Cast Party

 The Cast

            The heroine of this essay will be Ms. Cora Louise Fleming-Benite, granddaughter extraordinaire and, for the brief captivity of a few hundred words, guiltless prey of the social historian.  If you are a reader of history books, certain clichés are probably incised upon your cerebellum.  The most notorious, perhaps, is “the rise of the middle class.” The middle classes have so long been ascending above the pages of our history books as to be visible only with the aid of the most powerful optical instruments.  But there are many others: “index of social change,” “the formation of elites,” “revolutionary consciousness,” “liminality”, etc., etc.

            It is sometimes possible to observe rapid social change very close up.  Take a farm kid from the Ozarks and, just for the preposterousness of it, send him to Oxford, where he will meet and eventually marry the brilliant and accomplished daughter of Edwardian meritocrats.  Let the female issue of the Oxonians, having already begun a stellar academic career, marry an equally brilliant Israeli historian of Iraqi background and terrifying erudition.  Then take the infant products of that union to Paris for four or five years and, upon their eventual return to America, place them in the Ecole Internationale de New York (alias EINY) so as to allow them to maintain their native French.

"What?  Me worry?"

            The Parisian schools in which my granddaughters were enrolled have a very cool institution called the semaine verte—a “green week,” which is a sort of American school “field trip” on steroids.  The kids are rusticated to some gorgeous old farmstead in the Cevennes or somewhere, where they get to breathe the air and milk the cow, or feed the pig, or trample the grapes—in short, to go seriously rural for a few days.

            Part of the authentic Frenchiness of EINY is that they should offer such an opportunity to the cliff dwellers of the concrete canyons of New York City.  But for New Yorkers, the Cevennes region is a little distant.  The obvious destination combining Francophonie with reasonable proximity is Québec.  However, if you are making your trip to Québec in the winter, it is much more likely to turn out to be a semaine blanche than a semaine verte.  Thus did my granddaughter Cora Louise find herself last week at the winter resort of Mont Tremblant to the northwest of Montreal.

            But here social history ends and human drama begins.  Social history might explain why little Cora could indulge in such exotic sports d’hiver as ice fishing and dog-sledding—hyperborean exertions known to her aging grandfather only from the pages of Jack London.  But it was not sociology that determined that on the last day of the school trip, indeed on the last straightaway of the last ski run, Cora Louise should fall and painfully injure her lower right leg.  That will have been determined either by the God of Small Things or the Random Play of Electrons that our godless age seems to prefer to the mellower concept of Providence.  In any event, that is what happened.

 Scene of the Crime: Mont Tremblant, P.Q.

            The battlefield diagnosis, which at the time seemed a reasonable hypothesis, was “sprained ankle”.  The treatment for that sort of thing is three pronged: ace bandage, aspirin tablet, and a certain level of words of comfort from concerned adult supervisors.  That therapy, reinforced by the usual animal energies characteristic of young persons on long bus trips, proved entirely sufficient to return her uncomplaining to New York City.  But the next morning her vigilant mother could tell that all was still not quite right.  Her misgivings were confirmed by a radiologist in the Emergency Room.  Cora’s ankle was not sprained; the ankle bone was broken.

            This means about a month in plaster.  Except that to my admittedly inexpert eye it doesn’t seem to be plaster anymore.  It’s more like gauze reinforced with light-weight kryptonite.  It is no doubt admirably suited to its task, though as a writing surface it is less satisfactory than the old plaster casts of my youth.  Even so I was able to leave my mark—“Gran Dad,” written in a jagged, spidery hand as though the material written upon were a white window screen.  But other inscribers of the cast have sensibly gone for the pictorial, and even since I took the photograph two days ago, it has flowered with cheery images in red, yellow, orange, and green.

            Her school is a fair distance from her home, and even the most modest ambulation is no small challenge under the circumstances.  Little Cora is having to master the use of crutches, and she has faced the awkwardness of it all with determination and a nearly supernatural cheerfulness.  This little girl is one of God’s brighter sunbeams.  In general her most pessimistic category is the glass three-quarters full.  The very least I can do is salute her in “Gladly Lerne Gladly Teche.”

XLII

“Ultimate Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything,”  Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

As I left for my dawn swim this morning, I still had no idea for a blog essay, but I knew that I could count on the exquisite boredom of natation to serve as midwife to some invention or another, however desperate; and as I made the turn at the end of my forty-first length it came to me in a flash.  Forty-one is followed, almost immediately by forty-two; and according to Douglas Adams, forty-two is the meaning of everything.  Of course Adams has no idea why, nor do any of his enthusiasts whom I have encountered.  The reason is that forty-two is the biblical number of completion.

In Book 9, chapter 19, of War and Peace the novel’s hero, Pierre Bezukhov, arrives at the conclusion that the Emperor Napoleon is the Antichrist and that he, Bezukhov, has the sacred duty to assassinate him.  The first conclusion is child’s play.  First you must adapt the ancient conventions of kabbalistic gematria to  the Latin alphabet in the manner favored by the mystical Freemasons of Lyon, as follows: 

a  b  c   d  e  f   g  h  i    k    l     m    n    o     p    q       r    s    t

1  2  3  4  5  6 7  8  9 10 20   30   40  50  60  70   80  90  100           

u        v        w      x       y       z

110   120  130   140   150    160

You then write out, in French, the title L[e] Empereur Napoléon, cheating ever so slightly by not eliding the e of the article.  Now add it all up to get 666, the Number of the Beast (See Revelation 13: 18).  More important from Pierre’s point of view is that in the fifth verse of that same chapter it is written that the beast will be given authority for a period “forty and two months.”  Pierre, an erudite fellow, knows that when the Bible speaks of “days” or “months” it actually means years.  He knows as well that the year is 1812, meaning that Napoleon, born in 1769,  must in fact be forty-two years old.

 Napoleon, alias Apollyon the Destroyer, alias 666

It takes Pierre a little while to figure out his numerological role in the great scheme of things, but he does so after a certain amount of orthographic jiggery-pokery, this time dropping an e that should be there.  It turns out that the phrase L’ Russe Besuhof (roughly, duh Russian Bezukhov) is also a 666.  So the Beast has come to the end of his allotted days.  Forty-two is all you get.  History buffs and readers of Tolstoy will know that things didn’t quite work out, but that was the theory.

L' Russe Besuhof

Yet that is only the beginning of the biblical forty-twos.  Such chiliasts as Joachim of Fiore were particularly thrilled by what they found in Revelation 11:3, in which the seventh apocalyptic angel gives license to the “two witnesses” to prophesy for a period of “a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth.”  Because Joachim knew, as I feel certain my erudite readership also will, that in the genealogy with which the gospel of Matthew commences there are, as it happens, precisely forty-two generations between Abraham, with whom God made the original covenant, and Jesus Christ.

Everyone further knew that there are thirty years in a generation and that 42 x 30 = 1,260, the number of days (meaning of course years) granted to the sackclothed witnesses.  Something very big had happened forty-two generations before the birth of Jesus, and something equally stupendous ought to happen in the year 1260, with the completion of the forty-second generation after his birth.  Joachim thought that the sackclothed fellows would be some new kind of monks.  The Franciscans and the Dominicans, who had appeared on the scene only after Joachim’s death, thought so too.  That is why most of Europe was anticipating The End as the days grew shorter toward the close of the year 1260.  That is why so many medieval writers (such as Dante in the Vita nuova) divide their compositions in forty-two numbered parts.

 How Joachim of Fiore saw things

The definitive trip of all time must surely have been the Exodus out of Egypt.  If you have absolutely nothing better to do you can read through the story, calculator in hand, and make note of the number of times the children of Israel set up temporary camp on their way to the Promised Land.  But since you now know the “number of completion” you could probably work it out in your head without reading anything.

Not every completion ends with milk and honey, of course.  When it comes to prophets, it is best to show them some respect.  As Elisha was passing through the village of Bethel, a bunch of bad little children ran after him, mocking him for his bald head.  “And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them.  And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them” (II Kings 2:23).  The only trouble with doing stuff like this in the swimming pool is that you are likely to lose count—of laps that is, not of wicked children.

 Naughty, naughty boys!

The meaning of all this should be clear: if you regard an important part of good writing to be its alignment with the eternal verities of the cosmos, you must structure its concluding paragraph in precisely forty-two words, not more, not less.

Lessons from the Fun House

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.  Ecclesiastes, 7:4.

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world".  That is the famous aphorism of Shelley from his Defense of Poetry, and once it was true, or might have been.  Certainly the greatest of moralists were novelists.  Read Tom Jones.  Read almost anything by Dickens.  Read Middlemarch or Vanity Fair.

This perception is perhaps relevant to our current national malaise, which might be characterized as an apprehension of severe economic difficulty transformed to existential crisis by moral confusion.  It is entirely unrealistic to expect that our politicians might address the situation coherently or comprehensively.  Even the few equipped to do so credibly dare not speak seriously, with moral vigor and nuance.  The politician must seek to please, and to do it quickly: in sixty seconds, with perhaps another thirty for “follow up”.   That is not the mode of the prophet—even though the prophets do have all the best short sound-bites, such as “You cannot serve God and Mammon.”  Of course stuff like that does tend to get you banished, stoned, imprisoned, beheaded, or crucified, all of which things are serious impediments to your election or reelection.  Maybe a novelist will rise to the occasion.

It is interesting that the popular image that is catching on is mathematical and statistical: the ninety-nine percent and the one percent.  When it comes to money, how much is enough?  Some clever people at Slate have created a Mitt-Meter, an online tool allowing you instantly to calculate how long it would take you, at your current rate of income, to match Mr. Romney’s 2010 haul.  I am an affluent retiree, so it would take me only the better part of two centuries.  Well, good for Mr. Romney.  He rightly refuses “to apologize for success”, and such concepts as Aristotelian moderation or grotesque excess are obviously subtleties beyond his ken.

            Subtlety was not beyond the ken, however, of our great writer Edith Wharton.  I hope you have read her magnificent novel The House of Mirth (1905), or seen its sumptuous costume-drama cinematic adaptation.  If you haven’t, the present moment of Downton-Abbey-mania would be the perfect time.  The House of Mirth is the tragic story of Lily Bart, a young, beautiful, but unsuccessful aspirant to the flaky upper crust of New York moneyed society, a society in which greed vies with vanity, and both are trumped by hypocrisy.

            

Edith Wharton (1861-1937): Noblesse oblige

               When it came to uppercrustness, Wharton knew whereof she spoke.  She was definitely Old Money, though fabulous sales of her book added a measurable influx of the New.  She was a top-drawer Episcopalian who hobnobbed with the Pierpont Morgans and hung out a good deal in the “cottages” in Newport.  But she happened also to be a deep thinker and a serious Christian, and those were the factors that chiefly inform her novel.  Concerning the broader issues raised in The House of Mirth she wrote as follows in response to a fan letter: “Social conditions as they are just now in our new world, where the sudden possession of money has come without inherited obligations, or any traditional sense of solidarity between the classes, is a vast and absorbing field for the novelist, and I wish a great master could arise to deal with it…”  That was in 1905.  Fast forward a century.  Our world is a little older, but it’s déjà vu all over again.

Wharton’s letter has been published more than once, and I had read it; only this week did I read the letter to which it was a response. Her pen-pal was the Rev. Dr. Morgan Dix, the priest who had officiated at her wedding.  Dix was for a lengthy period in the Gilded Age the rector of Trinity Church, Wall Street, one of Christendom’s more famous (and opulent) parish churches.  It turns out, as I learned last week in an accidental way, he was also an astute literary critic.*  Professor Donald Gerardi, known to me only indirectly as a friend of a friend, is an expert on American religious history, who is just now working on a biography of Morgan Dix. Dix’s letter to Wharton, to which I gained access through Prof. Gerardi, whets my appetite for the completed biography.

Morgan Dix (1827-1908) greets the dawn of photography

Here is a brief part of what Dix had written.  “Though you may demur to my conclusion, let me plainly express it.  I claim you as one of the preachers to this generation; as a preacher of righteousness and pure living, not directly, as we of the clergy preach them in fulfilling our appointed course, but indirectly, by showing what must come when righteousness, and faith, and reverence die out of the souls of men and women, and nothing is left but a mad desire for wealth and the pleasures it procures, and the vast conceit which arrogates to itself a primacy and a superiority based not on virtue, honour, intelligence, or character, but simply on the possession of money, well-invested, and ministering to the pride and lusts of its owner.”

Money well-invested!  That can buy a ticket to the Fun House all right.  One can sense perhaps that when it comes to social critics one is always likely to prefer a Chaucer to a Savonarola.   But one also sees where Edith Wharton was coming from.  “I am sure that you read your Bible as you did when a young girl…” Dix writes. “I know the verse in Ecclesiastes from which you took the name of your volume, those words which strike like a knell through the hollowness of a society devoted to selfish pleasure as the one and only object of pursuit…”  I have read several critiques of The House of Mirth written from the point of view of its “Jamesian techniques” and its “feminist sensibility”.  I’d like to see one now from its own point of view, that of the social teachings of the Anglo-Catholic revival.  That was for Morgan Dix the appropriate “critical perspective”; and far from demurring, Edith Wharton immediately invited him to dinner.

*I had heard of Dix only through an amusing episode of New York social history, in which he comes off as terminally humorless and stuffy, in W. A. Swanberg’s The Rector and the Rogue (1968).

For Better or for Worse

 
GOOD  In pious times, e're priest-craft did begin / before polygamy was made a sin...

I am in the final push in the preparation of a book about the Enlightenment period, and as usual thinking about issues in distant history intrudes upon current perception. If the early medieval centuries were the “Dark Ages,” the thirteenth the “Age of Faith,” and the Eighteenth the “Age of Reason”, what is the defining characteristic of the age that has given us our formation?  Your answer will probably be determined by which of the two large historical schools you fall into: the optimistic, or the pessimistic.

When doctors disagree, its best to attempt a comprehensive review of the evidence.  When Pantagruel went off to study in Paris, his father Garagantua wrote him a letter full of enthusiasm for recent advances in learning, most of which could be attributed to the invention of printing.  “I see robbers, hangmen, freebooters, tapsters, ostlers, and such-like, of the very rubbish of the people, more learned now than doctors and preachers were in my time.”  He does allow that the destruction wrought by another recent invention, gunpowder, might cancel some of the gains won by movable type.

In the eighteenth century Voltaire wrote his immortal novella Candide (subtitled “Optimism”).  Candide is a young fellow schooled in the optimism of the philosopher Leibniz.  He wanders through the mayhem of war, rapine, the Inquisition, and the Lisbon earthquake piously reciting his well-learned mantra: “This is the best of all possible worlds.”  It is not long before the reader perceives that this observation, though acute, is pessimistic rather than optimistic. 

A famous pop-psychologist of the turn of the twentieth century, Emile Coué (1857-1926), gained thousands of followers by getting them to intone daily: “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better” (“Tous les jours, a tous points de vue, je vais de mieux en mieux.”)   This mode of therapy was called couéisme, which is apparently French for balderdash.  A recent bestseller by Steven Pinker entitled The Better Angels of Our Nature would persuade us that in the Great Scheme, there is a definite uptick.

Another way of asking the question is this: do you detect in history a pattern of progress, as many people since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have done?  As a medievalist I am more inclined to the classical-medieval view of incremental decay.  Several writers of our English Renaissance gave some version of the following derivation of the word world: “World, from wear-old, that thing that groweth worse as it groweth older.”  These writers and their Continental contemporaries had been deeply schooled in the classics, and thus subscribed to the theory of the “Ages of the World.”

            The two greatest poets of classical Latinity—Virgil in the first of the Georgics, Ovid in the first book of the Metamorphoses—had given beautiful expression to the myth of the Golden Age, an age of pre-industrial, indeed pre-agricultural, primal justice and bliss, in which the human race lived in harmonious simplicity, feeding itself from the earth’s uncultivated bounty, and slaking its thirst at the rivulets of its crystalline waters.  This story seemed to such early Christian writers as Lactantius an obvious analogue to the pre-lapsarian state of our first parents in the Garden of Eden.  So it was treated by Boethius in one of his most famous meters (poems), which for a thousand years most people who could read at all were likely to know nearly by heart.  A translation of it was one of Chaucer’s early productions.

 Oxford: Bodleian, MS Douce 195: Comment iupiter oste les genitoires a son pere

(Translation: "This was the most unkindest cut of all.")

            But the myth of a Golden Age, like the third chapter of the Book of Genesis, is one of a paradise lost.  Saturn reigned over the Golden Age, the age of justice.  But the Golden Age came to a brutal end when Saturn’s son Jupiter rebelled against his father.  There is no polite way of telling you what happened.  Jupiter cut off his father’s sexual organs and tossed them into the Mediterranean Sea.  The results, after a certain amount of aqueous bubbling, are well known to you all from a famous painting of Botticelli: Venus on the half-shell!  Yes, lubricious sex entered the world only with primal sin.  “Then the eyes of [Adam and Eve] were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.”  (Except that I prefer the reading of the Geneva Bible of 1560, in which they made themselves “breeches”.  The historical human problem has been hot pants, not hot aprons.)

            The fall from gold to silver was, alas, the mere beginning of a continuing downward slope of degradation that saw a steady metallic descent through Ages of Bronze and Iron.  Fortunately the classical period ended before things could get much worse, which they have continued to do ever since.  Though no poet has shouldered the task—How could one?  We have no epic poets any more—the materials are there awaiting.  The world has had its Ages of Ceramic, of Wood, and of Papier-Mâché.  I think we are now in a transitional period between the Age of Cardboard and the Age of Bubblewrap.  Under these circumstances, despite Pinker’s captious statistics, it is hard for me to agree that our own age, the century of Auschwitz and Vorkuta, is a marked improvement over the century of the Seven Years’ War.

NOT SO GOOD : from Goya's "Diasters of War"

Isidore of Seville and the Dog Whistle

           

I am an alleged expert in allegory—a literary genre that advances its fiction beneath a dark conceit.  There are some pretty famous examples, such as the Divine Comedy, the Faerie Queene, and Pilgrim’s Progress.  Some literary manuals define allegory as “an extended metaphor,” but I prefer the simplicity of the medieval definition of Isidore of Seville:  Allegoria, he writes, id est, alieniloquium.  Allegory is “saying one thing to mean another.”  It’s more compehensive, and, besides, Isidore is the patron saint of the Internet.  (Note the cool laptop, below.)   Internet users ought to give him a plug whenever possible.

            I like this expansive definition because it includes such useful speech acts as sarcasm, as well as literary irony of many kinds.  One so rarely meets in real life people called “Red Cross Knight” or “Mr. Worldly Wiseman” that one is likely to suspect them of being allegorical immediately when encountered in books.  And if Red Cross Knight goes on to slay (slay, note, not kill) the Foul Dragon—well, you can be nearly sure he did it with his trusty Sword of Faith.

Real life alieniloquium can be more interesting.  Say you run into someone, an old associate you don’t particularly like but fortunately also rarely see any more, in circumstances that require a few minutes conversation.  Vapid as it is, the conversation is sufficient to remind you why you don’t like this person and to demonstrate that the person feels exactly the same way about you.  Nonetheless the interview ends at the fifty-ninth street stop or wherever with mutual declarations of how good it has been to catch up and the suggestion by one or other that “we must get together for lunch”.  “We must get together for lunch” is alieniloquium for the unutterable “So long, and with any luck I won’t run into you for another seventeen years.”

Though I have written whole books about allegory and the difficulties of its interpretation, the current Republican primary contests, or at least the learned journalistic disquisitions thereon, have revealed what an allegorical piker I really am.  It appears that the Republican candidates have all been “telegraphing” in “coded language” certain “messages” interpretable only by hermeneutically adept hillbillies.  Very often their utterances have been “dog whistles”, presumably discernible only by the hillbillies’ hunting hounds.  Though varied in nature these alieniloquia meet in a single, simple certainty: all criticism of the current president and his policies is racist.

I had been wondering what it was, actually, that is so wrong about Mitt Romney.  Yes, he’s filthy rich and as phoney as a three-dollar bill; but cut him some slack.  The man is a presidential candidate.  After all, the words and deeds of his current rival, Newt Gingrich, threaten to give hypocrisy a bad name.  Yet Mitt Romney somehow makes Gingrich look good.  Then I saw a snippet from one of the talking head festivals, and the scales fell from my eyes.  George Will, the columnist and pundit, nailed it.  The trouble with Romney, he said, is “Romneyness”. So repellent is Romneyness from the political point of view that I ordinarily wouldn’t be inclined to defend its only begetter from attacks, even in the pages of the New York Times.  But a recent op ed essay there by Lee Siegel (“What’s Race Got To Do With It?”) goads me to draw my tropological sword from its anagogical sheath.

According to this essay what’s wrong with Romney is not his Romneyness but his whiteness.  “Mitt Romney is the whitest white man to run for president in recent memory.”  Like the probing literary critic he is, Siegel supports this sweeping generalization with concrete textual and iconographic details.  Romney invokes an America of “white picket fences”.  Furthermore, “He is nearly always in immaculate white shirt sleeves. He is implacably polite, tossing off phrases like ‘oh gosh’ with Stepford bonhomie.”  (I think Stepford Bonhomie is that rock band with white guitars, but I’m not sure.)  Siegel’s essay is accompanied by a devastating “visual”—one of those patriarchal family photos favored by rich people who can’t descend to ordinary Christmas cards.  You cannot deny the testimony of your own eyes.  The guy’s wife is white; so are all the kids, and the grandkids.  The black shirts are just to confuse the opposition.  Then, too, the guy is trying to get into the White House!

“I am sure that Mr. Romney is not a racist” writes Lee Siegel.  “But I am also sure that, for the many Americans who find the thought of a black president unbearable, he is an ideal candidate.”  There is no footnote citing the epistemological grounds for the author’s certainty on either point, but how can you footnote a dog whistle?  Only the most intelligent dogs can so much as construct a complete sentence, let alone give proper citations.

The first thing the student of allegory needs to learn is that not everything is one.  Sometimes a Red Cross Night is simply an evening spent at a fundraiser for a social service agency.  There are even times when an invitation to lunch is an invitation to lunch. Now and again the newspapers report that in New York or Los Angeles a police officer has shot an unarmed Hispanic youth in a dark alley.  The cop always thought the kid had a gun.  He almost always saw the “glint of metal” in the kid’s hand.  It almost always turns out to have been a cigarette lighter or a soda can.  We say that seeing is believing, but it often works the other way around.  Fixed expectation carefully edits our sensory experience.  We see what we already believe—or already fear.  But that’s no less true of newspaper columnists than of cops.

Four Pages of Family History

Over the holiday season the Grim Reaper was busy in my little corner. Just around Christmas my cousin Edie Kellem died in Mountain Home, Arkansas. Last week I learned that one of my closest friends of undergraduate years, Dupre Jones, died on January 9 in Beaufort, South Carolina. Both of them were killed by bladder cancer. There were less savage bonds of coincidence that might link them in my mind, and that might plausibly give shape to a readable essay. But it is too early for that; for the moment they are the stuff of private meditation rather than public proclamation. “Family and friends.” They are the usual categories of our scrapbooks, our generic Christmas letters, our intercessory prayers. For most of us, too, for most of the time, they are the categories of history. 

We all have history. It is the medium in which we live--and die.  One mode of history we are all familiar with is “family history”, but my own family--that of my father and mother, I mean, and their own forebears– have been terrible historians.  There are of course material reasons why “the short and simple annals of the poor” are short and simple.  Most of my ancestors simply did not lead lives nourishing of the archival mentality. I'm trying to do a little better for my own posterity. For this reason I was delighted if also flabbergasted when a few months ago I found three letters written by my father. I don't know where they came from, although one of them is addressed to me. That is one of two printed note cards decorated with Navajo designs—the other is addressed to his brother John (my uncle) in Arkansas—written after my mother’s death and shortly after his penultimate stroke in 1978.  “Dear John,” he writes in a hand barely decipherable through the palsy, “I am working hard on speek and writing.”  He worked hard at most things; I don’t know many people who worked harder.

But it is the third letter I intend to share with you.  How it came into my possession, or why I never saw it before, is a mystery now beyond resolution.  This letter is undated, but context shows that it was written in 1942 from Gary, Indiana, to his father Samuel Fleming (my grandfather) in Arkansas.  As the disastrous economy of the Depression began to brighten a bit as a result of the European War, he had found work in the steel mills where he had once before worked in the mid 1930s.  The letter is more or less self-explanatory.  As my father writes, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is a recent event.  He is explaining to his father why he feels impelled to leave his family and go to war.  The people alluded to are his sister (my Aunt Louise), my mother Janet, and “Ricky”, my baby brother.  We talk in a rather vague and sentimental way about the “Greatest Generation”.  For me the penultimate paragraph of this letter gives sharpness and specificity to the phrase. And as a bonus I also found out where my heart murmur came from!

†   †    †    †    †    †

Dear Dad,

                  Probably you have heard from Janet’s letter to Louise about what’s been going on.  Believe you are entitled to a more minute account of proceedings so here goes.

                  The day after my arrival from Arkansas I thought I’d take a trip to the Chicago naval recruiting Station to see what I could find out about their construction work.  So Janet called there and yes they would be open all day Saturday and yes there were openings in naval construction.  So up I goes.  The Lieutenant in charge, after talking with me for several minutes advised my taking a physical and then see if we could agree on something.  So I did.  I passed the vision 20-20 and the hearing OK also the teeth.  I was going great guns when bang! the doctor says “How long have you had that hernia and why didn’t you tell us about it before?  I was too astounded to answer and even more so when about 3 minutes later a doctor called me for a heart murmur.  I was beginning to feel mighty blue not only missing out on service but I dreaded the time should come I’d have to take a physical exam at the mill.  About ten minutes later they smacked me again blood pressure 170.  I really felt like calling for an ambulance.  So they said they were sorry but come back and take a GCT test.  I supposed it was some sort of heart test and only went up Monday because I wanted to get it over with and be rejected and get something done about the hernia.  Monday I found that the test was a mental one—they wanted to see as they cold bloodedly told me whether it was worth their while to assume such a poor risk!  Thank the Lord I passed the mental with a high grade.  Then they found the blood pressure was down to normal the high reading of Saturday I suppose was caused by shock and apprehension.  So they passed me physically.  By the way the Doctor said the heart murmur was wholly functional, that 18 out of 100 have it and it’s not to be considered as a heart disease or anything of the sort.  It just isn’t a perfect heart.

                  After getting some recommendations from the mill and out West the Lieutenant offered me a rating in construction Battalion.  This is a new branch of the navy.  I am listed as a carpenter’s mate, first class.  That is a first class Petty Officers rating, corresponding with a Top or First Sergeants rating in the Army.  I am to await call and after 3 weeks inoculation etc be shipped to whatever base we are to help in constructing.  They range from Alaska to the south Seas and from Ireland to Brazil.  Rather expect when the time comes to head South as I am listed as having some command of the Spanish language.  The base rate is 114.00 per month plus 34.50 for Janet and 22.80 for foreign service.  There is no domestic service in our branch.

                  In many ways the rating should be better, at least financially than a higher one.  One grade up—chief Petty officer and you have to buy your own uniforms.  They total I am told about $300.

                  I am very thankful to get the rating.  I will be doing vital and important work even though it is considered non-combatant.  The enlistment runs until 6 months after the war.  I am to be hospitalized whenever the rupture bothers me and I can carry $10,000 insurance.

                  To say that the thoughts of separation do not appal both Janet and I would flatly be a lie.  I hope the war is short – I fear it will be long.  That’s a sacrifice we must make.

                  Janet will be going to Denver for over the winter at least.  Give Ricky one more year and Arkansas should be much less dangerous to him.  If I can obtain permission I’ll drive her out.

                  Concerning the money we owe you Dad I guess if you’re willing we’ll have to let it ride.  Janet will have to have a little reserve until my checks start coming.

                  In many ways this has been a fortunate break.  They laid off to May 1936 in my department, so I’m hanging on by three months service.  There’s another cut coming later sure as shooting.  Of course there are jobs and plenty of them.  The armor plate mill, […] rubber plant etc and of course back in the copper mines they are crying for men.  But that rupture wouldn’t help at all in getting those jobs and it would have been found out I’m sure for the navy doctors caught it instantly.  I had been aware of a chafing feeling for some time but never dreamed of a hernia.

                  Please all of you write to Janet regularly.  She has had her heart set on going to Arkansas for a long time and she’s going to be very lonely.  After all, as she says, she rather got accustomed to being around Flemings.  But I felt it best she should go to her folks over the winter.  You know how those Arkansas rains are and with the lack of doctors it makes a hazard for Ricky.  But of course in an emergency wire for Janet right away.  I told her she could probably go to Arkansas in the spring.

                  When I’ll be called I don’t know and I know enough of military procedure not to start fretting.  You cant rush those people and when they want me they holler.  Meantime I’m on the active list.

                  I hope my course of procedure does not grieve you.  We have under God each our own conception of duty that we owe to ourselves and our loved ones our country and our Lord.  In the case of my wife and myself this conception left us but one choice of action – the choice is not mine but ours – for we see eye to eye on this matter.

                  I doubt extremely if I will get to see you again before leaving for duty.    So to all I say may God bless us – one and all.

Your son

Marvin

Leper Leads Calais!

Your Blue Jays is to be found sitting before his machine playing with his favorite Christmas present, 2 Rick his voice recognition program: Dragon Dictate. It will be immediately apparent to you that Mr. Dragon and I will have to work at our relationship.  What I thought I was writing was not “Your Blue Jays” but “Your bloguiste”, while the “2 Rick” was intended as “to wit.” Then again my brother Rick can be quite a wit, so I can understand the confusion.  The interesting point about this technological marvel is that its mistakes are almost always more interesting, from the point of view of language and ideas, than the intended burden of my dull prose.  I was prepared for Mr. Dragon to have some difficulty dealing with foreign words and especially proper nouns. I first grasped the full dimension of his awesome genius when I tried to write the following sentence: “Madame de Krüdener took as her lover a stripling youth named Hippolyte Tarray.”  This in Dragonese became: “Not in the creator took as her lover is Stripling use named leper leads Calais.”  The manifest superiority of the latter requires no comment.  Leper Leads Calais.  What a fantastic headline!  I am trying to work up a story worthy of it.

We all must be aware of instances in which the erroneous rescues or redeems the humdrum canonical.  The small child who in reciting the Lord's Prayer petitioned “Lead us not into Penn Station” demonstrated a theological acumen unparalleled in two millennia of scriptural exegesis. 

A few years before he became famous with the publication of his novel The Moviegoer (1961), Walker Percy published in the Sewanee Review a brilliant essay entitled “Metaphor as Mistake”. In fact I can remember the date--1958, my senior year--though I retain only a vague sense of the argument. But should you be interested in the habitual failure of language to do what it is supposed to do by doing something better, you would find Percy considerably more engaging than Jacques Derrida (or shocked Gary in Dragonese).

 M and M

Two Giants of

American Literature

 There is a particularly striking example of the ameliorating powers of error related to our great Herman Melville. It is well known to professional bibliographers, a group that unfortunately makes up at least half my boutique readership, but I shall rehearse it anyway.  Near the end of Melville’s novel White Jacket the first-person narrator recounts a terrifying experience—namely, that of falling a hundred feet from a yard-arm into the sea below.  As he plummets downward, seemingly in slow motion, his life passes before the screen of his mind, and he is perfectly conscious of the certainty of death.  Then he hits the water:

The feeling of death flooded over me with the billows. The blow from the sea must have turned me, so that I sank almost feet foremost through a soft, seething, foaming lull. Some current seemed hurrying me away; in a trance I yielded, and sank deeper down with a glide. Purple and pathless was the deep calm now around me, flecked by summer lightnings in an azure afar. The horrible nausea was gone; the bloody, blind film turned a pale green; I wondered whether I was yet dead, or still dying. But of a sudden some fashionless form brushed my side–some inert, soiled fish of the sea; the thrill of being alive again tingled in my nerves, and the strong shunning of death shocked me through. [Library of America edition, p. 763.]

That is what Melville wrote, or at least what nineteenth-century editions of White Jacket led readers to believe he wrote.  One such reader was Professor F. O. Matthiessen, of Harvard University (1902-1950), sometimes credited with “inventing” the field of American literature as an academic subject.  Matthiessen was very struck by this passage—so struck, perhaps, that when he chose to end his own life he did so by leaping from a twelve-storey building.  He wrote a good deal about Melville, and famously about the paragraph just cited.  According to Matthiessen Melville, in choosing the adjective soiled to describe the fishy form which by its touch gave evidence to the submerged sailor that he was still alive, had performed an act of linguistic magic.  The astonishing phrase soiled fish—so surprising, so indeterminate, so evocative—was a hallmark of genius.

 soiled

coiled

Then the bibliographers set about their spoil-sport work.  There was a compelling argument that the soiled fish of the sea was a typographical error.  The fact that the phrase was meaningless was only one clue.  Documentary evidence showed pretty clearly that the author had written coiled fish.  (Remember, we are talking Herman Melville, author of the world’s biggest book about whales.)  The transposition of the letters “C” and “S” is not uncommon in old hand-set copy.  If you examine the layout of the job case you can see that the error is based in a kind of spatial dyslexia.  So the great literary critic F. O. Matthiessen had been caught with his hand in the linguistic cookie jar.

To which I am tempted to say: So what?  Had Melville been offered the option of the mistake, he would have been a fool to reject it.  From now on I am going to write “Hippolyte Terray” only on those rare occasions when it is absolutely necessary.  Otherwise it’s “Leper Leads Calais” every time.