Freak Occurrence

 

 

 If reading is a serious part of your life, chances are good that you are familiar with abebooks.com., which aggregates on a single website the holdings of most of the second-hand book dealers in the Anglophone world.  I would not venture to estimate the size of the stock thus organized, but it surely must be in the millions.  I am trying not to acquire any more books, or at least to dispose of enough to ensure that the ones I require do not increase the total book space, already too large, in the house.  But for many books I want, or think I want, the prices are so low that from the financial-exertional point of view, it is more rational to order a book than go through the effort of making a special library trip to track it down.  And when I am writing something scholarly, or even contemplating doing that, I often need, or think I need, to gather a mini-collection of books relevant to the project.

 

I have bought some hundreds of books in this fashion over the years, most of them later recycled as donations to the annual Bryn Mawr Book Sale.  Abebooks is quite efficient, but every now and then there is a goof-up in the system or an ordered book is a no-show.  This past week I had a new experience.  We are soon to leave for France where in my leisure I want to think about a little project on religious themes in nineteenth-century European literature.  So I ordered a few light-weight books I shall want to have with me.  The typical price for such books is eight dollars, including shipping.  As they have been arriving, I have simply been opening them, setting them aside, and immediately discarding the sometimes bulky packing materials.  This past week I got three books.  I thought they all related to the project just mentioned; but I only looked at them, really, after a few days.  By then the packing materials had been recycled.  I now discover that one of the three recently arrived books is one I never heard of and certainly never ordered.  It must have been sent to me by mistake, but with the packaging discarded, I now have no way of knowing from which of thousands of bookshops, as no transaction concerning it features in the usually highly accurate Abebook records.  It’s like a gift from a Secret Santa.

 

Here is a freak occurrence in a double sense.  Because the book (whose compiler is somebody named Marc Hartman) is entitled American Sideshow: An Encyclopedia of History’s Most Wondrous and Curiously Strange Performers.  What it is really about is freak-shows and the famous human freaks featured in them.  And before any reader freaks out over my use of the word freak, silently censured by the virtuous but philologically naïve along with other useful words like retarded and handicapped, the politically correct euphemisms of an earlier age, I might point out that the meaning that shocks them is historically novel.  The more traditional meanings of the word are joke, jape, or stunt and a human being of unusual and imposing appearance.  Or it can mean anything very strange, unexpected, or uncommon, such as a “freak accident”.  Onions, in the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, thinks the origins of freak are probably “dialectical”.  (I presume it is probably northern, as I seem to remember that in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight the terrifying green giant is a freke.  But the poet uses the word frequently, often meaning simply “a guy”.)

 

The book is mainly an anthology of the better-known freak-shows organized by P. T. Barnum (1810-1891), often associated with his museum on lower Broadway in New York City.  Of course, Barnum was merely the most famous, successful, and influential of the entertainment professionals who made this peculiar theatrical performance ubiquitous for nearly a century in this country.  It is true that Barnum himself did not use the term “freak-show”, though everybody else, including his business successors did.  He called his offerings “sideshows” or “congresses of living wonders.”  He sought out and exploited people with unusual physical features and medical anomalies: Siamese twins, giants, midgets, bearded ladies, that sort of thing.  Remarkably, he developed them not merely as oddities to be gawked at, but as actual performers, some of whom were compelling as speakers and actors.  He always spoke of them as one would of professional actors of high quality.  Perhaps on account of this, the morale among his odd-ball troupers was generally high, and many were well remunerated.  Many were grateful that Barnum turned their physical abnormalities, which so limited their possibilities for normal social life, into remunerated professions.  But of course Barnum was no stranger to fraud, to which he probably relapsed as need dictated.  His first prominent show featured the “Fejee Mermaid,” which according to the author “was nothing more than a monkey’s torso with a fish tail attached”.  There were undoubtedly some frauds among his later specimens as well; but he actually does seem to have tracked down and put under contract the tallest, the shortest, the fattest, the thinnest, and in general the weirdest-looking human beings alive.  Barnum was a huckster, and it is not surprising that he had considerable success in politics.  He was also principled, to a point.  He was, for example, a fierce and outspoken abolitionist.  However, that did not keep him from beginning his career essentially by buying an old black woman, Joice Heth,  whom for years he put on display as the ancient nursemaid of the infant George Washington and, at 161, the oldest living person in the world.  (She died in 1836, probably in her eighties).

 

Autres pays, autres moeurs: other lands, other customs.  Though our politicians often still speak as though we are in unbroken contact with the early Republic, it was in many ways a strange and foreign land.  Barnum is supposed to have said “There is a sucker born every minute.”  That appears to be one of the things he perhaps should have said, though probably didn’t.  For our young country was full of hayseeds and rubes who lapped up the pseudo-exoticism of Persian dwarves and quadrupedal Malay princesses and other museum attractions on offer.  Americans were not yet three generations away from the London mobs which relished public executions at Tyburn, toured mental asylyms for sport,  and who enjoyed dog fights and bear-baiting.  It is not surprising, I suppose, that they could find unabashed amusement in the mere fact of grotesque human deformity.  I would not ordinarily seek out an encyclopedia of freak shows but having had one freakishly thrust upon me, I have to say I learned a lot about the texture of mid-nineteenth-century American life.  Barnum’s spirit lived on well into the twentieth century, indeed into my own lifetime, with the Believe It or Not! books, radio broadcasts, and newspaper features by Robert Ripley.  According to its own estimation, the “Believe It or Not Museum,” a “museum of living wonders and curious oddities,” is to this very day the biggest attraction in Amsterdam!  Bigger than the Rijksmuseum?

 

 

Passportal

 

This week’s little story, though still in progress, is a very happy one so far and, if nothing else, allows me to approach my weekly scrawl in a wholly upbeat mood.  Amidst all the forest fires, drowning migrants, and legal indictments, the story is a reminder of how many nice people, some of them strangers, one stills runs into on a daily basis.  It is also in some ways an autumnal story.  For summer is winding down, and already, amid the continuing heat and almost daily thunderstorms, I begin to experience that autumn-tinged, slightly wistful feeling that began with my first view of Princeton in the late summer of 1961, when I arrived to begin a doctoral program.  At the time, I couldn’t understand the wistful part.  A lot of good things were happening.  I had just completed three glorious years at Oxford, glorious in part because I had done so much traveling and “goofing off,” as we then called a relaxed attitude towards the more serious invitation of academic work.  But now I was getting ready to be very serious indeed.  The plan, successfully carried out, was to complete the comprehensive  general examination within a single year, get married when that had been accomplished, and begin immediately on a doctoral dissertation (subject as yet unknown) before setting off a professorial career I knew not where.  Expectation but uncertainty: the very stuff of youth.

 

More than sixty years later things are very different—save for the weather.  All of life has become more contingent and slow-moving.  One knows pretty much what to expect.  Just at the moment our expectations are high.  We have tickets—rather expensive ones I have to say—for a flight from Newark to Nice over the night of September first.  Our destination is a lovely farmhouse in Salernes (Var), the sunny property of our dear friend Andrew Seth, who for the past three years has gathered together a house party including several ancient retainers who forged our associations together sixty years ago at Jesus College, Oxford.  I have written about this Provençal mini-paradise place before.  And while one always hopes there might be more yet to come, there is also a certain strain of octogenarian realism that sensibly focuses on the present.

 

One night just about two months ago I suddenly awoke stricken by a night terror.  Dream or reality?  Surely you know the feeling.  You just discovered your wallet is missing.  Your old car has just broken down in the middle of the night out in the deep country.  You slept through the exam.  That sort of thing, only worse.  I actually got up in the middle of the night and crept as silently as I could to the desk drawer in Joan’s study where we are wont to keep various seldom-used but important documents, including our passports.  My worst fears didn’t need confirming; though shallowly covered in denial, I knew what I was going to find. My passport  had expired three weeks earlier!  I could see this even by the faint light of a single bulb and without my glasses.  Expiry date: May 20, 2023.

 

People were not traveling much during Covid.  But I’d actually seen an article in the paper about how now everybody was wanting to travel, and to travel next Tuesday.  The minimum wait time for passports was nine weeks!  (I later would learn that that was the expedited service, with an extra fee of two hundred and seventy-two dollars.)  The backlog was something like pi rounded out to three lines of twelve-point type, but without the decimal point.  The reality of the situation dulled my senses.  Yes, I know that Amazon has next day delivery, but we are talking now about the government of the United States of America.  As I lay sleepless through the dawn, I tried to practice in my mind how to convey this news to my spouse.  At nine o’clock I was at the camera shop buying two very expenses photographs of my very pale and morose visage.  At nine thirty I was at the post office in the little village of Kingston, N. J., headquarters of our nearest official passport agent, Tari Pantaleo, and, as it happens, one of the nicest people God ever made.  Ms. Pantaleo did not exactly put me at ease.  That would have been impossible.  But she was clearly deeply experienced with the flustered old man syndrome.  She was pretty confident that—bearing in mind the aforementioned two hundred and seventy-two dollars part—I would yet be able to frolic in Provence.  Since in my fluster I had taken off for Kingston without my wallet, I had the further humiliation—after going through the psychodrama of imagining I had lost it--of having to phone my already sufficiently annoyed wife to ask her if she could possibly, pretty please, drive up to Kingston with it.

 

Enter stage left very nice person number two.  That would be Rekha Arapurakal, our long-time friend and travel agent.  She told me that once the papers that Ms. P. had sent on to Philadelphia reached the passport office, I could reasonably hope to be supplied by email with a “tracking number,” and that once I had a tracking number, Cory Booker might be able to expedite matters further.  Cory Booker?!  Cory Booker is one of the United States senators from the State of New Jersey.  He is an outstanding national figure.  Of course in a state where the baseline for satisfactory senatorial performance is simply to remain unindicted, he would be a natural superstar under any circumstances.  But that he could possibly be concerned with my expired passport was news to me.  However, I did meet him once at a Rhodes Scholar thing, and I was game for a try.  I went to his website and, sure enough, among the helpful services advertised on offer through his Newark office was the category “help with a governmental agency.”  There was a telephone number listed.  I called it, and nice person number three picked up the phone.  I know only his first name—Zaire—but I’m putting him up for the Croix de Guerre with three oak-leaf clusters.  Zaire was friendly.  He was cautious, but also hopeful.  Naturally there was a form I had to send him—in the post within the hour.  A week later I had an email from Zaire.  He had sent my information to the Passport Office in New Orleans!  Why New Orleans, of all places?  I thought (best case scenario) I would have to trek over to Philadelphia, and was dreading it.  Then silence for about ten days.  The wait was disquieting, but in my mind I established August 21^st as official panic day, and did my best to postpone the anxiety.  On August 9^th I received an email notification  informing me that a package addressed to me had been sent from New Orleans and arrived in Hot Springs, Arkansas on August 9^th.  Hot Springs!  Arkansas!  Who knew?  This package would be delivered to me no later than 6 pm on Thursday, August 10^th.  In fact the passport arrived midmorning on that day.  The new passport has some new security features, including a strange double photograph, half of which appears spectral and nearly transparent, marked by the pallor of terror.  Looks pretty grim, but I’ve got fairly decent hair, considering. 

 

I like to remind myself that our word travel has an alternative version of travail, the pains of childbirth, or (in the French) exertive work of any kind.  All traveling was once hard traveling.  Sometimes it still is, especially for the infirm and the elderly.  Hospitality and hospitals, the venues of hospitality’s principal practice, were especially associated with those spiritually motivated  travelers called pilgrims.  Travelers can need a lot of help.  I am not sure that I had ever before read the message from the Secretary of State printed within my passport.  It is highly relevant to my experience, for it is itself a request for help.  “The Secretary of State of the United States of America hereby requests all whom it may concern to permit the citizen/national of the United States named herein to pass without delay or hindrance and in case of need to give all lawful aid and protection.”  How grateful I am that in a moment of need so many very capable and benevolent people arrived to help me. 

 

 

Elitism

Elitism strikes again

 

            The Supreme Court decision about the legality of race-based college admissions has been almost universally—and in more than one instance probably hypocritically—deplored by American college and university administrators; but of course it has been accepted, for now, as the inconvenient law of the land.  But I doubt that much as been “settled.”  Quite apart from the widespread hope for a different court and a different decision at some point in the future, a large and well remunerated section of our legal fraternity have as their principal task finding ways of skirting such inconvenient laws as have not already been obviated by the friendly commerce of our large and well remunerated lobbying fraternity with the elected members of our Congress.  I don’t think we have any hard data on how the public rates lawyers on mass, only a frequently cited sanguinary suggestion in one of Shakespeare’s history plays.  But on Congress we do have a statistic: nineteen percent of Americans approve of the job it is doing.

 

            For the moment, the outrage of the aggrieved has shifted to another subject: legacy admissions.  That is the practice of giving some degree of preference to candidates for admission who have a plausible connection to the institution already.  This usually means that they are the children or grandchildren of alumni of the institution.  Oversimplifying somewhat: if you cannot have “affirmative action” for the underprivileged, how do you justify it for the overprivileged?  I am not entering the debate on the substance of the issues involved.  Neither one seems to me open-and-shut one way or the other.  The one dealt with by the Supreme Court was decided by a majority but not by a unanimous vote.  But I do want to talk about a topic front and center in the discussions: that is elitism.  Everybody seems to be against elitism, a very curious opinion to be held by citizens of the United States of America.  It seems to me that a lot of people don’t know what the word elite means.  For a long time I didn’t either.  I thought it referred only to the small type face on an old Remington portable typewriter.

 

            Elite is a French loan word, the past participle of the verb elire, which derives from the Latin eligo, the past participle of which is electus.  If electus sounds to you that it might have something to do with English elect, you are absolutely right.  What is elected or elite has been chosen from among plural options on some supposed belief in its comparative desirability.  The system of the American Constitutional political system is explicitly elitist.  We choose our legislators and our chief executives on the supposition of their superiority to alternative possibilities who are not elite or elected.  If you have ever voted for anything, if you have ever chosen one garment over another, if you have ever asked for chips rather than rice on the blue-plate special, you are an elitist.  If you put the Latin reflexive pronoun se at the front of eligo you get seligo, to select.  If you can in today’s English find a dime’s worth of difference between elect and select, please let me know. 

 

            Think of a few instances in which election or selection is involved.  Do you prefer any particular commercial good over another similar to it?  Is  the National Football League Draft “rigged” in favor of good football players?  If you prefer your soft-boiled egg pointy-side up in the eggcup, are you exercising malign discrimination against Big-Endians?  Is it unfair of your teacher to grade your course paper by a means other than the tossed-down-stairway method?  Now very manifestly the process of college admissions has to be an elite process that renders elite results.  Of course electing applicants for admission solely on the basis of their skin color would also be an exercise in elitism, as would specializing on the applicant’s eye color, whether their zipcodes begin with an even or an odd number, or possibly their shoe size.  This is not sophistry or philological arcana.  People who complain about “elitism” in American higher education, and in the practices of selective admission in general, are really complaining about something else, namely the social and sociological results they rightly or wrongly associate with a “good” college education.  But if it seems reasonable to you that the owners and managers of the New York Yankees hire their team members on the basis of their anticipated capacities to play baseball well, or that the Met choose its opera performers on its evaluation of their abilities to sing well, what possible objection can there be to a college admissions committee that tries in good faith to assess candidates on their probable abilities to thrive in, contribute to, and make the most of the educational opportunities in the specific institutional context on offer?  All of the “elite” colleges with which I am familiar are wealth-redistributing charities.  As one small contribution to this mission they have for many years run summer academies and the like, backed by energy and resources, in an effort to give some number of promising high school students from “underrepresented” groups the opportunity and the invitation to glimpse and participate in something like actual college life.  The motive is the sincere desire to inspire and encourage.  These are good faith institutional efforts, and one step ahead of mere symbolism.  But highly selective research institutions do not make the best use of their extraordinary resources by mounting remedial courses in basic literacy and numeracy, fundamental skills that since time immemorial have been regarded as the remit of elementary schools.  It is their elementary nature that makes secondary education secondary and higher education higher.  Though a topic for another essay, my opinion is that serious progress could be made in facing some of our problems of social inequality by yet further focusing national resources on the early years of public education.  But we need to do it with our eyes open.

 

            The schools and their teachers,--or, later,  the colleges and their professors-- should not be expected to do all the work, though they too often are.  “No Child Left Behind” is a great slogan for the right idea.  The limitations in its visible “outcomes” have not been the results of bad faith or the unwillingness to spend public money.  But at least half of our early education, surely, comes from the domestic setting, and from habits, practices, and expectations projected in a child’s home.  The triumph of the republican principle , which allows the individual citizen to express and act upon individual preference in search of  democratic decisions, has rightly been regarded as one of the lasting achievements of Enlightenment.  Yet true elitism, the maximization of  opportunity for wholesome independent choice, cannot thrive in a context of serious social pathology.

Owen Roberts

 

Ann Clwyd and Owen Roberts

 

 

            It will no doubt seem odd of me to write a memorial of a person who died in 2012, triggered by an obituary of his widow, who died less than two weeks ago.  Nonetheless I am moved to do so.  Joan’s sister-in-law Margaret Newman in England sent her an email saying that she had just seen in the Guardian the obituary of Ann Clwyd (1937-2023).  Margaret knew that we were friends of Ann’s.  I was able to find the obituary immediately, and though I thought I had known a good deal about Ann, I learned about several dimensions of her distinguished career that came as news to me.  She was for many years the Member of Parliament for Cynon Valley in South Wales, with many native Welsh speakers (like herself) among her constituents.  She became prominent during the Blair administration, and a figure in the national news, at the time of the controversy over the Iraq War.  The warm obituary in the Guardian includes the following sentence: “In 1963 she married Owen Roberts, a TV director and producer…”  This is the sentence that has generated my blog post.  Owen Roberts (1939-2012) was a friend of very long standing, beginning during my Oxford years, one of the closest I have ever had.  It is true that he was “a TV director and producer,” a datum merely incidental to his being a world-class Mensch.

 

            Many of my life decisions seem have been made rather casually.  As a Rhodes Scholar-elect I had to make up a wish-list of my three top choices of Oxford colleges.  We had all received a copy of the Oxford University Handbook to help us.  I knew nothing of the individual colleges, but Jesus had a least a name with which I was familiar, and its battels charges (food contract) was a few shillings cheaper than the rest.  From the  Handbook  I learned that Jesus was the only Oxford college founded by Elizabeth the First, and that it was especially partial to students from Wales.  What I knew about Wales was a rather pedestrian lunch dish, hardly distinguishable from a toasted cheese sandwich, which my aunt called “Welsh Rabbit” and my mother “Welsh Rarebit”.  I was soon enough to learn a good deal more.  The were many Welsh undergraduates in Jesus, including a sizeable number of Welsh-speakers.  The joke was that if you walked into the front quad of the college and loudly shouted out the name “Jones”, every third window would be opened.

 

            Among the first classmates I met was a very appealing, soft-spoken, good-looking guy named Owen Roberts.  He was a Welsh-speaker from Llan-something on Angelsey, the large island off the coast of North Wales.  He had come to Oxford to read (major in) history, concerning which he already seemed to me to know a prodigious amount.  We were destined to become  intimate friends.  He found my Americanness as curious and exotic as I found his Welshness, the study of which he greatly advanced by inviting me to spend the major part of one of our first six-week vacations in his home.  I left the Roberts household knowing a good deal more about Wales, and the ambiguous attitudes of many Welsh folk concerning England and the English, than I would have thought likely.  If you have seen the BBC video series “The Crown”, you are likely to remember the episode in which the current King Charles is, as a youth, invested in his full splendor as the Prince of Wales.  It is thought prudent by the London powers-that-be that in preparation for this solemn event, it would be a good thing, from the political point of view, if the young prince could learn enough Welsh to deliver a brief speech in that tongue.  So he is sent off to live in Wales under the supervision of a distinguished Welsh linguist, who not surprisingly turns out also to be a Welsh nationalist.  Poor Prince Charles has a great deal to learn, only part of it linguistic.  Owen’s father was in fact a Welsh scholar, among other things.  So I was a bit in that same situation, except for the fact that I was greeted only with warm-hearted friendship entirely without any political edge and without the requirement of learning a word of Welsh—though I couldn’t help learning a smattering.  The Robertses also fixed me up with my first British girlfriend, a lovely lass named Gabriella, home on vacation from her first year at the University of London.  But the distance between Oxford and London, though not very great, proved too great for the relationship to continue.  And by that time I probably had already met, or at least crossed paths with, my life-partner.  Somewhat later Owen lectured me about this woman, Joan, with a tinge of exasperation in his voice.  He told me that it was obvious that I was in love with her, that I might just be lucky enough to get her, but that I had better get on with it.  The rest is history.

 

            Youthful friendships are intense and indelible, especially those of one’s college years, filled as they are with a strange amalgam of serious intellectual industry and madcap irresponsibility.  Owen left Oxford with his cohort, swept up in the whirl of young professional life.  He was destined for distinction as a journalist.  He was for a time the head of Welsh broadcasting for the BBC, but he really more enjoyed working for one of the independent commercial networks.  I was aware of his marriage to Ann Clwyd, though I would not meet her for many years.  Owen had all the virtues of friendship, save one.  He was not good at writing letters.  Before the age of easy international telephonic communication, that was a serious impediment to staying in touch.  And then, far too soon, Owen was struck by the dread disease that he battled for most of his adult life—multiple sclerosis.  It killed him only in his early seventies, but it slowed him down considerably for decades before that.  I kept up with him irregularly, when I was in Britain; and he made one trip to New York, just to say he had been there.  He was already walking with a stick.  I couldn’t get him down to Princeton.  But Joan and I did have a lovely stay with him in Cardiff toward the end of his life.  It was on that same trip, I think, that Ann treated us to a drink in the House of Commons.  I don’t get that kind of treatment around here!  Eventually the disease did overwhelm him, and he died, apparently rather miserably, in the University hospital in Cardiff.  Ann Clwyd, who was outraged by his treatment there, and who was vocal in expressing the view that he “died like a battery hen,” raised the episode in Parliamentary debates about the National Health Service, of which she became a ferocious Socialist critic.

 

            The bitter taste of that final episode naturally depressed me when I heard about it.  But in retrospect it does nothing to cloud my admiration for a splendid man or dull the luster of one of the great friendships of my youth.  I was perhaps remiss in not writing about it at the time.  But I am now glad to be able to do so in reflective tranquility.  So here’s to my friend Owen Dryhurst Roberts (1939-2012).  Requiescat in pace.

Berry Picking

Father and daughter on the berry trail
 

            We are basking in the pleasure of a week’s visit from son Luke and his two delightful kids, the second visit of the year.  Melanie, alas, has had to remain in Montreal dealing with insurance agents and the like.  She has had to do that because her neighborhood in Notre Dame de Grace was visited by a flash flood while the family was away on a visit to the West coast.  The damage to their own basement was relatively minor compared with that of their immediate neighbors, but not so minor as not to need an insurance adjustor.  Actually there has been a fair amount of flash flooding recently up and down the Atlantic coast, including in our own local area.  The heat here has also been oppressive, and I blame it for the impoverished harvest of wild raspberries—which will become the main feature of this post in a paragraph or two.  Weather is big news these days.

 

It must have been on a particularly frigid morning in January, 1964—anyway, shortly after the Kennedy assassination-- that I stumbled into the Library of the University of Wisconsin in Madison at opening time.  I had discovered that the index of real cold in Madison was the funny feeling of the little hairs freezing within your nostrils.  That level had been reached the  moment I put my nose out of the door.  The heat within the vast vestibule of the library was like a rescue party.  There seemed to be nobody else in the building except for a classic old-school librarian of the Gorgon tribe, waiting at the gate.  I set out to charm her.  “Wow!” I said wittily.  “It is just a mite chilly out there.”  “Really?” she replied.  “I don’t much notice the weather….which is a pity, seeing as how it’s the only thing some people can talk about.”  It cut me to the quick .  I suspect that this good lady has long since gone to her reward, but if by any chance she has not, even she must now be talking about the weather.

 

To get back to the local wild raspberries, I have to begin with the admission that strictly speaking they are not real raspberries.  My son Richard, and other agricultural purists, in fact most people, call them wineberries.  The proper botanical name is Rubus phoenicolasius.  The redness is of a particularly alluring nature.  Even if you don’t know any Latin you probably know what a rubric is, an annotation or brief commentary in an old book, especially a religious one like the Bible or the Book of Common Prayer.  In medieval manuscripts these notes were often written in red ink—or rubricated.  And since raspberries confusingly come in three shades—yellow, black, and red—we also speak of “red raspberries”.  Wineberries are both smaller and much seedier than the cultivated raspberries that you get in grocery stores. The seeds are a deal-breaker for the faint of heart, but not for those who grew up on breakfast grits. My opinion, not shared by everyone, is that their taste is more intense, and that they are especially fine in baked goods like cobblers topped by a little vanilla ice cream.  My son Richard despises the wineberry because it is a foreign and invasive species.  This indictment is true.  We know from various historical episodes that it is very easy quite without intention to disturb ecological systems by importing, say, a few of those cute bunnies from the old country.  Problem is, there may not be any old country vulpine varmints to combat the results of the favorite outdoor activities of the over-sexed rabbits.  Somebody, sometime, had the bright idea of importing kudzu into our land.  Kudzu is a voracious predator that ought to be the subject of a horror movie.  It is affectionately known as “the vine that ate the South”.  If you have ever been on an Interstate south of Washington, you are bound to have seen its majestic green curtains smothering the parkways.  On the other hand you might argue—and it’s likely that somebody has—that a country of colonists and immigrants ought to be more welcoming.  If “diversity” is a cardinal good in the human domain, why should we disdain it in the vegetable kingdom?

 

But I digress.  My complaint is not about the berries but about the weather, which I am convinced has this year distressed the plants and  reduced the size of the crop.  It simply was too hot during too long a period of the early formation.  Yet though berries are indeed  crucial to berry picking, they are not what berry picking is really about.  No, what berry picking is about is the effort to find in a few undeveloped spaces of the New Jersey suburban landscape something of the wonder and thrill experienced by a young lad in the deep country some eighty years ago.  This beautiful thing, so delicious to eat, just lying about free to anybody ambitious enough to seek it out and hardy enough to endure some sunburn and berry prickles.  The experience, while not exactly subject to duplication, does turn out to be transferable.  So now the pleasure is mainly in seeing the pleasure of our young grandchildren.  They live in Montreal, and frequently are in the marvelous parks and deep country of Quebec.  They are by no means city-slickers.  Even so they thrill at the discovery of brightly colored succulence superficially concealed among the jungles of unattended suburban land that, so far, has dodged the Jersey urge to cover anything green with macadam.  There is a pseudo-primitivism or rurality in the activity.  It cannot be quenched even by the sound of cars on a road not seventy-five yards away.  According to the ancients, the first age of the world, when Saturn ruled, was one of simplicity and bliss, when the still innocent and untoiling human race fed itself on the uncultivated fruits of the earth.  This was the Golden Age of the poets; and the famous poetic meditation upon it by Boethius in the early sixth century was imitated by the great poets of our language beginning with King Alfred and Chaucer.

 

Young John Henry and Hazel are as yet too young for Latin meters or even their classical English remakings.  But they are not too old to thrill at faint glimpses of Golden Age life.  So it didn’t matter at all that the berries were comparatively few in number and a bit disappointing in their hardiness.  It is the journey, not the destination; and for young sensibilities not yet taught that transcendence is not cool, it may still be found in strange places.  Thus ardent possibilities of the epic and heroic are awaiting discovering even in the “undeveloped” open spaces of suburban New Jersey.  Maybe even, especially there.  To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield!

 

Gilgo Beach

 

 

            Seldom do I find myself in the position of great poets of the past, but I just underwent an Ovidian transformation of sorts.  According to Ovid’s playful testimony he had just written the first words of a martial Virgilian epic when his nemesis, playful Cupid at his shoulder, reached down and stole one of the feet out of his first hexameter line.  Now the line was in elegiac meter, forcing the poet to return to his habitual genre of naughty love poems.  Well, I had already written the better part of an essay about affirmative action in college admissions, a sort of supplement to my last, when it occurred to me that probably neither I nor my audience was up for back-to-back ponderous political posturing.  But mainly I was distracted by an article in the morning paper about the indictment of a suspect in the Gilgo Beach serial murders.

 

            Given the publication statistics of “true crime” literature I at least can claim plenty of company in my interest in historical episodes of homicide.  There is probably a reason that the murder mystery is among the most popular of fictional genres.  Most people are at least aware of certain celebrated historical episodes, such as those involving Jack the Ripper and Lizzie Borden; but I often go back further than that.  Just at the moment I am deep into the case of a famous and consequential murder that took place on the public street in Paris in 1413.  During the endless frustration and ennui of the library lockout of Covid, I discovered many podcasts and Youtube channels featuring or even specializing in homicide, most of them crude and off putting, but a few thoughtful and thought-provoking.  I got caught up in the recent trial in the Murdaugh case in the South, which presented in a particularly troubling form both the “banality of evil” and the Pauline “mystery of iniquity.”

 

            I had not been aware of the case prominent in today’s Times, which manifested itself in the discovery in 2010 of the remains of four murdered prostitutes deposited on wasteland on Gilgo Beach in the greater New York City area. Gilgo Beach is part of an infrequently visited thin ribbon of land—it rather gives the appearance of a barrier reef—that parallels part of the south shore of Long Island.  Other remains, possibly the work of the same killer, were also found later.  Police made little headway, and the case went cold.  As is frequently true, some critics of the police claimed that they had “bungled” the job or perhaps even did not invest much energy in it because of their disdain for the victims.  That is the angle taken at the Times reporters who largely credit the apparent late success of the investigation to a new woman director who reanimated the investigation after its long drift in the male doldrums.  This police executive merits high praise.  However, not every problem in the world is the result of malign discrimination.  Sadistic sexual murder visited upon a prostitute is no less heinous than sadistic murder visited upon a nun or a neurosurgeon; but it is much more frequently and easily achieved.  The occupational activities of such victims are almost always conducted with a certain degree of stealth, and often enough in a recklessness of personal desperation.  If there is no opprobrium to be found in renting out one’s body for the sexual gratification of random clients, there should be no opprobrium to be found in the nouns prostitution and prostitute, both of which have long and stable linguistic histories and are more precise than the obvious journalistic euphemisms “sex work” and sex worker”.  The occupational perils of a woman habitually advertising sex for money on Craig’s List in New York City  must surely be significant, and easily rival those of Grand Prix racing drivers or of sky divers.  Two points struck me in the bail application document of the criminal indictment recently delivered by a grand jury and now printed in the press.  The first is that the highly intelligent killer was as careful and disciplined in his efforts to conceal his identity as he was evil and sadistic in the brutality of his murders.  He enjoyed tormenting relatives of his victims in what he undoubtedly thought were untraceable phone calls, and seems like many deranged murderers to have considered his own considerable intelligence and cunning superior to the pedestrian efforts of a bunch of flatfoots.  This was not an easy case to investigate, and the police certainly did make at least one serious mistake in not earlier fully realizing the significance of a report of the sighting of a vehicle possibly connected to the killer.  The second is that the police work leading to the indictment, however slow-moving and slogging, was eventually brilliant, and to a large extent enabled by forensic techniques and experience not available fifteen years ago.

 

            The accused man is a successful middle class professional, an architectural consultant with recognized savvy concerning the complicated world of NYC’s construction bureaucracy.  He fits several of the expected categories of earlier serial killers.  He is a white male.  He is of such “ordinariness” that he fits plausibly into the protean profiles devised by serial killer experts, an apparently numerous fraternity.  The first requirement: Nobody would have ever expected this of him, though of course at least one neighbor, once the accused had been fingered by the police, was not in fact surprised.  This must raise the question of whether one does know people of whom one does expect grotesquely vicious, cruel, and perverted homicides.  All this seems to be par for the course, serial-killer-wise.  The “true crime” literature might seem to suggest that in cases of this sort sleuths would do well to begin by ruling out all those they think might have done it and concentrate solely on the multitudes who couldn’t possibly have done it, for there only is he to be found.  After the publication and press coverage of the grand jury’s detailed legal document, there doesn’t seem to be a lot more left for prosecutors to do in a trial.  This is less an instance of trying a case in the newspapers than of announcing the likely pattern of a forgone conclusion.  So the police and the press sure better be right.

 

            If the Gilgo Beach murders  offer no relief from our burden of apprehension of the unfathomable depths of human depravity, one may at least take heart at ingenious advances in criminal science.  The indictment document is mainly a meticulous catalog of the accused’s cell phone activity.  The techniques police experts used in analyzing it, though too complex for brief summary here, seemed to me dazzling.  It would appear that the wizardry of electronic communications is now promising to offer as much of an advance in criminal forensics as the analysis of DNA did in recent decades.  Even though I have difficulty with the most basic functions of my own phone, I dimly grasp the damning implications of the various charts and maps of the suspect’s wandering phone(s) and other features of his complex telephonic life illustrating the indictment.  Perhaps it is no bad thing that I usually can’t find my phone.  There is also DNA evidence of an oblique but convincing nature.

Supremely Decisive

 

I have mentioned in the past my admiration for the late Robert Goheen (1919-2008), former president of my institution who, when I was more than fifty years younger gave me a memorable piece of much-needed advice.  He suggested that on validly contested issues I should never be certain that my own opinion was more than eighty percent right.  That is because very few complicated issues are subject to the definitive resolution of a simple problem of addition or subtraction.  Two plus two does equal four.  I am a hundred percent certain of that, though necessarily prepared to face the possibility that there is some arcane branch of mathematical speculation prepared to quibble even there.

 

But our current cultural landscape is full of hundred-percenters, whose hundred- percentism extends to topics that many citizens regard as licitly debatable, such as the constitutional basis of abortion upon demand or the legality of race-based college admissions.  Obviously, I do not pick these topics at random.  Both have been very much in the news recently in the context of Supreme Court decisions.  The Court did not have a hundred-percent decision on these matters; they had a sixty-six percent decision —clearly suggesting, in my possibly naive view, substantial disagreement on matters that I regard as substantially contestable.  But that has not been the opinion of the chief source of information in this household, namely the New York Times.

 

Just at the moment it is a little difficult to feel sorry for the justices on our land’s highest court, affectionately known in the popular press as the Supremes, but my fellow feeling makes me sympathize with them in spite of it all.  In this instance what “it all” refers to is the recently revealed news that at least some of them have discreetly been enjoying the largesse of very rich guys with whom they have been hanging out.  There is probably nothing illegal here.  The Supremes’ job is to know what legality and illegality are as established in all those leather-bound volumes in the background of the photographs of famous lawyers.  But their duty also includes the recognition and avoidance of even the appearance of impropriety.  This is another matter since common sense differs from Blackstone’s commentaries.  If their virtue cannot be as manifest as that of Caesar’s wife, they ought at least aspire to the level of, say, second cousin once removed.  Still, honesty demands the recognition that criticism of freeloading on private jet travel seems a transparent front for an objection to a particular judicial philosophy as expressed in certain of their decisions.  So I shall try to address that matter, sort of.

 

My natural sympathy for the Supremes—any and all of them—is rooted in vocational fraternity.  The justices are the only major players in our government who, like me, are paid literary critics.  There are some differences.  They are paid more, and their remit is a single piece of aging English prose rather than an indeterminate but vast number of pieces in poetry and prose in many languages.  The Supremes’ remit—the Constitution, of course—is of very great, indeed existential importance to the practical daily lives of all Americans.  Much as I love literature, I cannot make that claim about the texts I study.

Political commentators usually divide the court into two groups: the Conservatives (currently in a majority of six) and the Liberals (currently a minority of three).  What the Conservatives are conservative about is language.  They seek to understand what the Constitution’s words meant at the end of the eighteenth century.  For this reason, they are said to be originalists.  The Liberals, sometimes said to believe in a “living Constitution,” seek to interpret the Constitution in terms of today’s cultural realities.  The difference between the two groups often enough manifests itself in historical linguistics.  A good example, perhaps, is this: What are the arms of the unabridgeable “right to bear arms” of the Second Amendment?  Do they include the AK-47 and the M60 machine gun, weapons which nobody in Constitution Hall had ever seen or probably even dreamed of?  In very crude terms this parallels  the division among literary scholars who try to understand old texts on the basis of the linguistic and cultural contexts in which they were written (historical critics) and those disposed to discussing them in terms of more modern critical theories such as deconstructionism, gender theory, race theory, etc.  I am of the former group.  I endorse, that is, the opinion of the neo-classicist Alexander Pope who says: A perfect judge will read each word of wit/ with the same spirit that its author writ.  And I illustrate the method by explaining that for Pope the word wit means “good writing” or “creative  writing”—by no means necessarily humorous writing.  Pope is being classical by “wittily” rephrasing the ancient Roman poet Horace.  Now my own approach to medieval literature is definitely “historical” or originalist; but it is by no means the only or even the majority approach.  In fact my approach has got me into a lot of trouble.  But it is not life-threatening because very few people give a hoot about medieval literature and regard anyone who studies it from any perspective as too weird to worry about.  But the issue is not irrelevant to the classroom.

In the prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer gives memorable thumb-nail descriptions of the participants in his pilgrimage, beginning with the Knight.  I used to advise my students to pay particular attention to what the poet tells us his pilgrims loved, as that features in many descriptions.  The knight loves five things: he loved chivalrie, trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie.  Those nouns are in Middle English, but they have obvious modern English versions.  The trouble is that none of the Middle English words means the same thing as its modern English version, though truth and honor come pretty close.  The word fredom in Chaucer’s language obviously has some connection with the political sense of Latin liber; but the sense here must be translated in our English as liberality or generosity.  One of the first brilliant undergraduate papers I encountered in the Chaucer course at Princeton was entitled:  A knight ther was: a fourteenth century freedom fighter.  The paper was well written, well structured and engaging.  It was also pretty well researched, to a point.  I had to give it a high grade.  The only problem was that it was completely bonkers.  Modern English freedom has lost the very different Middle English meaning certainly being used by Chaucer: generosity, nobility of character.  Chaucer’s knight is an “ideal figure” to be sure, but his military profile is much more that of Yevgeny Prigozhin than of Che Guevara.  The Hundred Years’ War was mainly fought on the English side by mercenary “companies”, such as the White Company of Conan Doyle’s terrific novel of that title.  Chaucer’s Knight is also (anachronistically) a crusader.  The model that this student had in mind was the Palestinian “freedom fighter” encouraged by the first category of eternal Arab enmity towards Israel stated in the Khartoum Resolution of 1967.

 

What most interests me about medieval chivalry is how very different it was from modern military theory.  The knight and his tale are simply much richer and more interesting in their own linguistic terms.  But I should not think that the “Knight’s Tale” is supplying a model of twenty-first century life—which is, however, what a number of very old documents claim to do.

 

I am by no means entirely opposed to maintaining some archaisms in our old documents, especially the sacred ones.  I was sorry to see “the quick and the dead” replaced in the Creed by “the living and the dead”, but apparently some folks were thinking that the original was referring to the two kinds of pedestrians on a Zebra cross walk.  And if a usage has become truly confusing even to educated people, it needs updating.  (So I agree that they needed to do something about “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven: (Mat. 19:14). 

 

How a secular and utilitarian guidebook like the American Constitution has become a sacred text is a mystery to me.  The Founders very sensibly provided a means of changing it, and one of the first things done (tacking on the Bill of Rights) is in practical political terms as important as anything else in the original document.  Many of the Founders simply assumed that there would be fairly frequent constitutional conventions for purposes of paring, revising, and updating.  But it has become in certain minds the profane equivalent of the sacred King James Bible.  If it was good enough for Jesus, it is good enough for me.  Keep the Government’s meddling hands off of my Medicare!  Our great country once celebrated its formidable strength in a unity drawn from diversity (e pluribus unum).  And our great national powers of innovation were applied to the state itself: the state that in Lincoln’s noble words was so innovative in its conception and dedication as to call into question its very viability, an audacity requiring a massive blood sacrifice to endure.  His words and his ideas are as close to immortal as the words of mortals can be.  But the quill pen with which he wrote them down on the back of the famous envelope and the steam engine that propelled him to Gettysburg as he did so are now museum pieces.  Many of the great works of literature in the English language—and I would include our Constitution within the legal branch of that literature—are difficult for us to understand.  That is why we have learned editions with numerous and sometimes lengthy explanatory notes, and a Classics Comics version of The Scarlet Letter.  I could direct you to several eminent English professors who will tell you that John Milton, a seventeenth-century English Puritan, wrote a biblical epic in which God Almighty is the villain and Satan the hero.  That is about as likely as that apes with Apple computers wrote the works of so-called Shakespeare, who was really Bacon (or at least ate bacon); but they have not been banned from Twitter for “disinformation,” whatever that is.  The opinion has no practical effect on your life.  The opinions of the Supremes do.  If there really is a national democratic consensus concerning a constitutional right to abortion on demand, we could either say what it is in clear contemporary English, or say nothing at all.  That is why I see promise in the state constitutional ballot arrangement now moving forward in Ohio.  It could render a democratic opinion, the substance of which  I cannot predict.   But I can pretty safely predict it would not violate Goheen’s eighty percent rule.  To depend upon the mind-boggling originality of the anti-originalist discovery that there is a hidden “right to privacy” in the interstices of several other parts of the Constitution we already have can hardly be wholly satisfying to any honest native speaker. 

                                                          a knyght ther was