Singin' and the Rain

I have never quite understood boredom, by which I suppose I must mean extended periods of boredom, as opposed to the fleeting experience of a bad lecture or a committee meeting.  For the most part life has been a Heracletian fire, full of crackling rapid movement that has left me wondering what comes next.  Even retirement itself, which I expected to devolve in some pastel monochrome, has already been punctuated by a series of vivid, not to say garish episodes—some of them, admittedly, of the sort I could do without—that have been anything but boring.  No doubt this in part arises from the fact that aging makes many intrinsically simple and ordinary things rather complex and extraordinary, and consequently their achievement more notable.  In the twenty-third canto of the Inferno Dante conjures up a procession of the Hypocrites.  These damned souls can move only at snail’s pace, burdened down as they are with cloaks, flashy on the exterior, but actually lined with lead.  Perhaps I can find a more positive analogy in the sight of some of our young college athletes in training, burdened with heavy backpacks as they run up and down the long ranks of seats in the football stadium.  In any event, I feel leaden a good deal of the time.  When locomotion itself becomes a kind of ordeal, simply showing up can be an adventure.

On Monday night we went to a remarkable musical event in the University chapel—a performance of Georgian folk music by the Ensemble Basiani, the Georgian State Vocal Ensemble.  This was a male choir, thirteen strong, all dressed in traditional ethnic finery, sort of decorated black soutanes, over very elegant high black boots in supple leather.  The singing, which included both religious and secular songs, was amazing.  Only a few pieces included some kind of minimal instrumental accompaniment; the main instruments were deep, powerful male voices.  Georgian folk music is characterized by a lot of orchestrated noise—shouting, clapping, and a very distinctive kind of yodeling, sometimes supplemented by dance.  

But the seemingly mundane tasks of getting to and from the venue were slightly more than routine.  It was, in the immortal words of Bulwer-Lytton, a dark and stormy night, fraught with possible geriatric anxieties.  Driving visibility was poor; finding a parking spot demanded competition and an adrenaline flow.   Triumph in that arena left us still with a bit of a walk through a cold rain.  I was armed, but insufficiently; I couldn’t get my five-dollar umbrella open.  Every few steps of the way we would be overtaken by lither juniors.  This process was repeated in the return trip to the parking lot.  Now if age is daily presenting you with an anthology of petty quotidian reminders of your incremental geezerdom, it is only fair that it offer also some contrasting compensations.  It does that marvelously by giving you grandchildren.  A grandchild is not simply a child at one remove, or a smaller version of their own parents.  A grandchild is a unique blessing, a living symbol of vital continuity, a tolerant and ever-surprising companion, a rewarding student and so bounteous a fount of frank and uncomplicated affection, however undeserved, as to repair a souring view of human nature.

We have six grandchildren, five lovely girls and the most delightful little chap you will ever meet--all geniuses of course, all faster than a speeding bullet, each more powerful than a locomotive, and every single one able to leap tall buildings at a single bound.  Furthermore, you have to bear in mind that buildings are now considerably taller than in the heyday of Superman! Admittedly, the oldest “girl” is in her mid-twenties, beautiful and brainy,  and a high-powered executive in New York.  But  do not press me as to what, exactly, it is that she executes.  It’s one of these techie “platform” things that, so far as I understand, empowers other platforms.  In my mind it must be similar to Garrison Keillor’s National Organization of Organizations.  What really keeps me on my toes, I just realized, is not kefir or yoga; it is grandparenthood.  In a healthy familial setting grandchildren are like works of art as written about in Eliot’s great essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”  They recapitulate a respected cultural inheritance while applying, modifying, and expanding it through individual personality and experience.  They are teachers as well as learners.

The youngest of the grandkids, also female, has only arrived at the beginning of her schooling, though she  already radiates an executive aura.  Four of them live in New York, and the other two not so very much further away, in Montreal.  We see the New Yorkers very frequently and the Montrealers perhaps too seldom but still not infrequently.  We are rapidly coming up to Thanksgiving, which will involve the usual stuff-and-groan contest, and for a New York kid a leafy New Jersey back garden opening on a sylvan path to Lake Carnegie is as good as Camp Gitche Gumee any day.   All the grandkids will be there save Lulu who on her own initiative is spending a (high school) junior semester is Marseille in order to keep up with her French.  But I could feel her sitting next to me at the Basiani concert.  For right in the middle of it the golden youth of the Princeton University Glee Club briefly claimed the stage (i.e., the cathedral-like chancel steps) for a couple of beautiful numbers.  The talented director of this group, Gabriel Crouch, wrote thus in the Program Notes: “…[W]e’ve never come so close to a tradition which makes our own feel so…adolescent.”  According to Chaucer’s Miller, an exponent of the generational war, “Youthe and elde is often at debaat.” But on Monday night youth and elde were in harmony, or at least sweet and fulfilling complement. 

The ancient music of these Caucasian singers had another special balm for my geezerdom.  We were sitting in the second row of the nave, which, as the first row had been left empty, was in effect the very front.  I don’t know how large a Georgian expat community there is in central Jersey, but judging from the friendly personal exchanges between singers and audience members I’d say quite a few.  There is a subsidiary entrance to the chapel at the chancel level on its east side.  During an applause pause midway through, a group of three sodden late comers came in: a middle-aged woman, a very ancient woman in a wheelchair, and what I must describe as an ecclesiastical Gerontius.  They came to the front row immediately in front of us.  The man, though not in full ecclesiastical regalia, was obviously of some high order of Orthodox Christian episcopacy, in the autocephalous Church of Georgia.  His beard, though not quite so long as his full-length cassock, was perfectly proportioned to it.  He wore an elaborately embroidered tall, flat cap that puts to shame the one I bought in the Istanbul market.  He carried a beautiful stick, half cane and half crosier, topped with a large metal ornament in a material I took to be gold.  He was probably not much if at all older than I am, but he radiated the aura of Blake’s Ancient of Days.  He also radiated an unfeigned “child-like” joy for the music both of his foot-stamping, hand-clapping compatriots and the sober reticence of the American teen-agers in the Glee Club.  In that moment neither walking sticks nor wheel chairs seemed a very big deal.

William Blake, "The Ancient of Days"

You can hear a short piece by the Basiani Ensemble HERE: or their whole 2017 concert in Saint Petersburg HERE.

Searching for Jan Valtin

Retirement is something you have to feel your way into.  It took me about a decade to realize its principal point for my life: that there is precious little that I am actually obliged to do.   I realize that I spent a professional career largely defined by deadlines, due dates, and the prompt appearance at duly scheduled meetings.  Furthermore, I felt obliged, in order to “keep up” with my field to read a lot of poorly conceived and poorly written scholarship that dispirited rather than enlightened me.  Just as I shall never have to grade another final examination, I shall never have to read another book on Queering the Quest or Questing the Queer?  Artistic Obfuscation of the Sexual Subject in the “Chivalric” Poems of Reinhardt von Eisenbach.  I can spend my time reading Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha,” which is how I spent some happy hours during the last week.  Talk about multicultural!  Anyway, the unfortunate feeling of pressing obligation made its unwelcome though thankfully brief return last week.  This is how it came about.

Ten years ago I published a book, The Anti-Communist Manifestos, in which I studied the political and cultural impact in the United States and in France of four best-selling books of anti-Communist tendency.  Probably the least known of the four—although it had been the best-selling book in America in 1941—was Out of the Night by Jan Valtin (the pseudonym of a German sailor named Richard Krebs).    I hope it is not immodest to say that my book has played a role in animating a certain scholarly interest in Valtin/Krebs, a rather mysterious figure who claimed to have been a Communist espionage agent and who was accused by some enemies of being a Gestapo agent.  Together with one of the leading French historians of Communism, Guillaume Bourgeois of the University of Poitiers, I had planned to help organize an international scholarly conference devoted to him.  Serious illness has for the last year somewhat curtailed my activities, however, and I am unable just for the moment to travel to France to participate in my “own” conference.  Bummer.

But Guillaume had the idea that I might at least be present as some kind of spectral presence on a screen; I could send a short contribution by video.  In my professorial life I had naturally given video-recorded lectures many times.  But always I had behind me the technical resources of a university’s Audio-Visual Department or of the private corporation that was paying for the lectures.  Now I had to try to come up with something on very short notice.  I didn’t think my phone, even if I could miraculously learn how to use it, was the right tool for the right job.  How fortunate for me then that my elder son Richard is a sound-recording engineer, and indeed one of the best in the trade.  Sound engineers are not of course the same as videographers, but the two work together and complement each other.  As luck would have it Rich was briefly between assignments in distant parts and proved his filial affection by agreeing to help me out even at the expense of upending his family plans.  So I am grateful not only to him, but to a wonderful daughter-in-law and granddaughter, who tolerated the disturbance.

So on Monday afternoon Rich arrived at my house lugging a large, heavy, stoutly built box containing the state-of-the-art video camera he had borrowed from a brother in the trade.  Taken from this box and assembled, it was one of the most magnificent pieces of techie equipment I had ever seen.  Rich told me that it costs $50,000, of which the lens accounts for four-fifths.  I hope that this was hyperbole, but fear it probably wasn’t.  When it comes to a borrower or a lender being, I am a flat-out Polonian.  My mind was haunted by memories of the Maupassant short story of the lost borrowed necklace.  I was glad to get definitive word that Rich got the precious instrument safely back to Brooklyn.

I had spent so much energy fretting about how it might be possible to produce a video in forty-eight hours that I had given practically no thought to what I would actually say should we be able to find the necessary equipment.  But I did have a couple of hours to sit and think about it, and I was able to jot down a few notes, gather a few show-and-tell items, and stretch out a rather minimalist youtube presentation  to nearly half an hour.  The big question about Out of the Night, which must remain the fundamental written text for any study of Krebs, involves its historical reliability.  It was presented to the public as straight autobiography, but I have had to conclude that it is largely a work of fiction.  Like many novels it is enriched by the author’s personal experience, but as an “historical document”—the category to which its author and publisher assigned it in 1940—it doesn’t come close to passing the smell test.  One of the Irish bishops is supposed to have remarked of Gulliver’s Travels, at the time of its publication, that there were parts of the work he could not fully credit.  Let us say I have a similar reaction to Valtin’s book, though that is far from the reaction of many of its readers.  I pursued this theme, along with a couple of others, in my little talk; and although in the video my son Rich was not able to transform his paternal pig’s ear into a silk purse, he did come up with something surprisingly plausible.  What a great guy!

https://www.youtube.com/embed/60z3H0TNZcE

Piratical Publishers

The catch phrase “Publish or perish” is perhaps heard less frequently in the digital age than it once was, but one of the anxieties of younger scholars is the necessity of finding a press willing to publish their work.  I sometimes try to comfort such people by putting things into historical perspective.  The modern author, it is true, must find a publisher; the medieval author’s first task was to find a dispensable sheep.  Earlier periods of book production are much on my mind just at the moment because of a recent happy experience. 

Last Sunday saw the annual Dinner of the Friends of the Princeton University, a group to which I have belonged and in which I have played various small roles for many years.   There are not too many joint causes that are so uncomplicatedly benign as support of research libraries.  One classic definition of the role of universities—the preservation of old knowledge and the creation of new—would be difficult to pursue without well tended libraries.  It is true that we are experiencing a dramatic revolution in “print culture” generally, one that is driven by rapidly changing digital technology.  This is a dynamic process, not easily predictable, and it is uncertain where or when we shall emerge from it.  I recently met my first young literature professor who makes it a point of pride to own no actual physical books.  I think he’s nuts, but he may represent the shape of a future in which the word “librarian” is as likely to invoke ideas of computer science and of artificial intelligence as of Bodoni bold and card files.  Our group of Friends includes scholars, students, antiquarians, connoisseurs and collectors, print historians, and digital nerds in several categories.

Such diversity of bibliographical expertise presented me with a problem in my modest role of trying to help the leader of our group secure an engaging after-dinner speaker for our annual banquet.  Perhaps I should say it would have presented me with a problem were it not for my good luck in having been friends for the last half century with Robert Darnton.  Darnton, one of the great historians of the Enlightenment and the Revolution was my long-time colleague here before he was lured away by Harvard to be the director of their library system, a task to which he devoted the last decade of his official working life before his recent retirement.  In the meantime, among his prodigious scholarly production that has been recognized with prizes and awards too numerous to mention, are several important works dealing with book history, the history of printing and of publishing, and in general the many roles played by books and writers in the creation of the modern intellectual world.  You can see a bit of what he has been up to by visiting a fascinating website he has created.

   

                                                                            Robert Darnton   

Darnton’s topic, to which he has devoted one of his recent studies, was French book piracy in the era just before the Revolution.  He uses the word “piracy” to denote a variety of publishing practices that we would regard as very shady or simply outright theft of intellectual property.  Copyright law, especially international copyright law, is a relatively new thing in the Age of Printing.  Students of English literature will be familiar with the outrage of various important British writers of the Victorian era victimized by freebooting American printers and publishers.  Before the Revolution French books were published not by any legal “right,” but by the privilege of the King.  In one of his prefaces to his history of the Revolution, Jules Michelet contrasted medieval attitudes toward religion—centered in the idea of divine grace and favor bestowed upon an undeserving, punishable, and often punished mankind—with the idea of equable justice as a right emergent among intellectuals and future revolutionaries.  Like so many other aspects of governance in the ancient régime, the feudal relic of the royal privilege of publication advanced the maximal interests neither of those readers who turned to books for instruction nor of those who turned to them for delight. In the literate circles of Europe, as any reader of War and Peace knows,  the French language occupied the international role now played by English.  But the King of France was not yet the King of Everywhere, as Napoleon apparently set out to be, and dubious pamphlets actually manufactured in a Breton cellar might still gain traction by falsifying their place of publication as Amsterdam or Vienna, sometimes to the confusion of modern bibliographers.   In the “ordinary” commercial French book market there was a definitely dog-eat-dog spirit and a competition to get books thought or already known to be likely market successes into print as quickly as possible.  In this stampede the book’s actual author and whatever contractual arrangement had already been made usually played no part whatsoever.  The motive for the publisher was manifestly crass: to maximize the bottom line.  A small army of pirates scoured the printing houses of Europe for promising material to steal and put on the public market as quickly as possible.  If in your mind’s eye you picture all the old printers as noble humanists holding a newly discovered manuscript of Cicero in one hand and the platen-lever in the other, think again.  Darnton explained how ruthlessly “big business” and financial the publishing industry actually was.  Once a book left the printer’s shop it was fair game for the pirates, who specialized in cheap reprints swiftly produced and efficiently, if sometimes clandestinely distributed throughout the market.  Nor did the pirates always wait until a book was already in circulation.  The true industry leaders sometimes had paid spies in their competitors’ printing shops who could supply them with valuable “market research,” sales reports, and actual purloined proof sheets of promising materials in the process of manufacture.  By this means, Darnton said, an enterprising pirate could on occasion get his stolen “product” on the market even before the original had appeared.  The evening left me feeling strangely reassured: our current anxieties about fake news can perhaps be somewhat assuaged by historical precedent.  This was not one of those after-dinner talks one must consider primarily as a tax to be paid for the enjoyment of the crème brûlée.

A Story by Willa Cather

 

Willa Cather (1873-1947)

At last I find occasion for a “trigger warning”.  Though I aim at “general interest” in this blog, I must indulge myself from time in a rather “academic” post.  Such a time has come, so if this is not your sort of thing I suggest you follow Chaucer’s advice and simply turn to another page.  What is “literature”?  The question is more difficult than it might appear.  Among the dictionary definitions is “printed material,” any printed material.  The best literature on septic tanks recommends plastic baffles.   More commonly the word implies a positive aesthetic judgment.  Literature means writings having excellence of form or expression and expressing ideas of permanent universal interest.  For me, a work of literature is traditional—meaning that it is aware of earlier written works with which it engages in a spirit of respect or competitive contestation without recognition of which a reader must necessarily have but a limited view of the work.  Thus practically all of Roman literature imitated earlier Greek “models”.  Dante in his Commedia is “imitating” Virgil, who at the literal level is the pilgrim’s guide for most of the poem.  And Dante obviously “influences” the many writers of Renaissance epic.

This past week I have read for the first time a number of the early stories of Willa Cather.  By any just reckoning Cather is one of our greatest twentieth-century writers.  I was particularly impressed by her story “‘A Death in the Desert,’” published in 1903.  To this story I shall in a moment return, but I must first note that I find a decisive shift in her writing after the first World War, especially in the great novels My Ántonia (1918) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).  These are novels still clearly linked to a classical tradition, and by the time of her death in 1947 she had fallen somewhat into eclipse.  It is one of the ironies of the perversity of current academic fashion that her critical reputation was reanimated by an unwarranted attention to her lesbianism.  The obviously more important wellsprings of her art, which I have rarely seen mentioned, were classicism (she was a Latin teacher) and Christianity (she was a fully engaged practitioner and active member of the Episcopal Church in its frontier outpost of Red Cloud, Nebraska.)  But when it comes to English departments, one must these days be content with what scraps are on offer.

Perhaps the most important character in “’A Death in the Desert’” is a famous and deeply self-absorbed American composer named Adriance Hilgarde, who makes no direct appearance in it.  Adriance, who has had a great success in Europe and is on the verge of a crowning triumph in Paris, has a much more ordinary brother, Everett, who so annoyingly resembles Adriance in physical appearance that Everett is constantly being mistaken for him.  There is a third major character, Katharine Gaylord, an aging singer, a very old associate of the Hilgarde brothers.  Katharine is dying of tuberculosis in a ranch house in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where (following the standard medical advice of that age) she has retreated in the vain hope of regaining her health.  As the story begins, Everett, one of those nice guys who always finishes last, travels from the East by train to the wilds of the West to comfort the doomed woman.  Her dying is protracted, and the two share many intimate conversations.  She recounts her hopeless and unrequited love for the Olympian composer.  “It was not the first time that [Everett’s] duty had been to comfort, as best he could, one of the broken things his brother’s imperious speed had cast aside and forgotten.”  Everett in turn, rendered incautious by the pathos of the moment, confesses his own long-standing passion for Katharine—a revelation that startles, indeed shocks her.  Then she does die, and Everett, as he is departing Cheyenne is mistaken for his brother by a visiting German singer with whom he crosses paths in the train station.  Now that is about as Henry James as you can get without being Henry James.  Indeed, a valid criticism of the early Cather is its excessive “Jamesianism”.  But James is not the only great writer with whom Cather engages.

She puts the title of the story in quotation marks because it is an actual quotation.  It is the title of a (once) well-known poem by Robert Browning.  Browning is among our hardest and most philosophical poets.  That is probably why he is so little read today.  Few of his dramatic monologues are simple, and this one is no exception.  But his death in the desert is that of Saint John the Evangelist, the last living literary eye-witness of the ministry of Jesus Christ.  What will become of Christian faith when the last personal witness of the Christ-life is gone?  Among the complex issues the poem raises are questions of truth, the authority of written texts, and grounds for belief.  I believe that for Browning, one of the prominent issues he had in mind was the nature of Scriptural authority, a subject that had among intellectuals been pretty well revolutionized—to the dismay of many conventional Christian believers--by the so-called “Higher Criticism” of the nineteenth century.  Cather’s story is not a theological treatise, but it explores the relationship of art (in this instance, music) and truth in a manner in which James and John strangely cooperate.  I suspect that no one ever reads a serious writer “completely,” but it is always worth the try.  And, certainly, there is as much danger of over-reading a subtle work than of under-reading it.

A major theme in Henry James is the spiritual freshness of the new American character in the context of the ambiguous sophistication of the old European societies.  So far has the world moved on since 1881 (publication of Portrait of a Lady), say, that the idea of the comparative spiritual wholesomeness of Americaness may seem mind-boggling.  But it is was major theme of our early national literature, elaborating the ancient subject of the moral superiority of simple, rural life to the dangerous sophistication of urban cosmopolitanism.  But the drab, dreary, and often sinister side of supposedly heroic pioneer life, and the small- town legacy of that life, likewise became an important American topic.  You see it famously in Sherwood Anderson, much admired by Cather.   Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize on the strength of it.  It is pretty much the essence of southern Gothic in parts of Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Carson McCullers.  It is not infrequent in Cather herself, and conspicuously in The Troll Garden, the early collection of short stories that included “’A Death in the Desert’”.

Willa Cather was not merely a great writer, but a conscious creator of literature as I defined it at the beginning of this short essay.  The title of “’A Death in the Desert’” is, I suspect, a lapidary ornament.  The masons who built the great medieval cathedrals sometimes placed beautiful stone ornamentation in parts of the building invisible to those who worshiped in it.  The idea, I think, was that God could and did see it.   It was a kind of redundant luxury, a work of pious artistic supererogation.  No reader needs to see the meaning of Browning to her sad story—presuming it really is there--but if you do see it, it is likely to increase the already opulent pleasure of the reading experience.

A Few Words about Elitism

I first heard the word “elite” in a somewhat unusual context.  My Aunt Heartz always seemed to me an exotic figure.  Before the War she had spent time in the Philippines with her military husband, and her house was filled with rattan furniture.  She also had a portable typewriter in which she took pride.  One of its most desirable features was that it was an elite, not a pica.  That was long before I had any technical knowledge of type and printing, but this elite typewriter produced text in approximately ten point, whereas the more standard office model pica was twelve point.  What elite meant to my aunt was something like stylish or elegant—definitely superior, a cut above.

Well, I have heard a great deal more about the words elite (adjective and noun) and elitism in the years since then.  Much of it has been censorious.  That is probably because I spent upwards of half a century teaching at one of the world’s most elite universities listening to my administrators and colleagues gas on about how terrible elitism is.  So let me say a few words in its defense.

People do not want to be “elitists” for good reason.  They do not want to be stuck-up snobs, reveling in their supposed superiority to supposed inferiors.  We want to be egalitarians—believers in the proposition put forward in our Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal.*  That all are “equal” is a very nice thought, but the moment one expresses it, one must realize the ways in which it is not true as well as those in which it is.  The equality of “all men” will not be found in their height, weight, physical dexterity, mental acuity or other accidental features, which in their composite entirety tend to define what we think of as individual identity or “personality”.  We mean that all men have ethical and political equality, that all have “equal protection under the law,” and (if we are religious) that all have certain rights endowed by God.  That is the essence of the matter.  When Robbie Burns writes “My love is like a red, red rose,” he is not trying to convince us that his girlfriend is bright vermillion of hue or that sharp spines protrude from her limbs.  No, he is claiming that she shares the essential aesthetic and moral attributes of “rosiness,” whatever they may be.

It may be impossible to impose effective economic coherence upon the egalitarian ideal.  The radical anarchist claim that that is the case cannot be refuted by reference to any known political system in today’s world, certainly.  Modern democracies have done a poor to fair-to-middling job at best, but they have been able to achieve even this only on the basis of elitism—that is, on some form or another of representative government.  The English word elite is very easily traced through its immediate French source to its Latin origins.  Elite means elected, chosen, picked   If you exercise any conscious sense of preference in the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the friends you make, the partner you marry, indeed if you make any choice among plural possible options, you are practicing elitism.

            All this is to say that you are being discriminating or practicing discrimination, another word likely to cause anxiety to many well-meaning people and therefore one perhaps deserving  a brief philological mini-lecture of its own.  Discrimination involves making a judgment or decision in relation to alternative possibilities.  One such distinction is between guilt and innocence.  Our word crime derives from the idea that a fact  has been ascertained by a certain kind of discrimination or judgement.  But discrimination can be practiced on the basis of both sound and unsound criteria, and those judged unsound have changed dramatically in the age of democracy.  It is the fear (and history) of using unsound criteria that spooks many people today.  For effective purposes the word discrimination as it is mainly used in your newspaper refers to racial discrimination.  Usually it is a fairly easy empirical matter to discriminate between a man and a woman, and between a black person and a white one.  But that discrimination is a matter of personal identity which, according to our Constitution, is politically irrelevant.  Though it has been very different in the not distant past, race-based discrimination is now legally authorized only in various “affirmative action” programs, where its operations are often highly opaque and contested.  In such programs, incidentally, the elitist program is often even more articulate than it is elsewhere.

            It is probably too late to save the word elitism or to use it in a benign sense.   Not too many words can survive the suffix ism.  There might yet be hope for discrimination, which is, from a certain point of view, the method as well as the goal of all education.  The cultivation of discriminating taste, the discriminating consumer, a discriminating mind—all these  are still positive concepts for most of us.  The value of discrimination is not limited to the purely aesthetic realm—concluding that King Lear is more worthy of your sustained attention than a Harlequin romance.  It is discrimination that advances our civilization in the material and practical realms as well.  The engineer who is expert in the strength of materials will discriminate between pre-stressed concrete and braided steel cables by applying expert knowledge to a specific situation.  Just as we would avoid shoddy construction materials in building our houses we should strive to avoid shoddy thinking.  And there’s another most interesting word, shoddy.  Its principal meaning as a noun was woolen stuff made from picking apart old rags.  The adjective soon followed.  It is akin to tawdry, the kind of stuff you could pick up cheap at Saint Audrey’s fair on October 17, the late medieval version of the Dollar General Store.  If we do not want our minds to be cluttered with the shoddy and the tawdry we are forced to become elitists through the operations of discrimination.

*And as an elitist, I am impatient of the philological ignorance than cannot recognize in this eighteenth-century usage the generic sense of all men as human kind.

Nobler in the Mind

            I am not “on” Twitter, as they say, or might say, one is “on” crystal meth.  One would think that artificially enforced economy of space would stimulate clarity of thought and elegance of expression.  Brevity being the soul of wit, one would suppose that the Land of Twitter would sparkle like a Restoration comedy.  It is the purpose of artificial literary constraints, as in the sonnet or the clerihew or the double dactyl, to encourage ingenuity.  But the twittered obiter dicta of our celebrities, and especially our presidential celebrity, do little to confirm such an expectation.

Twitter was involved in the first of two “free speech” incidents that caught my attention in the last week or so.  The first was the flap caused by Daryl Morey, the General Manager of the Houston Rockets in the National Basketball Association, who, with regard to the political demonstrations in Hong Kong, tweeted a poster image reading “Fight for freedom—Stand with Hong Kong.”  Unfortunately, “fighting for freedom” is not merely meaningless but a losing business plan if your real goal is to extract as much money as possible out of China, as Mr. Morey soon discovered.    He immediately—though still too late—hit the delete button.  “I did not intend my tweet to cause any offence to Rockets fans and friends of mine in China,” Morey wrote in a Twitter post on Monday morning. “I was merely voicing one thought, based on one interpretation, of one complicated event. I have had a lot of opportunity since that tweet to hear and consider other perspectives.”  One of those perspectives came from the basketball superstar LeBron James.  James’s opinion is that Morey is insufficiently “educated” on the complex issue of political discontent in Hong Kong.  James himself is very well educated on that score.  He knows exactly which side of his bread is buttered.  This is an observation, not a criticism.  American citizens still have the right to express themselves as they wish, if they are prepared to face the possibility of reactive twitter storms themselves.  And as our President has apparently decided that our State Department professionals are useless to him, basketball professionals may be as satisfactory substitutes as are available for the articulation of foreign policy.

The other episode was more strictly literary.  In fact, it was very literary, as it involved the Nobel Prize in Literature.  As you may know there is a bustling industry devoted to the manufacture of fancy cultural “collectibles”—presidential plates, busts of movie stars, flasks and decanters celebrating the world’s great vintages—that sort of thing.  They are usually sold through magazines catering for “seniors” with the suggestion that they “can only increase in value,” though one generally finds them resurfacing not in museums but in flea markets along the interstate.   There is also a bibliographical dimension to this trade, finely made books (often of English or American classics) offered by the Folio Society or the Franklin Mint at a considerable price.  And a couple of times in second hand shops I have come upon a large collection of fancy books called the “Nobel Prize Library” or something like that.  Each of the many volumes contains the best-known or most plausibly representative work of a Nobel laureate in literature.  Several things struck me as I rapidly surveyed the post- War volumes.  The first is the achievement of American writers, which has been considerable.  The second was that there were many winners whose work was quite unknown to me, and even several of whom I had never heard.  My ignorance was a bit awkward.  I am, after all, supposed to be a professor of literature.  I am afraid the same thing happened this year, when the recently  announced winners (there are two) were Peter Handke and Olga Totarczuk.  Olga who?  I should have known, but I didn’t.  Actually Totarczuk’s prize was a kind of “make up” for 2018, when a scandal among the Nobel judges aborted that year’s deliberations.

But my unfamiliarity with these authors did not last long.  Indeed I first heard of the prizes from an outraged statement protesting the judgment of the Nobel committee by the current president of PEN America, Jennifer Egan.  PEN stands for something.  It originally stood for “poets, essayists, and novelists”—or “creative writers,” as we used to call them, before it finally sunk in that the phrase creative writer is a pleonasm like power politics or food nutrition.  But PEN also stands for something in an ethical sense: “PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write.”  I can go with the flow.  It is all the rage these days for scholars, academic disciplines, critical approaches, and literary theories to “stand at intersections”.

Peter Handke is an Austrian writer of conservative political cast.  Olga Totarczuk, a Polish writer of fiction and a public intellectual.   The main complaint concerned Handke, who had defended the actions of the disgraced Serbian politician Slobodan Milosevic.  Handke had gone so far as to offer a eulogy upon Milosovic’s death.  While I share the conventional view that Milosevic was a bad hombre, the man did die of natural causes during the protracted course of a trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, presumably while still enjoying the assumption of innocence.  The criticism that has been leveled at Totarczuk is apparently based on her willingness, indeed stated pleasure, of sharing the prize with Peter Handke.  Jennifer Egan, a fine American writer and the current President of PEN, issued the following statement: “We (that is, PEN) are dumbfounded by the selection of a writer who has used his public voice to undercut historical truth and offer public succor to perpetrators of genocide.”   Now, remember that the motto on the PEN website is “Freedom to Write.”   Remember also that PEN admonishes us to “defend free expression, support persecuted writers, and promote literary culture.”   Finally, remember, as the Nobel committee itself was provoked into pointing out, the Nobel Prizes in Literature are given in recognition of literary achievement, not on the basis of political orthodoxy or heresy, let alone conspicuous zeal for the intersection of literature and human rights.  Time was you could be a Stalinist toady and gulag pooh-pooher and a prize-winner.  And as far as “historical truth” is concerned, truth is that no small number of the world’s great writers have been swine—swinishness, alas, being a not uncommon feature of the “human condition” that is the subject of great literature.

Blowing the Whistle

It is said that the only major Christian doctrine that is empirically verifiable is original sin, which is confirmed by the experience of parenting.  It is further supported by linguistic history, which reveals the tendency of the meanings of simple nouns to deteriorate with age, rather like the portrait of Dorian Gray.  Just look up such words as villain, boor, or harlot in the OED to see what I mean.  Fortunately there are still a few distinctions between art and life.  For example, playing second fiddle is regarded as a slightly subordinate occupation, whereas blowing second whistle is about as good as it gets, whistleblower-wise.   At least this is what I surmise from the journalistic excitement revealed in such headlines as “Second Whistleblower Comes Forward!”  The utterly depressing nature of what I shall call the continuing Ukrainian “revelations” forces me once again to eschew the substance of a major political crisis and to wander about in its philological periphery.

For the news is bursting with much admired whistleblowers.  The current whistleblowers in the Affair of the Ukrainian Telephone Call, though their actual identities remain so far unknown, and are meant to stay that way, are being called “heroes”.  I am a little leery of calling conscientious good citizenship “heroism”.  Why one should be called a hero for testifying truthfully in exposing malfeasance on a matter of great political significance, or why such a person would have to be protected by a Whistleblower’s Protection Act, needs some explanation.

The explanation is to be found in the social odium surrounding the word informer. When I joined the Princeton faculty in 1965, there was still a mandatory meeting for all new faculty to be instructed in the elements of the Princeton Honor Code.  This compact, which all incoming students had to sign, affords students the right to unmonitored final examinations in exchange for their signed pledge that they have not cheated on the exam and the sworn obligation to report any instances of cheating by others of which they became aware.  It is similar to dozens of other such compacts at other institutions.  An elderly dean, very much Old Princeton, made the presentation.  When he asked “Any questions?”, there amazingly was one.  A smart-ass young French mathematician expressed the opinion that he saw but dubious honor in an arrangement requiring you to be an informer against your mates!  The dean actually sputtered.  Here was a perspective never previously encountered in his seven decades.  “Young man,” he replied, “the Princeton Honor Code is based on universally acknowledged moral principles, which anyone can accept, be he Christian, Catholic, or Jew!”

This unusual ecumenical claim notwithstanding, the English language is rich in its colorful vituperation of tattle-tales, also known as snitches, squealers, stool pigeons, grassers (British), rats, finks, and the combinatory ratfinks.  The refusal to blow one’s whistle has won high praise in odd places.  Here is Richard Nixon, caught on his White House tapes, praising the traitor Alger Hiss. “You know the great thing about—I got to say for Hiss.  He never ratted on anybody else.  He never ratted!”  So far as I know, the term whistleblower had to be imported from the domain of field sports for lack of any extant affirmative term.   It is so new that standard usage has not yet decided whether it’s a compound word like pipefitter, or a hyphenated one (whistle-blower, apparently the emergent journalistic choice).   And as to its exact meaning, so much depends upon situation and context—on who is the truth-teller, what truth is being told, and to whom.   Was Daniel Ellsberg a whistleblower, or an egomaniacal blabber-mouth?  How about Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning? 

Whittaker Chambers, super-snitch

I mention Hiss as he was the occasion, more than ten years ago, of my own realization that in the popular mind “bad” informers outnumber “good” ones about ten to one.    I was at an academic conference entitled “Alger Hiss and History”.   You will recall that the heart of the “Hiss case” was the testimony by the government witness (informer) Whittaker Chambers that Hiss, a darling of liberal New Dealers, had been a Soviet spy.  Today this is a fact scarcely doubted by any serious historian.  But on that day it dawned on me only gradually that out of about 450 mainly academic participants gathered in the auditorium of the NYU Law School, I was perhaps one of ten who believed that Hiss had been a covert Communist and that Whittaker Chambers had been a generally truthful witness.  For as the ancient seer Cassandra so tragically discovered, the zeal of many ostensible seekers after truth is satisfied not by the truth they hear but by the one they want to hear.

It is possible that you never will have heard of the most famous whistleblower of the modern era, partly because he may never have existed but mainly because, well, it’s all so unpleasant.  His name was Pavel (Pavlik) Morozov, and in 1932 he was a young peasant living with his parents on a farm in the Sverdlovsk Oblast of the Soviet Union.  This was in the mopping up period of the forced collectivization of agriculture in Russia, the same period that a thousand miles to the south witnessed the engineered famine in Ukraine, called the holomodor.  Central Party policy was to extract as much of the grain harvest as possible from its rural producers in order to be able to feed the industrial workers in the cities.  The confiscation was ruthless, often leaving the farmers themselves starving and lacking even sufficient grain to reseed the fields.  Resistance was widespread and ingenious as the peasants attempted to secrete some grain for their own necessity.  But resisters, who were called “hoarders,” saboteurs, wreckers, and “hooligans”, were treated with utmost severity—usually summary execution or the gulag.  Young Pavlik knew that his father had stashed away a couple of bags of grain.  He  was a Pioneer (Communist Cub Scout),  and he saw his socialist duty clear before him.   So he blew the whistle on his old man.  The Checkists came running and sorted the matter out in their customary ballistic fashion, rendering Pavlik an orphan but also an exemplar of social responsibility.  Some of the other adult peasants, criminal reactionaries, took another view of the matter, however.  A gang of them waylaid the boy and murdered him.  After the authorities sorted that one out, Pavlik was declared (posthumously) a “Hero of the Soviet Union.”  (That is one of the reasons I hope we can be satisfied by calling witnesses to our President’s derelictions merely upright citizens.  We don’t really need any more Russophilia at the moment.)  His story was told in song and story.  For a long generation of Soviet youth his exploit became a compulsory subject of political meditation by all junior students.  Hundreds of statues and other monuments were erected in his memory.

 

Pavlik blows the whistle