Appalachian Baroque

 

            The pandemic has effected many dramatic delays, postponements, and reversals, most of them unfortunate and some disastrous; but at the domestic level it has afforded me one or two useful permission slips.  In recent years I had been making some effort to downsize my library, a very painful task.  That has come to a screeching halt and indeed something of a reversal.  If you can’t get to a big research library, indeed rarely leave your own precincts except for walks in open places, you need to import reading material.  I am allowing myself to buy at least  such volumes of the magnificent Library of America as I lack and want.  That is how a beautiful, two-volume boxed collection of the short stories of Peter Taylor arrived at my house recently—1,397 pages of them to be exact.

 

James Agee (1909-1955)
 

 

            There are at least two great Tennessee writers of the twentieth century, James Agee and Peter Taylor.  If names count for something we would have to add a third, Tennessee Williams, though he was not really a Tennessean.  It is only because a medievalist feels safer in judging defunct writers that he  says nothing of the very powerful and happily extant Madison Smartt Bell.  All three of the older guys have connections with my alma mater, Sewanee, the University of the South, though none of them attended it.  Taylor and especially Agee were significantly influenced by Fr. James Fly, a priest who long taught at the St. Andrew’s School just beyond the Sewanee domain.  Taylor lies buried along with Flye and many of my own revered teachers in the extraordinary Sewanee cemetery.  Agee and Taylor were both serious, unsettled Christians.  Tennessee Williams much admired his grandfather, a Mississippi priest who was a Sewanee graduate, and in his honor left the college a sizeable legacy in his will.  Late in his life Williams, never particularly religious,  joined the Roman Catholic Church, though I think rather in the manner of an American Oscar Wilde, and for much the same reasons.   The greatest of them in my view was Agee, who died far too young.  Nobody has written better film criticism.  And his unfinished novel, A Death in the Family, is a great work of art.

 

Peter Taylor (1917-1994)

 

            The current topic, however is Taylor’s art.  I began with one of his substantial older and more famous stories—“Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time” (1958, the year I graduated from Sewanee).   It was, I think, the first thing I ever read in the Kenyon Review, twin, as we thought of it, to our Sewanee Review.  The plot is rather fantastic, but you don’t mind.  A really great fiction writer can always get a reader not merely to tolerate but positively to collude in the famously “willing suspension of disbelief.”  The Dorsets, an aging, unmarried brother and sister, living in isolation and genteel poverty in a decaying mansion in what I think must be one of the more sizeable old towns in an imagined geography somewhere beneath the western extension of the Mason-Dixon line, are  largely disapproved of by the town’s “society”, who disdain their standoffish eccentricities and geriatric slovenliness.  Yet they have long hosted a  single elegant annual social event—a house tour and dinner party for a select group of the town’s graduating high-school seniors, strangely endorsed by the young people’s parents.  So we have mysterious people, a mysterious party, and a mysterious house in which, very mysteriously indeed,  the sole piece of art on display is a magazine reproduction of a mid-sixteenth-century work of the Florentine Mannerist Agnolo Bronzino.: his so-called called “Allegory of Love” or “Allegory of Cupid and Venus” in the National Gallery of Britain.  We get the story of what happened the year of the last dinner party, the year that Bronzino met the Junior Varsity of the First Families of Virginia, so to speak.

 

            As you can see if you didn’t already know, it is one hell of a painting.  Does Bronzino’s incestuous theme extend to the  aging Dorset siblings?  Who are the strange onlookers?  Taylor’s short story is, among other things, a subtle and softcore example of Southern Gothic, perhaps most famously exemplified by Faulkner’s necrophiliac short story “A Rose for Emily”—echoed by Taylor—and the recent spectacular novel by Donald Ray Pollock, The Devil All the Time, which enthusiastic critics have praised as “Hillbilly Gothic”—a  possible upgrade?  What is Taylor’s story really about?  Since I’ve  got 1,368 pages of other stories still to go,  I can keep thinking about it as I move along.  What I am thinking about just now are the commodious convergences of life, a pattern of personal and mental implosions  that transform seemingly random and disparate personal experiences into a plausible if fragile coherence: Taylor, Tennessee, Sewanee, then in widening, fainter rings so much of Southern literature, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon, Andrew Lytle, lesser lights yet, with all of whom I had some fleeting, obscure, spear-bearer’s association.

 

            The Bronzino was a different matter.  I doubt, at the time I first read Taylor’s story, that  I had the slightest clue of who he was or the good sense to think that he and his painting might have some specific role in the strange narrative.  That all changed when I got to graduate school and read Erwin Panofsky’s Studies in Iconology, first published in 1939, one of a small shelf of books that directed me to a major theme of my life’s work.  Iconology, more precisely than the broader term iconography, is the study of the figurative or allegorical meaning of the images (in Greek, icons) in the visual and plastic arts.  Very often such images have their origins and/or parallels in literary texts, especially in the classical poets or the Bible and its early exegesis.  Panofsky was one of the great German art historians scattered through the Anglophone world by Hitler’s madness, and one who became a colleague of Einstein’s at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.  His book on iconology was already twenty-five years old when I met him.  His principal iconological interests were secular and often arcane—the commerce between the profound revival of classical learning in Renaissance Europe and the visual art of that period.  I now believe that some of his interpretations are too ingenious by half, but his deep discussion of the Bronzino was for a time the last word on the subject.  It had to have been directly or indirectly from Panofsky, I now see, that Taylor had taken the painting’s very title: Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time.  Well, there are few permanent  “last words” in humanistic study, but three out of four ain’t bad.

 

Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968)

 

            I tried to do a quickie catchup on Bronzino studies of the last few decades, as best one can do such things at a home computer screen.  The most interesting thing I turned up along these lines was an essay in which a young scholar identifies the subject of the painting as “bisexual eroticism” deriving from an ancient debate renewed in the Renaissance, largely but not entirely whimsical, concerning the comparative pleasures on offer from the lower orifices of schoolboys and nubile maidens.*  That day I read no further—in Bronzino studies that is.  Hillbilly Gothic seemed the safer and chaster choice for the moment,

 

            Naturally I claim to know what the Bronzino painting really “means”, and I could tell you, but then of course I would have to kill you--a violation of Google's rules for its bloggers' platform.  So I shall end by returning to my beginning.  The point I wanted to make was that even among the constraints, constrictions, and limitations of a pandemic lockdown of unpredictable duration we are not without resources.  As Milton’s Satan said when faced with a drastic downgrading of his real estate options, “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.”

 

*Will Fisher, “Peaches and figs: bisexual eroticism in the paintings and burlesque poetry of Bronzino,” in Sex Acts in Early Modern Italy: Practice, Performance, Perversion, Punishment, ed. Allison Levy (Ashgate, ca. 2010), pp. 151-164.  [This time, three out of four are bad].  I should not gratuitously choose to impose possible indelicacy upon my genteel readership, but I think it important to remind ourselves from time to time of just how cool and edgy the study of dead white males can sometimes be.

 

The Donald, the Dex, and Me

 

 

            Fitzgerald’s famous story “The Rich Boy” begins with two oft-quoted sentences: “Let me tell you about the very rich.  They are very different from you and me.”  Hemingway is supposed to have deflated this pseudo-sagacity by responding, “Yes, they have more money.”  That was a great crack, but Fitzgerald still had a point. Despite all our democratic pretensions, the actual disparities between Americans in wealth, power, and well-being have become something of a scandal.  To be fair, the democratic dogma, degraded or not, was never very realistic.  For example, it should be obvious that the life of an American president is necessarily very different from that of an ordinary citizen like myself.  Just for starters, I don’t have a red button I can push if I want to destroy the world—an idea that, on fleeting occasion, has come into my mind.  I don’t have Air Force One at my command. I did make a model airplane once when I was about eight, but God only knows what became of it.  Nor do I resent my own humdrum obligations of which the President, ex officio, is free.  It would definitely be infra dig to have the President of the United States wandering around his basement in bedroom slippers wondering what the hell became of the toilet plunger.  Every now and again, though, there is an intrusion of the Higher Democracy.  There are a few shared experiences that might be called the Great Levelers, in which the commonality of the human condition is exposed in its ineluctable simplicity.  None of us can avoid death and taxes!  Well, just to be safe, maybe I had better say none of us can avoid death.

            It was the Immortal Bard himself who wrote, in a charming song in Cymbeline:

            Golden lads and girls all must

            As chimney sweepers, come to dust

and it is in that inevitable dust-heap that Donald Trump and I shall find our eventual equality.  But of course human bodies don’t just become dead for no reason.  As the Duc de Somewhere-or-Another famously said, Pour être mort, il faut mourir.  For many of us the prospect of the process of transition is more unnerving than its inevitable end. Some sudden or gradual interference with the physical requirements of vitality arrives.  Frequently this is a somewhat unpleasant experience.  Medical science does its heroic best to defer the inevitable, and in its magnificent delaying tactics I have discovered a kind of prelude or premonition of presidential parity: dexamethasone.

 

            It has been reported that when the President returned to the White House from Walter Reed Hospital he made a few remarks that puzzled reporters from our newspaper of record, who just will not get off his case.  He said this, for example: “I’m back because I’m a perfect physical specimen and I am extremely young.”  Physical perfection may be in the eye of the beholder, but there is at least a rough consensus concerning the Seven Ages of Man.  It is true that Mr. Trump is ten years younger than I, but seventy-four is not usually thought of as extremely young.  Hence the journalistic puzzlement.   Indeed Mr. Trump himself injected ambiguity into the matter when he added: “I’m a senior.  I know you don’t know that.  Nobody knows that.”  Letters to the editor in that same journal tried to make a big deal out of such remarks from the Unknown Senior.  One Dr. Fink, an internist in Beverly Hills, noting that Mr. Trump has been prescribed dexamethasone, insisted on quoting the minute print of the little paper that comes with that particular medicament: “Psychic derangements may appear when corticosteroids are used, ranging from euphoria, insomnia, mood swings, personality changes, and severe depression, to frank psychotic manifestations.”  It adds that should you already be psychotic, the medicine may exacerbate the psychosis. 

 

            Well, I perked up when I read that because here was an arena in which I could compete as an equal with the President of the United States.   I myself have been ingesting these same pills on an occasional basis for quite a long time now.  With me it has been five the night before and five the morning of a chemotherapeutical infusion, followed by one or two for a couple days after.  The tablets themselves are tiny but terrific, sort of like the Monty Python rabbit.  I persevered into old age in my naïveté concerning our national drug crisis, but I now see it’s possibly less complex than I had been imagining.  Drugs  make you stop feeling bad and start feeling good, and there is a certain simple-minded attractiveness to that sequence.  Fight fire with fire, or as Ovid puts it, speaking of the pains of romantic disappointment, drive out the old nail with a new one.  Dexamethasone is a steroid that, by inhibiting the ordinary operations of the immune system, leaves you in blissful ignorance of the full extent of your body’s revulsion to what is happening to it.  Of the dire possible side-effects on the little piece of paper, I suffer only insomnia, which is quite enough, as it could accurately be described as insomnia on steroids.  And the little paper leaves unmentioned a number of interesting anal, oral, fetal, fecal, and armpit sensations that you simply can’t get from Nehi grape soda.

 

 cuniculus audax (montepythonicus)

 

            There is a problem with dexamethasone.  It is quite a mouthful—linguistically, that is.  Try repeating the word three or four times, fast, and you’ll see what I mean.  It’s hard enough to say the word even once while you are actually on it.  Much of the English medical vocabulary is artificially invented, constructed from Greek roots, sometimes with Latin intervention,  by scholarly physicians in the Renaissance.  Linguists speak of “inkhorn terms,” manufactured words as it were siphoned directly from the ink bottle into the linguistic mainstream rather than developed from earlier vernacular forms.   Big, intimidating words are almost inevitable under the circumstances.  For example, the Greek roots meta and its variant meth are practically invitations to long-winded pretension, as in metempsychosis and metamorphosis and methodology.  Though our national meth problem is primarily chemical, one cannot wholly ignore the linguistic side.  That’s probably the reason the pros favor streamlined jargon.  If you hang around an infusion bazaar long enough, it is inevitable that you will overhear a certain amount of elliptical conversation among the highly trained staff, such as “Are we sure she took her dex?”  That’s because having to say dex-a-meth-a-sone every time really sucks.  Speaking of which, aficionados of Medical Forensic Files and Nurses Who Kill will certainly  know that succs is short for suc-ci-nyl-cho-line, the drug of choice used by eight out of ten homicidal health professionals when offing their patients, parents, or intimate partners.  It’s even harder for the coroner  to detect than it is for him to pronounce.   Fortunately, there are no such persons in the establishments I frequent, but I have noticed that the medicalese spoken in those parts is characterized by frequent elision and abbreviation: A-fib, Catscans, EKGs, meds, MRIs, chemo itself.  That’s how Dex has transitioned from the pharmacological to the familiar, and become as much of an old friend to the Donald and me as Darkness was to Paul Simon.

 

 

 

The Gospel Truth

 

 

The motto of Harvard University, to be found  boldly divided into trinitarian folios and mounted on an heraldic shield,  is VERITAS, Latin for “truth”.  You are sure to have seen it at the bottom of the title page of a learned book, or, if not there, on a keyring, beer mug, or sweatshirt.  It is also the title of a terrific new book* by Ariel Sabar that my erudite son-in-law Zvi just sent me as a gift.  Zvi is a broad-gauged historian, a Sinologist, an expert among other things on Islam in China.  In his spare time he is also what you might call a Bible buff, a student of the literature and archaeology of antique Judaism in the time of Jesus.  Some of his more colorful fellow Bible buffs play roles in the book Veritas, to which I shall return after a brief but necessary digression into scholarly autobiography and an embarrassing confession I have not before made public.

 

            The subject of my doctoral dissertation was the iconography—the pictorial illustrations—of medieval manuscripts of a popular medieval poem, The Romance of the Rose.  Most of its many surviving manuscripts date from the fourteenth century, the period of the height of its popularity.  There are many illustrations of aristocratic women, some allegorical and some not.  A common feature of attire of aristocratic French women was the tippet—a decorative band of cloth, often a long one, that hung from the sleeve.  I had never before seen such a thing.  The human mind, puzzled by what is unknown and unfamiliar, strives mightily to crowbar the phenomena into categories of the known and the familiar.  Looking really hard, I did not see strips of cloth but rods of wood attached by a ringed clasp to the arm near the elbow: medieval elbow crutches!  But how to account for such a large population of crippled women?  Probably bone degeneration caused by dietary insufficiency.

 

 

            This “discovery” was entirely peripheral to my interest in the poem, and I had no ideological commitment to its validity.  But for about three weeks I truly believed it, and continued to “see” wooden rods, until somebody told me about tippets.  Fortunately, I had not mentioned my breakthrough in medical history to anyone.  It was an interior drama of the mind.  Having established my own residence in a glass house, I can now start hurling stones.  Veritas is about what can happen when a scholar does have an ideological commitment to a wacky idea and does want to tell people all about it.

 

            The wacky idea was that Jesus had a wife, probably Mary Magdalene, and that there was written evidence of this not merely in the Da Vinci Code but in a very ancient bible-like text, a newly discovered fragment of a Gnostic gospel henceforth to be known as the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife (GJW in academy-speak).  The scholar with ideological commitments was Professor Karen King, formerly a professor of divinity at Harvard.  If you do want to read a four-hundred-page book about feminist biblical scholarship, hot wives, child molestation, con artists, and the curious sociology of south Florida—as I sincerely hope you do—stop reading this essay immediately, as it could spoil a great experience awaiting you in Veritas.  But for the unfortunate few who lack the time or inclination I shall persist.  Prepare yourself for a breathless ride.

 

            There are three human actors in this drama, and one on paper.  The two human antagonists are an erudite and famous and feisty feminist scholar at Harvard and a seedy German con man and pornographer.  The hero is Ariel Sabar, the author, who styles himself a journalist, but obviously is actually the world’s Numero Uno Private Eye.  The paper player (GJW) is a fragmentary text on a piece of papyrus of about five square inches.  You can read the whole thing in less than thirty seconds—provided, of course, that you can read garbled Coptic fluently, as a surprising number of people in this book seem to be able to do.  The fourth line of GJW is supposed to say: Jesus said unto them my wife…I think it’s in Lolita that the narrator, Humbert Humbert, recalls having read a French mystery novel in which the clues were printed in italics. The scribe of GJW was similarly accommodating.  Karen King, the Harvard Professor, biblical scholar, ewig Weibliche  of the radical Jesus Seminar, and author of an imaginative book about Mary Magdalene, was intrigued to hear this, for she was already of the belief that women were far more important in organizing primitive Christianity than you would know from reading the canonical gospels.  Those gospels had first been spun and then given privileged status by a bunch of patriarchal geezers whose sex phobias encouraged misogyny, the suppression of women, and the establishment of an exclusively male and celibate clerical caste.  Speaking of gospels, in this tale Professor King  was in the classical lingo of the confidence game the mark.  The con man was a brilliant but reptilian German lowlife named (no kidding) Fritz.  Raised in the south of (West) Germany, Mr. Fritz had a difficult and perhaps traumatic childhood.  Later he started on a graduate degree in Egyptology in Berlin but dropped out before achieving it.  He reappears sometime after German reunification as the director of a new museum dedicated to the Stasi, the old East German Secret Police.  His directorship was brief, as he was lousy at his job though possibly adept at stealing treasures he was ostensibly guarding.  The next act finds him in south Florida, where he may be an officer in a German tool-making company, and may be the proprietor of a Potemkin gallery dealing in Egyptian art and antiquities, but certainly is the entrepreneur of a robust pornography outfit called HotWives.  HotWives is more or less what its name suggests, and the hottest wife, the superstar of most of the videos, is Mrs. Fritz—porn name, Jenny Seemore.  And, oh, yes: using linguistic expertise gleaned in graduate school, and a piece of ancient papyrus gleaned from God knows where, Mr. Fritz forged the fragment GJW and drew it to the attention of a famous Harvard professor who, he had excellent reason to believe, might be willing to authenticate it.  Eventually she did, against her own first instinct and the view of numerous peers whose shared perception of the fraud differed mainly in their esthetic judgement of the degree of the amateurishness of its fakery.  The coming-out party was  a biblical conference in Rome.  That was the place to stick it to the Pope and all that Virgin Birth, clerical celibacy, male priesthood stuff!  She then published it to academic drumrolls in the prestigious Harvard Theological Review. 

 

            It turned out to be a debacle, of course, leaving not only Professor King but various other Harvard worthies (its PR departments, the editors of the Theological Review) with most of a large, drippy omelet smeared across their faces.  But in the end traditional Christians dodged the bullet of having to think about a sexually active Jesus Christ.  I suppose I am not a traditional Christian, because that idea in the abstract bothers me not at all.  My medieval Franciscans spent endless folios in meditating upon Jesus’s Passion and its agonies.  Giving a little time to some imagined ecstasy might seem only fair were there any better evidence than that concocted by an erudite pornographer.  There isn’t.

 

            Sabar tells this story in amazingly documented detail, leaving a reader marveling at his forensic skills.  The first two thirds of the book can be read as a kind of exotic academic comedy, but in its last movement it becomes quite somber.  The author does not hesitate to detail the long path of evasion, obfuscation, professional impropriety, and actual prevarication Karen King traveled in order to overcome her own disbelief in a pseudo-antique fraud highly convenient to supporters of certain political and cultural arguments of today.  Nor does Sabar stop there.  He goes “heavy” of a sudden.  He wonders aloud how well a postmodern historiography for which facts are the malleable ornaments rather than the solid foundation of the intellectual enterprise actually can serve the endlessly  restated mission of our educational institutions, particularly the oldest and most famous of them, one proclaiming in wrought iron its allegiance to Veritas.  It turns out that “seeing is believing”  is  fake news.  Very often it works the other way around.  We see what we already believe, want to believe, or need to believe.  That’s how  one sees prosthetic devices instead of haute couture.

 

*Ariel Sabar, Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man, and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife (Doubleday: New York, 2020), pp. 401

Courting Disaster

 

 

            Give no thought to the morrow.  Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.  We have that on the highest possible authority, but I am no more able than the vast majority of my compatriots to cease from worrying about the next day, and the next after that.  A general pandemic anxiety, often vague but always disconcerting, has suffused our household and probably most households.  There has been and continues to be plenty to be worried about: the virus and its medical and economic devastations, police brutality, mob brutality, violent storms, raging wild fires, an impending general election already characterized by rancor, suspicion, and (whatever the results of the voting) premonitions of outraging approximately half of our fellow citizens.

 

            One of the gaudiest floats in the fast-moving pageant of impending dangers is dedicated to the donnybrook awaiting us in the confirmation process for a new nominee to the Supreme Court.  The nomination is not yet a week old, but the first brickbats were already being hurled in the actual public announcements of Justice Ginsburg’s death on September 18.  As seemliness has long since disappeared from our politics, we can hardly wonder at its absence in much of our political journalism.  Be that as it may, the opposing forces have formed their ranks.

 

            Our Supreme Court was one of the most extraordinary innovations of our Constitution.  There was no very close model then in existence, and there have been surprisingly few close imitations since.  Only in the first decade of the nineteenth century did the court’s principal task, judicial review, become explicit.  The famous early Chief Justice, John Marshall, put it this way: “It is emphatically the province of the judicial department to say what the law is.”  That dictum itself, was, of course, already an interpretation of the written document that was to be the final arbiter of the validity of all legislation proposed by Congress and confirmed by the signature of the President.  That document was, and is, the Constitution.  Thus I can say emphatically, using Marshall’s word, that the Supreme Court is a body of literary critics charged with adjudicating the meaning of written texts—laws proposed by the Congress—in the light of an older one, the governing Constitution of the United States.  Since my whole career as a professor of literature has been devoted to the attempt to explain the meaning of old literary texts, I consider myself qualified to comment, in a general way, on the Court’s performance in that same genre.  A cat may look at a king.

           

            The unspeakable is not the same thing as the not spoken about, but not infrequently the two are close allied.  The American Civil War had several contributory causes, and some historians of the war, like some of their predecessors who were participants in it, have been eager to cloud the obvious principal cause in some kind of redeeming complexity.  Not so Lincoln.  In his justly famous Second Inaugural, the President said this: ”One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.”  Even if “all knew” that slavery was the cause of the war, there was a preference for talking about other causes, mainly more abstract and high-minded or at least less concrete and sordid ones, such the preservation of the Union or the sovereign rights of individual states.

 

            Talking about secondary or even factitious issues is in political circles a time-honored means of avoiding real ones that are controversial.  In any political system in which continuing access to power depends upon the short-term popularity of elected representatives there is bound to be a lot of dodging and weaving.  Sometimes admirable motives seem to justify the grossly politic in all politics.  The framers of the Constitution were so eager to achieve a fragile political union that they thought they could get by with passing the buck about slavery.  Not to do so might have doomed the national project from the start.  After the Civil War politicians thought they could get by with passing the buck about unjust social arrangements that frustrated the promises of emancipation.  They have been doing that more or less ever since, with results so lamentable only the blind can fail to see them.

 

            The anticipated battle over the proposed confirmation of Judge Barrett is not unrelated to the unhappy history of avoiding unpleasant topics.  I venture to suggest that, as Lincoln would put it,  “all know” that “somehow” the cause of this war is abortion.  But it is ever so much more comfortable to talk about other things, such as the outrageous hypocrisy of Senators McConnell and Graham, the fate of Merrick Garland, the high-handedness of Harry Reid, the borking of Robert Bork by Ted Kennedy—well, I’ll cut it off there, but we could easily continue on a bipartisan grievance tour probably going back to the British Enclosure Act of 1773 and beyond.  These topics are all of great interest, and have undoubtedly contributed to the poisonous atmosphere in which the battle will be joined.  But outrageous hypocrisy is nowhere mentioned in our secular Sacred Text, nor is there any suggestion that a duly elected President cannot offer a nomination three weeks or three days before the end of his statutory term.

           

            Abortion, though a supremely contentious issue in the country, nonetheless commands a kind of strange and paradoxical consensus.  Most Americans don’t much like the idea of abortion; most Americans don’t much like the idea of criminalizing abortions either.  That pretty well describes my own state of ambivalence.  What is for some a settled matter of constitutional right is for others an everlasting affront to conscience.  One can well understand why prudential legislators have been willing to let the literary critics on the Supreme Court deal with the matter.

 

            Any intelligent American can read the Court’s decision in the case of Roe versus Wade, which is based in an exegesis of certain phrases of the Fourteenth Amendment.   The Court’s vote in 1973 was not even close, seven to two.  We now know what the law is because “it is emphatically the province of the judicial department to say what the law is.”  But though that same intelligent American is obligated to honor the force of the law, she is not forbidden from regarding the exegesis on which it is based as highly curious.  As early as the period of classical antiquity Stoic logicians bewailed the near impossibility of meaningful written communication “because all words are ambiguous.”  Yet they could only be interpreted through other words.  “That is like bringing a quenched candle into an unlighted room”.  The heirs of such ideas, in trendy modernized form, are today very common in university departments of literature.  This is one reason why much literary criticism, which in earlier periods commanded a broad audience among general readers, has become an arcane, mandarin, and above all unconvincing enterprise uncongenial to lovers of literature.   You may or may not buy the argument that Satan is the real hero of Paradise Lost quite without Milton’s realizing that fact.  That was a rather mad idea floated by William Blake when Paradise Lost was not quite as old to him as the Constitution was for Justice Blackmun when he wrote the majority decision in Roe versus Wade.  There is not a lot of “real life” consequence in that interpretation of Paradise Lost, which is now commonplace in Departments of English.  Yet it is neither more nor less obvious than the interpretation of “unreasonable search and seizure” in the Fourteenth Amendment made by the court in 1973.  That is why both parties in our duopoly have been at times quite open in insisting that the crucial issues in a presidential election are the President’s powers of nomination and the Senate’s power of confirmation.  Power is often unattractive in its naked form, but eventually real issues do emerge even, or perhaps especially, when Congress doesn’t want to deal with them.  But the issue here is not really a clash of high-minded moral principles— let alone the struggle of good and evil so often invoked to describe it.  It is a squabble of literary critics and a contest of textual interpretation.  Not that high principle plays no role.  The high principle of the Republicans is that their candidate must be confirmed.  The high principle of the Democrats is that that must never happen.  The situation seems rather bleak, yet not quite so bad as last night’s alleged “debate.”

 

 

 

Instrumental Agreement

 

            “All the instruments agree..,”  It’s actually part of a line from an Auden poem, his famous elegy written in response to the death of W. B.  Yeats on January 28, 1939.  What all the instruments were in agreement about was that the day of the great poet’s death was “a cold, dark day”.  I now hear the phrase about the agreement of all instruments being applied to almost anything the speaker wants us to believe is certain.  In fact I have myself used it in that sense.  Of course Auden himself had in mind far more than just the weather or the meteorological instruments used to measure and describe it.  The instruments of mind and heart and artistic aspiration were likewise in mournful concord at the loss of so great a poet.  When a great life, talent, or virtue is extinguished, the physical loss is often the least of it.  The death of greatness casts a very large shadow.  The application to art and artists is hardly a new one.  At the death of Orpheus all of Nature wept.

 

            As it happens, the agreement of all instruments beginning with those of the meteorologists has been much on my mind this week on account of the unusually dramatic arrival of autumn.  The calendrical event took place on Monday, though I think that the actual measurable equinox was yesterday.  The drama of autumn’s arrival, however, was not in the calendar but in the change of the weather itself.  The last day of summer was sultry, hot and moist.  The first day of autumn was cool, crisp and dry.  Like most of the rest of the country we had been following news of the terrible fires on the West Coast.  We have friends in Portland, and a close friend here has a daughter and grandchildren living there.  Along with the refreshment of cool air in central New Jersey came the news of considerable improvement three thousand miles to the west.  They had had some rain, enough to douse some fires and slow down others, and to clear away some of the clouds of suffocating smoke.  Our friend’s daughter reported by phone that she and her kids were at last able to go out of doors comfortably, and “even to breathe some fresh air.”  Again all the instruments, or at least several important ones, appeared to be agreeing.

 

            Is the paradox here real, or simply imagined?—that the refreshment of new life should appear with the advent of the season of waning, retrenchment, indeed death?  For death did indeed arrive.  On the last Friday of summer came the news that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of our Supreme Court had died.  The national outpouring of sadness and admiration has been extraordinary.  I can remember no other such widespread lament for a defunct jurist in my lifetime.  Its genuine basis cannot be doubted even though it is probably exacerbated by specific political anxieties as well as a much more generalized feeling of foreboding triggered by the disquieting anxieties of the medical pandemic. 

 

            Most of us operate on an emotional plane on which the personal and the public, the interior and the exterior, the individual and the cosmic are in interplay.  As the years have rolled by the autumn has become for me an ever more wistful season.  I think I have probably written about this more than once.  Certainly I remember an essay I devoted about a year ago Keats’s great “Ode to Autumn”, among the many excellences of which is the poet’s perfect capture of the season’s paradox, or at least the somber interplay between fruition and decay, vitality and extinction.  Then, in yesterday’s newspaper, I found a beautiful little essay entitled “At Summer’s End” by a fine Nashville writer named Margaret Renki, a contributor to the Times who specializes in such topics as the “flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South”.

 

            Though it didn’t get around to politics or culture, exactly, her essay is full of little gems—about the natural world and about the lessons of life and art that world teaches.  I suppose one could say the same thing about the “Ode to Autumn.”  But at heart her column was for me an instance of déjà vu and not that only.   For I have not merely seen it  before but read and written it before as well.  Ms. Renki would appear to be considerably younger than I, for her sense of vague plangency at fall’s arrival appears to be a new thing for her.  It is one I have known for at least two decades.  “But perhaps the reason I didn’t feel sad about the onset of fall when I was young,” she writes,  “is only that I was younger, with my whole life still ahead.”  Yes, perhaps so.  But the analogy of the course of human life and the course of the vegetative year, with the beginning of autumn the definitive beginning of an end, is surely hard-wired?  All the instruments agree.

 

Church Militant

 

 

 

            Some years ago, while researching a book concerning the literature of the Cold War, I came upon a French Communist front organization active in the late 1940s with what I thought was an amusing name—Combattants de la paix, which might be roughly translated as “Warriors of Peace.”  This group was active in various phases of the Soviet “Peace Offensive” in which various eminent Western intellectuals—including Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Erica Mann, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Bertrand Russell played prominent roles—up through the McCarthy Era.  The “Warriors of Peace” struck a chord in my medievalist’s consciousness, though not one relevant to the research I was then conducting.  But now the stir-craziness of pandemic isolation and a friend’s jigsaw puzzles encourage me to return to the theme.

 

            In a post three weeks ago I explained that a friend has loaned me two high-tech wooden jigsaw puzzles.  To the first, an exquisite religious panel by Fra Angelico, I devoted an essay of iconographic description.  I arrive now at the second, which features a gorgeous book painting from an early Renaissance historical chronicle in the National Library of France.  Its subject is the amazing defense made by the Knights Hospitaller of their stronghold on the island of Rhodes when besieged by the huge army of the Sultan Mehmed in 1480.  In the painting reproduced in the puzzle the Ottoman attackers foregrounded on its left side are given visual top billing.  Never mind the challenge they present to the Christian knights in the serried ranks within the castle walls.  Think of the challenge their jig-sawed gorgeousness presented to me. 

 

            Military metaphors have probably been popular since the invention of language.  Ovid has a well-known poem “Every Lover is a Soldier”.   In my own lifetime I have been witness to wars on poverty, drugs, obesity, Christmas, women, cancer and other adversaries too numerous to mention.  Even in the spiritual realm warfare antedates St. Paul’s donning his breastplate of salvation.  Was it not Job who said “The life of man upon earth is a warfare”?  But the medieval Christian Church, moving beyond metaphor, saw the rise of several small armies composed of men who were at once monks and Marines, “Combatants for the Prince of Peace,” usually called the Military Orders.

 

            The most important of these, the subject of my puzzle and my theme today, was the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, usually called the Knights Hospitaller (after their principal charitable vocations) or the Knights of Malta (after the island stronghold to which they strategically retreated after being kicked out of Rhodes in a second siege, in 1522).  But I must mention at least two other such orders, the Teutonic Knights and the Knights of the Temple, or Templars.  The Templars are probably the military order today’s general reader is most likely to have heard of.  That is because the conspiracy theories instrumental in its grisly destruction have become only more lively and fantastic in the seven hundred years since.  Today if you want to persuade people that Hilary Clinton is involved in a pedophile ring operating out of a pizza parlor, you will probably be called a QAnon nut-job.  On the other hand write a book about how the Templars kept Jesus’s hook-up with Mary Magdalene under wraps until Leonardo da Vinci blew the whistle on that caper in his “Last Supper” and you’ll make a few millions.  The Templar factor makes all the difference.

 

            The English words hospital and hospitality, though obviously related, today have gone in separate directions with only one of them necessarily suggesting medical attention. The medical implication arose in the Middle Ages.   Ancient “hospitality” is perhaps best illustrated in biblical terms in the parable of the Good Samaritan, who ministered to a severely injured traveler both by addressing his wounds and by paying for a recuperative rest at an inn.  Premodern travel was an arduous and often dangerous business; one of the common motives of medieval travel was religious pilgrimage, and for Europeans the pilgrimage par excellence was that to Jerusalem.  Already early in the Middle Ages charitable people established pilgrim hostels; religious hospitality was also to be had at many monasteries.  The Knights Hospitaller had their remote origins in that mileu, but the order’s militarization and prominence came in the Crusades.  The bellicose knights enjoyed their greatest prestige after the fall of Constantinople when from their stronghold on the island of Rhodes they long hindered the trade and expansive ambitions of the Ottomans in the Mediterranean.  In this regard the knights’ heroic repulse of a third siege, that of Malta in 1565, was perhaps of even greater significance than the stunning and better remembered Christian naval victory in the Battle of Lepanto (1571).

 

                                                                                        Suleiman the Magnificent
 

            I found the hardest part of the puzzle was the challenge of the Turkish tents on the left side and the top, both the two ornate ones and, especially, those in the soldiers’ campground seen in the distance.  But I knew the very moment the last remaining blob of ambiguous gray necessarily fitted into the last lacuna on the board that I had to learn more about the Knights of Malta and their formidable Muslim adversaries, especially the Sultans Mehmed the Conqueror and  Suleiman the Magnificent.  So I did what has become a custom for me during the pandemic lockdown while I have had no access to the university.  I simply ordered a few promising and affordable second-hand books on-line.  Two of these were essentially light reading:  The Siege of Rhodes (1985, English translation 2006) is a work by the popular Japanese historian Nanami Shiono, whose field of expertise is Italy from Brutus to the Borgias.  The Shadow of God (2002) is “a novel of war and faith” by Anthony Goodman, an octogenarian medical professor and history buff.  .The differences between an historical novelist and a novelistic historian are not all that great, and both of these books are good, exciting reads.  Two others were much more substantial,  One is the learned biography Suleiman the Magnificent (1944) by the Harvard historian R. B. Merriman.  The other is the “official” history of  The Knights of Malta (Yale, 1994) by H. J. A. Sire, a British free-lance historian whose Gibbonesque style I find enviable.  Of the battles for Rhodes and Malta he begins thus: “Our story carries us to a period of eighty-five years in which the Order of St John, comparable in numbers to the population of a village, produced three leaders and three feats of arms worthy of an empire.”  I  was astonished to discover that the author was himself a member of the order he studied.  Admittedly the group these days is more similar to the Knights of Columbus than those of Jean de la Valette, but still….Indeed researching the historian was in this instance nearly as engaging as his own research.  Sire is a theologically arch-conservative Roman Catholic vehement in his hostility to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.  Some years after the publication of this authorized history, the Grand Master of the Sovereign Order of Malta felt obliged to suspend its author from the brotherhood on account of  controversial attitudes expressed by him in a subsequent book about the current pope, Francis I.  I have not seen the book, but there is perhaps a clue in its title: The Dictator Pope.  Ah, Combattants de la paix!

 

 

Conversations

Walter Savage Landor (1775-1865)

            One of the things that keeps living languages alive is their accommodation of linguistic change, one feature of which is semantic change, that is, change in the generally accepted meanings of words.  In our tongue the process is particularly robust, and there is not the damnedest thing grumpy old English professors can do about it—except, of course, write grumpy blog posts.  If you frequently use dictionaries—as all intelligent readers do (a group necessarily including readers of this blog)—it is a good idea not merely to take notice of definitions.  Quite as informative, often, are etymologies.  These days any reader with a smart phone can have pocket access to the entire Oxford English Dictionary, the Rolls Royce of word-books, and thus, in effect, can read a mini-history of any word in our mother tongue.  Change being an immutable feature of the Heraclitean universe, if you will indulge the paradox, even dead languages undergo semantic change.  Imagine how Cicero would respond to a query as to whether one could find his declamations on Catiline'a conspiracy on video.

            So I am definitely on board with semantic change.  I also recognize the reality that the change is likely to exhibit ethical decay.  It was with more imagination than linguistic science that Sir Walter Raleigh derived the word world from wear-olde, that which “groweth worse as it groweth older.”  But many ordinary words like boor, knave and harlot began life without pejorative connotation.  Right now I am worried about the moral fate of the word conversation, which in its common usage means “oral exchange of sentiments, observations, opinions, or ideas.”  A crucial part of this definition is exchange.  Within the last few years I have noticed—first in academic-speak and then in the speech of ordinary mortals—a new meaning of the word.  We are getting more and more important conversations, long-overdue conversions, national conversations, and conversations we absolutely need to have.  In recent weeks I have participated, sort of, in several such conversations having to do with race and race relations in America.  They have varied considerably in quality.  The best of them were lectures, the less good harangues, but  none of them was a conversation—not if a conversation involves the significant participation of at least two people.  We may regard them as “imaginary conversations,” though not of the sort to which I now turn.

            Consider dialog(ue), another English word apparently yearning to breathe free.  The obvious meaning of this word is an oral exchange between two speakers.  I recently have noted that if an important conversation is important enough it may require that dialogue be turned into a verb.  “We have to sit down and dialogue about this.”  This usage may become common, though for the time being “dialogue” still retains a literary and more specifically theatrical suggestion.  But a good deal of ancient literary dialogue, including that of the drama, is not exactly what we would call conversation.  Imagined dialogues have more prominently been the vehicle of “important conversations” about politics, law, ethics, and religion.  Think about Plato, Cicero, and Boethius for starters.

            For dialogue you will recognize as actually conversational, you may have better luck with modern authors.  My latest delivery from the Library of America included three volumes of novels by Elmore Leonard, one of several recent authors I had thus far neglected.  The precision with which he captures the way certain Americans talk to each other is astonishing, though not less so than the ingenuity of his plots.  But only one author known to me actually built a literary career on imaginary conversations.  For that is the generic title—Imaginary Conversations—of several volumes of dialogues written by Walter Savage Landor.  There are many people for whom the name Landor (1775-1865) may be new.  He is, in my view, among the most important of little-known British literary figures.  His biographer Sidney Colvin, who in his youth knew him,  put it thus: “Few men have ever impressed their peers so much, or the general public so little.”  Landor was a brilliant man of enormous energy, and a very remarkable classical scholar, a large portion of whose poetical compositions were in Latin.  He was an advanced political thinker and a wellspring of personal virtues sometimes concealed by rebarbative impulses that repeatedly brought serious trouble upon him.  He was kicked out of various distinguished places, such as Rugby School, Trinity College, Oxford, and (in a sense) his family home and England itself.  He was a passionate supporter of the oppressed peoples of southern Europe, first the Greeks smarting beneath their Muslim Ottoman occupiers, then the Italians abused by their own petty Christian tyrants left around from the Middle Ages.

            He knew many of the giants of the English literary world over the course of a very long career.  (He published his last book sixty-nine years after he had published his first.)  Many of his most productive years were spent abroad, especially in Italy; and it was there in the 1820s that he undertook the enormous work of the Imaginary Conversations.  Years ago by luck I came into possession of the great edition of Landor’s English works, ten of the sixteen volumes of which are devoted to them.  He throws together unlikely conversation partners from many ages and civilizations, though the first he ever published (1823) featured Englishmen personally known to him: the poet Robert Southey and the great classical scholar Richard Porson.  The subject of their conversation was the poetry of Wordsworth—presumably his early poetry, given that Porson died in 1808.

            One imaginary conversation of particular current interest is that between the British parliamentarians Samuel Romilly and William Wilberforce (vol. 5: 126-138) supposedly in the first decade of the nineteenth century.  Both of these men, and especially Wilberforce, were animated by reforming zeal, and among the most burning issue on Wilberforce’s mind was the suppression of the slave trade, which (as knowledgeable European statesmen knew) was by constitutional arrangement to cease in the United States in 1820.  European slavers knew they had better make hay while the sun shined, incurring the disgust as well as the bitter opposition of reformers.

            I must say the slightest word about Landor as a poet.  One specialty of his was the four-liner, a kind of poetic epigram.  Two of those written in old age as he faced the abyss are likely to impress any reader in a similar situation.  The most famous, the supposed testament of an aged philosopher, goes as follows:

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife:

Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art:

I warm’d both hands before the fire of Life;

It sinks; and I am ready to depart.

The image of “warm[ing] both hands before the fire of life” is a beautiful statement of the enthusiasm with which he had thrown himself into so many causes, controversies, loves and labors.  And that now waning fire is the occasion of another of his mini-masterpieces, a strangely one-sided “conversation” the full meaning of which is perhaps clearer to the eavesdropper-reader than to the poet-participant.

Death stands above me, whispering low

I know not what into my ear;

Of his strange language all I know

Is, there is not a word of fear.