Difficult to Digest

My number one son Richard, the formidable blogmeister of “A Brooklynite on the Ice,” drew my attention to what he thought may be a blogable item for a geezer like me in the form of an AP story headed “Chapter 11 Plan Cedes Reader’s Digest to Lenders”. From his point of view the story has to do with the preposterous nonchalance with which American corporations now file for bankruptcy. The very word “bankruptcy” used to reverberate with the terrors of the charnel house. American captains of industry now declare bankruptcy with about as much drama as they down an aspirin tablet. But Rich also knew that I had some interest in Reader’s Digest as an index of popular American culture and especially in the magazine’s role in the formation of the anti-Communist consensus of the 1950s. I touch on this subject in several places in The Anti-Communist Manifestos. It’s a little hard to believe that a journal with five and a half million readers is going under. Why, that’s even more readers than "A Brooklynite on the Ice" commands! But it’s certainly a falling away from the glory days of post-War, when it had a paid circulation of more than seventeen million monthly copies. Reader’s Digest was launched in 1922 by a husband-and-wife genius team, DeWitt and Lila Wallace. This pair was sufficiently famous to have commanded a Time magazine cover at one point.

It was the admirable Robert Hutchins who made the memorable quip about popular journalism in America. We have two great magazines, he said: Time, for people who can’t think, and Life [the great precursor of modern photo-journalism], for people who can’t read. He might have added, “and Reader’s Digest, for people in between, those who have trouble with disyllables.”

The basic idea, simple and brilliant, anticipated the Internet in certain ways. Reader’s Digest would gather and “condense” interesting articles from the whole range of American journalism.There are numerous books about the Reader’s Digest, which must be regarded as a phenomenon unique in the annals of publication. Academics love "the masses" in principle; practice proves a little more difficult. Many scholars seem to think that there must be something morally dubious, and certainly politically incorrect, in a journal read by so many millions of their compatriots. The fullest study is probably John Heidenry’s Theirs Was the Kingdom: Lila and DeWitt Wallace and the Story of the Reader’s Digest. Full does not, alas, always mean accurate. Unfortunately, on the one point which most interested me (Jan Valtin’s publication of “American Dawn”) this book turned out to be woefully errant. Joanne Sharp’s Condensing the Cold War: Reader’s Digest and American Identity has the virtue of revealing its simple (not to say simple-minded) thesis right up front. The implication here is that the Wallaces were the grandparents of the vast right-wing conspiracy.

From nearly its very inception the Reader’s Digest was the magazine that left-wing intellectuals loved to hate, and they have been constant in their disdain. They couldn't stomach its combination of saccharine patriotism, hick religiosity, and fantastic financial success. As I wrote in my book “As late as 1982, Susan Sontag caused an uproar among progressives by suggesting that 'the émigrés from the communist countries we didn’t listen to, who found it far easier to get published in the Reader’s Digest than in the Nation or the New Statesman, were telling the truth.'” In the 1950s one recurrent theme was the battle of the FBI against domestic Communism. The magazine's tendencies are memorialized in an imaginary joke title of a typical article of the 1950s: "I Slept with a Bear for the FBI, and Found God."

I first encountered this curious political bias when I was writing about Whittaker Chambers. Chambers had first been introduced to a Communist Party meeting in the 1920s by a strange character named Sender Garlin. This man was a Communist Party apparatchik for many decades. He only recently ended his days as an elder statesman of the progressive community of Boulder, Colorado. In the 1930s , Garlin and Chambers worked together on the Worker, the newspaper of the American Communist Party. In 1943 he published a dime brochure entitled "The Truth about Reader's Digest". What that "truth" was was spelled out in a prefatory letter by the famous novelist Theodore Dreiser. "Just now, from reading your booklet, I gather the publication's true attitude and import. It is all so fascinatingly sly, and to my way of thinking, criminal--since plainly it labors to belittle our chief and most valuable ally, and to forward the desires of the capitalistic group in this country that seeks--and has sought from the very beginning--to establish money-plenty and money-authority for the few as opposed to poverty and slavery for the masses here as elsewhere on earth."

"Sly" is not the first word that comes into my mind with regard to the magazine. Most Digest articles had all the slyness and subtlety of a hydrogen bomb or perhaps the Bubonic Plague. One of my heroes, Max Eastman, who enraged the Left by moving from being editor of the Masses in the 1930s to being a frequent contributor to Reader's Digest in the 1970s, put it thus: “Writing for the Reader’s Digest while not exactly an art, is a highly specialized craft. The magazine is largely concerned with the life of ideas, but as it is addressed to some 50 or 60 million readers—the actual copies printed number over 17 million—the ideas have to be presented with a self-explanatory simplicity. I have learned this craft by thinking of myself as a teacher when writing essays of this kind for the Reader’s Digest.”

Garlin's pamphlet has become a rare item, in large part no doubt because it features three line etching caricatures--of Franco, Charles Lindbergh, and Jan Valtin, who happened at that moment to be the CPUSA's fascists du jour--by the brilliant Communist artist William Gropper. Gropper is particularly "collectible" at the moment, so the dime pamphlet now goes for at least twenty-five bucks when you can find it. I, alas, have had to chase down two copies. It's a thin little thing, and I lost the first one somewhere among my books. Let me heirs be put on notice. By the time they find it, it's bound to be worth a C-note. This Gropper cartoon called "May Day" gives a good idea of Gropper's power and economy of line.

What had particularly enraged Garlin was the fact that the Reader's Digest was prominent in the promotion of the Communist renegade author Jan Valtin (real name Richard Krebs). The Wallaces had "digested" bits of Valtin's famous anti-Communist "autobiography" Out of the Night, and undoubtedly helped increase its circulation. To make matters worse they then published in the May 1941 number Valtin's essay entitled "American Dawn"--one of the most fantastically successful pieces of American boosterism ever penned. "American Dawn" is the story of a repentant ex-Communist who longs for nothing more than to be allowed to become a good American citizen. It worked wonders in helping Krebs to get around very serious immigration problems. At that point the magazine was being distributed in just over four million copies, but the Wallaces were worried that that might not be enough. So they had 750,000 copies of the article made up as offprints for free distribution. I was able to track down on eBay a copy of the original issue in all its dull typographic respectability.

Gold for Geezers

ABOVE the oracular cave at Delphi, we are told, was inscribed the fundamental atom, or perhaps even quark, of all wisdom: NOSCE TEIPSUM, “Know thyself!” For some reason the Greeks thought it cool to write their mottoes in Latin, just as the Romans often opted for Greek. But whether in Latin or Greek (γνῶθι σεαυτόν, if I am provoked to a display of pedantry) the injunction to self-knowledge has a long and venerable history in the western philosophical tradition.

Self-knowledge is of course the hardest of all knowledge to obtain. “O wad some Power the giftie gie us,” wrote the immortal Robbie Burns, “to see oursels as ithers see us!'” Most of us are pretty good at some things, and not so good at others. But what a rare ability it is to have a clear and accurate view of which is which. In fact the more things we are good at, the more lively is the danger that we will think we are also good at vaguely related things. For example, I am pretty good at eating. Indeed modesty alone keeps me from saying “very good”. Eating is logically connected with cooking, but it would be most rash of me, and even rasher of you, to suppose that my prowess at eating implies an equal prowess at cooking.

National political developments of the last month have encouraged me to think about the Delphic injunction with regard to our much-admired president. Barak Obama is a very able politician. In fact he is a superb politician. But even though he is very good at most things political, he is not, alas, very good at all such things. Contrast, for example, the lavish praise that has greeted the “Cash for Clunkers” program with the controversy and dramatized divisions ignited by his Medical, well, Whatever. I speak thus irreverently only because the Democrats seem to have abandoned what was formerly called their “Health Care Plan” in favor of their “Medical Insurance Reform”. I am not sure I like the switch, because I am a man with a prostate; and if I have to be in the hospital I’d prefer being treated by a doctor rather than an insurance agent. I can hang out with any number of insurance agents at the Rotary Club.

Still, there does still seem to be, camouflaged amidst the Delphic obscurity, an actual medical dimension to Health Care/Insurance Reform. The trick is figuring out what it is. There is light-hearted Saturday program on NPR (“Wait, Wait—Don’t Tell Me!”) in which one of the segments tries a contestant’s ability to pick from three preposterous stories the one that (in addition to being preposterous) is an actual news item. President Obama has assured me of three things: (1) he will give health care insurance to about fifty million currently uninsured people; (2) this change will have no effect on my own personal medical arrangements unless I want it to, and (3) nobody making less than a quarter of a million dollars per annum will be asked to pay a penny more in income taxes to pay for the program.

The problem is to figure out which one of the three highly popular possibilities could conceivably be true. I have no intention of going to a Town Hall Meeting, and I certainly will not foam at the mouth if I stumble into one by accident; but as an Obama voter I do have to inquire whether lobotomy will be a precondition for my support of the president’s good intentions?

The question Mr. Obama should be discussing with Messrs. Rahm and Alexrod, not excluding of course Speaker Pelosi, is how to make the Health Whatever as attractive as “Cash for Clunkers”. The popularity of “Cash for Clunkers” has nothing to do with the free lunch aspect. It is the intellectual elegance of the concept. Toward the beginning of the last century one of the European governments, concerned with the frequency of fatal railway accidents, established a commission to look into the matter. The commissioners soon discovered that by significant proportion most people killed in railway accidents had been sitting in the last car of the train. In a flash the elegant, cost-free solution to the problem flashed through the mind of the chief investigator. The commission would recommend that in future the last car be removed from all trains. Voilà!
A clunker: $4500 max

That’s the kind of thinking that has made “Cash for Clunkers” such a success. The beauty of it is that the model can be applied to the Medical Whatever at the slight cost of a few modest adjustments of vocabulary. Everyone agrees that the killer cost in health care is geriatric medicine. But “geriatric medicine” is merely a euphemism that may disguise rather than identify the problem. Let’s call a spade a spade. The real problem here is geezers. First they get old. Then they get sick. Then they expect to see a doctor. Give them an inch, they take a mile. The suggested plan to create a special group of thanatological shrinks (commonly called the Kevorkian Corps), while undoubtedly well intentioned, is actually an inadequate response. The health care crisis demands something more fundamental. The solution is obvious, though it may at first seem a little startling. Eliminate the last car on the train. Get the geezers off the road in the same way you are getting the clunkers off the road. Give the program a snappy title: “Grants for Gramps,” perhaps, or better yet “Gold for Geezers”.
A geezer: $450 max

Tragic, to be Blunt

Among the last week’s news stories that most captured my attention was the announcement by the British Library that the manuscript of Anthony Blunt’s memoirs, deposited there in 1984, has been released to public availability after the twenty-five-year temporal buffer to which the library authorities had agreed at the time they received the document. Such waiting periods are not uncommonly applied to controversial materials that have the potential to cause distress or embarrassment to living persons or even cause legal difficulties for those who publish them. But such arrangements can be unfair in another way. The gossip of a dead man, after all, now beyond all power of direct interrogation, may be more dangerous than that of the living.



Most of us, I suppose, would be more in favor of virtue if we could postpone having to face virtue’s inconveniences, preferably indefinitely. Saint Augustine had famously prayed, “Make me chaste, O God, but not just yet!” Anthony Blunt and hundreds of others have said in effect, “I want to be truthful and straightforward, but of course not right now.”

Blunt was a most distinguished art historian. As director of the Courtauld Institute (the art history department of the University of London, so to speak) he greatly advanced the cause of academic art history not merely in Britain but wherever his many distinguished students extended his influence throughout the world. As the socially upper-crust conservator of the Queen’s own private collection of paintings, a function he performed so satisfactorily as to earn him a knighthood, he was a star of modest magnitude in the BBC’s night sky of television public intellectual luminaries. But Blunt was several other things as well. He was most notoriously a Soviet spy and a traitor to his country.

The Internet is already abuzz with Anthony Blunt, and I presume to add to the chatter only on account of two accidental circumstances. The first is familial, and it suggests that the "six degrees of separation" theory is far too conservative. My brother-in-law John Newman, a distinguished architectural historian and the current editor of the well-known series on The Buildings of England, was for some years Blunt’s junior colleague at the Courtauld Institute in London. He greatly admired Blunt as art historian and academic administrator and was of the view that the public rhetorical violence that followed upon Blunt’s tardy public exposure in 1979—which Blunt in the newly released memoir apparently says drove him to contemplate suicide—was in large measure sanctimonious and unreflective. John’s opinion is not one I would dismiss lightly. Furthermore, among our personal friends is a woman who (I learned many years after first meeting her) is a blood relative of Blunt's. A second circumstance tends in another direction. I happen to be in the process of publishing a book (The Anti-Communist Manifestos, with an official release date less than a month away) in which I touch upon the thought processes that led many able and accomplished western intellectuals to invest their deepest allegiance in the unspeakable tyranny of Stalinist Communism. In preparing this book I had to read literally dozens of autobiographies, confessions, apologies, explanations, or reaffirmations of an unrepentant defiance written by 1930s and 40s Communists. I have of course not yet seen Blunt’s memoir, though it is bound to be in bookshops nearly as fast as computer keyboards can clatter, but from its characterization in the press it appears likely to fall into a familiar self-serving genre.

I mention Blunt in The Anti-Communist Manifestos only in passing. What I say of him specifically comes in a discussion of the social myopia that kept American and British authorities from exposing damaging Soviet espionage in a timely manner. The Cambridge spy ring should have been shut down in 1940 if not before. “Unfortunately,” I write, “one of the spies, Anthony Blunt, a sort of British Alger Hiss, whose extraordinary distinction and public reputation made the very thought of his disloyalty impossible, was one of the foxes overseeing the operations of the MI5 henhouse.”

The parallel between Blunt and Hiss, while imperfect, is apt. Neither man was an open Communist, and Blunt was not a Party member at all. Anyone familiar with the patterns of Communist espionage and front organizations of the period will recognize the practical insignificance of this fact. Communist sympathizers and some actual Communists were often more useful to the Party if their allegiance was not explicitly known. Hiss and Blunt also shared the arts of practiced liars. Blunt lied about his espionage for as long as he could, through several incompetent security inquiries. Hiss continued to lie until his dying day, even after he had been found guilty of lying by a jury of his peers.

A point frequently encountered in histories of the Nazi regime concerns Mein Kampf, Hitler’s autobiography, which he published in his late thirties. The point is that all the horrors of the evolving regime, though European observers usually reacted to them as developments wholly unpredictable if not actually inconceivable, are clearly adumbrated in Mein Kampf. Mein Kampf was not an obscure book. On the contrary, it was a huge best seller in German-speaking countries, and widely available in translated form in the other major European languages. Hitler’s plans were quite clearly spelled out in the book, but the foreign service professionals in Whitehall and the Quai d’Orsay paid no attention to it. The author of such a book couldn't be serious.
During the research for my book I encountered a sort of minor league Mein Kampf published by Anthony Blunt in 1937. Actually, it's only a short essay; but nobody who read it and took it seriously could have possibly been surprised when Blunt turned out to be the "Fourth Man". George Orwell said that there had been more lies published about the Spanish Civil War than any other event in history. That was undoubtedly hyperbole, but it is certainly true that in the late Thirties a lot of famous people published a lot of stuff they later regretted. One well-known example is Auden's poem "Spain", which the poet later spent several years trying wish away or to revise retrospectively. In 1937 the (at that point) Communist poet C. Day Lewis edited a volume of essays entitled The Mind in Chains. The title referred to the supposed state of things under capitalism. Essays by various hands addressed the fields of education, literature, art, drama, cinema, music, and so forth. In a fascinating introduction the editor began with the mythical chains of Prometheus as developed by Shelley and ended with the metaphoric chains of the conclusion of The Communist Manifesto. "Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to win." The authors were not all Communists--according to Day Lewis they represented the full socialist coalition of the Popular Front--but they shared one fundamental assumption. Western capitalist society was either actually dead or near death. Hence the essays followed a roughly similar format: a description of current capitalist sterility, followed by a blueskying projection of a future socialist vitality. What "vitality" seemed to mean to all the writers was the Soviet Union--yes, the Soviet Union of 1937! "The Mind in Chains could never have been written were it not for the widespread belief of intellectual workers that the mind is really in chains to-day," wrote Day Lewis, "that these chains have been forged by a dying social system, that they can and must be broken--and in the Soviet Union have been broken..." Day Lewis seems not to have read or credited Max Eastman's Artists in Uniform: a Study of Literature and Bureaucratism (1934), in which the ex-Communist editor of the Masses had made an empirical study of the actual state of art and literature under Stalin. As for Blunt, artistic uniformity seemed to be the artistic goal.

Certain changes will inevitably take place in the forms which artists use to express the ideas of the classless society. The conception of a painting as a unique private possession will disappear....The easel painting, which was the particular art-form evolved at the time of the Renaissance when art became essentially private, will become of secondary importance, and instead mural painting will be developed in a form suitable to the decoration of the communal buildings devoted to the culture and recreation of the workers. But it will still, of course, be true that people will want something to decorate the walls of their houses, to which large scale murals are not generally appropriate. This need will probably be satisfied by the creation of what may be called publishing firms of painting, whose function it would be to commission originals in order to have them copied in large quantities by some process of colour printing....By this method the idea of the unique original with great scarcity value would be avoided, and the original itself would probably be kept in the state museum as a help in the training of other artists. In this kind of production much of the process will be mechanical and the same will probably be true of many other kinds of painting. [120-121]

It is fascinating to learn from one of the great art historians of the last century and the future Surveyor of the Queen's Paintings that the art of the socialist consummation so devoutly to be wished for would consist chiefly of post office murals and the polychrome print rack at the National Gallery souvenir shop. When Blunt turned out to be the infamous "Fourth Man" incredulity trumped consternation in the British press, but no one who had read the essay entitled "Art Under Capitalism and Socialism" need have been all that surprised.

Political belief should never be criminalized, even if that belief is invested in the benignity of the international criminal conspiracy that was the Comintern. But ideas do sometimes have consequence, and active participation in criminal conspiracy is not an exercise of a civil right. In what he came to call the greatest mistake of his life, Anthony Blunt became a criminal and a traitor. Like so many others he sought to justify his actions on the basis of high political and moral principle. The political principle was "anti-fascism," the moral principle "personal loyalty to one's friends." He apparently never pondered the incoherence of the two principles.

A certain quotation from E. M. Forster has become de rigueur in discussing the Cambridge spies. Forster was another Cantabridgian, though of one generation older than the spies, another genius, another (with Burgess and Blunt himself) tortured and furtive homosexual. In a provocative essay Forster had written: "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." What was already an arresting apothegm later took on an aura of prophecy when it turned out that Anthony Blunt had indeed made that choice. And here was something extraordinary. The same man who in 1937 was articulating a Marxist artistic theory in which the individuality of the artist and the particularity of subject were to be made entirely subordinate to mechanical reproduction and the satisfactions of the "workers" took as his highest moral principle, one that trumped any larger social obligation, loyalty to a coterie of highly privileged personal friends. Here was a tragedy much larger than politics, one that would require a Shakespeare or a Goethe to probe.

Triumph at Baker's Basin

According to one cynical view the two secrets of a happy life are, first, to identify genuinely modest goals and, second, to cultivate very low expectations in their pursuit. In other words, “Dream the possible dream.” From this point of view my past week must be judged a succès fou. I succeeded in having my pickup truck inspected and validated by the State of New Jersey.

The general experience of NJMVD Inspection Station at Baker’s Basin used regularly to be described as an imaginary supplement to Dante’s Inferno. Many residents of the state suspected that the system was secretly controlled by the garage owners’ and auto mechanics’ lobby—there must be one—since many people were willing to pay almost anything for a private inspection that would relieve them of the necessity of a personal visit to Baker’s Basin. My first happy

Baker's Basin (Mercer County NJ) Inspection Station before recently instituted reforms

surprise was that the place itself had shaped up measurably since I was last there four years ago. The geography is still vestigially infernal. You have to drive around three sides of the Quaker Bridge Mall to reach the station, though if you go early that mainly involves lapping empty parking lots. But once there, things weren’t so bad. In fact, they were pretty good. It used to be like a Black Friday shoe sale. You are now funneled, in single file, into an automated gate, where you pick up a ticket stamped with an accurate time of arrival: in this instance, 9:31.
Baker's Basin (Mercer County NJ) Inspection Station since Jon Corzine became governor. Note coordinated pastels, which invite the motorist to make contact with his/her own inner inspector...

There were fewer than a dozen cars distributed among no fewer than five inspection alleys. By the time I got to the head of my line there was nobody at all in either of the two left-hand lanes. An inspector in one of those alleys beckoned in my direction, but when I started to react he yelled out, “No, not you—you,” pointing to a late model Acura driven by a bejeweled matron behind me. “Your vehicle,” he said, shouting to me again, “is too old for my lane.” Snappy repartee in such a situation is not easy, but I tried. “You sure know how to hurt a guy’s feelings,” I shouted back. I thought the remark had been drowned out by the Acura sweeping around and past me, but he surprised me with a good humored answer: “Sorry about that”.

The purportedly ancient vehicle which I presented for inspection is a 1993 Ford pickup truck. Now something fifteen years-old is, generally speaking, not exactly venerable. For instance, would you really like to have a fifteen-year-old give you a colonoscopy? Would you seek the meaning of life from a fifteen-year-old metaphysician? Would you really be impressed by a firm that boasted that it has been a "purveyor of sweetmeats to the royal household since 1993"? My truck, though fifteen years old, has been driven less than 100,000 miles, and it has been scrupulously maintained from the mechanical and safety points of view. On the other hand, its exterior, especially the bed and tail-gate, naturally display the cicatrices of serious industry. This is of course entirely as it should be.

What a 1993 Ford pickup should never look like (except perhaps in 1993).


What a 1993 Ford pickup should always look like.

The commonly encountered phrase "a beat-up pickup" is a pleonasm. Every pickup should be beat-up. That is what pickups are for. Those grotesquely pristine things you find parked in front of franchise restaurants in shopping malls are not real pickups. But, alas, some folks in New Jersey, and particularly the state inspectors, simply don't get it.

For nearly two decades they have been doing their level best to get "older vehicles" off the road. They say so quite openly. This policy, executed under a bogus claim of ecological consciousness, ministered to the sloth and incompetence of Detroit and the greed of lending agencies, contributing to the results we have recently had cause to deplore. If the vehicles Detroit makes are junk, they soon end up in the junk yard; but it's an ill wind that blows no one some good, in this case the duly certified usurers who loan the motorist the dough for the next expensive piece of junk.

More than twenty-five years ago I noticed a dramatic change on America's highways: the virtual disappearance of the jalopy. The kind of vehicle that most male 'teen-agers of my generation once bought on monthly installments with their paper route money, then lovingly rebuilt, then endlessly drove around the courthouse square of a Saturday

The Joad-mobile from John Ford's version of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Soviet authorities arranged for mass showings of this movie in Russia, claiming that it gave an accurate picture of the realities of typical family life in America. They had to abandon the program quickly when the factory workers reacted with amazement and jealousy that an ordinary American family could be so prosperous as to own a car.

night--that vehicle simply no longer exists. The loss to our culture is not slight. In 1936 the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset published a famous book, The Revolt of the Masses, in which he used a now classic characterization of modernity through the image of the internal combustion engine. Throughout the western world, he wrote, millions of people have become utterly dependent upon a machine whose basic mechanisms are mysterious to them. The point is an excellent one, and truer today than then, especially when we think of the cybernetic sphere; but it was lost on me when I first read Ortega's book because of the ineptitude of the the specific example offered. When I was growing up there wasn't a fourteen-year-old boy in Baxter County who couldn't take apart and reassemble a Chevrolet of the same age. For both sexes erotic initiation involved the negotiation of the steering wheel of an old Plymouth. I was left wondering about whatever could be wrong with little Spaniards. No more. I haven't seen a kid working on his car in about twenty-five years. The video game addict is the unworthy successor to the shade-tree mechanic.

At the inspection station you have to wait in a little bullpen from which you can watch the inspectors at work on your vehicle as it moves slowly down the lane. Mine moved much slower than the others. My guy was nice enough, but he became obviously frustrated by his inability to fail me. Yes, the horn works; the lights all work; the windshield wipers are actually new. If you get a reasonably tuned Ford engine with tight cylinders and correct time, it will not emit culpable emissions whether it was made in 1939 or 2009. Brake equalization is a little tricky, but if it's really out of whack a driver will know it and have it remedied before showing up at the DMV. It just about killed the guy, but at 10:02 am he had to to plaster this on my windshield:


HOW vainly men themselves amaze
To win the palm, the oak, or bays,
While limping numbers tell the score:
Oh seven three, oh four six four.

Uncles and the Present Perfect

We just spent a delicious Fourth of July holiday that turned out, in an unexpected way, to be a nearly complete family gathering. Zvi and Katy arrived a few days ago from Paris, with young Lulu and Cora very much present. (Sophia is for a while at an upscale photography workshop in Ireland—a boondoggle passed off as “preparation for the Bac.”) Luke and Melanie naturally drove over from Philadelphia. This meant that only Richard would be missing. He, I knew, was in Atlanta crating up his photographs, prior to driving to Massachusetts via North Carolina and Brooklyn.

It had not occurred to me, though it had to Rich, that an itinerary indentured to the I-95 corridor would inevitably bring him very near our house. He called with the news that he could make a brief meal stop, and Joan, who answered the phone, conspired with him to double the delight by making his arrival a surprise. At least I had no inkling he would be appearing, nor did his adoring young nieces Lulu and Cora. They had already been given the disappointing news that Uncle Rich would not be there. In fact, since they had asked about this more than once, they had been told more than once.

I don’t know whether the Fourth of July is an official “family” holiday; but ours was at least an informal one, and before it was over I had occasion to meditate on the appropriateness of one of our old national emblems—Uncle Sam. Supposedly Uncle Sam came about because of the importunities of anthropromorphism and the need to fit the pre-existing initials U.S., but there’s more to it than that. Brother Sam, Cousin Sam—they wouldn’t do. In Hamlet’s famous remark about his stepfather Claudius—“A little more than kin, and less than kind”—we are reminded of the double nature of family relationship, in which the ties of blood and those affection are by no means identical. “Of all my wife’s relations,” my father used to say, “I like myself the best.” The primal memory of blood is fossilized in our word cousin, which really means “of one blood” (con + sanguinis), which is why the word is used so often in Renaissance drama of any blood relative, sometimes to our confusion. The distinctive feature of the closest of all relationships, the marital relationship, is that though it is the creator of the blood bond, it is not itself one. In fact many societies have taken elaborate care to keep the marital bond and the blood bond separate. The old Anglican prayer book had an elaborate Consanguinity chart, summarizing the consensus of medieval canon law, allowing marriage between partners at the fifth degree of consanguinity (first cousin, once removed) but no nearer. The old country phrase "kissing cousins" refers to those kinsfolk sufficiently distant to lust after safely.

The animus here is a primitive fear of incest, which exists in most cultures and is immortally enshrined in the western cultural tradition at the very birth of tragedy, in the story of Oedipus. Faithful adherence to the consanguinity charts was intended to obviate the Theban unpleasantness. One of the great lines of world literature is taken from one of these charts: Tom Jones’s horrified realization that unknowingly he may have been in bed with his own mother. “Incest!” he cries out in alarm, “—with a mother!” That is perhaps the most telling indefinite article in all of English literature.

The blood relationships are all different, often in indefinable ways. We all of necessity have a similar pattern of biological forebears. Almost everybody has had the experience of parents, and most of us of grandparents. But we may or may not be brothers or sisters, uncles or aunts, nephews or nieces, cousins. I had brothers but no sister; but I realized how much I had missed only much later when, as a father, I closely observed the interaction of brother and sister within my own house.

My more severe disadvantage has been in the realm of uncledom. I had two terrific uncles, especially my Uncle John, for whom I was named. He was my father’s elder brother, and those two remained close until the end of their lives. Between the two of them they taught me all the arts and crafts of country life, not a few of which turn out to have a surprising relevance in the New Jersey suburbs. The more important instruction was informal; they taught me about brotherhood and friendship.

Before I got married I didn’t think much about what kind of a father I would become, but I spent a good deal of time imagining my avuncularity. Here Fortune dealt me a blow. It isn’t that I have nobody to be uncle to. I have two splendid nieces, one of them an expert in primary education, the other an intellectual property lawyer, both of them as well busy mothers in their own right. But they are Englishwomen, separated from me by a wide ocean, and I was able to make only occasional and usually highly formal appearances in their young lives. There wasn’t much opportunity for me to teach them how to repair a hay-bailer. I was for a time worried that something similar would happen among my own children when they began going international in a serious way, but if you get to be sufficiently international you also make the effort to keep in frequent communication.

The relationship between nephews and nieces and maternal uncle was particularly strong, and it had a special character, in that the uncle was the particular mentor of the nephew and the protector of the niece. This relationship probably developed in early warrior societies in which male mortality was high and widows and orphans numerous. There are many allusions to this situation in our earlier literatures, where it not infrequently is the occasion of irony. In Beowulf King Hygelac, the emblem of the brittle warrior code at the tragic heart of the poem, is the brother of the hero’s mother. In Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, which considerable complicates the narrative situation of Boccaccio’s Filostrato, its ostensible source text, turns Pandarus into Criseyde’s uncle. The obvious purpose of this detail is to heighten the awfulness of his sexual treason against her. In one of the most haunting and mysterious of the Troubadour poems, Arnaut Daniel’s sestina Lo ferm voler the strangely rhyming impediments to the lover’s enjoyment are the ongle and the oncle, the metaphoric fingernail of the spying gossip, the watchfulness of the guardian uncle.

Well, the Fourth was a beautiful day. The usual family high jinx were in train, with central headquarters, as always in the kitchen. I was doing a little intermittent, desultory work in the garden when little Cora came running out to me in a paroxysm of excitement. “I have seen Richard,” she blurted out. She did not say “Richard is here” or even “I just saw Richard in the kitchen”. I probably would have intuited the whole plot in an instant if I had heard either of those sentences. But “I have seen Richard” was so formal, so literary, so clearly at odds with the normal syntax of a four-year-old, that I just stood there befuddled for a moment. There is a special dignity in the present perfect tense, a solemnity. “He hath loosed the awful vengeance of His terrible swift-sword.” Now there is an absolutely indispensable hath. It just wouldn’t do to say, “He loosed his vengeance.”

It finally dawned on me what “I have seen Richard” had to mean, and, standing as I was in a garden, I at the same moment realized why little Cora’s sentence was so arresting. Her words were nearly identical to those of Mary Magdalene who had gone to visit a dead body and found instead a living man. “Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news, ‘I have seen the Lord’” (Luke 20:18). She had at first mistaken the risen Christ for the gardener! This beautiful anecdote is the literary source of one of the great subjects of medieval and Renaissance art—the so called “Noli me tangere”.



Although little Cora has already mastered some of the Hebrew prayers for the Sabbath meal, she is not yet truly a Bible scholar. So I do not claim to find here a conscious quotation. What I can and do claim is a very particular love of a niece for her uncle. She was as delighted to see Richard walk into the kitchen as Mary had been to stumble upon her risen Lord. Joy doesn't get much more intense than that.

John Locke and the Argentine Connection

“Why,” my wife asked me “is Sarkozy’s picture on the front page?” Casual error not infrequently becomes the occasion of deep insight. The front page photograph was not of Nicholas Sarkozy, but of Mark Sanford of South Carolina, and it went with a headline reading ENDING MYSTERY, A GOVERNOR SAYS HE HAD AN AFFAIR. That was a revelation of some interest, though not as much as the realization that Sanford does sort of look like Sarkozy. And note how close they would be in an alphabetical listing....



Who is who?



When I realized it was Sanford, not Sarkozy, I immediately thought about the time my car was stolen in New Jersey while I was in Italy.

The logic of all this will be clearer to you if you are a reader of Laurence Sterne, whose immortal Tristram Shandy has a lot of fun with Locke’s views of the “association of ideas”. The crucial association here is that linking oddball southern politicians with Argentinian bombshells. You see, Mark Sanford, the governor of South Carolina, was supposed to be taking a lonely hike along the Appalachian Trail in order “to recharge after the stimulus battle.” Well, actually he was supposed to be being the governor of South Carolina, but the Appalachian Trail was a plausible alternative. It turns out he was actually having a dirty weekend recharging after the stimulus battle with his Argentinian girlfriend in Buenos Aires. So now Mark Sanford can’t be president, because anybody who lies about walking the Appalachian Trail has for sure lost the tree-hugger vote.

The “Times” had a big story about all this, but as so often they missed the most important thing about it, which is the trend, the pattern. Oddball southern politicians compromise their chances of becoming president through involvement with foxy Argentinian women. Recall the late




Wilbur & Fanne at play









Representative Wilbur Mills (D-Ark.), who in his day was the powerful chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. (“Powerful”, incidentally, is an adjective de rigueur any time the Ways and Means Committee or its chairman is mentioned in the national press.) In 1972 Mr. Mills ran for the Democratic nomination for president, garnering thirty-some votes on the first ballot, before being somewhat outdistanced by George McGovern. But after the fiasco of the McGovern campaign Mills seemed to some plausibly placed for actual viability should the Democrats ever revive. Unfortunately in the wee hours of October 9, 1974, the Washington Park police stopped a car to alert its driver that he ought not to be driving with the lights off, as the night was dark. The driver was Wilbur Mills. Mr. Mills was manifestly drunk. His face was somewhat disfigured by superficial wounds that appeared to be the results of a stimulus battle he had just had with his front-seat companion, a most attractive woman of fiery Latin mien several decades his junior. This lady took flight and leaped into the nearby Tidal Basin.

When plucked from the water she turned out to be Annabelle Battistella, alias Fanne Foxe, a strip-tease artiste even better known as the Argentine Firecracker—a name based partly in her nationality and partly in the details of her art.



Foxy Fanne Fox on the job











That, alas, was the last we heard of Wilbur Mills as presidential candidate. My uncle John waxed gloomy. “Now they will never elect a President from Arkansas,” he opined with authority. That was the year Bill Clinton was entering his political career.

Ah, yes, you ask, but what has any of this to do with the theft of my car? Answer: everything. I am from Arkansas, and I used to visit family members there regularly. While there in the summer of 1972 I picked up, for what I thought might be its novelty value, a bumper-sticker that said “Yea, Wilbur!” This message, though conveying significance to proud Arkansas natives, proved highly puzzling to the residents of Princeton, NJ, where I live, partly because people there simply are not named Wilbur and partly because by the time I got the car back there nobody could remember the names of any candidates but McGovern and Nixon. One of my colleagues, puzzled by the bumper sticker, asked me if it were an advertisement for a restaurant.

For part of the academic year 1972-73 we were in Italy, at Grottaferrata near Rome. I was conducting research at the Franciscan Library of the Collegio San Bonaventura there, working on a book that eventually became An Introduction to the Franciscan Literature of the Middle Ages. While we were out of the country we loaned our aging Ford, including its bumper sticker, to our friend Jim Magnuson—now the exalted director of the James A. Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, but then a young playwright and novelist on a visiting fellowship at Princeton. During the school vacation Jim was sharing an apartment with an undergraduate Canadian hockey player named Ralphie, who sometimes used the car. One day Ralphie, driving along Nassau Street on his way back home after doing the week’s grocery shopping, had a strange encounter. A wild-eyed young man wearing what was later described as “a kind of mechanic’s uniform” rushed up to his car and climbed into the front seat. He needed help, he said. He was in town to view the Simon Norton exhibition at the art gallery, but he had just learned that his wife, who was either in Jersey City, Newark, or New York, and who was either sick, having a baby, or very recently deceased—all of these possibilities appearing in alternate versions of the story he rapidly, nervously, and incoherently spilled out to Ralphie as he twirled the dial of the car’s radio in apparent search of breaking news—desperately needed help, pronto. Could Ralphie drive him to New York?

Now Ralphie was—and no doubt still is, in his undisclosed location—a nice guy, a gentle soul in an athlete’s body. He would go the extra mile, or even fifty-three miles, as was now proposed. But there were frozen peas and ice cream in the grocery bag, and he must first briefly return to the nearby apartment to deposit them in the freezer. He parked the car near the apartment, leaving the young man and the car key in the Ford. He deposited the perishables and took a moment to write a note that perhaps still exists buried within Magnuson’s increasingly valuable literary archive. It said: “Dear Jim, had to go to NY to help a guy out.” Upon returning to the parking lot, he was amazed to find neither the Ford nor the nervous young man who had been in it. Both were at that very moment heading in the direction of Route 1.

The story the young man had told Ralphie was part truth and part fabrication. He was an inmate in a state penal institution. There was no wife, no baby. The true part is that he was in Princeton to view the Simon Norton Exhibition. That is called progressive penology. He was making an escape from a post-Exhibition lunch to which he was being treated, along with other incarcerated art lovers, at the Annex Restaurant.

Reporting this audacious crime to the police proved a little taxing. Like many deep thinkers, with minds forever voyaging on strange seas of thought alone, Jim and Ralphie were sometimes unobservant of the dull details of quotidian life. They had not noticed, for example, the make or model of my car, let alone its license number. At first this threatened to impede the police investigation; but the records of the Motor Vehicles Division suggested that they were looking for a 1961 Ford Galaxie. Its color was recorded as “green”, though in fact the




elements had by then given it a kind of tie-dyed appearance. Jim strained to remember useful clues which, the moment he recalled them, he would telephone to the police. He had recently completed a run of his play on the theme of David and Goliath. “In the trunk,” he was able to tell the state police lieutenant, “you ought to find a kind of tiger-skin loin cloth and a big slingshot.” This was, indeed, information that might prove useful in confirming the identity of the car once found, but the officer was hoping for something more. “Any exterior indicators?” he asked. Jim thought hard. “Well,” he said, “it has a Wilbur Mills for President sticker on the rear bumper.” “A what?” The police found the car within six hours. In fact the car was actually missing for a considerably shorter period than was Governor Mark Sanford.

Of Columns, Communists, and Camões

Professor Fleming’s Last Column…

For the last decade or so of my active service on the Princeton faculty, I wrote an opinion column—at first biweekly, then weekly-- for the Daily Princetonian. Its title, “Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche” was probably “overdetermined”, as the literary critics say. It is of course a phrase from the concluding couplet of Chaucer’s description of the Clerk of Oxenford in the Canterbury Tales.
Sownynge in moral vertu was his speche,
And gladly wold he lerne and gladly teche.
Many years ago I was at a reading at which Stephen Spender read one of his most famous poems (“I think continually of those who are were truly great”). The poem, written in his youth, seemed now to embarrass his middle age. Of its well-known initial line he said this: “It’s one of those awful boring things poets say, like ‘I pray all the time,’ or maybe ‘I gladly learn and gladly teach’.” It was with a similar awareness of pious cliché that I succumbed to the inevitability of the title for my column. After all, I was probably best known on campus for my Chaucer course, English 307; and Chaucer’s Clerk is the closest thing in Chaucer to a college professor. On May 15, 2006, I published the following valetudinarian column. It is, perhaps, a little solemn. I had the poignant sense, of course, of bidding farewell to the active phase of a teaching career from which I had derived endless satisfaction. I had yet to learn just how many and how rich would be the opportunities offered by retirement. As my title made clear, I certainly thought I was saying goodbye forever to "Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche."

Eschatology, the theological science of the Last Things so important for the understanding of much medieval literature, turns out to have a modest branch relevant to the Academy. I am practically awash in last things. I've given my last lecture and conducted my last preceptorial. I've directed my last senior thesis and written my last thesis comment. A few lasts still remain: last Honors meeting, last farewell party, last Commencement. Today, it's my last column.
It must be toward number 300, but my spotty records go back only to 1995, so I cannot say for sure. People have been generous with suggestions of ways I might spend my time in retirement, including that I might try to recuperate a full bibliography of my fugitive pieces. I have higher things in mind, like Court TV. But I do remember when in the early '90s the new chairman of the 'Prince' first approached me. Like so many before and since, he brought a reformer's zeal to his high office. He wanted to make the paper broader in appeal, more catholic in tone, more adventurous of initiative. Bill Clinton in recently naming his first cabinet had said that he wanted it "to look like America." This editor wanted his masthead "to look like Princeton." Its writers would include undergraduates, graduate students, administrative staff, even a faculty member. "After all, if you look at it from a certain point of view," he told me, "the faculty are an important part of the University too." Flattery will get you anywhere. The rest is history.
My learned books and essays mined with strenuous labor over months and years from the hidden chambers of the world's great libraries got me tenure and respectful footnotes in other learned books and essays. Only my 'Prince' columns, often written in an hour on trains or airplanes, have involved me in a large weekly international correspondence. They have been anthologized, blogged, plagiarized, refuted, excoriated, stretched upon the cruel rack of the Internet and even fatwaed. Through them I have made life-changing connections. This is not a bad showing for a professor of medieval literature, but it is one enabled only by the special genius of this place.

So the theme of this last column must be my sincerest gratitude for the inestimable privilege of living and working for four decades in this community of scholars, Princeton University, which when it is true to its best aspirations still brings together the young and old, students and faculty, to join in fruitful and often joyous collaborations of the mind and heart. I speak of its "best aspirations" for there are others less good but of siren voice and dangerous attractive powers.

During the last few weeks, I have basked in a bright sunshine of affection and undeserved adulation. I have received messages of retirement congratulations, probably in the hundreds, from former students. There was an international scholarly conference in my honor at which a number of the world's greatest scholars of medieval Franciscan culture joined in conversation so nearly angelic as to echo the table-talk of Thomas and Bonaventure in the ancient refectories of Paris. I was the subject of an approbatory unsigned editorial on this very page. Having to share its accolades with my friend John Gager was a small price to pay for the association with a literary genre previously unknown to the annals of campus journalism. After the midpoint intermission of one of the most exciting concerts ever heard in Richardson Auditorium, I was publicly proclaimed an honorary member of the Princeton University Orchestra. That must have been on the basis of my charm, because the actual audition left a little to be desired.
The more substantial honor, available to all Princetonians whether they spend 40 years here as I have done or four years as most of you who read this will do, is the privilege of being a part of one of the world's great universities. To live and work as glad learners or glad teachers among the freshness and talent of youth and in the reflected brilliance of noted scholars and scientists, eminent writers and artists, experts in many fields committed to the disinterested pursuit of knowledge and the interested application of human thought to the daunting challenges of the human condition — that is our shared honor. And though there are few occasions when academic taste would allow so bald and unironic a statement of so obvious a piety, surely a last column is one of the few.

….and His First Blog…

But that was the last installment of Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche, the column; this is the first installment of Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche, the blog. (Stay tuned for Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche. the movie, the opera, and the theme-park.) I do not embrace this genre blithely. Indeed, could anyone gladly blog? Whoever invented the word “blogosphere” hadn’t really thought through the reality. The word “sphere” suggests a pleasing and spacious rotundity filled, perhaps, with an odorless crystalline aether too fine to delay even briefly the busy commerce of great thoughts that flash through it at the speed of light. But though there is indeed a great deal of gas bubbling up through the blogosphere, the medium itself is not gaseous. It is liquid, or at least semi-liquid, a murky pool so filled with tree snags and discarded truck tires as to be a kind of submerged junk-yard in colloid suspension. The better term might be blogomere—a mere being in the earlier forms of our language a kind of spooky, cold lagoon, the sinister watery haunt of uncouth monsters like Grendel and his Mom. Yet here I go, diving blindly into that Stygian pool without so much as a canister of Airwick for protection. There is one glimmer of comfort. After all, when one has become johnvflemingdotcom, there is no lower one can sink.

…in which he explains why he has sunk so low

I feel compelled to attempt an explanation of why, at my advanced age and state of mental infirmity, I should start a blog. As I teetered on the brink of folly, I naturally took the advice of several esteemed experts, gurus, techies, computer wonks, and Anglican clergymen. The advice I got was varied and largely contradictory, but there was one constant theme. I repeatedly heard, and usually in these very words: “Any fool can put together a blog.” That advice was actually superfluous, since I had by then already spent quite a lot of time looking at people’s blogs. The question needing resolution in my mind was slightly different. Do you have to be a fool to put together a blog? The answer, though never direct, seemed sufficiently clear. Being a plain country fool is not technically required of the blogger, but it is an enormous advantage. Nonetheless, here I go. I am doing it for two reasons, one good reason, and another one.
The good reason is that I am greatly inspired by the blog (“A Brooklynite on the Ice”) created by my number-one son, Richard Fleming. Yes, that is indeed Richard A. Fleming, the well-known travel writer, and most recently the author of Walking to Guantánamo, which has overnight become the gold standard of Cuba books. Rich’s blog is eclectic, but it has a number of detectable recurring themes.

The famed White Space Gallery, Atlanta: Richard A. Fleming being interviewed with intensity by the cultural press at the opening of his recent one-man show of photographs of Cuba

Primarily, I suppose, it is the diary of a world traveler. He seems to hang out in the world’s most interesting places. Under these circumstances the simplest account of where he is and what he’s up to is likely to strike us stay-at-home types as exotic high adventure. Special interests occupy a certain number of posts: bird-watching, for example, pursued as a surrogate religion, or Afro-Caribbean music, his actual religion. When he is at home, home is his very cool house, in a state of permanent reclamation and renovation, on Coffey Street in Red Hook. In the unlikely event that anyone outside my immediate family is reading this, I should perhaps say that Red Hook is a particularly happening neighborhood in waterfront Brooklyn, and that Brooklyn is one of the boroughs of New York City. The Red Hook scene provides material for a number of his posts. One of his best ideas, which I have already ripped off in my “Current Reading” section, is to offer occasional impromptu book reviews of whatever worthwhile comes his way. Here the sub-specialty, I suppose, is classic travel literature, but again he casts his net quite wide. This fellow has been a voracious reader since he was about five, and since he is also of a markedly independent cast of mind, some pretty out-of-the-way stuff shows up from time to time. And Rich is a fine writer, way better than I have come to expect of Princeton graduates. Of course I don’t want to bury the blog in praise, as it is not above criticism. For example one can point to its obscurantist title, which fossilizes the fallacy of the short-term thought. The title once made excellent sense. He undertook this project during a protracted stay in Antarctica, but that was quite a long time ago. In general the Brooklynite now seems to spend most of his time in torrid climes, equatorial Africa and tropical Latin America being his apparently favorite haunts. These places don’t have much to do with ice, beyond wishful thinking. Since I intend to keep on teaching gladly and, especially, learning gladly, I hope I am on firmer ground.

The other reason is the johnvflemingdotcom reason. The blog is supposed add a hint of redeeming social purpose to the website established in response to the emphatic recommendation of the marketing mavens at W.W. Norton & Co. as a device to advertise—and with luck even hawk a few copies of—my book in the process of publication at their distinguished publishing house. That would be The Anti-Communist Manifestos [ISBN 978-0393069259], scheduled for publication on August 17, 2009, but already selling well at its rank of 2,046,013. And of course it is pre-orderable by early-birds, or indeed anybody else with an appetite for worms, at Amazon.com.

Uncle Joe reacted with suspicion to the very title of the book…and that was before reading a single word of text!

In case anyone is wondering how a nice medievalist like me ended up writing a book about four masterworks of anti-Communist literature of the mid-twentieth century, it just so happens that I was already intending to offer an explanation. The first reason is personal history. I was actually born in the twentieth century, and, as it happens, in 1936. That was in America the year of Roosevelt’s second election victory and in the USSR the year of the super-Purge and the much-vaunted “Stalin constitution”. I’ve always done a lot of recreational reading about the 1930s, with sub-specialties in American proletarian literature and the Spanish Civil War, both of which topics eventually turned out to be highly relevant to my theme. But the project had its beginnings not in a desire to write a book, but in an effort to bind one. I explain the strange genesis in my “Introduction”.

I am an amateur printer and book-binder. Topics relating to my large home pressroom-cum-library will doubtless provide materials for future postings. What are called “boards” in binder’s lingo are really slabs of very dense cardboard to be covered with leather or, much more frequently cloth. The language of the print shop is highly conservative, and a good deal of social and material history is preserved in its vocabulary. In the period of early printing the boards really were wooden, and you can still find oak-clad volumes in the great rare book collections. Large sheets of binder’s board having become expensive and not always easily available, I adopted an unconventional strategy. A second-hand book dealer of my acquaintance sells off in bulk and very cheaply books that he regards as otherwise unsellable. I buy, butcher, and recycle the covers of such books. In picking my materials my only concern is the size—the bigger the better-- and condition of the boards. I seldom even note the titles.

One day, for no good reason whatsoever, I picked up one such book in my workshop and instead of dismembering I started reading it. After two or three pages I couldn’t put it down. It was a thick stout octavo with fine boards covered with strong blue cloth. It was Out of the Night, by Jan Valtin. I had never heard of it, or of him. My ignorance rather embarrassed me later when I learned that it had been the best-selling American book of its year, 1941. Out of the Night purports to be the autobiography of a German sailor and Communist agent caught up in the political madness of the 1930s as the Reds and the Browns battled in the streets of German cities. The first serendipity of discovering the book was dwarfed by a second. When I went over to the Firestone Library to try to learn something more about “Jan Valtin” (the pseudonym of Richard Julius Hermann Krebs, of whom I had also never heard) I discovered that by remarkable chance the library had very recently come into possession of the author’s whole archive. In it I found a gripping story—several stories, rather—about the world-wide role of Comintern espionage and subversion, about the attractive powers of Communism for many American intellectuals in the 1930s, about the role of popular literature in the great conflict that would eventually be called the Cold War. As I was writing about “Jan Valtin” for the Princeton University Library Chronicle [“The ‘Truth” About Jan Valtin,” PULC, lxvii (2005/6): 68-80], I recalled a conversation I had had at a social occasion thirty years earlier. At an academic reception I found myself chatting with a colleague I had never before laid eyes on—Nina Berberova, of the Slavic Department. I would not for some years read her wonderful memoir, The Italics Are Mine (1969), which confirms the impression I picked up from that conversation—namely, that this fascinating woman had known personally just about every important Russian writer of the twentieth century. The one she talked about that day was a colorful character, a Russian political defector, who had written a very important book that caused a big stink in Paris. Thirty-five years later I could remember neither the defector nor his book, but it was the work of two minutes to recover them: Victor Kravchenko, author of I Chose Freedom (1946). Meanwhile, I had for several years been teaching Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940) in a course called “Masterworks of European Literature.” I realized that there was a body of very powerful anti-Communist literature that had little to do with the caricature visions of J. Edgar Hoover or Senator Joseph McCarthy. It was clear that this literature had played no small role in the broad anti-Communist consensus that emerged in American public opinion. Even further it seemed to me that certain of these books demarked a definite literary genre, though at first I couldn’t define it. But my brilliant number-two son Luke could. He was the one who came up with my title: The Anti-Communist Manifestos.

Only later did I add the fourth book to my study: Whittaker Chambers’s Witness (1952). I knew all along that I needed one with a specifically American focus, as the three others have European settings. Communism was never a serious political possibility in the United States, as it undoubtedly had been at different times in Germany, France, and Italy; but it played a far larger role in the imaginative universe of American intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s than is sometimes remembered today. Witness is a quite remarkable book from the artistic point of view. Like the three others it aroused ferocious controversy, although the history of its publication was, when compared with theirs, straight-forward. Chambers’s book was actually a part of my own lived experience. I read excerpts from it as they appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, to which my grandmother subscribed. When I got to college in 1954 one of my history professors said straight out, in the middle of a lecture, that the book was a pack of lies, that Alger Hiss was guilty of nothing but having progressive political ideas, that Whittaker Chambers was a despicable man and a pervert, a tool of the yet more despicable Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had by then become prominent in the news. That was long before I became a professor myself, and I then still tended to believe that what a professor said had to be true.
The details of the “Hiss-Chambers case” are a little complex, and I doubt that you have them in the forefront of your mind. If you are interested, you can find them in my book or a dozen others. I think the most elegant general treatment is still the first one, A Generation on Trial by Alistair Cooke (1950). Cooke, of course, was the memorably suave and vertical Britamerican who spent his golden years introducing the episodes of Masterpiece Theater on television. The most comprehensive is Allen Weinstein’s Perjury: the Hiss-Chambers Case. (1978). But just for the moment take my word for it that Hiss was convicted of perjury not merely on the basis of the oral testimony of Whittaker Chambers, but on the basis of actual documents. In order for Alger Hiss to have been innocent, it would have been necessary that these documents be forgeries. Though both possibilities are most unlikely, it is actually slightly more probable that apes with Apple computers wrote all the works of Shakespeare than that Chambers and/or his friends forged the “Pumpkin Papers”. Nonetheless it was for several decades a fundamental clause in the political creed of many American historians that Hiss was guiltless and that Chambers, probably with the aid of J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI and/or Richard Nixon of the House Unamerican Activities Committee, had indeed performed “forgery by typewriter,” in Hiss’s parting words to the court.

Whittaker Chambers apparently can’t bear to read about it …or has he been distracted by the sudden arrival of the historical Furies knocking at his front door? In America, a defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty. But his partisans’ presumption of Hiss’s innocence only got its full head of steam once he had been convicted by a jury of his peers. Had not Yeats written, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”?

The historiography of the Hiss-Chambers affair beautifully exemplifies in miniature the historiography of American Communism generally. About half of what is written is intended less to explore the political battles of the 1930s than to fight them over again in a contemporary idiom, and in the same bitter partisan spirit. George Orwell once said that there had been more lies published about the Spanish Civil War than any other topic in history. The claim is improbable from the statistical point of view, and so global as to be beyond verification. Having immersed myself for more than a year in the battle between Communists and anti-Communists around 1940, however, I conclude that Orwell may have at least identified the right general historical period. The apothegm that the first casualty of war is truth applies to cold wars as well as hot ones. I am not speaking here of error or licitly varying interpretations. There is a difference between being wrong in a particular historical judgment, which is the common fate of all historians, and embracing a prejudice that guarantees that you will never be right. The literal meaning of prejudice, of course, is pre-judgment, judgment prior to the investigation on which judgment should in theory be based. One of the country’s most venerable organs of liberal thought, the Nation magazine, embraced a prejudiced view of the Hiss-Chambers affair in 1948 and has been unable to wriggle free even yet. A more elaborate exemplification of the phenomenon, which in my book I call the misapplication of the Sherlock Holmes Principle, is provided by the website “The Alger Hiss Story” (http://homepages.nyu.edu/~th15/). Sherlock Holmes several times enunciates the following principle: when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however unlikely, will be the truth. Begin with the premise that it was impossible for Hiss to have been a Soviet agent, and “forgery by typewriter,” though of infinitesimal likelihood, suddenly will become plausible to you. The Communists of the 1930s thought that the Soviet Union could never be wrong. If you didn’t think that, you couldn’t be a Communist. Some anti-Communists, on the other hand, thought that the Soviet Union could never be right. Those are not very promising a priori historical principles, and their efficacy is only slightly improved by transporting their lineal descendants to the history books of the 1980s and 1990s.

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HAVING thus fulfilled my commercial duties of shameless self-promotion to a degree sufficient, I hope, to justify the com and maybe even the dot, I now propose to move on, with or without the org, to a topic of the kind I hope will be more worthy, in the long run, of the ambitions of “Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche”. To be specific, I want to teach you something I recently learned. At the beginning of June the University of Massachusetts [at Dartmouth] Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture announced the publication, through the Luso-American Foundation in Lisbon, of a new bilingual edition of Sonnets and Other Poems by Luís de Camões, the original texts together with contemporary English versions by Richard Zenith, whose reputation at a translator of Portuguese literary texts is already well established. Among the world’s truly great poets, and I am here talking about the top fifty at most, Luís de Camões is one of the least widely appreciated. The fact is lamentable, but not inexplicable. To begin with he wrote in Portuguese, a language which, though the tongue of one of the globe’s vast and populous countries, is insufficiently know both here and in Europe. Next, Luís de Camões is the author of a “classic,” the Lusiads, and as every reader of Mark Twain knows “a classic is a book everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read”. Next, his classic has recently been assigned to the PC Index librorum prohibitorum, as its subject is the Portuguese imperial expansion of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Next, Luís de Camões is a very smart poet, and he makes the risky assumption that his reader should be smart too. The truth is that you will hardly begin to appreciate the Lusiads unless you have a little experience in reading previous classical writers such as Virgil, Dante, and Petrarch, the same being true, of course, of Virgil, Dante, and Petrarch and indeed most other poets worth reading. But finally, when you get down to it, the real problem is that Luís de Camões looks slightly alarming

It is very hard for your average modern reader to relate to a one-eyed guy looking distinctly ruffled in his ferrous sweatshirt, sporting leaves in his hair, and propping up a volume apparently printed back to front. This sort of thing is perhaps appropriate for baroque title-pages, memorial bronze medals, and rare Angolan postage stamps; but it simply is not going to cut it on American Idol. He lost his eye nobly, incidentally. If you think the Somali pirates are a menace now, you should have seen them back in the day.
It is often said that the Lusiads has no hero, or at least no personal hero, its hero being the Portuguese nation. “With a fine audacity Camões begins his poem with the words As armas e os barões: arms and the men I sing, as compared with Virgil’s Armas virumque,” writes Aubrey Bell, one of the first great English-speaking critics of Iberian poetry, and himself a classic. “He takes for his subject a whole nation, and as a result his epic, like Milton’s Paradise Lost, is without a hero. On such lines it required true genius a spirited and living poem.” I believe that I have read all the major Renaissance epics, and at one time studied or taught most of them. Like Bell I find only one of them truly comparable with the Lusiads, and that is Milton’s. Fortunately there are many good translations available, though the best, both for its poetic sense and for the richness of its notes, is that by Leonard Bacon, sponsored by the Hispanic Society of America in 1950. But just as the reader aspiring to approach for the first time Virgil’s Æneid or Ovid’s Metamorphoses might well be counseled to make a preparatory excursion beginning with two or three of the Eclogues, or with something from the Amores of Ovid or his always delightful Art of Love, I would advise a beginner to approach Luís de Camões through some or his shorter lyrics on amatory or religious themes. A very good place to start would be this new bilingual edition of Sonnets and Other Poems. I myself hope one day to devote a substantial study to one of the extended redondilhas, the “Babylon and Zion,” the religious and philosophical poem that no less an expert than the great Lope de Vega called “the pearl of all poetry”.