight car of goods was waiting to be claimed on a siding at the Berwick station.  “What is it?” asked the befuddled butler.  “It seems to be mainly—mainly toilet paper” was the astonishing and as it turned out inaccurate reply.  Because it was only most of a box car and entirely toilet paper.  If I could believe my hostess, the household and “half the village” had been slowly working its way through this stockpile for the last twenty years.  “That’s how I learned what Americans consider ‘most necessary’,” she told me.  “We were of course most grateful.  Now we can defecate securely until Doomsday.”

Taking It Lying Down

It was only when I myself became an English professor that I came to appreciate the serious confusion that most Americans entertain concerning my profession.  Whenever I was in social situations with what I shall call normal people—meaning people other than professional academics—I was nearly certain to hear some version of the following remark.  When I revealed my profession to my conversation partner—which I did only when forced to do so by a direct question—roughly eighty-five percent of the time this person would respond: “Well, I’d better watch my grammar.”  The implication was that most of my compatriots thought that what I did, to the limited degree that I might actually do something, was to invigilate their grammar.

This is a flattering though faulty assumption.  The slightest reflection on your everyday linguistic exchanges, or even occasional perusal of our magazines and newspapers, should be enough to demonstrate that nobody is playing that role.  Progressive educationists have determined that prescriptive grammar is an offensive idea.  Like keeping within the lines in the coloring book, having decent handwriting, or even knowing the difference between the written forms of majuscule and miniscule letters, it is a straight-jacket to be doffed, a limitation on a young student’s individuality, creativity, and unique expressive “potential”.

Only a few of us dinosaurs are much concerned about this any more.  I cannot rid myself of the belief that clarity of thought demands some clarity of expression, and that clarity of expression depends upon the rules, models, and historical “best practices” of the language of expression.  I used to talk about these things with various dinosaur colleagues, and especially with a close friend of forty years, one of the world’s leading students of Dante.  We have now been separated by the caprices of age and infirmity.  Widowed, he has moved far away to live with children and grandchildren, who are, as I well know myself, the succor and balm of senectitude.  Of course I miss talking with him directly, but I recently had the pleasure of what might be called the satisfying echo of a conversation.

Among the most common of vulgar linguistic errors is the confusion of the verbs lay and lie.  Both of these words, as nouns, have several meanings; but the basic distinction in their verbal form is that lay is transitive while lie is intransitive.  I lay the table, meaning that I place dishes, cutlery, napkins, etc. upon it preparatory to consuming a meal.  I lie upon, or lie down on my bed.  Brick-laying is an activity; being an outlier is a passive state.  That is the basic distinction, though of course there are various possible complications and anomalies connected with the usage of both words, as I have written about before.  As a  medievalist, I have very few anecdotes concerning famous writers I have known.  But I once did have W. H. Auden in my undergraduate rooms at Oxford.  He was inebriated and in pursuit of one of my classmates, a young Welsh language poet, who was also at the party.  Auden told us that his French translator had rendered his phrase a good lay (“a perfectly fine American expression” in Auden’s view) as un grand poème!
 

Anyway, Bob and I used to talk about stuff like lay and lie in our more general laments concerning the fall of civilization.  In terms of old fogeyism, he is even a little older and, if I may say so, even a little fogeyer than I am; but he is also way more productive.  Instead of just griping, he actually wrote a dandy little grammar book!  Thereby hangs a tale, though no dangling participle.

Over his last few years in Princeton my friend had to do some stints of rehabilitative physical therapy (PT, for short) in a couple of local facilities specializing in those arts.  I visited him a few times in these places, one of which is called the Saint Lawrence Rehab Center, housed in an old Catholic hospital or retirement home, and still having some partial or implicit religious connection.  I presume it derived its name from the fact that it is located in a town called Lawrenceville, but there are other possible associations.  Saint Lawrence is the one who, while being martyred on a barbeque grill, is supposed to have said to his tormentors, “You can turn me over now; I am done on this side.”  As I eventually have had to learn myself, that is roughly the experience of even modest callisthenic activity on a thoroughly deconditioned body.

 

 Saint Lawrence, patron saint of the NFL: They laid him on the gridiron, and he just had to lie there.

But by the time I learned some of the realities of PT, just a few weeks ago, a good deal of time had passed.  My friend moved away from Princeton the better part of a year ago, and I myself was continuing in ambiguous medical therapies that preserve one’s life at the necessarily tolerable expense of certain peripheral inconveniences.   In military lingo, the euphemism is “collateral damage.”  For me collateral damage has included neurological deficiencies in the lower extremities, uncertain balance and gait, and a generally undesirable limitation of confident ambulatory mobility.  So now it was I who found myself being shipped off a couple of hours a week to Saint Lawrence Rehab.

 It was quite an experience.  It is in the first place humiliating to be assigned  modest physical tasks of apparent simplicity but which turn out to be achievable, if at all, only with great effort and concentration.  One comes to appreciate anew the extraordinary complexity of one’s human body, and to acknowledge belatedly the near miracle to being able to perform simple movements one has never thought about until one is unable to make them.  Most of all I was impressed by the staff of the center—a group of intelligent, knowledgeable, experienced, good-humored professionals seriously devoted to helping people who need help.

Though various therapists helped me, there was one very nice young lady designated as the “supervisor” of my case.  I liked her immediately.  She made me try to walk toe-to-toe, stand on one leg with my eyes closed, and perform other impossible circus tricks.  Toward the end of the first session she turned to haunch and back “arching”, to be performed in a prone position, face down, on a kind of large bed.  “For this one,” she said, “you need to lay down over there.”  You remember the scene in the old Western.  Hero comes into the bar through the swinging doors to find forty-two drunk miners playing cards and one beautiful young woman in a prom dress.  His line: “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”  That was exactly how it was when she told me to lay down.  “Look,” I said “You are obviously a very nice person and very good at your important job.  But I am an English professor, and I simply have to explain to you the difference between the words lay and lie.”  I thought this was a little bold, but she took it in stride.  “Oh,” she said, “another one.  Just so long as you don’t give me a copy of your grammar book.”

The Sobieski Stuarts

Title page of the Vestiarium Scoticum (1822) of John Sobieski Stuart

A few years ago I published in one of these essays a deliciously ironic photograph of a police surveillance camera mounted high on the wall of a building next to a sign identifying the place as the Plaza de George Orwell in Barcelona.  I won’t need to tell this literate audience why it is ironic.  The year 1984 has come and gone, and the surveillance state, armed with ever more powerful snooping tools, continues to burgeon.  Photography, finger prints, blood types, voice prints, facial recognition software, accurate DNA analysis—more than a century of incremental technological developments have made it harder and harder for those who might seek to conceal their identities from those intent upon discovering them.  Lots of problems attend these developments, but just at the moment I am looking through the other end of the telescope at a number of interesting instances before the development of powerful forensic techniques, when certain means of identifying people might be entirely lacking.

How did the eighteenth-century “Interpol” work?  I first became interested in this some years ago when I was writing about Cagliostro, an internationally famous guru, swindler, gynecologist, and master of the Masonic arts who travelled all over Europe openly and in disguise, usually pursued by the secret police agents of at least four governments and usually escaping their clutches. 

One or two examples of interestingly disputed or false identities may already be familiar to you.  You may have seen the film of The Return of Martin Guerre, based on actual events in a rural village in sixteenth-century France, or be familiar with one of several versions of the alleged survival of Anastasia, daughter of the last Romanov czar.  The mysterious stranger is a stock character in earlier history and literature, with prominent examples ranging from the Man in the Iron Mask to Kaspar Hauser. The number of dubious claimants to valuable property, thrones, titles or simply the south forty are legion.  Many instances involve deluded and gullible people of wealth who refuse to believe long lost relatives are really dead.  One such instance, that of the so-called “Tichborn Claimant”, was the subject of a sensational legal case in Victorian England.  In it a boorish Australian butcher weighing in at about 240 pounds nearly convinced a rich and grieving aristocratic English mother that he was her long-lost (and strikingly svelte) son.  Some surreptitiously gathered Facebook data could have avoided the drama.

The case I shall raise today, simply because it has so many happy byways, is that of the so-called “Sobieski Stuarts”, two brothers who pretended to be Pretenders, so to speak.  Toward the end of the tumultuous seventeenth century in England the line of Stuart monarchs came to an abrupt end when the Protestant William of Orange, married to the Protestant daughter of the Catholic King James II, was placed upon the English throne in the so-called Glorious Revolution.  James went into exile on the Continent.  Many believers in royal “Divine Right,” and especially the conservative Catholic nobility of northern England, Scotland, and Ireland—called “Jacobites” after the Latin form of the name “James”—continued to support the cause of the deposed monarch.  The Jacobites caused some reasonably serious political and military problems for about fifty years and supplied inexhaustible romantic fodder for novelists for the two hundred and fifty years after that.  Read Walter Scott; read Stevenson’s Kidnapped.

Bonnie Prince Charlie on a good day

James II’s son and grandson (the “Old Pretender” and the “Young Pretender” respectively) lived more or less futile lives supported by the King of France, eager to injure the English enemy in any way possible, and by successive Popes, eager to believe that the “real” royals of England were Catholics.  Particularly feckless was the Young Pretender (Charles Edward Stuart, 1720-1788), the famous “Bonnie Prince Charlie”.   Never was more affection and esteem invested less deservingly in a pathetic sot than the Jacobites invested in him.

Albany and Alfieri

The British pretenders in their Continental exile naturally had to marry other Catholic royals, and this was not always easy.  The Old Pretender lucked out with the Polish princess, Clementina Sobieska, the granddaughter of the Polish hero-king John Sobieski III, a woman of parts, who became the mother not merely to the awful Young Pretender but to his brother who became a cardinal in the Roman Church and for a time made the unlikely claim of being the Cardinal-King of England!  I shall return to the Polish Sobieskis in just a minute, after a brief but sensational digression designed to introduce you to a new author.  Though it seems to defy demographics, there are in my experience in life and in history way more superb women married to scumbags than admirable men married to scumbag women.  The Young Pretender’s wife, Princess Louise of Stolberg-Gedern. beautiful, brilliant, witty, and adventurous, was grossly mismatched to a boring boozer with an IQ even lower than the British royal average.  Her unsatisfied libido eventually got the better of her, and she entered a red-hot affair with the famous Italian writer Count Vittorio Alfieri, a volcanic genius and the Italian version of Lord Byron.  For reasons of delicacy Princess Louise was known as the Countess of Albany—which is the title of a terrific and seriously under-appreciated book by the terrific and seriously under-appreciated writer Vernon Lee (alias of Violet Paget, 1856-1937), a butch lesbian buddy of Henry James, who was himself also known among literary wits as the “Old Pretender.”  Henry James, get it?

Violet Paget, alias Vernon Lee, by John Singer Sargent

Now, back to mysterious strangers.  Around 1820 two guys, mid- to late twenties and declaring themselves to be brothers, showed up in Scotland.  It is reasonably clear now, though it was not then, that they were the sons of a British naval officer, that they had been born in Wales in the 1790s, and that their actual surname was Allen, Allan, Hay, or Hay-Allen.  Their extraordinary claim was they had only recently learned that they were actually the last Stuarts of the Sobieski line; they later “discovered” that they had been in born in Versailles.

At first it was not quite clear what the exact grift of the “Sobieski Stuarts” was.  They made no serious claim to the throne, if only from prudential reasons, as it was unlikely that the Coldstream Guards were going to join them in a putsch against George IV, William IV, or Queen Victoria, the monarchs whose hospitality they dubiously sought.  Their actual aim seems to have been scholarly fraud as a prelude to social eminence, and in this they were strangely successful.  Scottish clan costumes did exist, but the mysterious Sobieskis revolutionized the concept.  They more or less invented the Scottish tartan racket, still a major money-making industry in Scotland.  They published an amazing coffee-table book entitled Vestiarium Scoticum (The Scotch Wardrobe, I suppose), a large collection of pseudo-scholarly pseudo-information about the decorative patterns used for clan identification in woolen goods.  This proved to be a huge success with the British middle classes, almost all of whom had or could invent some Highland family connection, however remote, and discovered that, without knowing it, they themselves were tartan-eligible.  I really shouldn’t complain, as the Flemings were supplied with a bonny bright blue and green swatch to go along with our slightly less hokey coat of arms.  (See my essay “Flemingiana").  I might even show you my tartan keychain bought for me by a beloved granddaughter in a French  airport.

As scholarly frauds go the Sobieski Stuarts were unusual chiefly in the fact that their main goal seems not to have been tenure but social cachet.  They never could have gotten by with it had they simply been a couple of impoverished graduate students of textile science.  But the gap in the surveillance tapes allowed romantics half to believe that they might actually be the tragic pretenders to the British throne.

Super Tuesday?

Super Tuesday, indeed.  Do people still say “Harrummph” as they did in the old cartoons?  If not, we need to do something about reviving the custom.  Those of us who have been trying to follow the course of the nomination process in the Democratic Party find ourselves in the curious  position of discerning through the dawn’s early light that the choice has effectively been narrowed down to two geezers.  You have one crabby old man who thinks that the source of most of our ills is a system rigged in favor of “millionaires and billionaires” and one vague old man who says that 150,000,000 Americans have been killed by guns in recent decades.  He is the one who won Super Tuesday and is once again the leader of the pack.  Apparently ours is indeed the age of big data.

A crabby and vague old man like myself will perhaps be especially alarmed by the prospect before us.  We have had many chances to consider the credentials of Mr.  Biden, and I would prefer someone else.  In our household there were once high hopes for Senator Warren, who came in fourth in her native state and third in the state she represents in the Senate.  That means, in practical terms, Senator Sanders, a career politician who in a forty-year career has maintained his progressive purity at the relatively small cost of never achieving much else.  One of my sons, who commands my admiration and respect, is an enthusiastic backer of Bernie; and that alone is enough to make me take him seriously.  For me the first problem is that Sanders claims to be a Socialist, subgenre democratic Socialist; and it is far from clear what he means by that.  The pundit Paul Krugman insists that Sanders isn’t a Socialist, but just likes to say he is.

In the most recent “debate” Mayor Bloomberg (a third geezer) chided Senator Sanders for his Socialism, which he regards as a failed system.  “We’re not going to throw out capitalism.  We tried that.  Other countries tried that.  It was called Communism, and it just didn’t work.”  Mr. Sanders’s riposte was “Cheap shot!”, and indeed there is a whole rhetorical industry devoted to the search for a significant distinction between “Socialism” and “Communism”.  Before going there, as we say, one might point out that the absurd format of these so-called debates does little more than provide an arena for cheap shots.  It also encourages the fantasy, rarely acknowledged by the candidates, of a nearly omnipotent president who can single-handedly, by ukase, achieve free college, emissions reductions, “comprehensive immigration reform” and more or less any other mighty feat that enters his or her head.

Mr. Sanders, though presenting himself as the polar opposite of our current President,  has a similar penchant for impolitic praise of tyrants.  So he has praised the late dictator Fidel Castro for doing some “good things” alongside the bad “authoritarian” things Sanders disapproves of.  Specifically, he organized a literacy campaign.  Since according to the political theory dominant among Cuban refugees and large swathes of the Republican Party, it is impossible that Castro ever did anything good in his life, Sanders is feeling some heat for his attitude.  Such is the Manichaean passion of partisanship.  But I doubt that anyone has performed only evil acts.  Read the story of the Jongleur de Notre Dame.  Hitler, our chosen icon of evil unalloyed, did all sorts of good things.  So did Josef Stalin.  For instance, he won World War II, and you might want to give him some credit for that.

One still has to point out that coercion does not cease to be coercion just because you can tolerate or even applaud its effects.  And coercion is a prerequisite to Socialism.  Among dozens of explications of  Socialist coercion I recommend especially the brief and lucid chapter “Why Socialism?” with which Martin Malia began his magisterial The Soviet Tragedy: a History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 (1994).  The bosses of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were unaware that it was a “cheap shot” to call themselves Socialists.

I happen to have been reading Alexis de Tocqueville this week, and he has acute remarks that are relevant here.  Socialism may rightly be called an alien idea in America.  It is a manufactured political theory or what de Tocqueville called a “general idea” in his chapter “Why the Americans have never been as passionate as the French about general ideas in politics.”  He thus amplifies: “The Americans are a democratic people who have always taken charge of public affairs themselves, and we [French ] are a democratic people who for a long time could only dream about the best way to conduct public business.”  Unlike Sanders, de Tocqueville was not terribly keen on the “revolutionary” idea.  Of course his family had actually lived through a Revolution and was probably prejudiced by the guillotining of many close friends and family members in 1794.

It is obvious that Senator Sanders has spent some considerable time dreaming “about the best way to conduct public business.”  I’ll take his word for it that democratic Socialism eschews all authoritarianism, let alone the mass murder that has characterized Socialism’s more notable twentieth-century forms.  But it does take a certain testy audacity, to say the least, to insist—with scant attention to detail and none to costing--upon a behemoth of a nationalized universal health care program the first requirement of which is the destruction of a vast and complicated private insurance system interlaced with most of the nation’s industrial and economic life.

            The purposes for which our government was established are clear enough in the founding documents.  They are “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”  This is an agenda of liberation, not the blueprint for the imposition of a “general idea.”  A joke that has survived since the “Red Decade” of my birth has as its subject a Communist agitator orating to a crowd of workers on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.  “My friends,” he said, “Come the revolution, you will have strawberries and cream!”  But a skeptical kibitzer shouted out: “What if you don’t like strawberries and cream?”  “Come the revolution,” retorted the speaker without missing a beat,” you will like strawberries and cream.”

Spiritual Ableism

Chaucer's Pardoner

We just attended the annual Princeton Alumni Day, which provides the opportunity to see numerous old students and colleagues, to listen to some very impressive lectures, to try my best to down a tasteless cold salmon cutlet, and to attend the very moving annual Memorial Service.  By the mournful logic of life its long list of the “remembered” includes each year more and more old friends.  That is simply another implication of growing old.

I discovered myself succumbing to petty annoyance over one small feature of the chapel ceremony, which involved the usual amount of standing to sing hymns, sitting to listen to readings and uplifting pronouncements, and so forth.   The instructions printed in the program read as follows: “Stand as able.”  Now I am very familiar with this instruction from my own parish church, where it seems to have achieved a liturgical significance on a par with the Sursum corda.  In fact I anticipate soon hearing the instruction, “Lift up your hearts—as able.”  The invitation is of course kindly meant, even if it is also a self-uplifting demonstration of the sensitivity of the inviter.  But it is also rather inane.  If you are in fact not able to do something, you do not need to be told to do it only if you can.  And should you for some reason in fact be unable to do something, an instruction of this sort, far from assuaging your inability, seems rather to draw attention to it.  I doubt that any priest would say “Contemplate our beautiful east window—unless, of course, you are blind.”  Or how about “Please join in the reading of the psalm—if literate?”  I didn’t pay much attention to any of this until about a year ago when, in a period of infirmity, I considered it a pretty good trick getting to church at all, and I didn’t enjoy being admonished to a lot of gratuitous verticality contingent upon my ability.  So, you seminary professors of pastoral theology, just saying.

However, instead of griping about so minor an inconvenience, and one (as I say) so well intentioned, I should be seeking solace from history.  When it comes to the clerical manipulation of a congregation the place to look is the medieval Church, and particularly of course to Chaucer’s version thereof.  Chaucer’s Pardoner is distinctly not well intentioned, but he certainly knows how to capture his audience.

The office of Pardoner no longer exists in any church so far as I know, but it was an important and quite lucrative one in the penitential economy of late medieval Catholicism.  Pardoners played no small part in the initial financing of the biggest church building in Christendom, the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome.  They also played a role, of course, in provoking the Protestant Reformation, as famously illustrated by Martin Luther’s blistering criticisms of the operations of the Dominican Pardoner, Johann Tetzel.   A pardon was an actual written document attesting that its owner had been relieved of the temporal punishments that would otherwise attend forgiven sins.  A penitent could not buy absolution of sin.  Penance was a sacrament, and a commercial arrangement of that sort would be the horrible sin of simony.  But having received sacramental absolution by proper priestly authority, a penitent could indeed buy a piece of paper attesting to the fact of absolution and promising relief from attendant temporal punishment.  You may regard this as a distinction without a difference.  I would characterize it as one of the more blatantly cruel victories of the letter over the spirit that have characterized most periods of Christian institutional history—but let it pass.

In my youth there was a radio evangelist who broadcast on a very powerful transmitter located in someplace called Del Rio, Texas.  You could hear him as you drove late at night through a swath of the southern tier that went at least from Atlanta to Bristow, California.  This guy was about as “hands on” as you can be over the invisible airwaves.  As he approached the final paroxysm of his financial appeal he thus instructed his fascinated auditors: “Put your haaaands on the raaaadio!”  Only God knows how many car crashes that preacher-man was responsible for.  Chaucer’s Pardoner was a worthy predecessor.  This “noble ecclesiastic”, the poet tells us, was without a peer.  There was not another to match his cupidinous expertise in all of England.  His fellow pilgrim the Friar is expert at extorting pennies from poor widows, but even his prowess falls short of the Pardoner’s.  The Pardoner, an utter materialist, works through a collection of dubious material props, which he passes off as holy relics.  These include a piece of the sail from Peter’s boat, a pillow-case said to be the veil of the Blessed Virgin, a gaudily decorated cross, and a glass box full of pig’s bones.  In the “hands on” category he also has a magic mitten, the sacred origins of which we are not told, but the material effects of which are rather sensational. “He that his hand will put in this mitayn, He shall have multiplying of his grain.”  A bumper crop is certain, that is, so long as he be sure to make a financial offering to the Pardoner at the same time.

But the magic mitten has one limitation.  Unfortunately it can do nothing for people secretly guilty of horrible sins, and it is particularly counter-indicated for women who have been unfaithful to their husbands.  This limitation is regrettable, but it need not long delay the Pardoner’s sermon.   In the midst of his homily he pauses long enough to invite the congregants to come forward, put their hands momentarily into the mitten, and put a few coins into his own purse.  “This won’t take long,” he says in effect.  “You notorious sinners and adulterers can just sit there patiently for a minute.  I’ll soon get back to my regular sermon.”  You might paraphrase his spiel as follows: Please come forward as able.  The Pardoner calls this maneuver a gaude—a stunt, trick, or jape—and allows that he has made at least a hundred marks from it during the course of his brilliant career.  In England the mark was not a coin, but a measure of weight, roughly half a pound of precious metal.  The Pardoner could extort from poor peasants more money in a single day than a parish priest could take in in two months.

Pen and Gavel

The pen, it is alleged, is mightier than the sword.  But how does it stack up against the gavel?  This week I have been reading and thinking about two powerful literary responses to two famous (or infamous) judicial trials.  The first ended in the conviction of a French army officer on a charge of treason before a military tribunal in 1894.  In the second, in 1921, two Italian anarchists living in the Boston suburbs were convicted of capital murder before a court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  I refer, of course, to the “Dreyfus affair” on the one hand and to the “Sacco and Vanzetti case” on the other.

            Virulent French anti-Semitism did not create the Dreyfus Affair, but it greased the skids for a glide path to a monstrous injustice.  Dreyfus, an Alsatian Jew, was a French artillery officer charged with passing military secrets to the Germans.  There had been treason, and there was a French officer who had committed it, but it was not Dreyfus ; and in any event the actual issue almost immediately became overwhelmed by a much more profound political-cultural struggle to the death between Republicans (the heirs of the Revolution) and Nationalists (political and clerical reactionaries).   The Army was one of the few national institutions commanding wide respect, but its leadership was full of anti-Semites, Catholic reactionaries, and faded aristocrats.  Having once convicted Dreyfus in a hurried, grossly incompetent and unfair trial, the Army leaders could not allow the correctness of their verdict to be questioned, though its defense required the compounding of injustices and an increasingly criminal cover-up—abetted at every step by a gutter press seething with malevolence.

 Alfred Dreyfus ( 1859-1935)

            Into this maelstrom the liberal novelist Emile Zola made the most famous journalistic intervention in history.  At the beginning of 1898 he published in a newspaper a blistering open letter to the President of France, Félix Faure.  This was the famous “J’accuse” letter in which he charged Army leaders, and especially the chief investigator, General du Paty de Clam, of conscious criminal malfeasance.  His aim was to invite a suit for libel which might force the uncovering of the cover-up.  The plan worked to a degree; for although the civil court too acted in a grossly prejudicial way, and although Zola was convicted, his intervention helped turn the tide.  Dreyfus was eventually cleanly exonerated.  Seldom has a secret conspiracy unraveled so dramatically.  The Dreyfus Affair convulsed France for a decade, and many historians see it as the defining event of post-Revolutionary French modernity.  Actually, Zola had not known the half of its iniquity, but his fearless catalogue of accusations remains one of the most influential op-eds ever penned.

Emile Zola (1840-1902)

The case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, an immigrant cobbler and an immigrant fishmonger, is just a hundred years old.  The crime was the murder of two men in a payroll heist on April 15, 1920 in Braintree MA.  The circumstances were and remain murkier than those in the Dreyfus Affair as finally revealed.  The two men were not rich Jews (Dreyfus was usually described as a “rich Jew”), but their families had not arrived on the Mayflower.  They were wops or guineas, in the slurs du jour.  Even worse,  they were politically active anarchists—one of the scarier words in a country in the grips of a post-War Red Scare.  Soulful Vanzetti, with his huge mustache and his eels, was very probably innocent.  Sacco, a true proletarian revolutionary with his cache of small arms and ammunition, was --despite decades of orthodox left-wing denial long since turned to sedimentary rock--probably guilty.  But the legal process, which found little room for reasonable doubt or much else that was reasonable, was grossly prejudicial.  Both were found guilty and both, after heated years of ferocious protests, political tensions, gubernatorial reviews, temporary stays, competing hysterias on the left and on the right, and the crudest forms of exploitation by accusers and champions alike, both were electrocuted in 1927.

Nicola Sacco 1891-1927) and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (1888-1827)

The was no single Emile Zola for Sacco and Vanzetti; but there were a hundred aspirants.  Throughout the world, but especially in America, the number of writers and intellectuals who took up their cause was legion.  I cannot pretend to have read all of them, but I still have no hesitation in identifying one essay as the greatest.  That would be the memoir-essay of Katherine Anne Porter—she calls it a story—entitled “The Never-Ending Wrong,” first published in The Atlantic Monthly for June, 1977, half a century after the executions.*  A work so carefully mellowed can hardly be accused of giving voice to the passions of the moment.  It is instead a meditative poem in prose by one of America’s purest writers, ever.  Not that it lacks passion, but it is an examined passion.  Wordsworth famously characterized poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind”.

 

Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980)

The history of American labor relations is rife with economic brutality, police malfeasance, judicial criminality, frameups and railroading.  But the history of radical protest is no less rife with manipulation, bad faith, and useful idiocy.  Porter was entirely aware of the cynical Communist efforts to highjack her own protest group back in the Twenties.  I myself am old enough to have seen thousands marching to proclaim the innocence of Julius Rosenberg, and I was provoked into writing a whole book by five hundred academic intellectuals gathered to deny the mendacity of Alger Hiss and heap calumny upon Whittaker Chambers.  Even though some of our historians are as dogmatic as the theologians of old, the standard of history cannot be the standard of Anglo-American jurisprudence: certainty beyond reasonable doubt.  Ms. Porter could not bring herself to believe, as I have come to believe, that Nicola Sacco was a murderer, that indeed his political doctrine made no accommodation for the “bourgeois” legal procedures in which he became enmeshed.  But that does not change the fact that the Sacco-Vanzetti trial was indeed a “never-ending wrong.”  The eventual, and for far too many the grudging rehabilitation of Alfred Dreyfus could not recompense his sufferings on Devil’s Island.  Esterhazy, the real spy, lived out his days in undisturbed mendacity in England.  The criminal conspirators in the Army (save one who committed suicide) made no atonement.  But Dreyfus was alive and well and  died in bed a septuagenarian.  For Sacco and Vanzetti it was the hot seat and the cold grave.  There was not much that a tardy resolution in the Commonwealth’s legislature could do about that—or even a brilliant retelling of the “story” by Katherine Anne Porter.

*Library of America, vol. 186, pp. 830-866.

Disasterology 101

Johnstown PA May 31, 1889

The evidence is in, and it is clear.  Once again, Iowans have interfered in our national elections, sowing confusion among our citizens and undermining confidence in our half-assed apps.  Among so much that is not yet clear is whether the situation should be classified as major debacle or minor disaster.  I opt for debacle.  As always, perspective is called for.  Among the websites I frequent is one called “Word Histories,” run by an indefatigable  etymologist, Pascal Tréguer.  His specialty is the explanation of common (and sometimes decidedly uncommon) English expressions, saws, and figures of speech.  One recent entry was “Don’t spit.  Remember the Johnstown Flood!”  While I doubt it is a common expression, I had encountered it once before in my eighty-three years.  I saw it on a wall placard in a nondescript roadside bar around 1960. 

            I presume you follow the transition here?  The  Johnstown Flood set me to thinking about comparative disasters from an historical point of view.  One is unlikely to avoid thinking about current ones.  So many are reported in the daily press that papers really ought to have a special “Apocalypse Section” at least once a week.  This would cover the body counts achieved by plane crashes, lethal fires, mass shootings, earthquakes, violent storms, common or garden-variety homicides, and really scary medical epidemics including, perhaps, opioid abuse.  A recent headline on an article about the fires in California and Australia caught the spirit: “The Twenty-First Century: Age of Disasters.”

Getting back to the Johnstown Flood of`1889, perhaps the first thing to say about it is that it was not a flood but a tsunami.  Johnstown is a small city straddling a modest river (the Conemaugh) about seventy miles east of Pittsburgh.  A group of wealthy Pittsburg industrialists and country club types had created an extensive private pleasure grounds about fifteen miles upriver from Johnstown, a prominent feature of which was the incorporation of a large lake artificially created by an inadequately designed earthen dam, a relic of the 1840s, restraining the south fork of the Conemaugh.  Disasters waiting to happen frequently tire of waiting.  The dam failed, releasing the hydraulic force of the Delta Mississippi into a modest but rapidly descending stream bed.  The water-wall obliterated several river-bank hamlets before hitting populated Johnstown.  It killed about 2200 people, many of whom suffered agonizing death in floating mountains of burning debris.  No need to worry about the Robber Barons of Pittsburgh; they had excellent lawyers.

The Johnstown Flood was prelude.  The American twentieth century got off to a notably disastrous start with the Galveston Hurricane of 1900—at least six thousand fatalities, perhaps as many as twelve thousand.  The comparatively modest death toll of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 comes nearly as a relief.  But I have skipped over the  Collinwood (Ohio, 1902) school fire with 172 incinerated kiddies and teachers and the Iroquois Theater fire (Chicago, 1903) with more than 600 victims, most of them female, including many children.  You may not have heard of this fire, which lacked the “social interest” historians have invested in the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory (New York, 1911).  Most of the 146 Triangle victims were sweated immigrant women and girls, not bourgeois Chicago matrons idling away a theater matinee, but the human folly that lay behind the horrifying death tolls was remarkably similar in both instances.  I shall leave unmentioned the fate of the Titanic (1912, death toll 1500 plus).  We ought to be able to give that one to the Brits.  The main theme here is American carnage.

Turning to “natural” disasters, Katrina, the storm that went a fair way towards destroying the city of New Orleans in 2005, may have been responsible for upward of fourteen hundred deaths—a huge number swollen by human failure and inefficiency. But so far that’s the worst our century has been able to do.   Superstorm Sandy of 2012, while visiting the northeast with massive property damage, took only about 230 lives, by far the most of them outside the United States.   I somewhat arbitrarily place the attack on the Twin Towers in the category of acts of war—not that acts of war are not disastrous.  But even Nine Eleven and the “endless” Middle Eastern wars following in its wake do not raise the level of the slaughter of the early twenty-first century to that of the early twentieth century.  Remember that on the first day of the Battle of the Somme (July 1, 1916) twenty thousand British soldiers died.   By the time the battle was “over” the figure was 300,000.  The death toll for the whole of the Great War was about seventeen million.

Nothing seems more frightening than epidemic disease, and as I write the country seems poised on the brink of panic concerning the coronavirus infection first found in China and now showing up in many other countries, including ours.  The possibility of pandemic is real.  This is nothing to be nonchalant about.  As yet, however, the number of deaths is comparatively small even within China.  Meanwhile “ordinary” flu, though seldom mentioned in the press, has already killed about 8,000 in America.  That might be described as business as usual.  There is by now a national cultural amnesia concerning American mortality statistics for the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918.  They are uncertain, but it carried away at least a half a million of a population just over a hundred million.

The most casual survey of world history should convince us that human life is a very fraught business full of danger, difficulty, and lethal adversities of every sort.  “Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward.”  That’s in the Good Book.  It’s actually something of a wonder that humans have survived at all, but we are right now on a roll.  People have trouble believing that broadly and statistically viewed the human race has never been so well placed as it is now.  For example, vast numbers—really vast numbers-- have quite recently emerged from poverty to lives of modest sustenance.  This development is perhaps hard to see through the smoky blur of Australian wildfires.  But a lot of us apparently don’t want to believe it anyway and are encouraged not to think about it by a press operating under the simple proposition that “If it bleeds, it leads.”  How I’d love to see a headline reading “For Eighth Consecutive Year Nobody Shot at Alabama-Auburn Game”.