Nobler in the Mind

            I am not “on” Twitter, as they say, or might say, one is “on” crystal meth.  One would think that artificially enforced economy of space would stimulate clarity of thought and elegance of expression.  Brevity being the soul of wit, one would suppose that the Land of Twitter would sparkle like a Restoration comedy.  It is the purpose of artificial literary constraints, as in the sonnet or the clerihew or the double dactyl, to encourage ingenuity.  But the twittered obiter dicta of our celebrities, and especially our presidential celebrity, do little to confirm such an expectation.

Twitter was involved in the first of two “free speech” incidents that caught my attention in the last week or so.  The first was the flap caused by Daryl Morey, the General Manager of the Houston Rockets in the National Basketball Association, who, with regard to the political demonstrations in Hong Kong, tweeted a poster image reading “Fight for freedom—Stand with Hong Kong.”  Unfortunately, “fighting for freedom” is not merely meaningless but a losing business plan if your real goal is to extract as much money as possible out of China, as Mr. Morey soon discovered.    He immediately—though still too late—hit the delete button.  “I did not intend my tweet to cause any offence to Rockets fans and friends of mine in China,” Morey wrote in a Twitter post on Monday morning. “I was merely voicing one thought, based on one interpretation, of one complicated event. I have had a lot of opportunity since that tweet to hear and consider other perspectives.”  One of those perspectives came from the basketball superstar LeBron James.  James’s opinion is that Morey is insufficiently “educated” on the complex issue of political discontent in Hong Kong.  James himself is very well educated on that score.  He knows exactly which side of his bread is buttered.  This is an observation, not a criticism.  American citizens still have the right to express themselves as they wish, if they are prepared to face the possibility of reactive twitter storms themselves.  And as our President has apparently decided that our State Department professionals are useless to him, basketball professionals may be as satisfactory substitutes as are available for the articulation of foreign policy.

The other episode was more strictly literary.  In fact, it was very literary, as it involved the Nobel Prize in Literature.  As you may know there is a bustling industry devoted to the manufacture of fancy cultural “collectibles”—presidential plates, busts of movie stars, flasks and decanters celebrating the world’s great vintages—that sort of thing.  They are usually sold through magazines catering for “seniors” with the suggestion that they “can only increase in value,” though one generally finds them resurfacing not in museums but in flea markets along the interstate.   There is also a bibliographical dimension to this trade, finely made books (often of English or American classics) offered by the Folio Society or the Franklin Mint at a considerable price.  And a couple of times in second hand shops I have come upon a large collection of fancy books called the “Nobel Prize Library” or something like that.  Each of the many volumes contains the best-known or most plausibly representative work of a Nobel laureate in literature.  Several things struck me as I rapidly surveyed the post- War volumes.  The first is the achievement of American writers, which has been considerable.  The second was that there were many winners whose work was quite unknown to me, and even several of whom I had never heard.  My ignorance was a bit awkward.  I am, after all, supposed to be a professor of literature.  I am afraid the same thing happened this year, when the recently  announced winners (there are two) were Peter Handke and Olga Totarczuk.  Olga who?  I should have known, but I didn’t.  Actually Totarczuk’s prize was a kind of “make up” for 2018, when a scandal among the Nobel judges aborted that year’s deliberations.

But my unfamiliarity with these authors did not last long.  Indeed I first heard of the prizes from an outraged statement protesting the judgment of the Nobel committee by the current president of PEN America, Jennifer Egan.  PEN stands for something.  It originally stood for “poets, essayists, and novelists”—or “creative writers,” as we used to call them, before it finally sunk in that the phrase creative writer is a pleonasm like power politics or food nutrition.  But PEN also stands for something in an ethical sense: “PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write.”  I can go with the flow.  It is all the rage these days for scholars, academic disciplines, critical approaches, and literary theories to “stand at intersections”.

Peter Handke is an Austrian writer of conservative political cast.  Olga Totarczuk, a Polish writer of fiction and a public intellectual.   The main complaint concerned Handke, who had defended the actions of the disgraced Serbian politician Slobodan Milosevic.  Handke had gone so far as to offer a eulogy upon Milosovic’s death.  While I share the conventional view that Milosevic was a bad hombre, the man did die of natural causes during the protracted course of a trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, presumably while still enjoying the assumption of innocence.  The criticism that has been leveled at Totarczuk is apparently based on her willingness, indeed stated pleasure, of sharing the prize with Peter Handke.  Jennifer Egan, a fine American writer and the current President of PEN, issued the following statement: “We (that is, PEN) are dumbfounded by the selection of a writer who has used his public voice to undercut historical truth and offer public succor to perpetrators of genocide.”   Now, remember that the motto on the PEN website is “Freedom to Write.”   Remember also that PEN admonishes us to “defend free expression, support persecuted writers, and promote literary culture.”   Finally, remember, as the Nobel committee itself was provoked into pointing out, the Nobel Prizes in Literature are given in recognition of literary achievement, not on the basis of political orthodoxy or heresy, let alone conspicuous zeal for the intersection of literature and human rights.  Time was you could be a Stalinist toady and gulag pooh-pooher and a prize-winner.  And as far as “historical truth” is concerned, truth is that no small number of the world’s great writers have been swine—swinishness, alas, being a not uncommon feature of the “human condition” that is the subject of great literature.

Blowing the Whistle

It is said that the only major Christian doctrine that is empirically verifiable is original sin, which is confirmed by the experience of parenting.  It is further supported by linguistic history, which reveals the tendency of the meanings of simple nouns to deteriorate with age, rather like the portrait of Dorian Gray.  Just look up such words as villain, boor, or harlot in the OED to see what I mean.  Fortunately there are still a few distinctions between art and life.  For example, playing second fiddle is regarded as a slightly subordinate occupation, whereas blowing second whistle is about as good as it gets, whistleblower-wise.   At least this is what I surmise from the journalistic excitement revealed in such headlines as “Second Whistleblower Comes Forward!”  The utterly depressing nature of what I shall call the continuing Ukrainian “revelations” forces me once again to eschew the substance of a major political crisis and to wander about in its philological periphery.

For the news is bursting with much admired whistleblowers.  The current whistleblowers in the Affair of the Ukrainian Telephone Call, though their actual identities remain so far unknown, and are meant to stay that way, are being called “heroes”.  I am a little leery of calling conscientious good citizenship “heroism”.  Why one should be called a hero for testifying truthfully in exposing malfeasance on a matter of great political significance, or why such a person would have to be protected by a Whistleblower’s Protection Act, needs some explanation.

The explanation is to be found in the social odium surrounding the word informer. When I joined the Princeton faculty in 1965, there was still a mandatory meeting for all new faculty to be instructed in the elements of the Princeton Honor Code.  This compact, which all incoming students had to sign, affords students the right to unmonitored final examinations in exchange for their signed pledge that they have not cheated on the exam and the sworn obligation to report any instances of cheating by others of which they became aware.  It is similar to dozens of other such compacts at other institutions.  An elderly dean, very much Old Princeton, made the presentation.  When he asked “Any questions?”, there amazingly was one.  A smart-ass young French mathematician expressed the opinion that he saw but dubious honor in an arrangement requiring you to be an informer against your mates!  The dean actually sputtered.  Here was a perspective never previously encountered in his seven decades.  “Young man,” he replied, “the Princeton Honor Code is based on universally acknowledged moral principles, which anyone can accept, be he Christian, Catholic, or Jew!”

This unusual ecumenical claim notwithstanding, the English language is rich in its colorful vituperation of tattle-tales, also known as snitches, squealers, stool pigeons, grassers (British), rats, finks, and the combinatory ratfinks.  The refusal to blow one’s whistle has won high praise in odd places.  Here is Richard Nixon, caught on his White House tapes, praising the traitor Alger Hiss. “You know the great thing about—I got to say for Hiss.  He never ratted on anybody else.  He never ratted!”  So far as I know, the term whistleblower had to be imported from the domain of field sports for lack of any extant affirmative term.   It is so new that standard usage has not yet decided whether it’s a compound word like pipefitter, or a hyphenated one (whistle-blower, apparently the emergent journalistic choice).   And as to its exact meaning, so much depends upon situation and context—on who is the truth-teller, what truth is being told, and to whom.   Was Daniel Ellsberg a whistleblower, or an egomaniacal blabber-mouth?  How about Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning? 

Whittaker Chambers, super-snitch

I mention Hiss as he was the occasion, more than ten years ago, of my own realization that in the popular mind “bad” informers outnumber “good” ones about ten to one.    I was at an academic conference entitled “Alger Hiss and History”.   You will recall that the heart of the “Hiss case” was the testimony by the government witness (informer) Whittaker Chambers that Hiss, a darling of liberal New Dealers, had been a Soviet spy.  Today this is a fact scarcely doubted by any serious historian.  But on that day it dawned on me only gradually that out of about 450 mainly academic participants gathered in the auditorium of the NYU Law School, I was perhaps one of ten who believed that Hiss had been a covert Communist and that Whittaker Chambers had been a generally truthful witness.  For as the ancient seer Cassandra so tragically discovered, the zeal of many ostensible seekers after truth is satisfied not by the truth they hear but by the one they want to hear.

It is possible that you never will have heard of the most famous whistleblower of the modern era, partly because he may never have existed but mainly because, well, it’s all so unpleasant.  His name was Pavel (Pavlik) Morozov, and in 1932 he was a young peasant living with his parents on a farm in the Sverdlovsk Oblast of the Soviet Union.  This was in the mopping up period of the forced collectivization of agriculture in Russia, the same period that a thousand miles to the south witnessed the engineered famine in Ukraine, called the holomodor.  Central Party policy was to extract as much of the grain harvest as possible from its rural producers in order to be able to feed the industrial workers in the cities.  The confiscation was ruthless, often leaving the farmers themselves starving and lacking even sufficient grain to reseed the fields.  Resistance was widespread and ingenious as the peasants attempted to secrete some grain for their own necessity.  But resisters, who were called “hoarders,” saboteurs, wreckers, and “hooligans”, were treated with utmost severity—usually summary execution or the gulag.  Young Pavlik knew that his father had stashed away a couple of bags of grain.  He  was a Pioneer (Communist Cub Scout),  and he saw his socialist duty clear before him.   So he blew the whistle on his old man.  The Checkists came running and sorted the matter out in their customary ballistic fashion, rendering Pavlik an orphan but also an exemplar of social responsibility.  Some of the other adult peasants, criminal reactionaries, took another view of the matter, however.  A gang of them waylaid the boy and murdered him.  After the authorities sorted that one out, Pavlik was declared (posthumously) a “Hero of the Soviet Union.”  (That is one of the reasons I hope we can be satisfied by calling witnesses to our President’s derelictions merely upright citizens.  We don’t really need any more Russophilia at the moment.)  His story was told in song and story.  For a long generation of Soviet youth his exploit became a compulsory subject of political meditation by all junior students.  Hundreds of statues and other monuments were erected in his memory.

 

Pavlik blows the whistle

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.