Autumn

 mellow fruitfulness

In 1919 the Dutch scholar Johan Huizinga published a highly influential “crossover” work of medieval history entitled Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen—better known to the world at large through two translations of 1924, Herbst des Mittelalters in German and The Waning of the Middle Ages in English.  Seventy years later a new English edition appeared, this time entitled The Autumn of the Middle Ages.  With Huizinga’s famous book clearly in mind the Dutch-born theologian and historian Heiko Oberman, who spent much of his important career in this country, in 1963 published a book about a late medieval theologian (Gabriel Biel) entitled The Harvest of Medieval Theology.

You don’t need to be a serious Germanic philologist to note that the Dutch Herfst and the German Herbst (the common terms for the fall season) must be kissing kin of English harvest.  So they are.  They are Germanic equivalents of Latin autumnus—another word we also use in an English form.  I raise the matter of the book’s first and still by far best-known translation not out of pedantry but because it captures the ambiguity of the season, of this essay, and of my mood.  Is autumn a waning or a waxing, a depletion or is it an abundance?  Huizinga’s book seems to deal at once with phenomena of cultural decadence and of exhaustion on the one hand, and on the other to point to new attitudes and thought patterns we usually think of as belonging to the “Renaissance.”

I had occasion to ponder certain ambiguities of the calendrical season during this past week of perfect Indian Summer.  It has been almost supernaturally clear, crisp, and calm, with several days cloudless.  Yet the days are shortening perceptibly, and the foliage has withered on the grapevines, almost as if by command.  The mellowness of plenitude presages the inevitable morbidity of the approaching winter.

Many poets have written about seasonal change, and written about it well.  But I find myself each year returning with mixed pleasure and plangency to Keats’ ode “To Autumn”.   It’s only about thirty lines long, but, his own achievement, and English poetry as a whole, would not be the same without it.  Keats probably wrote this masterpiece in the last week of September, 1819—that is, almost exactly two centuries ago.  This is an inference to be drawn from a letter to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds in which he comments on the mellow beauty of stubble fields, an image also prominent in the poem.  He was staying briefly in Winchester enjoying what in retrospect would prove to be his final days of good health.

Though I praise the poem so highly, many students find it hard going.  A two-hundred-year-old poem is likely to exhibit a few distracting conventions and some poetic diction, thees and thous and so forth, uncongenial to a contemporary reader.  But an important purpose of education is to combat provinciality, including that historical provinciality so brazen in our culture, and such an ironic feature of academic “multiculturists”.  The central image of Keats’s poem is the personified season, a rustic laborer “sitting careless on a granary floor” with “hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind / Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep, / Drowsed with the fume of poppies…” combining the abundance of harvest with the narcotic somnolence of a prospective hibernation.  I have always taken this personification as feminine, but my wife Joan, who demurs, drew me up short by pointing out to me there is no textual certainty of this conclusion, and some linguistic and sociological counter-indication pushes against it.  Latin Autumnus  is usually masculine, sometimes neuter; male agricultural workers can have long hair and probably usually do.  So perhaps androgyny is a conscious artistic aim.  In any event, as people age—at least if I can judge by my own experience and that of contemporaries—the advent of autumn becomes ever more portentous and solemn.  The relation of the year cycle and the life cycle, always just below the surface, becomes obvious and articulate.  Two weeks past I learned of the death of one of my oldest friends, a man I met as a fellow college freshman in 1954, a date that will seem practically prehistoric to the vast majority of the world’s residents today.  Keats was living at his own historical cusp, but he still lived in a primarily agricultural world.  He had seen real reapers, and he knew, as we hardly can, the intimate relationship between his daily bread and the threshing-floor in the granary. 

So much of what separates us from our vanished past is of recent invention, especially electrification and the vast increases of mechanical power.  We have to the greatest degree possible cast aside as encumbering restraints of the diurnal and seasonal distinctions for which the human race was trained by long millennia of evolution.  Your recent ancestors “went to bed with the chickens,” as the saying was, that is, when it got dark.  There was no easy artificial way to erase the distinction between night and day, or to defeat the heat and humidity of summer or the chill of winter.

Above all, human life was in many ways linked to the larger patterns of the agricultural cycle.  In visual terms this connection is often beautifully illustrated in the old calendars, with their “labors of the months”—as well, of course, as in an entire season called “the harvest”.  But the germination of grain, the staff of life, involved its own paradox, and one that brings together the most elementary forces of life and death.  “Truly, truly, I say to you” says Jesus, "unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and

October, from the Très riches heures of the Duc de Berry 

 dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”  (John 12:24)  He is there speaking in a mysterious way of his own proximate death, and of all human death for that matter.  I shall not presume to interpret mysteries except to acknowledge that human life, if allowed to run what we usually call its “natural” course, will arrive at its ambiguous autumn, a time both of waning and of harvest.  Keats—though his own life was just about to be cut off so prematurely—heard a special dignity in autumnal “music” when compared with the upbeat “songs of Spring.”  As he looked out over the rose-tinted stubble field from which the fruit had been gathered and safely stored against the dearth of winter, he listened.  “Then in a willful choir the small gnats mourn / Among the river sallows, borne aloft  / Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies…”

The Sicilio-Ukrainian Gambit

The Great Gate of Kiev is a striking piece of music by Mussorgsky, and must be differentiated from the rapidly emerging narrative of Kiev-Gate, which is not so great.  Yes, I reluctantly return from the sun-drenched plains of philology to the murk of the political arena.  This essay is all jealousy and sour grapes.  It involves Ukraine, and specifically my missing out on the gravy train of scuzzy Ukrainian money that has been enriching so many of my fellow citizens.  Ukraine, or as we used to say in the very old days “the Ukraine,” now an independent country, is that large part of the dissolved Soviet Union that was once called the “breadbasket” of the old Russian heartland, the place where Stalin and Krushchev, in refounding the agrarian economy on sound socialist principles, bumped off all the “millionaires and billionaires” of the day (i.e., the kulaks, some of whom owned as many as two pigs) and starved several million people to death.  I am no Soviet expert, but I did have to look into all of this while writing about the Ukrainian defector, Viktor Kravchenko, one of the important authors I dealt with in The Anti-Communist Manifestos.

Kiev-Gate is a rapidly developing story, but here are the principal players so far.  I’ll begin—solely for purposes of dramatic contrast--with my only strong card,  Marie Yovanovitch (Princeton class of 1980), former Ambassador of the United States to Ukraine, an honorable professional who got canned for being honorable and professional.

Next comes Paul Manafort (former chairman of Trump’s presidential campaign, current prison inmate), perhaps best characterized as greedy, meretricious, and felonious.  Then we have former Vice-President (and current presidential candidate) Joseph Biden, whose curiously jovial incompetence is in this instance somewhat marred not by any criminality, as suggested by Trump, but by a suspicion of disingenuousness deployed in favor of his son Hunter Biden, Washington lawyer and sometime expert consultant in that branch of the olive oil business known as natural gas.   Then you have the principals: Donald Trump, who has behaved like a Mafia thug; Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolf Giuliani, once mayor of New York, whose public statements have been incoherent to the point of borderline insanity; and Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine, who may by now regret moving from theatrical comedy to that form practiced by politicians.  

As I assess things, the current Ukrainian flap involves outrageous behavior by Donald Trump, sleazy behavior by Hunter Biden, and dumb behavior by Joe Biden; it recalls earlier criminal behavior by Paul Manafort, formerly Trump’s campaign manager and now an inmate in prison, where, perhaps on holidays, he may be allowed to wear his Ukrainian-financed $15,000 ostrich leather sports jacket.   However, the current episode as it is being revealed is so obviously damaging to Donald Trump that folks don’t seem to notice that it is not really very good for Joe Biden either.  I don’t know whether there are any actual olive trees in Ukraine, but the olive oil business is clearly thriving there.  Lest my reference be obscure, I refer to memorable testimony before a congressional investigating committee made by Frankie Pentangeli in Part 2 of The Godfather.  The aspect of the olive oil business most relevant to our emerging story seems to involve natural gas monopolies, pipelines, exclusive franchises, and the potential legal liabilities of the oligarchs who have appropriated them.   These are matters that require a lot of expert advisors, or “consultants”—and not just any old consultant either.  Some journalists have hinted that on the face of things, Hunter Biden lacked the expertise needed to advise oligarchs about gas pipelines and such, but that is all nonsense.  This man had been, probably for more years than he could remember, the son of a prominent American career politician, and one who had at length arrived at a mere heartbeat’s distance from the Presidency itself.  And that is the kind of expertise likely to be useful in the olive oil business.  Any random engineering  graduate of Georgia Tech or the Bauman Moscow State Technical University can bring you up to date on pipe specifications.  This needs something special.  This needs Hunter Biden.

 Now, look, I’m a civil libertarian.  Live and let live.  It is not technically illegal to be named “Hunter Biden”.  In fact, “Hunter Biden” would be a great name for a character in a Fitzgerald novel, Amory Blaine’s roommate perhaps. But if your father’s political persona is that of Joe Sixpack from Scranton, PA, the name may raise just the slightest degree of cognitive dissonance.  On the other hand, “Hunter” may be preferable to “Fredo”, another literary allusion likely brought to mind by the circumstances.

In my part of the socio-cultural landscape, where political opinion generally runs all the way from A to A’, I have for the past four years struggled to maintain a broader view.  All attempts to enforce fair-mindedness, however, have been overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of our President’s behaviour.  Common or garden variety Washington sleeze, while often odiferous, cannot compete with constitutional high crimes and misdemeanors.  As this post is being published Nancy Pelosi has announced a formal “impeachment enquiry”.  That’s a serious step, and certainly one she has been reluctant to take before now.  The promise of the White House, for what it’s worth, is to release a full transcript of the telephone conversation between Presidents Trump and Zelensky that has been at the center of the speculative outrage.  Have your whistle ready at hand.

As in Shakespeare’s history plays, the most poignant villains are the hangers-on and henchmen.  Giuliani is not a man without accomplishments.  He was an effective comforter-in-chief to his traumatized city in 2001, since which time his speech has consisted primarily of tripartite sentences featuring a noun or two, a verb with luck, and the indispensable phrase “Nine-Eleven”.  In this he is now being imitated by Joe Biden, except that Biden says “Barack Obama,” or, when really closing in for the kill, simply “Barack”!  But whereas Biden merely sounds foolish, Giuliani is truly demented, his speech both violent and incoherent, not to mention mendacious of course.  One supposes that his assigned task was to transmit to Zelenksy an offer he could not refuse, but it is possible that he failed to transmit one he could even understand.

Reference Works for Light Reading

I am a reader of reference works.  That is different from being a mere user of reference works, as surely all readers must be.  I actually enjoy reading at random in reference volumes.  If you are into the quick refreshment of a brief read, you cannot do better than any two random pages of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.  Were you to read one entry from the Dictionary of National Biography each day, you would soon have made the acquaintance of a prize assortment of characters and learned a fair amount of British topography and genealogy without even trying.  Dictionaries are always good; but what animates today’s post is the page-turner quality of the third edition of Gildersleeve’s Latin Grammar.

                                                          Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve (1831-1924)

When I set out at a relatively late stage of my education to become a professional medievalist, I found myself at a considerable disadvantage.  A form of Latin considerably evolved from that of the classical period was the universal European language for a thousand years in medieval Europe.  Having never enjoyed an hour of formal instruction in classical Latin, I had to sink or swim in a huge lagoon of mainly monastic literature often quite different in its grammar, syntax, and vocabulary from Cicero, Ovid, and Virgil.  At the same time the language of the classical writers had been, remotely, at the center of medieval monastic education.  So I had to study classical authors on my own,  in the manner of a monoglot religious novice of the eleventh or twelfth century.  Thus the basis of my Latin is very imperfect, very unfashionable, but very medieval!  Such success as I have had I owe chiefly to Basil Gildersleeve and Gonzalez Lodge.

Among the outcomes of the “French and Indian War,” as the North American phase of the Seven’s Year War is usually known, was one of numerous episodes of ethnic cleansing that characterized American colonial history: the forced removal of the Francophone Acadians around 1755.  By modern standards the numbers were not large, for the population of Maritime Canada and the New England frontier, both indigenous and colonial, was sparse; but there were significant cultural results.  One of them was Longfellow’s Evangeline, a great poem now disgracefully neglected; another is Cajun food (Acadien > “Cajun”), which has fared better.  For me the most important was Prof. Gildersleeve, the grandchild of expelled Acadians.  I am not alone in regarding him as “the father of American classical studies.”

He was born in 1831 in Charleston.  After acquiring an astonishing juvenile erudition, he went to Princeton, where he took his degree at the age of 18 in 1849.  He always regarded himself primarily as a scholar of Greek.  He was among a pioneering group of American humanists who traveled to Germany (Göttingen) to do doctoral work and who were thus destined to foster the precise and scientific spirit of early classical philology in this country, a spirit that long distinguished American classicists from many of the great British scholars of the eighteenth century.  Gildersleeve was a Confederate patriot who carried a Yankee bullet in his leg for most of his life and maintained an unfashionable notion of vanished southern “honor” as it related to the Roman Republic.  It has often been said that the Cavalier class of the Old South had been corrupted by reading too much Walter Scott, but for the more learned among them I think the corrupter was Livy.  Recall that the assassin John Wilkes Booth cried out the Virginia state motto (Sic semper tyrannis, “Thus always with tyrants”) as he leapt to the stage of Ford’s Theater, taking too seriously perhaps  the advice playfully given to actors: break a leg!  And on what might be called the “generic” Confederate monument at Arlington is the much-quoted line from Lucan’s Pharsalia: “The cause of the victors was pleasing to the gods, but the cause of the vanquished to Cato.”

  Gonzalez Lodge (1863-1942)

 

Gildersleeve was not Cato, but he was one hell of a philologist.  He first published a Latin grammar in 1867, but it was in retrospect a mere type or shadow of the great revision of 1894 undertaken with the collaboration of his Johns Hopkins doctoral student, Gonzalez Lodge (1863-1942).  This has to be one of the greatest teacher-pupil teams of all time.  Between them these men established the American Journal of Philology, The Classical World, the Classical Weekly (!), and other scholarly initiatives too numerous to mention.  Lodge—unlike his Hellenic mentor who had directed his dissertation on Euripides-- even on occasion called himself a Latinist; and he had essentially memorized all of Livy, most of Cicero, and vast chunks of the poets.  Both men had astonishing powers of clarity and concision, and a passion for minute accuracy that only a fool could confuse with pedantry.  One of Gildersleeve’s few “theoretical” papers bears the title “The Spiritual Rights of Minute Research”.

Gildersleeve’s Grammar presents its materials with a nearly perfect clarity, coherence, and economy.  That doesn’t make it easy—far from it at times—but the student can never doubt there is a there there.  The rhetorical aim of much current “literary criticism” would actually seem to be mystification and indeterminacy, as though precision of signification were intellectual failure.   All citations from the original Latin sources, thousands of them,  are given in bold type, investing them, if possible, with even more awesome dignity.   So we come at random to section 333 (1): “Neuter Pronouns and Adjectives are often used to define or modify the substantive notion that lies in the verb.”  You may not immediately grasp what that means, but you just know it’s true.  After adding that “With transitive verbs an Accusative of the person can be employed besides”, Prof. Lodge, as always, gives you a telling example or so from an approved author--in this instance it is his fellow grammarian Quntillian:  Discipulos id unum moneo ut praeceptores suos non minus quam ipsa studia ament.—immediately and precisely translated as I give pupils this one piece of advice, that they love their teachers no less than their studies themselves.  Learn this and you can more or less forget the neuter pronouns and adjectives!

In that same section one gets the bonus of seeing American English in transition. “The usage is best felt,” write the grammarians, “by comparing the familiar English it after intransitive verbs, ‘to walk it, to foot it’, etc.,  where ‘it’ represents the substantive that lies in ‘walk, foot,’ etc.”  When was the last time you heard somebody speaking of “footing it?”  About the last time you heard “Cheese it—the cops!”.  Hoofing it, maybe.

Friends in Provence

Salernernes (Var): one side of the town square

Salernes is a sizeable village in the middle of the Var about fifteen miles west of Draguignan, perhaps fifty miles above St.-Tropez on the coast and twenty-five or so south of the Regional Park of Verdon, with its gorges and waterways.  It is a pleasant, active village, but by no means remarkable or “touristy”.  It was there that Joan and I spent our cloudless week away from Princeton.  We were staying at the country house of our friend Andrew, who has been in our lives since the late 1950s, when we were all at Oxford together.  We were a party of eight.  Andrew’s friend Lee, like Andrew himself recently widowed, was both an old work colleague and long-time family friend.  She is a witty lady of considerable professional accomplishment, with a house on the Riviera in nearby Grasse.  Getting to know her a bit more deeply was one of the pleasures of the week.  There were two other couples.  The husbands had been my classmates at Jesus College, though I had really known only one of them at the time.  I remember him as a brilliant mathematician, though I now learned he actually took his degree in physics.  His wife, Leslie, we had met on a previous occasion; in her professional life in England, she has been deeply involved with issues of domestic violence, and was a mine of information and informed opinion about the social challenges in today’s Britain,

sun-drenched breakfast, with our host on the right

Andrew’s French house I would describe as magnificent but not grand.  Beginning as a rather modest farmer’s cottage a couple of hundred years back, it has been expanded, widened, and heightened by succeeding generations into a sprawling elegance of bedrooms adequate for a large family and many friends..  To my eye it is beautifully proportioned and architecturally unified.  There is a great old farm kitchen, and a newer large “living room”, rarely used, with a huge hearth.  There are splendid amenities for the young and the active: a swimming pool and a tennis court.  But given the superb early autumn weather of Provence, we practically lived al fresco on the paved patio that runs along the whole house front, and looks down on an ever-changing view of a steep drop-off, with near and less near hills behind it.  You are on the edge of the village, but the experience is of deep and usually silent country.  There were three main communal activities: talking, reading, and eating.  Meals required a minimum of two hours each.  Breakfasts were pure indulgence: buttery croissants still warm from the baker’s, and tartines made from crispy fresh baguettes and sinful French preserves.  The major meals: abundant fresh vegetables, a variety of transgressive patés, high quality cuts of meat and fish.  Any cheese you could think of, all accompanied, if you wished, by the fine but apparently “unpretentious” local wines.  I would describe these days as “blissful,” were it not for the fact that the medical difficulties I brought with me from America, though ameliorated, did not vanish and in fact considerably constrained my activities.

view from the breakfast table

Conversation was incessant, and ranged in style from the old college bull session to the discontinuous dialog of a Chekov play aspiring to be Plato’s Symposium.  While politics was by no means  our only topic, it inevitably loomed large during that particular week.  It was a huge relief to me, as an American, that among this group of Brits the peculiarities of Trump ran a distant second to the trials and tribulations of the British Parliament and the new Prime Minister.  But the idea that the British intelligentsia are uniformly appalled by the results of their Referendum—theological bedrock in the American liberal press—was knocked in the head by this group, who held diverse opinions with (I believe) a majority of Leavers.  There was, however, nearly perfect transatlantic agreement on the inadequacy of our elected legislators.

'This lime-tree bower, my prison'

Andrew has a well-stocked summer-house library—mainly modern history and thousand-page biographies, but also some classic fiction.  He himself was marching rapidly through Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge.  His collection of Antony Beevor’s splendid military histories seems nearly complete, and I grazed happily on the one I had not yet read—The Ardennes.  It was there that my Uncle Wayne had had a tank blown out from under him.  But I had brought reading of my own—more of the Roman history and historical fiction discussed in a recent post.  I am still hot on the trail of Cicero—the “historical” Cicero and the imagined Cicero, to the degree there is any difference between the two.

There are friendships, and then there are friendships.  How many of them date back six decades, sometimes dormant for years at a time yet continuing to mature across vast distances of space and experience, of long marriage, of professional striving, of the intense demands and vicissitudes of raising a family?  The answer to that is: precious few. Boosting my morale was not our host’s only motive in setting up this house party, but it was manifestly a principal one.  That was a humbling realization.  And with it I suddenly realized the relevance of my accidental reading program to the meditation on friendship that occupied so many of my thoughts during the week.  For Cicero wrote a famous philosophical dialogue on the question of friendship (Lælius, 706/44 BC) shortly before his death.  It is in fact the only work of Cicero I have studied carefully or written about in the scholarly press.   In the twelfth century is was given a brilliant Christian “update” by one of my gurus, Ælred of Rievaulx, a beautiful soul and a master of Latin hardly less formidable than Cicero himself.  This revision—stressing spiritual friendship—was in turn translated into French by Jean de Meun, who also used its ideas with great subtlety in the Roman de la Rose.  I had written about all this years before.

Cicero defines friendship as “nothing else than perfect mental accord concerning all things divine and human, shared in benevolence and tenderness.”*  He regarded it as the second greatest gift of the divine powers—wisdom alone holding a higher place.  I had lots of time to think about all this on the flight home.  We have happily entered the phase of self-coddling and had booked business-class flights.  One really could stretch out and relax, provided only that you could first figure out the obscure hieroglyphic symbols of the control panel of the lounge beds—no mean feat.  Perhaps classical wisdom will continue to elude me.  But classical friendship I have indeed known.

*Est autem amicitia nihil aliud, nisi omnium divinarum humanarumque rerum cum benevolentia et caritate summa consensio.

Rural Gore

 

On the case: Chief Inspector Barnaby and sidekick Sergeant Jones

I must begin by announcing a week’s intermission in the blog, which I shall hope to reanimate on September 11.  We are about to fly to the south of France for a week of restorative hanging out with very old friends.  Such a prospect can never be anything but pleasing though I do have to register in my current circumstances some small degree of apprehension about the travel, my mode these days being rather slow and creaky.

            For the past week or so I have been feeling so valetudinarian, indeed, that I have shamefully little to report by way of achievement.  What with infirmity and an ever expanding realization of the extent of the mess that continues to be American politics, I have mainly sought escape and a surcease of sorrows in the “free” Netflix available through my computer.  I have immersed myself in an apparently endless British detective series—“Midsomer Murders.”  I am generally late in learning about these things, and my many hip readers doubtless already know all about it.  But it is in my opinion very well done, and it satisfies my own requirements for an enjoyable murder mystery.  The first of these is that there is not the slightest possibility of taking the murder part (usually several murders per episode) very seriously, any more than one can take the plot of the medieval pastourelle seriously.  Content is merely the necessary implication of style.  Secondly, the episodes are seriously long—roughly an hour and a quarter—so that I generally nod off for a moment or two, and I am never smart enough to figure out who did it.  And when I do find out who did it, I still am never sure why.

            The series, which is very well written and for the most part very well acted, gains most of its power through cognitive dissonance.  Midsomer is an imaginary British county in southern England (think Oxfordshire).  Its county town, Corston, is presumably some version of Banbury or Swindon; and the place is thick with the most beautiful ye-olde, Costwoldy  English villages the Tourist Board can come up with, each replete with a fine old church, a sixteenth-century manor house, thatched cottages and domestic gardens to die for.  There is always at least one great pub (pre-pinball), and pleached alleys, meandering streams and old canals, and absolutely gorgeous stonework everywhere.  This idyllic time-warped landscape is populated by a mixed population of Angela Thirkell characters, some really nasty vestiges of the old ruling class who have adopted very contemporary vices, and little old ladies galore.  These folks regularly bump each other off at an average rate of three per hour--by blade, rope, water, poison, farm machines, asphyxiation, explosion, fire, and (default mayhem) blunt force trauma to the head.  There are quite a few more or less conventional gunshot deaths, usually by birdshot fired at close range from muskets first used at the Battle of Marston Moor.  In one of the more macabre episodes two victims are actually guillotined during the filming of The Scarlet Pimpernel in the courtyard of a baronial mansion in the village of Midsomer Magna.  It is typical of the work’s delightful surrealism that everybody in the film’s cast, including the pensioners imported as extras from the Old People’s Home to form a chorus of oppressed peasants, treat the first beheading as roughly as important as an extra’s sprained ankle.  Nobody bats an eye.  The usual motives are sex and money, but in very kinky versions of each; some of the killers are simply crazy as coots.  Character stereotypes walk shamelessly at will through the episodes: the concealed bastard heir, the grizzled village hermit, weird, obsessive hobbyists.  That portion of the Anglican clergy (of either sex) who are not actually the murderer themselves take clerical fuddy-duddyism to levels not to be found even in Trollope.  

 Convener of the Women's Institute, Midsomer Noxia

            The director has a great time with “conventions”.  There is an amiable old forensic pathologist, George, and nearly every episode features the obligatory scene in which the chief detective arrives on the scene to find George and his mates, all of them decked out in nifty little blue plastic jump suits suggesting they ought to be in “Star Wars”, discussing the peculiarities of some atrocious wound or the surprising contents of the defunct’s GI tract, which may or may not include a revelatory flash disk.  This being a British show, much is made of class distinctions.  The CID officers get all the glory.  The regular coppers, referred to as the “uniforms,” are numerous but silent; they also serve who only stand and wait—and, of course, endlessly and obscurely rummage around the outdoor crime scenes with long poles, occasionally scoring an old candy wrapper.      

 Alexander Pope's Tower, Stanton Harcourt, Oxon.

             I don’t recognize any of the villages, though I probably should.  Sixty years past I spent a fair amount of time cycling around such places in the environs of Oxford.  There was a charming village (at least in memory) called Great Tew.  It witnessed the apex of my brief but spectacular cricket career.   There I hit a ball so far into the woods, baseball style, that they never found it.  Another timeless beauty spot was the village of Stanton Harcourt.  It has a connection with the poet Alexander Pope, who was a friend of the lord of the manor, who loaned him a romantic tower in which to work away at his translations of Homer.  A curious and tragic incident took place on the estate about that time.  A betrothed couple of agricultural workers, having sought refuge beneath a large tree in a sudden rain shower, were killed by a lightning strike.  Pope wrote a conventional moralistic squib about the incident, which can be found in his complete works.  To his friend Mary Wortley Montague he wrote something a little naughtier:

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

There have been several electrocutions in the “Midsomer Murders”, but as yet no orchestrated lightning.

                                                                                                                                                                 

Off to College

A few nights ago we had the pleasure of sharing a dinner with out next door neighbors, a delightful family who are a a never-failing source of unobtrusive cheerfulness and helpfulness.  Though I never anticipated it, like so much else in my recent life, we have become the “elderly couple next door.” And when that happens to you, and it will, you will be very lucky if the moral equivalent of the Woods are living next to you.  These are the kind of people who surreptitiously dig out your driveway for you on an icy day, and who never complain about the mess out around your garbage bins.  The specific occasion, at least ostensibly, was to honor Anna, the daughter, one of the nicer young women on earth, who graduated from Princeton High School in the early summer and was just about to leave home for New Orleans, where she is entering the freshman class of Tulane University.

She couldn’t know it, but going off to New Orleans filled with youthful enthusiasm was an experience which I myself had shared, an experience recalled with sharp detail as we listened to her talk of her exciting plans.  For it was in New Orleans that I myself set off on one of the several mysterious glide paths of my life.  Around Thanksgiving of 1958 I traveled to Little Rock for the state interviews of the annual Rhodes Scholarship selection.  I was then a senior in college rather than a fresh high-school graduate, but, as I say, this was 1958, and in “emotional age” I probably lagged by some distance the sophistications of a current graduate of Princeton High.  At the interview there were, I seem to remember, about a dozen of us, all of us pumped up, apprehensive, doing our level best to project a aura of nonchalance.  It was pretty obvious to me that I didn’t have a chance.  Candidates included the Razorback football captain, the Amory Blain of the hills and hollows, and a personage of semi-divine stature in the State of Arkansas, as well as a guy from Harvard who was supposed to have already filed three industrial patents.  Nonetheless the next day I was sent on to the “District” in New Orleans, my fellow state finalist being neither the quarterback nor the inventor but an up-and-coming politician and an all-state string player in the Youth Orchestra.  Very nice guy.  There is modesty.  There is false modesty.  And then there is simple incomprehensible good luck.  I was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship!  I celebrated with the Committee and the other district winners at a blowout meal at a sumptuous New Orleans restaurant.

That was still nearly a year before I would be graduating from college and actually heading for England, but I was suddenly being cascaded with good wishes and startling opportunities, mostly from strangers.  The senior senator from Arkansas at that time, J. William Fulbright, was one of the more complicated southern politicians of mid-century.  He was an erudite redneck, a segregationist, anti-McCarthyite internationalist and (I believe until this very day) the longest-serving Chairman of the Senate Committee on International Affairs;  a former Rhodes Scholar, a former president of the University of Arkansas, and a great believer in the value of international education.  Hundreds if not thousands of Fulbright Scholars have benefited from his vision.  I had never met the man, nor indeed laid eyes upon him.  Though I had no reason to know it, he took a special interest in Arkansas Rhodes Scholars.  Ten years later he would play a not insignificant role in advancing the career of Bill Clinton.  In those days, or for all I know still in these, senators enjoyed among their perks the gift of various “patronage” government jobs—remnants of the spoils system of one of his spiritual predecessors, Andrew Jackson.

Fulbright got me a well remunerated summer sinecure that allowed me to spend the summer following my graduation in Washington, where I lived with a group of friends and classmates from Sewanee.  I was a clerk in the Senate Document Room.  Computer technology has undoubtedly changed things, but at that time every piece of legislation working its way through either legislative house was repeatedly reprinted in its latest form for distribution to congressional staffers, lobbyists, and other interested parties.  I got paid what seemed like a lot of money to stuff interoffice envelopes with tear-sheets of the latest amendment to S. 356 or HR Res 193 or whatever, then drop them into a mail chute or wait for some staffer babe to pick them up personally on the run.  Only occasionally was the work demanding.  The Senate Document Room was approximately twenty yards from the door of the public gallery of the Senate, and we spent a lot of time watching “business” being conducted on the Senate Floor.  This experience was educational but also disillusioning.  My first conscious awareness of what would be the Viet Nam crisis came in one of these sessions.  Lyndon Johnson wandered over to Bill Knowland, the minority leader in the Senate,  and in a voice quite audible to me in the gallery explained to him his take on the problem of Viet Nam.  “They’re all Buddhists,” he said, pronouncing the syllable Bud as though it were the beer.  “All they want to do is fuck and pray.”  Ah, there were giants in the earth in those days!  Was this the same floor from which Daniel Webster had belted out his famous “Second Reply to Hayne”?

And then one day toward the end of the summer, just as I was preparing to pack up my belongings and head home briefly before actually setting off for Oxford, I experienced another little vignette that has stuck with me through the years.  It was a very hot, sultry Washington late morning, and I was sweating heavily in obligatory coat and tie as I negotiated the difficult pedestrian semicircles on the way down from the Capitol.  A golden tanned fellow in an open necked shirt and an open red convertible, blowsy blonde next to him in the front seat, actually slowed down to let me dart to safety.  He gave me a big wide smile and an indulgent wave of his hand.  It was John Fitzgerald Kennedy, junior senator from the state of Massachusetts.  There was already a lot of buzz.

English Take-Over?

In the Sunday “Weekly Review” of the Times there was an engaging essay about the state of the English language in the international arena.   It author is Pamela Druckerman, one of the paper’s contribution opinion writers, and its title is “Parlez-Vous Anglais?  Yes, of Course.”  I am usually glad to have that response to that particular question when I pose it, but Ms. Druckerman has sniffed out some cultural angst in it.  For the article’s sub-headed summary is this: “Europeans speaking perfect English sounds like good news for native speakers, but it may also be a threat.”  Well, the Times’s op-ed page is full of threats unknown in previous generations, or even in previous weeks.  When I was a kid, peanuts were an occasional treat at the ball game or the County Fair.  They now require red alerts from the school nurse, prophylactic inhalers and a hot line.  And who am I to doubt that the world daily becomes a more dangerous place?  Still, the idea that the continuing growth of the English language as an international medium of communication is a “threat” puzzles me in the extreme.  In fact, it is a development to which I can see no down side.

Articulate speech is the critical feature of human existence in the animal world.  In many of our great myth systems the destruction of a supposed original universal speech (think Tower of Babel) is a disaster to be remedied only by miraculous restoration (think Pentecost).  So great has been the felt need for a universal medium of linguistic communication that there have been many attempts to create one ab novo; but even the best known example,  Esperanto, caught on about as well as spiritualist table-rapping, and mainly with the same crowd.  The re-creation of spoken Hebrew worked out better than a slightly earlier effort to re-classiicize Greek, but such efforts have not created a world language.

Ms. Druckerman sees several tines on the  forked  “threat” of the spreading use of “good” English among the world’s non-native speakers of that language, two of which I find most curious and, if I may say so, culpably Americo-centric  The first is that if the Croats and Tamils all start talking with each other with the fluency of a Clifton Fadiman, Americans, who are notoriously bad about learning languages already will more or less give up altogether and thus be clueless when the foreigners retreat to their own gobblebygook.  “If all we know is English we won’t know what the rest of the world is saying about us.”   If this is a problem, it is caused not by the establishment of a de facto universal language but by the shockingly deficient system of public education in this country.  And unless one is brain dead, one knows perfectly well what they are saying about us.  Unfortunately.

The second threat appears to be economic.  If everybody in the world speaks really good English, English-language institutions of higher education will spring up everywhere from the Gobi Desert to the Mato Grosso, and students will choose to go there instead of here because the education will be of equal quality but cost much less.  There are already significant institutions of higher education conducting their business in flexible and fluent educated English throughout the “non-English” world, and there are bound to be many, many more.  What this actually suggests to me is that the world greatly admires our colleges and universities, but suspects that it is possible to offer quality education without forty-two highly compensated deans of diversity and a procurement officer specializing in the soft toys needed to add comfort to the “safe spaces” to which American students must retreat when traumatized by the naked “cultural appropriation” of a student Hallowe’en party at which fellow students showed up in sombreros, lederhosen, or conical witch-hats.  I am being a little provocative here, perhaps, and a little parodic, but only a little.  

Several of our current presidential candidates are rightly railing against a cost crisis in American higher education that leaves in its wake bankrupt parents or deeply indebted graduates or both—the proposed solutions being debt forgiveness and “free college”.  But if the biggest financial institution in the country (i.e., the government) decides that it is going to start lending money at apparently advantageous rates to people to go to college, people are going to borrow that money with sub-prime enthusiasm just as surely as they will “buy” a McMansion on the same terms.  Fly-by-night institutions will spring up like on-line fungi and fiercely chase after those bucks.  Not all of them are diploma mills, just most of them.  Study software engineering or “hospitality studies” today and pay for it tomorrow.  Nor, I am embarrassed to say, have the fly-by-day institutions such as those I have been associated with during my career been loath to waddle up to the trough.  The nearly obscene rise in costs at our colleges and universities has many causes, but prominent among them is a huge expansion of administrative costs in the creation of student services of dubious relevance to academic goals or outcomes.

How I tire of drivel about “cultural appropriation,” incidentally.  Culture is mainly appropriation, and no aspect of culture has been more appropriative than language.  An important aspect of the genius of English is the voraciousness and generosity of its appropriation.  Beginning as a German dialect of limited lexicon spoken by King Alfred’s ancestors halfway through the first millennium, English took on thousands of words from the Scandinavian stock, often at the point of a spear, other thousands of standard Latin words relating to the church (kirk, ecclesia), political administration, the law, and the arts and sciences of all kinds.  After the Norman invasion it swallowed the Viking version of emerging French more or less whole.  In the Renaissance, learned men consciously imposed another vast round of Latin from that language’s more erudite level.  Medical men mainly went for the Greek.

English is gradually taking on the role once played in western culture by Latin, but now on a global scale constantly reinforced by the ubiquitous and instantaneous reach of the Internet.  Consider the state of learning in Europe in the millennium between 500 and 1500 of the Christian era.   At the beginning of that period Latin, the old language of the decaying imperial power, was still a vital and palpitating language of important cultural elites.  In the fluent and learned form used by Jerome and Augustine, it reflected the rhetorical practices and literary achievements of the Augustan age.  While never ceasing to develop to some extent as a living language, it became largely frozen in time.  We call it, curiously, a “dead” language, but it’s hard to do that if you have read the Policraticus of John of Salisbury (twelfth century) or the letters of Petrarch (fourteenth) or the Principia Mathematica of Newton (seventeenth).  The language was far from dead.  It just didn’t have any native speakers, with the exception perhaps of a few juvenile oblates in monasteries who had arrived so young as to have forgotten their infantile babbling in Saxon or Basque.

               It became the stable “father tongue” of a Europe in which there were a couple of dozen constantly evolving mother tongues, only some of which (the so-called Romance languages) actually derived from “classical” Latin.  It is a wonderful experience to be able to communicate with fluency and effect in a tongue not native with another person doing the same thing.  Through the Enlightenment a scholar in Prague could and did have copious technical and literary communication with a scholar in Aberdeen.  Their commonly acquired language was the real “level playing field”—rather as championship athletic contests are often played on grounds that is the home turf of neither team.

            The deeper historical causes of the current primacy of English are of course rather political and brutal, but that is a completely different story.  The “fact on the ground” is that if you want to have a decent material life in today’s world—and most people do—it is a palpable advantage to be able speak, read, and write the English language well.  And I am not at all offended when I see a photograph of a cane-cutter in Mozambique wearing a Yankees hat.  Good for him.