Tea Party

 

I don’t believe that I had ever downed a cup of hot tea before I set foot on English soil, by which time I was already an adult.  Iced tea there had been aplenty, especially in the heavily sweetened  form once (and still, for all I know) common in the South.  However, I have made up for my earlier abstemiousness with a vengeance.  In fact, I have become nearly addicted to Lipton tea, seldom beginning any early morning without downing two huge mugs of the stuff.  I got on to Lipton because as it says right there on the package, it’s America’s favorite tea.  I also remember it as rather cheap, though that is no longer conspicuously true.  For the same money I could probably be drinking a high quality boutique Earl Gray if I just cut back a bit on the quantity.

 

            For I have no illusions concerning the actual quality of “America’s Favorite Tea.”  If I ever did, they were dispelled in 2013 on a visit to Sri Lanka.  I say this very casually, as though I travel frequently to exotic places.  In fact this trip was unique and  for us a big deal at the time.  It is my only experience of Asia, assuming that Turkey, where we had a wonderful trip in celebration of our fiftieth wedding anniversary, doesn’t count.  In 2013 Luke and Melanie, with the newly arrived  infant John Henry, were on research leave in Sri Lanka, residing in post-imperial splendor in Colombo.  Luke, a linguistic anthropologist, was fascinated by various aspects of the linguistic scene.  The population of the country reveals the palimpsest of its colonial history.  The first Europeans to arrive in large numbers were the Portuguese.  Today many of the Sinhalese natives of the cities have surnames like De Sousa, Barros, Gomes, and Oliveira.  There was an important Dutch period.  One still saw on the streets occasional striking Eurasians looking to  me like characters from a Conrad novel as I have imagined them.  A huge old stone Dutch Reformed church, beautiful in its unexpected vastness, rises on the Colombo waterfront.  But of course it was the traces of the British presence and the lingering whiff of Victoria Regina that provided the heaviest Western overlay.  They are everywhere, and one Sri Lankan intellectual told me, casually, that colonial remnants of the civil services are “the only things that work in the country now.”  He was perhaps having a bad day.  English, the “link” language between the majority Sinhala and the minority Tamil (the two official languages) seems to be spoken by almost everyone in public or commercial life. 

 

 

Luke and Melanie had invited us to spend a week with them on a private hired van tour of some of the island’s major attractions, and a fascinating week it was.  It was in some ways a staggering experience.  Oddly enough Sri Lanka, under the name of Ceylon, was a distant Asian land about which I had fantasized as a child.  The springboard of my interest was a set of beautifully engraved postage stamps from the early 1940s featuring George VI’s cameo head against a variety  of picturesque backgrounds, one of which was an elephant herd.  Miraculously. I still have the stamps, of scant financial value of course though forever a young boy’s treasure.  I found in Colombo a fascinating, hyperkinetic, dirty city almost overwhelmed by the internal combustion engine.  Though everyone told me that the density of population of the place was as nothing compared with their experience of India and China, it was enough to overwhelm me.  Genuine squalor is not far to find,  but so also are many elegant sights and private residences.  Americans no longer deserve the right to comment on huge and obvious disparities of well being.

 

It is not easy to get the sense of a place on a short visit, especially under the privileged circumstances we enjoyed, but there was still a slightly disturbing feel.  A single sprawling family, the Rajapaksas, long held most of the power in the country.  Their stranglehold may have been ended by the crisis of the summer of 2022.  At the time, there seemed to be a general awareness and begrudging acceptance  of the inevitability of a corrupt government—one sensed this instinctively in the air rather than by vivid personal experiences-- and perhaps even still some hint of the violence with which the Tamil rebels had been slaughtered in the civil war hovered over the place.  Melanie, as a Tamil specialist and Tamil speaker with many personal and scholarly friends among Tamil experts, perhaps felt this more keenly than others.

 

We saw many beautiful things, natural and man-made, in Sri Lanka.  A visit to the temple of Kandy, in which the great relic of the tooth of the Buddha was being ceremonially venerated, was necessarily one of the highlights.  The cascades of flowers that seemed everywhere a feature of Buddhist devotion were almost overwhelming in their effect.  We stayed  overnight at classy resorts, where Chinese tourists have replaced my countrymen and assorted eastern Europeans as the obnoxious loud-mouths of international travel, and where I earned the gratitude of a young doctor in her medical sari by giving her a few tablets from a prescription bottle containing something vital for one of her patients but unavailable in her country.  But we also spent time in the lovely countryside, and especially in the “tea hills,” so-called, of course, for the many tea plantations undulating over them.  Most of these, we were told, were at least the remnants of the vast holdings of Victorian Scottish entrepreneurs.  A visit to one of them was a part of the tour, and remembering it allows me to return to the ostensible subject of this essay.  We visited a large tea factory which consisted of one huge sorting or grading machine that gave off the vibe of a long toy railroad which, with every shake and jerk of its serpentine progress shook off differing grades of the dried tea leaves constantly being cast by the bushel upon it.  The machine itself, powered by electricity,  was a work of art, its flawlessly burnished teak bars looking like museum pieces.  Surely the date of its creation had been nearer to 1880 than to 1980?

 

The guide at the factory was a beautiful young woman wearing a beautiful sari, the classiness of which derived from the fact that the gold from which it appeared to be made was so tastefully unburnished.  She obviously knew everything there was to know about discriminating among the qualities of teas, and displayed her expertise in a voice that would not have been out of place in a drawing room of Lambeth Palace or at a seminar led by John Ruskin.  Never had I encountered a commercial pitch so upper-drawer, and it was impossible to leave without purchasing a specially prepared and outrageously expensive house selection.  What she said at the end of her  spiel sticks in the mind.  She was concerned to stress the ecological purity of the enterprise.  Everything was perfectly natural (or “organic” as we ludicrously say in this country), and everything usable was used.  There was no waste.  She had given a long list of the European tea retailers to whom they sold their product, few of whom I had heard of before.  “And we keep perfectly clean even the leavings.”  She explained that the leavings were the tiny bits of crushed leaf and stem incidentally caught up in machine parts.  “Nothing is wasted,” she said proudly.  “We sell the leavings to Lipton’s.”

                                 

  

So Long to Solon

 

Newspapers need “lead” stories, and it is often difficult to assess whether they are really important stories or simply the closest thing to something important that some editor could come up with on a slow day.  Despite the fact that the United Nations General Assembly was in session, this week’s blockbuster would seem to be the criminal indictment of Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) on charges of various acts of corruption. 

In response to his indictment Senator Menendez has been vigorous in indignant denial.  He immediately played the race card.  I didn’t know that there even was a race card for Cuban-Americans, but I should have known.  According to the Senator, he was being persecuted by unidentified enemies indignant at the achievements of an uppity, up-by-his-bootstraps Latino.  Even my Menendez, Lyle Menendez, a former Princeton student of mine (presumably no relation to Senator Bob), a man of Cuban “heritage” who in 1989 murdered his own parents with a Mossberg shotgun fired at point blank range in the living room of their Beverly Hills mansion, didn’t try that one. (He went with paternal sexual abuse.  And so far as I know even Representative Santos is not alleging anti-Luso-Americanism). 

Are we to believe that the senator is really guilty? The time- honored  presumption of innocence is a legal fiction that sometimes is very fictional indeed, as it seems to be in this instance.  Senator Menendez himself appears to have pivoted from the preposterous theme of racial persecution to that of “rush to judgment,” which is nearly as preposterous given the average time elapsing between criminal indictment and trial jury verdict in well-lawyered cases.  But is Menendez guilty as charged?  Probably.

 Everyone seems critical of trying cases in the newspaper, but that mode of proceeding does have one clear advantage over the regular judicial system.  Unlike that system, it usually honors the guarantee promised  by the sixth amendment to our Constitution that criminal defendants be provided with a speedy trial.  The newspaper reports are practically billowing dark, acrid smoke.  I doubt that the Times’s lawyers would have let the story be published were they not pretty certain of the blazing fire the smoke temporarily obscures.  It’s been a while since such succulent corruption in which New Jersey specializes has appeared on the congressional crime blotter.  George Santos (R-NY) has been more conspicuous in his mendacity, but Menendez wins the prize for the classiness of the evidence for the criminality involved, which includes gold ingots, a Mercedes-Benz convertible, and a strangle-hold on the halal meat concession for the whole state of New Jersey.  There is also a cupidinous Lady Menendez, not quite up to Lady Macbeth standards, but apparently aspiring.

Several weeks ago, in a post praising Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), whose staff helped me get my passport renewed in time to allow our recent and wonderful trip to France, I wrote the following: Of course, in a state where the baseline for satisfactory senatorial performance is simply to remain unindicted, [Booker] would be a natural superstar under any circumstances. The exaggeration in that sardonic remark was meant to be humorous; but as a constituent who in my layman’s role was pretty sure that Menendez was guilty of the crimes for which he was tried and not found guilty in 2017, I certainly had him in mind when I wrote it.  So if I failed as a humorist, give me credit as a prophet.  And Senator Schumer (D-NY), leader of his party in the Senate, reminds us that “Bob Menendez has been a dedicated public servant and is always fighting hard for the people of New Jersey. He has a right to due process and a fair trial.”  One can certainly get behind that second sentence.  And for all I know evidence of Menendez’s agonistic efforts on behalf of “the people of New Jersey”—even those not trying to corner the market in halal meat—may actually exist somewhere.  But one doubts somehow that the people of New Jersey for whom this dedicated public servant is always working hard are the intended beneficiaries of the $480,000 in cash discovered by investigators in the Menendez domicile, “ ‘much of it stuffed into envelopes and hidden in clothing, closets, and a safe’.  Agents found envelopes of cash inside jackets bearing Menendez’s name.”  I honor the distinction between conviction in a criminal court and the appearance of impropriety, even here where the circumstances stink yet worse than they look.  The Democratic governor of our state, along with two Democratic senators and six out of nine of the New Jersey Democratic House members (who outnumber their Republican colleagues three to one) have “rushed to judgment".*   Caesar divorced Pompeia for allowing herself even to fall under suspicion.

 

Power tends to corrupt, said the great nineteenth-century historian Lord Acton.  The corruption of politicians is ageless, international, and in our own country among the last remnants of the genuine bipartisan spirit.  The more the power, the more importunate the temptations and the higher the stakes for the powerless.  Menendez has been the chair of a very important Senate Committee, that on Foreign Relations,  Among the suggestions arising from his latest indictment is that he may have influenced American policy toward Egypt from corrupt personal motives. 

I know this isn’t really very funny, but as with so much of the political life of the country in recent years, one has to choose between tears and chuckles, and the latter are probably better for one’s health.  I thought that American policy in the Middle East was complex and challenging enough even without having to factor in a senator’s wife’s lust for a convertible.  Mr. Menendez has resigned from the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee but is for the moment emphatic in his denial that he will resign from the Senate.

Among the most famous lines in literature is Francesca’s lament in Dante’s Inferno: “There is no greater sorrow  than to recall our time of joy in wretchedness”.  But to an extent it works the other way around as well: “wretched” events, if you are not too close to them, can invite happy memories.  The committee chairmanship from which Menendez has at least temporarily stepped down has been filled by some distinguished senators from both parties.  Indeed it was long held by the only senator I have ever known personally, and someone I long admired.  I refer to J. William Fulbright (D-AR), who died in 1995 at the age of ninety.  Fulbright was very interested in higher education, and especially in the many dimensions of international study.   He was in his day the youngest college president in America, and his name lives on  in educational circles in the Fulbright Scholarships, designed for Americans wishing to study abroad.)  He himself had been a Rhodes Scholar in the 1920s, and he took a special interest in Rhodes Scholars-elect from Arkansas, the most famous of whom was Bill Clinton in 1968, but the most grateful of whom must surely have been I myself, in 1958.  It was through Fulbright that I got a patronage job in the summer of that year, before sailing for Europe in the fall.  The job, working as a clerk in the Senate Document Room, was a bit more than a sinecure but hardly high stress.  I doubt that the Senate Document Room still exists, but in those pre-computer days every bit of proposed legislation originating from either legislative house was printed in all its successive amended versions and was available for distribution upon request by any legislator’s office.  There was a significant volume.  A single proposed bill could go through ten or even twenty versions in successive amended forms.  The documents were identified by branch of origin (HR or S) and number.  The phone was always ringing with requests, which would usually be handled immediately by dispatch in interoffice mail, which was sent out several times a day.  Now and again an importunate congressional staffer would show up to fetch a document personally. The business was fairly brisk at times, but there were a lot of semi-official “breaks”.  The physical location of the Document Office was very near to the door of the  entrance to the Public Gallery, where we all spent plenty of time and whence as an observer I gathered a lifetime supply of anecdotes involving the lords of the Senate.  It was the heyday of William Knowland (R-CA) and Lyndon Johnson (D-TX).

There were a lot of “temps” like me working in the Senate Document Room, but also a certain number of full-timers who greeted each summer temp with a riddle upon our arrival.  Why is it, went the question, that in the House of Representatives there is a Committee on Foreign Affairs and in the Senate a Committee on Foreign Relations?  I had no clue, of course.  The supposedly hilarious answer was that the senators, who as a cohort tended to be considerably older than the representatives, lacked the sexual vigor to conduct affairs and had to be satisfied with occasional relations.  Even though the mustard-cutting capacities of our aging leaders continues to be a lively topic, that’s not what you might call a really great  joke—nor as offbeat in its humor as getting rich through the certification of halal meat.

 

                                             

  

 

*I wrote this yesterday afternoon (9/26).  As I slept, apparently, the dam of damnation was bursting, and many other legislators are now calling for Menendez’s resignation from office.  Crucially among their number is the soon-to-be-promoted  junior senator from New Jersey, Cory Booker.  Well, I was in need of a catchy title.

 

 

Descent of the Dove

                                         Piero della Francesca (15th c.)
 

 

The two blog posts I mounted from Salernes were achieved only under acute technological distress.  I cannot explain its nature, of course, since if I could, it would not have been distress.  If the situation led me to draw any general conclusion, I suppose it would be this: an octet of octogenarians rarely includes sufficient technological expertise to resolve computer mysteries.  (All the news is not so discouraging: we do continue to be able to change a light bulb if allowed to mass our forces first).  But I am now home and in a more friendly cybernetic landscape. I hope for the best. We arrived last Thursday evening just a little later than we had hoped for.  The flight from Nice sat on the tarmac blasting its fumes into the otherwise refreshing air of the Cote d’Azur for the better part of an inexplicable hour, then dawdled a while more at Orly Airport (Paris) where it stopped to refuel and pick up the bulk of the passengers bound for Newark.  So I felt that I had already put in my sufficient daily quota of airline-seat torture even before we took off for an eight-hour flight to Newark.  But the ground transportation arrangements worked like clockwork—or, if my own twelve-dollar watch counts—better than clockwork.  And there is always something sweet about returning home, even if it isn’t the Provençal countryside.

    

Indeed, a very sweet event was awaiting us: the baptism of nine-year-old granddaughter Hazel was scheduled for the next Sunday.  There was a slight wrinkle in this event, so far as we were concerned.  Hazel lives in Montreal, and the baptism was to take place in Christ Church Cathedral in that city; so our participation in it would be as spectators via Youtube.  But if computer technology had challenged me in France, Covid had made us all reasonably competent at Zoom, and watching a video is a piece of cake.

 

Baptism is the rite of Christian initiation, and since the Middle Ages, in churches of Catholic tradition, it has mostly been administered to infants, with the vows being made by proxies.  The real meaning of “god parent” is baptismal sponsor.  Like millions of others, I have to take my own baptism on faith, bolstered by the “oral tradition” and written testimony registered on an ancient paper certificate.  But in the early Church this was not the case.  Preparation for receiving the sacrament—the rite often was administered at Easter—was generally rather demanding.  Augustine’s philosophical seminars at Cassiciacum, touched upon in my last post, were a prelude to his baptism.  Hazel, though not yet up to Augustine’s erudition, was old enough to make an uncoerced volitional choice.  To the extent that anyone can be said to know the meaning of spiritual events, she had to know what she was doing and want to do it.  So I’m a little jealous.  How proud were her grandparents when we heard her, speaking with a clear and confident voice, promise to renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil.  I can but hope that she will be more constant and successful in this intention than I have managed to be.

 

            Baptism is the first sacrament of what eventually became seven.  The word is derived from the Latin “solemn oath” and the equivalent of the Greek word for “mystery”.  Indeed it is both.  One theological definition of a sacrament is “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.”  Though there are seven sacraments, only two (baptism and the Eucharist) are by biblical warrant required for all Christians.  As a student of poetry, I am inclined to think of a sacrament  as a material allegory in which meaning is conveyed not only by words but by things like water, bread, wine, oil, and so forth.  The most “sacramental” writer with whom most readers are likely to be familiar is Dante, a real man who in his famous poem becomes an allegorical emblem of the human situation.  Early in his poem, when he finds out he is required by Virgil (another real/fictional character) to undertake an arduous journey for which he feels incapable, he cries out in distress “Am I Paul?  Am I Æneas?”  The answer implied by the logic of the poet is: “Yes, you are both of those real  people”—symbolically or sacramentally, without ever ceasing to be “Dante”.

                                                              

  

            Baptism is, of course, a pre-Christian rite, versions of which or parallels to which are found in many of the world’s religious traditions today.  Perhaps the first act of Jesus’s public life was his baptism by the desert prophet John in the Jordan River.  According to the gospels, the spirit of God audibly approved the ceremonial act while descending on Jesus in the form of a dove.  This is a not infrequent scene in Christian iconography, my personal favorite being a great painting by Piero della Francesca.  The descent of the divine dove, a bizarre event, is naturally much discussed by early theologians.  One of the evangelists, John, adds a detail likely to disquiet anyone who has ever seen the effects of pigeons repeatedly taking roost on public monuments: “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode upon him”.  Many commentators were eager to insist that the bird was wholly spiritual and immaterial.  But Thomas Aquinas insisted otherwise.  The dove was literal, an actual bird of bone and feather.  That was because it would be beneath the dignity of the Divine Artificer to use anything that wasn’t real.  A famous Dante scholar of an earlier generation, Charles Singleton, used this theological argument in explaining the nature of Dante’s Commedia, a poem in which “real” history and allegory are sutured into an indivisible unity.

 

            In this instance the binding was also generational.  The figurative language of the baptismal liturgy is in the strange word that Dante used of his own poem—“polysemous,” having many layers of meaning.  Baptism is a symbolic cleansing or washing.  It is a symbolic death, burial, and resurrection.  It is a renovation of what is old.  It is the spiritual exemplification of being “born again”—a concept that must have baffled many of Jesus’s first admirers.  “Nicodemus saith unto him, ‘How can a man be born when he is old?  Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?’”  It is easier to see that Nicodemus didn’t at first get it than to get it oneself.  His words are just as strange to an eighty- as to an eight-year-old, but strange in a very different way.  Grasping the  idea of putting off the old self in favor of a new self requires living for a few seasons in the skin of an old self.  Wordsworth knew this and expressed it in a few short lines of what seems on the surface a rather simple poem, a verbal sacrament:

 

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

 

 

Cassiciacum in France

                                            at Cassiciacum today
 

We approach the end of our Provençal idyll. Two of our number left early this morning for the station at Les Arcs, thence to be whisked by TGV to Paris and some quick museum hopping before a later departure on the Eurostar and home to London. We who remain—Joan and I and the hosts—are feeling more than a little wistful suddenly facing the approaching end of another—another what exactly? House party? Long country home week-end? How to characterize a unique event that is at once refreshing and exhausting, at once a party and a taxing seminar? A partially useful parallel comes to my mind. Just about this time of the year somewhat more than sixteen centuries ago, in a landscape not unlike the one in which we now find ourselves, the young Augustine began an extensive rural vacation at a large country house near Milan in northern Italy. The spot was called Cassiciacum, and it deserves its place in the geography of intellectual history alongside the Stoa, the rue Saint-Jacques, the Berlin Akademie, or the two Cambridges. For it was at Cassiciacum in the year 386 that the young Augustine came to certain conclusions destined to have a huge impact on more than a thousand years of our intellectual history. Augustine retreated to Cassiiacum with quite an entourage in tow: including his mother, his son, his frequent sidekick Alypius, and another friend and colleague, a rhetorician named Verecundus. The seekers after truth met daily, mostly in the open-air classroom of a small garden nook. But sometimes, presumably led by Verecundus, their discussions took place in the partial shade of the still laden or recently despoiled grapevines that were an important part of the place’s agricultural activities. Just as the poetry of Homer has played an important role in all aspects of Greek education—including that being pursued by doctors and lawyers in training—the Aeneid of Virgil had become the fundamental textbook for Latin learners. How we might wish to have the lecture notes of Verecundus or of Augustine himself! How sweet an idea it is: reading through and discussing a book of Virgil’s epic lounging among the vineyards! Our daily seminars at Salernes in the “middle” Var, though perhaps less philosophically consequential, were probably a good deal more vinous. We have been a smaller group than that organized by Augustine, smaller and considerably older. There are, or were before today, eight of us distributed into four couples, We are all octogenarians, Some of us have been friends for more than sixty years, with the origins of friendship in our shared undergraduate days at Oxford. Several others are united by collegial ties in the British business world going back many decades, And the topics we have discussed endlessly have been fairly light on theology and very heavy on politics. With the world in such a mess this is perhaps inevitable. From that point of view the parallel with Augustine’s Cassiciacum is inexact. But there was also much great talk about books and music, endless captivating anecdotes from personal and professional experience. We are emerging from a fortnight’s festival of friendship. And, given our ages and the way of the world, we can hardly be certain that there might be another, or even others, in the increasingly uncertain future. So we face our own departure for America tomorrow with hearts full of gratitude to our hosts Andrew Seth and his partner Lee Godden, but also with a wistfulness ever to see associated with the unique sights, sounds, and perhaps above all the smells of an old Provençal farmstead.

Temporizing in Provence

        We arrived; we looked around; we were immediately conquered once more by this particular familiar  and enlessly charming part of Gallia.  Under these circumstances it seems absurd to worry about s blog post; so I won't.  I promise that with luck I might have a more substantial offering to share next week.  For the moment I must follow the advice of an important guru in my life: When in doubt, get horizontal.

The Beauty of the Lillies

 

                                                                                      Little Mac
 

I make little effort to “keep up” with current literature.  Ars longa, vita brevis est.  With so many great books of the last two thousand years still on my to-do list, it seems inefficient to limit the field to the last two issues of the New York Review of Books.  I think my principle is sound, but of course it means that I will never get around to some very important books published during my own lifetime.  But every now and then the Library of America allows me to catch up just a little.  I must have been in junior high school when the first volume of Bruce Catton’s three-volume history of the Army of the Potomac appeared (Mr. Lincoln’s Army [1951]), soon followed by Glory Road [1952] and A Stillness at Appomattox [1953]).  This trilogy made quite a sensation, winning for its author both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.  Later Catton wrote considerably more about the American Civil War.  He was not an academic historian but a journalist with historian's chops and a powerful narrative style.  Some have regarded his work as “middle-brow”; but now that I have belatedly gotten around to it, I find it rather wonderful.

 

The opportunity was thrust upon me by the Library of America, which recently republished the trilogy in its usual elegant format in a single volume.*  This alone would be sufficient to declare the work(s) a classic.  The Civil War must be the most written about topic in American history.  The centennial events of the 1960s inspired a publishing binge, one that continued through the very popular television mini-series by Ken Burns.  The last thing I read about the Civil War was another Pulitzer Prize book, Battle Cry of Freedom (1988), by my colleague and friend James McPherson.  There will be no actual last word on the subject, but to my amateur eye Battle Cry of Freedom comes close.  Let a thousand flowers bloom.  One epic event will spawn many epic books.  Horace said that the Trojan War was the only subject for the epic.

 

Part of the brilliance of McPherson’s book is its range.  Its subject is a fairly broad historical period—the subtitle is “The Civil War Era”--and it deals much more seriously than does Catton’s with political and social history.  Catton—in this trilogy—rarely strays far from military history.  Mr. Lincoln’s Army deals with the first year of the War, focusing on the early battles, and especially on the peninsular campaign (the failed attempt of the Union army to capture the Confederate capital, Richmond, by marching from the southeast up the peninsula between the James and York Rivers).  The subtitle could have been “The Conundrum/Tragedy/Paradox of George McClellan.” I refer, of course to General George B. McClellan, the supreme commander of the Union forces in the War’s first year, the unsuccessful Democrat presidential candidate in 1864, and more than ten years later Governor of New Jersey.  During the War he was also known as “Young Napoleon” or “Little Mac,” the Big Mac still happily unknown. 

 

History (meaning here the work of historians) now takes myriad forms, but I still believe that historians should always recognize, as etymology does, its connection with story, a crafted narrative.  Catton is a great story-teller, and the story he tells about George McClellan is fascinating both as structured narrative and psychological suggestion.  And much of his story seems highly relevant to the current national moment, which often seems to suggest that we are in the grip of a cold civil war.  The only divisions in the America of 1861 were not limited to those between North and South.  Within the Union Army leadership there were serious conflicts of thought, mistrust, and dislike just as there were hotter heads and cooler heads among the intrusive politicians in Washington and in the state houses.  I found the third long  chapter in the first volume, “The Era of Suspicion,” particularly illuminating.  For there was suspicion galore.  Lincoln was not spared his share, nor was McClellan.  What does he know about fighting?  Why won’t he fight?  Suspicion ruled the sublime and the ridiculous?  Why are certain officers so solicitous of the civilian property of the enemy, including the chicken sheds and the fat hens therein ?  Why are the camp fires of that Illinois bunch so smoky?  What is the war really about?  Lincoln’s official line was that the war was necessary to “preserve the union”, regarded as an unquestioned, sufficient terminal good in itself.  The line in the Confederacy was that the issue was “states’ rights,” an issue current in southern political thought long into the twentieth century.  But just beneath the surface the war was always about  the South’s “peculiar institution”, human bondage, whether this was actually stated or not; South Carolina did not secede over an abstract political theory.  The issue was far more material.  A huge part of the material wealth of the South resided in the fungible assets of the enslaved souls on which it was founded.

 

McClellan was in many ways an admirable soldier and man.  But he absorbed the notion that he uniquely had been personally entrusted with the possibly divine mission of saving the United States of America.  He didn’t quite have a God complex; but it certainly was at the archangelic level.  With such frangible cargo in his hold, he tried never to sail on storm-tossed waters.  War, alas, is by nature a tempest.  Soldiers under his command loved him for his sincere and cautious concern, or prudential restraint, and he basked in their hurrahs.  He was not about to act rashly.  The exasperated President came to fear he would never act at all.  He famously told McClellan: “but you must act”.  The general was impressive in his wind-up.  But where was the delivery?  He was ever preparing, marching, camping, decamping, laying log highways, and waiting for better weather.  He generally overestimated the strength of opposing forces, sometimes ludicrously overestimated it.  There developed between President and Generalissimo what might be called a healthy mutual disrespect.  On the question of slavery McClellan seems to have been a “moderate”:  he was of course against it, but moderately.  He regarded the baying abolitionists in New England as a part of the cross he bore.  But right from the start there was a large and principled presence within his own Union army that was immoderately hostile to slavery.  Attitudes toward John Brown, executed in 1859, are a good indication of opinion.  R. E. Lee had called Brown’s exploit the “most infamous crime” in American history.  But to thousands in blue he was a martyred hero.  A sizeable section of the Union Army came from the “new” frontier states on which the slavery debate had in recent decades been focused.  Anti-slavery sentiment was particularly strong in the regiments of German-Americans under McClellan’s command.  Those who fled Old Europe in the long wake of the reactionary aftermath of the 1848 revolutions had not come to America in admiration of its curious sectional deference to chattel slavery.  One is apt to be impressed by what people say and do in the face of mortal danger, and especially when actually marching toward it; what large numbers in the Army of the Potomac were already doing was belting out “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free!”—part of Julia Ward Howe’s new words to the tune of “John Brown’s Body.  That was at the beginning of 1862. 

 

McClellan was finally forced to act.  The Peninsular Campaign—attacking the South from the south, so to speak—was not without its brilliance of design.  McClellan almost certainly could have captured Richmond had he not been spooked by the Yankee ghost horde of his imagination and the perennially faulty intelligence on which he relied.  (Grant took the Confederate capital only in April of 1865.) But history, and most of all military history, is full of what-ifs.  For the lack of a nail…McClellan had the ironic success of indirectly making R. E. Lee, strategic genius, the Confederate commander-in-chief who would bedevil the Yankees for a long season yet.  So Lincoln finally had to invite more abusive second guessing by replacing “Little Mac”, and to begin the surprisingly long search for a commander with the sufficient strategic skill accompanied by the killer instinct.  On to the next volumes.

 

 

*Bruce Catton, The Army of the Potomac Trilogy.  Library of America, 359. (New York, 2022), pp. 1277.

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?