Salernes

         

In premeditating the possibility of posting a blog essay from a rural hideout in southern France, I had anticipated imaginary difficulties of a technical kind.  Nothing of the sort has arrived, but I do face a problem of a different kind—at least if I want to deal with a contemporary personal situation.  For what has made the past week so delightful for us—slow-paced relaxation beneath monotonously sunny skies, featuring a lot of gab with old friends—is not in itself a topic with a lot of intrinsic narrative pull for the general reader.  I suppose I had vaguely imagined the possibility of a sophisticated journalistic piece of comparative pandemicology in which I delineated the prevailing but subtly differentiated ways in which the Covid crisis is affecting two modern, industrialized nations one on either side of the Atlantic.

 

            That would involve actually knowing something about those things of course.  Since the principal strategy we have adopted, in common with most other sensible people, is to avoid all possible empirical experience of Covid, I actually know very little about the granular scene in America and virtually nothing about it here in Provence, where we have been hiding away from it, and most other things, on principle.  However it is possible to conduct some primitive research even from the hermetically sealed interior of a limousine speeding along the highways.  On our way from Nice to Salernes we saw a good deal of graffiti, especially in and around Draguignan, encouraging us to “de-mask” and to recognize vaccination for the sinister violation of our liberty that it really is.  So it is clear that some of the unhelpful hostilities of our own national experience flourish here as well.  There is no (enforced) masking in interior spaces, though many people at an open market in the town square did in fact wear face-coverings.

 

            We did not come here to spend time at weekly markets, however.  Our situation is closer to that of those gentlefolk in Boccaccio’s Decameron who flee the Plague ravaging the city to the comparatively safe rustication of a rural village.  Our Fiesole is called Salernes, a modest inland town in the Department of Var.  Our host, at whose commodious country house we are staying, is a very old and dear friend from Oxford undergraduate days more than sixty years ago.  After a long and varied career as father in a remarkable family, captain of industry, entrepreneur, volunteer executive in higher education, and cultural philanthropist, he now spends most of his time in a beautiful historic house in Sussex.  But he has several times welcomed us to Salernes for late summer visits, often with other guests as engaging and interesting as himself.

          

            This year’s house-party has had its special character, partly because it has been for all of us a long-deferred respite from the pandemic, and undertaken by all only with some difficulty and a little apprehension.  For a time, travel restrictions for the three countries involved—France, Great Britain, and the United States—seemed to be in weekly flux.  Adding to the sense of a movable feast is the fact that people have come and gone at different times.  We have been as many as twelve, but are now down to six, and for our last few days will be but four—Joan and I, our host Andrew and his delightful partner Lee.  So the week we have already spent has had its variable rhythms, crescendos, climaxes, and diminuendos.  

 

            The classic literary mode for introducing groups of people brought temporarily and fortuitously together long antedates Chaucer’s famous catalogue of his pilgrim-narrators in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.  My smaller number perhaps more closely approximates what we memorably find at the beginning of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where the narrator and his auditors are old friends brought together in the confines of a cruising yawl—probably only somewhat larger than the paved veranda on which we have spent most of our shared hours, reading, eating, and above all talking.  The males in four of the six couples were classmates at Jesus College, Oxford, around 1960.  The other two men are the host’s younger engineer brother, who has lived for many years as an ex-pat in Cleveland, and the husband of one of the host’s business colleagues back in the day.  The six women are conspicuous for a wide range of professional and artistic experience and achievement.  So there has been a good deal of shared experience and ancient friendship, seasoned, however, by some serious diversity of cultural attitudes and political views.  In academic terms there were some people more oriented toward the sciences, and some to the humanities.  Thus we have had ample raw materials for the most conspicuous pleasure of our stay, its nearly unceasingly rich conversations.

            As you know, the word companion derives from Latin words denoting a person with whom you break bread.  And it is not without significance that a minor genre of our literature—Table Talk—has preserved the meal-time conversations of such worthies as Dr. Johnson, Coleridge, and G. B. Shaw.  Many of our conversations, while less pontifical than these classics and hardly aspiring to publication, fall into this genre.  This means that the pleasure of conversation was often compounded by the pleasure of French food, much of it produced locally in the world’s finest market gardens.  And of course one must not forget the French wines, most of them local and of modest price but ample supply.  As lubricants of significant conversation, they are probably unsurpassed.  As is well known, and immortally expressed by A. E. Housman, “…malt does more than Milton can, to justify God’s ways to man”.

 

            As a group of vaccinated elders—several of us even boosted--we have been following a regime of shared or communal isolation.  It does not satisfy anybody’s strictest rules.  There are the comings and goings, and of course a minimal amount of masked commercial contact, though less even than at home.  But we have been very cautious.  A medical expert whom I trust has assured me that it is “virtually impossible” for anyone—vaccinated or not—to contract the virus while properly masked in the open air.  The open air of Provence is particularly appealing.  And although the two-hour lunch and three-hour dinner have been prominent features of each day, there have been many other pleasures.  We have had some nice country walks, solitary or shared, and an occasional al fresco beverage in the town square.  Later today we are scheduled for the test that will allow us to fly home.  So that is the report to date.  We look forward to our final two days here.

   

 

            

 

A Temporizing Announcement

 

            This is not a blog essay two days early but a temporizing announcement five days late.  We are boarding an airplane tonight to fly to Europe.  Nice!  That is a place name, not an adjective.  We are reserving the adjective for the lovely country property about a hundred kilometers to the west of the airport where we shall join a small group of friends, most of them known to us for more than sixty years, in a subdued house-party, gastronomic festival, and continuous seminar punctuated, possibly, by a few carefully distanced visits to sites noted for their particular natural beauty, archaeological importance, or architectural interest.  You know what they say about old wines, old books, and old friends.  Well, it is all true.  Travel under the current circumstances is not to be undertaken casually or heedlessly.  Had we but world enough and time…timidity would be no crime. Boosted by our booster shots, numerous other careful pre-arrangements, and as much of the cardinal virtue of Prudence as we can claim, we set off with blithe spirits, but just a little edgily.

 

            For more than a decade I have been fairly fanatical about publishing a weekly essay here.  This has been a self-imposed task.  Neither of my regular readers has pressured me.  But doing so while traveling has sometimes required heroic efforts.  Dame Prudence is an anti-fanatic.  I don’t know what electronic resources I shall actually have during the next ten days, and nothing more may appear here until September 22^nd.  Maybe even later.  So, just to be prudent, let me wish you all a most happy ending to the calendrical summer of 2021.

Dead Deer

 

My daily walk, which actually does happen on some days, has a variable route along a wooded lakeside and old tow paths along the Princeton stretch of the Delaware and Raritan Canal.   It generally begins and ends by going through the woods, field, and lakeside path between my back yard and the northern abutments of the bridge that carries County Route 629 (Harrison Street) over Lake Carnegie.  Once across, there are inviting walking paths going in both directions and on both sides of the canal, which at this point runs parallel to the lake.  The very beginning of the walk (or the very end, if on the return)—that is, the four hundred yards or so between my yard and the lake—offers two possibilities.  There is an “official” path used by most strollers and wide enough for the groundsmen to use now and again when  bringing in their large mowers to trim the fields.  Fifty yards or so to the west and more or less parallel to the official path is a long, thin glade where the trees are sparse enough that one can easily make one’s way around and through them on the grass.  These are alternative pleasant routes to the lakeside, and the only motive to choose one over the other is a desire for variety.

 

            About a week ago, having exited by the glade, I elected to return by the “official” path.  This was after about three miles in hot and humid weather.  That is a little beyond the comfort zone of my enfeebled condition.  I was perspiring copiously and looking forward to a sit-down followed by a shower.  Three hundred yards short of my house I came upon a downed animal flailing in the middle of the path.  It was a pretty large doe, probably near her full growth.  There was no blood, and I could see no evidence of a wound or a broken limb.  It apparently had been on the ground for some time, and in its thrashings it had scraped away patches of hair right down to the raw skin.  Though obviously in bad shape, it was still vigorously kicking its legs, its sharp hooves clattering.  I was not going to mess with this beast.  Years ago back on the farm I had seen large downed animals, domestic as well as wild, recoup their strength, rise, and totter on.  I convinced myself that this was at least a theoretical possibility in this instance; so I simply kept my distance from the flailing flesh and continued the short distance home.  The experience was of course disconcerting, a discordant end to a wholesome walk, undertaken in the pursuit of good health, through rain-fresh woods.  However, I was able to put it mostly out of mind.

 

            I did not return to that spot until two days later.  It was under the same circumstances of returning from a walk, and by the same route.  This route was downwind from the spot at which I had encountered the stricken deer, and the sickly odor of death reached me well before I could see the remains in the path.   Anyone who has done much hiking in real woods knows the unwelcome smell of decomposing animal flesh.  Even small critters, squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, can cast off quite a stench.  When I got in sight of these large remains, the color of the russet-brown beast seemed to have been transformed into something paler, a kind of light beige.  It appeared as though someone had placed a tight-fitting cloth over the carcass.  The garment was knitted or woven.  You could see the individuated short segments of knitting stiches.  Except that the segments were undulating, many of them rolling down the curvatures of the beast’s back and belly.  What I was actually seeing was a seething mass of fat, moist,  maggots feasting on a rapidly diminishing deer cadaver.   The realization struck me suddenly with equal forces of shock and disgust—and disgust in its fullest old Latin sense, which goes beyond the mere recognition of a repellent yuckiness to suspect a kind of cosmic faux pas.

            There is a large deer population in our part of the state, as there is through much of East Coast suburbia.   It is in fact an over-population, encouraged by an abundance of food and a protection from certain difficulties and dangers of true wilderness.  The animals’ greatest enemy here is not the gun but the motor vehicle.  It is very common to see dead animals on the roads and highways.  The phenomenon is national, and the danger does not reside with the deer alone.  About two hundred people die each year in this country in accidents involving them.  Municipalities have to contract with animal control experts, or at least with some strong guy with a full-bed pickup truck, to remove the roadkill.  An infrequently used footpath through semi-private woods is not the same thing as a state highway.  So I was surprised a few days later, when I next passed, expecting to see a pile of polished bones, to find only tiny trace elements remaining.  There had been a clean-up.  I presume a neighbor living much closer to the scene had called the municipality.  But removing some animal remains could not resolve the disquiet which the episode had left me.

 

            The problem of reconciling belief in a just God (or even the operations of a godless but benign material universe) with the fortuities of observation and lived experience has a fancy name: theodicy.  Its classical literary expression in our western literature is the Book of Job, which, though a beautiful poem, is for most modern readers even less consoling than the Consolation of Philosophy.  Whether you regard the problem as philosophical or theological, it’s a big one that has disquieted thinking people for eons.  Goethe was only six years old when reports of the Lisbon earthquake upended his infant confidence in a providential universe.  That even now in legal language “natural disasters” are often called “acts of God”—events in which individual human agency plays no role, at least so far as the insurance company is concerned—is possibly disquieting.  From the point of view of the dead deer, was not its grotesque fate as much a natural disaster, and therefore “act of God,” as a great wind or a floodtide?  The subject of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” is the premature death of promising youth, one of the classic topics in discussions of theodicy.  “Are God and Nature then at strife?”—asks the poet, before anticipating in the poem’s most famous phrase the grim doctrine so many would find in Darwin’s yet unpublished theory of natural selection: Nature red in tooth and claw.

 

            I recognize that I am saddled with various old-fashioned ideas that strike most of my younger contemporaries as quaint at best or at worst, worse; but I hoped that I had progressed beyond the early Victorian period.  I walk for healthy recreation, and because I enjoy the freshness of nature even in its carefully contrived suburban preserves.  Must I adjudicate the ghastly maggot feast on which I stumbled in terms of a problem in nineteenth-century moral philosophy?  Are my interpretive options limited to “Nature red in tooth and claw” and a striking demonstration of providential order through the food chain and a recycling program vastly superior to anything on offer from the Waste Management Corporation?

Medici Monuments

 

 

Excitement, of course, is to be judged according to a sliding scale, but by what might be called the geriatric-pandemic index, the Flemings have had an exciting week.  We escaped.  We broke out.  We found ourselves in New York City not once but twice, enjoying ourselves thoroughly on both occasions.  The trips were of quite different kinds, but both were to upper Manhattan. 

 

            On Tuesday we went up to visit with an old and dear friend, Christine Stansell, and to have lunch with her and her companion at a place called the Café d’Alsace, on 2^nd Avenue, a nice and airy space with what seemed like acres of “social distancing” in which to savor our large pots of delicious moules marinières.  When I call Chris an old friend, I am going back to about 1970 when she was among the first class of Princeton women undergraduates.  We knew even then that she was destined for greatness, which she went on to achieve as an historian at Bard College, then at her alma mater and finally at the University of Chicago.  Among her admired books is City of Women: Sex and Class in New York 1789-1860.  She was an Ohio girl, but she came to love the city she wrote about and wanted to live there in her retirement.

 

            On Saturday we were in New York again, pretty much the same latitude but a tiny bit west in the longitude, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  We went there to see the big Medici show—an extraordinary gathering of Renaissance portraits of, or relating to, members of the famous first family of Florence.  This trip, too, came about because of a dear friend, another long-ago student and one-time colleague, Frank Ordiway.  Frank lives in Princeton, where he operates a highly respected private educational consultancy.  He is a classicist as well as a great expert on Italian culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and he has made a special study of the Florentine scene.  So we could not have had a more competent guide or, to use a possibly yet more appropriate term, cicerone.  And when you are driven from your back door to the Metropolitan’s parking garage in a spiffy blue Honda, you maximize gain while minimizing pain.

 

            I am by no means an expert on Florence.  But like anyone who has ever been there I love it.  I feel a little disloyal to Dante in saying this, but there is a statute of limitations on vicarious grudges.  The Medici have a rather lurid reputation among the general population.  It may have something to do with all the torture chambers, false imprisonments, assassinations, papal copulations, and that sort of thing.  I am reminded of Edward Arlington Robinson’s nifty stanza in “Miniver Cheevey”:

 

    Miniver loved the Medici,

                Albeit he had never seen one;

    He would have sinned incessantly

                Could he have been one.

 

    But to get to the exhibition within the Met, we had to go through some of the Sackler galleries.  Joan made an excellent point and a masterful analogy.  Just as it is necessary to distinguish between the Good Sacklers and the Oxycontin Sacklers, one must distinguish between the peccant and the pious Medici.

 

   

                                                         Mrs. Oliphant
             

             Pandemics have some slender silver linings.  I can’t remember another major Met exhibition so sparsely attended that you could actually see and contemplate the exhibits.  I learned a lot.  Until very recently my knowledge of early Florence derived mainly from commentaries on Dante supplemented by a magnificent but eccentric book called The Makers of Florence (1876) by the prolific Victorian novelist and amateur historian Mrs. Oliphant (Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant, yes, married her cousin).  Mrs. Oliphant ends with the late fifteenth century and Savonarola, while most of the “popular” Medici (popes, queens, etc.) came later.  The materials in the Met show are sixteenth century.  Yet Oliphant’s qualified view of Medici magnificence in general is perhaps sufficiently indicated by her judgement of Lorenzo (1449-1492): A man of superb health and physical power, who can give himself up to debauch all night without interfering with his power of working all day, and whose mind is so versatile that he can sack a town one morning and discourse upon the beauties of Plato the next, and weave joyous ballads through both occupations—gives flatterers reasons when they applaud him.  Ah, if only I could have been one!  The Medici were a large clan, and liked to name their males Cosimo, but the chief of these for art historians was called Cosimo I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany (1519-1574).  He is much on display in the Met.

 

            A young friend of ours, Billy Magnuson, a brilliant law professor in Texas and a reader and speaker of Italian, is in the process of publishing a book about the development of the business corporation through history.  One of his chapters is on the emergence of the Medici bank.  He asked me to read through that chapter in manuscript and make any “medieval” comments that might be helpful.  I was able for form’s sake to make one or two very minor suggestions, but mainly I was learning, appreciating in a new and revelatory way the extraordinary importance of the emergence of a money economy for modern cultural developments. 

 

            Historical “elites” are increasingly objects of discomfort and even scorn among historians, and especially of course elite historians.  It may be disconcerting that rich people are disproportionately prominent in our social, cultural, and political histories, but the explanations are so easy and so obvious that it seems to be obtuse to fret about it.  Holding a grudge against rich people of the Italian Renaissance is not particularly productive.  It would be easy to walk through those museum galleries full of portraits of the high and mighty and see little more than the heedless hauteur, self-regard, and naked power of early robber-barons.  That is, to be sure, one thing to be seen.  I saw it and was rattled.   But it is far from the only thing.  In the current cultural climate, anachronistic virtue-signaling across the centuries is becoming a recognizable historical genre.  The impulse to cancel, suppress, erase, abolish from mind and memory those things that we don’t like is a strange exhibition of the thirst for justice.  A verse of the revolutionary anthem called the Internationale pleads thus: Let us make a blank slate of the past.  That way of thinking has not had happy practical results.  The impulse of the museum is quite the opposite, an impulse to conserve, rescue and display for study.

 

 

            One of the stranger series of Medici portraits depicts aristocratic Italian youths in the personae of sacral figures—Saint Sebastian, protector against plague, John the Baptist, patron saint of Florence and harbinger of Christ.  One that is particularly captivating imagines Cosimo as Orpheus.  A lot is going on in what seems a rather spare painting.  The mythological Orpheus, who harrowed hell to bring back from death his beloved Eurydice, had been a “Christ figure” in Christian art since late Antiquity. But no simple moral allegory fits the treatment here.  Cosimo-Orpheus sprawls in an awkward position, holding the neck of his elaborate stringed instrument in his left hand while fingering its bow in auto-erotic suggestion with the right.  The head of a large mastiff hound, emblematic I suppose of the whole animal kingdom charmed by Orpheus’s music, forces its way insistently into the scene.  It is hard to know what all this may mean.  The portrait is the work of the Duke’s court painter, Bronzino, creator of one of the most disputed, and certainly one of the most libidinous paintings of the Renaissance.*  We may be mystified by the meanings and motives behind works of art that have come down to us from the remote past, but we must first marvel at the miracle of their survival.  Visiting museums has been among our favorite pastimes.  This was our first post-lockdown museum after well over a year of enforced recusal.  I regard that as a little allegory of resurrection all on its own.

 

*See https://gladlylernegladlyteche.blogspot.com/2020/10/appalachian-baroque.html

 

Gubernatorial Valedictory

 

 

            Andrew Cuomo’s resignation as the Governor of New York had a long news run these past two weeks, remaining competitive even in the face of Olympic autopsies, pending Afghan catastrophe, and Haitian earthquakes.  The achievement of catastrophe in Kabul finally got him off the front page.  The news concerning Mr. Cuomo varied from day to day.  First there was speculation concerning whether such a dramatic development as a gubernatorial resignation might, well, develop.  Then came the countervailing stories about how it couldn’t really happen and how it certainly would happen.  The governor’s chief of staff resigned, charges of unsisterly collaboration with the Man swirling about her head.  She had been “Cuomo’s Ghislaine Maxwell,” somebody said, referring to the intimate friend of the late Jeffery Epstein, alleged to have helped Epstein bed teenagers.  The governor’s firm denials that resignation ever could happen were followed within twenty-four hours by apparently definitive statements that it would indeed happen, that it had in a sense already happened, though it would not take effect for another two weeks.  But the stories continue: insider revelations of desperate last-minute pleas and ploys, postmortems before the issuance of the death certificate, and attempts to find out something about the highly obscure lieutenant governor, who will soon be elevated.                                                                                                                                                                                       This is not an essay about Andrew Cuomo, however, only a meditation on certain aspects of his situation.  I am not a resident of New York, nor a knowledgeable observer of its politics.  I have to admit that my generally unfavorable view of the departing governor, who always struck me as arrogant and self-regarding, is of long-standing.  Many people, including the dispensers of Emmies, seem to have admired his nearly daily coronavirus pep talks; but I thought they were long-winded and hectoring.  And that voice!  Furthermore, as a democrat I have an aversion to our family political dynasties that began when John Adams sired John Quincy Adams.  A country with a population of over three hundred million probably has more competence and talent spread widely around than that found in a few favored families. That said, I would choose to avoid joining in the pile-on and offer some general observations about the curious contours of political cancellation.

            I am hardly the first to note that there is a certain capriciousness that operates here. Grabbing at third rails does not always prove fatal to Democrats.  Consider the following two cases. You will remember that Senator Al Franken was photographed simulating lascivious intent toward a woman asleep in an airplane.  This was a theatrical, performative mime designed to represent to others, beginning with the photographer who was recording it, that Al Franken found a woman’s boobs desirable and arousing.  It was crude and it was sophomoric and to anybody even slightly distanced from the moment it certainly failed to amuse, but it was not an actual sexual aggression.  Harassment may be difficult to define, but at a minimum I should have thought it required actual and direct tactile and/or verbal contact, or at least concrete material signs (unwanted bouquets of roses, murdered pets, slashed tires, etc.) of which a victim is made consciously aware.  Nonetheless several other women had their say, and Franken was out.  The drop in the average IQ of the Senate was mere collateral damage, the price of purification.

            But then we have another photogenic politician, Governor Ralph Northam of Virginia.  In the hierarchy of political criminality race generally trumps gender.  So it certainly looked as though Northam’s goose was cooked when a photograph of him from his college days, in which he appeared pigmented as an artificial negro, turned up out of nowhere—nowhere meaning the research files of his political enemies.  I will not go into any of the actual ambiguities of “blackface” because nobody else did.  People simply called for his resignation.  Northam abased himself with apologies in a series of intermittent struggle sessions.  Right thinking people continued to demand that he go.  This was two and a half years ago.  A few are demanding it still in a ritualistic sort of way.  It is not going to happen, because there are big differences between Cuomo and Northam, quite apart from their offenses.  One minor difference is that there were some people who liked Northam.  But the real reason was that the election of a Democrat in Virginia was regarded as halfway between miracle and revolution, and the Democratic Party wanted in no way to jeopardize a hard-won foothold which it hopes to secure and expand.  There hasn’t been a Republican governor in New York since Pataki, and there may well never be another one.  Under these differing circumstances it is possible that similar loudly proclaimed high moral principles will lead to dissimilar concrete results. 

            Mr. Cuomo’s theory that he is a victim not of his own grotesque behavior but of changing social rules in the sexual arena is perhaps a small step toward righting the serious imbalance of trade in cognitive dissonance amassed by Republican leadership during the Trump presidency and its aftermath.  "In my mind, I've never crossed the line with anyone, but I didn't realize the extent to which the line has been redrawn. There are generational and cultural shifts that I just didn't fully appreciate."

            If there has been an evolution of mores in in these matters, surely it has been in the opposite direction to that posed by Mr. Cuomo.  That is to say, social relations between the sexes have become ever more relaxed and permissive, with a tone ever more “liberated”.  In our country and many others this trend has been noticeable, and well noted, since the end of World War I, which is to say for a full century.  Don’t take my word for it when you can consult the testimony of the genius sociologist Cole Porter.  He wrote “Anything Goes” in 1934, two years before I was born.  “In olden days a glimpse of stocking / was looked on as something shocking, but now, God knows--anything goes.”  And he added another verse of special interest to literature professors: “Good authors too who once knew better words,/ now only use four letter words/writing prose, anything goes.”  Too true.

 

Cole Porter

            The goalposts have been moved?  The line has been redrawn?  The rules have been rewritten?  Mr. Cuomo seems to suggest that according to some unstated rule of the good old days of his youth, any big shot man was entitled to feel up any female target of opportunity he might come upon.  But surely no normal, decent person of either sex or any party can have believed that then or thinks that today.  To the extent there has been a rule change, it has been among journalists rather than politicians.  In JFK’s day you simply didn’t write about off-topic stuff like that.  The media engines of excess mentioned by Cole Porter are “those little radios.”  He knew nothing of our social media which leave no stone unturned and no slug or elephant bug beneath the upturned stone unrevealed or without its thousand “likes”.  Let it all hang out, or in this instance, crawl out.  I don’t know that anything goes, but Cuomo is going.

Inscribed History

 

            Last week I was bragging about being able to unload about two hundred books, slightly relieving the distressed shelves of my library and slightly relaxing marital tension, with what was generously described as “a good first step”.  The essay was a self-indulgent ode to bibliographical virtue.  This week you get the palinode—a fancy word for “retraction” or in politic-speak “walking back.”

 

            I had gathered the books I purged last week more than ten years ago when I was writing The Anti-Communist Manifestos.  This was a work of literary history unlike anything I had done before.  There was no single reason I undertook it, but a decisive influence was my accidental discovery of a writer previously unknown to me, Richard Krebs, a German immigrant who wrote in English under the name of Jan Valtin.  Only a few experts respond to the name of Jan Valtin today, but in 1941he was America’s best-selling author, and the controversy swirling about him and his blockbuster book (Out of the Night) remains an important episode in the curious history of American Communism.  Valtin, as I will call him, had been a Communist agent working in the German merchant marine.  He may also have been a Nazi agent.  He entered America illegally in the mid-1920s, was convicted of armed robbery in Los Angeles in 1926, and served time in San Quentin before being deported in 1929.  He returned to America, again illegally, a decade later, jumping ship in Virginia and making his way to New York with the intention of making it here as a writer.  His success in achieving that goal was astonishing, but fame brought its own problems.  One of them was that he was an enemy alien and a convicted felon who was in flagrant violation of American law simply by being here, but I will say no more of that for a moment.  The problem as he and his publisher saw it was this: how quickly could he put together a best-selling sequel to Out of the Night?

 

 

            The only thing he had in the ice box, so to speak, were some random sketches he had published in the San Quentin prisoners’ literary journal when he was a stripling youth.  These had been assignments in an extension writing course offered by the University of California, and taught by a high-minded and socially engaged journalism professor.  The pieces are not very good, and the book Bend in the River is more or less, well, blah.  It pretty much flopped.  But it is a genuine Jan Valtin book, and the copy I was about to give away is inscribed by the author.  This is not unusual.  He was lavish with his authorial signature.  But I had forgotten that this copy was signed, and I decided that I must keep it.  And since I was keeping it, maybe I’d better actually look at the inscription: To Mary E. Gallagher in appreciation of her gallant and selfless friendship.  Jan Valtin.  March 12, 1942.  Hmmm. 

 

            I then did something mad.  I presented the name “Mary E. Gallagher” to my friend Google.  As expected, there were approximately three million hits for approximately four hundred people named Mary E. Gallagher.  But I didn’t give up.  I then tried “Mary E. Gallagher Jan Valtin.”  For this you get precisely one suggestion, but it made my day.  If the general history of radical movements in twentieth-century America should be something that interests you, I suggest you do the same thing and I promise you the same results.  For what shows up is a substantial typed document, the transcript of a long interview given by Mary Gallagher to a researcher in an oral history project at the University of California on December 18, 1955.*

 

            Mary Gallagher would have at that time been 72.   Her immediate ancestors were Irish famine refugees.  She had spent most of her life—like so many of our lives, directed by personal inclination interacting with accident and opportunity—in the radical labor movement.  She knew most of the leaders of the International Workers of the World (the IWW or “Wobblies”) and experienced the effects of the national hysteria of the “Red Scare” of World War I and its postwar aftermath.  As a girl in Chicago she had fallen under the sway of the charismatic Honoré Jaxon, who had been the right hand man to the leader of the Métis (mestizo) rebellion in the Northwest territory of Canada in 1885.  She knew Emma Goldman.  She abandoned her Catholicism before she was twenty, but seems not to have replaced it with a doctrinaire political dogma, of which plenty were available at the time.  Her heart burned for justice.  What the Berkeley historians seemed most interested in were her roles in leading the defense committees for Tom Mooney and, later, Warren Billings, IWW martyrs long imprisoned in San Quentin on manifestly framed-up charges.  The Mooney-Billings affair (1916) is probably still regarded today by most labor historians as second only to the Sacco-Vanzetti case of the 1920s in the celebrated iniquity of its injustice.  (And there’s a pretty good chance that Sacco, at least, was guilty of murder.)  Eventually Gallagher’s work paid off.  First Mooney, and then Billings, gained release.  There’s more, much more, fascinating material in Gallagher’s interview.  She was involved in important episodes of American racial injustice.  Her second husband was a vaudeville performer, and she invested much energy in the National Theater Project.  I’d like to know a good deal more about this amazing little old lady, but I have to fast-forward to page 114 of her interview to get back to Jan Valtin.

 

            In 1941 the real Jan Valtin, Richard Krebs, was the sensationally successful author of a supposed autobiography that was, among other things, a devastating exposure of international Communist criminality.  Unfortunately, he was also a criminal himself.  Powerful forces, including the surprisingly influential American Communist Party and its legion of fellow-travelers, joined in strange alliance with right-wing super-patriots like the popular columnist Westbrook Pegler, were doing everything they could to get him discredited and deported.  Of several hoops he must leap through, the first was presented by his criminal conviction for armed robbery in Los Angeles fifteen years earlier.  This problem could go away only with the active intervention of the sitting Governor of California with his pardoning power.  In my treatment of this problem in The Anti-Communist Manifestos I struggled to figure out how Krebs pulled this off.  As I surveyed my materials, Culbert Olsen, the governor in question and the most radical governor in America, possibly in American history, seemed to me the unknown unknown.  I got it mainly right.  Krebs was backed by (among others) the head of the ACLU, by an influential Democratic congressman from Los Angeles, and by a celebrity Iowa farmer who had Olson’s ear.  Those were the intermediaries I knew about and invoked.  But all the time more important testimony lay hidden in the uncontemplated inscription that Krebs/Valtin had written on the fly-leaf of my battered ex-library copy of Bend in the River on March 12, 1942.  Krebs had been rescued by the “gallant and selfless friendship” of Mary E. Gallagher.  Gallagher, head of the Mooney Defense Fund, had worked closely with Olson.  The two were soulmates in their thirst for justice and their attitudes toward underdogs.  Krebs surreptitiously travelled to California to consult with her.  She introduced him to Olson, as she explains in her interview.  She could not have known, because scarcely anyone alive knew, the actual political ambiguities of Krebs’s past.

 

            One serendipity leads to another.  I hope to find out more about Mary Gallagher, and perhaps write a little something about her in collaboration with a dear old friend, Christine Stansell, my one-time colleague and now a University of Chicago professor emerita.  She has written important books in the field of American women’s history and hence knows a lot I don’t know.  She was in the first class of Princeton undergraduate women; and half a century ago she spent time with our family and other young friends battling the wilds of the Ozark wilderness in the attempt to construct a log cabin.  We are now both getting a bit long in the tooth, so this imagined collaboration may never happen.  But the inevitable unpleasantness of the aging process can be softened by harmless pipe-dreams.  And as Browning puts it in “Andrea del Sarto”: Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?  In light of my subject I point out that the word man there is not gender specific.  In the old usage it means humankind. 

 

 

*https://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/roho/ucb/text/gallagher_mary.pdf.

 

 

 

Anti-Communist Purge

 

                                                 a boot-load of books
 

            In 2010 I published a book unlike any other I had previously published or even thought about writing.  It is called The Anti-Communist Manifestos.  It deals with four famous or at least once-famous books which first appeared in England or America between 1940 and 1952, and, if my argument is correct, exercised considerable influence on Western attitudes toward Communism in the period of the Cold War.  Perhaps the best known of the four, and the only novel among them, was Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. The other three, in chronological order of publication were Out of the Night by Jan Valtin (pseudonym of Richard Krebs), I Chose Freedom by Victor Kravchenko, and Witness by Whittaker Chambers.  Don’t be alarmed if you haven’t even heard of one or two of these.  I did say famous or once-famous.

 

            Though I was confident that I could say at least a few interesting things about each of the individual authors and their books, the general intellectual background—the political history in Europe and America of the interwar period, with special emphasis on international socialism—was a vast topic for which I had to read very widely.  As I said at the time, to write knowledgeably about four books required me to read some hundreds of others.

 

            For many years the second-hand book market in this country—in marked distinction to that in Europe—has been very advantageous for impecunious readers.  The reasons for this are interesting, and might in and of themselves offer material for another essay.  But one reason is that a huge Internet aggregator, which brings thousands of sellers together on a single site, provides motive and means to undersell competitors, especially for items that have little or no rarity value, meaning probably 98% of all books ever published.  You will find church rummage sale prices combined with nearly endless selectivity.  I can almost guarantee you that the red-hot book on the front page of the Times review (current price $39.95) will be available for $15 on Ebay within a couple of months.  Ten years from now Better World Books will practically be giving it away.  That even most best-selling books enjoy but a fleeting fame or popularity was an implicit theme of my study.

 

            In any event, attempting what for me was a novel kind of writing—a book with a broad subject intended for a general audience, a book with substantial factual presentation and arguments, but without the bibliographical supplements of an academic study—led me to a new model of production.  I wrote the book mainly at home rather than in a research library.  I was able to do this by putting together, in my study, a library of two or three hundred books I actually needed or thought I might need, practically all of them bought very cheaply second-hand over the Internet.  I still had the resources of a major research library when I required them. But if for five bucks you can own a book with a permission slip to scrawl upon it at will and leave as many food stains and tea-cup rings as are needed, fold down pages, or leave overnight to be rained on in the back yard, why on earth would you expend the energy, time, aggravation, and gasoline to drive across town to the library in the never certain hope that the desired book will be on its shelf?

 

            It was a great system, and one I continued to use in writing two subsequent books.  But of course there is a “downstream” problem, as you doubtless can anticipate, even if I did my best not to anticipate it.  The day will arrive when the world has one more book than it needs—the one you just published—and you have three hundred more than you need.  What do you do then?  Temporize, of course.  What I did was to pack up many carboard cartons and plastic milk crates with the sub-library I had amassed for my project.  I then stacked these containers in piles in a partially available closet—the supposed “empty nest” never approaching anything close to actual emptiness with the departure of our adult children over the years.  I was able to force the door shut and forget about it, sort of, for about a decade.   But even the most long-suffering and supportive spouse has a limit, and in our house the limit is considerably less than three hundred unvisited books in milk crates.  Judgment Day has come, and with it the urgent obligation to transport the slag heap from the quarry for The Anticommunist Manifestos to the intake depository warehouse at which donations for the annual Bryn Mawr Book Sale are accepted between the hours of ten and noon on Wednesdays and Saturdays.  This Bryn Mawr sale is a very big deal in our town, and it seems to have morphed into the “Bryn Mawr/Wellesley Sale” while I was not looking.  As you either already know or can easily guess, it is an annual fundraising effort organized by alumnae of distinguished liberal arts colleges in support of their alma mater.  I don’t know how many years it has been running, or how many more it can survive.  The constraints of the coronavirus regime are (we pray) temporary; but several seismic shifts in the world of book culture generally are not.  My hope, of course is that the sale could go on forever.  There is something admirable about a community shake-up and redistribution of library materials in the aid of educational institutions, the advancement of knowledge, and the increase of pleasure.

 

            With regard to the books I am offloading, it is impossible to avoid commenting upon convergent themes of purgation.  Stalin’s phony purge trials and their accompanying judicial murders clouded the rosy view that many western intellectuals had managed to maintain of the Russian “experiment”.  In its high-minded attempts to preserve its political purity by purging everything that was impure, Bolshevism did a fair job of destroying itself, quite apart from piling up mountains of collateral damage.  I recall a lurid passage early in Whittaker Chambers’s Witness (the last of my four “anti-communist manifestos”) in which he identifies as a decisive moment in his own political conversion, in 1935 or 1936, the year of my birth, his first awareness of Stalin’s Great Purge.  “The Communist Party of the Soviet Union had begun to condition itself for the final revolutionary struggle with the rest of the world by cutting out of its own body all that could weaken or hamper it in that conflict.  It was literally sweating blood.”  I am trying to be a little less apocalyptic and to keep the blood-sweating at the figurative level.  I am not consigning all my books to the basement of the Lubyanka prison.  I hope indeed I am offering them a new lease on life, or at least a brief extension of the old one.  And as for the bourgeois sentimentalism so despised by Ivanov, the “bad cop” interrogator in Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, I am afraid I rather revel in it.  I have exempted a half dozen titles from the purge out of personal affection.  And I don’t have it in me to give away books inscribed to me by their authors.