O. Henry

 

            Once or twice a year this space takes a quasi-commercial turn as I encourage all literate Americans to become subscribers to  or even patrons of the Library of America, the non-profit publishing venture devoted to producing handsome, durable, and authoritative editions of the best work of the best writers to grace our land since the seventeenth century.  America’s extraordinary literary heritage is in some ways like our national parks, something to be preserved, cherished, and explored, an intellectual and spiritual treasure house, and a licit source of pride and patriotism.  What particularly impels me to this subject today is one of their most recent volumes (no. 345 in the Library’s continuing series) that arrived in my box last week: O. Henry, 101 Stories.

 

            Though I have spent much of my life in libraries, including some of the most famous of the world, what the word "library" first brings to mind is the eccentric and disorganized collection of books shelved behind a wood-burning cooking stove in a farmhouse I once lived in with several of my uncles and aunts.  The collection was eclectic.  There were several old religious books, which were however overwhelmed by a multi-volume set of Brann the Iconoclast, a Texas free-thinker and scourge of Baylor Baptists, one of whom shot him to death in demonstration of his love for our Lord.  Brann’s pungent essays included “The Mistakes of Moses,” dealing with the narrative absurdities of the Pentateuch.  I read it with mixed terror and delight.  There was a select collection of “How To” books, the most important being Audel’s five-volume Carpentry and Builder’s Guide, which had been used by my Uncle Wayne in building his own house, all made from timber he and his sister had themselves  cut and stone they had quarried on his wild Ozark land, in about 1932.  For me the most treasured volumes were those my Uncle John called “literature”—a few classic English novels, The Bible in Spain, A Treasury of Great Poetry, and what seemed to me a whole shelf of the individual collections of short stories by O. Henry.  “This man,” my Uncle John told me, “is a really great writer.”  Like so much else this beloved guru conveyed to me, the judgment was spot on.

 

            O. Henry didn’t invent the short story, but it is nearly impossible to imagine the genre without him.  In terms of output and consistent quality, there are but two other giants whom I can class with him: Maupassant and Chekhov.  (John O’Hara gets an honorable mention, and there are doubtless others I am neglecting.)  Amazingly the three were near contemporaries.  O. Henry was twelve years younger than Maupassant and two years younger than Chekhov.

 

            O. Henry is of course a pseudonym of still slightly uncertain origin.  The man’s real name was William Sidney Porter.  As a human being he was notably imperfect.  He was a petty embezzler who fled to Latin America to avoid prosecution but soon returned to face trial and a three-year stint in an Ohio prison.  His early death (at age 47) was hastened by his serious alcoholism.  All of us are in large measure “products of our times and circumstance”; but one can detect in certain writers a particularly strong sense of autobiographical burden.   One of the things that that draws me to Porter’s work is the particular nature of its connections to biographical circumstance.  Porter was born into the white middle class of the South during the Civil War, and thus inherited the curiously complex sense of being a loser that still animated many of the older people I knew when I was much younger.   Faulkner’s novels are replete with them in many forms, almost all of them involving dimensions of fantasy and denial, geographical escape, and the reinvention of a plausible self.  O. Henry became a kind of populist cosmopolitan for whom New York City—the city of How the Other Half Lives as well as the baronial palaces of Park Avenue-- would be the inexhaustible laboratory of his fictional examinations of the vagaries of human nature in their peculiarly American manifestations.  The first of his books I picked up in the family home was The Four Million, twenty-five New York stories first gathered together in 1906.  This collection unites several of his most famous pieces, including what is probably the most famous, “The Gift of the Magi”.  Some of them I hardly understood, and all of them had references I couldn’t catch.  Only many years later did I realize the political message of the book’s title.  It was a democratic put-down of the four hundred prominent families supposedly on Mrs. Astor’s exclusive list of people who counted in New York society.

 

            O. Henry’s production of short stories was prodigious and during his most intensive periods of production nearly incredible.  Out of many hundreds of stories I presume there must be a few clunkers, but I have so far found none in the selection of a hundred and one gathered in the Library of America volume.  When I became a professional student of literature in the 1960s I discovered that this author was regarded by many professional literary critics as rather primitive and passé.  His distinguishing characteristic was said to be the “surprise” or “trick” ending, as though cunning plotting was child’s play.  In fact, O. Henry’s skills as a writer do include narrative mastery.  He writes stories in the sense that most people understand that word.  Something happens.  There are characters in relationship who engage the interest of the reader.  Character is related to action.  But the narrator is always there too, and usually important in controlling the emotional or dramatic tone of the piece.  O. Henry was a very funny guy with a very subtle and modulated wit.  An excellent feature of the Library of America editions is the very discreet, disciplined and helpful collection of editorial notes, many of them explaining topical or historical references few of today’s readers are likely to appreciate without some help.  Certainly I need it.  For a “popular” writer, there is an impressive richness to his web of reference, allusion, and silent quotation.   My relatives were not college graduates, but they came from an era, as Porter himself had come, when a high school diploma had genuine significance as a guarantor of a certain level of cultural sophistication.  This was the man’s intended audience, as it had been also for Mark Twain and other of our great American masters of narrative.  He enjoyed and well deserved his high reputation among what used to be called general readers.  And given the fact that he has been dead for more than a century, one finds a surprising, unexpected currency in his pages.

 

 

 O Henry, 101 Stories, ed. Ben Yagoda (New York: the Library of America, 2021), pp. 828.

ISBN 978-1-59853-690-4

           

Sticks and Adders

 

 

pilgrim/prophet: St. James of Compostela 

 

           My late close friend Michael Curschmann was one of the greatest scholars of medieval German literature of the twentieth century.  We were neighbors as well as intellectual buddies, and for years we had lunch together two or three times a month.  Our conversations were rich and wide-ranging.  His sudden death in 2017 was a terrible shock; I miss him terribly.  He was brilliant and erudite.  Those characteristics are not uncommon among professors at major universities, but in Michael they were directed by something rather rarer: a quirky and mellow wisdom.  One example sticks in the mind.  In his last years he was afflicted with very painful back and leg issues that made walking quite difficult.  His doctor recommended a walker, but he wouldn’t hear of it.  “I shall use a stick.  A stick is sensible, dignified.  A stick can even be elegant.  Kant always walked with a stick.”  And indeed I later learned that the highest-end model of the highest-end European stick-maker is called the “Emmanuel Kant.”  It costs €333, and you can’t imagine sticking it into a mud puddle.

 

            I had reason to remember this a year after his death when I myself was suddenly rendered unstable of foot.  A dramatic side effect of the medical treatments that were staving off disaster on another front was bad neuropathy in my feet and ankles leaving me with an uncertain inebriate’s gait.  First I got a couple of conventional canes.  My daughter got me a quad-cane, but I feel about that the way Michael felt about the walker.  I’m reasonably steady inside buildings and on paved surfaces, but I still like to get off the beaten track a bit.  In the woods I need something fairly heavy duty, a really strong stick that offers support but can also beat around in the bush a bit.  A major “off road” problem—fallen tree limbs—proved to be its own solution.  I dragged a likely one home and cut a stout pole of convenient length.  It worked fine.  But as William Morris said,  “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful”.   This is the classical literary aesthetic of Horace from the Art of Poetry—a poem should both please and instruct—adapted to the industrial arts.  My stout pole was useful, but was it also beautiful?

 

            And so the medievalist in me kicked in.  For reasons unrelated to my increasing antiquity, I am a bit of an expert on the iconography of canes, crutches, and walking sticks. Romantic artists thought that ancient prophets and Celtic bards, in addition to speaking very loudly, were wont to carry big sticks.  So you get pictorial versions of Isaiah, Homer, Ossian, and others walking about with small tree trunks in hand.  

 

            There is something impressive in a seven-foot staff, but also something very heavy—seven linear feet of wood, perhaps—that diminishes the “useful” part, unless it is a skinny multitasking shepherd’s staff capable of serving as buttress, lasso, or club, all of which (and more) were implied in the symbolism of a medieval bishop’s crosier or crook.   Both of those words derive from crux (cross) and therefore recall the metaphor of the Good Shepherd (who “lays down his life for his sheep,” John 10:11), famously used by Jesus of himself and then of the office of episcopacy and indeed of all good shepherds, such as Chaucer’s Parson, who visits the sick and needy throughout his far-flung parish not on horseback, but upon his feet, and in his hand a staf.  But I must reserve  the fascinating topic of crosses as crutches for another possible occasion.  It vividly demonstrates some of the ways in which rank popular Christian superstition could link with deeply learned scriptural exegesis in creating the fascinating world of the medieval imagination.  Today my plate is already full with sticks and adders, as opposed perhaps to snakes and ladders.  For there is indeed a strong iconographic connection between staff and serpent.   

 

 

        Think first of the medical symbol of the Caduceus, emblem of the Greek healer-god Aesculapius.   Snakes—non-poisonous ones, naturally—were a feature of the Aesculapion or “dream hospital” of ancient Greek medicine.  They were considered benign rather than scary.  In the Hebrew Bible there is the famous stick-and-snake contest between Aaron and the Egyptian magicians Jannes and Jambres (Exodus 7:10-12) and many places in classical mythology invoke the episode of the blind seer Tiresias, who had a major snake-and-stick problem.  He had rashly intruded upon the sexual congress of two serpents with his walking stick, calling down upon himself a bizarre divine punishment.  Scepters and snakes do have much in common, though one is unbending, the other curvaceous.  So what I shall call the “snake staff” is perhaps an artistic idea so inevitable that it could penetrate even my mind.  Just because you happen to be lame doesn’t mean your stick has to be as well.

 

            In unkempt woods around these parts one frequently finds an unprepossessing multi-stemmed shrub, kind of semi-hardwood with a good bark, often ten feet or higher and taking up a lot of room, growing in near symbiosis with coarse, strangulating vines of pseudo-honeysuckle.  The wood is fairly light weight, but sturdy.  The vines, which are very strong, sometimes cling to a mini-trunk of this plant with great tenacity and, as the wood expands in its annual growth constrict and become buried in it.  I first discovered this effect on a holly sapling, actually, while out searching for last year’s ad hoc Christmas tree.  The visual results of this process are very striking and very serpentine.  The holly has a fine-grained white wood which is quite elegant when stripped, but its smooth, thin, tight-fitting bark also presents a very handsome appearance.  I found the serpentine scars on several scrub species, and I have been harvesting a few likely lengths from which I have experimented in making walking sticks of various designs.

my first effort: holly wood Christmas tree

 

            From the functional point of view a stick used for walking on rough surfaces needs to be reasonably straight, very strong,  yet fairly light.  It also has to offer a firm grip, though this need not be of traditional semicircular form. Traditional manufactured canes achieve their curved handles through steaming, sometimes in conjunction with lamination.  Finding suitable pieces of wood with proper “natural” handles is difficult but not impossible.  My best so far is a fine, strong, light-weight length of black locust limb felled by a windstorm at my son’s farm.

some raw materials

 

            The natural serpentine design can be more or less emphasized by digging out the entrapped vine (not always possible) and by the partial or total removal of the bark.  The possibilities are endless, and one really needs a different stick for every day of the week.  I probably need to lay down tools soon, however, if I want to save my marriage, for one man’s heptad of walking sticks is another woman’s patio clutter.  Besides, my enterprise may be less original than I supposed.  Somebody else—several somebodies--must be doing this somewhere because there are whole pages full of sturdy rubber cane tips of various diameters available cheap on Amazon.

 

           

 

Some Family News

 

 

                                                                             Dr. Katherine E. Fleming

 

            Trumpeting public pride in one’s children, though a sacred parental right, can be ghastly bad form, and so far as this blog goes, I try to limit myself to one such transgression per decade per child.  Even with three dynamic offspring, this stingy policy keeps the self-advertisement to a tolerable level.  The last time I exercised my self-authorized privilege with regard to our daughter Katherine was in 2010 when she was awarded a fancy prize at the Sorbonne.  That was more than twelve years ago, so I feel permitted to mention that she is just at the moment in Los Angeles for consultations.  The trustees of the J. Paul Getty Trust, having concluded an exhaustive intergalactic search process, have just announced her appointment as President and Chief Executive Officer of their well-heeled cultural and educational institutions. 

 

                                                            The Getty Center Campus  (gull’s eye view)

            J. Paul Getty was a twentieth-century oil tycoon who died in 1976.  He amassed a vast fortune.  In the days when a million dollars was still a significant amount of money, he was a billionaire.  But the American attitude toward people of great wealth is hopelessly ambiguous.  Being as rich as Midas often invites the Midas curse.  Really rich people are eminently otherable.  Getty was often said to be the richest man in America, and a license to despise the richest man in America will always be a part of our national birthright. “Let me tell you about the very rich,” says the narrator of an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story barely distinguishable from the author.  “They are different from you and me.”  Hemingway’s sensible answer, unfortunately apocryphal, was “Yes, they have more money.”  I know little enough about the historical Getty.  My first conscious memory of hearing his name is musical, a reference in a satirical song sung by a left-wing folk singer. “John Paul Getty is just plain folks/The UN charter is a cruel hoax/How do I know? /I read it in the Daily News”.  The satirical object here was not the billionaire but the then right-wing popular newspaper, the New York Daily News, which in that epoch was roughly analogous to today’s Fox Network.  Getty was not just plain folks, to be sure, but he didn’t light cigars with hundred-dollar bills either.  Sensational displays of conspicuous consumption are more characteristic of the wannabe superrich than of the real deals.  He was frugal enough to haggle with his grandson’s Mafia kidnappers even after they had sent him a morsel of the kid’s severed ear. When it came to wine, women, and song, he appears to have concentrated on the middle term, and in a big way.  But he also loved works of art, was active and informed in putting together one of the world’s great private collections, and visionary in establishing a trust with a huge potential for advancing the study, understanding, and creation of art in a world-wide context.  I have a keen sense of appreciation for cultural philanthropists.  Henry Clay Frick and J. P. Morgan are often catalogued among the robber barons, but when I’m looking at the Holbein portraits in the Frick Collection or examining a medieval manuscript in the Morgan Library I want to classify them as friends of humanity.  As so often, Shakespeare says it best: “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”

            The Getty’s activities are distributed among four divisions, each with its own director, under the leadership of the President of the Trust.  The one that most people know about is the Getty Museum, magnificently set into a coastal hill in Los Angeles and stunning alike in the architecture of its buildings and in the opulence of its collections.  In fact there are two museums.  But the Getty also runs a unique atelier to preserve fragile and vulnerable works of art and to train the skilled professionals who conserve them, administers an important program of research grants and fellowships, and maintains an academic research institute supported by a huge library devoted to art and architectural history with a broad approach to visual culture. I have personal experience of only two of these.  I visited the Getty Museum a few years ago.  Thirty years earlier I had failed in an application to gain one of their fellowships to research a book on Franciscan painting.  So I know they have a great museum and high standards.

            That this unique cultural institution of international consequence would seek out and cajole our daughter to be its leader naturally warrants our parental pride. The Board of Trustees must include some very persuasive folks.  It is one thing to get a job one has applied for and quite another to be lured away from a job in which one is fully engaged.  Being a successful seeker doubtless demonstrates force of character and initiative, but being sought after out of the blue is even better and can capture the imagination in a uniquely persuasive fashion.  So we are proud of Katy’s having been searched out, but even prouder of her spunk and energy in taking on the challenge.  Moving from being the Provost of a huge, sprawling university to the presidency of a very different kind of institution will not be just the same old same old in a different place.  My response, less as a father than as a humanist scholar in a culture where by and large the humanities are undervalued, is a humanist’s response.  The humanities are devoted to the study of things created by human skill and imagination.  Some of these are material and physical.  All are what Collingwood called “artefacts of human intellection”—the results of men and women thinking.  And the diversity of human thought has been in the past, and continues to be today, most remarkable.  One of the first books to expand my appreciation of the humanistic dimensions of art history was Ernst Gombrich’s Art and Illusion (1960).  Aided by a Saul Steinberg cartoon, he makes the claim that no one could possibly credit that human beings have changed as much through history as their artistic representations might suggest.  Viewing an object, like reading a book, always invites interpretation or “judgement,” as it was called in the neo-classical period.   Are there sound humanistic canons of judgement?  Are there objective standards at all?  Another famous theorist of the visual arts, Heinrich Wölfflin, says “People have at all times seen what they want to see.”  Never has this startling idea seemed more challenging than in the present cultural moment.  Museums and libraries are therefore not merely the indispensable repositories and protectors of the of the artifacts of human thought, but also the arenas in which they are tested and contested.  Hence the educational function of such an institution at the Getty is obvious.  Indeed, one of its earlier presidents called it a “university”.

            The tendency of the elderly to wax valedictory is probably a natural one.  Certainly we are very aware these days of narrowing horizons and lengthening shadows.  That is even without the discouragement of world event.  How wonderful it is, then, to see ever arising on the horizon a new and improved generation in whom one can discern the continuity of one’s own best values while appreciating and indeed marveling at the new, independent, and daring nature of their expression.  Although they are our superior successors, they still have a few things to learn.  For example, too few of them are readers of Tennyson.  The old order changeth , yielding place to new, And God fulfils himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

 

 

-o-

 

 

 Happy Palm Sunday 

James Ensor: Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 (detail)

Getty Museum of Art

 

 

 

 

         

Jacques Louis David

            Our latest adventure was a trip to the big city to visit the Jacques Louis David show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  We had been invited by old and dear friends, who also took us to lunch and rescued us from problems of elder telephone incompetence in arranging a Lyft afterwards.  I am slowly inuring myself to being the little old lady who needs a boy scout to help me cross the street.  We feel lucky there are so many about.  Boy scouts, I mean, not streets.  Our friend Susan also invoked her special privilege as a museum docent to get a significantly reduced price on the magnificent show catalogue, Jacques Louis David, Radical Draftsman.  In theory I am in a phase of library reduction, but…

 

            David was born in 1748 and died in 1825.  The “radical” of the catalogue title can be taken in a double sense.  David the classicist spent years in Italy searching for the roots of his art in the monuments of ancient Rome.  More obviously the word refers to his radical politics during the Revolution, in which he was active both as committed republican and anti-royalist, and as an artist.  The “Draftsman” part points to the central originality of this particular exhibition, which focuses on the literally thousands of drawings he prepared, either to record antique Roman monuments he admired and studied or in making preliminary sketches for possible paintings.  In a preliminary essays the exhibition’s curator, Perrin Stein, and Philippe Bordes, a leading David scholar and the former director of the Museum of the French Revolution, explain the previously insufficiently appreciated importance of the practice of sketched copies and preliminary drawing for the painters of the period.

 

            The evaluation of museum exhibitions, like the subjects and artefacts to which they are devoted, is to a large extent a matter of personal taste and cultural metabolism.   For me “Jacques Louis David: Radical Draftsman” (which is open until the middle of May) gets an “A” rating—for at least two reasons.  The first is its educational clarity.  Any intelligent viewing of a work of art will teach you something, but the context in which objects in museums are presented makes an enormous difference.  There is in this exhibition a very clear and illuminating focus on draftsmanship, especially with regard to the postures of the human body, and most especially with human bodies in relationship.  David kept many notebooks from his years of Italian apprenticeship in which the viewer can find evidence of the artist’s experiments and self-corrections.  Of course, many of his sketched copies and imaginative drawings, including some obviously intended for contingent and experimental purposes, give the appearance of free-standing works of art.

 

"Death of Socrates

            So the exhibition has a very evident “through line”:  the usually invisible preparatory work behind the great work of a great artist.  You may be familiar with several of David’s famous paintings displayed in the exhibit, and two are perhaps especially relevant to the painter’s use of classical themes for political purpose. These are “The Death of Socrates,” an historical allegory in which Enlightenment rationality suffers at the hands of tyrannical power, and “The Tennis Court Oath.” The latter refers not to one of the expletives with which so many amateur athletes are familiar, but a cast-of-thousands canvas commemorating in highly imaginative fashion an important revolutionary event of June 1789.

 

"Tennis Court Oath"

            The second great virtue of the exhibition from my point of view is its manageable size.  I find something uniquely exhausting about the mode of perambulation required of exhibition-viewers.  This may well be simply a personal liability.  It long antedates my use of a cane.  There is also a definite limit to the volume of visual data I can intelligently accommodate.  Seldom straying too far from their well-defined themes, the curators have laid out a wonderfully coherent and instructive itinerary in a few generously sized rooms.  It may get crowded with real spring weather and the hoped-for further improvement in the Covid situation, but things were perfectly manageable the day we were there.

 

            The tempestuous period of the French Revolution commanded David’s serious engagement in radical politics, as evidenced in his civic life as well as in his art.  He was a delegate to the National Assembly, and in the wake of the fall of Robespierre his Jacobin sympathies and associations led to his brief imprisonment on two occasions.  Like a number of the former revolutionary radicals, he made his peace with Napoleon with surprising ease.  It was David who painted what is probably history’s most famous “great man on horseback” canvas.  The reactionary restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814, forced upon France after Waterloo, precipitated the artist’s exile in Brussels during the last years of his life. Wherever he was, David remained true to his craft.  Some of his most extraordinary small portraits were made in prison. 

 

 

            People sometimes ask me, usually somewhat indirectly, why I write a blog essay each week.  It is a perfectly good question for which there is no simple answer.  It is certainly not because I feel particularly qualified to write about many of the topics I choose, though in an obvious way I do find the project consistent with my long career as a teacher.  As the name of the blog implies, there is a symbiotic relationship between teaching and learning.  In writing many of my little essays I often learn things I did not previously consciously know, especially about myself.  I had an important moment of self-realization during this visit to the Met.  I have never known much about the French classical painter Jacques Louis David, but I remember very distinctly my first introduction to him.  A lot of my scholarly work has centered on visual culture, and I now realize that it all began in my sophomore year at Sewanee when I took my one and only art survey course.  I had never heard of Jacques David or Théodore Géricault, both introduced to me in a single lecture.  And I noted that in speaking of the former one did not say DAYvud with its Sunday School pronunciation, but Frenchified dahVEED—the same word, yet different, one of those little distinctions or finesses which, when multiplied a thousand times, constitute the veneer of a liberal education whether it cover finely-grained oak or particle board.  It came back to me in a flash that the teacher was a Frenchman named Alain de Leiris, a really nice guy of whom I had not thought in years.  I realize now that this man was a research scholar temporarily lodged in a liberal arts college with many fine teachers but few actively publishing scholars.  Whatever had become of him?  A tiny bit of internet research, which included reading obituaries of his widow, very recently deceased at age ninety-five, provided the quick answer.  I did not find his own death notice, but he seems to have had a long and distinguished career at the University of Maryland, his specialty being nineteenth-century French painters, especially Manet.  But the best rewards of education are not material, and therefore, one hopes, not entirely mortal.  Perhaps I may even now, however tardily,  record my gratitude for a fine teacher?

Under a Cloud

           

            There is a natural tendency, exacerbated by the commercial requirements of journalism, to inflate the importance of current events.  Each day, after all, must have its headlines.  Sound history, on the other hand, demands retrospection.  Another way of saying this is encapsulated in Francis Bacon’s well-known saw that “Truth is the daughter of time…”  Nonetheless it would appear obvious that the Russian assault on Ukraine is a major world event with long-term repercussions that, however unpredictable at present, are likely to be of historical significance.  Nonetheless this will probably be the last essay I shall devote to it.  I wish I could say that is because the violence seems headed toward some kind of satisfactory termination, but it does not.  I simply have no unique or authoritative ideas.  The press is full of more expert opinion than one can read and far too much amateur emoting than one wants to read.

 

            We keep hearing that since the end of the last global war we have been living in a “rules-based world”.  How this differs from any other period in history is not clear.  After all, the Law of the Jungle is a rule of sorts.  Perhaps Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is slightly more subtle than that, but not much more.  The “rule” he has violated—that big fish do not have license to gobble up any smaller fish of their fancy—would seem to be a fundamental requirement for world peace.  But here it is in conflict with another unstated rule that must be honored to preserve the peace: the rule that one must not provoke big fish.  The big fish, of course, are those armed with atomic bombs.

 

            This is a subject on which it is far easier to bloviate as an olympian critic than to suggest any practical course of action.  When I say God help those world leaders, and especially our own, who have the awful responsibility of responding to Putin’s aggression, it is in a truly prayerful sense, not one of condescension.  But it cannot be wrong to ask questions about our national defense policies when their coherence or current relevance becomes questionable.  Our policy with regard to nuclear weapons has been a defensive one, based on the idea of deterrence.  Postulated when the “nuclear club” was much more exclusive than it is today, it rather sardonically adopted the acronym MAD, standing for “Mutually Assured Destruction.”  Practically speaking, the policy enshrined our belief that not even the evil men in the Kremlin, capable of perfidies yet unknown in world annals, would be so crazy as to launch an attack guaranteed to lead to their retaliatory destruction.  The MAD regime makes it possible for nuclear states to adopt an official or tacit “No First Strike” position, and that offers some psychological comfort.  But it offers no absolute moral guidance.   Quite apart from the fact that the nuclear club long ago abandoned exclusivity, with each increase in its membership actually diminishing rather than expanding security, there are problems with the policy’s intellectual no less than its moral coherence.  It is essentially the policy many of us deride we hear it from the NRA: the only force that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.

 

            The policy adopted by the Biden administration, and presumably shared by all of our EU allies, is that we cannot honor Zelensky’s repeated pleas for the establishment of a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine because that would make Putin really mad, mad enough perhaps to….you know what.  So we—meaning those world forces trying to support Ukraine and repel Russian aggression—cannot use one of the most effective military means of doing so.  Thus Putin’s unused nukes are to him highly useful, while ours are useless to us.  President Biden has not, however, completely ruled out any direct confrontation with Russian forces by NATO.  The special circumstance Biden correctly cites is that Ukraine is not a NATO member, and that we are therefore under no treaty obligation to come to its defense.  That is indeed a significant fact, not a mere Jesuitical distinction.  I suppose it means “But if you start in on Latvia, Putin, you’re in big trouble.”  Not that the crushing economic sanctions are only small trouble.

 

            But one of the dictionary definitions of appeasement is “to buy off (an aggressor) by concessions, usually at the sacrifice of principles.”  Putin was already able to gobble up a few choice pieces of the old USSR real estate, including the Ukrainian Crimea, without much serious complaint.  Dictators have shown a tendency to pay more attention to what their adversaries actually do than to what they say.   They note when  “red lines” consistently fade away into pale chalk marks.  One of Stalin’s favorite ripostes, when timorous subordinates hesitantly suggested that this or that policy might arouse complicating reactions by governments “in the West”  was “They will swallow the whole thing!”  The extraordinary thing about it was that he was almost always right.  It’s pretty clear that Putin in a slightly different metaphorical sense wants to swallow the whole of Ukraine.  Should our policy be one of peace at any price?  If not, what is our price limit?  After all the second World War was avoidable.  Many maniacs have headed large armies over the course of the centuries, but none has been so maniacal, to the best of my knowledge, as to insist on achieving through the expenditure of large sums from the national treasury and large casualties in their military forces what they could get by simply demanding it.  If the Western powers had been prepared to accede to all of Hitler’s demands and all of the expansionist ambitions of the Japanese Empire, there need have been no war.

 

            History both leads and misleads.  Thoughts of the Second War come naturally to me because my earliest memories are from those years, and the world in which I grew to adulthood was darkened by its shadow—the so-called Cold War.  The “problem” of Russia has thus been a constant of life.  The collapse of the Soviet Union would appear in the long run to have changed the world less than one would have expected.  We speak of the “lessons of history,” but the lessons are sometimes opaque.  In our changed, inter-wired world Mastercard may prove to be mightier that Migs.  That remains to be seen.  And will our own weary, waning, and increasingly incoherent country be able to refresh itself in what Lincoln once, in another difficult time, called “a new birth of freedom”?

 

 

                       

Patriotism

 

 

 

            A term commonly used in the Soviet Union for World War II was the “great patriotic war”.  Stalin, with his back to the wall, found that most of his subjects were far more enthusiastic about fighting for Mother Russia than for international Socialism.  For strategic reasons he even relaxed for a period his hostility to the Orthodox Church, which had continued through violent persecutions to be a source of Russian national identity.  No good deed goes unpunished.  Now Vladimir Putin, a Russian nationalist and super-patriot who hobnobs with the Patriarch and probably has never in his life talked about the international proletarian revolution, is getting a dose of his own medicine.  It turns out that Ukrainians really love their country too.  What is the source of all true patriotism?  Surely it is the love of locality, locality invested with a transcendent ethical as well as sentimental value.  One of the first poems ever to thrill me is by Sir Walter Scott: “Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land!  Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,  As home his footsteps he hath turn’d, From wandering on a foreign strand!”  This was all about some place I didn’t recognize called Caledonia, wherever that was.  Not long afterward our teacher introduced us to the once-famous short story “The Man Without a Country” by Edward Everett Hale.  (He was the nephew of the guy who gave an endless harangue at the Gettysburg battlefield dedication for whom Lincoln was supposed to serve as the warm-up band.)  The story is the patriotic tear-jerker of all time.

 

            I am thinking about the nature and various meanings of patriotism not merely on account of current world events, but because of two personal cultural encounters of the week, one with Jan Yoors and the other with Franz Schubert.  This is probably an equation with at least one unknown.  Yoors (1922-1977) is hardly a household name, but one of my favorite fellow Flemings.  Born in Antwerp, he made his adult career in New York as artist, tapestry maker, photographer, and author before dying too young.  At the age of 12, in 1934, with the blessings of his pre-hippie artistic parents, he joined a band of Rom “travelers” (gypsies) passing through Flanders with whom he mainly lived for several years in their wanderings.  He entered fully into their cultural cocoon.  He learned their cryptic language.  Fully accepted, he went native.  In 1967 he published a fascinating book (The Gypsies) in which he recounts his youthful experiences.  I feared I had lost this book, but just discovered it with great relief while cleaning up a closet, and I immediately reread its opening chapters.  Young Yoors was not merely setting off on a strange adventure.  Official Nazi racial policy toward the Roma was similar to that toward Jews and had similarly horrifying results.  He would soon be heading toward the maelstrom, and he wrote about that in a second book.  He loved his adoptive family and recognized their many virtues.  But he was utterly clear-sighted about their cultural habits—including petty thievery, confidence trickery, and mendacity—that so often brought down upon them the hostility of conventional society.  They were a people utterly without patriotism for they had no geographical patria, a tribe of eternal wanderers.  Their “identity” resided in cultural factors unrelated to any concept of locality.  The murderous Nazi policy was primarily based in bunkum racial theory, but their notorious want of “Germanness” was also a factor.

 

            A couple of days after this rereading we were at a concert featuring the pianist Mitsuo Uchida and the tenor Mark Padmore performing songs by Beethoven and Franz Schubert.  The Schubert was the complete “Swan Song” series, which I had never before heard in full.  The words of the first seven poems of this work were written by Ludwig Rellstab, apparently an important figure in the world of early nineteenth-century German music but previously unknown to me.  Rellstab wrote them with Beethoven in mind, but they were later passed on to Schubert.  One of them is called “In der Ferne” (“Far Away”), about a disappointed lover trying to flee his sorrow.  In its English translation by Richard Wigmore it goes like this: “Woe to those who flee, who journey forth into the world, who travel through strange lands, forgetting their native land,  spurning their mother’s home, forsaking their friends:  alas, no blessing follows them on their way!  The yearning heart, the tearful eye, endless longing….”  In this song the language dealing with the exile is more censorious than consoling.  The issue is by no means one merely of temperament, homebodies versus rolling stones.  It is fraught with moral significance.

 

                                                                    Jan Yoors and adoptive family
 

            Curiously, perhaps, the issues raised here in a secular and political context—what might be called an ethical interpretation of residential locality--have their parallels in the medieval religious culture I have spent many years studying. The issue was the question of Christian “perfection,” the ideal of the monastic life.  The theory of asceticism was that in voluntarily denying the common desires of human nature—material comfort, sexual gratification, free agency—the monks and nuns freed themselves to be available for higher or more “perfect” spiritual experience.  Their models were biblical, but susceptible of ambiguous interpretation.  One great image of “religious” life was the Hebrew Exodus.  But is the Exodus story one of hard, dangerous, and protracted travel or one of establishing a glorious settled kingdom in a Promised Land?  What might be called the political Zionism of Exodus and the Hebrew history books has its metaphoric or spiritual parallels everywhere in the prophets.  The relationship between the literal and the figural remains an issue in Jewish theology to this day.  In the early Christian writings in Greek there is a definite spiritualization of pilgrimage and homelessness.  “Let us go forth therefore unto [Christ] without the camp, bearing his reproach.  For here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come.”  That is a mystical and millenarian idea that has its secular, political analogue in the Dust Bowl ballad of Woodie Guthrie, “I Ain’t Got No Home in This World Any More.”  Remember why the English words travel and travail are kissing kin.  In actual fact the “open road” of pilgrimage could be the same ordeal it is for refugees today.

 

            The legendary lives of the earliest monks, the so-called Desert Fathers, are epics of peregrination and dismal squats in desert places, caves, and the abandoned lairs of wild animals.  This is plain living and high thinking at the possibly fanatical level.  The fantastic biographies of the “wandering saints,” most especially Athanasius’s super-best-seller Life of Saint Anthony, fired the imaginations of thousands of religious idealists, but could provide no viable model for actual mass asceticism.  Mass asceticism required considerable material organization and support, kitchens and dormitories, arable land and endowments.   The great Victorian historian W. E. H. Lecky, author of The History of European Morals (1869), expressing the nationalist sentiments of his time and place, has the following choice remarks about St. Anthony.  “A hideous, sordid, and emaciated maniac, without knowledge, without patriotism, without natural affection, passing his life in a long routine of useless and atrocious self-torture, and quailing before the ghastly phantoms of his delirious brain, had become the ideal of the nations which had known the writings of Plato and Cicero and the lives of Socrates or Cato.”

 

            As early as the fifth century Augustine was denouncing circumcellions, or religious wanderers.  The prologue to the Benedictine Rule, by far the most influential ascetic legislation of the Western Church, attacked so-called gyrovagi—those who “wander around in circles”—the idea of the circum and the gyro being essentially identical.  A not bad translation of the strange word gyrovagus might be gypsy.  Monasticism in the Benedictine tradition was based in residence in a fixed locality, “stability of place”.  Indeed, metaphorically the monastery was often called a “prison”.  In the later Middle Ages a parallel controversy arose around the new orders of mendicant friars, especially the Franciscans.  One of the early tensions within that order was between those who claimed strict “evangelical” poverty—those who thought they could own literally no property, especially fixed domiciles—and others more accommodating of the old Benedictine idea.  The refusal of mendicants to stay in one place is a wide-spread trope of the abundant anti-clerical literary satire of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.  Like the wandering lover in the Schubert Lieder, and like the gypsies, the religious wanderers, having no earthly patria, lacked also patriotism.