Autumnal Convergence

 

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continuance in some crinkled primrose leaves...

I have often pondered, and on occasions even tried to write about, the mysteries of synchronicity—“synchronicity” being the semi-scientific word now often used to denote what I grew up calling “coincidence”.  I step out of my apartment in Paris to buy a pineapple.  In the fifteen meters between my front door and that of the fruiterer I literally bump into one of my favorite Princeton students of a decade past,  now a lawyer in a small city in North Carolina.  A man can go in search of a pineapple at most daylight hours, but thirty seconds earlier or later we would not have met.  Nor would I have learned from her parents, who were with her, that in North Carolina they lived a street away from, and slightly knew,  the parents of my elder son’s girlfriend in Brooklyn.

            I believe it was the famous Swiss psychologist Karl Jung who popularized the idea of “synchronicity”—coincident events or situations without discernible causal linkages.  Perhaps I should italicize discernible.  I am after all a disciple of Boethius, who teaches that there is no such thing as chance, if by chance we mean an effect without a cause.   Jung brilliantly attempts a field theory of human mental experience in terms of poetry and myth.  In a quite difficult book called The Roots of Coincidence another of my gurus, Arthur Koestler, tries to transpose the matter from the key of myth to that of science.  I find both men fascinating, but neither fully satisfying.  I can but confess with the Psalmist an incapacity  to “exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me.”

            The apparent mundane inconsequence of so much “synchronic” experience is at odds with the disturbing abnormality of synchronicity itself.  In two recent sequential blog posts I touched briefly on two unrelated topics: (1) visiting my wife’s cousin, Margaret Richards, in her sensational house (converted stables) in Whitekirk near Edinburgh; and (2) planting daffodils on a beautiful autumn day in central New Jersey.  I did not mention that during our time in Whitekirk I had the leisure to do quite a bit of reading.  Margaret and her late husband John, an eminent Scottish architect, collected an extensive library.  One of John’s special interests was the history of the Great War (alias WW I), to which he devoted a large shelf.  I read several volumes from that shelf, the most memorable of which were Niall Ferguson’s hefty The Pity of War and The First Day on the Somme by Martin Middlebrook.  On the first day of the Battle of the Somme (July 1, 1916) the British suffered sixty thousand casualties.

            The next stop on our itinerary was Oxford, where I didn’t do very much except walk about, visit a couple of libraries, and seek out what remains of the once-thriving second-hand book trade in the city.  (Thornton’s, once with Blackwell’s one of the twin jewels of the Broad, no longer exists there, having decamped to a nearby village and the spirit-world of e-commerce.) Two once good little places in the Turl are also gone; but there is a sizable OXFAM bookshop there, and I poked my nose in.  Only folly urges me to acquire more books, as I ought to be in serious downsizing mode; but that is rather like saying that only hunger urges me to eat.

            There was in this shop an excellent copy of Siegfried Sassoon’s Complete Memoirs of George Shertson (1937; Reprint Society, 1940).  These memoirs comprise a thinly fictionalized autobiography of Sassoon himself, the first two parts of which (Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer) are generally considered to be among the major literary monuments to the Great War.  A 656-page book was perhaps not what my supposedly light luggage required, but I bought the book and spent several hours of the return flight reading it.  Sassoon’s grim take on the Great War invaded my mind and occupied it long after touch-down..

            But what, you might ask, has become of synchronicity?  For that we needed the daffodil planting.  My younger readers will one day know the autumnal experience of their elders.  The fall of the year has always had for me a certain somber cast, especially after the passing of the last Indian summer day of October.  But as I have aged the death of the year has become ever more personal.  How else could it be?  As the nights grow longer, the Night itself moves closer.

            There was perhaps more of this autumnal gloom in my passage on daffodil planting than I had intended, for a friend was moved to write to cheer me up.  I am lucky to have this lovely lady and deep thinker among my regular readers.  She forwarded to me a consolatory poem.  It is called “Another Spring,” and it makes the point, obvious enough once one stops to think of it, that there is natural rebirth just as there is natural death.  Jesus, indeed, seems to make the former contingent on the latter: “verily I say unto you, unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”   Such religious musings are not invited by the poem; its consolation is entirely secular.  Though the poet would die many years later as a Roman Catholic convert, he was at the time of writing this poem a man adrift, still struggling with his war-ravaged psyche, with his homosexuality, with unfulfilled literary aspiration—in short with the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.  The poet was Siegfried Sassoon.

    

  

 "Another Spring"

Aged self, disposed to lose his hold on life,
Looks down at winter's ending, and perceives
Continuance in some crinkled primrose leaves.
A noise of nesting rooks in tangled trees.
Stillness- inbreathed, expectant. Shadows that bring
Cloud-castles thoughts from downloaded distances.
Eyes, ears are old.  But not the sense of Spring.
Look, listen, live, some inward watcher warns.
Absorb this moment's meaning: and be wise
With hearts whom the first primrose purifies.

Read All About It

         

           Last night I was the “featured author” at a book launch at our town’s big independent bookseller, Labyrinth Books.  There probably were about forty people there, only half of whom were close friends or family members.  Such an unusually bookish experience gave me the occasion to think a bit not merely about my book but the state of the book in general.

            It is hardly news that the entire book trade is in a state of crisis or of transition--or maybe it is “critical transition”—and I do not pretend to be able to predict the commercial future of the printed book.  I have not yet fully absorbed the implications of the advent of the mega-publisher, the mega-store, and e-commerce; yet much more is likely coming soon.  I recently met my first bookless English professor, that is, a literary scholar who, confident that everything he will ever want or need to read will be available in electronic form, refrains from buying printed books on principle.  Under these circumstances a large, high quality independent bookshop that gracefully navigates the markets for both learned and trade books is a precious community asset.

            I was talking about my new book, The Dark Side of the Enlightenment.  If ever a topic were tailor-made for bookshop chatter the Enlightenment ought to be it.  For although there is no universal agreement as to what, when, or how the Enlightenment was, it’s easy enough to see that books had a great deal to do with it.  For convenience of chronology I am willing to follow Harold Nicolson in associating Enlightenment origins with two famous English books: Newton’s Principia of 1687 and Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)—two enormously influential books that, I claim, “mark a decisive shift in the way thinkers regarded the natural word around them, and the way they thought about thinking itself.”  I suppose the books that most people naturally call to mind when they hear the word “Enlightenment” are the large volumes of the great French encyclopedia published in Paris in the third quarter of the eighteenth century.

            Fortunately for us mere mortals, not all writings of the Enlightenment period were so difficult and high-minded.  My old friend and long-time colleague Robert Darnton, now the University Librarian at Harvard and one of the key players in some of the more benign of the vast electronic projects characteristic of our age, has written brilliantly about the print culture of the eighteenth century, demonstrating its extraordinary vitality and variety.

            One of the major figures dealt with in my book is “Count” Cagliostro, a famous alchemist, sooth-sayer, table-rapper, healer and Freemason of the second half of the eighteenth century.  If you believe Thomas Carlyle Cagliostro was “the most perfect scoundrel that in these latter ages has marked the world’s history…Gold-cook, Grand Cophta, Prophet, Priest, and thaumaturgic moralist and swindler, really a Liar of the first Magnitude…what one may call the King of Liars.”  If on the unlikely other hand you believe Fleming, Cagliostro was an unconventional social reformer and a Rosicrucian “friend of mankind” whose exploitation of celebrity just happened to be a bit advanced for his time.

    Charles Thévenau de Morande, ace reporter        

The Carlylian view of Cagliostro derives directly from a particularly seedy French journalist, active in London in the 1780s, named Thévenau de Morande.  His specialties were pornography and blackmail, not infrequently conjoined in interesting ways.  You may well think our gutter press is pretty bad, but a perusal of a few numbers of Thévenau’s Courrier de l’Europe will offer enlightening perspective.  The public revelation that journalists from Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World had hacked the telephone of an abducted and murdered girl in search of publishable information was a death sentence for that venerable yellow sheet.  Mr. Murdoch was dragged penitent before a tribunal to declare himself shocked, shocked by what had been going on.  The paper’s actual editors Rebeka Brooks and Andy Coulson are even at this moment being tried in court, where, ironically, the exposure of their own intimate misbehavior became a gratuitous and incidental point of testimony.

  Naughty, naughty!     

  

            A journalist of the school of Thévenau would have spared himself the labor and simply have made up whatever information he wanted.  There are after all distinct advantages to fictional journalism.  In the early part of the eighteenth century the great Jonathan Swift, who was among other things a journalist, took a dislike to the popular astrologist John Partridge.  (Astrology was very big during the Enlightenment).  This Partridge was a compiler of almanacs in which he published astral predictions concerning the high and mighty: what the stars had to say about the stars, so to speak.   So Swift, alias Bickerstaff, decided to make a prediction of his own.

Jonathan Swift, especially with his wit

            In his widely circulated journal he published the prediction that the well-known astrologer, John Partridge, would die on such-and-such a day.  Then, when the day arrived, he announced the sad news that poor Partridge had in fact succumbed on schedule.  Alas, the stars were fatally aligned.  Swift then sat back to enjoy the vain protestations of some man claiming to be Partridge to the effect that he was still alive.  After all, the whole world knew the truth.  They had read it in the papers.  Thévenau de Morande did a similar number on Cagliostro’s reputation, though he admittedly had some genuine good material to start out with.  Of course you can believe every word in my books.

A Gift of Moonlit Magic

 

       

the path into the Common Land wood in autumn as seen from the bottom of my garden

     The Gray Farm is a residential development  of about seventy-five houses in south-east Princeton, N.J.  It is bounded on the west by South Harrison Street, on the south by Lake Carnegie, and on the north and east by a lengthy curve of Hartley Avenue—my street.  In the center of the tract, running from Hartley to the lake, are many acres of dedicated green space called the Common Land: open fields and pathed woods.

            The Gray Farm was developed around 1960 by the authorities at Princeton University as an imaginative way to allow faculty, whose salaries at that time could rarely gain them entry to the town’s commercial housing market, to build their own houses.  Certain restrictions applied, naturally, the chief of which involved eligibility and resale: only tenured faculty and certain administration could participate, and when they eventually sold they must sell back to the University.  The original Gray Farmers rightly regarded themselves as pioneers of a kind, and they shared a strong feeling of community expressed through a neighborhood association so active as to have about it something of the whiff of a 60s commune.  The Grounds Committee—charged with maintaining and beautifying the Common Land for the enjoyment of all residents—was among the most active.

            Utopian communities are notoriously short-lived, and the neighborhood association (the “Gray Farm Neighbors”) had already lost much of its original ardor when we took up residence in 1988.  By now it has slightly the air of the last days of the Venetian Republic.  Practically all the founders are dead or scattered in retirement communities.  In changed circumstances the original economic rationale of the Gray Farm no longer obtains.  Many of the original houses have been torn down, replaced by grander piles whose inhabitants often do not even join the “Neighbors”.  We do have an annual meeting, but with only about a quarter of the residential families represented.  What I regard as the Gray Farm’s greatest asset—the beautiful woodland and lakeside paths of the Common Land—are seriously under-utlilized.

            But the Grounds Committee continues to exist.  I have been its chair for many years.   I now have but one regular helper—a woman not too much younger than I—and we have a half-day community work party once a year, for which perhaps twenty people will show up armed with secateurs and pruning saws.  The University mows the open fields in the summer, but we are largely on our own in managing the woods, making new plantings, keeping up the paths, and so on.  I have sometimes felt rather lonely in my role as groundsman and, truth requires me to confess, a little unappreciated.  Not any more.

            About ten days ago I was working on my firewood piles when two neighbors came walking toward me through the common ground.  One of them was the President of the Gray Farm Neighbors, and he carried before him, in semi-liturgical fashion, a brightly wrapped package.  I was amazed to hear that it was a neighborly gift offered to me in appreciation of my alleged services over the years as Chairman of the Grounds Committee.  My wife also materialized about the same time—she of course having been in the plot all along--and we all moved into the back yard and sat for a moment on the lawn furniture, not yet abandoned to its winter mothballs.  There I was urged to open the package.

            It turned out to contain a handsome L. L. Bean flannel work shirt in bright plaid.  I do my own shirt shopping at the Saint Peter’s Thrift Shop, where one can occasionally find such a quality item, though only if seasoned by a few years of pre-ownership.  So I was delighted.  Still, my benefactors urged me to look more closely.  Only then did I note that peeping out the shirt pocket was a small envelope.  Upon investigation the envelope proved to contain two tickets for excellent seats for the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Britten’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” for Wednesday night, a week ago today.

            Good seats at the Met are not cheap.  Putting that in a slightly different way, they are very expensive.  The luxury of the evening, already in excess of our sumptuary habits, was further augmented by the provision of a car and driver who whisked us home after the three-and-a-half hour performance.  But the munificence of this astonishing gift from friends and neighbors lay as much in its imagination as in its material.

            The Met’s production is mounted in part to mark the centenary of Benjamin Britten’s birth in 1913.   Perhaps someone among my neighbors had read my essay of two years past (“East Anglian Church Crawl”), in which I waxed enthusiastic over a tour of “Britten country” in and around Aldeburgh in Suffolk.  Be that as it may, the subject of Shakespeare’s immortal play is magic in the woods.  It is tonally complicated, for the fairy world is not without its dark side.  The teasing of Bottom is deployed along a kind of ethical razor’s edge.  Britten’s beautiful music fully honors the complexity, affirming the moonlit enchantment without entirely avoiding its anxieties.  One of Shakespeare’s themes is the evanescence of dreams, often beautiful but always fugitive.  The official setting of the play is supposed to be Athens, but the sylvan landscape seems much more like those of the south of England or the eastern seaboard of the United States.

            The current project of the Grounds Committee is bulb-planting.  I want to get a thousand more daffodils into the Common Land by Thanksgiving.  In the autumn of the year, in the autumn of a life, this seems a worthy aim.  The bulbs promise a brave show in another season.

Unhurt Locker Seminar

            

 Lincoln overlooking an opportunity

 “O would some power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us”.   Robbie Burns’s famous line is usually interpreted in a personal sense, as it was intended, but at times it is applicable to whole nations as well as to individuals.  We left for England on October 1, which was the deadline for the “funding the government crisis” and returned on October 16, the eve of doomsday for the “debt limit crisis.”  I was acutely aware of this calendrical happenstance, as I did not much look forward to trying to defend, or for that matter even explain, what appeared to be our collective national lunacy.

            I need not have worried so much.  Quite to my surprise and eventually my disquiet, the British press had practically nothing to say about it.  The Economist, intelligent as usual, had a very substantial piece, but then I think of The Economist as only technically British.  Of the major English dailies I saw, only the Guardian, with its famously anti-American attitude, had much to say, most of it rather superficial in my opinion.

            Despite the fact that I have lived in Britain for extensive periods of time, I have only rudimentary notions about British politics.  I can hardly expect a penetrating insight into American life from people who pronounce the first syllable of Houston as though it were a domestic dwelling.  But the journalistic tone deafness goes somewhat further.  What was lacking in the analysis was any sense that there are actual and weighty issues at stake.  Everything was personalities: Obama’s resolve, Boehner’s debility, Cruz’s folly, Harry Reid’s adroitness, etc.  But then, on further reflection, how different was that really from the treatment in most of the American press?

            It was with relief—in this regard, at least--that I got home and back to the locker room in Dillon Gymnasium, where most mornings in the dawn’s early light there is a lively running seminar of locker-holders on their way to or on their return from their various athletic activities.  The seminar participants vary a bit, but the  core consists of one medievalist, one plasma physicist, one financial engineer, and one pediatrician in public health.  Every month or two some of us have an extended palaver over coffee and a baguette at Panera’s.  

            The budget expert, Steven Semenuk, who is considerably younger than the rest of us, is a great reader.  His interests appear eclectic, with perhaps a tilt toward economic and political history.  It was Steve who via The Big Short set me onto the books of Michael Lewis.  Recently he has been reading around in American history of the pre-Civil-War period, and he suggested a parallel between the current state of affairs in Washington and that in the 1850s.  This seemed to me a most illuminating analogy, remembering always what an analogy is—a comparison of terms in some ways alike and in some ways not.

            The very strange allocution “kick the can down the road,” which seems to confuse a once-popular children’s game with a mode of locomotion, denotes the peculiar form of political pusillanimity by which procrastinating politicians try to dodge unpleasant decisions.  Though they are now talked about as saints bright shining in the seventh heaven, the Founding Fathers could kick a can with the best of them, and they did so with regard to the “peculiar institution” of chattel slavery.  With the Missouri Compromise of 1820 our leaders kicked it a little further.  By the 1850s, if not long before, it was pretty obvious that further kicking was not likely to work.  “I believe this government cannot endure,” said Abraham Lincoln in 1858,  “permanently half slave and half free.”

            The vilification of the “Tea Party” in the “main stream media”, vigorously encouraged by the antics of some of the most prominent party-goers themselves, is now so complete that it is easy enough to assign our current crisis to the categories of mental aberration or naughty behavior.  So far as I could discern it, that seemed to be the European view of the matter.  Such a view is comforting, perhaps, in that it allows us to avoid acknowledging the conflict between two quite coherent, quite powerful, and above all quite real visions of what American government is and should be.  But not every issue can be fudged indefinitely.  Some of them need actual resolution—meaning, alas, winners and losers.  The effective failure of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (alias Simpson-Bowles) perhaps suggests that “sensible compromise” will not resolve this particular dilemma.  I expect neither the dissolution of the Union nor Civil War, but then neither did Lincoln in 1858.

Meaningful Arches

 

 Princeton Graduate College: the Dining Hall

 Man was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for man.  The same ought to be true of the Quadath, as I shall hereafter denominate the fourth day of the week.  I missed publishing a Wednesday blog because I spent so much of yesterday either getting to Heathrow Airport or getting from Heathrow home.   Hence, an exceptional Thursday blog.  The launching of John Newman’s Kent: North East and East (see “Off to Canterbury”) took place in fine fashion on Tuesday.  Its perfectly appropriate setting was the medieval undercroft of the East Bridge Hospital in Canterbury.  In the fourteenth century a “hospital” was essentially a youth hostel, and this one was for Canterbury pilgrims.  The Wife of Bath may well have slept there—though of course they would not advertise that fact. 

            But we were forced to leave next morning, because a little later on this particular Quadath I have to give a little talk at the opening session of a major conference being held on the Princeton campus marking the hundredth anniversary of the building of our Graduate College.  This gives me, personally, the opportunity to celebrate the granting of my own doctoral degree through that institution, exactly fifty years ago.  I know that I am as old as a tree, but to be half as old as a graduate college is pretty threatening.

            I want to attempt something new here, by trying to think out a little of what to say in my talk this afternoon in this blog essay.  What I shall want to try to explain is how the Princeton trustees of the first decade of the twentieth century, Presbyterian pinch-pennies to a man, could authorize and pay for an ambitious and very costly building program of “collegiate Gothic” designed to leave their Protestant campus looking something like an oversized Cluny.  The subject therefore must be “the iconography of architectural forms”—a fancy and probably intimidating phrase I borrow from an eminent art historian of the last generation, Richard Krautheimer.*  What it means is not actually all that highfalutin.  Certain architectural forms imply an intellectual or spiritual content quite independent of their actual function.

            Consider for a moment one defining difference between the Romanesque and the Gothic.  The former is characterized by massive piles of stone pierced when necessary for portals and lights by semi-circular arches.  The great innovation of the Gothic, the pointed arch and ogive curve allowed for the transfer of weight in such a fashion as to allow relatively lighter wall masses which could be pierced by very large window spaces.  The “invention” of the Gothic was a purely technical development in building technique.  The Gothic arch had no meaning, though very soon we find it assigned one in late medieval, early Renaissance paintings.  Very often in such paintings the biblical city of Jerusalem is presented as a Romanesque creation.  The heavenly Jerusalem of the Apocalypse, on the other hand, is likely to be Gothic.  It seems obvious that the concepts of old and new (as found in such common Pauline dyads as the “old man” and the “new man,” the “old law” and the “new law”—or simply the “old” and “new” testaments—were transferred to these architectural forms.

            The origins of American collegiate Gothic, of which the Princeton Graduate College is an outstanding example, involved a similar intellectual transfer.  It is a simple fact that the oldest American universities had their explicit origins in well defined Christian traditions.  It can be said without serious exaggeration that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were all founded with the primary goal of educating young men for Christian ministry.  Nor is there any exaggeration in saying that the secularization of these institutions is now essentially complete.  That was a process already underway by the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.  But though the lineaments of explicit religious doctrines and sectarian affiliations might first fade and then vanish altogether, the aspirations to Arnoldian plain living and high thinking has everywhere remained in the American academy.  Today’s colleges and universities—sometimes assailed by conservative critics as hotbeds of moral anarchy and hedonistic excess--are in fact the heirs of medieval ascetic institutions.

            That is why the nomenclature of academic institutions is so peculiar.  There is no Provost of the American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, nor a Dean of Sales at General Motors—though they’d be well advised to get one quick.  This is why college professors—whose normal political profile falls somewhere between that of Emma Goldman and Karl Kautsky—so love the high Tory haberdashery of their Canterbury caps and taffeta robes at Commencement time.  That’s why there are gargoyles on Princeton’s crenellated (!) Dillon Gymnasium, and why the exterior of the dining hall of Princeton’s newest residential college, Whitman, looks for all the world like a church.  It's the iconography of architectural form.

* “Introduction to an ‘Iconography of Mediaeval Architecture’,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, v (1942): 1-31.

A Temporizing Intervention

Rather to my surprise, an opportunity has arisen that will allow me to meet my Wednesday obligation, if only in a symbolic fashion.

I spent the last several days in East Lothian, a lovely part of Scotland twixt Edinburgh and the sea, staying with Joan's cousin Margaret Richards.  When I first met her some decades past she lived in the stunning old manse of Whitekirk, one of the few medieval churches still in service in Scotland.  She has now passed the house on to one of her daughters and taken up residence in the spectacularly converted old stables building.  The church itself once had a holy well, and was a pilgrimage site in the fourteenth century.  I attended a service on Harvest Festival Sunday, when it was decked out with floral arrangements and baskets of various agricultural products--mainly gourds and squash this late in the year.  The Presbyterian minister was a Dutch woman with a perfect Scottish accent and a husband with a pony-tail.  John Knox was not in the congregation

Off to Canterbury

Canterbury glass

“Ye goon to Cauntererbury—” says Harry Bailley, host of the Tabard Inn.  “God yow speede!”  Well, I hope so.   This post is a day early, and the next one will be very late—just how late, I am not yet prepared to predict, but more than a week.  For very shortly after pressing the fatal “PUBLISH” button on the Blogger desktop, I am leaving for the airport and a fortnight in Britain, the focal point of which is a special event in Canterbury.  I have in the past endangered my health in various pestilential continental cyber-cafés simply to achieve a regular weekly post, however feeble, but not this time. I find that the computer, while an excellent servant, is a wretched master--don't you?  The dogged search for Wi-Fi is intrinsically boring and tends to be futile to boot, at least when conducted among my wife’s nonagenarian relatives in Scotland.   So my imaginary loyal readers can expect to hear from me next considerably later in October.

            What commands our trip this time is a ceremony in Canterbury in honor of my brother-in-law, John Newman.  He is not the same chap as John Henry Cardinal Newman, and the ceremony is not beatification—though perhaps it should be.  No, the occasion is the formal recognition of the publication of the revised edition of one of the two volumes devoted to the county of Kent in the Buildings of England series.  This publication will be the culmination of John’s long association with that extraordinary project, to which he has contributed several earlier volumes.

    John Newman (center) at an earlier book launch

        The one inconvenience of having John for a brother-in-law is that the brother-in-law joke is rendered meaningless.  In a long professional life I have met few people whom I more sincerely admire.  He read Greats (Classics) at Oxford just before my time there, and set out on the career for which his education had so obviously prepared him.  He became a classics master in one of the fine public schools of southern England.  He was very good at what he did—I actually once visited one of his classrooms—but his real “bliss” was an amateur interest in architectural history, an interest he had developed as a boy on long bicycle trips through the Kentish countryside.

            So he did something very bold.  He abandoned his job teaching classics to become a graduate student at the Courtauld Institute, which is in effect the Art History department of the University of London, and one of the world’s greatest seminaries of art historians and museum directors.  He certainly could not have known then—having absolutely no formal training in art or architectural history--that he himself would have a most distinguished teaching career at that very institution, serving in time its Assistant Director.

            The Buildings of England series was the invention of Nikolaus Pevsner (1902 –1983), among the most famous of the great generation of German émigré art historians who settled in Britain and America.  John Newman became (in rough chronological order) Pevsner’s chauffeur, his assistant, his friend, his collaborator, and his successor.

 Some of Nikolaus Pevsner's "Buildings of England" volumes

One of John Newman's two volumes devoted to Kent           

 Though he has published architectural guides to several counties in the west, there is a special appropriateness to the culminating Kent volumes.  In the first place, they are major revisions his own most important original work.  Secondly, he is actually a Kentish man, with a geographical trajectory ever deeper into the Kent countryside.  When I first knew him he lived technically in Kent, but actually in the London suburbs.   His young married life was passed in New Ash Green, a community that could legitimately be described as experimental both from the social and the architectural points of view.  His next sojourn was in Sevenoaks, an old and prosperous town full of interesting buildings and estates, including Knole House, once home of Vida Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, one of the most eminent “power couples” in pre-War Britain.  Now John and Margaret have moved once again, and once again yet deeper into Kent, taking up residence in the ancient village of Wye.  At last he is in a house suitable in its antiquity for one of the world’s great experts in Elizabethan and Jacobean architecture.

Wye: the parish church

            This puts him, too, very much in Chaucer country.  Wye is about twelve miles south of Boughton-under-Blean, where the Canon on his lathered horse caught up with the pilgrims, and a shorter distance still from Canterbury itself.  We think of Canterbury as the ecclesiastic center of Britain, and so it is; but the word Canterbury means “the fortified place in Kent”, so that the city’s secular history is hardly less important than the sacred.  On either ground, Canterbury is the indispensable place to honor a Kentishman who is one of the nation’s great champions of its sacred and secular architectural treasures alike.