One Father's Fathers Day

In my birth family the celebration of Mothers Day was distinctly muted, and Fathers Day got no notice whatsoever.  No specific and coherent argument was raised against it, but it was neither a traditional religious holiday nor a national patriotic one, and it just never became an actual thing as opposed to a convenient excuse for the Western Auto Store to advertise its tire sale.  I do remember one linguistic debate as to whether the proper form was Fathers Day, Fathers’ Day, or Father’s Day—all three of which appeared in a single tire advertisement.  A little anthropological research will soon reveal a probable connection of days dedicated to both mothers and fathers with various medieval Christian religious observances.  When I married an English woman, I became aware of Mothering Sunday.  I thought Mothering Sunday was a very cool name and almost certainly must have had something to do with the medieval cult of the Virgin, although in Britain it had become thoroughly Protestantized.  Fathers Day does have some antecedents in various festivals honoring Saint Joseph, though if its development had been a little more orthodox in terms of Catholic theology it would have been called Step-Fathers Day.  We find a related problem in the elaborate forty-two step genealogy at the beginning of Matthew’s gospel, though that has provided us with many marvelous artistic renditions of the beautiful “Tree of Jesse.”  In any event, it was only when both of our sons married delightful southerners, one from South Carolina and the other from Tennessee, that I started getting due acclaim for my relatively commonplace achievements as a progenitor.  I must say that I now find it very pleasant indeed to have salutes to my paternity coming in each year from various parts of the world.  Usually.

But this year the experience was doubly enriched by becoming, in effect, Granddaughters Day.  For an aging couple with shrinking social horizons we still seem to manage a fair number of conflicting obligations or opportunities.  Last week Joan spent several days at a kind of music camp with other members of her string quartet.  This is an annual event, scheduled months in advance, and it is rather intense.  Meanwhile our eldest granddaughter, Sophia, has a birthday just about now.  As it happens, so does her boyfriend Raymond.  So a plan developed.  There would be a joint birthday party for this winsome couple, very low-key, which would consist of a visit to check out their elegant and newly moved-into Brooklyn apartment, followed by dinner at a local eatery of repute, Frankie’s on Court Street.  The only fly in this fragrant ointment was the fact that Joan, still fully occupied with music making, would not be able to attend.  Thus it was decided that I would go to New York alone on Saturday evening.   And since travel is a little problematic for me these days, I didn’t want to try to go and return on the same day, and so elected to spend Saturday night at my daughter’s place on Washington Square, also the home of the two delightful younger sisters of the Birthday Girl.  So a grandfatherly clean sweep, of sorts, overnighted into Fathers Day.

The door-to-door transportation offered by the hail-riding companies is what makes such things possible.  It is expensive, of course, but not prohibitively so on an occasional basis.  This was my first unsatisfactory lift from Lyft.  The driver was an Arabic-speaker, a cheerful and voluble Egyptian, whose only certain word, or rather letters of English, was “GPS”.  His name was Ram, which had rather confused me, as I briefly expected the arrival of a Dodge Ram.  This seemed a little odd, but I am a nouveau uberite and Johnny-come-lately lyfter, and I would not have minded so long as I got to sit in the cab rather than the truck bed.  However Mr. Ram was actually driving a four-door Ford, which I had missed in the fine print.  But he had never before driven it or any other vehicle to New York, and his trusty GPS directed him by unconventional paths.  He was also a nicotine addict.  His first ploy was to offer me a cigarette in the utterly vain hope that I would collude with him in what was, I am sure, a breach of a cardinal rule of his employment.  But there was no collusion.  So censorious was my mien, indeed,  as to drive him to desperate measures.  When we got out on what might be called the open road, he began a program of surreptitious vaping.  It is not easy to vape surreptitiously, especially in an automobile.  The attempt required having both front windows wide open while operating the air conditioning at full blast.  Traffic was treacherous across Staten Island and onto the Verrazano.  Mr. Ram neither spoke English nor appeared to comprehend it in either spoken or written form.  I concluded that my best course was silent prayer rather than vehement remonstrance.  As we bumper-to-bumpered over the bridge he became visibly animated by the spectacular views, especially the glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, and waved his phone wildly with his right hand taking many photographs.  Altogether during this trip he may have had both hands on the wheel forty percent of the time.  But, as you are now my witnesses, I did live to tell the tale, to see Sophia’s nifty apartment, to have some transgressive calamari, and then to spend most of Sunday sedentary or actually prone on a luxurious couch at my daughter’s place.  Occasionally she, my son-in-law, or a granddaughter would briefly stint from their labors long enough to offer me a hot drink, or a cold one.  Eventually I was roused to a bowl of delicious tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich.  Now and again I read a few pages of something, or listened to a pod cast on my phone.  If you want to cosset a father on Fathers Day, you can forget the neckties and the cuff links, assuming that you’ve ever heard of a cuff link in the first place.  Just let the old guy lounge around on your couch for the day exuding his indeterminate fatherly aura.  Eventually it will occur to him that, as compared with Mr. Ram, he has had a pretty soft life.   He should count himself lucky that the paternal task of keeping bread on his children’s table never required him to drive around Cairo all day armed with only three words of possible Arabic: Alhambra, Aljazeera, and  al-GPS.

A Short Story by John O'Hara

John O'Hara (1905-1970)

The short story is not an American invention, but American writers at least since the time of Poe have developed it with a special inventiveness.  There was not a lot of fiction on the dusty shelves of my boyhood home, but there were more volumes than I could believe by O. Henry, who, I thought, must be the most famous and productive writer in our country.  Many years later I learned that there were many people—including the kind of people who grew up in big houses in Fairfield County with real libraries before going to school at St. Paul’s—who never heard of him.  I am not sure I ever heard his name mentioned in forty years of conversation with learned colleagues in my English Department.  But he was big in my early reading life.  O. Henry (it’s a pen-name, of course), who died before the beginning of World War I, was a master of the “surprise ending”.  The influence of De Maupassant is pretty obvious, but I hadn’t even heard of him at the time.

The genre is called the short story for a reason.  It has to do whatever it is going to do—or not do—fairly quickly.  In the short story the not doing part can be quite as important as the doing.  Think of the masterpiece by Henry James, “The Beast in the Jungle,” in which nothing happening is what happens, unforgettably.  Quite often the reader doesn’t get a subtle short story in a single reading.

I have recently been reading in a collection of stories by John O’Hara, who virtually dominated the fiction pages of the New Yorker when I was in college.  O’Hara does have a few “surprise endings,” but they are generally prepared for by what I shall call the unnoticed middle.  A couple of nights ago I read one of his gems, “Appearances”.  This story appeareded in 1962 in a collection, one of the few of his stories  not first published in a magazine.  Admittedly, I was nodding; but when I got to the end while I was sure that something had happened, I could not tell you exactly what.  O’Hara is the chronicler of the middle classes of the Main Line—meaning roughly the stretch of the Pennsylvania Railroad from Philadelphia to Boston, with emphasis on the former—during the years of post-War affluence and social malaise.  His natural peers are Updike and Cheever, but he has a sadness all his own.  His themes are perhaps the usual: mortality, adultery, alcohol, missed opportunity, inescapable pasts.  Several of those themes were in “Appearances,” but determining what it was about would require a second reading.

The mode of “Appearances” is third-person narration, but its principal character is one Howard Ambrie, middle-aged nondescript bourgeois living comfortably with his wife Lois on Long Island.  The couple have just returned in their car from some evening event.  We learn early on that their recently divorced daughter, a teacher, has temporarily returned to the family home.  The first part of the story details a conversation, or perhaps an argument,,  between Howard and Lois.  At issue is whether Howard plans on the following day to attend the funeral of somebody named Jack Hill.  Hill, we learn, was a friend of Howard’s for fifty years, though the closeness of the friendship is questioned in subsequent dialogue.  Jack’s bereaved widow, Celia, is likewise an old family friend.  Lois is rather shocked to hear that her husband does not intend to be at the funeral, and especially shocked at the reason he offers.  He has scheduled a game of golf he doesn’t want to miss.  After a certain amount of revelatory bickering, however, he does agree to go to the funeral after all.

The rest of the story takes place in the daughter’s room, where she is visited first by her father and then by her mother.  We quickly learn that the daughter—and the divorce triggered by her sexual impropriety--is relevant to whatever is or is not happening.  She seems to be an only child, and has an apparently frank and open relationship with both her parents; but the eavesdropping reader soon discovers that the intimacies of her parental communication are delicately compartmentalized.  In what seems a careful deference to the daughter’s agency and independence, her father has chosen not to inquire too closely into the details of the extra-marital affair with an unnamed married man that doomed her marriage.  His hopes are now for the future, and for her prospects for a second marriage with a doctor she has been dating.  “This time,” he advises her, “you ought to have children right away…It might have kept you together, Amy, a child.  We had you the first year, your mother and I.” 

Not surprisingly, the daughter is quizzical: 

“’Father, you’re practically implying that if you hadn’t had me…’”

“ ‘I know what I’m implying,’ he said.  ‘And I know you’re no fool.  You know it’s often been touch and go with your mother and I.  You’ve seen that.’”

The main literary theme here, I suppose, is the familiar one of the reduplication of pathologies within families.  But O’ Hara is an absolute master of middle class vernacular.  We don’t quite know Howard Imbrie’s place in the great scheme of things until we listen carefully.  As we learn in the story’s first line he lives in a house with a “porte-cochère,” and he presumably would never say “Me and my wife went to the movies.”  But he does say “…with your mother and I.”  As grammatical solecisms go, this one is no big deal; but it serves as what I have called as “unnoticed middle” for its story—unnoticed by me, at any rate, on first reading.

Imbrie bids his daughter goodnight and leaves the room.  But the mother soon enters it, asking her daughter, “What was that all about?”  Now we discover that the intimacy of mother and daughter, at least so far as the subject of “Appearances” is concerned, is more along the lines of a conspiracy.  But even in revealing what the reader must already be suspecting concerning the man to be buried on the morrow and the Prodigal Daughter, O’Hara deftly uses the heart-to-heart between Amy and her mother to bring out further sad limitations and bigotries that seem perhaps to come with the porte-cochère.  The author does this all in about three thousand words.  Just between you and I, this is no mean trick.

Sir Gawain ad Quadratum

On Monday I awoke to a beautiful spring day, and with intellectual prospects to match it.  My project for the next little bit is the polishing of an essay about “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” a wonderful poem by the only medieval English poet who can be regarded as Chaucer’s peer both in his manner and his matter.  Unfortunately the works of the anonymous “Gawain-Poet” are even less known to general readers than the poetry of Chaucer.  The Gawain-Poet wrote in the old alliterative style and in a difficult Midlands dialect replete with unfamiliar words, many of Scandinavian origin, that found no permanent home in Modern English.  Even so, many people know the outlines of the mind-boggling story: a beheading contest initiated by a ferocious green knight who appears on horseback (horse also green) in King Arthur’s dining room.  Needless to say beneath the exciting surface story lurks a complex moral allegory.  Sir Gawain, who rather rashly puts himself forward as the champion of the Round Table, undergoes a series of related tests, though critics can agree neither on what the tests test, exactly, or on what grades to assign Gawain for his efforts.

The Gawain-Poet was a learned theologian, with a sub-specialty in architectural mathematics.  All of his poems are “numerological” in structure, a feature of especial importance in his conception of this great romance.  If there is a single key number it is five.  The poem is composed of 101 stanzas, each ending in a five-line "tail", and  with a total line count of 2530.  The stanzas vary in length, but they average jut over 25 lines each.  The interior of Gawain's shield bears a private devotional image of the Virgin.  Its exterior is decorated with a pentangle, or five-pointed star, the moral meaning of which is developed by the poet at some length.  One thing the poet is covertly conveying is that he has constructed his poem ad quadratum—an architectural term I shall explain in a moment.

The once-magnificent medieval cathedral of Trondheim (Niardos) in Norway was by the middle of the nineteenth century in very bad shape.  The Norwegian government decided, out of national historical rather than religious piety to restore it, and in this regard they sponsored an architectural competition to come up with a plan.  It was in this context that a quasi-mystical architectural scholar, Fredrik Lund (1863-1943), undertook through archival study and on-site investigation to attempt to discover the precise original plan of the building.*  Though still regarded as kooky by many sober architectural historians, his book is full of golden nuggets strewn among the pyrites.  Ancient Latin architectural manuscripts speak of building ad quadratum.  The verb quadro meant to square or give regular shape to, and a quadrum was a square or other regular rectangular solid, in masonry a precisely squared stone.  But Lund deduced that by the technical phrase ad quadratum the master masons meant construction according to certain precise geometrical principles of proportion deriving from ancient Pythagorean mathematicians and visually evident in surviving examples of the sacred architecture of both the Greeks and the Romans.  It included prominent exploitation of the “line of beauty” or “golden ratio” mathematically achieved in an irrational number (now known as phi, 1.16803…) by the procedure of division of a line in mean and extreme ratio.  Concrete manifestations of phi exist throughout created nature, and are closely related to the spatial representations of the famous numerical “series” identified by the thirteenth-century Italian mathematician, Leonardo Fibonacci: the “Fibonacci numbers”.

            Though the literary applications of architectural harmonies are necessarily limited, obviously artistic use of the golden ratio is found in many places in ancient, medieval and especially Renaissance European poetry.  It is an artistic commonplace.  But I think the Gawain-Poet took matters a step further, recognizing in the pentangle a “natural” and universal emblem of artistic harmony and, by extension, moral order itself.  “The temple was supposed to be the material image of the mystery of existence” writes Lund.  “Its proportioning was therefore established according to an irrational measure, in an ascending, harmonic, geometrical progression, from the unit to the totality as this progression appears in the pentagram, which was the symbol of the harmonious system of the Cosmos, the masterpiece of the universe”.   The master builders knew, as the Gawain-Poet knew, that the geometric construction of the pentangle within a regular pentagon would unleash cascades of ascending visual harmonies corresponding to the mathematical laws within which they are based.  According to Lund’s theory, the architects’ ascending harmonic, geometrical progressions in stone were structural in both concrete and ideal expression.

            In the Christian era, Scriptural exegesis joined with Pythagorean number theory to form a single stout cord of meaning.  The poet tells us that the pentangle was devised by Solomon, builder of the biblical Temple, as a “token of truth”.  The poetic connection between stone-masonry and the philosophical quest would eventually become widespread in the secular world through the Free Masons of the Enlightenment.  Such theories were “esoteric” not because they involved magic or the supernatural, but because they dealt with an inner knowledge of Nature possessed only by a learned few.  Every Christian could claim the protection of the Virgin, whose image adorns the inner face of Gawain’s shield.  The pentangle is inscribed on its outer side, its public side so to speak, and like Gawain the reader must come to know its deeper meaning by trial and error.

            Few of us when invited to examine the delicate loveliness of a nautilus shell, are likely to think, “O, sure, 1.16803 and all that.”  A normal response is the enjoyment of thrilling beauty.  In like manner only the leaden hand of an intrusive literary analysis could encourage a reader to a mathematical first response to Gawain.  What the reader sees is a beautifully crafted, brilliantly plotted, structurally precise, suspenseful and action-packed story.  As its “meaning” is debated by the romance’s characters themselves, the reader surely has no obligation to have a single fixed opinion.  But whether in the nautilus shell or in the construction of the poem, there is a there there.  According to Shelley, poets were the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.”  But the medieval poet could rightly hope to surpass even that grandiose claim.  The medieval poet could claim to participate,  in howsoever small measure, in the artistic activity of the divine Creator of all things visible and invisible.

* Fredrik Macody Lund, Ad Quadratum: A Study of the Geometrical Bases of Classical & Medieval Religious Architecture  (London: Batsford, 1921)

Memorial Day

On Memorial Day this year we enjoyed a delightful pot-luck supper organized by an old, generous, and endlessly hospitable friend, who had gathered a group mainly of elderly familiars of many years.  Of course one always “does” something on Memorial Day weekend, but it rarely is to focus consciously on our nation’s dead warriors.  More prominent in our thoughts is the opening of the pool.

Now that practically all the “greatest generation” is gone I think it might be time to include within our memorializations a fuller recognition of the many thousands of veterans who survived the war in a sense more technical than actual.  That is, I think a very large number of men, and then by inevitable process their spouses and children, should be recognized as long-term casualties of war.  I think this when I reflect on the three members of my own family—my father and his two brothers—who fought in the war.  None was killed or seriously wounded; but I have concluded in retrospect that all three were significantly impaired by the experience.  They did not give up their whole lives, but enough of them to show, enough to earn a kind of spiritual partial credit in our national memory.  Details here are not particularly important.  They varied with every one of the war’s participants; certainly they were different for the three brothers who have this week been so much in my mind.  But the imposition of protracted trauma on so many of our young men for so extended a period left the whole country wounded in a fashion I am only now, three-quarters of a century later, able to realize.

Of course in presuming to judge in such matters, I have to be aware that there are many kinds of wounds including, perhaps especially including, those inflicted by parents.  The only thing more difficult to assess honestly than one’s own parenting is that of someone else.  There is usually a naturally loving relationship between grandparent and grandchild.  Certainly the unique joys of being a grandparent are great enough to survive being the stuff of bumper stickers; and most kids love their grandparents.  Even were there no piety, there should always at least be prudence.   Hence I try to assess my own forebears with the forbearance I will require, and certainly must hope for, from my own posterity.  Of course I loved my grandfather Fleming, and have a few jovial memories of him.  But when from the vantage point of my own old age I really reflect upon the way he treated his children, and more especially the way he treated his wife, I have to conclude that he was a hard man, the product of a hard life.  Its precise details were not within the public domain of family discussion.  The high point of his life, after which all seems to have been some kind of decline, came early.  He had been a recruiting sergeant in the Spanish-American War of 1898.

He regarded this conflict as “the real end of the Civil War”.  His argument was that it provided young (white) Southerners the chance to reintegrate with the United States, and join as fellow Americans with their old regional adversaries in the common cause of whipping “tyrants”—as their grandfathers had in the Revolution.  For years I believed that that was an adequate account of our national episode of belligerence with the sorry remnants of a cancerous Spanish empire in its third century of rapid decline.

He and his wife were a rather odd couple.  She was oppressively religious and dutiful.  If he ever darkened the door of a church, I was unaware of it.  They were the parents of seven children, four sisters and three brothers.   My own father, Marvin, born in 1906, was the middle son.  He was always very close to his elder brother John, for whom I was named, and who remained a lifetime inspiration to me.  The youngest son, Wayne, was significantly younger than his brothers, but all were of an age to be overwhelmed by the Depression along with their father and practically all of working America.

To this day the Depression plays a larger role in our national pathologies than we may recognize.  In this regard, the world war, horrible though it was, actually takes on an ambiguous cast.  The New Deal struggled to get us out of the Depression, but the war really did get us out.  What was true 0f the nation was even truer of the individual lives of its men.  The war offered purpose and authorized agency that the economic malaise of our national life could not.  But it also so distorted the lives of many of those who fought it, and so disturbed the moral rhythms of the country to which they returned victorious as to make them in large measure strangers in a strange land.  In its aggregate, a national trauma of this size was different in kind rather than in degree from the experience of Vietnam, large as that was, or from our continuing “low visibility” conflicts prosecuted by voluntary professionals in Iraq, Afghanistan, an who knows where next.  That distinction, however, can hardly comfort our contemporary casualties.

All three of the Fleming brothers were enlisted men.  John, who never rose above the rank of seaman, served on LSTs, including at Anzio, where his ship suffered many casualties.  But the only military thing he talked about, endlessly and somewhat boringly, was the awesome sight of the port of Plymouth on the eve of the Normandy invasion.  My father and Wayne were both petty officers.  My father fought all the way from the Battle of Midway to Okinawa, and he did not want to talk about any of it.  Wayne may have had it the worst.  He was a sergeant in a tank crew in some of the most desperate fighting in the northern advance from Normandy.  He had seen unspeakable things, which in rare moments he did nevertheless manage to communicate, sort of.  His closest friend had had his head blown off, I believe literally, while fighting next to, or at least near to my uncle.  He told me the worst thing about war was its smell, the stench of rotting, swollen cattle carcasses in every field and along every roadway in France.  I do not think he ever entirely escaped that stench for the rest of his life.  Who could?

Israel Potter

Spasms of virtue have been a curse in my life, sort of like the grand mal seizures suffered by epileptics, only we don’t call them grands bons.  One came upon me a couple of weeks ago.  It occurred to me that though the clock keeps ticking, I still had never read Melville’s Pierre, or the Ambiguities.  I was determined to read one or the other of them.  I am prepared to allow that, as existential crises go, this one is pretty rarefied.  I realize that there are probably many quite sensible people prepared to meet their Maker without having ever read Pierre, or the Ambiguities; but they may not be retired professors of English.  So I metaphorically girded my loins and reached for the relevant volume of Library of America.

There are some strange summer mornings in the country, when he who is but a sojourner from the city shall early walk forth into the fields, and be wonder-smitten with the trance-like aspect of the green and golden world.  Not bad, I guess, but I still had 140,000 words to go.  Then God sent me a message.  I actually nodded in my easy chair, just for a millisecond, and the book fell from my grasp, closing as it dropped into my lap.   When I reopened it, somewhere toward its thick middle, it was fortuitously at the title page of a completely different novel: Israel Potter, His Fifty Years of Exile.  I am not sure that I had even heard of this title before, but as though responding to the command of some invisible power, I abandoned Pierre Glendenning in favor of Israel Potter.

Israel Potter is an historical novel—sort of.  When it appears as a Netflix film it will be prefaced by the claim “Based on a True Story”.  But modern sociology teaches us that the superstructures erected atop even firm foundations may be rather rickety.  Here’s the story, the rudiments of which Melville found in an obscure autobiography, dictated by or ghosted for its author in the 1820s.  Israel Potter was born into a pioneer colonial family in what is now Vermont somewhere around 1750.  Youthful disappointment in love led him to flee his rustic family farm in favor of the life of the loner-adventurer.  He first became a trapper, following the life of the Canadian mountain men.  Later, he went to sea, a part of the burgeoning merchant marine industry that was a mainstay of the New England economy from early times.  In June of 1775 he was conveniently in port in Boston when the Battle of Bunker Hill went down.  If he didn’t personally fire the shot heard round the world, he still played no mean part in those famous early encounters with the Redcoats.  As the Revolution got serious, the Continentals desperately needed a navy.  They were facing the greatest naval power the world had ever known.  So Potter, an experienced seaman, became an American sailor.  Very soon his vessel was captured by the Brits, and the whole crew shipped as prisoners back to England.  In England this was thought of as “military recruitment.”  There were not all that many young men who truly volunteered for the life of a common sailor on a man-of-war in the service of King George.  But Potter was a hard case, and thrown into chains.

This is where the possible historical part wanes, and the unquestionably novelistic part takes off.  The rest of the book is the account of repeated escapes, recaptures, narrow scrapes, marvelous adventures with famous men, and decades of proletarian misery as a fugitive in the dark Satanic mills of industrial poverty.  Potter was finally repatriated only in 1826, arriving in the Back Bay of Boston on the Fourth of July.  Nobody remembered him, certainly not the American government, which denied him a pension “by certain caprices of the law.”  No one ever knew (save Melville), the details of Potter’s service as a secret diplomatic courier between radical sympathizers in Britain and Ambassador Benjamin Franklin in Paris, that he had served as chief lieutenant to John Paul Jones in that madcap admiral’s most desperate exploits, including the combat with HMS Serapis in which a saber slash across Potter’s chest joined with the signs of an ancient wound at Bunker Hill to render him the “bescarred bearer of a cross,” or that he had witnessed the disgraceful treatment of the American hero Ethan Allen in his British captivity.  So far as I know he never met the infant Abraham Lincoln or Sojourner Truth, but otherwise it was pretty much a clean sweep of our early notables.  Particularly memorable is the “portrait” of Benjamin Franklin in his Paris rooms.  His American contemporaries practically idolized the man, to whom they always gave the honorific “Doctor,” and whom they regarded as a combination of Rousseau, Kant, and the great naturalist, the Compte de Bouffon.  Here is Israel’s account of his first glimpse of the great man: Wrapped in a rich dressing-gown—a fanciful present from an admiring Marchesa—curiously embroidered with algebraic figures like a conjuror’s robe, and with a skull-cap of black satin on his hive of a head, the man of gravity was seated at a huge claw-footed old table, round as the zodiac.  It was covered with printed papers; files of documents; rolls of MSS.; stray bits of strange models in wood and metal; odd-looking pamphlets in various languages; all sorts of books; including many presentation-copies; embracing history, mechanics, diplomacy, agriculture, political economy, metaphysics, meteorology, and geometry….

Israel Potter is one of Melville’s minor works.  The funny thing about minor works, though, is that you first have to have some major works against which they can be judged slighter.  Everything about the great writer is here, especially his fastidiously researched details, his wit, his keen sense of narrative, and his boldness of symbolic conception (Israel in the brick factories of Egypt being one particularly brilliant touch).  But the thing that struck me most is the book’s enthusiastic patriotism.  Melville was no political patsy or company man.  One of his themes is the unseemly haste with which Americans were already able by mid-century to forget their revolutionary origins.  His sense of irony never grows dull from periods of long disengagement.  But for him the American Revolution was irrevocably about human freedom, and those who won it were the champions of the whole human race.  This was still the national consensus expressed in the Fourth of July celebrations of my own early years.  You won’t find much like it in the editorial pages of our opinion-makers today.  Of course there is still the minor problem of Pierre, or the Ambiguities.

How I Became a Famous Scholar

 D. D. Home Getting a Rise Out of His Aucience

One of my two academic children, the anthropological one in Montreal, recently approached me to voice concern about my scholarly Nachlass.  I use the German term, which is slightly less spooky than the English relics or remains.  Luke knows that I have written quite a lot of stuff over the years, including boxfulls of still unpublished papers, just lying around. What is worse from a scholar’s perspective is that I do not even have a complete list, or bibliography, of published works.   He wants all this to be available to the world; and it speaks eloquently of his character that the legacy that concerns him is this one.

This is where Academia.edu comes in.  Luke suggested it is the solution to the Nachlass problem.  Academia.edu is a huge platform, a single vast composite scholarly journal where academics can display their work, completed or in progress, and discover interesting work by other scholars.  It is a showcase of brainy Zuckerbergian “connectivity”. Many famous scholars participate, include numerous of my friends and old students.  It seems to be particularly well-patronized by younger scholars, for whom it can serve as a professional showcase.  The Academicians tell you how many readers you have, how many times your name has been mentioned by others.  It’s sort of like Tinder, as I understand it, except that position aimed for is not temporary and horizontal but vertical and tenured.

I actually had signed up a long time ago, though I had forgotten.  I forgot, too, that I had even published an essay there—a piece about Delmore Schwartz’s short story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”. I won’t tell you how I came to write that.  But since I clearly didn’t understand the system, my method of presenting it was as effective as filing it in a locked drawer.  So I needed to begin again.  The first scholarly squibs I committed to posterity are probably in the pages of Notes & Queries around 1963.  Pending further searching, I can do nothing more on that score. But my very first published essay I did remember well.  It dealt with philological minutiae in Browning’s dramatic dialogue “Mr. Sludge the Medium”.  The model for the satirized subject of this poem was a famous Hiberno-American spiritualist, D. D. Home (1833-1886), who had a sensational international career as a psychic, clairvoyant, levitator and table-rapping medium.  Browning obviously thought him a humbug.  Home had emigrated to America as a boy and spent his years of linguistic formation in upstate New York before returning to Britain to conduct séances for the rich and famous.  It occurred to me in reading “Mr. Sludge” that among other objects of Browning’s scorn were possible Americanisms in Home’s English.  They are the subject of “Browning’s Yankee Medium”, which was published in the journal American Speech, vol. 29, in 1964.  Were I to write a précis of this brief essay it would go something like this: “A seminar paper dealing with some minor philological points in a poem you have never read by a Victorian poet most people have forgotten.”  I mounted this paper into my barren niche at Academia.edu.

What happened next was dramatic.  Within twenty-four hours my paper had attracted one thousand, three hundred readers from all over the interconnected world.  Academia.edu congratulated me upon being, at the moment, among the top 1.6% humanistic scholars in their whole outfit.  They further suggested that I upgrade from the free service to “Academia Prime,” which I could do for the mere pittance of a hundred bucks.  The advantages of Academia Prime, though actually a little opaque to me, clearly promised yet more cossetting of the ego, and I sprang for it.  Maybe I could get it down to 1.5%?  Having satisfied the demands of historical priority, I then set out more seriously to implement Luke’s suggested plan, which was to begin by posting now and again a previously unpublished essay in conjunction with one that, though published, was to be found only in a rather obscure place.  As the example of the former I mounted “The Many Musics of Luís de Camões,” a literary-musico study of the Portuguese epic poet.  From the latter group I sought out an underappreciated essay on the relics of Thomas à Becket in his medieval shrine at Canterbury.  The first of these is merely brilliant, the second transcendentally so.

You can accordingly imagine my puzzlement at what can at best be described as a muted response from the Internet.  I did not attract thirteen hundred new readers.  Five people took a look at the Camões essay; that was the same number that over a period of probably three years had read my essay on dreams.  However, nobody had looked at the masterpiece on the Becket relics.

A few nights ago, at a friend’s book-launching party, I talked with an eminent nonagenarian colleague with whom I had not conversed in many months.  He told me he was writing a book.  That did not surprise me.  He has written many fine books, one of his themes in retirement being his youthful military service as an aviator in World War II.  But the subject of the work-in-progress did surprise me: Shakespeare’s King Lear.  He said he had at last understood the essence of Lear’s tragedy, as crystallized in a terrible scene (iv, 7) in which the King in his insanity is able to recognize neither his loving daughter Cordelia nor his faithful liegeman Kent.  The King says I am a very foolish fond old man, fourscore and upward…a likely prospect for a upgrade, I’d say.

Menacing Medievalists

A very large convention of medievalists is about to convene in Kalamazoo, MI; and in this regard our newspaper of record on Sunday published a lengthy article that has fluttered the medieval dovecotes by advertising Medieval Studies as another battlefield in the culture wars.  Specifically a growing group of medieval scholars, generally of the younger generation and of radical political stripe, are attacking "traditional" Medieval Studies for fostering racism and other criminal bigotries, and particularly for providing aid and comfort of proponents of white nationalism and hawkers of white supremacy.  Members of an emergent group called "Medievalists of Color" have become prominent in the discussion.

Medieval Studies have by no means been exempt from controversies.  A lot of my own career has involved debate and polemic.   A fruitful ferment is not foreign to any aspect of humanistic study. Disciplinary expansion and adjustment is more or less constant.  There is an unceasing undertow of intellectual revisionism, new models and schools of thought, improved techniques, new “approaches”, many accompanied by new insults to the English language in the “foregrounding of marginalized voices” and that sort of thing.  Engagement with “real-world” problems is a common aspiration.  Ivory tower types are an endangered species.   There is also the ambiguous operation of a generational or Oedipal imperative.  Young scholars may be inclined to revere their mentors but they also want their jobs.  There are still happy evidences of the ancient apprentice system in academic life, but young people do seek their place in the sun.  The possession of tenure, while not exactly the Olympian superiority of Christminster port-drinkers to the blighted aspirations of Jude the Obscure, can seem oppressive to the untenured.  Tenure once gained, the transformative process by which the Young Turk becomes the Old Fart is a mysterious one which few of us who have experienced it can date with specificity, and none who has not yet can even imagine. 

The term “Medieval Studies” is a rather vague one, denoting no sharply defined object of study or particular scholarly discipline or approach.  But if the term is elastic it is not unbounded.  “Medieval” is an adjective used in European languages to identify an historical period.  If you know a little Latin you can see that it must be a medial period between two other ages.  The pre-medieval period is often called the “Ancient World” or “Classical Antiquity.”  The “age” following is “the Renaissance”.  The period, roughly, is 500-1500.  These are manifestly Eurocentric categories.  But a millennium is a very long time and Europe is a very big space populated by vastly different peoples, frequently on the move.  Medievalists include historians, literary scholars, experts in the history of art and architecture, archaeologists, liturgists, archivists and codicologists, dendrochronologists, musicologists and numerous other ists.   It is all great fun, but the price of admission for most distinguished medievalists, really knowing one’s way around a vast Latin literature, requires years of apprenticeship.  The idea that Medieval Studies is some kind of narrow or parochial enterprise is ludicrous.

The Medieval Academy of America, of which I once had the honor of serving as President for a year, was founded not a hundred years past.  Its mission: teaching, scholarship, and useful publication of materials.  The Academy’s founders were mainly learned Harvard historians and philologists; its headquarters remain to this day in Cambridge, MA.  Like the rest of the human race, they were products of their time.  Among the greatest of them was Charles Homer Haskins (in those days academic gravitas, which Haskins had aplenty, nearly required three sonorous names).  He was a man of parts who had been among President Wilson’s most important lieutenants, an energetic administrator, a master of ancient and modern languages, and a superb writer.  I still recommend his great book, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1927) to people wanting to sample the intellectual excitement of one enduring style of Medieval Studies.

According to the Times, the field of Medieval Studies is inherently “conservative”.  I don’t know that this is true, but I hope it is.  Obviously I do not speak of the “politics” of its practitioners.  In my experience the political profile of medievalists in American and European universities is not much different from that characteristic of other large swaths of the academic humanities, meaning that by large majority they are leftists.  But the twin traditional aims of academic study have been the conservation of old knowledge and the discovery of new knowledge.  Very often the new challenges, modifies, or even demolishes the old.  But only cultural Philistines, fascist book-burners and Communist cultural revolutionaries glory in intellectual vandalism.  It was a very foolish librarian who threw away his Shakespeare first folio once the second had issued from the press.  As the recent fire at Notre-Dame de Paris might remind us, the material relics of medieval Europe remain pitifully vulnerable; and that is no less true of its great spiritual and intellectual legacies.  God bless the conservators.

One of the madder aspects of current political polemic is a free-for-all iconographic frenzy—a kind of Rorschach test in which the inkblots are linked by trip-wires to contemporary cultural anxieties—that fosters alarming interpretations of strange signs and symbols like Pepe the Frog or the circling of the index finger and thumb of the human hand.  That some racist marchers in Charlottesville carried emblems similar to that on the shield of the Knights Templar, which actually says absolutely nothing about the opinions or methods of medieval historians, is cited in the Times’s bill of particulars.  A fair amount of my own scholarly energy was spent in iconographic analysis.  It ought not be a casual pastime. 

One might recall another such episode of cultural illiteracy.  Rudyard Kipling, who died in 1936, had in the 1880s, some years before the birth of Adolph Hitler, adopted as his personal icon of good luck an ancient Indo-European emblem popular with Indian Hindus, among many other groups.  In medieval European heraldry the sign is called the croix gammée or cramponnée.  We all know it as the swastika.  Many early editions of Kipling’s works are decorated with this ornament.  Kipling was fanatically “anti-Hun”.  He practically moved heaven and earth to get his son into the Great War, in which he perished.  In his last years his attitude toward Chancellor Hitler was no more friendly than that toward Kaiser Wilhelm had been.  Nonetheless there is a fairly copious left-wing literature of the Thirties indicting Kipling for Nazism.  The iconography of his good luck charm was said to confirm his imperialism and jingoism.

Several of the more bizarre charges of today concern the alleged medievalism of the Confederate States of America.  But the cavaliers of the South were reading Sir Walter Scott, not Marsilius of Padua.  Scott was no less entitled to his version of the Middle Ages than were other nineteenth-century writers like Marx, Ruskin, Carlyle, Pugin, the brothers Grimm, Maitland, the younger Troeltsch--or for that matter Gilbert and Sullivan: “Though the Philistines may jostle, you will rank as an apostle in the high Aesthetic band / If you walk down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in your medieval hand.”  The same indulgence is of course available to the Medievalists of Color, as also to those of colorlessness.  Let a thousand flowers bloom—unchoked by the tares of virtue-signalling and political correctness.  But the way to handle ideas you don’t like is to examine and dispute—not censor—them.

The white supremacists in the Charlottesville march are advocates of inchoate but reprehensible ideas that have no purchase in American intellectual life.  The totalitarian political movements of the twentieth century, Fascist and Communist alike, had widespread representation in European cultural life, including in its universities.  If there is a self-identified American fascist or white supremacist on any American campus, I have yet to hear of that person; and I am inclined to be skeptical of political “identifications” volunteered by others.  The idea that our contemporary racists are inspired by serious medieval scholarship of any stripe is absurd.

It is my opinion that we have too many Harrisons in our academic institutions.  I refer to an imaginary character in a well-known Frost poem.  “Harrison loves my country too, /But wants it all made over new…/his mind is hardly out of his teens:/With him the love of country means/Blowing it all to smithereens/And having it all made over new.”  There are other approaches.

In 1823 the great philologist, historian, and medievalist Ernest Renan was born into a Breton landscape still physically maimed by the violence of the Revolution.  He was raised in the reactionary intellectual milieu of the Catholic “rechristianization” of the French countryside and trained for the priesthood.  His profound researches into Christian origins occasioned his abandonment of Christianity.  His intense lifelong secular faith would become that of the political Liberals—a term meaning roughly what it means in American English today.  Since he wrote about so much, including the origins of the nation state and the role of inconsistently defined “race” in its development, he has not escaped a certain amount of contemporary opprobrium.  In his own lifetime his deeply reverent but demythologizing Life of Jesus (1863), an international bombshell bestseller, was hardly less influential than the nearly contemporaneous work of Darwin in shaking the already crumbling foundations of the old creedal faith.  A reactionary pope called him “the arch-blasphemer of Europe”.  Late in his life this son of the Antichrist wrote as follows in the preface of a charming memoir of his youth.

In seeking to add to the treasury of truths which comprise the capital acquired by the human race, we are the successors of our pious ancestors, who loved the good and the true in the form received in their time.  The most distressing error is to believe that one serves one’s country in the calumny of those who founded it.  All a nation’s ages are the leaves in the same book.  The true progressives are those who begin with a profound respect for the past.  All that we do, all that we are, is the culmination of a time-honored labor.  As for me, I am never more firm in my Liberal faith than when I dream of the miracles of the ancient faith…