Annals of Political Discourse

 

Infrastructure challenge in Detroit

"We got to keep an eye on the battle that we face: The war on workers. And you see it everywhere, it is the Tea Party. And you know, there is only one way to beat and win that war. The one thing about working people is we like a good fight. And you know what? They've got a war, they got a war with us and there's only going to be one winner. It's going to be the workers of Michigan, and America. We're going to win that war," Jimmy Hoffa said to a heavily union crowd. "President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march. Let's take these son of bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong," Hoffa added.
                                                   James Hoffa (as quoted in the American press)

I have in the past expressed my admiration for the great Doctor Samuel Johnson, one of the first and best of bloguistes, and especially for his utter unflappability with regard to writing deadlines. He frequently would not even begin writing his required periodical essay until the printer’s boy appeared at his door urgently demanding copy. What Johnson achieved through sangfroid can be achieved also through mere oblivion and distraction. Tuesday offered a most pleasant distraction: an exhilarating doctoral defense by a brilliant young scholar of my acquaintance. The experience was so tonic that I went home and wrote a few scholarly paragraphs of my own. And though Wednesdays have been following fast upon the heels of Tuesdays even since my earliest youth, it was only latish on Tuesday that the significance of the time-tested sequence dawned upon me, blog-wise. Now what has dawned upon me is Wednesday itself.

Though I try to avoid current events, the week’s political developments have been importunate. First there was the flap over the President’s really pathetic attempt to upstage the orgy of self-promotion, posturing, and pandering that the Republican presidential candidates are pleased to call a “debate.” Hardly had this battle of titans achieved its uneasy resolution than alarums sounded on a new front: Detroit, where the president had gone to preview his speech (now scheduled for Thursday) before a friendly audience of “working Americans”. Among the friendliest of all (as in Johnny Friendly) was James Hoffa, whose office it was on this occasion to welcome the President to the podium. His introductory remarks, which according to Rush Limbaugh and numerous others included a generalized incitement to violence against members of the Tea Party, have become the object of journalistic--and now bloguistic—scrutinty.

My treatment of Mr. Hoffa’s remarks, though perforce censorious, will also be dispassionate. I have no animus against Jimmy Hoffa. In fact, I find Jimmy Hoffa rather reassuring. He is the living proof of the greatness of our democracy. For in this country it is not merely the presidency of the Republic that can be passed from father to son like the lordship of a thirteenth-century manor. The same is true of the Teamsters’ union. Nonetheless I must agree with Hoffa’s critics that the “Detroit remarks” crossed a line.

Johnny Friendly                                                                and                                                         Friendly Jimmy

But what line? You undoubtedly have heard the academic Q and A joke about the Mafioso and the Deconstructionist. The small degree of cultural literacy required for its appreciation—a passing familiarity with the Godfather movies—will be child’s play for my erudite readership.
     Q: What is the difference between the Mafia Don and the Deconstructionist?
     A: The Deconstructionist makes you an offer you can’t understand.
I had long since recognized the Mafioso style in the American labor union bureaucracy, but only now do I fully appreciate the more subtle influence of Deconstructionist style. In a stirring medley of striking but utterly indeterminate martial images Mr. Hoffa seemed to posit a “war” between “workers” and the “Tea Party,” a war in which the former must triumph. His specific and vigorous encouragement was this: “Let's take these son of bitches out.” The phrase “take out,” even when not being used of fast food, is I suppose sufficiently slippery that we must give Hoffa a pass. Take me out to the ball game. My husband never takes me out. That sort of thing. “Son of bitches” is another matter.

Even in American politics, where almost anything goes, this is entirely unacceptable. The term son of a bitch, a term of opprobrium dear to such great twentieth-century politicians as Roosevelt, Truman, and Nixon, is nearly as venerable as the eighteenth-century English whoreson, which in America it replaced. Its vernacular variant forms esohbee and sumbich are also amply recorded in our political discourse. But you simply cannot say what Hoffa said. You would never talk about “Knight Templars” or “mother-in-laws”. The proper plural is sons of bitches, with sons of a bitch being at least theoretically possible, if somewhat stilted. The English professors of America demand an apology. As for beating the war and giving America back to an America, those sound like sensible bipartisan suggestions.

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A note for regular readers.  Travels in England for the next two weeks may disturb the wonted schedule of postings.

Mycology, and Yours

While I am sure you are eager to see my stunning Power Point Presentation called My Irene--featuring my photos of my arboreal debris, my wet crawl space, my downed power lines, and my local inundated highway, complete with its stranded, half-submerged automobile—such images are a dime a dozen on this morning’s Internet, probably a penny a peck.  I therefore elect a more upbeat topic, namely my cology, which is to say, the fungus among us.  For abundant early autumnal rainfall in the north-central coastal states of America encourages a profusion of fungal growth, much of it of a scrumptious nature.

 Regatta Row, Princeton NJ

            I took a little walk around my neighborhood this morning, camera in hand, and within five minutes I had found succulent champignons (agaricus campestris), several fine boleti (including the boletus edulis), two different kinds of delicious leucoagaricus (sometimes called parasol mushrooms), not to mention exotic but edible tree fungi.  In Europe most of these would have disappeared by eight-thirty, but here in New Jersey I can count on them to be there until they melt into the ground.

South Harrison Street, Princeton NJ

            The American attitude toward wild mushrooms was neatly summed up a few days ago in an NPR squib reported to me by my wife.  The word from that eco-friendly group of tree-huggers and dioxiphobes, Sierra Club members to the last earnest voice, is that you should under no circumstances eat a mushroom lacking the cellophane imprimatur of some grocery chain.  Now it is true that a few mushrooms are poisonous, and a very few potentially lethal.  They are far less dangerous than roller skates or stepladders, however; and just as you should not operate a car if you don’t know how to drive, you should not eat a mushroom if you cannot identify its species.  It is about as easy to confuse a chanterelle with a Destroying Angel as it is a hawk with a handsaw.

R. Gordon Wasson, ethnomycologist extraordinaire

  
The message that Nature is out to kill you is unhealthy for our young people.  What we need on NPR is a little less ecological pseudo-piety and a little more R. Gordon Wasson.  Wasson (1898-1986), the father of American ethno-mycology was an English teacher who later became an investment banker and a VP of J. P. Morgan.  This was an unusual career move, but one that with impressive economy raised the cultural level of two professions.  He was married to a Russian doctor who was crazy about wild mushrooms, and found Americans’ fear of them just as crazy.  She knew that there is nothing in the world more delicious than a fine mess of field mushrooms, and that eating the cultivated and cellophaned ones (bisporigera) is by comparison the gastronomic equivalent of taking a shower in a boiler suit.

            He was a great amateur scientist of the Victorian stamp.  Together with his wife he wrote important books that are beautifully written in addition to being splendid specimens of typography.  The two most important are Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality and Mushrooms, Russia,  and History.  Second-hand copies of the latter, one of the great books of the twentieth century, now go for about $1500.

            You can still afford Divine Mushroom of Immortality, though.  Wasson was rich enough to be able to publish it on a “vanity” basis with a major New York trade house.  But as is well known, the rich get richer, and the book was a huge commercial success. In it Wasson arrived at the stimulating if controversial conclusion that the mysterious substance of the Rig Veda called in Sanskrit soma was actually the hallucinocenic fly agaric mushroom, the amanita muscaria.  This is the really sensational red or yellow spotted one most people think of as the quintessence of the so-called toad-stool.  I didn’t actually see one on my morning rounds, but they are very common here, and in many other places.

             Needless to say, you should not consume a fly agaric unless you happen to be a native of Lapland or the Kamchatkan peninsula, where piebald poison is “part of the culture,” and where there is not a hell of a lot else to do on a Saturday night anyway.  There the preferred mode of ingestion is via the intermediary urine of someone who has eaten some fly agarics or, failing that, of a reindeer that has browsed upon them.  Don’t ask.

            Do, on the other hand, take advantage of wet autumnal weather to check out some of the more delectable funky fungi of your area.  One golden rule eliminates ninety-five percent of all potential problems: Never, ever, eat a white amanita.  But look around for some delicious field mushrooms.  You might even luck out and find some morels or chanterelles.  All of these are very easily identified from books or from the Internet.  If you are timid, you can start with the baby step of a pasta sauce.  If you do, you’ll never turn back.

           

agaricus campestris (champignon, field mushroom)

boletus edulis

       chanterelle    

           

Bloguiste Rescues Literature

The author of Criminal Queens, with impedimenta

I am aware of my good luck in having an unusually literate readership—“fit audience though few”, as Milton wrote concerning his own blog—but I wonder how many of you have read Criminal Queens: Powerful Women as the Playthings of Love? It’s a trick question, of course. Nobody has read Criminal Queens, because nobody ever actually wrote it. It is the imaginary title of an imaginary potboiler written by Lady Matilda Carbury in Trollope’s great novel The Way We Live Now. She is a distressed gentlewoman with a number of the usual Victorian impedimenta—tradesmen at the door with overdue bills, a daughter needing to be married off, a wastrel son with a serious gambling addiction. She has to do a little writing on the side “to make ends meet”.

Hogarth: The Distressed Poet (with irate tradeswoman at door)

Well, Trollope knew all about that sort of thing. “Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money,” wrote W. H. Auden. “Compared with him even Balzac is a romantic." That became apparent, if it had not done so earlier, with the publication of Trollope’s famous Autobiography in 1883. It is perhaps fortunate that it was published posthumously, for it savaged his reputation even before the first edition had sold out. For in it Trollope “ruined literature,” as one reviewer put it.

Trollope had ruined literature by taking so very commercial an attitude toward it. Writing is like the grocery business, he explained. Sell a sufficient weight of tea each day, and prosper. The Victorians could handle this kind of thinking in almost all areas of life, but they still clung to a Romantic notion of artistic “inspiration”. Fiddlesticks, said Trollope. Inspiration, shinspiration. He rose early each morning and wrote, watching the clock, maintaining a rate of 250 words per quarter hour until the cook rang for breakfast. He then put his writing gear back in its box, ate his coddled eggs, and devoted the rest of the day to more serious matters, such as the Post Office (for which he worked) and fox hunting (his passion).

He kept meticulous financial records, from which he deduced certain principles of literary cost effectiveness. His readers didn’t much like Ireland; so he quit writing novels set in Ireland. They seemed to love the old cathedral towns of southern England; so he took them as a specialty. Over a lengthy career he netted about £130,000 before breakfast (maybe fifteen million dollars in today’s money), with which he was able to buy some really good hunting horses. He laid it all out in statistical tables in his autobiography. He ruined literature by making writing profitable.

 Anthony Trollope (after breakfast)

I, on the other hand, have just rescued literature. I found this out by accident late last week. I still have a mailbox in my old departmental office. I pass through and empty it occasionally. It’s mainly textbook catalogues and other items of the sub-junk category. What I’ll call my real correspondents use my home address. Very rarely there is a piece of “real” mail in the box, and such was the case last Thursday or Friday. There was a real letter in an envelope to which an actual forty-four cent stamp had been affixed. The elegant printed return address was that of a university press with whom I published, some twenty years ago, one of the seminal books of the last several decades—to wit, Classical Imitation and Interpretation in Chaucer’s “Troilus”.

I am sure it is unnecessary to tell you that I did not dash this thing off before breakfast at a rate of 250 words per quarter hour. No, it was the fruit of long hours of labor, mainly in the Classics Reading Room of the Bodleian Library in Oxford. As to the actual writing of it, it took about a year. On an extraordinary day, when the inspiration was positively crackling, I might achieve five hundred words; but on many days there were fewer words, and on some none at all. Hence I was hoping that my royalty statement—for such, I deduced, the envelope must contain—would allow me to purchase at least one small hunting horse, or at the very least a colt.

With trembling hand I opened the envelope, carefully using a cardboard advertisement as a letter opener. I then unfolded the statement and cast my eyes upon it. These things are always a little confusing, but I finally had to conclude that my total earnings for the period between July 1, 2010 and June 30, 2011 was--$0.00! However, the statement was not all noughts. There were also some crosses. It turns out that the account carried a “Balance Forward from Prior Statement.” That balance was minus $1.86. I am sure you have from time to time come across a book of which you thought: “They’d have to pay me to read that book.” Well, I wrote one like that! I had made history. I had achieved negative sales. I had saved literature.

Click to increase size; buy a copy to increase amount

Shaggy Granddaughter Story

One Sunday in 1786 Robbie Burns was sitting in church trying to filter out the sermon by concentrating on the back of the neck of the young lady in the pew in front of him when he noticed something alarming. There was a wee critter of ill repute crawling across the lacey fringe of the woman’s bonnet. In one of his most beloved Scotch dialect poems Burns characterized this odious insect as “ye ugly, creepin, blastit wonner / Detested, shunn’d by saunt an’ sinner”. The title of the poem: “To a Louse.”

Robert Burns (1759-1796)

Many people today don’t know what a real louse is, as opposed to a metaphoric one in an old James Cagney movie, nor may they recognize the related adjective lousy. There is a better chance that the plural form, lice, will ring a bell. The truth is that in most industrial countries the louse has been rendered a seriously endangered species by the dramatic improvements in plumbing witnessed by the twentieth century. Body lice, the dreaded porters of typhus, are now mainly relegated to memoirs of Auschwitz or the gulag. It would be hard to find a body louse even in the New York subway system, and that is saying something. As the admirable Hans Zinsser pointed out in a classic book*, indispensable to anyone approaching our subject, this should be no laughing matter. But it is. “The louse is foremost among the many important and dignified things that are the subjects of raucous humor by the ribald. Despite the immense influence of this not unattractive insect upon the history of mankind, it is given, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, two thirds of a column—half as much as is devoted to ‘Louth, a maritime county in the province of Leinster,’ one fifth as much as is allowed for Louisville, Kentucky.”

On the other hand, head lice, which fortunately do not carry diseases, have maintained their small but unshrinking market share among even the higher echelons of the American bourgeoisie, specializing in middle schools and summer camps, including the most de luxe. The website of the National Institutes of Health is very comforting. “Having head lice does NOT mean the person has poor hygiene or low social status”. Of course if you have to be reassured by a governmental bureaucracy concerning your “social status,” you are probably in deep trouble already.

 pediculosis capitis in mid creep

My beautiful and delightful granddaughter Lulu had to learn this the hard way last week. Everybody knows that if you lie down with dogs you get fleas. But what happens if you hang out for hours on end with the offspring of physics professors and tax lawyers in an “enrichment program” at an upscale Quaker summer camp? Answer: head lice. It was only as she was about to board a train to New York with her grandmother and her sisters that Lulu became definitively aware that some very intimate strangers seemed to have taken up residence in her long, gorgeous, raven hair.

I was not in New York, so I am dependent upon my daughter’s report for the rest of the story. It is a source in which I have the fullest confidence. I have bragged about my daughter in another post , and will not now burden my readers with further praise. But she is a very Can-Do kind of lady, and I had no doubt that she would be able to take care of the louse problem. What was unexpected in her report was the incidental good news about the American economy.

She met the girls upon their arrival in the city. After taking very brief medical advice, and conducting a hurried search on one or another hand-held device from her portable console, she took off, with three daughters in tow, for Midtown. There, somewhere in the mid Fifties are the posh offices and state-of-the-art delousing laboratories of Licenders. I’m one of the world’s leading collectors of silver linings. I try to practice, as well as preach to my students, the art of turning lemons into lemonade. But even I was astonished to discover that some American entrepreneurial genius has made a fortune coming up with a franchise for nit-picking. Jobs, jobs, jobs!  And not all of them in Texas!

For my daughter reports that the place was crawling with—uh, let me start that sentence again. She reports that the Manhattan offices of Licenders were replete with concerned matrons from the Upper East Side, each accompanied by a nervous child (mainly long-haired daughters), positively champing at the nit to pay a small fortune to undergo a process that the promotional video makes seem as jolly as a mother-daughter visit to the Camden Aquarium.

One mother in particular stands out in my daughter’s narrative: a severe and soignée blonde ice-maiden, “probably the wife of some hedge fund manager.” She couldn’t possibly have known that sociological detail. She was undoubtedly trying to spare her aging parents her more usual vernacular phrase, “rich bitch”. This woman was scandalized to find herself in a delousing station, however upscale, and positively mortified when an examination of her own expensively coiffured head—a survey of the heads of household being part of the drill at Licenders—discovered a thriving colony of the dreaded pediculosis capitis right there on the mother ship.

Meanwhile, life goes on. It took but a moment for our resilient raven-haired beauty to put this distressing episode behind her. She’s back among the Quakers this week without having missed a beat.


*Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice, and History (1935)

The Sex and Neo-Platonism Commission

...sed noli modo

No cross, no crown. With that economical maxim the old Methodist preachers summarized their theology. “For I reckon that the sufferings we now endure”, writes Saint Paul, “bear no comparison with the splendor yet unrevealed.” Secular versions of the idea are not difficult to find. “Anything worth having is worth striving for”. On the other hand, we hear that such and such isn’t worth the hassle, or the aggro, or the whatever—suggesting that if such and such were something else, it might be worth it.

I have been led to ponder these ascetic tropes in the course of the recent “debate” about the wisdom of increasing the federal debt ceiling. In particular I was struck by President Obama’s advocacy of a “balanced approach” that involves “shared sacrifice.” To sacrifice means voluntarily to give up something good or desirable with the aim of achieving something better and more desirable, or at least something of necessity on which the very possibility of the good and the desirable may depend. He speaks also of sharing the pain. No pain, no gain. Again the language used to express the view that present unpleasantness is the necessary prerequisite of future bliss has been interesting. We hear of having to “take the plunge” or “take our medicine”. The British Prime Minister, who of course talks Brit-speak, bravely “seized the nettle” of budget reform. One of President Obama’s curious expressions was new to me. He said we had to “eat our peas”. That one doesn’t work for me. There is nothing more delicious than peas, especially when young and not overcooked, and even more especially when served up with a little chopped onion and maybe some shards of fatback. The pea is much to be preferred to the lotus, and we have already done too much national lotus-eating.

As regards the fiscal crisis, I actually do believe in a balanced approach, if by that what is meant is a program that might balance our books. They are very unbalanced at the moment, so unbalanced in my view that the only plausible road to equilibrium necessitates both significant economies (aka “cuts”) in the bankrupting entitlements of Medicare and Social Security and significantly augmented revenues (aka “new taxes”) for the national Treasury.

What makes the achievement of this balanced approach a mere pipe dream is the Augustinianism rampant in Washington. Augustinianism has infected our Congress, and holds the President as a thrall. Yes, I do refer Aurelius Augustinus, alias Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430); but the Augustinianism I have in mind is that of the callow youth, not that of the mature bishop. He was one of the most famous Christian converts in all history, and the history of his conversion the most famous in all literature. Like the Congress, like President Obama, Augustine knew what he had to do, but sought ingenious ways to postpone it.

Young Augustine longed for the God of the Christians, but two obstacles blocked his way: sex and neo-Platonism. That is a dilemma that even across the ages most readers will be able to at least half understand. Augustine fretted a great deal about these matters, and with regard to the sex bit he prayed especially hard. He prayed one of history’s more famous prayers: Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, he implored the Lord, sed noli modo. “Give me chastity and continence—but not yet!” In other words, he chose to temporize by turning the question of his salvation over to a Sex and Neo-Platonism Commission— of course with sex and neo-Platonism “off the table” from the start.

Sex probably is better off the table, actually, and the concept of neo-Platonism on a table is too postmodern for my old mind. I am sure you grasp my point nonetheless. It concerns the fecklessness of our elected officials. Augustine’s actual moment of conversion, when it did come, was dramatic and nearly instantaneous. He walked into a garden with a bible, sat beneath a tree, and heard the sing-song voices of children at play repeating the phrase Tolle, lege; tolle, lege. “Pick it up and read it. Pick it up and read it.” He picked it up and read it. I’d give the same advice to our elected officials. The it could be, among so many other volumes in our grim library of discontents, the national balance sheet, the front page of most world newspapers, the report of the last Budget Commission, or the last poll of public opinion concerning the quality of work done by the Congress. Just tolle, 
lege.

The Elusive Primary Source

The mysterious Count Cagliostro (Houdon it)

“The beginning of wisdom,” said my great teacher, “is the primary source.” He was trying to get us to focus on Chaucer before focusing on what other people had said about Chaucer. This week I am immersed in Cagliostro, and the experience has reminded me once again of the large void between primary and secondary sources: the ambiguous space in which most history is actually written. You may know that Cagliostro was a colorful eighteenth-century character, “an Italian adventurer” and “a gifted conman.” Those phrases I lift from the Chambers Biographical Dictionary, a standard reference source; but similar ones will be found elsewhere in other dictionaries and encyclopedias and, indeed, in almost every account of the man published since 1833, the year in which Thomas Carlyle published what he called a brief “biography of the most perfect scoundrel that in these latter ages has marked the world’s history.”

The only significant primary sources for the life of Cagliostro are the following: (1) various dossiers compiled by the police of Louis XVI; (2) some scabrous articles in the journal Courier de l’Europe for 1786; and (3) reports of reports made by the Inquisition in Rome, justifying throwing the man into the prison from which he would never emerge alive. Now the Paris police would do anything the royal party instructed them to do, and the royal party wanted Cagliostro’s scalp. Practically any number of the Courier de l’Europe, run largely by blackmailers, would make Rupert Murdoch seem like Louisa May Alcott by comparison. And the Holy Inquisition was a far greater iniquity than any it pretended to expose. Hence, one may wish to entertain doubts. Carlyle chose not to, and his brilliant but dubious essay, for want of competition, became a pseudo-primary source for the next century and more.

Primary and secondary sources: DO NOT CONFUSE

That can happen when primary sources are too few, but a surfeit of primary sources may cause other problems for a scholar. When I first joined the Princeton faculty two of my senior colleagues (Carlos Baker and Lawrence Thompson) were engaged in writing the authorized biographies of two major American writers (Hemingway and Frost), for which the copious primary sources to which they were given privileged access taught them more than they wanted to know. They slowly discovered that the men whose brilliant work had attracted their life-long admiration often behaved, in those categories of deportment usually thought of as human decency, like scumbags. Such discoveries did not halt the biographers, but it made their task less pleasant.

In terms of primary sources the historian may perhaps hope, like Goldilocks, for that happy medium between too much and too little. The reason we can have a thousand plausible versions of Jesus and a hundred of William Shakespeare is that although for both men we have excellent primary sources, they are of the sort that give us a workable grid, yet leave it up to us to plot the essential coordinates.

Another difficulty: the sources we use to know about the past have been skewed by historical vagaries of which we are often unaware. Consider for a moment Anglo-Saxon literature. All surviving Old English poetry fits into a set of six octavo volumes, volumes occupying about seven linear inches in my library. With the famous exception of Beowulf and a few much shorter pieces, all of this poetry is very explicitly religious. Most of the poems are biblical paraphrases or versified saints lives. If all we knew about Anglo-Saxon society had to be deduced from its surviving poetry we might justifiably conclude that the place was populated mainly by monks, that most folks visited a church thrice daily, and that what made Merry England most merry was a good psalm-singing competition. But of course we do have other sources, which amply supply the poetically absent quotient of secular rapine, war, ethnic strife, indentured servitude, subsistence agriculture, frequent shipwreck, and various other nasty and brutish aspects of the daily life of our remote forefathers.

Hidden faces of Anglo-Saxon England

The explanation for the documentary “imbalance” is not hard to find. Practically the only people who could read and write were monks. Monks lived in monasteries. Libraries are the places where most books are preserved, and monasteries had the only libraries that have survived even partially. Monastic libraries—just like your library or mine—tended in general to reflect the interests of the people who created them. But it is no easy thing for a manuscript to survive for upward of a thousand years. Beowulf, replete with beer parties, monsters, and dismemberments, somehow survived, though barely. Having by near miracle made it through the Middle Ages and safely into the hands of Renaissance antiquaries, it came within an ace of burning up in a library fire in the eighteenth century.

Think of it this way. Imagine, God forbid, that a thermonuclear firestorm wiped out our entire nation tomorrow. Hundreds of years hence archaeologists sifting through the cinders find some pieces of surviving print: one copy of a supermarket tabloid with the headline “Dead Mum Gives Birth to Child in Coffin,” three Budweiser labels, a Harry Potter novel, twelve Gideon Bibles, a bumper sticker reading “Obama: Change You Can Believe In,” the July, 2002 issue of Penthouse magazine and 112 pristine copies of the 1040 income tax form. How accurate a picture would you then have of American civilization in the early twenty-first century? All too accurate a picture, perhaps, but only because I chose my texts carelessly. I’m sure you get the point.

Grace Abounding to the Least of Bloguistes

a graceful treasure 

Though I have made great strides in reorganizing my library after the seismic upheaval caused by having to leave a large, book-stuffed office of thirty years’ accumulation, I still face the occasional embarrassment of being unable to lay my hands on a book I am sure I own—or owned. There is paradox here. The more obscure the book, the better my chance of finding it immediately. It is the volumes I frequently handle, carry about, read on park benches, or loan to others that are likely to go missing. I have in such manner lost two successive copies of a certain treasured title to which I shall turn in a moment. It reappeared in my life this week through the cooperation of Grace and an eBay auction.

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

Its gracious reappearance demonstrated a principle that happily haunts my life: the principle of commodious concurrence. For I have been writing this week about Jansenism. You probably don’t want to know, and even if you should you have much better resources than a professorial blog. I could recommend at least two classic works of French literature. If you have a week to spare, you would do well to browse about in the Provincial Letters of Blaise Pascal (1656). If you have a couple of months you might try Sainte-Beuve’s huge Port-Royal from the mid-nineteenth century. If you have five minutes you’ll have to take my word for it that Jansenism (a pejorative term used by its opponents) was a spiritual movement within the Roman Church in seventeenth-century France that, at the doctrinal level, was all about divine grace.

The cemetery at Port-Royal des Champs before its desecration by the Jesuit party

Grace means help, support, comfort, encouragement. Women sometimes carry the personal name Grace, just as others carry the names of the theological virtues—Faith, Hope, or Charity. According to legend, a bishop whose wife was named Grace used to have trouble with the Eucharistic prayer for the whole state of the Church on account of the paragraph beginning “Give grace, O heavenly Father, to all Bishops and other Ministers…” The concept of grace informs some of the all-time greats of religious literature, such as Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners and “Amazing Grace”—the hymn for people who don’t know any hymns.

To believe in divine grace does require a belief in a divinity. A surprising number of us still do entertain that belief, but even if you get your help, support, comfort, or encouragement from shrinks, sit-coms, or sauna baths, you can understand the concept of grace. Despite the view famously articulated by A. E. Houseman that “…malt does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man,” it is my aim this week to advocate poetry as a means of grace.

Poetry As a Means of Grace is the astonishing title of a yet more astonishing book published in 1941 by Charles Grosvenor Osgood (1871-1964), for many years the Holmes Professor of Belles Lettres at Princeton. He had been one of the original preceptors hired by Woodrow Wilson when he instituted his new system of undergraduate education in the first decade of the twentieth century. I never met him. He retired the year after my birth and died the year before I joined the faculty! He was a man of enormous and wide-ranging erudition—“the dean of Princeton humanists,” in President Dodds’s apt phrase. He made many lasting contributions to literary study. Especially famous is the Variorum edition of Spenser, in which he played a major role, and his extraordinarily erudite translation and edition of Boccaccio on Poetry.

When I called Poetry As a Means of Grace “astonishing,” I referred to its content; but the same adjective could be used of it as evidence of the rapidity of social change of the last half century. English professors don’t have titles like that any more. We have titles like Liminality and the Heideggerian Quest in the Fiction of Armand Bol. (This is an imaginary title, used for exemplary purposes. Armand Bol never existed, and some of us heretics have our doubts about liminality and the Heideggerian quest as well.) It is nearly inconceivable that an Ivy League professor would write such a book as Osgood’s today, and flatly impossible that it would be published by prestigious university presses (Princeton and Oxford). For the “humanism” displayed by Osgood is the humanism of Erasmus, Thomas More, Rabelais, or Cervantes, all of whom believed with him that the purpose of literary study was to support “the art of living a good life,” meaning one spiritually informed. He writes, he says, for “all young people who wish to keep themselves articulate and to insure the perennial flow of their springs of spiritual life against the drouth of routine in business or profession.” The path to this goal is the habitual and informed reading of good poets. Here is “job counseling” of a most precious kind, but scarcely to be found, alas, in our academic Offices of Career Services.

Osgood chooses by way of example four great literary figures: Dante, Spenser, Milton, and Samuel Johnson. To each he devotes one lecture (chapter), but he makes it clear that these are merely exemplary. Indeed choosing your “own” poet, one with whom you have a particular and perhaps idiosyncratic rapport, must be done with patience and care. It is the first step to “grace”.

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) by Sir Joshua Reynolds

Do not be astonished, incidentally, to find Johnson in the list. He was not primarily a poet, and Osgood hardly touches upon his poetry, justly believing that with a man like Johnson the life is the poem. In such a life malt and Milton were not exclusive. “A tavern chair is the throne of human felicity,” said the great doctor. Meanwhile if among my readership there be anyone who knows what became of either of my two earlier copies, please be in touch.

The Cemetery: Princeton, NJ.  The sleep of the gracious