Betsey Stockton

 

 

            This week’s essay, inspired by a current book* but making no claim to be an adequate review of it, concerns two remarkable American teachers born about a century and a half apart into very different social realities, but sisters united in their signal contributions to the education of young people in the town where I live.  The subject of the book is Elizabeth (Betsey) Stockton (ca 1798-1865), the apparently mixed-race daughter of an African-American slave and an unknown Anglo father, the newborn being by the law of the day the chattel property of the mother’s owner, who was Robert Stockton, a prominent Princeton citizen and a cousin of a signer of the Declaration of Independence.  The biographer is Constance Escher, recently retired from a long career as a teacher of history in the Princeton public schools.  Connie Escher is personal friend of ours of long standing, and the mother of a close childhood friend of our own youngest child.

                                                    Constance Escher (photo: Town Topics)
 

            Nobody was lucky to be born a slave, but some few born slaves had better luck than others.  Betsey Stockton was sent to the household of Ashbel Green, a Presbyterian divine and later President of the College of New Jersey (Princeton University).  He and his family recognized the youngster’s remarkable abilities and fostered her secular education and her religious interests, which were pronounced.  She became a kind of surrogate daughter and sibling in the family, but her labor could still be commodified and rented out, as it commonly had been also for ostensibly free indentured servants.  It was necessary that de facto manumission become de jure for her to undertake her life’s work as a missionary and teacher.  Stockton’s long, varied, and fruitful career—better described as a vibrant religious vocation, as the animating force of her life was the love of Christ—is the subject of Escher’s book.  The historian has sifted judiciously through a large body of primary materials, some only fragmentary and suggestive, but others of amplitude.  Among the latter are substantial contemporary journals kept by Betsey Stockton and her Princeton missionary colleague Charles Stewart.  Any contemporary reader of nineteenth-century domestic documents—such as the letters written by ordinary soldiers featured in Ken Burns’s Civil War series--is likely to be amazed by the excellence of the writing.  Stockton’s prose is fresh, uncluttered, clear, to the point.  Since the same can be said of Constance Escher’s, her book offers as much delight as it does instruction.  I encourage you to seek out a copy of it and read it.  This essay is not a proper account of it, merely tangential ideas it encouraged.

 

            Female life expectancy in America at the time of Stockton’s birth was perhaps forty-five years.  She lived to be about seventy, and crowded into that time half a century of missionary ministry and teaching in Hawaii, Canada, and her hometown of Princeton.  Perhaps some readers will be disappointed that the liberation she was most interested in was spiritual liberation.  Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?  Chattel slavery, a grotesque social manifestation of the “body of death,” does not make a prominent appearance in her recorded thought.  But she lived and worked among black and white abolitionists and ministered to people of color in disparate parts of the world.  The degree of social liberation she had experienced she found in education, and it was that gift she spent her life imparting to others.  Yet there are several moments in her story where racial issues are raised.  There is one very telling passage in the book that both Joan and I found particularly striking.

 

            Among its other attractions, Stockton’s story can claim a place in the literature of American seafaring, resonating for me especially with Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast (1840) and Melville’s Moby Dick (1851).  In November 1823 Stockton, together with her white spiritual brother and sister Charles and Harriet Tiffany Stewart, sailed from New Haven bound for the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) on a grueling five-month voyage involving the “double” crossing of the African cape.  Betsey Stockton’s account of the terrifying storm-tossed seas of Cape Horn is reminiscent of that of Camões in the Lusiads.   The Portuguese poet objectified his fears in the invented mythological giant Adamastor;  Stockton located hers in her own timorous heart, a gloomily Presbyterian “bottomless sink of sin.”  But there was plenty to fear in the material world.  The harrowing fate of the whaler Essex, which had been sunk by an irate whale in 1820, was still in the news.  (This was usually called the “Essex disaster”; but perhaps whales just did not like being shot at with harpoons?)  Six or seven weeks out, approaching the west coast of Africa, the missionaries' vessel happened upon and conversed with a Portuguese slaver.  Stewart, an ordained Christian minister obligated by the Law of Charity, practically exploded in his Journal: “Surely, if anything on earth calls for the righteous judgment of God, it is the prosecution of the slave trade; and sooner or later, the retribution of a just avenger must fall on those who thus make the heavens to echo the moanings of the bereaved, and the rich earth with the tears and blood of the enslaved.”  That was written three years after the Missouri Compromise and thirty-five before John Brown’s prophecy of 1859: "I...am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed, it might be done."  Betsey Stockton died on October 25, 1865, and was buried in Cooperstown NY, next to her beloved spiritual sister Harriet Stewart.  One reasonably hopes that she had read in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural eight months earlier the equally prophetic words: “Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-men’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn by the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether’.” 

 

            The constant here, sadly, is the spilling of blood.  That is the world’s way.  It was not, however, Betsey Stockton’s way.  For her and her intimate companions the blood once shed long ago and far away was forever sufficient.  Her weapon was literacy.  If swords could be beaten into plowshares, why not pen nibs as well?  On this day, Ash Wednesday, a day on which we are invited to ponder the deep sinks of our own imperfections as fellow human beings are terrified, injured, and killed in wickedness by other fellow human beings, that is perhaps a thought worth pondering.  In any event, it is one brought to my mind by the extraordinary story in Escher’s engaging book.

 

  

 

* Constance K. Escher, She Calls Herself Betsey Stockton: The Illustrated Odyssey of a Princeton Slave (Eugene OR: Resource Publications/Wipf and Stock, 2022), pp. 197.

[ISBN pb 978-1-7252-7544-7; hb 978-1-7252-7545-4]

 

 

 

Old Friends

 

            We have just enjoyed another major victory over Covid.   On Friday afternoon we took a Lyft into New York to meet up for a restaurant meal with a couple of old friends normally resident in Austin TX.  We then spent the night at our daughter’s apartment.  Though she herself happened to be in Abu Dhabi at the time, she was a spiritual presence at this reunion with friends whom she has known since she was a child.  Her apartment house is at the northwest corner of Washington Square Park.  On Google Maps it is identified as “Eleanor Roosevelt’s Home” though she hasn’t lived there in a while.  The restaurant where we met our friends, North Square, is about a hundred feet away, so our total pedestrian travel within the City was maybe a hundred yards.  But it still counts as a pandemic triumph.

 

            I have not read Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield since, I think, 1957 when I was an undergraduate, and it was presented to us as the greatest English exemplar  of the “novel of sentiment” and therefore something a student of literature ought to read.  I don’t remember much about it except that I did actually like it, despite its, well, excessive sentimentality.  So far as the story goes, I remember a sort of a combination of the Book of Job and the Perils of Pauline.  The novel has one quotable, or at least frequently quoted, line.  One of the vicar’s sentimental saws is this: “I love everything that is old; old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines.”  The old times and old manners are frequently omitted, simplifying the phrase to old friends, old books, old wines.  This pretty well encapsulates the probably natural  conservative impulse of age.  I am not big on wines, old or new, but I make up for that in my enthusiasm for old books and old friends, and especially the latter, a finite and necessarily diminishing cohort.  Among the dearest of this group are Jim and Hester Magnuson.  Their names  have appeared many times in these essays over the years.

            We met Jim in the late 1960s, when he must have been in his later twenties and I in my earlier thirties.  A playwright and novelist, he had won the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton, an award given “to artists and writers of exceptional promise to pursue independent projects at Princeton University during the academic year”; and the program’s administrators were trying to find him a place to live on campus.  I was at that time the young master of Princeton’s only residential college, still regarded as an uncertain experiment and populated largely by people with a principled objection to the “Bicker” system in which upperclass social life was given over to a number of private selective clubs and dining halls.  The college was full of individualists, odd-balls, members of racial minorities, and others united by dissatisfaction with the traditional social options on offer from the university.  We felt we were pretty cutting edge.   Jim moved into a dorm and soon was an active presence in college life.  He built a “black box” theater in the basement, wrote several plays, some of which he staged and directed, and generally became an indispensable cultural figure on campus.  His fellowship was renewed a couple of times before he moved on to his distinguished career as Director of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, which is among the few best MFA programs in the country.  He headed the program for twenty-three years.  There is no absolutely representative example of his own work, but for a good romp I recommend his novel Famous Writers I Have Known.

 

            He was at Princeton long enough to form enduring friendships with many students and faculty.  For us one particularly intense and “bonding” experience involved a couple of summers of hardcore camping and intense labor in the backwoods of Marion County, Arkansas, where we—my young family and a group of student friends--began building a wilderness cabin on a wild forty acres I had bought.   This plot later became by forced purchase a part of the land included in the nation’s first National River—the Buffalo.  So it now belongs to you.  In retrospect we all regard it as an epic, nearly mythic adventure.  All this antedated Jim’s marriage to his future wife, Hester, who has likewise become a close friend over the years.  She is a member of a prominent family in Mississippi.  (Her brother is a former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities.)  We could have used her country chops in the Ozarks.  A good part of the enjoyment of long family friendships is following the careers, at least by occasional glimpses, of your friends’ offspring.  Jim and Hester have a dynamic medical daughter and an academic-legal son of bourgeoning reputation, so that finding out the latest about “the kids” is always pretty stimulating.

 

            Our meeting at the North Square was wonderfully mellow and only slightly comic.  My daughter, though in Abu Dhabi, did not relax her Covid Watch.  New York City had just, in theory, relaxed most of its restrictions, but she had arranged that we be seated in the solitary cool of a sidewalk cabana.  We enjoyed good views both of the overheated diners within and of the chilly passers-by on Waverly Place.  This allowed us to invoke, almost convincingly,  the Goldilocks Principle of the Pleasing Mean.  We didn’t actually have any wine, old or new, opting instead for the mulled cider.  There was a certain amount of discussion of old books—and certainly some of new ones, principally Jim’s.  But it was the old friends quotient that was over the top.  If you can imagine My Dinner with André lightened up by the absence of André, you get some sense of the occasion.    A full battery recharge, so to speak.  Few meaningful meetings are all cakes and ale, of course.  It is sometimes easier to see in one’s contemporaries the aging that one is perhaps reluctant to see in oneself.  We are all on the wheel, and the wheel does turn, though slowly. 

 

            We returned, feeling replete and mellow, to our evening’s rest, followed by a jolly breakfast moment with our son-in-law Zvi and our granddaughters Lulu and Cora.  The Lyft driver on the return trip was a well-turned-out fellow, well-spoken in fluent English, perhaps in his mid-forties.  He had attached to his rear-view mirror a mass-produced rosary and a small photograph of a handsome adolescent lad.  He told us that he lived in Bayonne and that his son of fifteen was in school there.  A few times during the hour-long ride he had brief conversations with someone—I believe his wife—in Arabic.  As he was helping us out of his car in our Princeton driveway, I asked him if he were a Coptic Christian.  This question—based in a pretty simple deduction on my part--had an electrifying effect on him, rather as though I had informed him that he had the winning lottery ticket.  We had a brief conversation, perhaps the first of its kind held on that tarmac, concerning the Coptic community of Hudson County NJ and my very small knowledge (in their English translation) of the Letters of Saint Anthony of the Desert.  A few hours later I got a bells-and-whistles text message from Lyft.  I was instructed to rejoice, as I had just received a five-star rating from one of their drivers!  My first and only.  I shall never again hail a ride without being sure there is a copy of the Vita Antonii in my bag.

 

Death Notices

 

 

One of William Blake's Illustrations for Young's Night Thoughts

            Does every ying require its yang?  Last week I was glowing with optimism inspired by a musical concert.  This week quite by accident, I found myself nagged by “night thoughts,” to use the gloom-and-doom term featured in the title of Edward Young’s famous poem of the mid-eighteenth-century, wildly popular on both sides of the Atlantic.  The poem is all about death, a topic the mind may naturally, though by no means necessarily unhealthily, turn to when one gets old.   Young surely inspired Emily Dickinson’s great (and mercifully shorter) thanatological masterpiece “Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers”: Safe in their Alabaster Chambers/Untouched by Morning/And untouched by noon/Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection, /Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone. If “rafter of satin” doesn’t creep you out, what would?  Well, what might do so could be the brief introductory essay by Martin Malia, the great Soviet scholar, in The Black Book of Communism, in which he sadly, dispassionately, offers a comparative glance at the numbers of people murdered by Nazis for the crime of their race and the number murdered by Communists for the crime of their social class.  In searching for a bibliographical reference, I inadvertently stumbled upon Malia’s enormous estimates of the hecatombs.

 

            During the Covid pandemic the daily actuarial reports of which Defoe writes in his Journal of the Plague Year are now features of the nightly news.  Certain publications have actually made printing history with their innovative “visuals”—charts and graphs conveying complex information in fine detail.  Though still penny-ante when compared with the political murders of the last century, world-wide Covid mortality has been horrendous.  In our country alone the deaths approach a million.  But equally horrendous also are some other disturbing statistics.   In a recent squib on the PBS New Hour the Covid announcement was supplemented by the news that drug overdose deaths in America last year topped 100,000, slightly exceeding the 95,000 “alcohol-related” ones.  For a particular reason I shall come to later, it will be the alcohol ones I will be pondering  most deeply in this post, but only after mentioning two other categories in which our nation is on the leadership board: vehicular deaths and gun deaths.

 

            In recent years there have been about forty thousand traffic deaths and forty-five thousand “gun-related” deaths in the United States annually.  The term “gun-related” may seem more oblique than necessary, as the “relationship” between the gun and the dead person is actually pretty clear.  A projectile fired from the former has effected the death of the latter.  With regard to highway carnage, we seem to have come to an unstated social consensus that it’s just awful, but whacha gonna do?  There's a price to doing business.  Some of the casuistry over gun deaths is perhaps animated by the fear that we might actually do something to stop them, but will perhaps feel less inclined to do so if we know that about half of all the gun-dead shot themselves quite intentionally, and that perhaps none of the children shot in their strollers were “the intended victim”.

 

            As it happens, I was encountering these gloomy statistics on the Monday and Tuesday of last week while I was still on the high of the symphony concert that I wrote about in my last post.  But blog day was followed immediately by chemotherapy day-–hardly an ordeal any more but still unpleasant enough and laden with intimations of pathology not improved by my recent contemplation of catalogues of macro-mortality.  Illness can complicate your view of many subjects, including some, like narcotic addiction, on which I might have thought I had a firm and unassailable view.  But if you are feeling really lousy and somebody gives you a pill that more or less instantly makes you feel really great, it may make you stop and ponder a moment.  How many Opioid deaths begin in such apparently simple fashion?

 

            Trying to read anything very serious while surceasing sorrow by medical infusion is a lost cause, so I often take a book of short stories to infusion.  This time it was one of my two thick volumes of Mauppasant: inexhaustible, and many of the stories really short.  Picking among them at random I found myself reading one called “The Baptism”.* This turned out to be a mistake.  The story begins with an old navy doctor taking a drink of cognac with a friend or friends.  He proposes a toast to “that charming poison…seductive murderer, and destroyer of people”—alcohol!  He suggests they have probably read Zola’s recent L’Assommoir (1877)—one of the most terrifying of many fictional treatments of the social disaster of alcoholism—but have they ever seen, as he has, the effects of alcohol introduced by the French and the English on the native populations of their colonial territories?  Or, he might have added, the laboring classes of their own native land?   Because that is what his brief tale concerns.  Years ago, he spent time over Christmas at an old family property in the countryside of the Breton coast.  Living on the place was a peasant who with his wife and sister-in-law looked after things.  The wife has a baby, and the proprietor was asked to stand as godfather.  Oh,  and also to front the parents money for the priest’s fee.  On the day of the baptism the January weather is freezing, and the priest is late in arriving.  Nonetheless, to the doctor’s horror the peasants insist on honoring their folk custom that the infant be kept stripped naked until the sacrament is performed.  The priest, moving at the speed of a “sacred turtle” shows no concern for this dangerous barbarity, his concern being the extortion of another five francs from the godfather.  The ceremony finally over, the parents and most of the baptismal party go off to a tavern to celebrate—meaning, for them, getting blind drunk.  When the alcohol runs out, they drink lamp fuel.  By next morning both babe and mother are dead.  It is just that abrupt,  Maybe I have read something more depressing.  Possibly Eli Wiesel’s Night.

 

            Why do the Breton fishermen drink themselves to death?  Because, the narrator says, when drunk they no longer see the foam atop the storm-tossed waves, only the waves themselves.  In a similar way the sweated textile workers of Britain’s Industrial Revolution found that “gin is the quickest way out of Manchester.”  There have been great medical advances in the use of chemotherapy, but I believe a basic paradoxical strategy remains: fighting fire with fire, the calculated administration of selected poisons.  This must be a rather delicate business, and probably never wisely self-administered. For Maupassant’s peasants the pain of daily life must have been very great indeed.  Yet certainly the coal-oil treatment was worse than the disease.  We speak of combating cancer and battling Covid, but two hundred thousand annual deaths from the self-administration of supposed palliatives suggest some huge cosmic snafu.  Death is a universal certainty and needs no extra help in performing its work.  Our catalogues of mega-deaths recording the operations of disease and natural disasters need not be swollen further by the depravity and folly of our species.

 

             

 

*I later discovered that Maupassant has two very different stories, with very different tones,  by the same name—“Le baptême”.  The shocking tale I describe is his second, from 1885 .  The first (1884) is tender and affirmative in its attitude to peasant life.

New Worlds

 

 

I came out of the weekend boosted by a nearly forgotten optimism.  Last Sunday afternoon we attended a full-scale performance of the Princeton Symphony Orchestra in Richardson Auditorium, a large, elegant, and acoustically superb concert hall on the Princeton campus.  Among the cultural treasures of the town in which we have lived for more than half a century now is the PSO.  This is a very high quality group of community musicians founded about 1980 by the late Portia Sonnenfeld.  It is in a sense the Town Orchestra as opposed to the Gown Orchestra of student musicians.

 

            Sunday’s concert was not strictly speaking the first live music we had enjoyed during the pandemic.  The inventive director of the Princeton University Concert Series, which brings musical artists to Princeton from all over the world, had earlier managed to arrange some very small, meticulously socially distanced events that we were able to attend.

 

            Those were imaginative and welcome palliatives.   But Sunday’s event was different in kind, a real concert, with lots of people sitting next to one another in the permanent fixed seats of an auditorium.   A spokesman for the orchestra  prefaced the musical performance with a few words of welcome, noting that this was the first time in two years the orchestra had been able to perform in Richardson, fulfilling the shared desire of players and audience alike to be able to come together in proximity in pursuit of a pleasure all shared.  The enthusiasm of the applause that greeted his remarks revealed a striking intensity of emotion in a usually restrained demographic of classical music lovers, many of us on the antique side.  Everybody in the world is fed up with Covid and the often vacillating and incoherent measures adopted by political authorities to address it.  Everyone was masked, of course, and we had to present vaccination credentials to gain admission.  There was no reckless hugging or backslapping.  But “symphony” means a joining of sound, and there was plenty of that both from the audience pit and the stage.

 

            To this audience of the music-starved, any performance would have been a treat, but in fact the quality of this performance was very high.  The two principal pieces played were of superb quality: the violin concerto of Sibelius, and Dvorak’s “New World” symphony.  And in both, for differing reasons,  I was able to find reassuring refutations of the heavy gloom of the pandemic.  Music is called “the universal language” with good reason.  Though like any language it must be learned  in order to achieve its fullest eloquence, the mode of its communication transcends the cultural boundaries within which all the world’s spoken tongues are necessarily confined.  Yet at the same time every piece of music  is a cultural artifact bound up like all such artifacts in historical particulars and local and temporal specificities.  And if simply being able to join in the truly social event of a musical concert felt like an act of self-liberation, the music we heard was of a sort to invite the mind beyond—or perhaps through—an aesthetic experience to an intellectual one.

 

            I am not certain that I had ever heard even a recording of the Sibelius violin concerto before, but I am unlikely ever to forget this live performance.  Though I am married to an excellent amateur violinist I could not identify the great professional players of the moment, except that one of them has to be the young soloist on the stage that afternoon, Alexi Kenney, a handsome, svelte, lithe fellow in his twenties whose bow is indistinguishable from a magic wand.  Of course a concerto is a symbiosis; and here the orchestra played its coequal role perfectly.  In contrast to the soloist, the concert’s conductor, Kenneth Bean, has the build of a football lineman.  His affect was one of precise and encouraging steadiness rather than of theatricality: he supervised a perfect team.   It was as though Bean and Kenney, animated by the spirit of  Sibelius, became a trio of benign pied pipers, recalling us all from two years of pandemic torpor.

 

 

            It has been said that the greatest example of American symphonic music was composed by a European, Antonin Dvorak.  We had the opportunity to ponder that paradox after the intermission.   The natural tendency of nineteenth-century European immigrants to America to stay in their familiar cultural clusters, not infrequently exacerbated by the disdain or hostility of anglophone “nativists” whose immigrant forebears got here a little earlier, created for a time odd linguistic islands throughout the plains and backwoods of the Middle Border, one such being the Czech community of Spillville, Iowa.  The much-travelled and cosmopolitan Dvorak might be a cultural lion in New York, but even citizens of the world can get homesick.  It was more practical to visit Spillville than Slovakia.  At the time of the Columbian Exposition of 1892, America had reached a new level of self-confidence, not to say obnoxious chauvinism.  But in Boston and New York the cultural mavens still tended to look toward London, Paris, and Berlin.  Emerson had delivered his famous talk on “The American Scholar” in 1837.  America had become a force in the international literary world through Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Mark Twain.  What of American music?

 

            That question is still being answered, and brilliantly.  At a time of such political doubt and darkness one treasures the light all the more.  And here Dvorak’s ideas continue to inspire.  Part of his greatness as a musician was an extraordinary versatility.  Music like all art is an intuition but also an expression, and music in its expressive aspect expressed something real, human life.  Among Dvorak’s most thrilling works are the Slavonic Dances, based in what is perhaps the most elemental form of music, that of folk.  Too few American cultural arbiters of the nineteenth century actually realized the artistic claims of democracy.  There were some Walt Whitmans of the visual arts.  Surely there should be some of music.  I Hear America Singing.  Dvorak astonished many and probably offended a few others by insisting that classical music in America should honor its own particular indigeneity, its “nativeness”, and especially the rich body of African and Afro-Carribean song that he had discovered here with such excitement.

 

                                         Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904)
 

            His own great monument to this idea was his ninth symphony, the “New World Symphony” (1893).  More precisely he called it “from the New World,” as he thought of it both as an announcement of and a gift from this extraordinary and still new place.  We might call it the “Spillville Symphony.”  Its haunting theme, a “folk” theme, is indefatigable but never itself tiring.  Is our country still an extraordinary new place?   There is plenty of reason for doubt, even despair.  Yet each day in the news I see terrible reports of people drowned in their desperate attempts to reach our shores and others willing to set off on foot from Lima on a thousand mile walk through the Darien peninsula to the difficulties and dangers of the trek toward the Rio Grande.  The testimony of the wretched of the earth has its own peculiar eloquence.  I left Richardson Auditorium feeling not merely personally liberated but comforted by a larger, inner hope.

 

                                                      Spillville IA, 1893
 

Music , Dvorak (Antonin), Covid liberation

Dangerous Words

 

            There is a little shuttle train that runs two or three miles from the Princeton station to Princeton Junction where you can get on a big train going either in the direction of New York or of Trenton/Philadelphia.  At the only level crossing on the shuttle line there are automatic barrier gates and flashing lights, along with a sign reading DO NOT PARK ON THE TRACKS.  Some years ago an anonymous wit supplemented this sign by adding a comma and two additional words: YOU FOOL.  And, indeed, public warnings of danger frequently imply a less than flattering view of the general intelligence of the citizenry: quite possibly with justification.  The first time I rode on an Italian train I noted with interest an elegant brass plate reading E PERICOLOSO SPORGERSI, IT IS DANGEROUS TO LEAN OUT.  I was of course immediately seized with the desire to open the window, stick my head out, and see whether there was a corresponding sign on the outside.

 

            The more fruitful train of thought induced by the experience had to do with the dangerous words in English, by which I mean words having to do with danger.  Italian is Latin in its old age, and it is easy to see the relationship between the modern pericoloso and the ancient periculosus (adjective) from periculum, danger.  Now that bilingual Spanish and English signage is quite common, most people know that a freshly mopped wet floor presents peligro as well as danger.  English has its own set of periculum words: peril (via the French, péril), imperil, perilous, and parlous, a wondrous adjective on life support and in need of revival.  But those are all fairly fancy words.  The word we ordinarily use is danger.  Though everybody knows exactly what it means, it remains one of the mystery words in our tongue.

 

            This seems as good a time as any for the mandatory digression.  In 1962 I wrote a doctoral dissertation about the Romance of the Rose (Roman de la Rose), a very long French poem of the late Middle Ages, enormously popular with the aristocracy and consequently surviving in a large number of fourteenth-century manuscripts, many of which are beautifully illustrated.  My hope was to use iconographic analysis (interpretation of the pictures) to help elucidate the poem’s literary meanings.  It was a golden time for us, first travelling in an old Citroën Deux-Chevaux to libraries in many parts of Europe, then hunkering down in a little village in Provence to do the actual writing.  This allegorical poem tells the quest of a passionate lover (Amant) in pursuit of a rosebud.  (So it’s sort of like Citizen Kane, only different.) 

 

 

He gains admission to a walled garden in the center of which is the fountain of Narcissus.  Reflected in its pool he sees a rose of rare beauty.  The rosebud begins as an emblem of a woman but increasingly and very naughtily becomes the emblem of a part of a woman.  In the poem various allegorical characters help the Lover in his mad quest to possess it (her) while others hinder him.  The helpers have names like Fair Welcome, Sweet Talk, and Good Looks.  The chief hinderer is a gigantic, boorish guy with a big club. 

His name is Danger (Dangier in the French).  The poem describes him as a shameful vilains (i.e., peasant).  "His name was Dangiers, and he was the keeper of the roses."

 

            It was easier to see Dangier’s narrative function—to keep the horny Lover away from rosebud—than what, exactly, his name was supposed to mean.  What is obvious upon reflection is that this allegorical personification cannot represent what is meant by the modern English and French words “danger,” which is a generalized sense of peril or jeopardy.  He has a specialized role within an erotic economy.  He is a kind of super-chaperon.   This takes us back to etymology, where we discover two rather different meanings, one of them explicable and the other still puzzling.  There is in post-classical or “low” Latin a feudal term, dangerium, referring to a very strict relationship imposed by a lord upon a vassal.  A fief held “in danger” was one held under specific onerous conditions all too susceptible to technical violations that could damage or ruin the subordinate party.  The great seventeenth-century lexicographer of medieval Latin, Charles du Fresne, more commonly known by his title of nobility as the Sieur du Cange, wrote a mini-essay on this subject in his definition of dangerium.  Danger is the power of a binding legal arrangement that carries with it great risks to one subjected to it.  This is clearly the origin of the danger we may associate  with the streets of Chicago, railroad crossings, slippery tiles, playing with matches, etc.  The danger pictorially represented as a redneck with a club is something else.  The fourteenth-century illustration I provide gives a memorable visual impression.   It shows the Lover seeking admission to the garden from the doorkeeper (Oiseuse, or Idleness), with the pool of Narcissus at its center, and Danger, club over his shoulder, hulking over the high wall at the left.

 

            Chaucer’s works contain many passages in which the adjective dangerous appears in a sense that has dropped out of modern English but obviously is related to that in the Roman de la Rose.  Leaving aside the several examples that are to be found in the fragments that have survived from his Middle English translation of the French poem itself, we find the following in the great monologue of his sexiest character, the woman from Bath, usually called the Wife of Bath.  This woman knows a good deal about the birds and the bees.  Like the woman whom Jesus meets at Jacob’s well in the fourth chapter of the Gospel of John—who is obviously her literary prototype—the woman from Bath has been married five times, “not to speak of other company in her youth”.  She is a serial widow and seems even now on the prowl for a sixth marital opportunity.  Her magnificent monologue, ostensibly the prologue or introduction to her short tale (about an Arthurian rapist), is actually a free-standing autobiography in verse, composed like a fine piece of music in varying tempos and movements.  One movement is a recitation of her marital history.  With a perversity hardly unknown in real life, she tells us that she loved her fifth and last husband best, despite the fact that he abused her and was often stand-offish.  “I trowe [warrant] I loved him best, for that he/ Was of his love dangerous to me.”  The extended passage, as well as many other passages in medieval texts, makes it clear that danger here means niggardliness, especially in terms of sexual availability.  This fifth husband was ungenerous in addressing his wife’s sexual appetite.  He was dangerous. 

 

            The meaning is sufficiently clear, perhaps, but the concept itself remains mysterious.  In medieval romance, no doubt as in medieval life, sexual repression could be evidenced both in an internalized feminine timidity and as an externalized social constraint.  The club or shillelagh on Dangier’s shoulder is a material exemplification of a potent social force in aristocratic circles.  Christian ascetic doctrine was overtly anti-sexual, and the transmission of secular power in theory depended  on the purity of bloodlines and paternal authority.  Hence the attitude of “Lock up your daughters”—no small part of the function of medieval women’s religious institutions—not to mention “honor killings” and vendettas, sometimes pursued on a grand scale, as in the Trojan War.  The anthropologist Mary Douglas studied some of these connections in her engaging book Purity and Danger.

 

            Chaucer uses danger in other senses as well, including the one with which we are all familiar today. But danger as sexual parsimony, standoffishness, hard-to-getness has departed our language as mysteriously as it arrived.  For no philologist has yet come up with a really satisfactory explanation of how it could relate to dangerium and the perils of narrowly defined feudal privileges.  If you have one, I’d love to hear it.  I myself would find it dangerous even to speculate.

Bar Sinister

 

            The abrasive metal file is an ancient tool, the ancient English name of which (feol) has changed little since the days of the Anglo-Saxon bards who in their search  for involuted and ingenious ways to denote the deadly weapons of their warriors would call a sword “the leavings of the file”—what was left of the iron when the file had done its work.  Long before I learned that, though, I learned in a metal shop class in school another strange philological file fact.  Our teacher, an old guy who had once been a lathe machinist turning parts for Model Ts, introduced us to something called a flat bastard, a heavy hand file of medium coarseness suitable for lots of ordinary jobs.  The tool’s name, first recorded in 1677, is very racy, as this guy knew.  The word bastard was ordinarily serious profanity, unutterable by the civilized.

 

            That was probably seventy years ago.  Since then the very concept of serious profanity has disappeared from our culture.  No Hollywood movie has even a chance of success without drowning its audience in a cesspool of former obscenities now so commonplace as to have lost any shock value.  This once forbidden vocabulary is but  imperfectly replaced in daily speech by a few political shibboleths and unutterable verbal thought crimes.  The anecdote can serve to introduce today’s subject, however, because it can suggest just how recently the topics of bastardy and illegitimacy, along with others relating to sexual matters, were often considered taboo.  Recent figures suggest that each year about a million American children are born out of wedlock.  It is hardly any longer a matter of notice from the ethical point of view, except to the extent that children of single mothers are, from the statistical point of view, alarmingly threatened by poverty and its associated social pathologies.

 

            The revolutionary character of the shift in social attitudes would be difficult to exaggerate, as becomes apparent from reading almost anything in our older literature.  Think of the bastard Edmund in King Lear.  His bastardy is not merely a social awkwardness or family embarrassment: it is an essential, malign moral state.  Even today, to the extent one hears the word bastard at all, it is as a generalized term of moral opprobrium having nothing to do with the marital circumstances of parents.  If there is a dangerous social myopia in contemporary attitudes—as I think there is—things were hardly better in the good old days of penitentiaries, orphanages, workhouses, and orphan trains.

            Last week, more or less by accident, I found myself praising Fielding’s Tom Jones.  I don’t know if I ever persuade anybody else to look at books I talk about, but I am great at persuading myself.  So I took it down from the shelf.  The opening chapters are especially good.  At the same time winter is really setting in.  We are pretty well locked down.  We go practically nowhere and don’t do much that is memorable.  Instead of just walking, I now spend my exercise hours gathering and processing firewood Carpathian-peasant style, so we enjoy supper around a blazing hearth most nights.  Joan suggested that we revive an old custom: reading aloud at the fireside some good poetry, or a chapter or two of a Dickens novel.  But which novel?  There are so many good ones.

 

            In the background through all this there is in our household, as probably in most in the country, a disquieting undercurrent of political anxiety exacerbated by the uncertainties of the pandemic.  For us, the anxiety is easily expandable to England where friends, and one in particular, keep us abreast of the perceived high crimes and misdemeanors of the embattled British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson.  In one blistering critique forwarded to us by our friend, Mr. Johnson was somehow brought into comparison with Oliver Twist in one of his more hapless phases.  That was the sign from heaven we were looking for.  The next night’s fireside reading had been chosen for us.

 

            Such were the circumstances in which I was re-encountering, more or less simultaneously,  two classic English novels—one from the mid-eighteenth and the other the mid-nineteenth century—which both open with essentially the same situation.  That  situation is the fallout in proper society from the perplexing and scandalous imposition of a presumably bastard baby.  The actual title of Fielding’s novel is The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling.  A foundling was just that, an abandoned newborn that somebody found dumped on a trash heap or in a wicker basket at the scullery door or (the best case scenario, but still not all that great) secretly delivered to the Foundling Hospital.  In Tom Jones, Squire Allworthy finds the infant in his own bed!  Such things, though not unknown today, are no longer commonplace.  They once were, and until surprisingly recently.  We actually witness the birth of the luckless lad who would become Oliver Twist—a birth fatal to his mother—in a hideous charitable institution recognizable from its current heirs in the  “Family Services” lineage.  For both these babes the question is the same: Who is the father?

 

            This is a wonderful device to kickstart any narrative.  Readers know from the beginning that there is somewhere they will eventually have to go.  The journey is a long one, especially in Tom Jones.  Both Fielding and Dickens were Christian humanists who seldom disguised their own moral perspective.  Both were unsparing in their satirical treatment of hypocrisy and self-righteousness, of which there is plenty on display in both their books.  Dickens can be downright brutal.  Yet at the same time you know from the start that somehow even for these great-hearted writers these babes will not be allowed to be what they seem—two more bastard children among so many others.  From Sophocles to Shakespeare, through epic, through romance, through our folklore, “good” blood will out.  The princeling raised by shepherds will eventually reaffirm his majesty.  The birthmark, barely noticeable, is irradicable. 

 

            I lack the space, and certainly the competence, to deal with the serious studies of family structure to which so much of the attention of anthropologists has been devoted.  The variety of  human experience may seem nearly infinite, but for most of the world for most of recorded history the prevailing attitudes toward human procreation have been dominated by long established and long-lasting concepts of legitimacy, a word invoking both laws man-made and those thought to be revealed in Nature.  If the societies of the West are fundamentally abandoning that view, that is real news.  History is a patchwork of stasis and change.  Change itself can be minor or major, gradual or abrupt.  It can involve material reality or mental constructs.  I doubt that metal shop still exists in any high school today.  Nor is much industrial machining done in this country, especially with the use of hand files.  A flat bastard might amuse a teen-ager these days, but would hardly shock or titillate one.  Now Heaven knows, anything goes.