Academic Vintage

                                                                     Cassiciacum

            In the year 386 the young Augustine rusticated for an extended period with various friends and family members at a large country house at Cassiciacum, a bit north of Milan.  There he spent a good deal of time praying, reading, writing and discussing books and their ideas, often al fresco, walking along the field paths or seated amid the shade of the vineyards.  This was one of the more consequential vacations in western cultural history.  I can’t go into all that now, but I can confirm the reality of literary seminars conducted in vineyards—a feature of the story I had been inclined to regard as poetic license, along with his sitting under a fig tree to read the Epistle to the Romans—because I just participated in one.

 

            On Saturday last, chauffeured by two good friends from New York, we made our way to the Unionville Vineyards in Ringoes, N.J., where the son and daughter of our recently departed friend and mentor, the great Dante scholar Robert Hollander, had arranged a Dante seminar in memory of their father.  There were I suppose about twenty-five of us, some family members, but mainly old students of the maestro and alumni of his own legendary summer seminars taught for many years in a Tuscan castle.  Our leader was Dr. Frank Ordiway, one of his brilliant students of the 1980s, and a great expert on medieval Italian writers and the Latin classics.

 

                                                      Unionville NJ

 

            The Divine Comedy is a long poem (about 14,000 lines) divided into three long sections, one devoted to each of the “three kingdoms” of the imagined afterlife—Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Heaven (Paradiso).  These long parts are called in Italian cantiche (singular, cantica.)  Each cantica is subdivided into smaller units called cantos, of which there are a hundred in the whole poem—thirty-three in each of the two latter cantiche, and thirty-four in the Inferno, with the very first canto acting as a kind of introduction to the whole poem.  As you can see, a canto’s average length is about 140 lines.  There is a vast body of secondary criticism devoted to Dante, especially in the form of essays that are meditations upon or explications of one of the hundred individual cantos.  Frank chose this mode; the particular canto of his choice was the thirtieth of the Purgatorio.  We began in the Hollander fashion with a viva voce reading of the whole canto, both in Italian and in the English translation.  The Italian reader, Jennifer Borghi, who holds joint American and Italian citizenship and has lived for years in Italy, is an opera singer to boot; the English reader was Katherine Charles, an English professor at Washington College.  The high level of the bilingual elocution was a harbinger of Dr. Ordiway’s presentation and the student discussion it stimulated. 

 

            In my experience people are likely to make one of two mistakes in reading Dante.  The first is to assume that you can simply sit down and read his poem as you would a newspaper op ed or a detective novel.  You can’t, at least not with pleasure and comprehension.  The second is so to quail before the “otherness” of the poem--with its elaborate and perhaps fantastic structure, its huge and promiscuous catalogue of historical, biblical, and mythological personages, its relentless literary allusions, its obscure historical references, and the strangeness of its religious ideas—as to give up in despair.  It was Mark Twain who defined a great book as “a book everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” This is another way of saying that good reading, however pleasurable, sometimes involves real work.  I am ready to guarantee that you really do want to read this poem—but you could probably use some help.

 

            Dante certainly needed lots of help himself.  I refer to Dante the literary character, the first-person narrator of the poem, a man lost in a dark wood, up the creek sans paddle, as the story begins.  Fortunately three heavenly ladies, aware of his situation, conspire to rescue him.  What he needs first of all is good guidance—moral and literary—and so a guide is enlisted.  Who could be more qualified to lead a befuddled Florentine through a Christian epic than Virgil, the greatest poet in the pagan Latin literary tradition?  Well, lots of people, you might think, but you have to get used to surprises in this poem.  By historical misfortune, Virgil himself lived “in the time of the false and lying gods”.  Tough luck.  He is eternally doomed to the Underworld, suburban Hell, so to speak, Hell’s high-rent district, a place without the more sensational torture chambers, but also entirely without hope.  Yet he can guide another toward a goal that he himself could not achieve.

 

 

            There is a difference between leading toward and leading to, a difference dramatized in the canto carefully chosen by Ordiway for our discussion.  Virgil apparently can get Dante no further than 62.5% of the way toward the Beatific Vision, by my reckoning.  In the thirtieth canto of the Purgatorio Virgil abruptly disappears, and his A-Team replacement, a heavenly lady named Beatrice, takes over.  It is hard for a reader not to find cruelty in this passage.  By this point in the poem Virgil has saved Dante’s bacon more times than a reader can remember.  He has taught, guided, comforted, encouraged and literally carried him through intellectual and physical terrors nearly impossible for us to grasp.  Virgil now simply vanishes from the poem.  Dante is given all of six lines to express his distress—a distress for which he is immediately reprimanded by his new and superior guide.  Onward and upward!  Ultreia!

 

        So there we were, seated in a vineyard in a wide circle of folding chairs, thinking and talking about all this.  In speaking of the suddenly absent Virgil, Dante the pilgrim had called him “the sweetest of fathers.”  We were gathered at event convened by a son and a daughter to memorialize their distinguished father.  In Germany, where they virtually invented the modern Ph. D. degree, scholars reverently referred to their doctoral supervisors as “Doctorväter,” doctor-fathers.*  I have heard the leader of our seminar use that term of his old teacher, as I myself have used it of mine.  Analogies are comparisons in which some elements are alike and some unalike; but I believe all of us there grasped the particular poignancy of an extraordinary passage of poetry that invoked at once the sadness of irreparable loss and the promise of continuing vitality offered by great poets and their great interpreters for generations yet unborn.  All of us gathered there in that grassy circle were aware that we had had to say goodbye to a trusted guide and mentor.  But no more than Dante himself had he left us comfortless.  There was a whole warehouse of happy memories; and we were after all reading our text from the bilingual text of the Divine Comedy "in a verse translation by Jean Hollander and Robert Hollander.”  It was a considerable dantisa of the seventeenth century, John Milton, who perhaps said it best.  “A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”

 

 

 

*In the contemporary scene the term should be recognized as parental rather than exclusively paternal.  There are of course  doctor-mothers, one of the most notable being Beatrice, Virgil’s supererogator.  On that one, Dante was approximately seven hundred years ahead of the Pope.  

 

 

The Literary Life

 

Among the social issues that have become prominent over the last few months, especially in the wake of the “Black Lives Matter” movement, have been those relating to crime and punishments, policing and penology.  Such terms as “mass incarceration,” “the new Jim Crow,” “defunding the police,” and many others have become part of a common vocabulary by no means limited to activists of the progressive movement.  But I have also been bemused by developments in the literary world.  Literary intellectuals have played a huge role in shaping public attitudes, at least elite public attitudes, on such questions.  For example a little book published by Victor Hugo in 1829 (The Last Day of a Condemned Man) has been credited with starting the long, slow eradication of the practice of capital punishment in many parts of the world.  There now seem to be new developments on this front.

 

            In 1981 a career criminal named Jack Abbott published a very successful book entitled In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison.  The “beast” of the title was a metaphor for the machinery of incarceration that in one form or another had controlled most of the thirty-seven years of Abbott’s miserable life up until that point.  The crimes that had put Abbott in prison were numerous and varied, but once incarcerated he had put a capstone atop them by murdering another inmate.  His literary career was most unusual.  He had been discovered, aided, promoted, and sponsored by the literary superstar Norman Mailer.  Abbott had learned that Mailer was working on his own extraordinary account of crime and punishment, the book that became The Executioner’s Song.  This is his genre-bending true crime journovel about Gary Gilmore,  a murderer with a profile strikingly similar to Abbott’s.  Both men were incarcerated in Utah, and Gilmore would become the first American to suffer capital punishment after the supreme court reinstated it after a legal hiatus.  Abbott had written to Mailer to tell him that he (Abbott) would be a better source about the actual gritty circumstances of prison life than Gilmore himself.  Mailer went for this, adopted him as a kind of demi-monde protegé, engaged in correspondence with him, worked for his early release, and played a major role in the publication of his letters.  Six weeks after being paroled, and the very night before a review of In the Belly of the Beast appeared in the New York Times, Abbott stabbed a young man to death at a Greenwich Village eatery: a review to die for, so to speak.

 

                                         Normal Mailer with press clipping

            Abbott’s groupies naturally included some Hollywood celebrities, notably Susan Sarandon.  The aggrandizement of authorial criminals and thugs by the cultural elites has its own history, part of which I have touched upon in one of my books.*  I called it “chain-gang chic” in imitation of Tom Wolfe’s wonderful title Radical Chic of 1971, an account of Leonard Bernstein’s famous fête for the Black Panthers.  Jack Abbott was a brutal sociopath and a proven menace to society, but his gratuitous snuffing out of a promising young life received a strangely muted condemnation among the intelligentsia. The post-homicidal reviews did have more reservations about the writing.  On the whole people seemed more inclined to criticize Mailer.  So far as I know, Abbott suffered no reproof from his publisher, Random House.  Only a successful wrongful death suit by his victim’s family kept the killer from profiting handsomely from the book’s healthy sales.

 

            Mailer died at eighty-four.  Philip Roth was ten years younger than Mailer and died at eighty-five, thus extending the rarely acknowledged New Jersey dominance of American letters by a whole decade.  It is now Roth who has become obliquely central, so to speak, to the cultural crisis of literary criminality.

 

            Not that there is the slightest suggestion that Philip Roth did anything criminal.  He was a really great writer and, some of his friends continue to maintain against mountains of plausible published evidence, also an amiable chap.  I never met the man.  We have no criminal statutes against vanity or self-regard, or none should scape whipping; but one may still regard his near obsession with his reputational legacy as extreme.  No one is more likely to be aware of the importance of the big literary biography than a big New York writer, and Roth was the biggest.  His strategy was to select a biographer to his liking, and to privilege this person with exclusive access to a mammoth archive of carefully preserved documents, many of them unique, and to make himself available for innumerable lengthy interviews with this person alone.  The resulting book would necessarily have an unchallengeable depth and authority.

 

            A biography of such a major literary figure achieved under such circumstances had a very good chance of bringing its author both fame and fortune.    One supposes that many a writer would have liked to toss their hat into the ring.  In the end the person graced with the assignment was Blake Bailey, a one-time schoolteacher and seasoned literary biographer of high reputation.  Published by Norton, Bailey’s door-stopper sized Philip Roth appeared to the generally expected high praise a few months ago.  According to Cynthia Ozick in a lead review for the Times book supplement, it is a “a narrative masterwork both of wholeness and particularity, of crises wedded to character, of character erupting into insight, insight into desire, and desire into destiny.”  I haven’t read the book—but, Wow!

 

            Yet with the buzz about the book, the trouble started.  Me Too for Bailey too.  Women came forward—that is the canonical somber phrase—women came forward to accuse the biographer of sexual misbehavior in days of yore.  This was not trivial stuff, especially as some of it related to his time as a teacher of young girls.  But so far as I know none of the charges came supported by contemporary police reports.  Bailey has denied all accusations vehemently and categorically.  He remains entitled to a theoretical and high-minded presumption of innocence; but this is one of the circumstances in which fireless smoke is rare.  Norton, the publishers of the book, nearly a guaranteed best-seller and money-maker, did something extraordinary.  They withdrew all support for it, cancelled plans for future print runs, and announced the title would go out of print.  It makes me feel better about their merely having remaindered two of my own titles!

 

            This is a remarkable cultural development.  So far as I know no reader of Plutarch, Seutonius, Vasari, Casanova, or Boswell had implied definite moral requirements for a biographer.  Probably a good thing, too.  Remember that Jack Abbott stabbed a man to death on the eve of a glowing Times review that his publisher, Random House, happily used to boost the sales of his book.  By rights this should have nothing to do with the reputation of Philip Roth, who has been dead for three years.  Not too much happens “by rights” these days.  I don’t know whether “sex-obsessed” is a fair characterization of Roth’s fiction, but he sure put fellatio on the literary map.  Many of the charges of swinishness raised against him—and they are many—relate to alleged misogyny and sexual boorishness.  One of the chief hostile witnesses, if I can call her that, is his long-time girlfriend and short-time wife, the actress Claire Bloom.  Concerning Roth’s attitudes toward women and behavior with them, her memoir of their marriage is pretty devastating and unfortunately very convincing.  The sea of troubles that has swept over his biographer is also plashing up over the memory of the dead author.  Nasty as it is, the suspicion that Roth may have chosen his biographer partly in the knowledge, belief, or hope that a like-minded masculist would have a more indulgent attitude toward certain recurrent patterns of his life than would the neo-Puritans has been aired.  To fret about what one’s biographer will say is a rarefied worry reserved for those few expectant of biographies.  To them we may cite the noble opinion of Cicero: fame is the shadow cast by virtue.  But as literary biographies get longer and longer, I would hope that a reader’s stamina in slogging on to page seven hundred might be regarded a sufficient demand.  Conducting a preliminary moral investigation of the biographer’s biography can surely be left to the realm of supererogation.

 

           

*The Anti-Communist Manifestos, pp. 149-150.

 

Eça de Queirós

 

                                                                  J.-M. Eça de Queirós (1845-1900)

            I am facing a serious decision with regard to my Duolingo Portuguese course, which I first reported on some months ago and have been following with a fair degree of attentiveness since.  The circumstances are unusual.  My original aim was to move beyond my semi-mastery of the highly Latinate Renaissance language of Luis de Camões in order to be able to attempt some modern authors.  For years, teaching Chaucer I was focused on helping students look backward through their contemporary English to understand an earlier form of the language.  Linguistic time travel is usually retrograde in this sense.   Here the task has been very different—that of an Elizabethan schoolboy wanting to read Henry James or William Faulkner, perhaps.  This is a somewhat perverse approach, but it has pretty well worked—pretty well.  I deduce that most of the people using Duolingo are young folks, who are principally interested in achieving a fluency sufficient for the corporate offices and discos  of contemporary São Paulo.   Such students understandably might have a greater interest than do I in video games, running shoes, speed dating, electronic gismos and other such topics as loom large in the “literary” materials provided by the on-line course, a series of increasingly demanding mini-stories, very good, engaging, and amusing of their kind. 

 

            Needless to say these are not Henry James, but I think, perhaps arrogantly, they have been enough to send me timorously off on my own.  It is probably rare for an octogenarian literature professor to be making his first discovery of a really great novelist who has been dead for more than a century, but that is what I am doing.  By more or less general agreement the great Portuguese novelist of the nineteenth century was José Maria Eça de Queiroz (or Queirós after orthographic reform), who died at the age of fifty-five in the year 1900.  So with considerably less equipment than that possessed by a Brazilian elementary school student I have undertaken to read a novel by perhaps the greatest writer of a modern language currently spoken by about two hundred and fifty million people.   And what a novel!--The Relic (1887).

 

 

            The plot of The Relic is brilliant but pretty simple.  The financial future of a worldly young man named Teodorico Rasposo, an orphan descended from a once grand family, is riskily dependent upon a hoped-for inheritance from the elderly maiden aunt who has raised him and whose cloying, ostentatious, and formulaic Catholic piety he  hypocritically imitates in hopes of staying in her good graces.  In 1875, when he learns she may be contemplating leaving her fortune to a religious order, he takes a desperate action to impress her with his religiosity.  He undertakes a pilgrimage to Jerusalem on her behalf with the aim of securing a precious religious relic: in the event a DIY Crown of Thorns!  Eça de Queirós was himself a kind of Teodorico, not an orphan but a bastard child without notable worldly prospects

 

            There is a major tradition in early Spanish prose fiction of the picaresque novel.  The pícaro is a bad-boy, anti-hero type, a scamp, an attractive scoundrel whose outrageous escapades engage the reader in a kind of narrative schadenfreude.  The greater Teodorico’s ethical outrages, the greater the reader’s enjoyment.  Eça toys with this tradition and exploits its comic  potential, but his intellectual concerns are serious and contemporary.  Both as an artist and an “ideas man” he seems to me the peer of predecessors and contemporaries to whom he was sometimes considered even superior: Dickens, Zola, Flaubert, Tolstoy.

 

            The Relic is in a certain sense an anthology of narrative genres.  I have already mentioned its allegiance to Hispanic picaresque tradition. Eça’s comic range, however, includes the subtle as well as the thigh-slapping.  The satire, though mainly directed toward the stultifying conventions of Iberian society, reaches out in many directions.   Teodorico’s unforgettable travel companion, an erudite German archaeologist named Topsius, is one of those who would peep and botanize upon his mother’s grave and the pedantic quintessence of modern Teutonic science.  As the story of a pilgrimage to then exotic parts, it is also travel literature of a high order.  The Jerusalem it describes, as that depicted more famously by Pierre Loti some years later, is a sad and grubby Ottoman outpost in the unfriendly desert, little more than a watering hole and a souvenir factory.  The novel would be highly satisfying if it did no more than present the reader with several vivid character placed in convincing dynamic relationship, but it has and achieves higher ambitions.

 

            The extraordinary modernity of the thought of Eça de Queirós is revealed in an utterly unexpected passage of narrative experimentation at the center of the book.  He has to be described as a realist—as real as Flaubert, as real as Zola, and a good deal realer than Dickens.  But in the midst of the novel, at what one could expect to be the culmination of the “travel plot,” he suddenly abandons Thomas Hardy for Jules Verne.  One does not know whether to describe what happens at the center of The Relic as science fiction, time-travel, or authorial mental breakdown.  Suddenly the picaresque travelers find themselves, jokeless, in the Jerusalem of Jesus of Nazareth—in fact at the time that the capital trial of Jesus of Nazareth is to be conducted.  And just as the Jerusalem they visit is not that city lauded in the psalms and centuries of Christian hymnody, neither is the Jesus on trial the man-god of two thousand years of Christian theology.  It is at this point that The Relic became for many conventionally minded conservatives a deeply controversial work of blasphemy rather than simply a racy comedy.

 

            By the middle of the nineteenth century the countries of the Iberian peninsula were long since imperial has-beens, politically moribund, intellectually feeble, culturally stultified.  In both the Roman Church in its most reactionary forms continued to wield oppressive cultural power amid great wealth.  For many, little seemed changed since the time of Voltaire, who had memorably treated Portugal as a bastion of obscurantism, bigotry, and the Inquisition.  As they sadly surveyed their native wasteland, men like Eça de Queirós sought their inspiration abroad: Germany for science, France for art, England (where he lived for several years) for political liberalism.  They often adopted explicit anti-clerical positions.  I want to work on this more, but I already am pretty certain that he intended his extravagant, fictional life of Jesus to contribute to a scholarly tradition that was shaking traditional European  fideistic Christianity to its foundations.  This work had been done not so much by Darwin or natural scientists as by theologians.  In 1835 a German pastor, David Strauss, published his blockbuster The Life of Jesus Critically Examined.  This demythologizing biography, in its English translation by Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), had enormous influence in England.  In the Portuguese novelist’s youth the French historian and patristic scholar Ernst Renan published a yet more popular Life of Jesus in 1863.  And at least one like-minded radical Italian journalist, Petruccelli de la Gattina, had produced a model in fiction, a sizzling fantasy biography called The Memoirs of Judas (1867).

 

            My method of approach borrows from the Latin-teaching techniques of Renaissance Jesuits.  There is more than one English translation of The Relic, but the best is by a fine Hispanist, Aubrey Bell, who first published it in 1925.  I read this through carefully and keep it close at hand.  After that is the slow business of collated paragraph after paragraph, with frequent consultations of the Novo Michaelis Dicionário.  Duolingo has given me a surprising and probably false confidence about basic linguistic structure, but the lexicon is overwhelming.  Eça de Queirós has an enormous vocabulary, and his realism does not eschew ambitious lyrical moments.  His world is one of the horse-and-buggy (and the camel back) across a large ocean from the coffee shops and rock concerts of Rio.  But even with all the barriers of time and water it comes across fresher than The Pickwick Papers, fresher and a good deal funnier.  And it does take one’s mind off coronavirus.

José Maria Eça de Queirós, The Relic: a Novel, translated from the Portuguese by Aubrey F. G. Bell, preface by Harold Bloom

Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2012

ISBN 978-1-933227-35-1

 

 

 

 

 

 

All the Buzz

 

 

            I had little difficulty in choosing this week’s topic, which was in fact nearly inevitable.   It was all the buzz around here, and it had already been bugging me for several days when over yesterday’s breakfast table Joan excitedly pointed out a terrific article in the “Science Times.”  It had the possibly misleading title “Your Invitation to Party Like It’s 2004”.  She read most of it to me aloud.  The supposed partygoers were “seventeen year” or “Brood X” cicadas rising by their millions from the warming earth just as their parents had done in 2004 and their grandparents had done in 1987 and their great grandparents had in 1970—the first year in which the big red-eyed bugs had come to my attention.

 

            The past week around here was already one marked by certain events of parochial interest.  In addition to the attenuated excitement reported in my last post the period included my eighty-fifth birthday, a family gathering to observe it, and the first restaurant meal and first “in person” religious service (al fresco, of course) I had attended in living memory.  Several millions of flying, chirping, staggering, creepy-crawling, messily mating hyper-bugs showed up to help us all celebrate the easing of pandemic restrictions.  The “millions” is of course an extrapolation.  I can attest to no more than several thousand in the immediate vicinity of my front and back doors.  But as I write this within an enclosed room in an enclosed house I can hear the unceasing hum of  what must be a truly vast chorus.

 

            The story of the cicadas is the story of our greatest literature, though presumably a few hundred thousand years older than the invention of writing.  The first words of the great medieval romance of Tristan and Iseult are these: “My lords, if you would hear a high tale of love and of death, here is that of Tristan and Queen Iseult…”  If you don’t have Anglo-Norman romances at your fingertips, think of the “Liebestod”, the final movement of Wagner’s treatment of the same story.  Denis de Rougemont wrote a once famous book (Love in the Western World in its English translation) explaining the inescapable connections between eroticism and death, but you can save a lot of time and just look at the cicadas.  Love and death are about all they do, and that very briefly, if you don’t count seventeen years of preliminary and subterranean root-sucking.

 

            Gardeners may of course from time to time find evidences of their generally hidden existence.  Occasionally in turning over a spadeful of garden soil I have discovered a pasty colored wingless thing without visible carapace that you might at first mistake for an oversized slug.  These are called nymphs—very sexy name.  But Nature’s clock is ticking and when warm weather arrives you begin to see not merely the fledged cicadas but the little holes in the earth from which they have emerged.  They do fly, but rather awkwardly.  They appear to favor the creep,  and to judge from the hundreds that make their way to our new patio, they are partial to warm, flat stone.  But they are very thick as well in certain shrubs and, especially, in the trees in which they elect to deposit their eggs.  One such tree is the large old oak in our front yard.  I reported in an earlier post the planting of some young trees at Richard and Katie’s place in Kingwood.  We now fear that planting seedlings in the seventeenth year might not be such a great idea!  The egg-layers seek out “pencil sized” twigs according to the forestry gurus.

 

our oak tree

 

            The most evident traces of the cicadas, their abandoned semi-translucent shells or body-masks (exoskeletons), are rather ghoulish.  The insects land especially on vertical wooden surfaces such as tree trunks or wooden furniture or house sidings, wriggle free, and leave the exoskeletons behind, often in apparent defiance of gravity.  The strength of the grip of the tiny claws is nearly incredible.  I have repeatedly cleared the patio with a powerful leaf-blower, which has sometimes been insufficient  to dislodge them from their imperceptible purchase on the flat bluestone!  Then we accidentally learned a more drastic way of clearing the field.  On Sunday we had a belated birthday lunch on the patio, and my granddaughter Sophia and her boyfriend Raymond brought their dog Bambi.  Though the most friendly, mild-mannered, and unaggressive  thoroughbred you’ll ever encounter, Bambi really went to town on the cicadas.  I can only hope she didn’t have any tummy trouble on the ride home.  I believe the protein content of these flying worms is not insignificant, and I hear reports of a rise in their consumption by humans.  It probably would not take too many incidents to make a rise.  Once in the spring of 2004, at the X-bugs’ last appearance and shortly before my retirement, I was walking one day along the back of the building housing the Daily Princetonian.  A group of student journalists, many of whom I knew, were cavorting about; and one of them called me over.  He had a challenge for me.  Would I dare eat a cicada smeared in heavy chocolate sauce?  How could I lose face before my own students?  So I chomped down.  It was really good—tasted sort of like chocolate.  But one such feast is perhaps sufficient for a lifetime.

 

            According to the “Science Times,” their survival strategy is primitive but effective.  They simply reproduce in such extraordinary quantities that there are not in the world enough dogs, cats, rodents, birds, undergraduates, motor vehicles, or size twelve shoes to gobble up, smash, or squash any number of discernible statistical significance.  They do have some serious threats, not all of them fully understood.  There seems to be a mystery about their significant decline on Long Island, for example, though one probable cause is ecological change in the botany, especially an increase in invasive species.  In Princeton they have been more numerous in long settled parts of the town, where it has been many years since bulldozers dug out basements and house foundations.

 

 

            My first experience of the cicadas took place in 1970, when I was one of the ceremonial marshals in the Commencement ceremony.  These were revolutionary times—the Kent State massacre had taken place at the beginning of May—and the emphasis was on Revolution.  One of the honorary  degree recipients was Bob Dylan, then twenty-nine years old but long since a cultural superstar and anti-war “icon”.  There was a very fancy outdoor lunch thrown for the dignitaries on the sumptuous lawns of Lowry House, an elegant historical mansion used to house the President of the University.  Unfortunately the cicadas also found the ambiance agreeable.  The first course, already on the tables when guests took their seats, was a rich gazpacho.  Several of the bowls had been further enriched  with a drowned or flailing cicada.  One soldiers on.

 

 

            Bob Dylan later wrote a song about his experience at Princeton.  It is called “Day of the Locusts”—errant from the entomological point view, but spiritually apt in other respects.  The song speaks of “the man standin’ next to me” whose “head was exploding” with potentially messy results for the narrator.  This is what we call poetic license.  To the degree it is possible to make historical identifications of products of the poetic imagination, this man was Neil Rudenstine,a senior administrator and the future President of Harvard.  It would in fact be hard to find a less flapable or explosive fellow.  Dylan is a genius and a great poet, but even Homer nods and “Day of the Locusts” is not “Blowin’ in the Wind”.  It is, however, the only work of a great artist for which I was present at the birth, and thus has a special significance for me.  Poor Bob Dylan.  Our birthdays are only four days apart, and I am ahead of him by a mere five years.  We were lucky enough to be able to have lunch on my actual birthday with a dear old friend, Dale Allen, of the Great Class of 1970.  Dale is a real naturalist and ecologist who spent his career with the Trust for Public Land in his native Florida.  He and his wife Karen had come up to New Jersey to visit some of her relatives, to bike around on a few interesting trails, and—of apparently equal importance—to see the cicadas.  As one of the graduates of 1970, he remembered both his classmate Bob Dylan and the X-brood of cicadas vividly.

 

 

Honoris Causa

 

 

            On Sunday last Princeton University held its two hundred and seventy-fourth Commencement ceremonies, which included a couple of minutes of personal fame for me as one of six recipients of honorary degrees.  Neither the honor of the event nor my sincere appreciation of it was tempered by the somewhat peculiar circumstances under which the ceremony was conducted.  Under the conditions imposed by the pandemic many colleges and universities have this year once again cancelled any large “in person” events of this sort at all, as Princeton itself had done in the spring of 2020.  The suppression of college Commencements is a serious deprivation imposed both upon students who have worked long and hard toward a challenging goal and for the parents and other well-wishers who have invested so heavily in their enterprise.  There are things for which Zoom  approaches some kind of minimal adequacy, but an American college commencement ceremony is probably not one of them.

 

            The improving medical landscape and the imaginative repurposing of our football stadium  allowed our institution to pull off what I thought was a pretty remarkable feat.  Some large number of people—I shall not hazard even an approximate count—were able to participate in a kind of no-frills, pared down, socially distanced,  in-person ceremony that, in my admittedly biased opinion, still retained sufficient elements of both its necessary dignity and its desirable leaven of light-heartedness.  The traditional venue for our Commencements is “Front Campus.”  That is the name for the lawn, over which are scattered several large trees, between Nassau Hall, the oldest building on campus, and Nassau Street, the town’s main drag.  This is a setting that nicely links Town and Gown, as Nassau Street is  a state highway, indeed a segment of the old Lincoln Highway, if anybody still remembers the name of our first intercontinental “interstate” of 1913.  Front Campus used to be a very suitable  venue for Commencements—when there were considerably fewer students in the college.  In recent years, between the cramped seating for the graduates and the packed bleachers set up for the spectators, the metaphor of the sardine can naturally comes to mind.  Or perhaps in the present circumstance, the petrie dish.  A less “distanced” communal space would be hard to imagine—perhaps a beehive or a bat cave.  I suspect that the projected increase in the size of the undergraduate body, though fairly modest, may mean the end of Front Campus Commencements altogether.

 

                                  Pre-Covid Front Campus Commencement
 

            I think that the “back yard” of Nassau Hall, a large open grassy space called Cannon Green, might offer long-term possibilities.  It is a big area with fewer trees, and another large-scale event of the Commencement period is already held there.  To accommodate the numbers for Commencement itself would at the very least require some architectural imagination and the probable acquisition of considerably more banked bleachers.  For a variety of reasons I hope that the football stadium does not become a permanent Commencement site, but it worked surprisingly well last Sunday.  A football field with its margins is a lot of space, and the large number of graduates, even conspicuously “distanced,” were far from exhausting it.  Out of precaution each graduate was provided with only two tickets for guests, most of whom were parents.  I chose my spouse and my daughter, the more senior and proximate of the two professors among our offspring.  The spectators, scattered in widely separated pairs around the huge, high horseshoe stands, gave something of the impression of the Greek front line at the Battle of Marathon as I imagined it as a child.  The principals donned their academic garb in the locker room of the football team and marched solemnly into the arena through the tunnel from which our gridiron gladiators are wont to rush forth to thunderous applause.  The “interpersonals” were ostentatiously chaste: the ethos of safe sex adopted to ancient academic ritual,  There was no shaking hands, let alone the normative back-slapping, hugs, and kisses.  The praxis of hooding of the honorary degree recipients—normally their big moment in the ceremony—was omitted altogether for the sake of medical prophylaxis.  When we got back to the locker room we were presented with bags containing our hoods along with our elegant diplomas.  All in all, the event was one of the more brilliant triumphs of improvisation that I have ever experienced.

 

 

 

 

 

                                              Covid Commencement

            The degree is “Doctor of Humane Letters,” a most pleasing title and one that closely corresponds to what I have been trying to do for all of my professional life.   It also has an explicit connection to Oxford University where, sixty years ago now, I completed three transformative years of study as a Rhodes Scholar.  “Humane Letters” is the English version of Literae Humaniores, the intensive honors course in classical literature, history, and philosophy at Oxford.  It was generally called “Greats” by its students—whether in reference to its content, its ambition, or the exertions required to follow it successfully I cannot say.  I should make clear that I myself did not pursue this course.  I was “reading” (as they say in England) English literature, and my literary interests were at the time of my arrival mainly modern, even contemporary.  But the curriculum of the Oxford English course forced its students into serious philological study and the reading of important works in Old and Middle English, subjects I had pretty well avoided in my earlier undergraduate career at Sewanee.

 

            Literae Humaniores is probably also the eventual source of our most common use of “humanities” or “the humanities” in English today.  The Latin phrase, which means roughly “the more human branches of literature” clearly implies a contrast with something that is “less human,” namely theology or “study in the sacred page” as they called it in the Middle Age.  This phrase emphasized that the basis of “theology” was not free-wheeling speculation but literary study, biblical interpretation.  Theology was the “Queen of the Sciences”, but humane studies, that is the Liberal Arts, were its worthy ancillaries.  There was a fine pre-Christian exemplar of this way of thinking in the Latin phrase for the totality of human thought: “all things human and divine.”

 

            The humanities, or “humane studies,” are founded in tradition—that is, in the appreciation and critical assessment of the legacy of cultural inheritance.  The informed appreciation of human experience has a vertical as well as a horizontal axis.  We strive mightily to understand the variety (or if you prefer “diversity’) of human experience in the world of our own day; but we also study with intellectual sympathy and honesty the vast cultural deposit of ages and peoples past.  The human race has existed for a very long time and in nearly unimaginable variety.  Our striving for perfection in our own times is not advanced by the cancellation, erasure, or willful neglect of the human experience of the past.  Humane practice has had a special home in our institutions of higher education—some evidences of which, trivial but not insignificant, are the funny vestments and Latin phrases one encounters in academic ceremonies.  In a moment in which the sustaining power of humane studies is being noisily called into question, to be honored for pursuing them over a long career is, well, a real honor.

 

Stone Yard

 

            Our house, a Sixties-Modern bungalow that might be described as “small box,” has a pretty pedestrian presentation on its windowless front or street face.  Its back wall, in contrast, has huge floor-to-ceiling windows with wide views of  a lovely, sloping yard down to an open field beyond.   We really feel we live on that side, the garden side..  For years, probably decades, we talked vaguely of enhancing this back side with a deck.  Then last fall we took tea with our friend Frank on his recently and professionally installed small bluestone patio.  Seeing it inspired Joan to take dramatic unilateral action involving uncharacteristic extravagance.  So just as winter was setting in she had Frank’s master masons install a patio here, and not all that small a one either.  They finished as real winter arrived, so we were for some months in the rather weird situation of having this new outdoor “room, ” available but unusable and snow covered as we awaited spring.  Spring did finally arrive,  though, and the patio has revolutionized our lives.  We have some bright annuals in flowerpots to doll it up a little, and we practically live there now, at least in sunny weather.

 

            In a sense our beautiful patio is but the capstone of a garden that, if it is distinguished at all, is more notable for its geology than its botany.   It is perhaps paradoxical that its finest features are a variety of rocks, but if you don’t have a green thumb you have to make do with a granite-colored one.  I really like rocks and I really like found objects; and since rocks are among the more easily findable of objects, the rest was destiny.  I decided quite soon after moving here that I wanted to construct a stone wall around the property’s  periphery.  You see some beautiful old walls throughout the local countryside,  The reason there are so many old fieldstone houses in the northeast is that the farmers of the colonies and early republic kept damaging their plows on big, squarish rocks as they were plowing their fields.   The topsoil of most of our state thinly covers huge masses of schist.  This stuff has a natural tendency to break along a quite straight edge, at least on one side, and often ends up in almost regular rectangular form, making it highly suitable for walls, canal embankments, and the exteriors of domestic buildings.  There is not so much agricultural plowing these days; but the rocks are still there, and are dug up in large numbers in almost any construction project..  I made a specialty  of shopping malls under construction.  The process sometimes requires displacing by dynamite and earth-moving behemoths a few hundred thousand cubic yards of lovely semi-ashlar rubble.  If you are quick, audacious, crafty, and in a pickup, you can get there before the big trucks haul it off to the stone-crushing machines,  And that is how I came by the wall that now surrounds most of our garden.  I began modestly—at first I intended only to put up a low, decorative border to the driveway in the front of the house—but I then fell victim to mission creep.

 

 

            I have a certain amount of difficulty in dating this Pharaonic  project of wall-building with tolerable accuracy.   It moved at a variable pace over a few years and involved the searching out, securing, transportation, and artistic repositioning of what I reckon at the very least to have been more than a hundred tons of Jersey field stone.   But since every single stone was gathered by me and lifted or levered into the bed of a pickup truck, my automotive history gives me one solid date: 1993.  That was the year I had at last to replace the 1963 gray-green Chevrolet pickup with a big maroonish Ford pickup, the first new vehicle I had ever owned.  By that time the project was seriously advancing, though probably not yet at the halfway point.  My Dad had had the  Chevy on his farm in Arkansas and it was already battle-scarred from its previous heroic service when I acquired it and drove it East around 1970.  What a truck!  It can claim a nearly parental role in the raising of three great kids.  This is not to disparage the Ford which, having enjoyed a comparatively gentler youth than the Chevy gave me loyal, uncomplaining service for more than a quarter of a century.  But it is now gone too, alas, alas, and I must spend my last days pickupless.

 

            Naturally I had been gathering other sorts of stones long before I began the wall.  The one of which I am the proudest, and which has a history worthy of its own blog post one day, is a tolerably handsome cast cement statue of St. Anthony of Padua.  It was in pretty good shape, if you overlook the decaitated Christ child.  We sometimes call this statue “Frankie” in memory of the iconographic ignorance of the delightful friends who once kidnapped him and held him by that name for ransom under the misapprehension that he was Francis of Assisi.  One trash collection day long ago (we were still living on University Place then), driving through a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of modest homes once mainly inhabited by Italian immigrants, I saw this statue thrown out at curbside.  I actually thought it was plastic, and thus would nicely supplement the plastic pink flamingos already campily adorning our yard.  It is, however, solid masonry.  It was about all I could do to lift it and stagger to the truck’s tailgate.  Just as I  got it there I saw that I was being observed with what I must call astonishment by a woman two houses away.  It was in fact Jeanne Stone, a formidable grande dame and spouse of the famous historian Lawrence Stone, my distinguished senior colleague.  Over the years we became good friends with the Stones.  The episode of my strange garbage collection was never mentioned.

 

 

            A couple of other stone findings are of particular interest because I was actually able to include them in the wall.  A good friend, once our neighbor on University Place, came by a rather macabre item among a miscellany of relics on his domestic property: part of a German grave marker.   The inscription in the marble is “VATER”.  God only knows where it came from or how it came to be where it came to be.  I was able to incorporate it into a garden seat which I created at one end of a length of the larger wall.  Above it I have a small statue, and this one really is Francis.   My son-in-law, an Iraqi Jew,  gave it to me—a fact adding to the cosmopolitan allure of this rustic corner of suburban New Jersey.  Francis and I are both fathers, though of different sorts,  Actually, I made a few of these seats, and have the materials for several more.  They have their story too.  The long pieces of slate forming the seat benches were once the treads in an old staircase going up the west end of McCosh Hall, where the English department is housed, on the Princeton campus.  They were ripped out and cruelly thrown into dumpsters.  They are noticeably worn down and smoothly grooved by the friction of the feet of thousands of students of several generations—very soothing to one’s bottom.