The Puzzle of Fra Angelico

 Friar John of Fiesole, O. P., believed to be a self-portrait

            If you are so locked down that the only social event in your month is chemotherapeutical or ophthalmological, you find yourself searching for challenging things to do around home, especially on days too hot or too wet to move your molecules in the garden.  An excellent old friend, once my student and now my teacher, recently came to the rescue by loaning me two very high-quality jigsaw puzzles produced by a British outfit called Wentworth.  Obviously there has been a technological revolution in the manufacture of puzzles during the twenty years my back was turned.  Gone are the imperfectly die-mashed bits of cardboard with wounded, wobbly lobes.  These gorgeous things are works of art in and of themselves: cut by laser saws from slim sheets of strong hardwood with razor-thin precision.  There are no pieces that almost fit, only very tight fits.  This particular company specializes in what they call “whimsy” pieces.  For each puzzle they make a few intricately shaped pieces to correlate with the larger iconographic theme of the whole work of art or scene.  The laser control allows fiendishly precise cuts along color lines and other dirty tricks such as the suppression of right-angled corner pieces.  Finally, the printing process by which the image has been inked upon the wood is of superb quality.

            My friend Frank is among other things a medievalist, and the puzzles he loaned me were gifts given to him by his brother with his medieval (and Renaissance) interests in mind.  The one I tackled first was very much down my line: a panel from the fabulous “Silver Chest” or Armadio degli Argenti built to hold the sacred treasures of the Church of the Annunciation in Florence and painted by Fra Angelico around 1450.  Rarely are the containers of such objects more precious than the objects themselves, but this richly painted armadio is quite literally priceless. 

            Much of my own scholarly work has dealt with the cultural contributions of the medieval mendicant orders, and I have had a particular interest in the visual arts, especially within the Franciscan Order.  Fra Angelico got his nickname from the nearly supernatural beauty of his paintings.  His more conventional name was Brother John of Fiesole, and he was a member of the Dominican Order.  These two largest orders of friars, though sharing a great deal in common, were in a sense spiritual rivals, emphasizing different evangelical vocations.  The Dominicans might be said to be the more intellectual, their most famous theologian being Thomas Aquinas.

            There are complex theological ideas conveyed by the stunning chromatic beauty in Fra Angelico’s panels.  It was a common medieval belief that both words and pictures were conventional signs of communication, and both were extensively used by friar-missionaries, often with subtle interrelationships.  My late friend Michael Curschmann wrote many important studies of the commerce between text and image in medieval books and other artifacts.

            Fra Angelico’s design for the amazing coffer is that of a miniature art gallery depicting mainly a series of small, related scenes taken from the life of Christ.  The principal subjects of the particular side of the chest reproduced in “my” jigsaw puzzle are the Passion and its post-Resurrection sequence.  I think I detect in several of the small quadrants the definite influence of a famous fourteenth-century Franciscan work called the Meditations on the Life of Christ, and I may follow that hunch up with some serious scholarly research if I can ever get back to proper work.

            Just for the moment jigsaw puzzles are probably the appropriate mode.  The particular panel of the chest featured in the puzzle I put together is laid out in twelve sequential “scenes” in four columns of three-mini panels each intended to be read,  as one would the written lines in a book.  The specific layout is as follows:

1 VIA DOLORSA    2. STRIPPING          3.CRUCIFIXION      4.DEPOSITION

5. HARROWING     6.QUEM QUAERITIS?            7.ASCENSION              8.PENTECOST

                9.  and  10.       LAST  JUDGMENT        11. CORONATION           12. LEX   AMORIS                                                       

the puzzle completed

Beginning with Christ’s painful road to Calvary (1), the “historical” sequence ends with the mytho-poetic Coronation of the Virgin (11).  The Last Judgment is divided between two panels (9 and 10) as Christ sits in glory in his role as judge, with the saved souls to his right and the damned to his left, sinister in Latin.  The final mini-panel (12) is a theologico-pictorial tract of considerable numerological ingenuity.  On the shield of the female figure at the left we can read LEX AMORIS, the “Law of Love,” the concept that is the key to the scheme of the entire complex work.  The whole of this panel is a symphony of text and image, with each scene appropriately designated with texts from the Latin Bible.  The LEX AMORIS “scene” is mainly textual, but founded in the mystical meanings of two numbers, seven and twelve.  The most prominent pictorial element—perfectly chosen for a receptacle designed for sacred furniture—is a large and beautiful seven-branched candlestick or menorah.  The seven banners weaving in and out of its branches are devoted to the seven sacraments of the Church.  On the “north side” of the picture (taking the cross at the top, the vertical extension of the candlestick, as representing the east end of a church) we have twelve Hebrew prophets with their individual prophetic scrolls.  On the right (south) the common iconographic motif of the twelve apostles each with his written clause of the Apostle’s Creed.  This constitutes an allegorical claim for the spiritual continuity between the prophets and the apostles, and from Temple to Church.  The scribal banderoles  above and below the “Lex Amoris” are the only ones left blank.  What was the intended missing text?

 The "Lex Amoris" (12) with empty banderoles

            That is one of the puzzles generated by another.  A second is more personal.  I have a special, eccentric reason to be enthusiastic about Fra Angelico.  For many years I had a low-voltage friendship with one of the Princeton rare books librarians, Jean Preston, a manuscripts expert and a scholar extremely knowledgeable about medieval English literature.  Ms. Preston was a very unpretentious, modest, reserved English lady, of the sort sometimes unkindly called timid or even mousy, who walked quietly on her little patch of earth leaving no scuff marks in her wake.  I knew she had a small collection of what she called “treasures,” though I never was privileged to view them.  She retired shortly before I did, moved back to England, and took up residence in a small and unremarkable house in Oxford, where she died in 2006.  I had not been in touch with her since she left Princeton.  When her executors set out to deal with her few possessions they discovered they included several extremely valuable books and paintings, including two small panels by Fra Angelico.  Those two pieces alone went for about four million dollars at auction.  But that is only how the world assesses value.  I think Jean, like Fra Angelico himself, operated according to a different, higher standard.

from the domestic decorations of Ms. Jean Preston

Brown Revolution

 

 

A benevolence of Blackwells 

            Reading books on-line is uncongenial to me, but it becomes necessary if the book is not readily available in a nearby library.  And if you happen to be living in the middle of a medical crisis that has closed or severely limited access to academic libraries, that means virtually any book that is not already in your personal library.  So this past week when it seemed imperative to me to consult for a little light reading something entitled The Making of the Universe (Boston, 1914), I had to turn to the Internet.  There I found—from the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Radcliffe--a digitized copy of the book originally presented by its author to an old friend, bearing the following inscription: “Rev. Olympia Brown with best Christmas wishes from her longtime friend Antoinette Brown Blackwell.  Dec. 1914.  Elizabeth N.J.”   They were indeed old friends at that time.  Antoinette was 89, Olympia  79.    

            I’ll tell you about how the Universe was made another time.  Today I want to move to this week’s centenary commemoration of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.  To get there one might begin in 1848, a revolutionary year in Europe and the United States, although many historians have paid too little attention to the American side.  That is a pity, because whereas the European revolutions, which took part in many places on the Continent, all failed pretty ignominiously, that in America succeeded.  Admittedly, it took its own sweet time to do so.  On the nineteenth and twentieth of July, 1848, a small convention met in Seneca Falls, New York, with the aim of airing national women’s issues, including suffrage.  August 19, 1920 saw the final stage of the ratification of the constitutional amendment extending the franchise: seventy-two years later!  The date of August 19^th has other distinctions.  Happy Birthday, Joan.

             The “Seneca Falls Convention,” though not the first public discussion of its themes, claims its fame for its early date and the literary celebrity or future prominence of several of its attendees.  The more substantial political work really got moving at the first of the annual “Women’s Rights Conventions” (1850-1869).  The first meeting drew something like truly national representation, including such activist superstars as Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass.  But the only attendee of the initial meeting in 1850 still alive at the time of the 1920 election was Antoinette Brown Blackwell.  As an idealistic young woman she had once believed that women’s suffrage was so just, reasonable, and necessary that it would take no more than a year or two to achieve when raised in rational political discussion.   One recalls the line in John Brown’s final communication concerning his one-time belief that slavery could be abolished fairly easily.  “I had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.” 

            So far as I know there was no familial kinship between Antoinette Brown and Olympia Brown, or of either with a third Brown revolutionary just mentioned, John Brown of Osawatomi, who does not feature as a principal in this essay but who is hardly an insignificant figure.  What united the female Browns was an unflinching Christian vocation to religious ministry and to cardinal aims of political and social justice, meaning the fair and equable treatment of all: the abolition of slavery, the achievement of female enfranchisement, the ordination of women in the Protestant churches, and the amelioration of a huge national problem of alcohol abuse that left in its wake poverty, misery, and violence against women and children.  Every one of these causes ran headlong into the opposition of powerful and mainly male groups, and every one was principally animated by Christian religious conviction.  All of these causes save the last have been successfully “achieved” on paper; yet all remain works in progress.  It is apparently impossible to legislate intoxication away.  Prohibition was, to use a mild adjective, unsuccessful.  It still is.  Though alcohol abuse remains a major national problem, today’s prisons are filled not with the dealers and users of booze, but with those of narcotic intoxicants. 

             Antoinette Brown Blackwell (1825-1921) and Olympia Brown (1835-1926) both have claims to be the first American women to have been ordained to religious ministry in a mainline Protestant church.  The former was ordained in 1853 under the sponsorship of her local church, the latter in 1863 with the blessing of the constituted authorities of her whole denomination.  As is suggested by Blackwell’s dedication of her gift book, there was a warm relationship between the two, the older woman being a mentor and inspiration for the latter.  Though until recently unknown to me, Antoinette is very well known among scholars of American social history.  The Blackwell family into which she married was for more than a century a virtual training college for activists in virtuous social causes, especially though not limited to causes expanding the opportunities for women in American professional life, and particularly medicine.  It is virtually impossible to look into nineteenth-century social movements without encountering the Blackwells and their close associates such as Olympia Brown.  (Olympia, married to a man named Willis, continued to use her maiden name.)
 

             I knew practically nothing of this when I whimsically set off to check out some lady’s ideas about the formation of the Universe.  And when the topic mutated opportunistically to the history of women’s suffrage I did not sufficiently anticipate that everybody and her sister would of course be writing about this topic this week.  The Times had a very informative magazine supplement about it, but (in my opinion) a much more brittle and doctrinaire editorial (roughly “# Suffrage History So White”).  Most of us are convinced, I suppose, that the world would be ever so much better a place if everybody in it were exactly like ourselves in their unspotted political orthodoxy; but several of the Times’s regular editorial writers have made an art form of conveying such belief.  My own half century of historical study has convinced me that such study invites less the imposition of conformity than the appreciation of diversity—a word frequently trivialized in today’s campus discourse.

 

             In one of her books available on-line (The Sexes Throughout Nature, 1875) Antoinette Brown Blackwell, a serious student of science and especially of evolutionary biology, tries to link men and women both in their commonalities and in their differences, and to draw a bright line between nature and nurture.  This necessarily involved her in a trenchant though modest and respectful engagement with two intellectual giants of her day, Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer.  Though I lack the competence to judge, I know that few if any of the classics of nineteenth-century science have not undergone serious emendation, and that undoubtedly holds true both for Blackwell’s ideas and those of her sources.  But some spurious theory of innate male intellectual superiority (as opposed to diversity of evolutionary function and social conditioning) was always implicit if not overtly explicit in defense of the exclusively male electoral privilege and numerous other social arrangements.  Blackwell addresses both the nurture and the nature parts with elegance.  “[A]s highly complex beings women must be taught to exercise all their functions, that they may develop and strengthen all their faculties healthily and symmetrically.  A regimen of sofas must be as utterly demoralizing as would be a regiment of soft bread and milk, appropriate enough to the yearling baby…If anybody’s brain requires to be sacrificed to those two Molochs, sewing-machine and cooking-stove, it is not hers!”  Concerning the Nature part, she is pithy.  “Is it true that average women to-day are less versed than average men in abstract thinking, feeling, or acting?  Not in New England!”

Election Jitters

Dixiecrat delegates walk out of the 1948 Democratic Convention

            Every week or so I have a telephone conversation with my brother out in New Mexico.  It’s generally pretty basic.  We cover a limited number of subjects, mostly competitive complaints about the state of our health, the miserableness of our weather, and the God-awful mess in which our country wallows.  There is a certain invariable sign that our conversation is nearing its logical end.  That is when Rick says “I’ll tell you one thing.  I wish this stupid election was over.”  I can count on him saying that every time.  That sentiment is pure Marvin Fleming, our father, expressed in his exact words.  It takes me back sixty, seventy years.   It’s actually good to know that there are a few solid rocks jutting out above the swirling surface of the sea of change.  My father, dead only forty years, would have difficulty recognizing our world; but he would certainly identify correctly certain stupidities of the current political moment.

            It is questionable whether it is the election itself, as opposed to the electors, that is “stupid.”  If your vote is seriously susceptible to interference from Internet trolls, whether Russians or Martians, the problem does not seem to me to be Internet trolls.  A sizable proportion of the American electorate is either not interested in voting at all or insufficiently interested to expend even a modest effort to do so.  Many who do participate are what are now euphemistically called “low-information voters”.  It seems clear from the huge sums expended by both major political parties on brief television attack ads that professional experts consider them an effective method of political persuasion.   As Mencken is supposed to have said, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.”  And if he didn’t say that, he should have.

            On the other hand there are several features of the electoral process itself that invite the dreaded adjective “stupid.”  Fortunately, there is some evidence that at least some of the electorate is beginning to twig to their stupidity.  During the past week I have either read or heard spirited and intelligent criticisms of two of them—our time-honored, circus-like political conventions and the so-called “debates” among the contestants.

            In the old days, when methods of communication were inadequate for the quick conveyance of news and information over a continental area, national in-person conclaves were a natural phenomenon, which in a sense were of a kind with the operations of our national government itself.  Through the earlier decades of the twentieth century nominating conventions, though increasingly buried in a blizzard of sophomoric show biz, did perform some strenuous democratic work.  The chaihh recognizes the gentlelady from the greeeet state of...etc.  Credentials committees sorted out conflicting claims of authentic representation.  Passionate delegates decided hotly contested competitions requiring many tedious ballots to bring to a conclusion.  Delegates walked out to protest either the adoption or the rejection of certain proposed  party platform planks they passionately championed or opposed.  But with the rise and increasing importance of the primary election—which seemed such a good idea until the appearance of the unanticipated results—there’s nothing substantial for a nominating convention to do.  But of course they still have to do it hour after hour for several days running.  There is a tremendous expenditure of hot air and helium balloons, but the main upside would seem to be some overtime hours for some folks who could use it, the people who have to sweep up the debris from the Convention Center and adjacent streets.  The Covid crisis is likely to lead to a certain amount of unfortunate long-term social change.  Perhaps we shall all be wearing surgical masks until Judgement Day.  We ought to welcome a few beneficent changes, such as the silent demise of the political nominating convention.

            Of course, they may not go quietly.  Financially improvident city governments—many of them the proprietors of lavish and underutilized public arenas--will continue to proclaim their importance, as may the top echelons of the political parties themselves.  It seems likely that Mr. Trump considered the choice of convention venue a political act of some weight.  He appeared to be exercising his own weird southern strategy.  He started out in Charlotte, and when that didn’t work retreated four hundred more miles down the meridian, to Jacksonville.  When that fell through he simply gave up, but my theory is he still wasn’t quite far enough south.  I suspect that President Bolsonaro would have accommodated the Republicans in São Paulo.

            The debates are a different matter, actual debate being a necessary and appropriate aspect of democratic governance.  And both parties seem to regard them as a necessary exercise.   The Republicans are animated by vain hope while the Democrats tremble in plausible fear.  The Republican hope is that Donald Trump might after all rise to a complete and correct declarative sentence with a definable subject in grammatical agreement with a definable predicate.  The Democratic fear, of course, is that their candidate will reveal himself as an amiable gaffer who would have trouble keeping accurate score in a shuffleboard game in a Florida nursing home.

            Debate has a long and distinguished history in the progress of human intellection generally.  From the legal proceedings of the ancient Romans to the disputations of the Schoolmen to the oratory of the Whig and Tory parliamentarians the thrust and parry of argument and counter argument has been one of the principal methods of intellectual progress in important fields, especially politics.  In our own country think of debates at the Constitutional Convention or those between Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln.  To this very day speakers in the British Parliament continue to prove that the exchange of ideas can be at once raucous, witty, artful, and substantial.  But of course the journalistic events sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates are not debates They are difficult to account for from the generic point of view: serial press conferences perhaps, or sequential brags, but not debates.  All an audience remembers of them are theatrical moments, notable gaffes or put-downs.

            The first of the televised debates, that between Kennedy and Nixon, set the trend.  Though there was at least a feint at the engagement of ideas, savvy commentators immediately recognized it as a beauty contest that Nixon lost mainly because of the televised appearance of his five-o’clock shadow.  This debate also initiated another trend.  What the supposed debaters actually said would be subordinated to interpretations of what they had said offered by celebrity journalists.  Recent experience suggests that the deportment of candidates is less important than the deportment of the debate moderators—all of them journalists.  As is true of the conventions, there are of course whole industries lobbying in favor of the debates, and obscure educational institutions love to host them to boost their “visibility”.  But that they advance the cause of intelligent democracy is, let us say, debatable. 

Home, Home on the Range

 

          Among literary topics I should like to explore were I suddenly granted another lifetime is American literature orally preserved or written down in languages other than English.  There is quite a lot of it.  American Indian languages, which preserved a vast store of history, legend, poetry, and song in oral form were intensely and sympathetically study by early members of the American Philosophical Society, including Jefferson.  The Relations or scientific diaries of French Jesuits are fundamental primary sources of American historiography.  A book written in French by Alexis de Tocqueville is the classic of early American political commentary.  There were important and long-running periodical literatures in several European and Asian languages indispensable for students of American social history.  German was particularly important, but Yiddish is in a class by itself.  English versions of the classic stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer now necessarily find their place in the beautiful volumes of the Library of America, an enterprise devoted to the giants of our literature.

            I recommend Singer to Americans who on occasion try to find the lighter side of objectively distressing situations.  Is there still a lighter side to ours?  We face a pretty bleak landscape these days.  Just about everybody is sick and tired of the pandemic and its constraints.  Millions are unemployed and in financial crisis.  With good reason anxious parents fret about their pent-up children.  Half the country seems to have adopted the brittle moral censoriousness of a college campus.  There are occasional comic episodes, but they tend toward the sardonic.  A couple in a place called St. Johns, Michigan, run a bed-and-breakfast out of what appears to be a big, beautiful old Midwestern house from the Civil War era.  I won’t ask why it is called the “Nordic Pineapple,” but I deduce it has something to do with the Norwegian heritage of its proprietress, whose name is Kjersten.  That is surely the reason the establishment formerly sported matching Norwegian and American flags attached to its stately front pillars.  It does so no longer.  Righteous activists, ardent for racial justice but a bit wobbly on heraldry, vilified and hounded the proprietors for their blatant racism in the display of what they imagined to be the Confederate flag!  The ignorance, one might hope, is vincible—but probably not the woke self-righteousness it serves.

The "Nordic Pineapple" in pre-woke state

            On the day I encountered this grimly comical news snippet I happened to be reading Ole Rolvaag’s great novel Giants in the Earth, a pocket-epic glimpse of the Scandinavian immigration to the Great Plains in the decade after the Civil War.  (The Homestead Act had been passed in 1862.  This was in the days when we had a functional government capable of doing important things even in the midst of crisis.)  Rolvaag, who became a Professor of Norwegian at Saint Olaf College, published his book first in that language.  The English version (1927) pretty well put paid to the genre of the Romantic Western.  Rolvaag himself had not been an immigrant of the generation he treated in the novel, many of the episodes in which derived from the childhood experiences of his wife.  The band of struggling Nordic farmers who pushed their way from Minnesota into the huge solitude of the Dakota plains found little more evidence of the benefit of “privilege” there than they had in the hardscrabble life of the fisheries in the Lofoten Islands or in the reception center at Ellis Island.   As linguistically isolated from the majority of other widely scattered European settlers as from the even more rarely encountered native itinerant hunter-gatherers, their first assimilative struggle was material rather than “cultural”, an unrelenting existential contest against the vast emptiness, loneliness, and meteorological hostility of potentially fertile flatlands previously untouched by human agriculture.

 Professor Ole Rolvaag

            The hard life of the prairie pioneers is remembered in a family legend of my own, which came from my maternal grandmother.  Her maiden name was Harrington.  The Harringtons were English Baptists of the John Bunyan variety.  Although Dissenters (i.e., non-Anglicans) formed the primary demographic among the American revolutionaries, there was also a strong Tory strain among them.  “My” colonial Harringtons were staunch royalists as well as staunch Baptists, and they moved (“fled” being the verb often used) to British Canada as the revolutionary cause prospered.  They were part of a numerically significant migration.  But a century later, with the extraordinary industrial success of the northern United States, and especially after the Homestead Act, quite a few of them, including my infant grandmother’s family, returned to make a claim in the surveyed lands of the Kansas, Nebraska, and Jefferson Territories.  My grandmother’s family actually stopped in Dakota, but considerably to the west, I believe, of the setting for Giants in the Earth.  Early autumnal chills, presaging a severe winter, were already in the air by the time the sod house was finished.  Seven people lived in one large room.  Then the snows came, blizzard after blizzard.  There was a primitive jakes, set at a considerable distance from the house (English Baptists).  As blinding snows were a weekly, sometimes daily phenomenon, they had to lay out a lengthy rope-line guide to help find it.  One dark snowy afternoon a young adult uncle of my grandmother’s quietly stepped out of the house to relieve gastric distress.  His protracted absence was not noticed until darkness had fallen.  Tardy searches discovered the rope-line broken and footprints already completely obscured by heavy fresh snow.  They found the frozen cadaver only a couple of months later in the spring thaw; it lay well over a quarter of a mile from the house site.  I think I have somewhere earlier mentioned Michael Lesy’s remarkable book Wisconsin Death Trip (1973), based on a unique cache of glass negatives made by a nineteenth-century photographer in Jackson County, near La Crosse.  The only actual photographs of many pioneers, and especially children, are photographs of corpses.  I also recommend the autobiography of John Muir, among the greatest of true American heroes, who spent formative time on a Wisconsin farm in that same neck of the woods even before the Civil War.

            Such were some of our very own American giants in the earth.  From every race and creed, they have continued to reappear in every historical phase of immigration.  If you haven’t read Rolvaag, I would encourage you to do so.  His novel has no sex and practically no violence of the ordinary sort, although the Norwegians do have to deal with the criminal intentions of some Irish claim-jumpers.  What it does have is the bittersweet savor of agonistic life and the triumphs and defeats of universal human aspiration.

Olivia de Havilland

           As we look for a few anchors to hold firm the various parts of our lockdown days, we have raised certain of our Darby-and-Joan routines to the status of sacred ritual.  The subliminal plan may simply be glorified time-killing, but we find it useful if not indispensable to impose a sense of order and structure on our days.  A daily walk, weather permitting, sharing a mid-morning glass of chocolate milk, deploying our awesome powers on Alexa’s “Question of the Day”—such things are the coarse straw that gives some strength to the soft mortar of the day otherwise occupied by individual “projects,” reading, writing, and a good deal of dolce far niente.  Particularly important is the reading aloud of parts of the daily New York Times over breakfast.  This is a custom of long standing, but it now has become a felt necessity.  We can barely down a mouthful of Special K on those very rare days when the paper is late.

            We usually do a couple of Trump and/or important international stories, followed by the letters to the editor and selected op-eds.  This gives us the opportunity to bicker over, first, what we are going to read and, second, what we eventually have read.  I am still in “recovery” from cataract surgery, which was a great success in removing the cataract but, so far, less so in restoring serious vision to the operable eye; so on Monday Joan did most of the reading.  The op-eds and letters are normally on the antepenultimate and penultimate pages of section one, which when open for reading reveals the whole of the back page to someone sitting on the other side of the table.  Recently this page has been given over to a few short and moving biographies of typical or interesting victims of Covid-19, but this time, as I could see with my good eye, there was a “regular” but very long obituary of a single person not a pandemic casualty: the classic movie star Olivia de Havilland, who just died in Paris at the age of 104.  This had a special significance for Joan and me, because we “knew” her—meaning that we have been in a very large space in which she was present.

            When we were living in Paris a few years ago we became attached to the lively congregation of Trinity Cathedral, otherwise known as The American Cathedral, on the Avenue George V just across the river from where we lived, and two or three hundred yards up the road from the “living flame” of the Princess Di memorial.  Ms. de Havilland had at that point been a member for roughly fifty years.  By rough and ready estimate about forty percent of Anglicans show up in an actual church building only on Easter and Christmas, and nonagenarians are generally given a pass altogether.  But at Trinity Cathedral there was a tradition, established in time immemorial (probably meaning around 1952) that the sacramental validity of any Christmas Eucharist might be dubious if Ms. de Havilland, whose voice must have been even more impressive than that of the angels who made their announcement to the shepherds, were not the principal lay-reader for the service.  This detail is alluded to in the Times obituary. 

            But there was an aspect of all this not widely known.  The dean, talking out of school, told Joan that by the 1980s the situation had become a bit delicate.  Ms. de Havilland was a passionate supporter of the Palestinian cause; there were certain psalms she found it inappropriate to read.  Some of them, you must agree, are a little hard to swallow, such as the enthusiastic infanticide of the imprecation against the Edomites at the end of Super flumina, “Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stone”.  This is an extreme example, no doubt.  Hard cases make bad law.  Olivia de Havilland was not chary of going up against the powers that be, as evidenced by a successful lawsuit that went a good way toward taming the arrogance of some Hollywood studio moguls back in the day. 

            For many people I suppose, Ms. de Havilland will forever be associated with Gone With the Wind—a novel published in the year of my own birth and turned into a famous film three years later.  I long ago discovered that Americans are likely to put a naïve trust in cinematic versions of important novels when they ought to know there always is a big difference.   This was brought to my attention by one of my early English teachers, who for some reason took exception to the fact that in my book report on Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, I consistently referred to an important character, Sydney Carton, as “Sydney Colman”.  (In the old film I had seen, Carton had been played by classical Thirties heartthrob Ronald Colman.)  If Gone With the Wind is the first thing that comes to mind, Ms. de Havilland’s death may have come at an inconvenient time for her reputation.  I learned from the obituary that “The 1939 Civil War epic was briefly pulled from the HBO Max streaming service last month and returned with an introduction saying that the film presents the Georgia plantation at its center as ‘a world of grace and beauty, without acknowledging the brutalities of the system of chattel slavery upon which this world is based’.”

            I am not an expert in the history of American cinema, nor am I even a competent film critic.  Among other things that the pandemic has already proved is that I will watch almost anything on Nexflix.  Nonetheless it will be a pity, in my view, if the honor due to the memory of one of the great movie stars of the twentieth century is clouded by political passions of the moment; but such collateral damage is one of the less significant hazards of a current cultural moment hovering between promise and menace.  On the other hand it is going to be highly tedious if people whose job it is to facilitate the technical transmission of visual data appropriate the role of historical censors as well.  I have little confidence in their capacities in that department.  Be that as it may, the character played by Ms. de Havilland is one of the nicer inhabitants of Tara, so there is that.  I would preserve my wrath for Anthony Adverse, in which the actress also appeared.  The novel Gone With the Wind is plenty long, but Anthony Adverse, a runaway success of 1933, was even longer, nearly interminable indeed; and its Protean hero was for a time an actual slave trader.

           

            I am a pretty old guy.  The demise of a grande dame who was already an international celebrity before I learned to walk is a sobering event for me, and one that encourages meditation upon one of the great classical themes of world literature.  I imagine that Ms. de Havilland would have approved of the thirty-ninth psalm, “…mine age is as nothing before thee: verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity.”  Gone with the wind, so to speak.

Through the Lens of the Dollar Store

           This will be an essay about the great American institution of the Dollar Store, but I must approach my subject in a manner that an ungenerous reader might find oblique or even confusing.  Among the canonical crimes of boring people is their penchant for insisting that you listen to their accounts of various medical adventures, especially if they involve surgery.  I would never bore you with an operation I had.  Instead, I’ll bore you with one I hope to have.  This is the removal of a cataract from my left eye scheduled for Friday.

            This procedure was supposed to happen months ago, but the specialized surgical center was actually closed for a long period, creating a messy backlog.    In order to be allowed to present oneself for a bloodless removal of a cataract, it is necessary first to present evidence of the negative results of a very recent test for Covid-19 and a satisfactory report on a very recent general physical examination.  The logistics of arranging and then actually achieving these ancillary events has been nightmarish.  But I emerge from them with a vivid sense of the widely diffused disruptions or “ripple effects” caused by the pandemic throughout the whole medical structure, and with a yet increased admiration for our medical professionals.  Even as I write this, however, it is not entirely certain that all preliminaries will be in place.  

            I very much hope they are, because I am having trouble reading.  Dejà-vu, so to speak, as that circumstance precipitated the removal of a cataract from my right eye some years back.  But my serious dollar store career began probably years before that with deteriorating eyesight and the need for reading glasses.  I am very careless with glasses.  I lose them.  I break them.  I scratch the lenses.  Somebody told me you could get them at the dollar store for, of course, a dollar.  I started buying them in bulk.  I have a really large bowl full of them An honest doctor told me that from the optical point a view there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between dollar store reading glasses and the ones for sale in his practice’s own upscale optical shop.  I’ll admit that the Foster Grants are superior in style and durability—but are they fifteen or twenty times better, as their prices are fifteen or twenty times higher?  Doubtful.  They practically fly off the racks in the dollar stores.

            I was surprised a couple of weeks ago to find as the leading article in The New Yorker an essay about Dollar Stores*.  A dollar store, obviously, is a place where things cost a dollar, but there is a slight nomenclature problem here.  There are several chains of dollar stores, including even some that don’t actually feature the word  “dollar’’ in their name; but some smart guy got there first with a name patent on the capitalized version.  The article, which focuses on such stores in Dayton and on several armed robberies at them, in some of which store employees were killed, does not disguise its negative view; the subheading on the title page is “A business model that harms vulnerable communities.”  I am writing about the store as a fixture of low income American life, the uncapitalized form.  I already knew without reading this article that I didn’t want to work at a dollar store, which offers niggardly compensation for tiring work in a dismal atmosphere.  Yet in my opinion this article says more about the social pathology of Dayton than the chintziness of the dollar store chains—and that is really saying something.   If you tolerate living in a filthy rich country with a large underclass living at the subsistence level or worse, what do you expect?  Merchants are in business to make money, and a business specializing in selling stuff at bottom dollar is unlikely to go top-dollar in its overhead and labor costs.  But if the answer to armed robbery is to banish the stores that get robbed rather than the criminals who rob them, the current clamor from many of my compatriots to “abolish the police” is perhaps less wacky that it has seemed to me.  You would, of course, have to be prepared for the successors to the police:  war-lords, vigilantes, and star-spangled Second Amendment Patriots galore. 

            The author (Mr. MacGillis) assumes that few readers of The New Yorker are likely to frequent dollar stores.  That is probably a correct assumption, as is its reflex: few habitués of dollar stores subscribe to The New Yorker.  At best we view one another indistinctly and partially, as through a social ocular cataract.  Here is another slightly exotic pairing of tribes or “bubbles” in which Americans seem to have quarantined themselves with evident harm to civility, empathy, and political efficiency.

            Dayton is not all of America.  Dollar stores cater to the economically marginal and to bargain seekers, but they are by no means emblems only of urban blight.  There are several stores in my area, mainly in secondary shopping malls nestled among ethnic restaurants and big boxes.  It is true that they offer a glimpse of American life very different from that with which most middle class citizens are familiar and perhaps to some an uncomfortable one.  MacGillis leaves a reader with the impression that they are rather sinister places, and I have read other commentators who go so far as to say that they “prey” upon the poor, in whose neighborhoods they are often the only local emporiums.  But another way of thinking about them is that they offer opportunity for people who otherwise might lack it to exercise the national birthright of shopping.  In the South, where they are nearly ubiquitous, the stores often have a kind of folksy, friendly vibe, not unlike that of your local New York deli.  To a degree they serve the function of social centers.  In my experience the clientele is mainly female, but the extensive line in basic hand tools and some building accoutrements attracts men—at least this man.  From what I have seen I deduce that some people do most of their grocery shopping there.  I would not recommend this.  The shelves are bulging with sweetened drinks and junk food in many forms, and all sorts of empty calories that will fatten you, disturb your blood sugar levels, or rot out your teeth.  However, there are some undoubtedly salubrious bargains, mainly in the line of canned fruit and vegetables.  There are always some items that are alimentary equivalents of the amazingly cheap remaindered titles at the Strand Book Store, such as a ship’s container of Turkish sun-dried tomatoes that Whole Foods wouldn’t touch.   Soaps and common toiletries are also excellent, along with basic medicine chest items.  Also serviceable kitchen and table ware.  Even among the acres of Chinese plastic and tinfoil gewgags my granddaughters always find something to amuse them or to be put to some surprising artistic use.  But my top product remains a usable pair of reading glasses for a buck. 

            Of course you get what you pay for—sometimes.  Veblen’s still great Theory of the Leisure Class reminds us of the degree to which irrational expensiveness—that is, cost far in excess of what common sense would regard as actual value—is a part of upscale American commercial life.   It seems only fair that there should be a counter-market specializing in the cheap and nasty.

 

*Alec MacGillis, “The Dollar Store Deaths,” The New Yorker (July 6 & 13, 2020), pp. 20-26.

Picks of the Month

            Like many others, we tend to lose track of time during this season of plague, when one day is pretty much like the last, and the weeks pass by at once very fast and very slowly.  There is a minimal pattern.   Friday is garbage pick-up.  Recycling comes around every other Monday.  High summer should mean some official attempt at “vacation,” probably one of our rare but always much enjoyed visits to the Jersey shore.  That was, long ago, an actual plan.  We had reserved a place big enough to accommodate us and our Montrealers for a few days in July.  Then they closed the beaches and (more importantly) the Canadian border, and though both are now partially opening by fits and starts, we long since had to cancel.

            But one calendrical constant remains reassuring.  So far as I can tell, important parts of the natural world are oblivious to Covid-19.  Old Man River—he just keeps rollin’ along.  The same can be said, fortunately, for the realm of botany.  Grass keeps growing, and my lawn requires its weekly trim.

            I wrote in a couple of earlier posts about the bamboo, which launched its spring attack, as though animated by clockwork, in the first ten days of May.  And despite its heat, the month of July has been particularly comforting this year in the timely flourishing of my two backyard fruits, raspberries and grapes, the one wild and the other cultivated—sort of.

            There are several varieties of wild raspberries, including a prolific invader, but the most common one, certainly in these parts, is the north American varietal of the rubus idaeus, usually called the “American red raspberry.”  I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the learned adjective idaeus there refers to the famous Mount Ida, the highest point on Crete, a mount sacred to the goddess Rhea, whose counterpart in the Roman world was the Magna Mater and in the Christian system the Virgin Mary.  I presume raspberries grow (or once grew) on the mountain’s sunny slopes, allowing a pretty good pedigree for such a common comestible; and certainly raspberry fool is divine.

            The native raspberry plant likes plenty of water during the early spring months, and its ambitious roots prefer a friable soil amended with compost.  In our neighborhood the latter condition is frequently achieved naturally, as it were, by large accumulations of decaying leaf and dead wood left untouched for years around the edges where timber-line and mowed field meet.  And this year we had a lot of spring rain.  I could tell two months ago that there would likely be a bumper crop of berries.  So it has proved to be.  Rubus, which sounds like it ought to mean “red”, is actually the generic name for bramble bushes, especially blackberries.  We do have wild blackberries here, too, but they are far less common than raspberries, and for some reason the local ones at least bear mainly stunted berries.

            This year there is a bountiful raspberry harvest to be had within a hundred and fifty yards of my house, some of it in my own yard.  I am amazed that none of my neighbors show any interest in the freebee delicacies surrounding us.  There does remain of course a keen competition for this succulent food between bird and man, with each side having its advantages.  The birds, naturally, are greatly favored.  There are many, many more of them.  They fly.  Their vision is amazing.  It is rare to come upon ripe berries on a bush that does not also reveal the evidence of previous avian scavengers, the tell-tale sign being the tiny, conspicuously bare pale yellow cones from which the berries have been plucked.  The principal human advantage is our comparatively gargantuan size and strength, and above all our ability to penetrate and probe the interstices of bushes impenetrable by our feathered friends.   It is not easy to pick berries while wearing gloves, and should the picker happen to be an old guy on a blood thinner, the sanguinary results, though superficial, may appear rather dramatic.

            The wild raspberry is small, and seedier than its commercial counterpart, but also more authentic in its sweetness.  However. it takes a lot of them to make a pie, so that efficiency in the gathering becomes an issue.  First you have to establish in your mind a color benchmark.  The darker the berry the riper and sweeter it will be.  If you have any doubt about a berry, leave it; it will be ready in another full day of sun if you return.  Next, operate according to the “spilled milk” principle: make only one swipe at any single fruit.  If you miss or if the berry falls to the ground, simply go on to the next.  You need to maintain a sense, even if an illusory one, of steady, unbroken, inexorable progress.  I learned this tip as a child from an old man who had done time in the Missouri state penitentiary, where he developed a whole philosophy of life based in his compelled cotton picking.   Always prefer the bunches to the singletons.  On many inner sprigs you will be surprised by bright crimson clusters of as many as ten ripe berries.  Here the trick is to make gravity your friend by placing your gathering receptacle precisely beneath the cluster so that when with one finger you nudge the fruit free from the stem it falls into captivity rather than through the brambles to the ground.

            More or less in synch with the reddening of the berries is the purpling of our Concord grapes.  We have many semi-wild vines, all of them originating from a single root wrested twenty years ago from the ruins of an abandoned communal garden once attached to a now razed apartment house.  I don’t know whether you can properly call these “heirloom” plants; maybe “recycled” is more accurate.  It is practically impossible to kill these hardy grapes, but you would be wrong to underestimate my abilities in this line.  Mostly I have them trailing over stone walls and climbing trees, but I do have one especially constructed trellis.  Though this year I didn’t get around to pruning its vines properly in April, it still seems to be really loaded.  The fruit, however, is notoriously susceptible to some kind of blight that hardens as many as half the grapes in what starts out as a big, luscious bunch.  I’m afraid I am an anti-vaxer when it comes to the back yard. 

            There are still new worlds to conquer.  On Monday we were at our son Richard’s fabulous place near Frenchtown.  He has discovered a nearby forest of chanterelle mushrooms, apparently huge in its extent.  Only once in my years of local mushrooming in Princeton have I encountered chanterelles, and they were given to me by a friend who found a modest mess of them in a residential area on a new construction site.  In my view, chanterelles are the fungal gold standard, and I am reanimated to search further around here.  But that is for another day or, perhaps, another life.  Just now what I seek is some kind of convincing temporal grounding.  Yesterday I encountered my first seriously overripe berry.  That would mean it is pretty close to the middle of July.

Hunterdon County chanterelles, processed and preserved by R. A. Fleming (July 2020)