Class Reunions

 

                                       

 

                                            

The manner in which art imitates art imitating art is demonstrated in the many riffs on a great Thurber cartoon itself riffing on a not-so-great line in a Swinburne poem: “I said, ‘The hounds of spring are on winter’s traces’, but let it pass…”  Well, around here we had three nearly perfect days, alias the Memorial Day Weekend, in which the Stallions of Summer appeared to be sniffing the air with satisfaction.  The sun shone brightly; community swimming pools opened; and the Princeton University class reunions ran their many decibelled course without the inundation from the skies I had thought was a necessary requirement of the occasion.

 

For the most part we had a distanced experience of the celebrations this year.  We live perhaps a mile from the center of campus festivities, close enough to hear the distant shouting from athletic events and the base line of musical groups and to see something of the fireworks show; but not close enough to be annoyed or kept awake.  But the fact that the house is within fairly easy walking distance for a reasonably fit younger person has its payoffs.  Though it is wonderful to see old student friends, the typical Reunions encounter is brief, hurried, and unsatisfactory, allowing insufficient opportunity for any significant or serious communication.  Our plan this year, which worked to perfection, was to have a few “quality” off-campus meetings with friends we especially wanted to see.  In fact we participated in only one on-campus event, and that one was hardly typical of the bacchanalia for which Reunions are famous.  That was the “Dante Reunion.”

 

One of the greatest scholars in the history of Dante scholarship was Robert Hollander of Princeton, who died just about two years ago.  He was not merely my colleague in the study of medieval literature, but a very close personal friend for decades.  Probably every college has a few small courses that over the years gain a reputation for their  exceptional challenges and their exceptional rewards, and at Princeton one of those for about forty years was Hollander’s undergraduate Dante course.  It regularly attracted a small cohort of the brilliant and the eccentric, about half of whom were not majoring in literary study at all.  I don’t know the exact origins, but at some point Hollander and a group of the course’s veterans from the years past came up with the idea of having a seminar on Dante as one of the optional events at class reunions.  The rest is, as they say, history.  A most enjoyable part of that history for Joan and me is that as the fame of the event grew in tandem with the generosity of some of the alumni dantisti (as the poet’s votaries are known in the Italian tongue) it became possible to have the luxurious supplement of a week-long summer seminar in a medieval Tuscan castle.  Life doesn’t get much better than that.  I was sometimes invited along as one of the preceptors, or discussion leaders.

 

Bob’s death (after a long and punishing illness), though a terrible blow for the dantisti, did not quell their enthusiasm for Dante.  His successor in the Italian section is Simone Marchesi, one of his few graduate students, and a brilliant, charismatic, and energetic young scholar whose work has already catapulted him to prominence in his field.  He has taken over leadership of the Dante Reunion.  Having now taught the Dante course for several years, he has many enthusiastic alumni of his own, all of them new to me of course.  Lots of them showed up, joining forces with alumni of earlier generations, including a couple of greybeards from the days of an all-male student body.  The seamlessness of the event was beautifully symbolic.  Dante, the life of scholarship, the scholarly life of the mind—all these are ever the same yet ever changing.  The event was a poignant testimony to the power of an immortal poet, to the inexhaustible plenty of thoughtful reading, and to the vitality of the still precious privilege of higher education.

 

Our good friends Susan and John, practically cut off from us during the long reign of Covid, came down from New York.  Joan and Susan were partners in walking the Compostela pilgrimage together over several summer stints, during some of which John and I (in a comfortable car) drove around the countryside seeing interesting things.  So many happy memories, and one unhappy one.  (Five beautiful sausages I bought in the market at Carcassonne were seized by customs officials at Newark Airport.)  The four of us went to dinner after the seminar to an excellent new Italian restaurant in nearby Kingston.  It was not quite Siena, but tolerably close.  We had plenty of time for a real catch-up conversation.  One of the joys of old friendships is their easy renewability even after long dry spells.

 

I always have a number of phone calls from old students a day or two before Reunions, and some particularly nice ones this year.  We had three special pre-arranged home visitations, two of them by old students still connected with us through the Dante seminar.  Another, Annalyn, I had been lucky enough to supervise in the English Department.  I should have known from her senior thesis on Virginia Woolf that she would one day win a Pulitzer Prize for her criticism, as she and her husband did in 2005 for their joint biography of Willem de Kooning.  She was later a trustee of the university for a while and therefore in a sense my supervisor  Another, Carolyn,  is a recently retired professor of Hispanic literature with a specialty in the earlier periods; we have many long-standing personal and intellectual connections, especially a shared late friend, going back to the 1970s.  She gave me the gift of a book that already has me hooked, and I reciprocated with my little monograph about Luis de Camões, for which she is a member of the small ideal audience for whom it is intended.  Small?  Minute, perhaps.  Another couple—Bill and Anne—take me back even further, practically to the very inception of my career here.  Bill, a member of the great class of 1969 (!) was in a raucous undergraduate course in Old English I taught so long ago that it has the flavor of a dim racial memory.  But memory is what both class reunions and history are all about.  How blessed I have been to have been given so many happy ones.  It is a good thing from time to time to bring them together—that is, to reunite them.

 

                                        

     

Grandparental

 

            In general I try in these essays to observe the remit suggested by my blog’s name—that is, learning and teaching-—but this one will be a little different.  A while back a correspondent told me, intending a compliment, that what I wrote was not a “real” blog.  Context suggested that he thought a “real” blog would deal in personal musings and reflections and not “covert lectures on medieval philology.”  So this one will be short, self-indulgent, and personal.  I propose a brief encomium extolling the joys of being a grandfather, with particular reference to two of our younger grandchildren, John Henry Putney Fleming (who will soon be eleven) and Hazel Elizabeth Fleming, who turned nine yesterday.

 

            We have six grandchildren in all, five of them females, all of them delightful, ranging in age from nine to twenty-nine.  Four of them, who live in New York, we get to see with frequency, especially as one of them doesn’t exactly live in New York anymore, having just completed her first year at—Princeton.  Visits from John Henry and Hazel are naturally less frequent, but I have just enjoyed a most delightful one.

 

            It is an ill wind that blows no good.  Regular readers already know that my distinguished brother-in-law, the architectural historian John Newman, Joan’s only sibling, recently died in England.  Joan of course flew over for the funeral, but not without some necessary thought to the logistics.  She is sprier than I am, but still does not undertake international travel unadvisedly.  Her trip was greatly eased because our elder son Richard was able to go also as companion and chauffeur.  That left me as the problem.  Just at the moment I was not able to go, or to do a few other needful things, even with some excellent home health care.  So our younger son Luke, a professor in Montreal, flew down to spend a week with me here.  We had a great time.  He fairly recharged my batteries.  He got me back into the library.  He is starting to write a new book and got me to think I might possibly do the same.  Possibly.  Thus at the mere cost of seriously disrupting the lives of two families, and imposing yet further demands upon two already sufficiently occupied daughters-in-law, the Princeton gerontocracy continued apace.

 

            The big payoff for me came over the weekend.  It happened to include my birthday, for which the only semi-secret festive family plans had been overthrown by the death of Joan’s brother.  But a hastily arranged Plan B was implemented.  Luke’s wife Melanie drove down from Montreal with John Henry and Hazel to spend a couple of days before Joan’s homecoming, and then to return to Canada with Luke.  That was a lot of driving for one geriatric birthday dinner.

 

            The disappointing abandonment of earlier plans, Covid related, had meant that we had not seen the Montreal kids for too long a time.  At their ages, both physical and personality development is rapid.  Both had gained several inches of verticality and a significant if not precisely measurable depth of consciousness since we had last been together.  They were bubbling over with surprising conversation, jokes, riddles, high jinks of all kinds.  The inches we recorded in quasi-permanent pencil on the white wainscotting of the kitchen.  We simply enjoyed the increment of mental agility.  Our wild back garden seemed to them to rival all the provincial parks of Québec in which they have camped.  They were fascinated by the rampant wildlife of our corner of suburban New Jersey, which includes a couple of foxes who ambulate up and down Hartley Avenue as though it were the Promenade des Anglais in Nice.  They teased and spoofed us.  Hazel, deploying Academy Award level skills, extracted from me, all unaware of her covert purpose, the information she and her mother (a professional caterer) would need to surprise me with what I can only call the birthday Cake of Ages.  I do not mention any precise age.  The weather was perfect for walking and working in the yard.  It is the season for the battle of the bamboo.  We attacked both the quick and the dead, the shooting tender spikes that move so fast you can hear them growing, and the old dead, hollow trunks, halfway to being flagpoles, whitening with age.  Young John Henry threw himself into this task with all the energy of his Stakhanovite namesake.  How could I possibly deserve—how could anyone—these beautiful and brilliant infants, shining mirrors of affection and promise?  Heaven, even as imagined in the colors of Fra Angelico, is not easy for me to conceive.  But that suggested by Jesus works for me: a place full of children.  I’d like to think that the vibe would be more that of a kids’ project at a daycare center than a session of the Congress of Vienna.

 

            Somewhere in the garden shed is a ghastly pewter plaque, which somebody paid five bucks for in the shop of an Interstate rest stop, with the stamped image of a geezer with a pipe and the legend: HAPPINESS IS BEING A GRANDFATHER.  It’s one of those things somebody gives you to put in the garden shed.  The presentation so tacky, but the message so true.  And it all begins when they are mere babes in arms.  You get to cuddle and rock them.  And when they poop—hand ‘em back to Mom!  The next thing you know they’re backpacking in Nepal or closing six-figure deals in some glass cage on the forty-seventh floor.

 

Joan and Richard returned from England in time to spend a few hours with the Montrealers before they had to get into their big Dodge van and headed back north.  They reported a soft landing after a long day’s drive.  The kids didn’t even miss a day of school, because it was a Canadian national holiday, Victoria Day, named after you-know-who.  Only in Québec, where the politics are a little edgy, it’s the Journée des Patriots.  But reports of changing the name to Meghan Day are baseless rumor.

 

 

 

 

 

Villainous Villon

 

There are many well-known books written by virtuous people unjustly imprisoned by wicked or unenlightened authorities—the Consolation of Philosophy, Ralegh’s History of the World, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Letter from a Birmingham Jail, to name a few.  But some  years ago I became interested in the phenomenon of real criminals toiling away at their writing in their well-deserved prison cells.  Specifically I was writing about “Jan Valtin” (Richard Krebs), a German Comintern thug who profited from his residence in San Quentin for attempted murder in the late 1920s by studying creative writing in extension courses from the University of California.  He went on to publish a lucrative blockbuster in New York in 1941.  But I discovered that he was only one of several incarcerated scribblers in residence at the time.  One of them, a famous Canadian bank-robber, actually left an unpublished manuscript entitled “Prison Literati” cataloguing the incarcerated writers.  I was moved to the conclusion that San Quentin, in the mid-Twenties, “would appear to have housed about as much literary talent as any given summer session of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.”  But surely, it struck me as I was writing about the benefit of clergy last week, our greatest literary felon must surely come from one of my own fields of special interest: medieval French literature.  I refer to François Villon, inveterate criminal, sentimental Marian Catholic and literary genius.

 

Considering Villon’s social obscurity, we know an amazing amount about him, though much of what we most want to know remains a mystery.  He was born in 1431 and was able with luck and meritocratic pluck to take arts degrees  at the University of Paris.  Like Ovid and Alexander Pope he “lisped in numbers,” meaning that he began composing verse as a child, and was already the most famous poet in Paris by the age of twenty.  His criminality is amply documented in police records.  In 1463 he was spared execution and mercifully exiled from Paris as an habitual offender, a punishment only technically less severe than death for a man whose entire life was the vibrant world of the taverns, markets, gambling dens, whorehouses, and religious shrines of the great city.  He disappears, never to be heard of again; and I half imagine that his life actually ended on some obscure provincial gallows.

 

There is a brilliant—I use that overworked adjective soberly—a brilliant biography of Villon written by the English journalist and Catholic convert, D. B.  Wyndham Lewis: François Villon, a Documentary Survey (NY, 1928).  The religious dimension is relevant, for it differentiates Villon’s villainy from that of our contemporary criminals, and I think makes it more approachable.  In the essay I was writing about Jan Valtin I touched briefly on Jack Abbott, a psychopathic killer and the author of In the Belly of the Beast (1981), a searing indictment of our penal system.  Abbott was briefly championed by Norman Mailer, but his career as literary flash-in-the-pan ended when he was arraigned for a brutal murder on the same day that his self-pitying best seller was reviewed in the Times.  Though the two may have similar results, psychopathy is different from sin, the latter being a mainly discarded theological concept based in the theory of individual agency and the autonomous will.  “[Villon] was a great sinner…”, writes Wyndham Lewis, the Catholic convert.  “During his hunted life he had twice, possibly three times, lain under sentence of death, had been half a dozen times punished by the Question, twice banished voluntarily….He had committed homicide at twenty-four and burglary and sacrilege at twenty-five, and his unrecorded thefts, stabbings, cheats, and brawlings are probably innumerable.”*  And he was the greatest poet of his age.

 

It is fascinating to me that the most serious engagement with the moral problem raised by Villon’s habitual and serious criminality is to be found not in the several historical biographies devoted to the poet, but in a work of fiction by the great Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, who published a short story entitled “A Lodging for the Night: A Tale of François Villon” in 1877.  It has more than once been called “the first modern short story”.  In it Villon, in his mid-twenties part of a dissolute crowd of desperate ne’er-do-wells, is at a sordid nocturnal festivity.  While the poet works at writing a poem, one of his mates stabs another to death over a card game.  After dividing the dead man’s spoils, everyone must flee the premises to avoid association with the crime.  This is a rather desperate situation.  It is after curfew; the night is freezing, and the vigilant police watch patrols throughout the locked-down city.  In the confusion, an agile cutpurse steals Villon’s money as he departs, leaving him penniless.  He must seek refuge for the night by knocking on random doors.  Amazingly he is admitted at the door of an imposing house.  Its only occupant is an elderly aristocratic military officer formerly in the King’s service.  He welcomes Villon, and retires to the scullery to fix him a plate of food.  In his absence the poet contemplates how easy it would be to steal some precious objects in plain sight in the sitting room.

 

For the rest of the long night they engage in a pointedly personal conversation about their “life styles.”  Villon defends his life of dissolution and crime on the grounds of penury and lack of social status.  The knight claims that his military exploits, including the frequent injury to non-combatants, is noble because it is founded in honor.  Villon’s brawling and thieving , on the other hand, are vile and dishonorable.  Villon responds with an argument already ancient in Antiquity, made famous by Augustine in the City of God, and actually reproduced by Villon in the Testament.  A certain notable pirate named Diomedes  was chastised by Alexander the Great for his criminality.  Diomedes boldly replied that the only difference between the two of them was the matter of scale.  Plunder one ship and you are a criminal for hanging.  Plunder ten countries and you are Alexander the Great.  Augustine called that answer “elegant and true”.  Perhaps more proximate to the situation in Stevenson’s story is the way John Locke puts the issue: “Should a robber break into my house, and with a dagger at my throat make me seal deeds to convey my estate to him, would this give him any title? Just such a title, by his sword, has an unjust conqueror, who forces me into submission”.  However, as Villon leaves his host as dawn renders the streets once again safe, he has made the decision—the ambiguity of which is wonderfully “modern”-- not to rob the old man.

                                         

                   Gibbet of Montfaucon as reconstructed by architectural historians

Villon lived beneath the shadow of the gallows—and what a gallows!  The authorities had erected at Montfaucon (near the present site of the Gare de l’Est) a monstrous three-tiered, open roofed edifice with forty-five symmetrical piercings tall enough to accommodate a hanging corpse.  Some malefactors were actually executed at Montfaucon; but its main purpose was to expose the bodies for the edification of travelers  on the busy crossroads that met at its southwest corner.  Supplementary corpses from the city’s numerous “minor” gibbets were brought there in sufficient quantity to keep most of the gruesome windows full at all times.  The stench, the raucous bickering of carrion birds, the incremental dissolution of human flesh left to rot for weeks and months—all this, according to medieval penal theory, full of healthy moral lessons for the populace.

 

We shall never know where his bones lie, or how they got there.  But his readers took more care with his poems, which were wildly popular among a new reading public in the first flush of the Gutenberg revolution.  Closer to our own time they have been edited and explicated with great care by French literary scholars: the love poems, the satirical poems in slang, the erudite poems, the personal poems that, like Dante’s Commedia, are full of the names of his actual contemporaries, “real life” characters from the Parisian demi-monde.  He conceived of his poems as legacies—gathering them as Testaments, as in “last will and testament,”—the final attempt of the dying to influence the world of the living.

 

Even many people who are not poetry lovers are likely to know one of his lines, and may even know it in French: Ou sont les neiges d’antan?, “Where are the snows of yesteryear?...” from his “Ballad of the Ladies of Times Gone By” in the Grand Testament.   This is a conventional wistful meditation on the transitory nature of the phenomenal world as illustrated in the brief lives of famous beautiful women of history; but of course Villon always stamps convention with his own original hallmark.  We are in this “sweet world”, as Dante calls it, for but a moment, as transitory as the fallen snow.  In the midst of life we are in death.  This the poet knew, believed…but…but the savor of a hot meat pasty, the sweet notes of the lute, the rush from the flask of a southern wine, the cunning ambiguity of an obscene rhyme in one of his poems, the thrill of caressing a firm breast beneath a flimsy bodice…O stay, thou passing moment, thou art so fair.

 

Villon’s French is sometimes difficult mainly because of its heavy use of now disappeared slang and informal usage, urban argot,  and fifteenth-century in-jokes that probably even some of his contemporaries didn’t get.  I don’t get all of them either.  But that is actually true for practically any book published before the day before yesterday.  There are many available English translations of Villon’s poems, some bilingual.  The best by an English language poet is probably that of Galway Kinnell (Princeton ’48),  But if you are one of those who really wants to know, I suggest tracking down a second-hand copy of the Wyndham-Lewis, several copies of which are for the moment available at ridiculously low prices on Abebooks.com. Easy-peasy.  Wyndham-Lewis gives excellent translations of most of the many texts he cites through the course of his “documented survey”.  And his dedication page alone is worth the price of the book.

 

 

*Wyndham Lewis, François Villon, 221.  “The Question” was interrogation under excruciating torture.

Benefit of Clergy

 

Let me ask you about a couple of words, and one three-word phrase.  Do you know what a dirge* is?  How about a placebo**?  You probably know both those words, the one a funeral lament, and the other a fake medicament, as illustrated in a couple of quotations in the notes.  How about the phrase “benefit of clergy”?  One of Rudyard Kipling’s most arresting stories is entitled “Without Benefit of Clergy.”  It has been much admired, and twice made into a movie, but it is by no means easy to describe or to understand.  Its setting is British India of the Victorian period.  Its subject is the socially impossible union of an unmarried English civil servant engineer (John Holden) and a young Muslim girl (Ameera) whom he has purchased from her mother!  Given its date (1890) its themes seem prophetically relevant to many current discussions of race, gender, religious identity, and cultural diversity.  Holden has to hide his chattel-love out of sight of the British community.  The whole situation is dangerous and doomed, as Holden knows.  The phrase “benefit of clergy” is one not infrequently found in historical literature.  When I first encountered it and tried to make sense of it, I supposed it referred, as it seems to in Kipling’s title, to an irregular sexual union outside the religious sanction of marriage: cohabitation, “common law marriage”.  It is a frequent ploy of the mind to try to force the unfamiliar into submission, however absurdly, into categories of the familiar.  The phenomenon includes words and phrases we hear but do not understand.  I wrote an essay sometime ago about the phrase “to beg the question,” for which the absurd new meaning has become “to pose a question”.  But of course if it works, it is no longer absurd.

 

            It is the title of Kipling’s story rather than the troubling issues raised in it that is the stuff of this essay.  Its subject will be aspects of the reflection of the biblical book of psalms in odd corners of the cultural landscape—including the phrase “benefit of clergy”.  Returning to dirge and placebo, most people know the words, but few are likely to know their etymological origins. Both of them come from the Vulgate,  the medieval Latin translation of the Book of Psalms!  The first two “hours” (or parts) of the Office of the Dead were known as Dirige and Placebo. These were the initial words of the first antiphon (liturgical chant) in the morning “hour” of the Office:  Dirige me, Domine Deus meus… This is a paraphrase of a verse in the fifth psalm.  “Dirige” means guide or lead in the imperative mood.  “Guide or direct me O Lord my God…”  A dirigible airship was so-called because it could be steered.  The Latin imperative dirige eventually wandered off into the English noun dirge, meaning a funereal lament.  Placebo means I shall please or be pleasing.  A psalm verse (114:9), Placebo domino in regione vivorum… (“I will please the Lord in the land of the living…”) likewise was prominent in the liturgy of death.  The English language swallowed placebo whole, so to speak, though the specialized medical application is pretty oblique!  You are pleased to think that the vacuous pill is making you feel better.  The Book of Psalms has had an enormous cultural influence over the last two thousand years.  In terms of musical “albums” judged in the long view of history, it would be a platinum encased diamond disk like no other.

 

            And what has any of this to do with benefit of clergy, the English translation of a medieval Latin legal phrase, beneficium clericale?  An ordained churchman (cleric) was someone with education or (in Anglo-Norman French) clergie, English clergy.  Hence, clergyman.  In medieval Europe there were two parallel but separate systems of law.  There was the ordinary secular law, in England called the common law; but there was a separate set of ecclesiastical courts.  Lay people could be hauled before these courts for certain infractions--Chaucer’s Summoner makes a good living from this racket—but mainly they were used to adjudicate cases involving the clergy.  In general, the punishments meted out for convictions in the ecclesiastical courts were less severe than those in the King’s court, in which capital punishment was very common.  So if you were in serious trouble, there was a great advantage, privilege, or benefit to being tried in church court, for which all clergy were eligible. The term benefit of clergy properly refers to this ecclesiastic privilege.  There were plenty of clerical felons to claim it, not to mention plenty of lay malefactors who sought to escape their just fates by claiming to be clerics.  Q: How can you to tell that someone is clergy (of clerical status)? A: by demonstrating that he has clergy (learning, education).  He does that by reading aloud and correctly translating something from the Latin Bible.

 

The canonical text for this purpose was the initial verse of the fiftieth psalm: Miserere mei, Deus: secundum magnam misericordiam tuam.  “Have mercy upon me, God, according to thy great mercy.”  This psalm was usually called simply the Miserere.  Its exegetical “story” is that it was written by an abject King David as he contemplated his sinful behavior with Bathsheba—adultery aggravated by homicide.  As the most important of a group of seven poems within the Psalter known as the penitential psalms, the Miserere has a rich liturgical and musical history.  According to one famous anecdote, the fourteen-year old Mozart was so taken by hearing the version of the Italian composer Gregorio Allegri (1582-1652) that he transcribed it from memory!  This verse has also a colorful legal history.  It was commonly if irreverently known as the neck verse because an accused malefactor who could read it in plausible-sounding Latin and translate it correctly into the vernacular, might establish his “clergy” and claim its benefit: being tried not in the secular but in the ecclesiastical courts, thus probably saving his neck.  There are many reflections of it and its spiritual implications in European literature.  The first three words actually spoken by any character in the Divine Comedy (Inferno 1:59)—the  address of the terrified Dante to the shade of Virgil—are “Miserere di me”!  The first word is good Latin, the next two an accurate translation of Latin to Italian.  This lost soul knows he is in desperate trouble; so he recites the neck verse!

 

The special homage paid by law to erudition survived the medieval church and even the Reformation.  There are some interesting episodes from English literary history.  The theatrical world of Elizabethan England could get rowdy.  Christopher Marlowe was killed in a barroom brawl in 1593.  Details, as they say, are lacking.  Five years later the then fledgling playwright Ben Jonson fought a duel with an irascible actor named Gabriel Spencer and killed him dead.  We know a few more details about this incident, which was in  the eyes of the law manifestly a capital manslaughter.  Jonson was arrested, imprisoned, and almost certainly headed for the gallows.  But he miraculously produced a kind of Get-Off-the-Scaffold card.  Jonson was a bricklayer, but a particularly erudite one.  He made a plea for benefit of clergy.  He could read and write Latin—which is what the word literate then chiefly meant.  Remember that the word clergy meant both the clerical caste and the learning for which they were distinguished.  The plea was accepted.  He would not be subjected to the jurisdiction of the common law courts.  We see here the laicization of a medieval religious privilege that a college professor must necessarily applaud.  That did not shield Jonson from all criminal liability, but it saved his neck.  How he wiggled out of the remaining situation is not entirely known.

 

*”A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young”: E. A. Poe, in Lenore

 

**”Research shows that if patients believe they are taking the real drug, they are more confident of improving and, so, improve even if they are actually on the placebo.” John Cornwell

Justicia

 

John Newman

 

 

John Newman (1936-2023)   

 

We have suffered a death in the family.  On April 19 my brother-in-law and Joan’s only sibling,  the architectural historian John Newman, 86, died peacefully in his sleep at his home in Wye, Kent, a few miles from Canterbury.  He had long been ill and in his last days in obvious terminal decline.  But death is no less final for being expected.  His widow Margaret, and his two daughters Elizabeth and Hilary and their families survive him in England.  And here his slightly younger sister Joan is left to balance grief and many happy memories.

 

This personal tribute to John will not compete with that currently on the blog page of the Courtauld Institute in London, of which he was a post-graduate alumnus, a long-time teacher, a one-time Deputy Director, and a distinguished emeritus fellow.  I encourage you to consult this lovely memorial (https://courtauld.ac.uk/news-blogs/2023/john-newman-1936-2023/), which surveys the main currents of John’s extraordinary professional career.  I merely want to add a few of my own remarks and personal and affectionate memories.  The Courtauld Institute is sometimes described as the Art History Department of the University of London.  It is actually an independent college of that university, and one of the most distinguished art historical institutes in the world.  It is appropriately housed in one of Britain’s most distinguished buildings, Somerset House (near the Savoy and Temple tube station).  Many visitors to London are familiar with the Courtauld’s fabulous art gallery which is also housed there.

 

John Newman and his sister Joan, my wife, were born respectively in 1936 and 1938, the only children of Arthur and Wynifred Kate Newman.  His father was a scientist, an industrial chemist, and an executive in a prominent pharmaceutical firm.  My dear mother-in-law Kate Newman was a homemaker and domestic horticulturist with considerable musical talent who imbued her children with broad cultural interests.  Naturally the War loomed large in the children’s earliest memories.  The family removed for a while to Derbyshire, but John spent several of his early years in rural Kent.  It was there that he nurtured his lifetime fascination with the English built environment, travelling on solitary bicycle tours through the villages and countryside on the trail of big houses, old churches, indeed of any architectural monuments of interest or distinction.

 

The family moved nearer to London, and John attended Dulwich College, where his classical education prepared him perfectly to pursue the Greats (classical studies) course at University College, Oxford.  He seemed to be following a well-beaten path when he became a classics master at the Tonbridge School in Kent.  He was by training well suited for this career, and good at it.  But he then did something very courageous under the circumstances of those times.  His love was architecture, and he chose to follow his bliss.  Giving up his nascent and safe career as a teacher of classics, he applied to, and was accepted into, the postgraduate program of the Courtauld Institute.  This was a bold move, not without financial risks, that led to no certain or even likely employment prospects.  But the rest is, as they say, history.  So conspicuous were his talents as an architectural historian that he never left the Courtauld, merely moving to the other side of the desk, so to speak, and to the outstanding career outlined in the memorial notice to which I have referred.

 

 

John’s most notable public scholarly role was that of successor to Sir Nikolaus Pevsner as supervisor (and author of several volumes) of the monumental Buildings of England series.  Once again, we see the serendipitous pattern of John’s life.  The relationship between these two giants of British architectural history began when Pevsner put a notice on a message board seeking a chauffeur to drive him around the county of Berkshire looking at buildings to write up.  John, then a student, leapt at the chance.  Sir Nikolaus died in 1983.  By then John was driving the Buildings of England in a very different sense.  One of my own happiest memories of John was attending the festivities about ten years later—held in an amazing medieval crypt on the High Street of Canterbury—celebrating the publication of his second fat volume devoted to Kent, his home county.  I am sure that Sir Nikolaus, his early patron and colleague, was beaming down from the empyrean.  The breadth and range of the architectural expertise displayed in the Kent and other volumes wholly written by John must be described as awesome.

 

Public eminence and achievement deserve our honor and our admiration, but the best part of a man’s life, as Wordsworth reminds us, are his “little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.”  Around such acts John’s life seemed to be organized.  He was almost culpably modest and self-effacing; and I don’t think he had a mean bone in his body.  He was kind, equably tempered, quietly energetic, socially concerned, an unostentatious but ethically engaged Christian.  He and his life partner Margaret were the unassuming regents of a happy, well regulated, culturally rich life lived in modesty and calm.  Their two lovely adult daughters, now on the cusp of middle age, are living monuments to their upbringing.  John was very proud of his accomplished children and grandchildren and particularly pleased, I think, when one of his grandsons matriculated at his old Oxford college.

 

Relations with one’s inlaws are often the stuff of lame mirth.  One of my own father’s favorite quips was this: “Of all my wife’s relations, I like myself the best.”  Friendship almost perpetually practiced across the width of the Atlantic has its own special character.  We had a few episodes of happy professional collaboration.  I remember teaching one of his classes at Tonbridge; I tried, not altogether successfully, to summarize the Latin literature of a thousand years of the Middle Ages in fifty-five minutes.  On two of our alumni tours of Britain I prevailed upon John to lecture about the extraordinary medieval church and alms houses at Cobham in Kent.  Of course there were hard-wired differences between of us, temperamental and national, of which we were not unaware.  Our friendship was different from the  easy intimacy of childhood chums.  But all the same qualities that won the admiration of another father, the professional acknowledgement and praise of other deeply learned and productive experts, and not least the affectionate esteem of generations of Courtauld students whom he had taught, guided, and encouraged, made their enduring impression also on a brother-in-law. John was indeed my only brother-in-law.  The sense of loss is deep and—how to put it?—mature.  Various circumstances have led to the postponement of the funeral until mid-May; and even then I shall not be able to accompany Joan and our son Richard to England for the ceremony.  (“Uncle John” was important figure in Richard’s early ornithological career, among other things.)  But my own heart and mind will indeed be there to bid farewell to this man of such admirable independence of character, such steady quality of mind and, indeed,  spiritual character of such unwavering decency.  May he rest in peace.  Peace, too, to all who loved him.

 

                                            

 

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