Ripeness Is--Most of It

Greg Hicks as Lear

            Readers of this blog have already “met” our remarkable friends Susan Saltrick and John Meyer with whom we have had such delightful summer experiences along the littoral of the Mediterranean crescent running from Livorno to Barcelona and, on one recent memorable occasion, on a boat between those two places.  Susan and Joan were the pilgrims, John and I the motorized support team who would show up at the end, vainly seeking to earn the crown without the inconvenience of first bearing the cross.  Well, our adventures continued on Saturday last when they treated us to a delicious brunch at their Manhattan apartment, then treated us to a matinee performance of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s King Lear at the Park Avenue Armory.

            I am always pleased when things I have been saying for years on faith actually turn out to be true in empirical fact.  Heraclitus said that you cannot step into the same river twice, and Fleming has been saying that you cannot read the same book twice.  I have read King Lear many times, taught it more than once, and remember at least two earlier stage productions.  What I saw on Saturday was something entirely new to me.

            I am not referring to novel features of David Farr’s production, though some were notable, not to say spectacular.  The Armory building, for those who have not visited it, is itself spectacular, accurately described by its promoters as “part palace, part industrial shed”.  I learned from my friend John that the palace part—capaciously conceived and sumptuously decorated reception rooms—was the fruit of a collaboration between Stanford White and Louis Comfort Tiffany.  The shed part, which has been the venue for nearly every conceivable genre of event and exhibition, including the antiques extravaganza, has for this summer season been turned into a kind of Erector Set version of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater. 

 a palace...

 ...and an industrial shed...

...in which to rebuild the Globe Theatre with industrial strength Lego...

Its remarkable engineering allowed us to look down from the highest rung of its heavens, as one might from a helicopter or a mountain peak, at the pitiable carnage below.  That mountain might perhaps be Olympus, for as the blinded Gloucester says,

                        As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,

                        They kill us for their sport. (IV, i, 37-38)

Those are great lines.  I had forgotten, indeed, just how many great “quotations” there are in this one play: sharper than the serpent’s tooth, come not between the dragon and his wrath, eater of broken meats, ripeness is all, the rack of this tough world…an anthology nearly endless.  But great lines are not necessarily true lines.  That was the new thing I saw this time.  Neither the play’s tragedy nor its horrors—and one can pretty clearly distinguish between the two—are brought about by the gods. 

No, the secondary evils of the play are almost exclusively the work of Edmund, whose very essence embodies the plenitude of illegitimacy once resident in the now archaic word bastard.  He does get aid, not to mention comfort,  from the two bad daughters, but they are his victims as well.  As for the principal evil, it is all of it, every inch, brought about by old King Lear himself.   He is stupid.  He is foolish.  He is vain.  He is self-righteous.  Indeed, I left the experience with the feeling that there can be few other “tragic heroes” in the dramatic repertory less justified in claiming, as Lear memorably does:

I am a man
More sinn'd against than sinning.  (III, ii: 58-59).

Does Lear have even that minimum of grandeur and dignity that would be demanded by any even vaguely Aristotelian sense of tragedy?

            Well, yes, when you see this production.  But he claims it on the basis of Shakespeare’s language, not on that of his deeds.  Lipstick on a pig actually improves the pig considerably.  This is, I know, heresy, for which I could be stripped of my English professor epaulettes.  But it is the conclusion I reached on Saturday.  The reason you cannot step into the same river twice is because the river is always changing.  The reason you cannot read the same book twice is because you are always changing.

            After seeing the play we sought out the New York Times review by Charles Isherwood so we could know what we were supposed to think.  It turned out that the RSC production “can be strongly recommended for hypersensitive souls,” that it was a “competent but immaculately unwrenching production”.  I do not know Mr. Isherwood, but I am guessing that he is probably not a foolish fond old man negotiating the Great Generational Shift, nor the father of three adult children.  As a matter of fact this is my own first experience of Lear from that particular perspective, and I found it plenty wrenching and the hero maculate as all get out.

 "Howl, howl, howl, howl!"

A Political Mess

I have not written a “political” essay in many months. To begin with, it seems to me that there are already far too many political blogs, and that their ratio of good sense to verbal volume is unpromising. I myself have neither academic expertise in political science nor practical experience in politics. Such developed political ideas as I do have are frequently offensive to my peers. Under these circumstances it seems to me best to honor the classical adage: Cobbler—stick to thy last!

The current mess in Washington is so appalling, however, as to suggest that leaving politics to the politicians is a mere acquiescence in disaster. Do not go gentle into that good night. It is hard to know where to begin. We face some very serious problems, many of them related to a world economy so complex that only fools pretend to understand it entirely. We depend for their solution upon the actions of largely incompetent and partially corrupted legislators, chosen by a largely ignorant electorate who share with them a spiritual attention deficit disorder.

One of our major political parties has spent half a century creating a vast base of dependency which it now proclaims it a sacred duty to protect. The other has managed to reduce the noble concept of Burkean conservatism to a superstitious mantra concerning tax policy, while actually pushing the country into a staggeringly expensive war in Iraq and a huge and wholly unfunded increment to Medicare. But according to the partisan political blogs the one is staunchly “defending ordinary Americans and working families” and the other bravely opposing “job-killing taxes on the wealth creators”. Both are claiming to focus like laser beams on “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs.” Is it any surprise that this Congress enjoys job-approval ratings of seventeen percent?

It may not actually be possible to get out of this mess, finally. Nations, no less than their individual citizens, can be subject to powers largely beyond their control, the influences of which they can but exacerbate or attenuate. Certainly we are not going to get out of it swiftly enough to meet the national code of instant gratification. But we are unlikely to get anywhere at all without combining serious reductions in government expenditures with substantial increments in tax revenues. For identifying this “mother of all no-brainers,” David Brooks has been clubbed with the Club for Growth.

Longevity often has the curious side effect of insulating the long-livers from the full intensity of current realities. We have prior spiritual commitments, so to speak. I hope you can believe, however, that there are quite a few folks who know a lot despite the fact that they aren’t even on Face Book. They may know, for instance, that the idea that the New Deal “brought us out” of the Great Depression is pretty hokey. That is an idea I have encountered repeatedly in the web essays of various youthful pundits, who seem to regard the New Deal as a benign model for governmental “stimulus,” such as that in the “Cash for Clunkers” program. I even have a relevant personal anecdote. For a while in 1937 or 1938 my Dad worked for the WPA putting in some railway trestles on the north fork of the White River in Arkansas. His later description of the experience was this: “We pretended to work, and they pretended to pay us.” Many years later I heard the same “joke” quoted as an anti-Soviet witticism emanating from the eastern bloc.

Insofar as some dramatic intervention “brought us out” of the Depression, that intervention was the international disaster called the Second World War. That did indeed rev up the American economy, at the expense of millions of lives lost or blighted, and left us for a time fortuitously unchallenged by the economies of our natural industrial competitors, which were either flattened by our bombs or simply exhausted by a supreme effort. But it also invited the slowly maturing national self indulgence that over six decades has brought us to our present pretty pass.

Are any of my readers old enough to remember the old American work ethic? There is indeed a national “job crisis”. One part of it is this: many of the limited number of jobs that are available, though socially necessary, are ones that “nobody” wants to do. Hence the invasion of the Latino army, concerning which our national hypocrisy daily reaches new heights. If you are a suburban New Jersey householder, you will be predictably faced on a regular basis with the need to remove snow from your sidewalks and driveways, to cut your grass and tidy your gardens, and to engage in various other seasonal chores needed to maintain and preserve your property. If you are an aging householder, or a preoccupied one, chances are that you would be happy on occasion to hire someone to help you with such chores. There was a time in living memory when wholesome looking teen-aged males, often the offspring of friends or neighbors, would appear on one’s doorstep soliciting such work. They were “saving for college,” or trying to get the money together to buy a jalopy, or to rebuild one they already had. I have had no such visitation by a native speaker of the English language in the decades I’ve been living in our current house. I’m not even sure I’ve had a magazine subscription scammer.

A Safe and Sane Fourth

For the last several years we missed the impressive Town-Gown Fourth of July Fireworks display mounted in our community, and we were on schedule to miss it again. Our fecklessness and indolence bear some responsibility, but so do the unknown civic organizers. One fairly predictable thing about a Fourth of July event, in my opinion, should be that it take place on the Fourth of July. But here the town fathers, most of whom are mothers, have adopted a Precept of Approximation according to which the Second of July will do just as well—in fact, even better. So there we were about nine o’clock on a Saturday night, contemplating the prospective comfort of bed, when several loud boom-boom, ka-boom-boom-boom noises, emanating from the west, rattled the house.

I must pause to say a couple more words about our house. It is in most respects a splendid house, but it has one serious liability: a flat roof. The academic architect who designed it long before our tenancy was apparently dreaming of summers in Marrakesh, or maybe Bristow, California. Flat roofs are not recommended for central Jersey. Quite apart from its intermittent failures, I spend too much time on the roof, sweeping away debris and trying to keep the gutter spouts clear. For this reason there is usually a ladder leaning against it.

"Take me to your ladder.  I'll see your leader later."

A second point is this. Until about a year ago there was a huge linden tree that blocked out most of the skyline west of the house, but it blew down in the Tornado of Twenty Ten, missing the house by inches.

As is well known, it is an ill wind that blows no good. Joan, who is quite acute at seeing unlikely connections, intuited a way to combine two deficits—a flat roof and a lost linden—to create an unanticipated asset. “Let’s climb up on the roof and watch the fireworks,” she said. And we did so. The prospect of two septuagenarians with waning eyesight (one of them in his bedroom slippers) clambering in the dark up a ladder to roam around their roof is perhaps not one to make the heart of an insurance adjuster sing. But for the septuagenarians themselves, who after all were the principals, it was a tuneful experience indeed, and one that brought to mind madcap ventures jointly undertaken half a century ago in and about Oxford University.

The view was perfect, like a carefully cropped I-photo that isolates the essentials and discards the distracting periphery. A darkened tree line blocked out all but the upper reaches of the rockets’ ascent and the pyrotechnical bursts themselves. Only as the scintillating fragments were falling did we hear the reports of the explosions that had sent them skyward, followed by faint and muffled oohs and aahs of spectators so unfortunate as not to have their own distant rooftop from which to watch. The effect was, in a pleasing way, rather like that of my misbehaving Samsung 630 television set, from the screen of which a lean and dapper young man silently moves his lips, then purses them emphatically, after which the set says “I’m Alan Cumming, and this is Masterpiece Mystery.” It was an experience that vindicates Saint Augustine’s theory of the primacy of sight in the hierarchy of the senses.

I grew up in a climate of pyrotechnical deprivation. Our idea of a big Fourth of July time down on the farm was to explode a couple of blasting caps with .22 rifle shots. Blasting caps were used (and I assume still are) to make a small explosion sufficient to encourage a huge explosion in a pack of dynamite. The origin of these caps was mysterious. They were generally attributed by my uncle to “a guy I know at the quarry”. If they were the “wrong” kind, they couldn’t be detonated by percussion at all. But the “right” ones did make a hell of a noise.

the Royal Fireworks of 1749 threatened to burn London down

I had heard of cherry bombs and ladyfingers, but I could only fake familiarity with the exotic names of devices sometimes invoked by my classmates. No doubt a comprehensive investigation of these names would yield an interesting study A few years ago, when I was working on some eighteenth-century musical materials, a librarian friend directed me to one of our library’s treasures: the original printed schedule for the Royal Fireworks of 1749, ostensibly celebrating the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, for which Handel wrote his deathless music. The list is an orgy of technical terms deriving, apparently, from the nomenclature of battlefield artillery, already greatly developed by the middle of the eighteenth century. The were no Black Mambas or Whistling Busters, but practically anything else you can buy today on the Tennessee interstates is there.

My first experience of real fireworks was deliciously unreal. It was in the wonderful Hitchcock film To Catch a Thief (1955), which is about upscale criminality on the Riviera. In it there is a memorable scene in which literal and metaphorical fireworks spice up an encounter between Grace Kelly and Cary Grant. Its effect on my adolescent consciousness was to render the national American holiday permanently if subliminally erotic.

in congress assembled

Monasticats

One of the more complex pleasures of my profession is to have played some role in the education of brilliant undergraduate students who later go on to become famous scholars. If you have ever heard of William of Champeaux—which is at least possible—it is only because he was the teacher of Abelard, of whom you have certainly heard. One of several Abelardian eminences whose reflected glory combats the falling shadows of my senectitude is the provost of Georgetown, James J. O’Donnell. He has appeared once before in this blog, around which we conduct a laconic and intermittent correspondence.

O’Donnell has produced the definitive edition of the Confessions of Saint Augustine, but he is also what you would call a “general reader”. It is he, for example, who introduced me to Chic Sale’s The Specialist, the ne plus ultra in outhouse humor. Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, the “prince of travel writers,” died on June 10. As comment on this sad event, a week or so later Jim forwarded to me one of his favorite Fermorian prose gobbets, a description of a religious liturgy in a two-man Greek Orthodox mini-monastery:

The church, which is scarcely larger than the oratory of a castle, is dedicated to All the Saints. A lowered sanctuary lamp and the tapers that lighted the breviaries of Father Christopher and Bessarion dispelled a little the surrounding shadows. But outside their narrow pools of light, all was dark. I leant in one of the miserere-stalls that lined the small semicircular bay on the right of the chancel. The corresponding apsidal concavity on the left was lost in gloom. The three of us were alone in the church. As Bessarion chanted the office, I attempted to follow the neumes and flexions and quarter-tones in the oriental-sounding monody by the dots and the rise and fall of the slender curves and pothooks in scarlet ink above the text on the taper-lit page. The hair of both the monks, usually twisted into buns and tucked under their headgear, now tumbled in long twists half-way down their backs. From below, the candle-light threw peculiar shadows on the waxen features of Bessarion and sharply defined the deep eyesockets, the fiercely bridged nose and quizzically wrinkled brow of Father Christopher, when, censer in hand, a magnificent colossus in splendid and threadbare vestments, he emerged from the altar. His deep voice groaned the responses to the higher pitch of Bessarion. At a pause in the liturgy, the deacon swung the pyramidal lectern round on its pivot, turned the pages, and began intoning the panegyric of St. Demetrios. Makry the tom cat stalked slowly into the church and up to the rood-screen; the light from the central arch cast his elongated shadow portentously across the flagstones. Nimbly he leapt on the high, mother-of-pearl-inlaid octagonal table supporting the lectern and, curling his tail neatly round his haunches, sat gazing at the page. Without a break in the chanting, Bessarion pushed the raised paw away form the margin and gently stroked the tortoiseshell head as he sang; and slowly the long liturgy unfolded.

 

Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011)

A glorious piece of writing, indeed, a  tribute alike to an author’s power and a reader’s taste. I had not read the book from which it comes (Roumeli), and one detail in it captured my special attention: the tortoiseshell cat. That is because among the four-foot shelf of Fleming’s unpublished (because unwritten) books is a study of monks and animals: The Monastic Menagerie.

In it cats would claim an important chapter. The best known is probably the industrial-sized cat who is Saint Jerome’s constant eremitic companion, just as in the secular tradition, and for nearly identical reasons, he is the companion of Androcles. But the most delightful monasticat is surely the humble mouser, Pangur Bán, who crept about the scriptorium of the famous island abbey of Reichenau, in the Bodensee, probably sometime in the eighth or ninth century. In the margins of one of his manuscripts a nameless Irish monk, far from home, wrote in his native vernacular tongue a charming poem about Pangur Bán, whose Irish name means something like “Whitey,” “Snow White”, or rather (with a scriptural allusion to Mark 9:3) “Transfiguration White”.

Bulger Bán and Pangur Bán, alias McCavity, the Mystery Cat

"For he's a fiend in feline shape, a monster of depravity." 

(Irish expatriates appear to be partial to the name “Whitey”, whether for felines or felons.)

Here are its opening lines:


I and Pangur Bán, my cat
'Tis a like task we are at;
Hunting mice is his delight
Hunting words I sit all night.
Better far than praise of men
'Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill will,
He too plies his simple skill.
'Tis a merry thing to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.
Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur's way:
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net…

You should read the whole poem, which has been rendered into English by many eminent hands, including several well-known Irish poets. I want to recommend this translation of the English medievalist Robin Flower, because he so clearly presents the poem’s actual subject, which is that special mode of scriptural exegesis called by the monks the lectio divina. The lectio divina (“sacred reading”) was to the pleasures of the heart and mind what the Slow Food Movement is to the pleasures of the tongue and gullet. The medieval monks savored their readings in the Bible, which they sometimes compared to the extraction of honey from the comb or marrow from the bone. For they sought what they called the “spiritual sense” of a text, its veiled or allegorical meaning. That is what the old Irish poet meant by capturing a meaning with the net of his thought.

Reichenau today

Our own English poetry was born of the monastic life. Bede tells us as a notable wonder the story of the poet Caedmon, an uneducated agricultural worker in the coeducational monastery at Whitby in Yorkshire. Though illiterate, Caedmon, through divine inspiration, was able to transpose into English verse the Bible stories read to him by the brothers. Bede draws his very traditional monastic simile from the bovines rather than the felines: “And he was able to learn all that he heard, and, keeping it all in mind, just as a clean animal chewing cud, turned it into the sweetest song.”

The word hermit literally means a “desert-dweller,” and the old practitioners of the lectio divina associated themselves metaphorically with the four little critters of the wasteland (Proverbs 30:24) that are “the least upon the earth, yet exceeding wise”: the ant, the grasshopper, the rock-dwelling rabbit, and the lizard (stilio). It is this association that explains the recurrent zoology and entomology of learned medieval and Renaissance pictorial treatments of ascetic themes.

Saint Jerome with friends

Upstate Adventures

The Falls in the Huyck Nature Preserve, Rensselaerville NY

We have just returned from a nearly magical place called Rensselaerville, near Albany, where my wife had been invited to preach at the bicentennial celebration of the local parish church.  As the church is dedicated to the Trinity, and as it was Trinity Sunday, the topic of the sermon naturally had to be that most exalted and mysterious doctrine; and aside from perhaps Saint Augustine and Dorothy Sayers, I doubt that anyone has done a better job.  My part in the event consisted entirely in receiving graciously the lavish hospitality afforded us by various fascinating residents of the place.

Trinity Church, Rensselaerville NY, founded 1811

            Worthy though it be, however, Rensselaerville will serve this blog post only in an ancillary fashion, providing the excuse for a couple of nice photographs, and acting as an antiphrastic counterpoint to my first experience of Upstate New York, which was singularly bizarre.  For Joan has her calling, and I have had mine.       

About forty years ago I participated in an academic conference held at the State University of New York at Binghamton, probably a hundred miles west of Rensselaerville. There is at that institution a Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.  It is today a kind of living skeleton, but five or six budget-slicing governors ago it was pretty lively.  Its comparative prosperity was fostered by a director, a senior scholar in my field, who practiced unconventional economies.  He asked me if I could help save the budget a little stress by staying not at a hotel but at his daughter’s apartment, which was not far from the campus.  The daughter would return to the parental home for the week-end, and I would be joined at her place by another participating scholar, a friendly acquaintance of mine from the University of Illinois.

            Naturally, I agreed.  Elaborate three-way communications among Binghamton, Princeton, and Champaign-Urbana took care of driving instructions, the location of a secreted key, and one or two other details.  I drove up on a nasty autumn afternoon.  By the time I reached Scranton, with fifty miles still to go, the shades of night were falling fast, and snow, which had been threatening all afternoon, began in earnest.  So I was glad to get to Binghamton safely, to find the apartment after only negligible misstep, to find the key immediately and, what’s more, to find that it opened the door.

            What I did not find was my Illini friend, who never showed.  It later turned out that he had been overtaken by the storm and sought shelter in an Interstate motel.  But this was in the age before cell phones.  So I put the key back in its hiding place, wrote him a note, left the light on in his presumed bedroom, and went to bed in my own.  About three in the morning the telephone wakened me.  I intended simply to wait it out, but it continued with insistence—I mean twenty rings, maybe thirty.

            At last I answered it: “Hullo?”

            After the briefest pause, an instantly angry, feral, male voice, in which I seemed to detect chemical additives, shot back: “Donna!  Where’s Donna?”

            “Uh, Donna’s not here.  She…”

            “Listen, ---- ----, put Donna on the line, and do it now!”  He sounded scary, very scary.  Under these circumstances of nearly maximal disorientation I did not acquit myself well.  I tried, not very plausibly, to give an account of the situation.  My grandfather had an old saw: “When a man argues with a fool, the fool is doing the same thing.”  I found myself saying ridiculous things.  “Look,” I said.  “I’m a speaker.”  This fatuity merely gave him an opening for his redneck repartee.

            “Oh, yeah?  Well, I’m a speaker, too.  And I’m speaking to you right now…And I’m telling you I know exactly where that bitch’s place is.”  He spoke next about his gun and its caliber—thirty-eight—which he intended to take with him on his speaking tour, the first stop of which was apparently the bitch’s place.  The next topic was what he intended to do to me and Donna upon arrival.

            He finally got off the line.   It was then I discovered that I was alone in the house, that Prof. Illinois was a no-show.  That night I slept no further.  I reclaimed the key from the icy front porch—for all I knew he was accustomed to finding it there himself—then sat for three hours in the pre-dawn dark watching the dimly lit street through a crevice of Venetian blind.  Nothing but wind and waving limbs.

            I was not in the greatest form for my speaking role the next morning, but I got through it.  As I sat listening to other papers, very few of which reached the standard of my wife on the Trinity, I wrestled with an inner moral dilemma.   The matter seemed to me delicate.  I didn’t know Donna from Adam—or Eve either, for that matter.  I knew Donna’s father only slightly.  But I myself was a father—of quite young children, to be sure—and I had to imagine that any father would want to know, and need to know, about the maniac on the phone.  So seizing my courage in both hands, I took the distinguished Professor X aside at the afternoon coffee break.

            “Uh, Bernie, look…this is very awkward, but I have to tell you about a disturbing thing that happened last night…”

            “Yeah?  Really?  What’s that?”

            “Well, there was this phone call…it was for Donna, but of course I answered it.  There was a man, maybe drunk, maybe high, but violent-sounding…and…he seemed to have some relationship with Donna, and he…”

            My host, looking very puzzled, cut me off with a query: “Donna?  Who’s Donna?”  His daughter’s name was Susan.  I had apparently been terrorized by a seriously wrong number.

           

           

Thomas Hardy vs. the Indeterminate Sentence

I am told that in penological circles no topic is more hotly debated today than that of the indeterminate sentence. Some bad man does some bad thing, and a Judge says: “That’ll be three to seventeen years [or whatever] in the Allegheny Work House [or wherever].” The indeterminacy is supposed to be an encouragement to the felon, so that he might deport himself in such a way as to be more consistent with the smaller rather than the larger number. Of course determinacy might also be an encouragement. In the middle of the eighteenth century a naval court martial condemned Admiral John Byng to death for his supposed cowardice or incompetence at a battle in the Balearic Islands. There were extenuating circumstances, but Voltaire wryly remarked that now and again the British felt they had to hang an admiral in order to encourage the others.

But I must not digress. This post is about indeterminate sentences, and I am against them. That is, Thomas Hardy and I are against them. There is an experience that most readers surely have shared while walking through some populated place, or when crossing with pedestrians walking in the opposite direction. One catches what we call a “snatch” of conversation. Overheard cell phone conversations are also good for this purpose. Sometimes one hears things so extraordinary as to pose a challenge to the imagination. What possible context might lend them coherence?

Once on a street in Rye, Sussex, I encountered two elegant gentlemen, one of whom said to the other: “Was it ormolu? I mean, actually ormolu?” That is all I heard. Here the indeterminacy is fathered by the word “actually”. It is weird enough that anything might be ormolu, but that one would have to attest to its actually being ormolu is just too much. How many things out there are just pretending to be ormolu? Another dilly once overheard was this: “…only solution—get a divorce, or fire the Chinese cook”. I leave that one up to you.

Is it....actually?

Of course a “snatch” of conversation is by definition fragmentary. A sentence is by definition “the expression of a complete thought.” Yet more and more of the prose I encounter in my daily rounds, though ostensibly written in complete sentences, seems strangely indeterminate. Often the problem is one form or another of SDS (the Syntactic Derangement Syndrome), which is now pandemic in editorial offices on both sides of the Altantic. The copybook example of SDS is probably known to you: “Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address while riding to Gettysburg on the back of an envelope”. A clever diagnostician will identify the problem here easily enough, and call in the word-surgeons. Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address while traveling to Gettysburg on the back of an envelope….Just kidding.

More often, however, the level of incoherence is more comprehensive and hence more baffling. I am usually up and about quite early, some considerable time before the brightening of the eastern sky or the arrival of the New York Times on the carport driveway. At such hours, in my continuing quest for self-improvement, I visit websites claiming to offer news, sometimes even the “latest news”. For the past two or three days I have intentionally avoided American sites, having reached saturation point so far as congressional undergarments are concerned. So this morning I went first to the BBC page. Was I any better off? You be the judge.

The story that greeted me there was summarized in the following sentence: “On Monday, Mr MacMaster, originally from the US state of Georgia but now a student at the University of Edinburgh, said he was sorry for posing as a Syrian lesbian”. What interests me is less the story itself, engaging though it be, than the puzzle presented by the sentence. There is no way to tell what, amidst all the information seemingly contained, the author considers important. Is it Mr. MacMaster’s contrition or his Cracker origins? Would he be equally sorry for posing as a Sudanese lesbian? How about a Syrian bricklayer? Is Monday as significant as its rhetorically emphatic position might suggest?

By chance I happen just now to be reading The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) by Thomas Hardy. Further by chance its opening sentence is superficially similar in its construction to that cited from the BBC news summary. “One evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached one-third of its span, a young man and woman, the latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of Weydon-Priors, in upper Wessex, on foot.” The big difference is that Thomas Hardy knew how to write a consequential sentence. A reader just knows that every clause in that sentence is stress-bearing. The reader probably also suspects, since it is Hardy, that the child will be dead in no time at all, and the woman soon enough, leaving the man to arrive at his miserable end with Victorian leisure. But Hardy’s is a sentence that makes you want to turn the page, not to send the writer off to writer’s camp for three to seventeen weeks.

 Their fates will be cruel, but ever so well written

My First Century of Blogging

 This post witnesses the completion of my first century of blogging. If this claim seems implausible, the problem is probably philological. Cricket fans and readers of Thomas Traherne will have no difficulty, but quite a few other people seem to have forgotten the primary meaning of the word century, which is “a hundred of something”. A hundred years is only one possibility. Long before that it was the hundred centurions making up that division of a Roman legion called a centuria.

A similar fate has befallen decade, “ten of something,” now used almost exclusively to mean ten years. We don’t think that the only thing you can have a dozen of is eggs, do we? But our universal anxiety with time sweeps all before it, including your bloguiste as he sets about writing his one hundredth blog post. For the wheels of Time’s Winged Chariot have been clattering rather than whirring softly since my last effort. For starters, I turned seventy-five on the very day I flew to Europe. Yet more sobering was the news that reached me when after several days I reconnected with my email in Compostela. My Sewanee classmate and long-time friend Dave Evett had died on May 25 at his home in the Boston suburbs.  Herein, perhaps, is a topic of sufficient solemnity for the occasion.

David Hal Evett (died 25 May 2011).  May the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace.

David was a great man—brilliant, talented, energetic--an athlete, a singer, an actor, a powerful writer. Our careers, personal and professional, had several external parallels. When we first met in the fall of 1954 we were amused by the coincidence that we both came from small towns called Mount Pleasant—one in Michigan, the other in Texas, but both double misnomers. After college Dave went to Dijon on a Fulbright Scholarship, then on to Harvard for his Ph. D. in English and, as it turned out, an equally doctoral spouse, with whom he would raise three highly accomplished children. We almost but not quite overlapped in the English Department at Wisconsin, from which he later moved on to a long and distinguished career at Cleveland State University. He was the author of important studies in the field of Renaissance Literature. In retirement he and Marianne removed to the Boston area, where all three of their children had put down roots. He died peacefully, as I understand it, after a meal at which his whole family was gathered.

Dave was also an excellent poet. In lieu of a Christmas card he would send out each year an original Christmas poem, and we never could regard our seasonal preparations as complete until it arrived. Naturally in my state of disorganization I cannot now lay my hands on the anthology of these poems he prepared for distribution at our fiftieth class reunion a few years past. But I do have one poem of his in my computer—one not entirely inappropriate for this blog century. It is called “Alumni News,” and it responds to the announcement of the death in 2004 of another classmate (called by the poet’s sensitive pseudonym Matthew George Todd), once close friends to us both.

Probably no more lost than most

Gertrude Stein famously called her fast-living expatriate Parisian friends of the 1920s “a lost generation”. But I doubt that her generation was much loster than mine—or perhaps yours, or any other. The sheer number of my bright shining classmates who crashed upon the shoals of life, not a few of them last seen adrift on a sea of alcohol, is appalling. Of them there might seem no more poignant example of sheer waste than that afforded by “M .G. Todd”. Evett’s evocation of the “inheritors of unfulfilled renown”—a famous and tragic phrase from Shelley’s “Adonais”—was hardly hyperbolic, given this man’s talent and potential. Like most good poems, this one tells a story, the outlines of which are sufficiently clear, even without any footnote explication of its enriching details:



ALUMNI NEWS


Matthew George Todd, ’58, of Austin, Texas, died March 11, 2004.


Lean, cool,
with a voice like George Sanders'
and a wry snort of a laugh
and a graduation watch identical to mine.
Riding the Southern on the last leg together,
Nashville to Cowan, Tennessee,
through leads in the senior play,
basketball, Hemingway,
we frisked into cronyhood
like two dogs into a wood.
Bronze hours:
dismayed to find him deadly from the key,
though I was stronger off the boards,
I challenged him at tennis,
and lost there, too;
we both paid homage to Bill Rotten
if the last trump refused to fall.
When the old Dodge balked
an hour north of Knoxville
on the way to some Virginia college weekend
we watched the winter sun strike
through the window of a clean, well-lighted place
the silver bubbles rising through the Bud,
the plywood booth, the green baize; Keats
was more real to us than the bodies of girls, then,
and we were all inheritors
of unfulfilled renown.
Later, he dared auditions and casting calls
off Times Square, the high life
of singles in D.C. played
against a barren federal job,
too much drink and sex,
while I took a safer road
through graduate school and marriage.
After this fraying globe
spun him back to Rose City, Texas,
an epistolary confession
twenty years long
on sheets from yellow legal pads
tracks his battles
with the flesh and the world and the church:
addiction was the Devil,
he knew, and wrote a long, strange book
to prove it that no-one would publish.
When a draft of this sat unread
while I tried to finish a book of my own
the letters stopped. I let it lie.
Can we not think about how he died last month,
leaving me this glum rage
over the slow corrosion
of bronze hours and my failure as a friend,
and about that devilish voice instead?
Three no trump? Double, I say. Snort.
Is there any more beer?  [David H. Evett, 2004]

The concluding lines about the obligations of friendship cut to the quick.  After twenty years of silence "Todd" had resurfaced in my sphere as well, first with a mad and truculent essay about the Cathars, then with the searing but incoherent manuscript about addiction to which the poem alludes.  One didn't know where to begin.  I, too, "let it lie".  But a couple of years later, around 2000, an academic conference took me to Austin.  By a near miracle I tracked "Todd" down by mail, and arranged to meet him for a meal.  He had greeted my initiative with something like enthusiasm, but the night before our scheduled meeting he called me at my hotel.  He abruptly, rudely, indeed angrily cancelled, then hung up the phone. I never saw him nor heard from him again.

As for David and me, the friendship was continuous if seriously intermittent.  In the last decade (of years, I mean) we tried to meet at least once each year, in New York in November, at an annual conclave of the somewhat Trollopian group known as the Guild of Scholars of the Episcopal Church.  We had in fact pre-scheduled a private conversation on the topic of "the nature of religious faith" for last November, but I bagged it when I had the chance to go to Paris instead.  At the time it seemed to me one of life's easier choices--between talking about religious faith or going to Paris, I mean.  Now I am not quite so sure.  I'll think about it more during the next century.

 The Cumberland Mountains around Sewanee TN