Mob Epiphany

 

It seemed like a good idea at the time.  Choosing Wednesday as blog day, I mean.  Middle of the week, a day fair and balanced, avoiding the tawdry extremes of a Saturday or a Monday, giving me the time to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest some recyclable Weekend Something on a slow news day.  So naturally the Barbarians arrived at the gates a few hours after posting time on a Wednesday, the Day of Epiphany.  The show they put on was so grotesque, so violent, so unaccountably unopposed, indeed so appalling in every way that I probably could have nothing interesting or novel to say about it in any case, but certainly not after every scribbler and talking head in the land had had a six-day-and-twenty-hours head start.  Yet it is too big an event to pass over in silence, even if my only contribution is some reflection on the shared opinions of the scribblers and the talking heads—two of their widely shared opinions in particular:

 

            This was a coup or, at the very least,  an attempted coup.

            This is not America.           

 

            Calling this violent but inchoate melee a coup is an insult to lexicography that, if uncontested, threatens to besmirch the reputation of all acts of violent and illegal seizure of power.  Real coups always begin with the capture or effective disruption of some important center of power, communication, or transportation.  Readers of Joan Didion may remember the American lady in A Book of Common Prayer who hangs out in Boca Grande, an imaginary Central American banana republic with a political culture we ourselves, after several near misses, have at last achieved in actuality.  One day she rushes to the airport to fly to Miami and get away from the latest coup, leaving the sardonic narrator to point out that if the airport is still open, it’s not a coup.  At first glance it might seem that the Capitol is indeed an important center of power, but think about it a little.  If the Viking, or the guys with the Stars and Bars or the one with the “Camp Auschwitz” T-shirt, were serious about power,  they wouldn’t be vandalizing Nancy Pelosi’s office or being photographed in boorish postures in the swivel chair of the President of the Senate.  They would go after power.  They’d be out in Silicon Valley arresting Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg.

 

            Read about the famous revolutions, coups, and putsches of history.  They all start with busting open prisons, capturing the post office, the telegraphy center, the telephone exchange.  Lenin, in one of history’s more unhappily consequential coups, seized the Smolny Female Seminary for the Education of Noble Ladies.  So it was perhaps fitting that among the first international expressions of Schadenfreude that came to my attention—including  solicitous inquiries from the Turkish Strong Man concerning the health of American democracy—was a sincere private communication from a friend in Paris.  He is an American ex-pat who teaches English at an institution very like Smolny, the  Maison d'éducation de la Légion d'honneur at Saint-Denis, one of the prestigious schools established by Napoleon for the female offspring of the copious numbers of dead heroes supplied by his endless military adventures.  How was my friend to explain all this to his highly intelligent girls in this elite institute, many of whom, despite a shared national default anti-Americanism often only skin deep, were actually secret admirers of our great nation with its punk rock and its fecund invention of emojees for text messages?  The poor best I could come up with was to point out that at least we didn’t kill any Carmelites.

 

            Yet what killing there was was more than enough.  Some unknown rioter killed a cop with a fire extinguisher.  A policeman shot a woman armed with wild conspiracy theories and an American flag.  These are hardly laughing matters, but some things are sad beyond tears, a thought that brings me to my second refutation: “This is not America.”

 

            Partly because of a demographic background that leaves me with Trump-supporting relatives and some partial understanding of the way they see things, and partly from weariness of long years spent in a  burgeoning illiberal academic monoculture, partly because I am a genuine democrat, and one well practiced in being  on losing sides, I was more disposed than many were four years ago to cut our new president some slack.  Though I could not vote for the man, I thought that, duly elected, he deserved the time and opportunity to show us a competence, or normal human empathy, or simple fidelity to some recognizable and consistent political principles of the sort that perhaps cannot shine through the fog of a chaotic and partisan election campaign.  But disillusionment came rapidly, and was repeatedly reinforced by the President’s improper,  boorish, or dangerous behavior, which has not stopped short of incitement to sedition.

The riot was a complex event animated by varied and incompatible motives, extending over several hours.  Despite the fact that only a minority of the huge crowd gathered before the Capitol actually attacked, vandalized, and looted it, one can understand the press’s reserve in  withholding their customary “mostly peaceful protest” label in the journalistic take that has already jelled.  No such violent action in history has been uncorrupted by the madness of the mob, though not a few have been retrospectively  sanitized in the history books by partisan or romantic sensibilities.  At this point no clear path to national moral rehabilitation is discernible, but we might start with some wise advice from Mark Twain.  “When in doubt tell the truth,” he says. “It will confound your enemies and astound your friends.”  I suppose it was inevitable such a shocking event would require some pious prevarication from our President-elect, many other political leaders, and a large choice of pundits and “influencers.”  We certainly got it.  This is not America, says Joe Biden.  We are better than this says Kevin McCarthy of the minority party.  This is not the only America, nor is it the essential America.   But it certainly is America.  Our much vaunted “diversity” extends to the ethical realm.   Our history of violence, including political violence is pretty appalling, from the French and Indian War to the latest drive-bys in Chicago.   We are better than this usually. The unpleasant but necessary task of the moment is not to seek refuge in the rhetoric of our aspirational best but to face with honesty the bitter truth of actual gross turpitude.  Cheap grace is no more efficacious in politics than in religion.  No cross, no crown.  There are three parts to penance, the first non-negotiable being genuine contrition, which requires real soul-searching, and the second confession, requiring truthful speaking.  One wonders whether our Vice President, whose toadyism endured so long and so heroically through four years of humiliations, could clearly hear the raucous chant of the flak-jacketed patriots echoing through the Capitol corridors: Hang Mike Pence!  Did there flicker through a sensibility so well versed in the Bible that awful question: What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world if he lose his own soul?  And to have made the bargain for a short-term lease on a house in the Naval Observatory!  Do Vice-Presidents read Shakespeare?  Or even Hilary Mantel?  “Had I but served my God with half the zeal I served my king, he would not in mine age have left me naked to mine enemies.”

 

            Meanwhile in my little locked-down Covid world it is once again Wednesday, and foolish consistency, the hobgoblin of my little mind, requires me to post this essay rather than to wait some hours to see whether the President is impeached.  Looking further ahead, I foresee missing the Inauguration next Wednesday in similar fashion.  But anyone seeking commentary on these subjects is unlikely to be in want.  I shall try to search out some eccentric topic more in the spirit of Gladly Lerne.

 

 

Dilemma (cont.)

 

            What is often called the “race problem” in America is a whole anthology of questions, some of them more tractable and others less so.  In 1944 the Swedish economist, Gunnar Myrdal, a Nobel laureate, who was commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation to provide a dispassionate foreigner’s view of our uniquely national sickness, used a more appropriate word in a massive and highly influential two-volume study entitled An American Dilemma.   Questions and problems sometimes have relatively simple answers or solutions.  A dilemma always signals arduous, uncomfortable work, and resolutions that are not without friction.  Though certain racial issues that became prominent in public action and discussion during the pandemic spring and summer are no longer the invariable daily fare of the press, they have not gone away and they cannot go away unless and until they are addressed with a determination and an honesty neither easily found nor comfortably pursued.

 

            Speaking of honesty, it is not easy to avoid the two most flagrant topic of the moment.  The first of these is the publication of President Trump’s astonishing telephone conversation with Georgia’s Secretary of State.   From my point of view the economic and cultural decline of my native country may be regarded is an additional sadness of my old age.  Its moral and political degradation as revealed in what sounded like a presidential supplement to the John Gotti tapes comes closer to tragedy.  Then, just as I am publishing this post, there comes news from that same state of Georgia of a very different tenor.  But the shake-up of the Senate will hardly lack for public commentary far better informed than my own.  Persevering with the topic already contemplated, I found that once past the banner headlines in Monday’s newspapers, I could find at least two items of relevance to our racial dilemma, one a breaking news story, the other a cluster of letters relating to an earlier news story continuing over many months.

 

            A front page article announced that “Lawsuits Target a Covid Fund Meant to Help Black Residents”, with a subhead elaborating: “A Cry of Discrimination over the Economic Aid in Oregon”.  It has been widely reported that African-American and Hispanic communities have been “disproportionately” affected by the coronavirus, the gauge of proportion being by percentage of the entire American population.  With this in mind, Oregon state legislators earmarked sixty-two million dollars (out of roughly a billion and a half total allocation) for the exclusive relief of “Black residents, business owners, and community organizations enduring pandemic-related hardships.”  One especially hard-hit group, throughout the country and necessarily through all ethnic groups, have been the proprietors of small businesses. The crisis has been acute in the alimentary sector, dealing financial devastation to the owners of or workers in restaurants, diners, cafés, snack carts, and so on; but of course very few economic sectors have been unscathed.  One does not require a Yale J.D. to sense a potential problem with the legislature’s plan to distribute public relief funds on an exclusively racial basis.  Indeed, you probably need that degree to avoid seeing a problem.  It is inevitable that such a plan would meet with prompt opposition, as it has.  It is utterly irrelevant from the legal and constitutional point of view that the presenting plaintiffs are “one Mexican-American and two white business owners,” but the obvious sense of importance of that fact to the New York Times is probably shared by most Americans likely to read about it.  Less likely to achieve consensus are attitudes toward the justice of the plan or the appropriateness of the objections to it.  The admirable motives and good intentions behind the legislation can hardly be doubted.  But by the standard of “equal justice under the law” the initiative seems a non-starter.  To categorize it as an exercise in affirmative action, as the Times does, requires an understanding of that term far different from the one I have encountered in many years of discussing the college admissions process.   So, a dilemma.

 

            Another form of the dilemma dominated the letters section of the op-ed pages of that same issue, where several articulate readers  responded to an editorial that ran on December 26 entitled “Elite Schools Don’t Need to be Exclusive.”  The subject here is one I have written about before: the composition of the student bodies of great, selective public high schools in New York City, such as Stuyvesant and the Bronx High School of Science.  Admission to the schools is made on the basis of a single competitive examination in two broad subjects: the levels of competence and distinction in the skills of English language literacy (reading and writing) and mathematics.  No examination is an entirely adequate gauge of a student’s abilities and preparation to do advanced work at a high level; but this one is about as objective a predictor as I can imagine.   It reveals with some clarity a student’s potential for successful pursuit both of the  humanities and the crucial STEM fields.  It is not culturally insensitive to expect competence in our national language, which also happens to be the world language of learning.  But the problem is that a “disproportionally” large number of Asian-American students win places and only a tiny number of African-Americans do.  The remedy proposed by the Mayor and the Superintendent of Schools is to get rid of the admissions test.  All of the letters published recognized the scandal in the situation, but most of them also derided the speciousness of the mayor’s solution.  The retired principal of one of the schools wrote thus: “The mayor’s plan to remove academic admission screening for middle schools for at least a year does nothing to address the deficient preparation that too many Black and Latino students receive, and that is where our effort and finances should be directed.  There are no shortcuts.  Attacking entrance standards is simply a cover-up, concealing the financial and moral commitment the city has been reluctant to make.”  That devastating statement, particularly with regard to moral commitment, has broad applicability to the national scene.

 

            Whoever penned the title “Elite Schools Don’t Need to be Exclusive” apparently doesn’t know what the word elite means.  Or perhaps exclusive either.      The dictionary definition of elite in its nominal form is “a select group that is superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society.”  I presume that would characterize the Times’s  view of its own editorial board.  The adjectival form means “chosen” or “elected/selected”.  When Joe Biden was chosen as the Democratic presidential candidate, that action excluded twenty other people actively seeking to be chosen.  When the electorate gave him the presidency, it necessarily excluded Donald Trump from that office.  Because it is only in Alice in Wonderland that “everybody has  won, and all must have prizes.”  Any truly democratic system—that is, one that elects people by preferential choice—is necessarily an elite system.

 

            It is the natural impulse of the social mind to want to solve problems and the nearly invariable desire of the political mind to want to solve them as cheaply as possible with cosmetic applications or outright leger-de-main, which is French for the light touch as practiced by card-sharps and magicians.  Mayor De Blasio’s proposed solution to the admissions dilemma at Stuyvesant High reminds me of a legendary anecdote from an earlier age of train travel, partially founded in partial fact.  As the number of passenger lines proliferated in the nineteenth-century European rail system to accommodate an ever-growing ridership, so also did the number of fatal rail accidents.  Neither pedestrian nor equestrian travel was without its risks (consider the implications of the English word travail), but train wrecks could be very gory and cause multiple deaths.  Furthermore, train wrecks were a journalistic sensation and therefore a political problem.  If it bleeds, it leads.  Today a statistically rare air disaster is international news.  Meanwhile millions upon millions of uneventful flight miles are racked up every week, but that is not news.  In any event legend has it that in the Low Countries about 1900 a royal commission set up to study and solve the problem of frequent fatal train wrecks discovered that most fatalities occurred in the last car of the train.  The commission’s recommendation was simplicity itself.  Just remove the last car from all trains.  Problem solved.  But not our dilemmas.  Those will take unstinting hard work on the part of generations younger than my own.

The Zoom and the Tomb

 

            We just had an e-mail report from  an old friend of ours who moved to New Hampshire some years ago giving us a vivid report of his Christmas activities, which appear to have been composed of equal parts mud and Zoom. The first was caused by a marked warming period with steady rain falling upon, and rapidly melting, two feet of fallen snow.  The second was caused by Covid XIX.  (If the awful monarchs of history rate Roman numerals, why not other plagues?).  He had spent a good deal of annoying time hopping about on Zoom in search of religious services.  But he added this: “When I complained recently about Zoom to my 90-year-old friend in town, she said, ‘It's what we have just now’.  I hope that someday I can attain to her wisdom.”

 

            Well, me too.  We had a fairly Zoomed Christmas, as we have had a fairly Zoomed last half year at least, and I have griped about it a lot.  But  the remark of our friend’s friend has set me to thinking about just how helpful Zoom can be, as well as to try to categorize the functions for which it works more satisfactorily, and less so.

 

            In 1961 O. B. Hardison, an important literary scholar who died too young, and a one-time director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, published an important book entitled Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages: Essays in the Origin and Early History of Modern Drama.  It had long been understood that the medieval European religious drama (often called the “miracle plays” from their typical content or “mystery plays” because they were sponsored by the misters, or trade guilds) exercised a defining  influence in the development of the secular drama of the Renaissance, the Age of Shakespeare.  Specifically, the birth of modern drama is supposed to have occurred not in the stable in which Jesus was born but in the tomb in which his body was laid.  One of the liturgical embellishments of the Easter services was a little dialogue, slightly reshaped from the gospels, between an angel assigned to the burial site and the women (often called the Marys) who had come to visit the tomb.  The women, we may presume, were equally surprised by who was in the tomb (the angel or angels, Luke reporting two) and who wasn’t (Jesus).  The following colloquy ensued.  It is usually called the “Quem quaeretis trope” after the Latin of the angel’s first two words.

 

            Angel: Whom are you seeking in this tomb, O followers of Christ?

            Women: Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified, O heavenly ones.

            Angel: He is not here; he is risen, just as he foretold.  Go, announce that he is risen from the tomb.  Alleluia

  

                                                                             Two Marys and one Joanna
 

         

           

Here I must get a bit technical.  This little dialogue was supposedly performed against the background of the melisma of the final syllable of  Alleluia, the all-purpose biblical ejaculation of praise and triumph.  Melisma is the musical term for extending a single sung syllable over several notes.  You may not be familiar with the term, but you certainly have experienced the phenomenon in the great cantatas, grand opera, and Hank Williams.  Please pass the chee ee ee ee se, sort of thing.   As the singers extended the final -a-of  “Alleluia” over many notes, some monks performed the mini-play with the dialogue given above.  That final unemphasized vowel was pronounced with the neutral sound of -uh- that punctuates the oratory of poor public speakers.  Prefaced with a d you get duh, an international signal of idiocy.   The symbol for the vocalic sound in the International Phonetic Alphabet is ɘ, and its name is schwa.  I always wanted to teach a course entitled “The Western Drama from Schwa to Shaw.”

 

            Having squandered most of my allotted words setting up a bad joke, I must be brief in concluding.  Hardison went further in discussing the religious origins of the stage..  According to him, the Mass itself was a drama.  At the time I read the book that claim seemed to me a trope too far, so to speak, and I could not agree with it.  My experience with Zoomed eucharists has only confirmed my original judgement.  Any spectacle—that is, a thing to be watched, like a play, movie, or athletic contest, can be more or less successfully Zoomed.  Vital, communal, participatory and interactive events more complex than Face-Timed conversations are different matters.

 

            I well know, however, that there are differing opinions.  As I was pondering this topic there appeared in the Times an opinion piece by Esau McCauley entitled “You Can’t Meet God over Zoom.”  Though I was somewhat dubious about his title, probably the work of a newspaper editor, I was in general agreement with his drift.  But a few days later McCauley’s thesis was disputed by two correspondents in the letters column.  A Lutheran pastor thought that Zoom enabled an entirely new kind of spiritual experience for his small congregation, and a Jewish lady explained that Zoom sometimes allowed for the gathering of a minyan, the minimum number of congregants needed for a communal worship service, which sometimes proves difficult to round up in actuality as opposed to virtuality. 

 

            But if my belief is more than mere prejudice and a defensible rule of thumb, the exception proving it was a lovely Christmas Eve Zoom with Luke, Melanie, and their two youngsters in Montreal.  The Canadian border has at times during the pandemic been as forbidding and confining as the old Berlin Wall, and we haven’t been able to have tactile contact with this family for far too long.  So Joan and Luke contrived a customized “Service of Lessons and Carols,” structured around a four-part reading of the gospel Nativity legend distributed among the four adults, the parts interspersed with choral interludes from more or less familiar carols.  Both families gathered about a laptop and a piano, and simply dived in.  From what I have observed, only practiced professionals equipped with high quality earphones can achieve tolerable choral music on Zoom, and from the technical point of view our international warbling was a disaster.  But in fact most amateur carol sing-alongs are disasters, and this one was only a little further along the spectrum.  But we didn’t care a whit.  We were not trying to compete with the Trapp family.  The music was not the goal, but the instrument of achieving the goal.  Instead of being an unsatisfactory religious service, it was a triumph of family fun.  And after all the elderly friend of a friend in New Hampshire was certainly right.  Zoom is what we have just now.  So deal.

 

 

 

 

 

Great, Danes

 

                                                                            Borgen: the cast
 

            My most recent act of Covid escapism was a semi-binge on three seasons of the Danish political drama from a few year back, Borgen.  “Borgen” is a synecdoche (a figure of speech in which one uses the container for the thing contained, or in this instance a particular location for the thing that happens at that location), such as the “Quai d’Orsay” in Paris, or “Whitehall” in London, or “the Hill” in Washington, all of which denote governmental functions carried out in those places.  In its root Danish Borgen means “castle” or “fortress”, and here specifically the Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen, the seat of the Danish government.  If you happen to be a professor of Old English you will notice as well that the borg part has to be cognate with high German -burg and English -bury, as in Luther’s famous hymn Ein feste burg (“A mighty fortress…”) or in the place name Canterbury, “fortified place in Kent”.  In Romance countries you get castel-this and chateau-that, and everything-ville, because big buildings owned by important people were so often the nuclei of whole towns and cities. 

             Borgen deals with the fictional career of a fictional pioneering prime minister, Birgitte Nyborg.  Other major characters include her husband and two children, several parliamentary colleagues and adversaries, a couple of oversexed press agents, and various other newspaper and television journalists.

             The English language dubbing, on which I am of course dependent, is rather disconcerting, as the voices are a medley of British accents ranging from apparent natives of the Orkneys to the male lead’s Mick Jagger London mumble.  The use of the revolting verb shag is prominent, since for approximately twenty percent of the screen time somebody or other is doing it, though there is still more than the statutory use of the f-word in its general all-purpose meaningless adjectival senselessness.  The leading actor, Sidse Babett Knudsen, comes across as so mentally, morally, and physically attractive that I was smitten from the first moment.  Indeed, the writing, the plotting, the direction, and above all the acting in this series are of a very high quality.  For a long production in which there are many big roles, this is really saying something.  I strongly recommend it.

                                                                 Prime Minister with spin doctor

            For Americans the trouble with West Wing and House of Cards, the obvious models for Borgen, is not that they aren’t great TV serials, which they certainly are, but that you are likely to know just enough about actual American political life to be unable to ignore their lack of verisimilitude.  Since I know nothing of Danish politics, the boundaries of the plausible, and even the barely plausible, are much more fluid.  In fact, I have met few Danish people in either my actual or my imaginary lives.  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were already dead when I got there. And none of the only five  vaguely recent great Danes I have read or read about—Hans Christian Andersen, Soren Kierkegaard, Niels Bohr, Karen Blixen (aka Isak Dinesen), and my brilliant long-time colleague Hans Aarsleff--is a political  type in the conventional sense. 

             Denmark is not a world power, but an itty bitty little place with roughly the population of Washington, D. C.  As presented in Borgen, however, it is a very attractive place, big on intelligence, beautiful young people, social welfare, pork bellies.  The Danes have a multi-party parliamentary system with the usual problems and usual advantages.  It may be difficult to construct workable governing coalitions, the construction of which generally requires imagination, cooperation, and compromise.  But if one of the parties suddenly suffers brain death, it is not necessarily a national catastrophe.  Simply form a new and improved party.  People peddle about on bicycles except when shagging, and the political correctness quotient is off the charts. The government has a Minister for Integration, just in case, since most  the dislocated immigrants  seem to be brain surgeons,  though a few are merely academic PhDs.  On the down side, the Danes don’t seem to have gotten the word about smoking, and they sleep in their clothes a lot.  The chief executive lives in a little house without security guards, heats up her own TV dinners, worries about her teenager’s anxiety problems, has a cool British architect lover who designs bridges in Finland,  and she speaks in complete sentences in which subject and predicate are in invariable grammatical agreement.  Not exactly what you could call presidential.  You can absolutely believe that her political party is called “The Moderates”. 

            But Borgen is no mere rip-off of the Anglo-American political drama.  Though I have not found this in the few reviews I have been able to find, I think Borgen subtly aligns itself with an ancient Danish tradition.  I think most people know that Beowulf is a very old English poem, but they may not know it it is an old English poem about old Danes, effectively a piece of Danish literature accidently written in English.  The Danes show up in the poem’s third word:

    Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,

    þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,

    hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

    Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,

    monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah,

    egsode eorlas.,,

                                   which goes roughly like this:  “Listen up!  We have heard about the prowess of the leaders of the Spear Danes in days of yore, how the princes performed bold deeds.  Frequently Scyld Scefing (that is, “son of Scef”) seized the mead-benches of enemy forces, of many tough folks, and terrified their officers.”  This Scyld Scefing was himself a child immigrant who became the founder of a warrior society (hence the spears). In the poem his descendants are sometimes also called the Ring Danes (they loved the bling), also the South-, West-, North-, and East-Danes (which pretty much covers the waterfront of Denmark), and occasionally the Scefings.  The Danes were really rough customers in the old days.  If you don’t think it takes cojones to seize an enemy mead-bench, I invite you to try it for yourself.          

            Well, the action of Beowulf is set many generations after Scyld Scefing.  The current king is a wise and venerable senior named Hrothgar.  His borg is not a stone castle but a huge wooden mead-hall called Heorot.   In this mead-hall his warriors sit around on their mead-benches drinking mead, which is a highly intoxicating drink made from fermented honey—a drink that this blog cannot in good conscience recommend even in this festive season.   Beowulf is an epic, and in its way an immigration epic.  Hereot is under attack by a monstrous outsider, Grendel, who breaks into the borg of an evening to chow down on a few of Hrothgar’s thanes.  The Spear-Dames seem incapable of dealing with this invasion.  In desperation Hrothgar must turn to another foreigner, the hero Beowulf, who eventually quells not merely Grendel but Grendel’s even more ferocious mother.  I’ll grant you that the parallels are not exact.  There has obviously been considerable social evolution in Denmark since the days of Beowulf.  I don’t think that the Moderate Party had yet been founded in Beowulf’s time, for instance.  Yet I suspect that careful textual research would discover a pattern of subtle continuity.  

    In Borgen the widely bruited spiritual void of the modern Scandinavian welfare states, classically illustrated in the gloom of Bergman's Seventh Seal, is clearly on display.  The series appears to search for redeeming redress in a strange quarter: journalism.  Newspaper reporters and TV anchors form a thin red line of heroes mounting a lonely defense of Truth, Beauty, and meaning in life.  But then it may be only natural that a bunch of television writers and producers should stake a claim for the unique nobility of their trades.  One of the great scenes in Beowulf is the bragging contest.

                                                                   Beowulf meets Grendel's mother
 

       

 

 

Women in Black

 

Christmas approaches.  This will be my last homicide for the indefinite future, and that’s a promise.  But you need to know that in 1909, in Essex County NJ, three weird sisters, the impoverished daughters of an old, ruined Southern family named Wardlaw, were indicted on charges of having committed a ghastly and incomprehensible murder.  The signature feature of their flamboyantly eccentric behavior—labelled a folie à trois by the fascinated metropolitan press, which for a year kept the case headlined on its front pages—was that all three were never seen wearing anything but heavy, enveloping black mourning dresses with full veils.  This meant that they were seldom actually seen at all.  The semi-starved body of a young woman, Oceana Martin Snead—the daughter  of one of the sisters (Caroline Martin) and the niece of the two others (Virginia Wardlaw and Mary Snead) lay dead in the water of a bathtub at the top of an old rented house in East Orange, a nearly empty house in which there were only a few sticks of furniture.  She had been dead for at least twenty-four hours when her aunt Virginia Wardlaw, apparently the unfurnished house’s only other inhabitant, tried to summon the coroner.  According to the aunt, poor young Ocey (as she was called)—discouraged by the death of one young child, the necessity of having to commit a second baby to a charity hospital, and the disappearance and presumed death of her husband (who also happened to be her first cousin)--had drowned herself.  This was also the gist of a supposed suicide note at the scene.  This note seemed a bit fishy to the authorities at the time, given the fact that there was in the house no paper and neither pen nor ink.  Their suspicions were not allayed when in the course of investigation in various parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan through which the Wardlaws had left a trail of unpaid bills for short-term rentals, they uncovered dozens of similar suicide notes, written by one hand, signed by another.  They also discovered that Ocey’s young life had been lavishly insured by her relatives, that the Wardlaw ladies indeed were surrounded by a veritable cloud of witnesses of conveniently insured dead associates, and that the bizarre transactions of their peripatetic lives constituted a pattern of elder-care anticipating that in  Arsenic and Old Lace.  (It turned out that their thing was actually morphine.)

 

 

            Many years ago I was involved in recruiting for our department the eminent feminist scholar and general all-around great lady Sandra Gilbert, co-author of a book much admired then and now, The Madwoman in the Attic.  Readers of Jane Eyre will at once recognize the reference to Mrs. Rochester, née Bertha Mason, the demented, incendiary wife of Jane’s brooding heart-throb, kept under wraps in permanent house arrest on the top floor of creepy Thorncroft Manor.  Not good mental health therapy, perhaps.  The “madwoman” theme has been brilliantly developed by feminist literary criticism.  But Virginia Wardlaw demonstrated the dangers of letting the madwoman out of the attic.  Death by fire, death by water: take your choice.  Virginia’s own lawyer declared her mad, and her ministerial brother tried to save her from the trial of being tried by having her committed instead.  But she took charge, went on a hunger strike and died before the Law could arrange either her punitive or her protective confinement.  The State of New Jersey took the other two sisters to trial.  At the last minute Caroline Martin plead guilty to manslaughter, while Ocey’s surviving aunt got off on a legal technicality, there being no such thing as an accessory to manslaughter.

 

 

Oceana Martin Snead, in better times

 

            There are limits to the amusement to be found in eccentricity, which often enough masks grave distress.  What I know of this matter comes from a delightful book, and I have adopted the tone of its lighter moments.*  However, there was much, much more to the story, some of it tragic; and Ms. Wardlaw’s tragedy played out on several levels: mental illness, the upheaval of war, the inequities of a Man’s World.  For there is definitely a feminist dimension to the Wardlaw disaster.  All three women, dependent upon male lawyers, were patronized offensively by court and counsel alike.  They explicitly made the point, made also by other female defendants, that an all-male jury could hardly be regarded as a “jury of their peers”.

 

            The sisters’ stuffy lawyers told them to keep their mouths shut.  “I want to talk,” one of them said to eager newspaper reporters,  "but I am like one of the six hundred who rode to their death through obeying orders.”  This was, of course, an allusion to Tennyson’s famous poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” the subject of which is a horrendous military snafu in which Lord Ragland’s Light Cavalry brigade of six hundred men was mistakenly sent against an inappropriate artillery target at the Battle of Balaclava (1854), resulting in nearly forty percent casualties.

 

Into the Valley of Death

            Rode the six hundred...

Honor the charge they made!

Honor the light brigade!

 

Her point was that her lawyer’s gag order was stupid, but had to be followed.  “I do not mean that we are surely going to our death.  We are innocent.”  My point is that in 1909 she could assume that any reporter, and possibly most Americans capable of reading a newspaper, would pick up on on a citation of the British poet laureate.  It was a different age.  In a moment of whimsy I once wrote those final two lines in very small print on the memo line of the payment check for a steep monthly PSEG electric bill.  The result was a phone call from a puzzled employee at a “payment center.”

 

            The most interesting thing I learned from this bizarre criminal case was incidental.  It concerns the history of American education, particularly the education of young women.  All three of the sisters were well educated teachers.  One of them had had a distinguished career in the New York high school system—a statement far from meaningless in 1900.  Before they left the South, all three sisters had been active in the organization and administration of two highly successful “female seminaries”.

 

            I was only vaguely familiar with this term, the modern synonym for which would be “girls’ school”; and to the limited degree I had ever thought about the subject at all, I suppose I imagined them as rather trivial “finishing” schools for the daughters of the upper middle classes.  So they were, to some extent.  The curriculum normally included such things as piano, needlework, freehand sketching, painting on velvet and other domestic skills thought socially necessary for a family matron and the mistress of a household, the destiny presumed for their pupils.  But among the six thousand female seminaries active in the United States on the eve of the Civil War, many also taught Latin, Greek, French, geography, mathematics and laboratory sciences.  Many were well equipped with scientific instruments, for which there was a bull market beginning in the 1850s.  In New England, not a few of them were hotbeds of Abolitionism and therefore, almost necessarily, of the nascent movement for Women’s Rights.  Obviously, this was not true in the same way in the South, but many schools there were also “progressive” in the context of the time.  Two of the sisters had with considerable success organized and nourished excellent schools in Murfreesboro TN and in Christiansburg VA, near Roanoke.  The Soule Academy in Murfreesboro, the flagship educational institution of vigorous Tennessee Methodism, was of ante-bellum founding and boasted a strong science curriculum.  The Montgomery Academy in Christiansburg had flourished under the headship of a Mrs. Oceana Pollock, after whom the bathtub victim had been named.  In both instances it would appear that successful Wardlaw enterprises  were finally overthrown by the deranged interference of the mentally ill Virginia.  Blood was thicker than water, and the Wardlaws stuck together.  Education was one of the limited number of  arenas in which women were allowed to make significant public social contributions in the old South, and the sisters unquestionably made theirs.  In the bankrupted and reactionary climate of post-Reconstruction, the Wardlaw sisters, like so many others, found it much more difficult to continue to do so.  Like so many emigrées from other national cataclysms, the French or Russian Revolutions, for example, they had been cast into a hostile world which they could face only when shielded by the heavy black garments of eternal mourning and inconsolable loss.

 

*Norman Zierold, Three Sisters in Black (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968)