A Patriot in Song

Professor Francis James Child (1825-1896)

The sense of the word “hero”—once limited mainly to famous warriors, explorers, and self-sacrificing patriots--has apparently expanded so considerably as to include any member of our armed forces and most civilian “first responders”, at least the ones who are not racist pigs, another category of the lexical growth industry.  I do not begrudge the generous instinct to create more heroes.  Indeed, I want to add yet another subspecies: the academic hero.  That is the category to which one could plausibly assign Audubon, to whom I devoted a recent post; and it is certainly the category for Francis James Child.  Child was born in Boston in 1825.  The Republic was not yet half a century old.  Though he would become a famous Harvard professor and the bosom companion of Brahmins like William James and Charles Eliot Norton, he was born into modest circumstances and was a product of those democratic and meritocratic impulses that continue to animate our higher education at its best.  I, of all people, can “relate” to a nation that values the pursuit of old Germanic philology as well as the pursuit of the almighty dollar.  If you can believe Thomas Jefferson, he was not less proud to be president of the American Philosophical Society than to be President of his country!

Child was of a scholarly generation that treasured the primary text.  That is, literature itself was more important to him than the ingenious prolusions of professors upon it.  Therefore he was first of all an editor.  But it was impossible to do groundbreaking editorial work on Chaucer from America in 1850.  He therefore brought out five annotated volumes of Spenser—no trivial task.  Then, both as scholar and as patriot, he designed a vast project of unique American significance.

Most of us know something of the Pilgrims and Puritans of New England.  We tend to be less knowledgeable about succeeding generations of British immigrants, mainly from the North of England, from Scotland, and from Ulster, the so-called “Scotch-Irish” whose arrival antedated the large Catholic immigration of the potato famine.  They were mainly no-frills Protestants used to very plain living, and they swarmed westward through Tidewater Virginia and the Carolinas to the Appalachians and the Cumberlands, into the Ohio Valley and the lush forests of Kentucky and Tennessee.  These pioneers travelled light: a Bible, a gun, agricultural tools, spindles and sometimes even a spinning wheel.  More than a few, though, had musical instruments, and practically all carried within their memories an invisible inner treasury of popular song passed on to them by family elders and hayseed bards from the time of the War of the Roses to the Battle of New Orleans.  In the Faerie Queene Spenser had deployed one kind of epic.  In his huge edition of the transplanted English and Scottish Ballads (8 volumes, 1857-59, later 5 volumes of larger format) Child laid out another: the epic poetry of the young American republic a-making.

The cultural importance of folk music, real folk music, not its pallid contemporary simulacrum, is impossible for us to understand today.  The commodification of popular music, and the big business that generates and distributes it, were unknown before the Civil War, and hardly known before the twentieth century.  Child, though a polyglot, was a native speaker of American English and a scholar of early English dealing primarily with printed texts; but his enterprise inspired, and sometimes provoked, those field-workers who eventually would be called ethno-musicologists to try to preserve native Amerindian traditions and to study the musical archaeology of large and disparate American populations of African and Iberian origin, among others.  The English musicologist Cecil Sharp, an early twentieth-century heir of F. J. Child, went ballad-hunting in Appalachia during the First World War, recording a vast repertory of songs to be returned, marvelously preserved, to the crofts and cottages whence they had migrated a century earlier.

The old ballads are about everything under the sun: battles, sea voyages, hunting parties, public executions, country fairs, and supernatural events galore.    Chevy Chase, based in a half-remembered anecdote about an obscure fourteenth-century battle as reduced to a brawl between two great Border chieftains, is a tale of a great slaughter of deer that turned into a great slaughter of men.  Yet what power it has.  It was already old in the sixteenth century, when one of that age’s most elegant poets, Sir Philip Sidney, said this about it: “Certainly I must confess mine own barbarousness; I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet; and yet it is sung but by some blind crowder, with no rougher voice than rude style; which being so evil apparelled in the dust and cobwebs of that uncivil age, what would it work, trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar?”

But mostly the old ballads are about the two great themes of world romance: Love and Death.  “Would you, my lords”—so begins Bédier’s reconstruction of the medieval Tristan and Isolde—“would you hear a fine story of love and death?”  And, boy, do we get one.  “Set me as a seal upon thine heart,” says the Song of Songs, “for love is as strong as death”.  My grandfather Fleming used to sit on his porch in Arkansas half mumbling, half crooning “Barbara Allen”.  I wish I had paid more attention.  “Barbara Allen” is apparently the most recorded song in musical history.  I could wish to have added to the repertory.  I don’t know whether any two singers have agreed as to its words.  Like many old ballads it is an at times inchoate verbal quilt.  Yet a discernible plot forces its way like a red cord through the song’s peripheral incoherencies and shifting points of view; and it is the plot of tragic love.  Cruel Barbara Allen makes all the lads sing “well away” or “lack a day” or, presumably, any trisyllabic bit of verbal stuffing that could rhyme in -ay.  All that is the noise.  The signal is that cruel beauty must come to know the everlasting sorrow of love and death, must find indeed that they are the same.  “My true love died for me today,” she tells her distraught mother. “I’ll die for him tomorrow.”  Though she spurned him in life, they will lie till Judgment Day in contiguous graves in the old churchyard; yet even now the bard is not finished, for “out of his grave grew a red, red rose, and out of hers a briar.”

The Rack

 James V. Forrestal with Harry S. Truman

Shakespeare’s famous “Seven Ages of Man” have through the wonders of modern science been augmented by an eighth: the ætas medica, for the variable duration of which one’s chief occupation is being transported to and fro various modern day temples of Asclepius.  Last week I had a kind of medical version of a busman’s holiday.  Given a week’s reprieve from my wonted regime, I spent my Wednesday instead in a gleaming new wing of the Langone Hospital in New York having what is best described as a micro-collander infiltrated into my cardiac appendage.  There are not too many things that leave you happy to get back to your good old chemo, so when one appears it needs be noted.

            But today I’ll be back to chemo, which takes place in a medical suite in Plainsboro, some three miles south of my house.  When I first arrived in these parts Plainsboro was a small village clustered around an old church and surrounded by potato fields, presumably the “plains” alluded to in its romantic name.  All that has changed, and it’s quite a bustling place now.  Gone are the potato fields.  They put up a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swinging hot spot.  Actually it's a Marriott, a CVS pharmacy, and a Panera, but same idea.  Also numerous medical offices, always to be found in proximity to retirement communities and nursing homes, of which there are several round and about.  The opium den I frequent—euphemistically denominated an “infusion lab”--is a spacious well-lighted place divided into semi-private cubicles, each furnished with a sybaritically luxurious high-tech chair with built-in butt-warmer and more bells and whistles than First Class on Air France.

            To get there involves driving through Princeton’s Forrestal campus, the site of the Plasma Physical Laboratory and its Project Matterhorn’s continuing efforts to achieve fusion and an energy bonanza of mind-boggling opulence.  Few humanists have even been there, but I am lucky enough to have a most remarkable friend, a retired physicist, who has shown me around a couple of times.  The campus is named for James V. Forrestal of the Class of 1915.  The origins of my interest in Forrestal are eccentric; he is the only famous person known to me with the initials JVF.  He was a genuine war hero, the brilliant Secretary of the Navy more consequential for the defeat of Japan than even Admirals Halsey or Nimitz.  He then became the first American Secretary of Defense.  He deserves to be memorialized by the academy; he was a great proponent of government support for scientific research.  Unfortunately he is today more remembered for his death than for his life.  On May 22, 1949, he appears to have leapt to his death from a sixteenth-floor window of a hospital in Bethesda, MD.  I say “appears,” though suicide is not in much doubt—just enough to float a dozen conspiracy theories involving Harry Truman, the embryonic Israeli Mossad, and/or extraterrestrials.

            Soon after I arrived in England in 1958 there appeared on the cultural scene a literary sensation in the form of a novel: The Rack, by A. E. Ellis, the pseudonym of one Derek Lindsay.  So far as I know, the literary world never heard of this one-book wonder again; but sometimes one book suffices.  The Rack is the story of a tubercular English military officer, Paul, who survived the War but is unlikely to survive the “cure” of two years of gruesome therapy in an Alpine sanatorium.  It naturally invited comparison with the great Magic Mountain (1924) of the great Thomas Mann, so I will offer one.  Mann’s sanatorium is all about philosophy, Ellis’s about tuberculosis.  Seldom has such a repellent subject received such a tragicomic treatment.  For the comedy part you might begin with the daunting advice in a brochure prepared by the institution’s weird superintendent.  “Sexual activities are strongly discounselled during illness and convalescence.  Patients should at all times bear in mind that a single orgasm (male or female) is equivalent, in energy expended, to a five-mile walk over rough country.”   The tragedy part, of which there is considerably more, is the remorselessness of suffering inflicted by a dread disease exacerbated by human folly and cruelty.  The reader very soon suspects that by the last page Paul will be contemplating self-destruction.  And so he is, and in a dauntingly literary fashion.  He reads on the last page of the Memoirs of the painter Benjamin Haydon the artist's anguished misquotation from the last page of King Lear written, perhaps, only minutes before he killed himself: “Stretch me no more on this rough world.”  Paul realizes the citation is slightly wrong.  Shakespeare’s phrase is “upon the rack of this tough world.”

            I read The Rack and numerous other books in paperback Penguins shared among a circle of friends.  One particularly brilliant member of this group, speaking of the novel’s ending, said to me: “He must have been thinking of James Forrestal”.  For the evidence suggests that Forrestal spent his last moments alive copying out some twenty choral verses from Sophocles’s tragedy Ajax, foreshadowing the warrior’s suicide, the subject of the play.  It little surprised me that he knew about Forrestal, for he knew about practically everything; but it does rather haunt me.  My friend’s name, too, was James; and less than a year later he put the muzzle of a fowling gun to his head and pulled the trigger.  Vex not his ghost: O, let him pass!  He hates him that would upon the rack of this tough world stretch him out longer.

The Death of Ajax (Greek krater)

Fish and Fowl

John James Audubon, American Patriot and Hero

One spring day a few years ago I stepped out into my back yard and saw some large whitish thing, roughly football size, lying on the grass.  It was a large fish.  It appeared to me to have been gutted and beheaded, halfway on a journey to becoming two generous filets.  I was puzzled.  Just then I became aware of a large shadow moving across the grass, along with a kind of hooshing noise above me.  A bald eagle alighted on a dead branch of a larch tree some forty yards away, looking down menacingly at me or the fish or both.  I rather divined what was happening.  In the first place I was laying eyes on the eagle reported to have taken up residence down by the lake.  More accurately, that eagle was laying eyes on me.  That was plenty exciting in and of itself.   Secondly, the eagle had to be responsible, somehow, for the fish on my lawn.  This likely supposition gained greater strength yet when, after I had absented myself for ten minutes to attend to a chore, I returned to the yard to find neither fish nor fowl.

            This was not an experience soon if ever to be forgotten, but it was brought back to me in a delightful way by some reading I was doing over the weekend.  Alice Ford, the biographer of Audubon, put together a marvelous volume entitled Audubon by Himself, a kind of bricolage autobiography cobbled together from a variety of the ornithologist’s large and disparate body of writing.

Audubon describes a “stake out” below a cliff side above the Green River “near its junction with the Ohio”.  He and a birding companion lay in wait for impatient hours in hopes of spotting the adult eagles returning to the nest they had noticed there, in which there appeared to be at least two babes left on their own.  At last the male parent arrived, bearing a fish for his young.   He was soon followed by his mate—his peer in piscatorial prowess, but his superior in size and sharpness of eye.  A keen human-spotter, she caught sight of the imperfectly concealed birdwatchers below.  “She dropped her prey with a loud shriek to the male, and together they hovered over our heads and kept up a growling cry to intimidate and foil our suspected designs...We picked up the fish that the mother had let fall, a White Perch of about five and a half pounds, its head broken in, and its back torn…”

            This anecdote, which in a flash illuminated my own mysterious experience nearly two hundred years later, leads Audubon to some surprising remarks regarding the bald eagle.  The slow but apparently decisive recovery of our national mascot, which until recently seemed doomed to extinction in the ecological maelstrom of contemporary America, has me and most other armchair naturalists filled with pious joy.  It is rather sobering to hear the following from Audubon:  “I grieve that [the eagle] should have been selected as the emblem of my country, and agree with Franklin that it is a ‘bird of bad moral character’…. not a proper emblem for the brave and honest Cincinnati of America, all officers of the Continental Army, who drove out the British ‘King Birds’ from our country, although these are perfectly suited to represent those French knights called Chevaliers d’Industrie.”

            This literary flight may require some explication.   For Audubon, born of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the recourse to zoological political allegory`, such as that of Gulliver’s sojourn among the Houyhnhnms, was perhaps nearly instinctual. If Bernard Mandeville could write a major work of political theory called Fable of the Bees, Audubon could find his own fables among the birds.  For him, It was always more than just zoology.  As a lad, he had been encouraged to study the birds by his enthusiastically ornithological father.  “He excited me, to make me study them and to raise my mind toward their great Creator.”  And of course he had more than a patina of classical learning.  Most people who have thought about it at all probably think, as I once did, that Cincinnati, OH, must have been named after the Roman farmer-general, Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who under importunity set aside his plowshare to take up the sword, only to return to the land the moment he had secured victory for his compatriots.  Of course the city was so named, but only at one remove.  Why the plural form?   I learned the answer to that question a few years ago when I gave an after-dinner talk to theNew Jersey Society of the Cincinnati.  The members of this Society, of which there are autonomous chapters in all the colonial states, must demonstrate a direct line of ancestry to an American officer of the Revolution. The Cincinnati were veterans of the officer corps of the Continental Army, a group very numerous among the Virginians and Carolinians who were the principal pioneers in the Ohio Valley.  They named the largest city on the river after—themselves.   Some of them were redeeming land grants promised to them for their heroic war service.  These “brave and honest” men were nothing like rapacious eagles in their deportment.  Audubon, though a quintessential American, spoke the heavily accented English of a native Francophone, and he occasionally indulges his French erudition.  The phrase chevalier d’industrie, which has now entirely fallen out of usage, sounds pretty good—unless you grasp the specialized sense of Latin industria from which it derived.  Audubon refers to the “knights” of—well, the knights of monkey business, funny business, shady business, flim-flam, sharp practice, strong-arm stuff.  Audubon thought the bald eagle, a raptor and a bully, had the morals of a magpie or a blue jay!  Eagles, he suggests, are the mafia of the skies.  And he knew a fair amount about birds.

Green New Deal

If the intention of the proposers of the Green New Deal (GND) was to initiate a debate, they were wildly successful in this household.  Joan sees it as welcome evidence that important people are finally getting serious about the climate crisis, and that consciousness-raising is more important than the specific proposals.  I view it as a formula for disaster and national bankruptcy, and since I am the one writing this essay, it will be my perspective you have to endure.

                    As the debate is already off to a bad start, let me say that I find in Ms. Ocasio-Cortez many attractive features of youth, including vivacity, idealism, sincerity, good humor—qualities far from conspicuous in many of the grim conservatives whose criticisms of her often combine a personal element of churlishness with condescension.  Admittedly her plan’s rollout was so maladroit that its proponents had to remove all specifics from the Internet, leaving only a feel-good congressional resolution.  It is easy to play “Gotcha!” with such clauses of the now vanished GND document as a guaranteed income for those unwilling to work.  I thought all along that was evidence of hasty copy-editing.  What excites my incredulity are features the plan’s authors undoubtedly do mean.  In an op-ed in yesterday’s Times David Brooks pretty well identifies those points, though even he falls for the suggestion that the “GND” is plausibly modeled on FDR’s New Deal.  The New Deal was never a comprehensive program based in a fixed theory, let alone in “science”.  Roosevelt himself frequently admitted its improvisational character and spoke without embarrassment of the experimental, trial-by-error nature of many of its disparate parts.

Most people I talk with do not recognize the origin of the phrase “New Deal”.  They think it has something to do with the sort of deal-making supposedly associated with great deal-makers.  In fact, it is a term borrowed from various card games, especially poker.  A “new deal” is a fresh distribution of resources, allowing a new chance to players unsuccessful with the hand they were first dealt.  It is thus a fresh beginning or a radical “reset”.  Brooks also seems to accept the greenists' poor analogy between their program and the national effort demanded by World War II.  As prodigious as the war effort was, it pales in comparison with what the GND would demand.  In fact of all the pharaonic enterprises recorded by history, only one strikes me as vaguely analogous: Stalin’s Five Year Plans, which, though somewhat less radical than the GND, approximated its proposed duration.  The Five Year Plans were designed to transform a vast agrarian nation whose land-use customs had developed over centuries into a heavy industrial powerhouse, and to do that in a very short time.  A sideline was the pseudo-industrialization of agriculture.  The plans were successful to the degree that they greatly increased the production of pig iron and electrical power.  They certainly helped enable Soviet victory in the world war. But the human costs were obscene even for the criminal state established by the Bolsheviks.  In order to prosecute a pharaonic project successfully it is necessary to gain or compel popular buy-in and get rid of all critics of Pharaoh, real or potential.  There were hecatombs of the purged and liquidated, and armies of the enslaved.  Stalin “reformed” agriculture by murdering or exiling millions and by turning the breadbasket of the Ukraine into a wilderness.  It is inconceivable to me that Americans will voluntarily sign up for the GND.  And if not voluntarily, under what duress?

            This melodramatic question brings us to the larger issue of Socialism and its strangely recidivist appearance on the American political scene.  Here we shall get nowhere without agreement on definitions.  “Communism,” said Lenin “is Soviet power plus electrification.”  Socialism is not elective democracy plus widely supported social programs, as in Scandinavia.  It is not even the Welfare State program of the post-War Labour Party in Britain.  No people has ever freely elected Socialism, which according to Marxist theory can be born only in violence.  The fundamental requirement of Socialism as imagined by its inventors and implemented by its historical practitioners is total State ownership of the “means of production”.  Its necessary corollary requires unchallengeable coercive State power to administer that arrangement.  Those are both terrible ideas, and the fact that Donald Trump opposes them redeems them not one whit.

The history of Socialism—not the theory, but “actually existing Socialism” as its proponents called it—has been calamitous.   Let me recommend two heavy academic books in defense of that sweeping condemnation: The Black Book of Communism (1997) and Martin Malia’s The Soviet Tragedy: a History of Socialism in Russia (1994). Nor was it any accidental aberration or external intrusion, as opposed to the essential features of Socialism—state ownership of the means of production and state coercion demanded for their operation—that doomed the USSR, the East Block, Cambodia, half of Africa, Cuba, and, yes, Venezuela.

Yes, I know, it can’t happen here.  In truth, I actually don’t think it can; and I am reluctant to engage further in competing apocalypticisms.  The “road to serfdom” is certainly the last thing on the minds of the well-meaning proposers of the GND.  But I fear a great deal else must not have been on their minds either—such as the potential damage that vatic half-bakedism can do to a very serious cause.  To be fair, the GND is not half-baked.  It’s been nowhere near an oven.  As Brooks puts it: “The authors of the Green New Deal assume that technocratic planners can master the movements of 328 million Americans and design a transportation system so that ‘air travel stops becoming necessary.’  (This is from people who couldn’t even organize the successful release of their own background document.)”

Pro-Ambivalence

As I write this, the Governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam,  is struggling to keep his job as his own top political party leaders, backed by a vast army of bien pensants with Twitter accounts, are demanding his resignation from office.  His alleged offense, no small one even when it was committed some decades ago, was to engage in some stupid high jinks now regarded as so hateful to God and man as to render their perpetrator unfit for elective public office, utterly and in perpetuity.  I am not a Virginian, and until recently I could not have recognized this man’s name if it were on a multiple-choice quiz.  Nor did I ever suppose that medical students assemble yearbooks, let alone ones that would embarrass your average Alabama high school.  Yet as it happens, by the time the story of the appalling photograph was surfacing, I had actually seen Gov. Northam in a television clip responding to questions about an abortion rights bill under consideration by the State Legislature.  He was saying that he approved of the measure, and that it would indeed allow, under certain circumstances, infanticide.  He didn’t use that word, and I don’t think he actually meant what he did say.  I doubt that he actually accepts the necessity of infanticide.  But that is what he said, and the only likely reason he said it was that he wanted to demonstrate his progressive bona fides to his party allies.   Not that I believe that infanticide is progressive or that people who call themselves progressives generally do either.  But the two episodes—abortion interview and the flap about the photograph—are not unrelated.  It now appears that Northam was “outed” with regard to the now infamous photograph by somebody outraged by his extraordinary remarks about the abortion bill.

Ordinarily I would avoid such a dispiriting subject as the abortion question.   It is a topic that invites passion and outrage and nearly guarantees the exacerbation of ill will with only the slimmest chance of advancing comity and ethical clarification.  It will continue to do so as long as we continue to act as though “Pro Life” and “Pro Choice” are not inadequate slogans but definitive adversarial categories like skins and shirts or Guelfs and Ghibellines, tribes or teams to one of which each of us gives our unqualified support.  There actually is an American consensus on the issue, but one unsatisfying to the righteous appetite for certainty.  Most Americans are “against” abortion.  Most Americans are “against” the criminalization of abortion.  This means that most Americans are ambivalent about an issue concerning which strident voices are demanding certainty.

What is progressive in the development of civilization is the abandonment of barbarity, not its continuity.  Some brutal practices of Antiquity are rarely remembered, but they do show up in myth, legend, and literary texts.  The motives for infanticide were many, but their common denominator was the social or economic inconvenience or potential long-term military or political threat posed by the child to living adults.  The “exposure” of unwanted infants—dumping them to die in some desolate place—was not uncommon in the Greco-Roman world.  You don’t come to be raised by wolves, even if you are Romulus and Remus, under ordinary circumstances.  The voice of the Hebrew exile in the beautiful psalm Super flumina anticipates with pleasure the prospect of dashing the skulls of Edomite children against the stone walls of the city.  C’est la guerre.  In medieval penitential texts there is frequent mention of something called “overlying”.  In peasant households several people might sleep in the same bed.  Babies were not infrequently stifled in the night, asphyxiated by the weight of heavy adult bodies, leaving moralists suspicious that many such mishaps were not in fact accidents at all, but acts of postnatal birth control.  Unless we wish to imagine widespread depravity, and deny any natural bond of love between parent and child, such episodes were evidences of a terrible desperation.           

In fact our literature, which is after all supposedly an “imitation of life,” has been on the whole perhaps more truly enlightening than street demonstrations and counter-demonstrations.  Among modern writers few are grimmer than Hardy, and Hardy’s grimmest moment is probably in Jude the Obscure, in which a child, believing that his father’s life chances have been blasted by his need to support a family, murders his two junior siblings and hangs himself, leaving the chilling note: “Done because we are too many”.  It is impossible to absorb the horror of the deed without considering the horror of its motivation.  Hardy was not the first to believe in a malign biological trap in which the sexual instinct was and forever would be a generator of tragedy for large swaths of the human race.  Dreiser actually put that word in the title of one of the great novels of the last century, An American Tragedy, closely based, of course, on a “real life” criminal case.  One of my recent posts concerned Farrell’s Studs Lonigan.  In it the “biological trap” is but one factor in a world that seems expressly designed for the destruction of its pathetic anti-hero.  But surely you don’t need to “shout your abortion” or acquiesce, as Governor Northam did, in the idea of “abortion” on the delivery table to avoid returning to that world.

Old Teachers

 

 Richard Hooker with injudicious bird

 

Motivated by mere curiosity, the other day I plucked from one of my shelves a fat book with a spine so faded that I could not make out what was printed there.  It was the first of two volumes of The Works of that Learned and Judicious Divine Mr. Richard Hooker (Oxford, 1850).  These books have been in my library for more than fifty years.  I bought them for a song in a second-hand shop in one of the English coastal towns in what now seems like another world.  Yet clearly I had too long neglected the judicious Hooker, for I had forgotten, if I ever really took it in, that this edition included a reprinting of his charming short biography by Izaac Walton.  From an early page of Walton I learned that the fair flower of Hooker’s genius, who sprang from an obscure family in provincial Exeter, might well have wasted its sweetness on the desert air had it not been for the perspicuity of a talent-scouting primary teacher.  This teacher recognized his ability, nourished it, expanded it, and set Hooker on his road to the university and scholarly celebrity.  Walton writes thus: “This good schoolmaster, whose name I am not able to recover, (and am sorry, for that I would have given him a better memorial in this humble monument dedicated to the memory of his scholar)…”

The Unknown Teacher had been a cog in the great machine of meritocracy humming away behind the flashy front of Tudor aristocracy, discovering the odd Dee here and the odd Shakespeare there.  The passage set me to thinking first about my own role as a teacher.  I would estimate, conservatively, that over my career I must have personally interacted with about twenty thousand students, and with perhaps with twenty percent of that number in some substantial or significant way.   I am not expecting that future archaeologists will find a tombstone reading “Hic jacet So-and-so, olim pupil of the Judicious Fleming.”  Yet surely there must be among so many one or two who…. But even a moment’s reflection made me realize that this line of thought was premature, and that before I could fantasize about my role as teacher I had long-standing debts still unacknowledged from my days as a student.  So I take the occasion to remember two particular people, both of them public school teachers in California, probably in different semesters of the fifth grade; and as it happens I do recall their names.   Indeed, I could never forget them.  I had a math teacher named Mr. Schwab.  He was tall, dignified, rather formal yet friendly and accessible.  He showed us the elegance of numbers and the absolutely objective, impartial magnificence of mathematics.  He lifted the veil from the tedious “word questions” in our work book about whether Jim, in pursuing his unlikely profession as picker of grapefruits, should choose to be paid at a fixed hourly rate or at a piece rate per grapefruit, given that as the day progressed and Jim grew more tired the quantity of grapefruit picked decreased at a rate of four percent an hour, and…Anyway, behind all this was a large, beautiful, crystalline edifice of thought, the music of the spheres, the universal appeal of which was irresistible even to me, a hater of grapefruit.  Mr. Schwab made me, and made me feel, pretty good at math, though even his method could not blur the eventually decisive distinction between pretty good and really good.  This took place in a very unpleasant corner of Contra Costa County called Richmond. 

Two weeks into the second semester my parents had dragged me to a little town called Taft in the San Juaquin Valley.  Our living conditions in Taft were slightly more salubrious than those we left behind, though the only time I ever heard Taft mentioned in later years was as the site of a race riot.  I think this might have been in an essay entitled “Kern County: California’s Deep South”.  In Taft I was inserted in medias res into the English class of one Miss Ihrig, a plain woman of uncertain years who wore no-nonsense shoes and, I suspect, was pretty devoid of nonsense in other aspects of her life as well.  She was less than effusively politically correct when it came to Okies and Arkies, even those who had enjoyed brief coastal acculturation in the cesspool at Richmond.  But she knew just about everything there was to know about English grammar and seemed possessed of the noble if absurd notion that the children of Taft, Okies and Arkies included, might also at least approach that blissful state.

Miss Ihrig believed that the beginning of wisdom was a command of the eight parts of speech, which she forced us to master with their bells-and-whistles elaborations.  She was particularly big on the formal conjunctive adverb.  “Words like hence, thus, then, yet, moreover, still, and so (when so means therefore) are not conjunctions,” she told us, as though warning us off venereal disease.  “They are formal conjunctive adverbs.”  Formal conjunctive adverbs were practically open invitations to the semi-colon, the most elegant of our points of punctuation, though also the one demanding the keenest authorial judiciousness.  She was also great at diagramming sentences.  Many of my classmates chafed, but I grasped behind it all wonderful symmetries like those that Schwab found in the Golden Section.  Today you cannot count on people under thirty even to know what a part of speech is.  Brilliant freshmen with pyrotechnical test scores show up on college campuses today unable to link two sentences together, let alone tell you what a subordinate clause is.  What used to be called “Remedial English,” slightly dolled up in the raiment of current cultural fads, is now a standard introductory requirement in Ivy League institutions.  But just at the point when I should be searching out the perfectly worded periodic sentence of conclusion, you must not get me started.  I’ll go quietly, thinking happily of Mr. Schwab and Miss Ihrig.

Studs Lonigan

I often praise the Library of America, the great collection that is bringing together the bountiful harvest of our national literature in beautiful editions that are also probably the greatest bargains in today’s book market.  Purposefully working through the list, even a professor of English discovers that writers who once were just names—Sarah Orne Jewett, say, or Lafcadio Hearn—are in fact geniuses so remarkable that one’s previous ignorance of their works will now seem calamitous, perhaps semi-criminal.  I am having that experience just at the moment as I work my way through the approximately thousand pages of James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy.

Only in my eighties have I found the stamina to take on this rather long story of the rather short life of an Irish-American kid growing up in the Chicago tenements but a century ago.  Its arc is that of The Rake’s Progress without the satire or of the Portrait of Dorian Gray without the mysticism.  All the major forces in young Studs’s life—his family, the Roman Catholic Church, the seriously bad-boy ethos of the neighborhood gang with whom he hangs out at the pool hall—are resources manifestly inadequate for his flourishing ; yet his self-destruction, however inexplicable and unexplained, is volitional, indeed almost perversely purposeful, and seemingly inevitable.  Farrell, perhaps like Thomas Hardy, seems to locate it in biology.

Unsatisfied lust has been the principal sexual experience of young men in our western societies, and even today anyone who sets out to write a competent Bildungsroman needs to bear that in mind.  So far as I am concerned that is one of several crises of the contemporary novel.  They have plenty of unconvincing sex, but there is little convincing lust.  It’s hardly worth describing life in a repressive society if you can’t examine repression.

In the first place, Studs is a product of a lace-curtain Irish domestic regime as fully constrictive as anything in Kate O’Brien or Joyce’s Dubliners.  Yet the lower middle-class narrowness against which he ostensibly chafes actually directs his concepts of decorum, with inevitably catastrophic results.  Young Lonigan longs to be a good Catholic.  Nothing is more fundamental to understanding his character than the sincerity of that desire—unless it be its triviality.   So he genuinely honors his brittle concept of  “good girls”, just as he despises the young whores with whom he finds furtive and unsatisfying gratification.

            There is a very brilliant chapter in the second volume (Young Manhood) set at Christmas, 1922, the year in which Studs has reached his majority.  It is close to the exact center of the whole work.  The Lonigan family Christmas Eve is ruined by a horrible squabble around the hearth, and Studs storms out for a night of dissipation—an old-fashioned word, but one fully justified by his old-fashioned loathsomeness.  Yet Farrell presents this so brilliantly that, despite the appalling behavior of the young anti-hero, the reader must grant him a certain measure of sympathy.  An all-nighter of cursing and quarreling, of tough-guy posturing, mindless drinking, and brutal lubricity in a “can house” (brothel) ends with a narrow escape from the police, a sprained limb, sleepless exhaustion, a raging hangover, the sickening implications of having missed midnight Mass, and a doomed resolution of immediate reformation as he sets off for the Christmas morning High Mass at his parish church.

The church is mobbed, and by accident of the crush he finds himself jammed into a crowded pew next to an unknown attractive young woman in a squirrel coat, a complete stranger.  This woman, whom he dare look at only with feigned indifference and sidelong glances, becomes an instant sexual obsession whose power overwhelms the formulaic rote prayers and mental acts of contrition that are the thin substance of his actual spiritual resources.  His fantasies concerning her will prey upon him for weeks and months.  The intensity of his carnal desire is matched only by its fatuousness.  Farrell’s is usually described as a late exponent of literary “naturalism,” the unsentimental and perhaps unliterary realism of Zola and such American masters as Frank Norris, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Theodore Dreiser.  Certainly the grittiness of Studs Lonigan, its inexorable sadness and utter lack of sentimentality, and the bleakness of its author’s own materialism, justify such a classification.  But most surprisingly it is here engaging, quite possibly accidentally, with an ancient romantic trope in which the extravagance of erotic desire is expressed in terms of its pseudo-religious character.  For church is virtually the canonical place for amatory trolling.  In the Ars amatoria (Art of Love) wise-ass professor Ovid teaches that the temple is an excellent place to pick up girls.  It is in a temple that Troilus, victim of an attack by Cupid, is stunned by the fairness of Criseyde.  And it was in the church of Santa Chiara in Avignon that the hottest of the red-hot lovers, Francis Petrarch, fatally raised his eyes from his prayer book and beheld in a distant transept the unattainable beauty of Laura.  Art imitates life, which reciprocates by reduplicating art.  Respectable Samuel Pepys does not fail to record in his famous diaries his favorites genres of sexual predation, of which the “church grope” is perhaps his favorite sub-specialty.

            The world of Studs Lonigan is precisely one lifetime away, my own.  The book dates from 1935, I from 1936.  Yet the world that it describes and scandalized is now vanished.   The novels were banned in Boston and charged with an obscenity now nearly invisible; their remorseless delineation of fifty shades of brutal racism, on the other hand—that was simply the way things are.  If you are among those who think that “things never change,” you might want to read this brilliant book.  But it’s neither for the faint of heart nor for the heartless.