A Rose by any Other Name

 

 

Most readers will probably be familiar with Oscar Wilde’s brilliant comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest.  The whole play, like the title, operates on several levels.  From the philosophical point of view—if that is not too grand an approach to a work so light-hearted at the surface level—the subject is a classic one: the relation of words to the things they denote.  In a sense this is an issue raised by all nouns, the English words noun and name actually being variants.  The title of Umberto Eco’s delightful medieval romp—The Name of the Rose—reflects the medieval ancestry of the matter.  When Juliet poses her wistful question to Romeo—"What’s in a name?”—she suggests the arbitrary nature of words, the meanings of which are “socially constructed” and depend upon a general cultural acceptance for their utility.  I thought when I sat down to write about all this I might entitle the essay “The Unimportance of Being John.”

 

There are a lot of plays in the repertoire that exploit the theme of false or mistaken identity.  The ancient playwright Plautus wrote a farce about twin brothers that inspired one of Shakespeare’s early efforts, The Comedy of Errors, and has echoes in probably dozens of other Renaissance plays.  To get into my own little comedy of errors, though, I have to tell you a little more than is really interesting to you about the neighborhood in which we have lived for about thirty-five years.  It is a subdivision of about eighty houses, most of which were erected in the 1960s.  It is called the Gray Farm presumably on account of an old family farm that once filled the grounds, though I am only guessing.  Several of them were designed by members of the faculty of the School of Architecture.  Accordingly, there is considerable architectural variety among them, and even some architectural distinction, though most of them are comparatively modest in size, certainly as gauged by contemporary macmansion standards.  The Gray Farm scheme was designed to allow modestly remunerated tenured faculty members to buy and own a house, and to enjoy whatever long-term appreciation accrued to the property, within the context of an expensive real estate market in a definitely upscale place.  Naturally there was a catch.  The owners of the houses truly owned them, but they could not be sold on the open market or be transferred by testamentary will to the owners’ children.  They had to be sold back to the University at a price arbitrated between representatives of the University’s real estate department and the departing owners or their agents.  The aim was to enable faculty to own property which they could not otherwise afford.  There are other stipulations to the scheme, but those are the essentials.  With the fairly dramatic long-term improvement in faculty remuneration over half a century, a development that greatly expands the housing horizons for faculty, the Gray Farm scheme has become less popular.  There are other attractive and affordable options.

 

Of course living in a faculty ghetto means you have some interesting neighbors.  For most of our years here our two nearest neighbors were both members of the Department of Near Eastern Studies.  On the west was the eminent Bernard Lewis, historian,  Semitic linguist, neo-con guru and counsel to the Bush administration, and a chief animator of Edward Said’s disdain in his book Orientalism. It was a rare week on our street that did not see a visit from a recording truck visiting our neighbor to tape an interview with him.  Professor Lewis left the neighborhood for a retirement care facility and died several years ago.  But there are several other such eminences scattered throughout the neighborhood.

 

 

Last week, as I was getting dressed after a shower, I heard the front doorbell ring.  I knew that Joan was already out of the house, so I called out to Christie, our wonderful health aide, and asked her to answer the door.  She did so, and I could hear snippets of her exchange with the man who had rung the bell.  I heard him identify himself as from Philadelphia and from the Associated Press.  He was looking for John.  I soon was more or less dressed and able to meet him in the living room.  The man had in his hands a rather formidable camera. “John?” he asked.  So far so good.  Without the slightest prevarication I was able to answer, “Right! I’m John.”  “Well, I’d like to take your picture,” he said. 

 

Suddenly I had the feeling that this—whatever this might be—probably was, well, you know….when a photographer from the national press tells you he wants to take your picture you somehow want desperately to think of some reason why that might be true.  Milton’s last infirmity of noble mind.  The photographer, noting my struggle, began to share it.   “You…you are John Hopfield, right?”  Alas, manifestly this was wrong.  I did of course know who Hopfield was and had twice said “Good morning” to him over a twenty-five year period.   He was yet another genius Princeton physicist, one who strayed into biology before straying even further into the faculty of the California Institute of Technology before (fortunately for us) returning to Princeton.  And of course I knew that Hopfield built the house which we have owned since 1988, though it had had at least one other owner in between.  He’s the guy who saddled us with the bamboo.  I also knew, instinctively, what the photographer now was going to tell me.  Hopfield had just won the Nobel Prize.  I was able to tell the photographer that I thought Hopfield lived somewhere over on the other side of the golf course.

 

 

I then remembered years ago sitting nervously in the waiting room of a dentist’s office—flipping through a dogeared magazine of that specially trivial genre unreadable except by people desperately trying to prevent their minds from acknowledging impending root canal work.  This magazine had brief “human interest” items interspersed with paragraphs of “fun facts”.  Fun fact: Castor beans grow wild in Abyssinia.  Fun fact: Paul Revere made George Washington’s first set of false teeth.  Fun fact number three jolted me to attention.  There are more Nobel Prize winners living on Hartley Avenue in Princeton NJ than live in seven western states.  Hartley Avenue!  Our little street!  And indeed I knew of, indeed actually knew personally, two physics professors—Val Fitch (now unhappily deceased) and Joe Taylor (still going strong)—who were Nobel laureates.  Ed Witten, who lived on a cross street a hundred yards frm the corner with Hartley, had merely won the Fields Medal, there being no Nobel Prize in mathematics.

 

Blessed Beasts

 

 

            After nearly two decades of retirement I can hardly talk about a “professional life,” but I found myself in an odd position this week.  I have involved myself in two public events of at least a semi-educational nature.  The fancier of the two, in fact, indeed will be seriously scholarly.  I have agreed, with pleasure, to give a “Work in Progress” seminar to the faculty group of medievalists at Princeton.  It will take place a few hours after mounting this post, actually, and will deal with the fifteenth-century French poet François Villon.  This obligation will explain why I have mentioned Villon in my essays a couple of times in the recent months .  A topic once raised in one’s mind has a tendency to stay there until resolved in some way or other.  But other things have also been on my mind.  Topics to which I devoted a lot of time years ago were the cultural impact of the Franciscan Order on the cultural life of late medieval Europe and the colonial evangelization of Spanish and Franciscan missionaries in the “New World,” including parts of our own country, in the wake of the Iberian voyages of discovery beginning at the end of the fifteenth century. 

 

This interest was for me intensified when in 1992 I was one of the co-curators of a major exhibition at the Library of Congress: “1492, An Ongoing Voyage”.  The invitation to undertake that task was nearly inexplicable, but I undertook it as an educational opportunity in several different senses.  I can only hope that that exhibition, which got good reviews,  was at least as partially enlightening to its many visitors as it was to its curators, or at least to this one.   The Columbus of my boyhood, to the extent that I was aware of him, was a much admired figure.  In 1893 the Columbian Exposition in Chicago—basically a world’s fair designed to showcase the dynamism and artistic, industrial, and political ebullience of a muscle-flexing United States of America—had presented Christopher Columbus in heroic terms.  The fifteenth-century Catholic Italian mariner was more of an ingenious and resourceful Connecticut Yankee type.  Samuel Eliot Morrison, Harvard Ph. D., and a popular historian, himself a reserve admiral in the United States Navy won a Pulitzer Prize in 1942 for his biography of Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, a book still in print and still being read eighty years later.  This book is not hagiographic, but it certainly is admiring and still admired.  Morrison, who I thought probably ought to know, clearly regarded Columbus as one hell of a sailor.  Which he was.  But by 1992, the historical tide had turned, so to speak.  In some important historical circles attitudes toward what in my youth was universally called “the discovery of America” had changed radically.  Just because benighted Europeans didn’t know anything about the rich cultures of the Guarini, the Incas, the Mayans, the Aztecs and so many other inhabitants of the Americas didn’t mean they needed discovering.  From this perspective the mildest accurate term for what happened was encounter, but better ones would be invasion, conquest, oppression, colonization, and of course genocide.

 

Such meager credentials as I had for the assignment derived from my study of late medieval apocalyptic thought, much of it stimulated by Franciscan friars.  These are the same credentials that allowed me to accept an invitation from the organizers of the adult education program at my parish church to offer an adult forum before the Sunday Eucharist, on the topic of Saint Francis of Assisi.

 

 

Changing attitudes about Columbus should alert us to the reality that no historical personage, whatever good press he or she has in the past enjoyed, is immune from the trashing of “revisionist” history.  The late Christopher Hitchens, a man I much admired, cancelled the much admired Mother Teresa, so there’s no telling.  Still, I think that Francis of Assisi ought to be safe at least for the time being.  He is not merely the all-star historical saint of the Christian churches.  He has “crossover appeal” to the spiritually indifferent and even the positively irreligious on account of his legendary gentleness, low-carbon (bare)foot print, and above all, his love of animals.  He used to address them with the titles of “brother” and “sister”, as though they were fellow-members of his religious order.  This was part of a radical egalitarianism in his personality that could not be constrained even by the rigorous hierarchies of medieval society.  Among the famous episodes in Franciscan history is the report that Francis once delivered a sermon to the birds.  (We have all heard sermons that are for the birds, so why not?)  His disciple Anthony of Padua—who actually came from Lisbon, a major maritime center—specialized in preaching to the fish.

 

In many churches, Catholic and Protestant alike, there has emerged a popular homage to Francis, celebrated around his feast day (October 4), called the “Blessing of the Animals”.  It is exactly what it sounds like.  Animals—mainly household pets in our suburban contexts—are brought before the altar to receive a sacerdotal blessing.  Having constrained animals present at a eucharistic celebration does invite certain possible risks, but I have not yet seen a real disaster.  The adult owners of the pets are sometimes slightly awkward and tentative during the procedure, but youngsters seem uniformly enthusiastic.  And, obviously, they are the ones who count here.  Let the little children come unto me.  In fact, on Sunday a few small children, not wanting to be left out but not actually owning pets, presented the priest with stuffed animals.  Dramatic showmanship was a marked feature of Francis’s personality.  He was the first to popularize the Christmas creche.  According to a still influential book by O. B. Hardison (Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages) the whole of the Eucharist is mimetic and dramatic.  In any event, this is what the week has held for me thus far.

 

Passion of the Prexies

 

A week or so ago Pamela Paul, an opinion editor at the New York Times, wrote a piece that caught my eye: “It’s Easy to See What Drove Jonathan Holloway to Quit”.  Though I correctly anticipated what her essay was going to say, I was eager to read it and happy to have done so.  In the broad sense the subject of the essay is a troubling aspect of American higher education, the field in which—as a classroom professor, not an administrator—I pursued a long career.  Few of the newspapers’ readers are likely to have recognized Holloway’s name immediately, but of course I did.  That is because Mr. Holloway, a distinguished scholar and seasoned university administrator, is the President of Rutgers, which is in effect the University of New Jersey, the main campus of which is in New Brunswick, about fifteen miles from where I live.   I do not know him personally, but most professionals in American higher education, and certainly most people even vaguely aware of the leadership class in our state, would be familiar with his name.  President Holloway is much admired by many people I know in the Rutgers community.  Since the default stance of American professors toward the higher echelons of their institutional administrations is often, unfortunately, one ranging between indifference and disdain, I find that significant testimony. The presidency of the state university of a large and populous state is hardly the kind of job that most able and available academics would disdain.  But I have known or known of several other manifestly able, high-ranking university administrators who have “quit” or very much wanted to.  Why should this be?

 

All situations have their distinctive attractions and unpleasantnesses.  Yet the reasons behind President Holloway’s announced retirement are probably relevant to situations facing the presidents of most large and complex American colleges.  I am invoking his story not for its individual singularities but for what I suspect are broad commonalities.  According to Ms. Paul’s account, President Holloway has soured on his job  because some circumstances do not allow him time and space to exercise leadership as he would like to do, while others require that he spend much time doing things he does not find congenial.  Several high-ranking administrators of my own acquaintance have told me in so many words that the job is simply not as much fun as it once was and as they would want it to be.  In these instances “fun” means productive as opposed to unproductive workaholism.  A good deal of the disenchantment is in fact exacerbated by what might be called the politics of college presidencies—a topic to which I shall briefly return.  But as higher education has in this country become bigger, more expansive, and more sought after, institutional life has become more ambitious, more demanding, more complex.  Imagine trying to “lead” the University of California, for example.  Dwight Eisenhower probably had an easier administrative task in supervising D-Day.  Clark Kerr, the first Chancellor or mega-president of the UC system, famously summarized the disparate interests of the major constituencies with whom he had to deal as follows.  The undergraduates were interested in sex, the faculty in parking, and the alumni in football.  Joking, yes, but….You may notice that quantum physics, business accounting, and Sumerian syntax are not on the list.  In fact, a college president has quite a long roster of chores that, at first glance, may seem to have little direct connection with education.  The first of these, in most instances, is of course fund raising.  As is the situation currently with regard to major political candidates, the ability of a “leader” to rake in dough is taken as an emblem of a wide range of other desirable abilities.

 

For one thing, the job has simply become more complex and demanding over the years.  Education has become ever more expensive and ever more bureaucratic—the latter feature very often having to do with the increasing role of government agencies.  Without declaring that government interaction with academic finances and organization is either good or bad, it is manifestly complex and time-consuming.  Political considerations, especially in state-financed institutions, are of course simply part of the job, but they are also time-consuming distractions.

 

This has been going on for quite a while by now.   The incrementally increasing commerce between government officials and college administrators is always burdensome, increasingly complex, and sometime distracting.  Only rarely is it amusing, and then often in a noirish fashion.  It is more than fifty years since Tom Wolfe published his trenchant essay entitled “Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers”, and I suspect that by now even the essay’s title might seem mysterious.  Mau-mau was an African term used to refer to the Kenyan rebels and/or their guerilla tactics in their struggle against British colonists beginning in the 1950s.  In Wolfe’s metaphoric usage it meant the bullying, harassment, and intimidation of the mainly white bureaucrats by the mainly black activists with whom they dealt in the administration of supposed anti-poverty programs which had swiftly descended into graft mills.  Canons of politically correct political discourse had not yet become so rigid as to banish entirely the recognition of the grim humor in such sensitive topics.  (The companion essay by Wolfe—"Radical Chic”—was about a cocktail party thrown by the famous musician Leonard Bernstein at which the guests of honor were prominent Black Panthers.)

 

What is the appropriate political role of a college president?  Expecting people to be apolitical is like expecting them to be ahistorical or asexual.  The late Robert Goheen was a president of Princeton with whom I worked but whom I came to know well and admire exceedingly only years after he had retired.  When criticized for allowing it to be known (when asked repeatedly) that he preferred the Democratic Party candidate in the election of 1968, he memorably defended himself: “A college president is not a political eunuch.”  The Ivory Tower was not completely immune from political consensus, but promotion to tenure in the sociology department was not always invariably dependent upon the obligatory but insufficient prerequisite of being a card-carrying member of the Spartacist League—presuming that that sodality even issues membership cards.  In our national politics, which for my lifetime have been dominated by two political parties, a vote split of 55/45 is likely to be described as a landslide.  On college faculties the faculty split along political lines is twenty, or more likely fifty, to one.  In my judgment, actually, the much discussed lack of political “viewpoint diversity” in academic institutions is less the fruit of an ideological conspiracy than a natural expression of the voluntary affinities of self-perpetuating powers.  Just saying…The theoretical basis of the idea of faculty appointment on continuing tenure is that it might protect qualified scholars with eccentric, unpopular, or controversial, or heretical ideas.

 

It is the ambition of the professionals in higher education to broaden the intellectual and cultural horizons of their students.  One way they continue to do that for some thousands of them is through the competent teaching of foreign languages and “study-abroad” years.  One can hardly overpraise these staples of the liberal curriculum.  But that is different from saying that a college president should be required to preside over a quasi-official, independent foreign policy.  That, however, is what many of the protestors at prominent institutions, now temporarily rudderless, have been demanding.  I am referring to Harvard and Penn, whose prexies were essentially canned, and Columbia.  Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik—in my opinion the most impressive of the three—simply gave up in disgust.  At least I think she was disgusted.  Certainly, a lot of other people were, starting with me.

Biblical Invective

 

I have spent a good deal of my life reading books, a certain amount more talking about books, and even a certain amount time writing books.  Books have even been, directly or indirectly, an important subject in many of my blog posts.  Today I turn my attention to the most widely printed, translated, and distributed book in the world: the Bible.  Although publication statistics are not always the same as reading statistics, the Bible also is probably still the most widely read book in the world—or at least read in.  Because, of course, the Bible is not a single book, but an anthology of books.  The word biblia is a plural noun meaning “the books.”  In fact, there is considerable generic differentiation among the biblical books, which date from different areas and reveal the influence of the varying historical and cultural eras in which they were written.  There are various “through lines” in the Bible, but it makes little sense to sit down and read through its thousand plus pages as one might try to read through War and Peace.  Large parts of the Hebrew Scriptures, or Old Testament in the terminology of most Christians, are legal, ceremonial, and genealogical compendiums that are pretty tough slogging.  So the question arises: what is the most widely read book in the Bible?

 

            I think the answer to that question,  approached from the historical point of view, must be the Book of Psalms.  Anyway, that is the one I’m going with.  The Psalms are, in the first place, a vital bridge between Judaism and Christianity, as they continue to occupy a vital role in both Jewish and Christian worship.  Some of the few words uttered by Jesus on the cross were psalm verses.  Paul likewise cites psalm verses.  Furthermore, the psalms have had an enormous influence on world literature, most especially of course its poetry.  My own last book was devoted to a magnificent poem by the Portuguese Renaissance poet Luis de Camões, often entitled simply “Babylon and Zion,” that is a meditation upon, and exegesis of, the psalm Super flumina Babylonis (“By the Waters of Babylon”), number 136 (137) in the psalter.* 

 

In 1903 Rowland Prothero (the Lord Ernle), a Conservative M.P. and first-class cricket player, published The Psalms in Human Life.  (Literate holders of public office, though on the wane even in Britain, were once thick on the ground.)  This particularly invaluable work of amateur Anglican scholarship I keep on a shelf beside a bilingual edition of the Psalms in the Socino Bible series (1950), a copy that once belonged to a congregant of the Etz Chaim synagogue in Flatbush, Brooklyn.  (One of the pleasures of having a library gradually constructed over many years, mainly from second hand and “bargain” books, is that provided by tracking down the connections of former owners.)  As for the psalms, I have never mastered the original Hebrew, but this translation is authoritative, and the commentary of the editor, the nearly anonymous Dr. A. Cohen, is invaluable.

 

            In the long tradition of Christian biblical scholarship, the psalms have been assigned to various categories.  One important group is called the penitential psalms, typified by the Miserere, “Have mercy on me, o God” (50, 51), traditionally thought to be the anguished cry of David as he reflected on what was in effect a homicide he had arranged to facilitate adultery.  But the group that has attracted my attention this week is that of the imprecatory psalms.  If you are familiar with any of the psalms at all, chances are that it is the very reassuring “The Lord in my shepherd…”  One doesn’t usually link the biblical spirit with violent imprecations—that is, curses—but there are some doozies in the psalter. 

 

            The fifteenth-century French poet François Villon, whom I have mentioned a couple of times in recent months, begins his most famous poem with an attack on Thibault d’Aussigny, the bishop of Orleans, from whose dungeons he has just been liberated--by nearly miraculous good luck.  (By ancient custom prisoners could be released on the occasion of a royal visit to the city.)  We do not know how Villon came to be incarcerated by the Bishop of Orleans, but my default suspicion is that it was for some very good reason.  He was, after all, a murderer and a cat burglar when not writing ballads.  Villon’s poem, of course, waxes indignant in its insistence that he was a victim of episcopal injustice.  He summarizes his poetic attack somewhat obliquely by referring readers to “the seventh verse of the psalm Deus laudem”.  The psalm to which he refers, a “psalm of David,” is Deus, laudem, meam ne tacueris…(O God, whom I praise, be not silent…), number 108 in the medieval Latin Bible.  In it, the psalmist, ostensibly King David, really unloads on his enemies, who “have opened wicked and treacherous mouths against me.”  If your idea of David is a nice little boy with a slingshot, this psalm may shock you as much as the behavior of its author.  The eighth verse is “May his days be few.  May another take his office [episcopatum].”  But that is only the beginning of the biblical invective.  Here are just a few clauses in the storehouse of Villon’s scriptural  invective: May his children be fatherless…May his children be roaming vagrants and become beggars…May the usurer ensnare all his belongings…May there be no one to do him a kindness…Let not his mother’s sin be blotted out…And that is just a sampling! Villon probably had the whole of the psalter by heart.  The feats of memory that were commonplace among the learned men of pre-Gutenberg times may seem to us astonishing.  Most “clerks” (i.e., educated people, including many women) had the psalter by heart , and you would too if you had recited it in its entirety week after week for years on end.  And there was within the book a poem precisely suitable for every mood and vagary of our human life.  Villon simply assumed that alluding to the title of the psalm would do the trick for him.

 

            I doubt that even among professional medievalists one in a hundred has run across the name of the once high and mighty Thibault d’Aussigny.  But most educated people have at least heard of the obscure university hanger-on, François Villon.  The poets usually win.  That is why Shelley calls poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

 

 

*There are 150 psalms, but there is a slight difference in the internal numeration in Catholic and Protestant bibles.  In earlier historical periods psalms were often cited by their incipits (initial verses) in Latin, as Villon does here. Thus the first psalm is called Beatus vir (“Blessed is the man…”), and that practice continues among many medievalists.

Strange Flesh

The American presidential campaign has witnessed what is apparently a second serious threat within two months against the life of candidate Trump, but thus far most of the news coverage about it seems concentrated upon the level of competence demonstrated by Secret Service officers in nipping it in the bud.  The press’s attitude would seem to be that since the only gunshots actually fired were those fired by the security forces, the real subject of interest continues to be the candidates’ debate held about a week previously. According to presumably reliable statistics, slightly more than sixty-one million people in this country watched the debate on television.  I will not put the well-deserved quotation marks around the word debate, even though the event had little in common with what happens regularly at the Oxford Union let alone what happened in 1858 at five venues scattered through the state of Illinois when Lincoln dueled with Douglas in an earlier set of American presidential debates.  From among the plethora of pressing national, international, and indeed inter-galactic political and socio-economic problems that potentially face the next occupant of the White House, the one that was discussed most memorably, and most thoroughly featured in the press, was the putative diet of recent immigrants to the small city of Springfield Ohio.  Mr. Trump imputed to a group of recent immigrants to Springfield, Ohio, a canine/feline diet.  According to Mr. Trump “they are eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people who live there.” 

 

What goes without saying too often goes unsaid.  So before advancing in this brief essay I suppose I am obliged to tell you that this is utter rubbish.  Neither the newest residents of Springfield, Ohio (most of them immigrants from Haiti) nor the native population (mainly though not exclusively of European ancestry) are eating dogs or cats.  This is just one of those things Mr. Trump likes to say in aid of wresting defeat from the jaws of probable victory.  From what might be called the ethical point of view, one does not know whether to hope that Mr. Trump actually believes what he claims or that he is merely making it up with gusto.  Yet more discouraging in my view is the fact that millions of his supporters greet Trump’s declaration with a yawn.  He probably was talking about hot dogs slathered with catsup.  So far has political deviancy been defined downward.  “Democracy,” said Mencken, “is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” 

 

From the historical point of view, however, it is likely, nay certain, that at some places and at some times on this large globe, people have indeed eaten cats and dogs.  Quite apart from the fact that the human diet throughout the world is as diversified as is human language, if you are hungry enough, you will eat anything edible and a few things that are not.  In fact, inventiveness of diet when in extremis has often been regarded as ingenious and gutsy.  Shakespeare’s Antony, rendered ethically feeble by his all-consuming passion for Cleopatra, is thus chided by Caesar.  Caesar is reminding him that he is supposed to be a tough guy, as indeed he used to be before he lost his mind over this woman:

 

…Leave thy lascivious wassails. When thou once
Wast beaten from Modena, where thou slew'st
Hirtius and Pansa, consuls, at thy heel
Did famine follow; whom thou fought'st against,
Though daintily brought up, with patience more
Than savages could suffer: thou didst drink
The stale of horses, and the gilded puddle
Which beasts would cough at: thy palate then did deign
The roughest berry on the rudest hedge;
Yea, like the stag, when snow the pasture sheets,
The barks of trees thou browsed'st; on the Alps
It is reported thou didst eat strange flesh,
Which some did die to look on: and all this—
It wounds thine honour that I speak it now—
Was borne so like a soldier, that thy cheek
So much as lank'd not.  (Antony and Cleopatra, I, 4,  485f)

 

Even without the gilded puddle chaser, such victuals do not sound exactly appetizing. Of course military power and cultural prestige have been wielded by many civilizations of beastly feeders in the past.  The Aztecs of Mexico, notable warriors, poets, and even astronomers, created a major empire powered, at the alimentary level, mainly by acociles (a very dubious looking crayfish thing thick on the bottom of Lake Texcoco), and spirulina algae transformed into a kind of flour suitable for baking.  Armadillos were a delicacy reserved for special occasions.  I must regard this menu item, though far from unknown in the American South of my youth,  as a bit iffy.  Armadillos are known to carry leprosy, and although the incidence level is “fairly low in most regions” there is apparently still a risk of transmission in handling the carcasses.

 

            One of the terms of opprobrium among the volunteer critics in our universities is “cultural appropriation”.  Recently young kids have needed to be very careful around Halloween time if they want to avoid cancellation by their second-grade confreres.  South-of-the-border sombreros are definitely out, and pirates’ eye-patches risk grave offense to the otherly abled.  You probably remember a highly televised fracas along these lines at one of the undergraduate colleges of Yale University not too long ago.  Despite this, it seems to me that cultural appropriation is a fecund force in human development, and often a very good one.  I am very glad we in this country appropriated the wheel and penicillin, to cite just a couple of examples out of many.

 

            I am now quite old, and for many decades I have had a professional interest in the English language.  Under these circumstances I am personally aware of the extraordinary increment in the vocabulary of our widely shared English language, just during my own lifetime, brought about by the American naturalization of an international cuisine.  Is there anybody who doesn’t know what a tortilla, a paella, or a barbeque is?  I could list a hundred more.  When I was a kid the only Chinese dish I had ever heard of was chop suey.  Is that even a thing now?  When it comes to gastronomic appropriation most Americans are all for it.

 

 

The Cotswold Dovers

 

 

The subjects of this essay came into my mind by way of a train of thought that began with the beautiful villages of the Cotswold hills of southwestern England, and that topic was stimulated by a couple of videos  that I chanced upon.  The circumstances also forced upon my mind the “uncertainty principle” associated with the German physicist Werner Heisenberg.  It holds that the smaller the particle the investigator sets out to study, the more likely it is that the investigation itself will frustrate the search for exactitude.  The Cotswolds are noted for their numerous beautifully preserved and picturesque villages.  Like so many other beautiful things in our world, whether made by God or by us, their delicacy is threatened by mass tourism.  This presents a dilemma for modernity and the democratic dogma, but fortunately not for me.  I am writing, at a long distance away, concerning two members of the Dover family, prominent in parts of Warwickshire in earlier centuries: the Dover family.

 

For Captain Robert Dover, a lawyer born in Barton-on-the-Heath in Warwickshire, we have a certain death date (1641) and an approximate birth date, proposed by the Dictionary of National Biography.  England has a good historical claim to being the Land of Eccentrics, and the Seventeenth Century has a claim to be at least one of the also-rans for the Age of Eccentricity.  Captain Dover, whose military rank, like those of so many of his contemporaries, was mainly ceremonial, had a legal career that was likewise somewhat of the same sort.  “He was bred an attorney who never tried but two causes…”  That is because he had a good deal of inherited money and had better things to do. 

 

What better things, exactly?  England in the early seventeenth century was already showing the religio-political divisions that by mid-century led to civil war.  Two great historians (W. C.  Sellar and R. J. Yeatman) characterized the two sides as follows: the Anglican Cavaliers were “wrong but romantic” while the Puritan Roundheads were “right but repulsive”.  The Puritans were, well, puritanical killjoys.  They frowned on cakes and ale, dancing, and good old family fun sports like bear-baiting.  Remember Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night? Or the community self-righteousness in The Scarlet Letter?  In 1605 Dover, politically conservative, religiously conventional,  and classically educated, decided that what the country needed was a revival of the ancient Olympic Games.  They would be set for the Thursday and Friday in Whitsun week (seven weeks after Easter), and the venue would be a particularly handsome spot in the Cotswolds.  The competitors would come from the local countryside.  In addition to various foot races, there was much leaping, walking on hands, rabbit hunting, throwing of heavy objects, etc., and of course “a country dance of virgins.”  All this was to be punctuated by bibulous al fresco feasting.    In short, something for the whole family, and something guaranteed to scandalize Puritans, and all of it presided over by Captain Dover in fancy dress on a big white horse.  The Cotswold Olympics had a surprisingly long run, followed by  frequent mini-revivals  down into living memory.

 

But Robert’s peculiarities may be thought to pale in comparison with those of a later eminence of the Dover clan, namely Thomas Dover, M.D. (1660-1742), alias “Doctor Quicksilver.”  This Dover has earned a place both in medical and in maritime history.  Quicksilver is of course the chemical element mercury (Hg, atomic number 80), and Dr. Dover became famous for his successful use of it as a specific medicine in treating what in the England of his day was euphemistically called “the French disease” (and less euphemistically the pox or the clap.)  This malady was rife among the dissolute aristocracy of Europe.  It is a recurring motif in the English literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly in the racier stage plays of the era. 

 

 

 One of Hogarth’s famous series “Marriage à la mode” depicts a visitation to the clinic of a syphilis quack.  The dread disease was considered the appropriate stuff of mirth.  Two young agricultural workers on the estates of Stanton Harcourt near Oxford, a young man and young woman engaged to be married, were working in the fields when a violent rainstorm suddenly burst out.  They took refuge beneath the branches of a large tree which, unfortunately, was struck by a lightning bolt that killed them both.  The poet Pope memorialized this tragedy in an X-rated obituary couplet:

Here lie two poor lovers, who had the mishap
Tho’ very chaste people, to die of a clap.

 

 

Today the oral ingestion of heavy metal is generally frowned upon, some of us indeed objecting also to its aural form.  But Dr. Dover discovered that if he had very good luck and a precisely minute dosage, quicksilver might kill the syphilis before it killed the one afflicted with syphilis.  But it was a close call.  But he did not invent the treatment, but rather refined it.  One struggles to imagine the process by which this medical discovery had first been made.  It was presumably by some such process as   that described in Charles Lamb’s “Dissertation upon Roast Pig” in his Essays of Elia.

 

In popular literature of earlier times a besetting sin of the medical professional is avarice.  The money-grubbing medico was already a stock literary character by the time Chaucer wrote his trenchant portrait of the “Doctor of Physic” in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.  But Thomas Dover took the concept of the piratical physician to an altogether new level.  Since 1684 he had been practicing in Bristol, a major port city south of the Cotswolds.  When he decided he needed to improve his income, he went to sea, though not as a physician.  He lived in the golden age of privateering.  A privateer was a government-sanctioned pirate, that is, someone legally sanctioned to plunder England’s enemies on the high seas on a system of sharing the spoils.  He and some associates undertook a joint enterprise along these lines, putting up the venture capital necessary.  In 1708 their ships, the “Duke” and “Duchess” set out on a world-wide quest in search of floating wealth.  Dover, a major investor, was captain of the “Duke”.  A real captain.

 

 

For the English, the enemy of choice was Spain, its once powerful empire in decay and decline.  The continent of South America, half of which was made up of Spanish imperial principalities, provided the privateers with a fine hunting ground.  In the course of their hunting expedition the entrepreneurs of the “Duke” and “Duchess” experienced an event of indirect importance to the history of English literature.  A few blobs of earth arising from the Pacific Ocean about two hundred and fifty miles west of Santiago de Chile are dignified by the name of the Juan Fernandez Islands.  On one of these a British mariner named Alexander Selkirk found himself stranded, under circumstances that are not entirely clear, in total solitude. He was an ingenious and resourceful fellow, and he had survived without seeing another human being for four years when he was discovered and rescued by the privateers, who had  been amazed to see a light shining over the seascape in the night.  In daylight hours they poked about and and discovered the literally isolated Scotsman.  It is plausibly believed that his remarkable tale, when it became known upon his return to the British Isles, provided Daniel Defoe with the idea of writing Robinson Crusoe, a book that has been being read with pleasure by a large number of readers for the last three centuries. Later Dover was involved in a plunder raid on Guayaquil, Ecuador, a town that was an important depot for the silver mines.   

 

Before returning home Doctor Quicksilver further displayed his maritime chops by capturing a Spanish war ship (twenty-one guns!) which he brought back to Bristol on the homeward journey of 1711.  The expedition had set out in the summer of 1709.  Sailing around the tip if South America was no mean feat, but Quicksilver took it in stride.

 

 

 

 

R. L. Stevenson, Man of Letters

 

Maybe other people who love  poetry, as I do, find the “situation” of poetry in America today somewhat paradoxical.  There are probably more active poets in the country than there have ever been.  At practically every college in the country a poet in residence is teaching a poetry workshop that has a waiting list of hopeful applicants, many of them talented.  But how many of our fellow citizens regularly read poetry?  I believe that the paradoxical answer is: not as many as the number of them writing it.

 

            Whether or not there is any substance behind this suspicion, I have been thinking about my own reading history.  I can remember very clearly how I got turned onto poetry and can still recite the poem that did the turning: “Bed in Summer,” by Robert Louis Stevenson.

 

 

In winter I get up at night

And dress by yellow candle-light.

In summer, quite the other way,

I have to go to bed by day.

 

I have to go to bed and see

The birds still hopping on the tree,

Or hear the grown-up people's feet

Still going past me in the street.

 

And does it not seem hard to you,

When all the sky is clear and blue,

And I should like so much to play,

To have to go to bed by day?

 

This is a poem of remarkable simplicity, three stanzas long, with each stanza made up of two rhyming couplets of absolutely regular iambic tetrameter.  The rhyme words are emphatic and exact.  More than ninety percent of its roughly eighty words are monosyllables.  There are few poems simpler in structure and diction than “Bed in Summer”.  But it tells a story, and it was my story and that of most children my age, the story of a kid who wants to stay out in the waning light of a long summer evening.  That’s what we want in a story—for it to be ours, or susceptible to being made ours by imagination.  I want to emphasize the story aspect of poetry.  I do not deny the power of lyricism, but great poetry demands the amplitude of narrative.

 

During the war—I refer to the Second World War of the last century--my mother, my two siblings, and I took up residence in the house of my maternal grandparents in Denver.   My dad was in the South Pacific.  Back in the day—the day being the first decades of Colorado statehood, my grandmother Davidson had been a school-teacher in the mountain village of Salida.  Salida is now a rather fancy place and miniature Aspen, but it was then a company town of the Denver and Rio Grande Railway Co.  Her husband, my grandfather Davidson, was a locomotive engineer.  My grandmother remained at heart a teacher all her life.  My older brother and I benefited from being her captive residential pupils.  After a while she introduced me to more Stevenson—this time to two of the great “youth” novels in our literature: Treasure Island (1882) and Kidnapped (1886), to be read in that order. For a growing boy the youthful heroes of these two tales, Jim Hawkins and David Balfour are the most “relatable” literary characters imaginable.  At the same time they are both “historical” novels—meaning that for their contemporary audience they already had the allure of exotic times, curious customs, and a vanished or vanishing maritime world.   Long John Silver has to be one of the greatest characters in world history, so good that he cannot be ruined even by having his name appropriated by a bad fast-food joint or parodied in a puerile obscenity that surface in the Clarence Thomas Judiciary Committee hearings of 1991.  Thus, I owe to this formidable lady—Cora Louise Nelson Davidson—many wonderful examples of the role of family mentoring in the transmission of knowledge and the whetting of a young person’s appetite to know things.  Among the other fatal misprisions undermining our national social arrangements is the legal fiction that the public schools, or any school for that matter, can compensate entirely for the informal but crucial education of family life.  Some other reading advice my grandmother gave me was that, though I should try to read widely, I should likewise carefully choose some authors to be my personal favorites, and that I would easily find one or two who had written many books, so many that I should not soon run out of them.  She gave Dickens as an example, but at that time it was Stevenson who stuck.  I especially loved the stories in New Arabian Nights.

 

            Such were the origins of my admiration of the great Scottish writer as poet and fiction writer.  Many other authors have been drawn to my attention in a similar manner, that is, on the recommendation of relatives or friends.  I am particularly admiring of our many writers who have excelled both at poetry and prose.  But more recently, in fact only quite recently, have I come to appreciate Stevenson in a third important category—that of literary critic and historical scholar.  In the past few months, I have been nosing around in the works of a medieval French poet I too long underestimated and thus neglected: François Villon.  Regular readers of the blog may have noticed a few references to him recently.  Villon is one of few medieval poets that many general readers have heard of.  There are many reasons for his (comparative) fame, but one of the principal ones is the modern taste for the edgy, irreverent, and transgressive.  Villon was a bad boy, a very bad boy, actually.  I refer to his actual documented personal criminality, but there is a sauciness in much of the verse itself that is daring and provocative.  He became something of a vogue among French and English bohemians in the nineteenth century.  Having now had the opportunity to read a good deal of the more recent scholarship and criticism Villon continues to attract, I still adjudge two periodical pieces published by Stevenson in 1877—one of them a short work of fiction—among the finest and most illuminating things ever written about the vagabond versifier.  But then I revel in being old-fashioned, frequently quoting Oliver Goldsmith’s most famous dictum—perhaps his only famous dictum?  I love everything that's old, - old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine.  But these days it's ixnay even on the vino.