Dim Sum and Victorian Verse

Two Chus, Two Flemings, and a Moy

 

Of the many rewards offered by the academic life, the greatest for me has been the endless succession of students, endless in number but also endlessly diverse and endlessly engaging, whom I encountered during a half century of teaching.  Hundreds of them remain vivid in memory, and not a few of them remain at least to some extent still in my life, or at least close enough to it that I am not all that surprised when they reappear, perhaps only for a few moments, often unannounced and unexpected.

 

An alumna friend with whom I had a pleasant interlude recently is Professor Olivia Loksing Moy of the English Department of Lehman College of the City University of New York.  To find the right stereotype under which to classify Prof. Moy presents the problem one faces with many polymaths, analogous to the problem of the “plurality of worlds” that taxed thinkers in the eighteenth century.  So “altruistic, overachieving female Asian-American literary scholar” will have to do.  She is an alumna of the Class of 2006.  That year was my final year of teaching at Princeton—a circumstance that would make me unlikely to forget her, even if there were not so many others.   I had also known her sister Olympia very slightly—Olympia today being a high-powered lawyer--so that I almost felt that she was a part of an incipient tradition.  In our shared final year Olivia took a class I was teaching in which a Princeton friend of mine for several years—a research physicist named T. K. Chu at our red-hot fusion laboratory—was also sitting in.  Dr. Chu and his wife are fellow supporters of the lively classical music scene around here.  The Moy sisters were both accomplished musicians.  So there was another link.

 

Thus both the nonagenarian Chu and the merely nearly nonagenarian Fleming were delighted to learn that Professor Olivia Moy was planning to make a trip to Princeton on academic business, a trip that might include a lunch with elderly Princeton friends.  That lunch actually took place last Saturday, and it was delightful.

 

In our adopted state of New Jersey, in which turnpike exit numbers are rich in their sociological significance, there is a tradition of locating surprisingly excellent restaurants, especially Chinese restaurants, in unlikely places.  I first experienced this phenomenon many years ago through a locally famous eatery that was an appendage to a BP gas station on US Route 1.  Its name was “A Kitchen”, and it was entirely unclear whether the “A” was a badge of merit or simply the indefinite article.  The fame of A Kitchen slowly grew to command the attention of the food editor of the New York Times.   Journalistic fame of course proved fatal.  Having achieved bourgeois celebrity the place moved to a slightly more conventional locale a little further north on (as I recall) Route 27 and submerged into the sea of Asian restaurants in the area, most of which I am sure are of course okay but, you know, simply lack the attractiveness of the gas-pump ethos.

 

The (current) name of the establishment at which we met Professor Moy is “The Shanghai Bun”.  It is located in one of the more modest, indeed obscure mini-malls of central Jersey, very near to the Princeton Junction railroad station.  I have no more idea of what the “Bun” is about in this name than I do of what the “A” is about in A Kitchen.  The restaurant does not seem to specialize in buns, but it does one hell of a business.  Its popular success seems to me well merited, for the food is delicious in taste and abundant in quantity.  If you consult the Internet for reviews, you will find only that “Dim sum & other traditional Chinese classics are prepared at this unassuming outfit in a strip mall.”  I presume that the “unassuming” in that description is artistic rhetorical understatement.  Nondescript is more like it.

 

The first person I recognized among the diners as we entered the place—indeed the only person I recognized--was the very nice lady who runs the best Chinese restaurant in Princeton proper.  This, thought I, is a very good sign.  Sort of like learning so many years ago that Stan Musial shaved with Gillette Blue Blades, same as me.   (They had “the sharpest edges ever honed,” though I thought the guy said “owned” and therefore wanted to own one.)  The restaurant was very busy, offering us the leisure for protracted catching-up conversations.  At the end, Professor Moy gifted us with two of her book-length publications.  One is a work edited with a colleague at Montclair State University and anthologizing essays by a dozen or so scholars under the general title of Victorian Verse: The Poetics of Everyday Life.  I have as yet barely leafed through it, but I spent a little more time with her own monograph, The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 2022).  I read a little more deeply in this one, deeply enough to know I want to read the rest.  By a strange chance the first scholarly article I ever published was concerned with Browning’s dramatic monologue “Mr. Sludge, ‘the Medium’”.  Fortunately, that was so long ago that I have ceased to be embarrassed by it, but I was certainly interested in what Prof. Moy has to say about the poem.  The good news is that it is never too late to learn, and there are few better teachers than one’s students.  And speaking of students…

 

I conclude this post with a note of personal privilege.  Later in the day we shall be transported to New York City to celebrate our beautiful, brilliant, and absolutely beloved granddaughter Lulu Mae Fleming-Benite, B.A., who has just graduated, after four years of deep intellectual engagement and high academic achievement, from Barnard College. Lulu will be no stranger to habitual or even intermittent readers of this blog.  She has featured in many essays and, deo volente, will feature in many more in a future that begins with her continuing studies in France.  Congratulations dear, dear Lulu!

Bowled Over

 

This will be an essay about exquisite literary bowls and granddaughters of the same quality.  It is also about the creativity of youth and the contemplation of age.  The Preacher of Ecclesiastes—I refer to the biblical book of that name--is gloomy, but what a poet!  His justly famous admonition to the young is best understood by the old.  Remember your Creator, he says, before it is too late. Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.  Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.  Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher: all is vanity  (Ecc 12:6-8).  Around the image of the broken golden bowl Henry James created one of the marvels of our literature.

 

            That’s the background on literary bowls.  Now for the background on granddaughters, or rather one in particular.  Lulu Mae Fleming-Benite, our Number Two granddaughter, is a young woman of parts.  Fulsomeness in pursuing this theme is a grandfather’s prerogative; but I shall be brief.   She recently turned eighteen, shortly after learning of her early acceptance at her college of choice, Barnard, where she will begin a course of study next fall.  Like her two lively sisters, Lulu has a wide range of interests and abilities.  A talented visual artist in several media and an aspiring musician, she also has a frank intellectual passion that reminds me (yes) of my own adolescent self.  In Marseille, where she spent a visiting semester of her high school junior year, she became interested in philosophy—philosophy being a high school subject in France.  She is now in fact working on the English translation of a book written by her philosophy teacher.

 

            At Christmas Lulu presented, us,  her local grandparents—those on her father’s side live in Jerusalem—a pair of gifts that exhibit some of the range of her artistic talents.  Working from a photograph taken in our yard last year, she painted for me a unique souvenir of an affectionate moment  during a family summer dejeuner sur l’herbe, quite the peer, in my biased opinion,  of similar efforts of Manet or Seurat.  And she poured her love for her grandmother into a remarkable work of ceramic art.  It is a beautifully proportioned bowl, three inches deep, with an eight-inch diameter at its top.  Its glossy, slightly curving sides taper down to a base with a diameter of six inches.  But it is its literary iconography that makes it so distinctive.

 

            My wife Joan, Lulu’s grandmother, studied English at Oxford and has been a life-long lover of good literature.  Among her admired modern authors is Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), a writer of revolutionary importance in terms of the aesthetics of English language fiction.  Her early novel, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) is on the face of it not about very much: Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-crust London society lady, throws a cocktail party for a group of friends, most of whom are as conventional as herself.  But what was not on the face of it—subtly shifting points of view, the examination of inner life, a bold prose lyricism—was akin to a literary explosion.

 

             I am an admirer of the fine ceramics one sees in museums, and years ago, when they were still affordable in England, I gathered a few old blue and white ginger jars that add a little class to the shelves that flank our hearth.  But in truth I know little of ceramic technique, and have no idea how one potifies an image of Virginia Woolf.  I do, I think, grasp something of the meaning of the floral decorations around the bowl’s exterior.  Lulu has captured a whole bouquet with botanical exactitude, and even I can recognize many individual species: pansies, dahlias, asters, hydrangeas perhaps, a rose certainly.  I seemed to remember that Mrs. Dalloway is full of flowers, but until I pulled it from the shelf I had forgotten just how full.  The novel’s first sentence-- Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself—contains but the first of literally dozens of obviously significant floral references.  One sees them everywhere, even in hastily skimming the book, as I did.  Roses—the one flower Mrs. Dalloway really approves for cutting--seem to be particularly significant.

 

            I am no expert on Virginia Woolf, but there are many such experts out there, and I was sure that even casual Internet research would turn up a few.  It took me approximately a minute and a half to find several promising titles, including an entire master’s thesis on the topic.  I promised myself when I retired that I would never again read a student thesis, but of course I’ve already broken that rule a few times.  Truth is, there are some very good student theses including one that  Betty I. Rychen presented to the faculty of the English Department at the College of William and Mary in 1982.  It is entitled Mrs. Dalloway’s Flowers: An Attempt to Define a Symbol.

 

            Mrs. Dalloway is a stunning work of art, but I find it immensely sad, as I think most readers, especially other elderly ones, might.  It is about many things, but one of them is how the promise and daring of youth can be stifled by caution and social convention. The saddest victories of convention are those that coerce love.  Oversimplifying only grossly, Clarissa Dalloway married the wrong man thirty years ago.  He is a perfectly nice and decent man, not without a certain worldly eminence, but he is the wrong man.   Right in the middle of the book there is a moment when Peter Walsh, the one Clarissa should have married instead of Dalloway, and for whom her decision has had consequences no less sad than for herself, is about to hail a taxi near the Regents Park tube station, across from which “a tall quivering shape like a funnel”, an old woman, a hawker of newspapers, stood singing in “a voice of no age or sex” a song as old as the earth.  “Through all ages—when the pavement was grass, when it was a swamp, through the age of tusk  and mammoth, through the age of silent sunrise” the woman “stood singing of love” remembering walking with her dead lover through long summer days.  The day he disappeared was  “flaming, she remembered, with nothing but red asters.”  Peter is moved to press a shilling into the crone’s hand.

 

            One of the marvelous qualities of great art is that it is so often midwife to other art.  For the rest of her days Joan will enjoy this bowl, uniquely original in its unique allusiveness, the gift of a delightful young woman  and a beloved granddaughter.  Lulu is now at about the same age as Woolf’s character Clarissa in what might be called the first movement of Mrs. Dalloway.  Many great decisions of her life lie ahead of her, but the nearly mystic bond of kinship, as much of character as of blood, is one which her grandparents will always cherish and will be brought to mind with floral drama whenever they sit down around the table.

 

 

 

In a Brown Study

When I first encountered the phrase brown study in British authors of the early twentieth century I was ignorant of its meaning but imposed upon it the absurd notion that it must refer to a special room in a man’s house.  Even gross error confidently embraced is not easily dislodged and only later did I come to appreciate the idiom as defined by Brewer.  A brown study is a certain frame of mind, “apparent thought, but real vacuity.  The corresponding French expression explains it—sombre réverie.  Sombre and brun both mean sad, melancholy, gloomy, dull.”           

            I am always uneasy about starting an essay when, as now, I am unsure what it will be about—beyond being the product of a brown study, that is.  It might be a tribute to smart Jewish girls.  It might be a commendation of literary study.  On the other hand it might be of a more conventional, not to say tedious genre—grandparental chortling about cute things their grandchildren say.

            But no essay could be plagued by more “mixed messages” than the recent slice of life it will attempt to report.  About a week ago we learned that a very dear friend, Joanna Lipking, had died in her sleep in Evanston IL on February 1^st.  Jo was married to Larry Lipking, my Princeton colleague in the sixties and seventies.  The Flemings and the Lipkings, who were still young, barely, hung out together and formed that bond of friendship that only the youthful can form.  Jo was brilliant, crackling with intellectual energy, and she expressed her strong opinions emphatically.  We were sad when the Lipkings moved on to Northwestern, where both were offered appointments in the English Department.  

            The friendship continued, of course, but in the distant and intermittent mode dictated by geography.  We had all been together fairly recently, when we discussed plans, long agreed upon in principle, to travel together in Sicily.  That, alas, can never happen.  The proposed trip must remain forever an emblem of many things undone and conversations not had.  That is how death works, or one of its ways.

            It will take me a while to wrap my mind around this latest evidence of our common mortality, though as one grows old one also becomes more familiar with the sting.  And if in the midst of life we are in death, it works the other way around, too.  The week before we had been in New York at a brunch to celebrate the eleventh birthday of our delightful granddaughter Lulu.  Lulu is another dark-haired beauty of fierce intelligence, interested in practically everything, and precociously talented in the pursuit of many of them.  She had already had a “real” party of her peers.  This was a ceremonial event mainly populated by her elders, including two of her godparents—two eminent academics, natch.

            Her godmother, who happens to live in the same apartment building, is Catharine (Kate) Stimpson, a prominent professor of modern literature and women’s studies, a novelist, and a past president of the Modern Language Association.  Those are some of the public externals one would find on her vita, to which those who know her even so slightly as I do would have to add achievements considerably more important, such as “fine woman” or “excellent person”.  What does one give an eleven-year-old for her birthday?  What does one give this eleven-year-old?  We had chosen a couple of nice little things for her, but Kate Stimpson gave her a copy of the Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.

            I shall refrain from launching into an ill-informed encomium of Emily Dickinson, except to say of her short poems what Saint Gregory says about the Bible.  Here is a gentle stream in which the lamb may safely wade; here is a mighty river into which the elephant can plunge.  But I wondered if little Lulu was really “ready”?

            I knew I was.  When I heard the news of Jo Lipking’s death, one of the first things I did was to return to one of Dickinson’s most haunting and enigmatic poems, a poem about death and the “safety” or consecrated indifference of the dead.

                Safe in their Alabaster Chambers -

                Untouched by Morning - 

                and untouched by noon -

                Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection, 

                Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone - 

                Grand go the Years, 

                In the Crescent above them -           

                Worlds scoop their Arcs - 

                and Firmaments - row -

                Diadems - drop -

                And Doges surrender -

                Soundless as Dots, 

                On a Disk of Snow.

I do not pretend fully to understand this poem, but I don’t know a more striking line in English than “Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone”.  I believe the final lines—the silent dots on the disk of snow—make technical allusion to telegraphy, the cybernetic wonder of the nineteenth century, but again I am not certain.  Does any of my readers have an idea?

            “The mind is its own place,” as Milton’s Satan famously observed.  The mind is seldom wholly occupied with a single theme.  There is a jostling competition for the mind’s attention, and mine was settled on some electrical problems related to a recent ice storm when a few days ago I got an email from my daughter leaking what was pretty clearly the firstfruits of Lulu’s close encounter with the newest book in her library.  Lulu had written her own first poem.  It is not a Dickinsonian imitation, but it is certainly of Dickinsonian inspiration.  And it connects.

            What is Brown?

            Brown is the Forest Underground

            An otter resting

            In the lake

            And the swamp

            When it's about to wake.

            It's the smell of the old book shop

            When you come in

            And the queer silence 

            When you start to stop.

            A color like no other

            But it's always chosen last

            And you always realize it

            When the time has long been past.

            It's only just a shade

            Speaking like an artist,

            A bit of all the colors

            In a sweet-simple serenade.

                                    Lulu Fleming-Benite