American Tragi-Comedy

 

One of the great English writers of the last century, Dame Rebecca West (1892-1983) became fascinated with the psychology of treason as committed by some British turncoats who aided the Nazi cause in World War II.  In 1947 she published a remarkable book entitled The Meaning of Treason.  Particularly brilliant is her long section on William Joyce (better known perhaps as Lord Haw-Haw), a complicated Irish fascist who made English language  propaganda broadcasts for the Germans through the course of  the war.  Some years later she returned to the theme—this time dealing with Communist spies—in The New Meaning of Treason.  These are two important books of lasting merit, both as “true crime” and as penetrating psychological and historical studies.  How much it is to be regretted that Dame Rebecca is no longer with us to write The Even Newer Meaning of Treason, or perhaps The Meaninglessness of Treason.

 

Rebecca West in her youth

 

Such musings are inspired, of course, by the reported activities of the puerile Massachusetts Air National Guardsman Jack Texeira, who leaked all sorts of top secret military documents to a group of his adoring acolytes, one of whom then became a super-spreader and the instigator of a massive American embarrassment and an international incident with still unforeseeable implications for further death and destruction in the Russo-Ukrainian war and for the future effectiveness of American military intelligence.  There is probably more disturbing news to come.  The latest press reports are that Texeira actually began leaking secret information about the Russian invasion within days of its commencement.  Nobody seemed to notice at the time, but people have noticed now.  A PBS interview with a Ukrainian military leader I saw last week was disquieting.  This official was of course being diplomatic  and understated , but you could tell that he was inwardly fuming over the stupidity of the leaks.  Altogether the episode is an American tragi-comedy that briefly turned my eccentric professorial mind to another great book actually entitled An American Tragedy (a novel by Theodore Dreiser, 1925).

 

Not enough people know this book today; so I’ll tell you a tiny bit about it.  An American Tragedy is the highly fictionalized descendant of a famous murder case of 1906, the fictionalized anti-hero being one Clyde Griffiths, the child and impressed factotum of impecunious street evangelists in Kansas City.  After his sister escapes her similar evangelical imprisonment by skipping town with a fancy man, Clyde finds work as a bellhop in an upscale hotel.  Though a low level and servile occupation, his job gets him away from his Bible-thumping parents, puts a little a money in his pocket, and inserts him into a group of young colleagues who in their spare time like to think of themselves as badasses in their pursuit of wine, women, and even occasionally song.  Clyde has a couple of particularly unsavory friends among this group, especially one Willard Sparser.  Sparser, who likes to impress his fellow bellhops, is responsible for cleaning and maintaining the expensive new car of a wealthy resident.  He “borrows” the car to take Clyde and some others on a day-off joyride into the countryside in search of booze and other assorted naughtiness.  But Sparser pays too little attention to how time is passing and discovers in alarm that he must drive at reckless speed back to the city in order to return the car and keep its unauthorized use undetected by its owner.  Alcohol impaired, he hits a young girl in the road.  Then, fleeing in terror from that crime he totals the car altogether.  Clyde tries to avoid association with these catastrophes by fleeing Kansas City, eventually arriving in Chicago, where after several hundred pages the actual main plot of the novel begins.  This is, as the Friar says to the Wife of Bath, a long preamble to a tale, but a preamble nicely exemplifying the motives of Jack Texeira, airman first class and “cyber defense operations journeyman”.  (The Air National Guard does not use the rank of Bellhop.)  Those motives were not the gnaw of conscience, intellectual conviction of the desirability of Communism (Alger Hiss, Philby, Maclean, Burgess, Blunt); nor (self) righteous indignation at the criminal behavior of our government (Ellsberg, Assange, Snowden, Chelsea Manning); they had nothing to do with the frank venality of money  (Aldrich Ames).  Nor is motivation to be found in his political views, religious inclinations, or possible racial prejudices—topics that in the current climate have inevitably been suggested in several cultural commentaries.  Unfortunately, there seems to have been no serious social motive, noble or base, plausible or crackpot, in play.  No, Jack Texeira mainly wanted to impress a group of adolescent video game players, to show them that he was very, very cool.  He had the keys to a metaphorical fancy new car—top secret documents!  He would treat them all to a joy-ride!  Whatever be the legal fate of Cyber Defense Operations Journeyman Teixera—and while honoring a quasi -mythical presumption of innocence, I suspect it will be unpleasant—I am already prepared to declare it at least a demonstrated linguistic crime that such a fellow could be said to work in the field of Military Intelligence.  And as that is the same Military Intelligence whose digital wizards were in their search for the leaker scooped by two reporters for the New York Times, one does have to wonder if we have a more systemic problem.

 

1920s bellhop

 

Jack Texeira

 

Much has been made of Texeira’s youth (twenty-one), and some have suggested that no person so young should have access to state secrets.  (Of course there is a difference between youthfulness and callowness.  Stripling youths fought effectively at Bunker Hill, Shiloh, Belleau Wood, and Tarawa.  Kim—Kipling’s young hero, I mean, not Kim Philby—was an ace espionage agent at the age of twelve.)  Having been a college professor for forty years, I am aware that young people often do dumb things.  As a matter of fact I myself was once young and did many very dumb things.  Yet even mindlessness operates on a sliding scale, and this document dump is so deep in the red zone that lights are flashing.  According to news reports Mr. Texeira’s desire to commit to a military career is consistent with a significant family tradition of patriotic service.  But he devoted many hours to playing online video games, and in this avocation became a kind of leader of and guru to a group of “gamers,” including teen-agers and others of possibly arrested mental development, who were like-minded video game enthusiasts.  Mr. Texeira apparently sought to impress these acolytes, as the fictional Willard Sparser had set out to impress Clyde Griffiths, of just how cool he was by the flagrant abuse of something potentially lethal that he was supposed to preserve and protect.  Texeira had promised to do so in a formal signed document, his oath of office so to speak.  Having now exposed my own deep and perhaps mindless prejudices about video games and those addicted to them, I must admit that I actually don’t know squat about such games, having never played one.  I do vaguely recall reading a news squib once that claimed that Marine recruiters actually sought out video-gamers because so many had honed their digital reactions to warp speed.  Theory holds that such dexterity ought to be transferable from a game board to an M27 automatic rifle.  And I more distinctly recall reading in the press almost a decade ago of a disquieting international brouhaha involving criminal misogyny alleged to have been visited upon female game creators and players by young men who believed the gaming world should remain a male monopoly.  I don’t know how this episode ended, but I do remember the catchy name it was given: Gamer Gate!  Thanks to some bungling Republican burglars working on behalf of Richard Nixon in the early Seventies, many outrageous scandals are now Something Gates—the stuff of a future whimsical philological essay, perhaps.  Just now I am too annoyed by the fact that this great moniker “Gamer Gate”, which seems so perfectly suited for the shenanigans of Jack Texeira and his elvish crew, is no longer available.  I suspect that this same fate of unavailability, except on prison visiting days, awaits our airman first class as well.  He is not a whistleblower, just a guy blowing his own horn; yet he is not entirely without his defenders.  Representative Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgia, a believer in Pizza Gate, if you remember that one (pedophilia plus pomodoro sauce), has proclaimed his heroism.  Don’t you find it funny that so many things that are not at all funny are so—funny?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Daffodils, One to Ten Thousand

 

In the Ouchitas

 

            In the third book of his Metamorphoses Ovid tells the tragic story of Echo, scorned by a beautiful but self-absorbed young man who, enamored as he stared into a sylvan pool, had no desire but for his own reflected image.  In this fit of erotic psychopathy he died.  Ovid says that his sisters, the Naiads and the wood nymphs, the Dryads, “were preparing the funeral pyre, the quivering torches and the bier, but there was no body.  Instead of his body they came upon a flower with white petals surrounding a yellow heart.”  Metamorphosis is a fancy word for “change”, and Ovid’s poem is a huge anthology of stories about human bodies changed into something else—flowers actually being one of the happier options.  This fellow’s name, of course, was Narcissus.  From this mythological name we now have, in the realms of medicine and popular psychology, the condition of extreme self-absorption called Narcissism.  In one of the most widely read poems of medieval Europe, the Romance of the Rose, Narcissus appears as a monitory reminder of the fatal powers of erotic passion.  There can often be a confusion between the scientific and the popular names of plants.  To botanists narcissus denotes a genus with more than sixty species of spring flowers, only some of which are called narcissi by gardeners.  In general, what we call daffodils are all yellow.  Certainly for my own plantings I prefer the more numerous all yellow blooms.  Call me a classicist.

 

 Narcissus

            Mythological and literary connections augment my love of the daffodil, which is my favorite flower for reasons both aesthetic and practical.  To begin with the practical, the daffodil has the great advantage of being unpalatable to deer.  Tulips, on the other hand, seem to be the caviar of our cloven-footed friends.  That reason might be enough on its own because it means that we actually have some chance of seeing spring color in the yard.  Practically all my other horticultural efforts, floral or vegetable, are frustrated by a small menagerie of quadrupeds that live on or circle our grounds.  But daffodils are safe from animal consumption, pretty easy to deal with, and pretty forgiving of indolence and incompetence.  They are very faithful and very steady, quietly spreading and multiplying.  The appearance of the daffodils each year is also one of the most reliable indications of the arrival of real spring.  In recent years the early spring weather has been variable in temperature.  A warm week, which brings out a brave showing of bright daffodils, can be followed by a lengthy cold period.  But unless it gets extremely cold, these circumstances only extend the life of the spring flowers.  It really is quite marvelous.  This year we had a good showing by Palm Sunday, with the appropriate climax appearing just at Easter a week later.  Just now an unusually warm week—temperatures in the 80s!—has pushed the flowers over the top and into decline.  The daffodil plays out the allegory of human life, all too soon displaying its mortality in the traces of its fading beauty.  But there is another allegory too, for there is  always a fresh one for my lapel button hole at the Easter Vigil. There can be no backsliding from spring now.  We must prepare for some months of heavy jungle green.  In particular I must prepare, if I am possibly up to it, for the annual battle of the bamboo.

            We have some of our daffodils in what might be called (generously) beds, but the gods intended them to grow wild.  The process of returning a bag of bulbs to the wild is called “naturalizing.”  In earlier years I have written a little about my own efforts to naturalize bulbs on the common ground of our neighborhood, called the Gray Farm, and at the beautiful rural property of our son Richard and his wife Katie Dixon up on the Delaware near Frenchtown.  Both of those naturalization projects are still works in progress, but they are very satisfying so far.

 

            Large fields of daffodils allowed to go (or stay) native can inspire awe.  They are to be found in many parts of the country, including my home state of Arkansas, where there are some much admired ones.  But the most famous daffodils fields on earth, I presume, must be those in the Lake District in England.  The person most responsible for their fame is the poet William Wordsworth. Anyone who knows his poetry at all is likely to know the lyric “I wandered lonely as a cloud…”  I wandered lonely as a cloud/That floats on high o’er vales and hills/When all at once I saw a crowd/A host of golden daffodils/beside the lake—the lake of course being Ullswater, one of the two larger lakes in the “Lake District” of today’s Cumbria.

            Poets are usually afforded what is called poetic license, so I will cut Wordsworth a little slack.  If I am correct, I am writing this little essay exactly two hundred and twenty-one years to the day after the actual experience being described.  On that day, most fortunately, he was not quite so lonely as a cloud.  His walking companion was his formidable sister Dorothy, the keeper of a journal that is itself a little treasure of English literature.  Here is what she had to say of that day: “I never saw daffodils so beautiful.  They grew among mossy stones….Some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness, and the rest tossed, and reeled, and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay, ever glancing, ever changing.  The wind blew directly over the lake to them.  There was here and there a little knot and a few stragglers a few yards higher up, but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity and unity and life of that one busy highway.”  The daffodil walk took place on April 15, 1802.  The poet wrote two versions of his experience, both of them quite some time later.  It is clear that both texts must have relied on the actual words of Dorothy’s journal.  It is fitting that one of the poem’s finer images is that of dancing daffodils.  At a stretch you might call the poem itself a kind of collaborative dance.

Turner, "Ullswater"

            Of course as we can learn from Turner, Ullswater is quintessentially “picturesque” with or without daffodils.  I visited the Lake District in, I think 1959, though not in the spring flowering season.  I did see some daffodil greens—but ten thousand?  I doubt it.  I came much closer once in an Ozark meadow.

wild meadow in Arkansas

Hillsdale College

 

 

The current issue of the New Yorker features a lengthy article by Emma Green, identified in the contributors’ notes as the writer covering “education and academia” for the magazine, entitled: “The Citadel: Why conservative politicians love Hillsdale College.”  Hillsdale College is a small old Christian liberal arts college in a small town at the bottom of   Michigan.  There are dozens of rather similar institutions scattered throughout the country, but Hillsdale has separated itself from the pack in the national consciousness, so to speak, through ambitious and successful programs of  fund-raising and self-advertisement.  Hillsdale presents itself, accurately, as founding its education on the study of the liberal arts as an ethical and spiritual enterprise.  It is unapologetic in linking its educational theory and practice to the Christian cultural traditions that gave birth to the medieval universities and to practically all the institutions of higher education founded in this country before the Morrill Land Grant College Act of 1862, which aimed to advance the “agricultural and mechanical arts” so necessary to western expansion.  So you could say that Hillsdale maintains many of the characteristics of the mainstream of American liberal arts colleges in earlier generations or that it has become a conservative outlier in the scene as presently evolved.  The canny exploitation of this status by Hillsdale’s president and trustees, together with effective fundraising and public relations, has thrust the institution into an ambiguous national prominence.

 

 

The reason I presume to write about Hillsdale is that I do have a little personal knowledge of the place based on a three-day academic conference in which I participated in the fall of 2017.  That is not much experience, but more than that of some of the school’s public critics.  The general theme of the conference was the rise and fall of the Soviet Union as viewed from a century after the Bolshevik Revolution (or coup d’êtat) of October 1917.  My own lecture was about the content, publication history, and reception of Arthur Koestler’s famous novel Darkness at Noon (1940), a book that had an unusually powerful political and cultural effect, especially in its post-war French language edition first published in Paris in 1945.*  Leaving my own contribution aside, I thought the quality of the papers excellent.  Were they “conservative”?  Undoubtedly, if you equate anti-Communism with conservatism, as many intellectuals strangely continue to do.  “Every anti-Communist is a dog,” said Jean-Paul Sartre.  To which one can but reply “Bow-wow” and footnote The Black Book of Communism (Harvard, 1999).  A public hyperconservative like Roger Kimball talking about the Polish anti-Marxist philosopher Leszek Kolakowski or the traditionalist Roman Catholic theologian Daniel Mahoney analyzing Solzhenitsyn’s epic history of the Soviet slave labor camps is likely to come across as “conservative.”  Both gave excellent lectures packed with facts and ideas, neither of which are a “conservative” or “progressive” monopoly.  The speaker with whom I hung out the most was Sir Antony Beevor, the only military historian whose works I have read extensively.  One of his many famous books is Stalingrad (1999).  His talk for the conference considered the Soviet role in the World War from a more comprehensive point of view.

 

There was to be sure lots of “conservative” stuff all about us.  The trustees had put up big bucks for the construction of a new house of worship; the work was in progress.  I doubt if many other colleges are building chapels at the moment.  There was a statue of Margaret Thatcher.  I doubt if there another campus with one of those.  The student dress code took me back to my own undergraduate days in the ‘Fifties—though perhaps it reflected not a daily norm but the special occasion of a campus conference.  The students were courteous and alarmingly deferential to a visiting professor they had never heard of.  While I had no deep conversation with any student, I was impressed by their general knowledge of the major events, personages, and geography of the European theater in the second World War—subjects as opaque to most undergraduates I know as the battle plan at Thermopylae.

 

           

There was one possible ambush.  At a plenary lunch or maybe dinner there was a short lecture by a distinguished Hillsdale alumnus, Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, a sort of private army.  His articulate lecture gave a thumbnail sketch of the history of military mercenaries and extolled the efficacy of what he claimed was a sizeable mercenary component in current use by our government under the euphemism of “private contractors” in the War on Terror.  As a child I had read with enthusiasm Arthur Conan Doyle's The White Company, about dashing mercenaries in the Hundred Years' War.  Contemporary privateering was not a subject I had thought about before, and I was not immediately persuaded that private armies are by and large Good Things today.   But then I was never a Navy Seal.  The talk was certainly off the topic of the conference--if indeed it was ever conceived to be a part of it.  But even Erik Prince—brother of Betsy DeVoe, as he is usually and irrelevantly identified in news stories--had no visible horns sprouting from his brow.  However, let the search continue.  I see that Mr. Prince has just failed to prevail in a libel suit about an anonymous, indeed Q-anonish charge that he attempted to collaborate with Putin’s favorite mercenaries, the murderous Wagner Group.  Does anyone ever win libel suits in this country?

 

As would be true of any “adult education” event at any college, there were many probably wealthy alumni in the audience.  The difference I noted here was that most of them were not alumni of this college.  The two with whom I had the most serious conversations were from Harvard and Yale!  Our conversations were not about conservatism or liberalism, Trumpism or anti-Trumpism, but about historical issues raised in my lecture; yet both made clear in other ways their belief that their “own” institutions already had plenty of money, and that they chose to direct their personal support toward the concept of the “liberal arts” such as they believed was being followed at Hillsdale.

 

In the last two presidential elections the split in the gross popular vote between the two top contenders was roughly 52% (D)//48%(R), with the recipient of fewer votes actually winning the presidency in the first instance—election being determined constitutionally not by popular vote but by the votes of duly authorized electors.  By any measure, these figures reveal a closely divided electorate along a   “conservative”/ “progressive” axis.  I need hardly point out that similar ratios will not be found among the administrators and faculties of America’s liberal arts colleges.  It is, of course, a strange way to talk about college faculties—strange, but unfortunately highly relevant and probably even necessary in the current cultural and political moment.  The tenured faculties of humanities departments are in effect highly independent, closed, self-perpetuating corporations for whom the word “diversity” as applied to intellectual and cultural disposition generally means “more people like me.”

 

What has made life on our campuses seem to so many to be increasingly monotone, constrained, and timid has, however, created opportunities for a few visionaries.  A number of prominent politicians are now extolling the virtues of an old-fashioned liberal arts education they may show scant evidence of possessing themselves.  A glowing future is guaranteed for that college that can establish itself as the Numero Uno brazenly conservative, unwoke, politically incorrect, morally traditional, and full-throated patriotic institution in the country.  It will have nearly half the nation as its potential donor base for starters.  There actually are quite a few schools with some aspirations in that direction, but I’m not sure they are aware that the race is on.  The savvy President and other administrators at Hillsdale seem very much aware, and they are way out in the lead.  Just think of how the PR people at some of our most respected liberal arts colleges--Wesleyan, Mount Holyoke, Davidson, Rhodes, Grinnell, or Reed, say-- would savor a long New Yorker article--even one treating them as anthropological curiosities.  So long as the extraordinary variety of American institutions of higher learning, traditionally one of our great strengths, is in cultural contraction, and it is now, places that are really different have a chance to be noticed.  The long expected consumer backlash  inevitable with seventy thousand a year tuitions and endless administrative bloat may well have a cultural as well as a financial dimension.  Let a hundred flowers bloom.

 

*The talk was a much shortened adaptation of  a chapter of my book The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books That Shaped the Cold War (N.Y., Norton, 2009).

Hospital Reading

                                             Richard Chevenix Trench

After long and importunate knocking at the door, Covid has finally got into the house this week: Joan first on Thursday, followed by me on Friday.  And for me prudence dictated hospitalization—again.  I must repeat the shopworn advice: do not, under any circumstances, grow old.  Wearing the bottoms of your trousers rolled will be the least of your problems.  After brief respiratory drama countered by brief medical wizardry, I was back to “normal Covid,” which seems to mean feeling sort of lousy and flu-like.  But once you are in the Medical Maw, you’re in until some mysterious authority decides that you are out.  The varieties of infantilization are many.  I suppose a man of my age ought to make the most of the opportunity to revisit childhood, and I am trying to adapt.

 

Leaving the house in a rush, I grabbed up only a note pad and a couple of books, one of which is a true Golden Oldie, volume 788 of the old Everyman’s Library: two philological books by Richard Chevenix Trench.  These are On the Study of Words (1851) and English Past and Present (1855) here republished under a single cover in, I believe, 1927.  The editor, George Sampson, makes a virtue of their obsolescence…“In short, Trench’s two most famous books, like the Odyssey, the Divina Commedia, and Paradise Lost, are out of date…”.  And the books were indeed famous, commanding a significant popular audience and earning their spot in Everyman’s Library.  There is an oft-cited quotation from Goldsmith, perhaps his only oft-cited quotation, in which an amiable character in The Vicar of Wakefield says this: “I love everything that is old: old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines”.  This pretty well expresses my own temperament.  For me the category of old books by no means excludes works of scholarship.  Few if any works of scholarship are entirely without error; and most probably soon become  hopelessly outdated.  But is there anyone with a lively mind who will not find nourishment for it in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy or Gibbon’s Decline and Fall or Darwin’s Origin of Species?

 

Trench was a pre-Darwinian Anglican clergyman who lived long enough to see most of his cherished ideas overthrown or abandoned.  His work in history and philology is not infrequently errant.  It is no less brilliant and rewarding for all of that.  We shall not scorn Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne because it is not Audubon’s Birds of America or scorn Audubon’s own writings because they are not the latest publication of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology.  Trench and Gilbert White, men of very different temperament and social prominence, exemplify a major phenomenon in British cultural history that deserves an ambitious study of its own.  I am thinking of the remarkable contribution in practically all fields of study in history, literature, and the natural sciences made by members of the Anglican clergy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  One might even conclude that these men were rather underemployed in their officially pastoral vocations.  White was a modest country parson. Trench held several important ecclesiastical positions, including that of a major prelate (Archbishop of Dublin).  Both were of course “amateurs” in the fields for which they are still remembered today.  It is perhaps difficult for us to believe that there was in Victorian England a club of amateur philologists with cultural clout (the Philological Society), but there was, and Trench joined it in 1857. He made an immediate impact by delivering a paper on “Some Deficiencies of Our English Dictionaries” and then, in another meeting, offering the proposal that the Society sponsor a new and improved one.  This can rightly be regarded as the originating moment of the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, usually called the Oxford English Dictionary or OED.  Trench thought of himself chiefly as a theologian and a poet; but his copious poetry now goes unread, and his theological tomes mainly gather dust.  Yet he deserves to be held in memory as an originating force of the greatest dictionary the world has yet known—and the author of two still engaging books about our mother tongue.

 

                                                             Richard Whately

 

 St. Patrick’s, one of two Anglican cathedrals in Dublin, has a rich literary, scholarly, and cultural history of its own.  Jonathan Swift among the most important writers in the traditional literary canon and one of the world’s greatest satirists, ordained a priest in 1695, was the Dean of Saint Patrick’s from 1713 to 1745—the period that saw the appearance of his best-known works, including the most famous, Gulliver’s Travels.  But my personal favorite among the Victorian Anglo-Irish clerical celebrities is someone very few people have ever heard of: Archbishop Richard Whately, who was Trench’s immediate predecessor, and who died in office in 1863.  Whately was a serious intellectual and philosopher whose writings on logic and rhetoric are still in use today.  In the first half of the nineteenth century,

 

Oriel College, Oxford, where Whately was first a student and then a teacher, played an important role in English ecclesiastical history as the center of the so-called Oxford Movement, in which Cardinal Newman, recently canonized a Roman Catholic saint, also played a major role.  Whately, though friendly with many of its leaders, was not sympathetic with its High Church or “ritualist” tendencies.  He belonged to an intellectual circle called the “Noetics,” which would seem to mean something like “the brilliant and witty ones.”  He battled against the infidelity of contemporary Continental theological literature not by being medieval but by being funny.  The attack on the veracity of the gospel miracles, often explicit in the (then) new German biblical criticism, had been anticipated in Britain by the Scottish  philosopher David Hume in 1748.  Hume’s argument, at heart, is based in the theory of probabilities.  Is it more probable that a man walked on water or that there is a mistaken or, worse, a fraudulent report that a man walked on water?  In the last decade of the eighteenth century and the first two of the nineteenth, the most famous man in the European world was Napoleon Bonaparte.  He was a colossus, his rise, rule, and fall a vibrant epic.  But Whately, using Hume’s genre of argumentation as regards the gospels, “demonstrated” that it was impossible to be confident of the truth of any of his reported exploits, or indeed of his very existence.  Historical Doubts Relative to Napoleon  Bonaparte, one of the most widely read pamphlets in literary history, enjoyed a runaway success in 1819 and repeated reprintings in the decades thereafter.  We lack reliable evidence as to what Napoleon Bonaparte, who was of course still alive in 1819, though rather isolated, made of the work.  Historical Doubts is a very droll production—if only you are into what Victorian clerics thought was drollery.  The cogent theological argument comes as a bonus.

 

 

 

It is well known that the hospital is no place for a sick person.  One needs a little extra help to get through the experience.  Reading some engrossing pages by one scholarly archbishop and simply thinking about the humorously trenchant pages of another got me through my most recent experience.  Not to mention another blog essay.

Technopaignion

 

"The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfills Himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world”.  That’s actually King Arthur’s farewell, and it may be a bit portentous in the present banal context, which is my notice of publishing this post a day and a half in advance of the usual schedule.  But I anticipate being tied up for the next couple of days and, besides, man was not made for the Sabbath.  Or for Wednesday, either.  One needs to break free and go wild from time to time just on general principle.

 

This little essay will be about poetry and mathematics and word games, mainly.   In the “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,” which is so to speak Alexander Pope’s literary autobiography, Pope claims that the gift (or burden) of writing poetry was thrust upon him at birth.  Over his poetic urge he had no control: “I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came/I left no calling for this idle trade.”  He was actually imitating Ovid, of course, the infant who simply couldn’t restrain himself from squalling for his mother’s breast in perfect hexameters.  But my interest here is in the use of the word numbers to mean poetry.  The reference is to meter, measure or rhythm, and the mathematical bases of music.  But before we get to numbers, let’s say a couple of words about words, since not all word games are mathematical though they are perforce verbal.  There is a very ancient Latin word game, puzzle, or mystery, the SATOR AREPO.  You may well be familiar with it.  It is based in a five by five square grid. Five is a privileged Pythagorean number, the conclusion of the first set of “Pythagorean triplets” in which a²+b² = c²  (i.e., 3² +4²=5²).  So the SATOR AREPO is already super  “mystical”.  It's pretty puzzling lexically as well.

 

It is easier to see some of the amazing things this construct does than to say what it means.  If AREPO is an otherwise unrecorded personal name, it could say “The sower [ploughman] Arepo performs the work with the wheels”--referring to a wheeled plow.  This puzzle appears frequently

 

in medieval church decorations.  It is hard to think it is of Christian origin, however, since it is found in the pagan city of Pompeii, sealed by volcanic ash in the year 79.  But it is also hard to think it is not Christian, since its twenty-five letters, rearranged, spell out PATERNOSTER + A/O (“I am the Alpha and the Omega”) twice with no remainder.  Well, they say that an infinite number of chimpanzees with an infinite number of Remington typewriters might in infinite time reproduce the first folio of Shakespeare….It is not really necessary for the SATOR AREPO to have a cryptic meaning.  Surely the dazzling graphic calisthenics are enough.  You won’t find any words more thoroughly crossed than these!  In any event, it is very cool, cool enough to provide yet another level of deeply satisfying incomprehensibility to Christopher Nolan’s recent film entitled Tenet.  (Note that TENET is necessarily a palindrome for the puzzle to work.)  I talk about the SATOR AREPO a little in my book The Dark Side of the Enlightenment.  Here I simply want to use it to introduce the very fancy term technopaignion, from the Greek words techne (art, skill) and paignia, (play, sport or game).  A prominent literary form of the technopaignion is the shaped poem.  A poem can be both aural and visual.    Most of us today first experience poetry aurally: hearing the popular songs that are nearly an inescapable background of American life.  But reading a poem begins with an ocular act, seeing something.  And what we see can be manipulated by the typographer’s art into various patterns or shapes with their own capacity for significant suggestion.  We call this body of shaped poems pattern poetry.  Such works, usually regarded as curiosities, are very numerous in many languages and cultures over many centuries.  A very playful and avant-garde artist, the late Dick Higgins wrote a book on the subject that I can recommend highly.*

 

Not all “playful” literary art is serious, let alone philosophical or theological.  Higgins’s book is replete with light-hearted poetic jokes featuring shaped verses contorted into every imaginable shape.  Valentine

greetings beg for the treatment as do animals and wine bottles.  On the other hand, there can be no doubt that the mathematical conventions of learned, platonizing Christianity do lie behind some of the best known “skillfully playful” poems in the western traditions, such as Dante’s Comedy.  In one utterly fantastic scene in the Inferno the poet, speaking in his own voice, guarantees to his readers the literal veracity of the whopper he is just about to write by swearing upon “the notes of this Comedia…”!  Harmonic “notes” of a similar genre are everywhere in cathedral architecture and baroque mural paintings and Bach compositions.  Such works have engaged my attention throughout my career.  The marriage of form and content  is a fascinating feature of most art.  How do shape and disposition relate to theme and meaning?  A verse in the apocryphal “Wisdom of Solomon” says this about God as divine artificer:  “Thou hast arranged all things by measure and number and weight” (Wis. 11:20).  This encouraged philosophical poets to believe that their art might in some fashion mimic or at least reflect what Dorothy Sayers in a challenging book called The Mind of the Maker.  A Scandinavian scholar who had studied these matters deeply, Maren-Sophie Røstvig, writes thus: “In the Renaissance, cosmic and poetic unity were of the same kind….Behind this cosmic and poetic unity was felt to be the unity manifested by divine revelation…”  The poet’s job was in part to echo the numerical techniques of the Divine Artificer.  The specific unifying element was often mathematical and numerical, as evidenced, for example in the “golden” section or golden number (division into mean and extreme ratio) frequently revealed in visual, architectural, and literary constructs of the era.

 

Cryptic verbalization is in fact an artistic implication of a belief in divine harmonies.  Here I must confess there is something missing in my own mental armature.  I am pretty good with words, but lousy at Wordle.  I struggle.  But what Augustine says regarding scriptural obscurity has a much broader truth.  Those things we learn with difficultly are more satisfying than those easily grasped.  In the beginning was the Word.  That is the beginning of the Gospel of John, but also of the modern cross-word puzzle.  The neon sign on the Pentecostal church is

perhaps a far cry from the elaborate cross-poems of Hrabanus Maurus in the early ninth century, but they are literary kin.  Had I more time I would say a little more about this Frankish monk , Hrabanus.  We overuse the phrase “mind-boggling”.  It should be reserved for such rare phenomena as his masterpiece, the De laudibus Sanctae Crucis (In praise of the Holy Cross),

 a vast verbal and visual grid that takes the concept of the cross-word to heights requiring an oxygen mask for the reader’s survival.  In the creation of artistic cryptograms of all sorts the role of the most common symbol of Christianity, the cross, has been immense.  That is in part because our Latin letters T and X, both viewed as versions of the cross, very early introduced into platonic Christianity rich emblematic possibilities from the Hebrew

 

 

and Greco-Roman traditions respectively.  I have written about this elsewhere in relation to St. Francis of Assisi, who adopted the tau-cross for his own “mystic” signature.  More fundamentally the cross has the fundamental “shape” of western writing itself—horizontality and verticality. 

 

The human appetite for harmony would seem to be hard-wired.  According to legend it was by accident that Pythagoras discovered the perfect musical fifth while walking past a blacksmith’s shop where men were beating out metal with hammers of different weights.  The artistic desire to embrace and emulate the numbers of universal harmony and “divine proportion,” once those numbers were grasped, directed or influenced the construction of many of our most familiar works of art, architecture, music, and literature.  It is perhaps of small intellectual significance that Herbert’s poem “The Altar” actually looks like an altar.  In judging the poem, we must use the same criteria we use to evaluate all poetry.  But you have to admit that the typographic layout does add something extra, a psychic surplus value.  George Herbert, who was a brilliant man, thought it was worth doing.                                                                                         

 

 

*Dick Higgins, Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), pp. 275 and dozens of fabulous illustrations.  Higgins also has a short book about the shaped poems of George Herbert,  perhaps the best-known poem-shaper in the major canon.

 

 

 

Death on the Oria

The Oria on a good day

As Sunday advanced I began to experience the first vague awareness that blog day would soon arrive and that perhaps it would be wise  to give the matter some thought.  Some readers found last week’s effort just a tad cryptic, as I fully expected; I had my reasons, but I recognize that nonplussing one’s readers on a consistent basis might be poor policy.  So I determined that I would pursue a definite subject, if only such a thing would come to mind.  It didn’t exactly come to mind; it walked in the door.

                                                            Sofia Papaioannou

 

We just enjoyed a rather whirlwind visit from our daughter Katy, freshly returned from professional business in London and Paris.  Accompanying her was her great friend and colleague—who has become a friend of ours as well—Sofia Papaioanou.  Ms. Papaioanou is a well-known television personality in Greece who has hosted a number of highly rated programs.  Katy is among other things a professional historian of modern Greece who came to her love of its people and culture as Lord Byron had in  the days of Ali Pasha, by spiritual immersion.  Sofia Papaioanou and Katherine Fleming are the joint directors of a very ambitious oral history project in progress under the sponsorship of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.  The project, named Istorima, is sending historical reporters into every corner of the Greek countryside.  Their mission is to seek out and to record the memories of elderly citizens whose experience in many instances goes back to World War II and the Greek Time of Troubles that followed it.  The project serves other ends as well, such as offering employment to a large number of young people challenged by Greece’s recent economic difficulties and the dislocations of the pandemic; but in its substance it may be the largest national oral history project ever undertaken.

 

Sofia had a little oral history of her own to report.  She had recently returned from the Veneto in northern Italy where she was undertaking a historical mission that, in addition to being fascinating, practically begged to be a blog topic.  It involves an episode in the second World War.  Though no expert in the history of that conflict, I do consider myself pretty knowledgeable about it.  And since I had never heard of the Wreck of the Oria, it is possible you haven’t either.  It was the largest known single-ship maritime disaster in the long history—and I do mean long--of Mediterranean navigation.  It was also  a German war crime for a time more or less successfully hushed up.

 

When the European war began, Fascist Italy under Mussolini was allied with Hitler under the so-called “Pact of Steel”, but the Italian army was technically a “royal” one owing formal allegiance to King Victor Emmanuel III.  Large Italian forces battled the British in the deserts of North Africa.  The king had been strangely subservient to Mussolini, but with the (for Italy) disastrous Anglo-American assaults on Sicily and the Italian peninsula in 1943, the King removed Mussolini from power and supplanted him with a new prime minister, Badoglio.  (Mussolini was famously rescued from detention in a daring German commando raid ordered personally by Hitler.)  Italy officially but equivocally remained allied with the Nazis, but the Badoglio government obviously didn’t have their heart in it and secretly pursued the hope of a separate peace.  Most of the German top brass held a very low view of the Italian “fighting man”, whom they often openly classed somewhere between a coward and a traitor.  Large numbers of Italian soldiers scattered throughout the web of German occupation were now openly regarded as nuisances if not enemies.  This was the background for many disasters, one of which originated on the island of Rhodes.

 

Italy had come into open conflict with Greece in 1940.  On Rhodes, later held by the Germans, there was a significant presence of “royal” Italian army units.  With the reversal of Hitler’s fortunes in Italy, the Germans now treated this “allied” army of more than 4,000 as prisoners of war and crammed them onto an old British commercial ship, now named the Oria and the property of Scandinavian shippers, and sent them off in the direction of Piraeus, the port of Athens, on the Greek mainland a couple of hundred miles away, to be held in internment camps.  On February 12, 1944, the ship crashed against rocks near the tiny island of Patroklos, about sixty miles southeast from Athens, and very near the southernmost tip of the mainland.  The ship was inadequate and the crew possibly incompetent.  There were virtually no safety measures in place, and practically no safety equipment.  More than 4,000 men drowned, almost all of them Italian soldiers of low rank, many of them peasants from the Veneto.  This was a year after the German catastrophe at Stalingrad.  The Nazi officer corps had to know they were losing, and their deportment in enraged defeat was not more gentle than it had been in arrogant victory.  They behaved in the words of the secular law with “depraved indifference to human life.”  The families of the Italian victims in most instances knew only that a loved one had disappeared, God knew where to.  Yet so spectacular a disaster could not be hidden, as hundreds of bloated corpses washed up onto the sand beaches, rocky coves, and rough shingle of the Athenian peninsula.  The local Greeks had their own immediate German problem to deal with.  There was still a whole year before the Germans would be definitively defeated; but for the Greeks the end of one war was the beginning of another.  Yet the Greeks of that area never forgot.  They were not allowed to forget.  For years the detritus from the Oria and the humble artefacts abandoned by its doomed human cargo washed ashore in heavy weather.

Imagine being a child in the bleak winter of 1944 and finding dozens of the dead, hideously mangled or bloated,  washed up on the rocks and docks of your fishing hamlet.  Such reports were among the indelible youthful memories recalled after seventy-five years by wizened old men and toothless women and reported to the istorima historians.  Some of this fascinating testimony is already available on the English language version of the istorima site (https://www.istorima.org/en/videos/119/canteens-at-the-bottom-of-the-sea-the-mediterraneans-biggest-shipwreck/).

Ms. Papaioanou saw here rich historical material practically crying out for expansion in podcasts and television programs.  And in her mind, and the minds of some of her fellow historians, an idea was dawning that even now these seemingly forgotten dead might be remembered and honored.

                                                 

Particularly numerous among the shallowly submerged artefacts were the Italians’ cheap, pot-like messkits.  They were common finds, and on the bottoms of several of them the names and villages of their wretched owners had been incised into the soft metal.  So now, two generations later Greek local historians (and humanitarians) took the lovely initiative, guided by the inscribed mess kits, of trying to seek out any possible identifiable living relatives or posterity of some of the peasant conscripts drowned seventy-nine years before.  In southern Europe that was not merely another time but a different age.  Sofia Papaioanou had but recently been on such a mission, and she gave a moving and heart-warming account of its reception.  The first problem the historians faced was the incredulity of contemporary Italians concerning the bona fides of the enterprise.  The youngest of the actual contemporaries of the drowned men had to be closer to a hundred than to eighty years old; yet there were some.  And though the oral memory of the “disappeared” had never faded from their villages, the whole enterprise—“oral historians,” television cameras, King Victor Emmanuel-- seemed to many of them incredible.  The historians were able to “return” three incised canteens.  They set up a meeting in the ancient little town of Cerea, between Padua and Verona.  It was in the heart of the agricultural landscape from which so many of the soldiers garrisoned on Rhodes had come.  Sofia expected to be meeting with two or three graybeards.  The photographs she showed us instead captured a sizeable room filled with an intergenerational crowd, many of them in best bib-and-tucker: the posterity and friends and relatives of the drowned men, the victims of an ancient myth. Perhaps a few of them were their actual direct posterity.  They treated the event with the somber dignity it so richly deserved, but also with a certain joyfulness.  The return of a battered tin pot may not be “restorative justice” as we usually think of it, but in the circumstances it was certainly a generous and inspirational act of fellow feeling and, indeed, of Christian charity, that both in its performance and its reception lets shine a shaft of light upon the darkness of the horrors of war.