Kingwood Thanksgiving

 

Kingwood Forest, not quite primeval but pretty ancient

We managed to spend the Thanksgiving Holiday in a way that accommodated the reality of Joan’s current residence in assisting living facilities at Stonebridge in Montgomery township with a major feast at Richard’s beautiful old colonial mansion in Kingwood township in Hunterdon County.  This beautiful property is far from what you are likely to think of if your concept of the state is constructed around turnpike exit numbers. The surprising truth is that New Jersey, though it ranks at the top of the list of states for population density, has an extensive amount of sparsely populated rural land and even some heavily wooded forest land.  It is of personal interest to me that the county seat of Hunterdon County, Flemington, was founded by an early settler, Samuel Fleming (mid-eighteenth century) whose surname I share.  I think of Samuel as a rather old-fashioned name; certainly my own long deceased grandfather Samuel Fleming now seems to me to have been from another world rather than merely from another generation.  One of the oldest buildings in Flemington still exalts in the rather pretentious name of “Fleming’s Castle,” though it is hardly more than a rather modest frame house that in its present configuration may disguise even more humble origins. 

 

Flemington, N. J., did have one moment of national, perhaps even international fame.  It came in 1935, when its courthouse was the venue for “the trial of the century”.  True enough, in our country trials of the century usually come around at least once a decade, but this one was special because it addressed the “crime of the century”.  A German immigrant carpenter, Bruno Hauptmann, was convicted of having kidnapped and then murdered the infant son of the aviator Charles Lindbergh.  Lindbergh was perhaps the most universally admired hero in America.  In May of 1927 he had performed the astonishing feat of having made the first ever solo flight across the Atlantic, leaving from Long Island in New York and arriving in Paris about thirty-five hours later.   Lindbergh was handsome, courageous, articulate, and highly photogenic.  There was in historical retrospect a downside: he was a voluble philo-germanic antisemite at the time Hitler appeared on the international scene.  Hauptmann’s trial, which was held in the courthouse in Flemington, focused international attention on the place for more than a month.  

 

One of the automobile routes from Princeton to Kingwood takes you through the small village of Rosemont.  Only somewhat confusingly, there is also a place of that name nearer to Princeton, and for all I know there could be a dozen other New Jersey Rosemonts and half a hundred in the country.  Rosemont today seems to consist of perhaps a dozen houses spread out along the right angle of a turn in the inland road between Stockton and Frenchtown.  I say “today” because stretched along the margin of that road is a quite extensive cemetery, fenced in with well laid stone and carefully tended, that testifies to what must have been a much more substantial local population in years gone by.  But of course like destination weddings, destination interments are not uncommon.  The considerable extent of still cleared fields in this part of Hunterdon County suggests that the whole area has long been under cultivation.  So although New Jersey is our most densely populated state, parts of it are considerably less populated now than in previous decades.  Even between the large cities of New York and Philadelphia there are stretches of countryside that suggest in the comparative sparseness of their rural contours the “wide open spaces” usually thought of in relation to the West.  It took me many years of residence in the state to discover and enjoy this pleasing feature.

 

There are two Katies in our immediate family, one daughter and one daughter-in-law.  They are textually distinguished by a small difference in orthography, but orthography doesn’t help with oral homophones, and so for clarity we refer to the daughter-in-law, Richard’s wife, by her fuller name, Katie Dixon.  This is the same means  used in the old ballad to distinguish among an abundance of ladies named Mary: There was Mary Seaton and Mary Beaton, and Mary Carmichael and me.  In any event Katie Dixon, among her other virtues and talents, which are many, has become the historian of her Kingwood property, tracing its ownership at least as far back as the Revolutionary period, when one of its occupants was a proto-American French Huguenot named Lequere.  And if George Washington didn’t sleep in her house, it can only have been due to insomnia.  That’s the vibe the place gives off.  Furthermore, I have a couple of times seen actual native wild turkeys around those parts.  So, a Thanksgiving feast in Kingwood seems about as “historical” as it can get.

 

The name “Kingwood” itself incidentally reveals a typical colonial attitude.  I recently viewed the latest Ken Burns documentary series, “The American Revolution.”  It reminded me of the extent to which colonial populations have been doggedly loyal to the mother country up to the point that they abruptly cease to be.  Many of the place names in the original American colonies are homages to British royalty.  The town in which I have now spent most of my life, Princeton, is one of a chain of villages which included a Queenston and a Kingston.

 

Though timber is not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about the American East Coast today, its forests were formidable.  There is still much evidence on both sides of the Delaware River of what must have seemed in colonial times the utter vastness of its forested lands.  Though Pennsylvania (literally William “Penn’s forest’) now refers to lands west of the river, the man at one point owned thousands of square miles of what is now New Jersey, including the spot on which I am writing this essay.  Hardly a mile east of my house, where US 1 meets one of the three east-west arteries into our town, and now buried in the mess that Route 1 has becomes, lie the scattered remnants of the one-time village of Penn’s Neck.  An old Baptist church now overwhelmed by the super-highway still boldly evangelizes via billboard.  One recent and memorable message: “Despite Inflation, Death Still Wages of Sin”.  Some verities are indeed eternal.  An old cemetery, walled in probably sometime in the nineteenth century but almost certainly of earlier founding date, is now just an extension of  Princeton’s sport fields.  But William Penn once owned it all!

 

Death and the Poet

Phyllis Wheatley
 

            The dark has returned.  Daylight Saving Time ended three weeks ago, and although the change was immediate from the experiential point of view, it has taken some time for the gloom to set in.  This somber turn is not simply a calendrical phenomenon.  I think most elderly people share the sensation that the autumnal reality, which surely everyone experiences, becomes more poignant each year.  And “poignant” is really a rather gentle adjective for what we experience.  I think that oppressive would be more accurate.  That is, the waning of the year seems more threatening, more inevitable, the more acutely you become aware of your own withering, waiting, and wasting.  The supposedly cheering question—if winter comes, can spring be far behind?—no longer has its solace.  It becomes a real question.

 

            But its answer, if only after real reflection, must be in the affirmative.    Surely the annual death of nature is at least by implication a demonstration also of annual revival or renewal?  How could the human mind be so blinkered and ungenerous as to think otherwise?  We all are subject to the iron laws of our physical existence.  I have undoubtedly written about this topic before.  Perhaps I have written about it every year I have been writing these essays.  I do remember one essay—I think probably just a year ago—in which I talked a bit about Keats’s “Ode to Autumn,” written in 1819 a few years before his youthful death.  And death was on his mind.  In another of his great odes (“Nightingale”) written in a remarkable spasm of invention without which English poetry would be so much less than it is.  Whether it was a spasm of transcendent perception or of alarming neuroticism, he says in so many words “I have been half in love with easeful death.”  But Keats had barely turned twenty when he wrote that.  I am up against ninety.

 

            Certainly the poets have written a great deal about death.  Many of our greatest poems are about it.  If art does indeed hold up the mirror to nature, that can be no surprise.  The laws of thought must lead us to conclude that there is more death in the world today than there has ever been before, for the simple reason that there is a larger population of mortal humans than there has ever been before.  That is another way of saying there is more life too.  Though I am a medievalist, I am a twentieth-century one.  I should not prefer to have lived in, say, 1400, when experts reckon that the world population was perhaps one twenty-fifth of what it is today and therefore perforce also its mortality rate.  There remains a certain paradox, however.  Though death surrounds us everywhere in our newspapers and on our screens, it is but rarely in our personal daily experience, as it would have been in centuries not long ago.

 

I have watched some of the new Ken Burns series on the American Revolution.  It has inevitably set me to thinking about the infancy of our republic.  And since I am a literary scholar, it perforce brings to mind some of our earliest writers.  There are, according to my judgment, but two important poets produced in our early republic: Phyllis Wheatley (d. 1784) and William Cullen Bryant (b. 1794).  Both of them could be somber.

 

          The title of one of Wheatley’s most represented poems is a short essay in itself: “To a Gentleman and Lady on the Death of the Lady's Brother and Sister, and a Child of the Name Avis, Aged One Year.”  Here the dead outnumber the living by a ratio of three to two.  This poem, while utterly conventional in its poetic diction and its consolatory message, is nevertheless very polished in its construction.  Its aesthetic is that praised by Alexander Pope as “true wit”, to wit, “What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed.”  Bryant’s only famous poem, written when he was seventeen years old, has the inkhorn title of “Thanatopsis”—which should mean, I suppose, “Looking at Death”.  If a seventeen-year-old boy could write that, I suppose it not too surprising that my teachers could think a twelve-year old boy ought to read it.  In any event, “Thanatopsis” is the first poem I can remember being assigned in school.  At home, my grandmother had introduced me much more gently to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses.  So In winter I get up by night and dress by yellow candlelight….

William Cullen Bryant (probably a few years after "Thanatopsis")
 

            The old Christian poets could be confident perhaps even arrogant in their attitudes toward death.  Think of Donne’s “Death be not proud…”   Modern poets, when they do confront it head on, are likely to do so with bitterness, even bellicosity.  Does anyone still read Dylan Thomas?   Some still delight in “A Child’s Christman in Wales,” but more will turn their minds first to the poet’s savage protest as his father lay dying:

 

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

 

Or the more direct, but quite possibly intentionally ironic

 

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon…

 

The sentiment of this poem is explicitly, perhaps oppressively, biblical.  But one can almost smell the ironic intention in the phrase that good night.  The connection of death with sleep in simile and metaphor is doubtless a cliché of world literature.  The final lines of Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” use it in what the poet intends as a positive, at least consolatory sense.  Thomas is pretty clearly invoking the expected religiosity of the Welsh chapel.  The title is “And Death Shall Have No Dominion”.  That is an explicit citation of the Apostle Paul (Romans 6:9) “….Christ being raised from the dead, dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him.”  It would be foolish to claim to understand the plain meaning of this text for it is a poetic idea itself, and poems rarely have plain meanings.  But it would appear that that Paul is speaking of a literal resurrection of Jesus and of a metaphorical resurrection—that is, the moral transformation—of Jesus’s followers.   Whether this is in any sense pious, on the other hand, must surely be called into question by the poem’s unmistakable anger.  I think it may have been Chesterton who said of Thomas Hardy that he could never forgive God for not existing.  I see something of similar suggestion here. 

            One of the most successful poems of the English eighteenth century was written by a writer otherwise rather obscure: Edward Young.  Its title is The Complaint: or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality, better known simply as Night-Thoughts.  It is nearly as long as its subject might suggest.  Its popularity was enormous, and there are many echoes of it to be found in our infant American writings.  Quotations from it are to found on the tombstones of some of our oldest burial places. 

 

In an absorbing book dealing with the some of the social effects of the American Civil War, Drew Gilpin Faust, former president of Harvard, studied the rituals of mourning created during the war’s carnage.  In many of them one hears the echoes of The Complaint.  Fortunately the brightness of a new day dispels the gloom of night.  I started writing this in darkness.  As I finished writing, the sun had just broken through what seemed but an hour earlier an impenetrable fog.  That seemed a pretty obvious invitation to conclude.

Wynkyn de Worde

Device of Wynkyn de Worde, heir of William Caxton

In the beginning was the Word…So begins the gospel of John, whose opening sentence proclaims the mind-boggling Christian doctrine of the divine Incarnation in Jesus.  Don’t worry.  I have no intention of writing a blog about that subject.  I wouldn’t dare.  In fact, I shall quibble a bit with John, for anterior to the Word there must have been the Letter.  And though John said that Jesus was the Word, Jesus himself only claimed to be two letters, the Alpha and the Omega.  About letters I must write a bit, for the invention of the alphabet lies behind almost everything in our cultural history. It is extraordinary enough that human beings, unique among all animal species, developed the capacity of complex articulate speech.  More remarkable yet is that they developed means of preserving the articulations of human speech beyond the moment of its articulation and, indeed, beyond the lives of its speakers.  In our language, letters put together make words.  But the Word that concerns me here, usually spelled Worde, was likely a place name in Western Europe made vaguely familiar if not exactly famous in British cultural history on account of the achieved fame of a immigrant Fleming to London in the later part of the fifteenth century, one Wynkyn de Worde. (You can modernize the spelling of his first name, but wy would you want to?)

 

Wynkyn was a journeyman associate of William Caxton, the man credited for introducing into England the craft of printing with moveable cast metal types.  Wynkyn became Caxton’s heir, and after Caxton’s death he eventually set up his shop in London’s Fleet Street, which remains to this day at least the symbolic center of Anglophone printing on account of the newspapers headquartered there of old.   The history of the fifteenth-century printing revolution in Europe features a considerable number of geniuses in the fields of mechanical fabrication, business vision, and commercial innovation.  A German, Johannes Gutenberg, had invented the basic techniques of letterpress about 1450.  His famous Bible dates from 1455.  It is sometimes called “the forty-two line Bible”, and indeed there was some symbolism in the number, though I shall not allow that to tempt me to digression.  William Caxton is called the father of English printing, though his first book printed in the English language actually appeared in Bruges in 1475. But two years later he was printing in London.  I have always though it poetically appropriate that the first English language book Caxton printed there (1477) was Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: a collaborative achievement involving two kinds of creative genius.  But everything about the origins of printing are testimonies to the astonishing brilliance of human abstract thinking and mechanical skill. 

 

Homo sapiens literally means the knowing man.  And perhaps the most important thing the species has known is how preserve for their posterity what it is they have known.  As Milton put it so beautifully: “A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”  When we think of dramatic moments in the history of human progress, we are likely to invoke the invention of the wheel.   On the level of intellection, I should suggest as perhaps the most appropriate analogy the invention of the letter.  The achievement of representing in graphic form the vocalizations of a broad suite of conventional signs catalogued in orderly form in an alphabet, even if we can understand what that means, may not seem front-page news; but it most definitely should be.

 

“Revolutionary” hardly does justice to the development of graphic technology in fifteenth-century Europe.  It was achieved not by boffins or theoreticians but by hard-headed practical artisans like Wynken de Worde, men trying to make a buck.  Letterpress printing is a very simple technique that almost any intelligent person can easily understand.  But to do it involved all sorts of precision engineering in metallurgy, finely tuned carpentry, finely tuned metal carving and casting, and the means of applying great redirected compressive force.  And this is just to speak of the basic printing machine itself.  The material on which the printing was to be applied, mainly paper made of varying materials, but also animal skins, and the inks to be used in the application—all these were matters of the greatest craft relevance requiring expertise to be gained only through lengthy and robust experimentation.

 

So the first European printers were businessmen whose business often required expert mechanical knowledge.  For many of them it demanded also erudition.  That is, they were likely also to be scholars and editors.  Neither Caxton nor de Worde was a deeply erudite man, but many others among the early printers were.  Classical texts were written in Latin and Greek after all.  Among the many famous scholar-printers the Venetian Aldus Manutius (they are known by the Latin form of their vernacular names for obvious reasons) is conspicuous both for his erudition and for commercial innovation.  He could be said to have invented the small format of the modern paperback, for example.  Most readers know the distinction between a folio and a quarto.  A folio is printed on a large sheet of paper intended to be folded once in the middle to make four pages in a printed book.  If you fold the sheet a second time you will find you have eight pages, or an octavo sheet.  (Octo is Latin for the number eight.)  To risk a daring analogy, it is a distinction parallel to that in handkerchiefs between a blower and a shower.  Do you use it to blow your nose or to stick out from a breast pocket to look spiffy?  A folio is likely to be ensconced on the polished hardwood shelves of a fine library.  A quarto, like a modern paperback, is more likely to be carted around in a book-bag or back-pack, bumped and scraped and coffee-stained.  It is much more probable that the folio will still be enjoying its ceremonial status fifty years hence than will the quarto.

 

As Shakespeare gained a popular following, several of his plays were published in relatively cheap individual editions as quartos.  They sold like hot cakes, however hot cakes are sold.  But relatively few of those copies have survived.  They were nearly all read to death, left at the beach, or chewed up by the family pet over the ensuing four hundred years.  But the sumptuous folio put together after the playwright’s death was a coffee-table book, a shower, not a blower.  Nobody’s going to take a folio to the beach!  But the Folger Library in Washington has, I believe, eighty-two of first folios of Shakespeare!  Earphones and books on tape?  That’s a different matter.  Wynkyn de Worde would have been on it like white on rice. 

 

 Kelmscott House,Hammersmith, London

 

I might sometime in another essay or another life report on my own experiences in London in 1976-1977.  What was the bicentennial of the American Declaration of Independence was the quincentenary of the first printing in London.  I spent that year as the visiting fellow of the William Morris Society, housed in Morris’s eighteenth-century mansion on the Thames at Hammersmith, Kelmscott House.  (This townhouse is not the more famous property in Oxfordshire, Kelmscott Manor, Morris’s summer house.)   There was even a little of Morris still around the old London mansion, including one of the beautiful Albion presses that has been used on the famous Kelmscott Chaucer.

 

Rebecca West

 

This essay will be, eventually, an homage to one of the great English writers of the twentieth century, Rebecca West.  Readers frequently ask me how I arrive at the topics I choose.  The tone of the question understandably sometimes suggests puzzlement.  I have no prepared answer, but I do bear in mind what the Venetian painter Giovanni Bellini said about his paintings.  He liked, he said to “always to wander around at will in the paintings” sempre vagare a sua voglia nelle pitture.  Well, in informal writing like this blog I enjoy more than the odd bit of wandering myself.

 

For an American of my origins and generation, I consider myself to be reasonably well traveled, as I have visited several European countries and even dipped my toe into Asia with a memorable trip to Sri Lanka.  But these days that’s probably average for a third grader.  And   the only foreign lands I can claim to know at least slightly more than superficially are France and Great Britain, and in particular England, where I spent three years studying at Oxford and where I met the English woman who has now been my wife for sixty-three years.  Of course I know that the England I came to know six decades past is not the England of today, but I still maintain a lively interest in its cultural scene.

 

Just now England is in an uneasy, perhaps even in a parlous condition.  Its post-WWII history has been one of gradual decline, and in recent years of accelerating loss of clear national identity.  A mild-mannered professor of War Studies at the University of London, David Betz, has attracted growing public attention with his alarming if not alarmist analysis of the current state of British civil society.  He moved from suggesting that it faces the possibility of civil war to declaring war’s inevitability.  The focus of discontent is a cluster of related problems arising from the huge influx of immigrants, many of them illegal, most of them from troubled Muslim countries, and large numbers of them culturally unassimilated.   These problems are shared with several other European nations of course, but Britain’s small size and literal insularity exacerbate them.

 

The official line of the two heretofore majority political parties—both of which have embraced mass immigration—is that “diversity is our strength.”  Seldom has a linguistic bromide seemed less empirically probable.  The current Labour Prime Minister, Kier Starmer, is a colorless human rights lawyer of Eurocrat tendency.  There is growing force and criticism from articulate conservative quarters at different social registers.  One of the more spirited and controversial dissenting voices is that of a man named Carl Benjamin, often publishing under the erudite pseudonym of Sargon of Akkad.  (Sargon of Akkad, I learn, was a Middle Eastern potentate of an ancient empire springing from the lands of the Tigris and Euphrates.)  Benjamin has been berated, cancelled, condemned, and deplatformed galore; but freedom of speech in England is still at times—if only at times--an operative principle rather than a pious fiction.  From my distant perch it seems to me that the political winds in England are shifting.  And he does have a large following.  He is usually classified as “ultra” right, though he classifies himself (on grounds that are at least historically plausible) as a classical liberal.  Benjamin is very much of a generation and disposition that has left me far behind.  He is, or has been, an enthusiast of video games, for instance.  He is very smart and even quite eloquent, considering the fact that his every third sentence seems to contain the all purpose adjective “fucking”.  There is, unfortunately, nothing abnormal about that these days. 

 

Sargon/Benjamin is sufficiently learned to have shocked me with a glimpse of apparent ignorance.  In alluding to an essay that he had run across in Nicholas Barker’s old anthology The Character of England (1947), he appeared in an aside not to know who Rebecca West, one of the writers who contributed to the volume, was.  This minor lapse is of no significance to his own argument, but it does allow me step back from danger and abandon further commentary on the political and demographic disasters of an admired foreign country to what for me ought to be surer ground, that is, the literature of an admired foreign country.  For I have neither authority nor the desire to talk about Pakistani rape crews, while I say with confidence that I consider Rebecca West one of the great writers of the twentieth century. The essay to which Mr. Benjamin alludes is entitled “The Englishman Abroad”.  One of the features of a good writer is that her title is likely to tell you what her essay is going to be about.  This one is about Englishmen traveling abroad, something they have been doing for a long time.  Two of the most memorable of the shorter poems written in Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon) are philosophical meditations that have been named by modern scholars “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer.”  Read Browning’s “Home Thoughts from Abroad.”  Read—without weeping, if you can—Rupert Brooke: “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field/ That is forever England.”  The series of learned anthologies in which the The Character of England takes its place is, or at least was in the bygone years of my post-graduate education, well known among professors of English literature.   I have to say that I find “The Englishman Abroad” both erudite and elegant, displaying at once impressive historical knowledge, striking psychological insights, and a considerable and wicked wit.  All of this is displayed in a sparkling but modulated prose of marked elegance.

 

And I can hardly be alone in my admiration of Rebecca West.  She didn’t merely gain a great name as a writer.  She had one given to her by a grateful nation.  Of all the honorifics that the British lavish on their big wigs, my favorite is perhaps that of Dame.  My approval stems, perhaps, from the jarring tonal difference between American and British usage of the word.  Were it not already self-evident, we have it on the authority of Oscar Hammerstein and Josh Logan, that there is nothing like a dame—no, nothing you can name.  And Dame Cecily Isabel Fairfield, aka Dame Rebecca West definitely was a real one.  She was born in 1892 and died in 1983.  She had an intense relationship with another giant of modern British literature, H. G. Wells.  She published about fifty books in many genres, including at least four that I want to think of as permanent classics.  I say nothing of her copious essays and periodical pieces.

 

My own serious appreciation of her work arose from her two books about treason—The Meaning of Treason (1947) and The New Meaning of Treason (1964), which were extremely helpful to me when I was myself attempting a book about literary anti-Communism in mid-century: The Ani-Communist Manifestos.  Her treatment of the affair of Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss brought, I thought, a peculiarly subtle intelligence to a controversial topic already much written about.   She is particularly clear-minded and ruthless concerning the role that dogmatically defended political lies played in the episode.  She called the legal action pursued an example of a fairly rare “dervish trial”—an earlier example being the French Dreyfus Affair—in which the supposed impartiality of the legal proceeding had been grossly distorted by obvious political passion.  In one of her later novels, The Birds Fall Down (1966), I find a particular brilliance.  It is a domestic history, spy story, a murder mystery, an imaginative refashioning of actual historical events, a puzzling hall of mirrors, and a politico-philosophical meditation.   It is probably a few other things to boot, but I hope that will be enough to encourage you to consider reading it if you have not read it already.  As for myself, I freely admit that I have arrived at an age, and also in an age, when I find surcease of sorrow in old books about vanished or vanishing places.

 

 

 

Bears, Literary and Local

 

Ursa minor Princetoniensis

 

I followed a career as an English professor, so that I naturally have spent a certain amount of my time—not enough time, of course, but still quite a lot—reading, teaching and thinking about Shakespeare and his works.  He remains, and is likely to remain for some time, the most famous writer of the English language.  This fact is due in part to what I shall call the law of classics.  Once an author or a work has been acknowledged as “classic” for quite a while, the classical status itself becomes classic.  I continue to believe that Shakespeare’s classical rating is amply deserved, but it is also now traditional.  And in a cultural world in which change, innovation and fleeting novelty are the norms, his eminence should remain encouraging to people like me.

 

Almost everything about the Bard has been studied to near extinction; so I today am reduced to writing about his stage directions.  One of the more memorable of Shakespeare’s stage directions occurs in the third act of The Winter’s Tale.  In fact it is a famous stage direction.  Antigonus, a Sicilian nobleman in the service of King Leontes, is charged with the indelicate task of getting rid of the infant Perdita by losing her in some distant wilderness. “Perdita” means in Latin “the Lost Girl.”  Antigonus opts for a desert in Bohemia, but no sooner has he dumped the poor babe than a bear shows up.  Antigonus hot foots it out of there, but to no effect, as we learn that the bear pursues and dispatches him.  The stage direction for the actor playing Antigonus is Exit pursued by a bear.

 

            Staging this scene is a little tricky, and probably was even for the Elizabethans, whose familiar commerce with bears was more culturally entrenched than is our own.  The British Isles were free of the more obviously dangerous animal species that inhabit our own wilderness areas and are the stuff of scary stories.  I mean critters like lions, tigers, Gila monsters, etc.  The English forests had their dangers, to be sure, but the only really plausible feral danger was presented by wild dogs, wolves, and bears.  For England did have some bears, and the English made the most of them.  A popular amusement was bear-baiting.  Bear-baiting—essentially chaining a captured bear to a stout post and then torturing it for fun and profit (you usually had to pay to see a bear tortured)--was one of several ancestral amusements now happily relegated to the past.  The poor bear faced sharp sticks and fierce dogs.  This “sport” had a long run, but was perhaps at the zenith of its popularity in Shakespeare’s day.  He mentions or alludes to such amusements more than once.  Macbeth, in his sense of outraged coercion, speaks thus: "They have tied me to a stake. I cannot fly, / But, bear-like, I must fight the course".  Ah, Merry England!  But what also interests me in the passage of The Winter’s Tale is a very small detail, the word exit.  This is the third person singular indicative of a Latin verb, exire: (s)he leaves, departs, steps out.  Elsewhere in Shakespeare and in other older dramatists you will find the plural form exeunt omnes, they all leave, everybody leaves.  

 

 

            Of course there are many splendid stage directions in Shakespeare and his contemporaries.  One of my favorites is Offers to stab him.  Talk about an offer you can refuse!  There is no precise modern English equivalent for the verb offers here, though threatens come close. The actor was doubtless instructed by the word to brandish the dagger in a threatening fashion as he spoke them.  Why the Latin, though?  Well, Latin was the language of learning, and of much practical information of all kinds.  It was in particular the language of commentary and explication.  Some of this tradition is preserved to this very day.  Most people would easily realize that a Vade mecum (go with me) is travel book, and that a primer is a book for tyros, or a book preliminary to another. 

 

             Of course it is important, if you are reading a prepared text, to be alert to the difference between what is text and what is commentary upon the text.  Otherwise you end up saying things like “…and this is my solemn vow!  Pause for applause.”  During his painful public decline shortly before retiring from the last presidential race, President Biden uttered a couple of things along those lines, and I know from experience that it is easy enough to do.  During the medieval period young scholars often wrote little “cribs” for difficult words in their communal textbooks.  You may have done the same thing in your French or Spanish primers.  By a kind of scribal “Chinese whispers”—you may know the game as “telephone”—the original text and the explanatory crib could get confused.   The pious thought that “God encompasses us” could end up as the pub name “The Goat and Compass”, together with its puzzling sign of a horned animal with a cartographer’s  instrument.  A good deal of the more famous classical scholarship of the modern period was devoted to sorting out texts in which this process of scribal distortion had taken place.  The great English scholar Richard Bentley (1662-1742) was particularly brilliant at the art of emendation, as the process of philological first aid is called.

 

 

            To get back to bears, we had one very recently on my little road, Hartley Avenue, in Princeton, NJ.  Bears actually show up in the East Coast suburbs with surprisingly frequency.  They are not quite as predictable as the official garbage collectors, of course.  What I shall call “my” bear, which appeared rather nonchalantly from between two houses as I was taking my daily constitutional, was surprising in several ways.  He was young; he was black; and he paid me not the slightest heed.  How do I know he was a he?  The answer is, I don’t; he just struck me as definitely boyish.  I can’t say he ignored me entirely, but he certainly was exercising a welcome ursine aloofness.  He trotted away from me at something close to what in a horse would be a trot, straight down the sidewalk ahead of me, then hung a louie across the road and into a large expanse of tall grass and brush trees of the still empty acres of the Butler Tract. He was now out of sight.  Upon reflection, I concluded that was actually a good place to be.  I decided to cut my walk short and return to the comfort of my library.  Baby bears do, after all, have mamma bears.  Thus I exited, pursued by the thought of a bear.

Whither Albion?

 

The calamity that struck Joan down some months ago has naturally presented us with practical as well as spiritual difficulties.  I had already had to give up driving some time ago, and even my basic ambulation is seriously compromised.  A one time student and colleague, and very longtime friend in the higher education business has been of inestimable aid and comfort to me both as an intellectual companion and as practical helper during the difficulties brought on by the situation.  I leave this personal hero unnamed only because among his many other virtues a self-effacing modesty is so prominent. We frequently grocery shop together, and not infrequently dine while watching something on the tube.

 

One recent binge was devoted to the original British version of the political series called House of Cards.  (This was the model, of course, for the excellent American series of the same name.)  British politics, while in many respects no less depressing than our own, often display a stylistic and rhetorical elegance wholly foreign to Washington.  It is clear that several British politicians have actually read books.  Certainly the fictional Francis Urquhart, played by Ian Richardson, a Tory leader positively reptilian in his fatally smooth and eloquent sleekness, has mastered the whole library.  You keep thinking you are hearing a Shakespeare play, and with good reason, for there is lots of Shakespeare, and especially of Macbeth, bubbling about.

 

I would like to say, and actually will say, that House of Cards is fantastic at the literal level.  I mean it is robustly fictional.  It is in the nature of fiction, including “historical” fiction,  to impose specific imaginative  interpretations on actual events.  But it still is strikingly relevant to our current political scene.  Mrs. Thatcher left the premiership in 1990, and a great deal has changed in the decades since.  But the great social issues at the center of the current crisis in Britain, mass immigration and its social manifestations, were already more than sniffable in the political air in the Thatcher era.  They had been at least from the late 1960s and a famous controversial speech made by a learned Tory politician named Enoch Powell.

 

The current reversal of fortunes of both of the two major political parties in Britain is nothing less than stunning.  Less than a year and a half ago the Labour Party won a landslide victory after two decades of Tory rule.  At the time the result seemed to counter a conservative trend discernible across the continent of Europe.  But that appears to have been a misreading.  It is true that today the exhausted Conservatives, having already nearly approached irrelevance, seem on a path to virtual extinction.  But Labour, too, is under water and still sinking deeper.  Nigel Farage, a seemingly paleolithic conservative English nationalist, momentarily basks in such glow as is cast by what many characterize as the best of bad lights. In May Britons saw the extraordinary volte-face of the Labour Prime Minister declaring unregulated immigration to have been an “unmitigated disaster” for which, actually, the Tories are responsible.  The general political consensus is that the first part of that judgment is wholly true and the second part partially so.  What is very clear is that the great controversies roiling Britain have to do with the long maturing and suddenly exploding backlash to mass immigration and the widening concentrated communities of unassimilating Muslims from various parts of the defunct British Empire, especially Pakistan and its eastern cousin, Bangladesh.  Pakistan itself is a country created amid much violence and what is usually called “sectarian strife” only after the second War in an attempt to separate the majority Hindus and minority Muslims in old British India.

           

The British press is perhaps yet more partisan, and thus to be taken even more skeptically, than that in our own country; and the dominance of the cultural left even yet more pronounced there than here.  But it is clear that there is, especially in England, some kind of a revolt of the masses, as yet inchoate, and that both of the business-as-usual parties are in deepening trouble.  Certainly the current Prime Minister, a colorless and lawyerly bureaucrat, is taking his knocks.  For the terrifying words racist and racism, on account of their formulaic and repetitive misuse, are clearly losing their once almost talismanic power to intimidate the aggrieved.  Patriotism emanates from a love of locality, inherited customs, and a feeling of belonging, of familiarity, of amenable geography.  Many ordinary native Britons no longer entirely feel easy access to such unacknowledged spiritual resources.  I think—or perhaps only imagine—that we all must share some vague version of their disquiet.  Old men forget, yes, but they also remember.  And to remember is to call to mind things past.  Can any person of mature years claim to do this entirely without regret or at least wistfulness? When to the sessions of sweet silent thought, I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought….What I myself have discovered in old age—as have so many of my contemporaries—is that I am no longer living in a world which I claim fully to understand or with which I am wholly comfortable.  Social change can be very swift, and certainly very powerful. 

 

It is quite remarkable that what is in effect a major revolutionary force in British politics seems to have arisen by spontaneous combustion.  It is one thing to “forge” or “create” a movement and quite another to find one lost on the sidewalk.  For Nigel Farage, an articulate and sometimes clever gadfly, can be said to be the “leader” of the Reform Party mainly by adoption.  That is, the movement has adopted him very much faute de mieux.  He is no Robespierre or Huey Long.  The conservatives still have some able people, but the Conservative Party is so shop-worn and tainted that it seems impossible that any of them could soon, or perhaps ever, regain robust national backing.  The greatest of several villains in the eyes of many of the revolutionaries is Boris Johnson, whose lengthy years in office as Mayor of London, Foreign Secretary, and then Prime Minister coincided with the entry into Britain of huge numbers of immigrants.

 

There are parallels between the political climates in Britain and America, so long as we recognize that some similarity is very different from near identity.  Who would doubt that the situation at our southern border has been chaotic?  Or that border chaos did not on the whole invite a big win for the Trump forces?  Although I have never thought of myself as a documented person, I can still tremble at the thought of being an undocumented one.  So I am not much relieved by the assurance that the number of persons illegally resident in the country is probably actually only ten million, not the twelve million or more claimed by alarmists.  That is to say, only the population of Michigan as opposed to that of Illinois. Michigan, incidentally, is just about the same size as the British Isles: England, Scotland, and Wales taken together.  In area, the United States is about forty-seven times the size of Britain.

 

Renan Remembers

Ernest Renan
 

My life at present involves much to-ing, the logical consequence of which is an equal amount of fro-ing.  And as my own not inconsiderable infirmities render me unfit to operate my own car safely, I have become something of an expert in cadging rides whenever possible and trying to game the Uber ap when cadging fails.  The Stonebridge medical facility where Joan is currently residing is a mere seven miles away, but the ruthless algorithm by which the Uber-masters operate severely limit my options.  And while I am in the free-form moment of this essay, I ought to say I actually deplore the misuse of the word “algorithm”, an example of which is prominent in the foregoing sentence, but what the hell?  Go with the flow.

 

There are few things to do while riding in the backseat of a car as it drives through repetitious landscape, but one thing you can do is read.  Ordinarily one does not choose one’s current reading because of the small format in which it is published, though that was the motive behind the invention of the small-format paperback also known at the pocket book.  If you do a lot of travelling in the back seat of a car and you also like to read books, it is useful to have a product that can minister to both needs.  But I don’t really like paper covers on my books, especially on books that I am going to be reading intermittently, with much intermittent putting them in and pulling them out of pockets or bookbags.  Such books soon become ragged and lumpy.  Reading a ragged paperback is very annoying to me.  Hence I regard the cultural contribution of book-binders to rival that of book-printers.  Fortunately I have a fair number of small-format hardbacks on my shelves.  The backseat book that I plucked from a shelf almost at random and have been consuming in intermittent small draughts with pleasure, is the autobiography of Ernest Renan, the nineteenth-century French orientalist: Memories of Childhood (Souvenirs d’enfance, 1883).  Some controversy surrounds this book.  And certainly some opprobrium lurks about my particular copy of it.   It was formerly in the possession of the Porter Library of the Kansas State College of Pittsburg, where it bore the identifying call number 848.8 R29s.  In that institution, likewise,  it was powerfully if coarsely repaired with black Monster Tape.  There is however no evidence that anybody ever checked it out.  Its “Due Date”, though hoary, is virgin.  What is indisputable in that my edition is six and a half by four and a quarter inches in format, in other words, perfect size-wise.

 

But Imagine a cultural world in which a British publishing house could profitably publish an extensive list of books in the French language.  For such was the “Collection Nelson”, published by an eminent Edinburgh publisher whose Paris office joined with other similarly eminent French houses (in this instance that of Calmann-Levy) to bring out a series of French classics. This collection began in an age when it was simply assumed that an educated English person would read French as an educated French person would read English.  This was the world reflected in my essay three weeks past, “The Man in the Red Coat.”  Renan’s most famous book by far was a tender but non-mythological biography of Jesus, a book that has remained in print continuously since its publication in 1863.  The Pope called Renan “the master blasphemer of Europe”.  I take some comfort in the fact that this papal opinion was possibly antecedent to that on papal infallibility.  The Académie called Renan an “immortal”.  You pay your money, and you take your choice. 

 

Many readers are partial to literary biographies, including that special branch of the genre that we call autobiography.  This perhaps is because though very few of us are likely ever to be the subject of a biography, each of us possesses a more or less structured autobiography in our minds.  At least it is difficult for me to imagine that there lives a man with soul so dull as never to contemplate at some level the interstices of at least one life—his own, of course.  To examine the contours of one’s own life is no easy task.  The easiest form of deception is self-deception, and usually one of the most comforting forms.  But the biographical mode offers models of description and explication which most of us can recognize as having relevance to our own lives, sometimes as admonition and at others inspiration.  One of the very first poems I was introduced to as a child was Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life.”  Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime, and departing leave behind us footsteps in the sands of time.  It is also of course possible to leave only some muddy footprints on the oriental rug instead.

 

Renan was an honest man of the most ruthless sort, which means a man honest about and to himself.  Born into modest material and cultural circumstances in the sticks of Brittany in the first generation after end of the Revolution, he was well along in a course leading to the priesthood when his philological learning proved superior to his religious training and eventually to his basic Christian faith.  In some ways he transferred the patterns of his discarded religious belief to the notions of nationality and nationhood itself.  Having spent most of my own life in allegedly exalted academic spheres, I am well aware that there is such a thing as stultifying secular dogma that can be quite as oppressive and blinkering as the religious sort.  But I would be misrepresenting the spirt of his autobiography if I failed to emphasize its modesty and geniality.  Though his Life of Jesus was destined to be the source of much cultural conflict, the author as revealed in his autobiography was gentle and genial.  The history of scholarship is replete with a certain kind of rags-to-riches narrative in which people of modest birth found recognition and preferment based on intellectual capacity and energy.  That is, learning has always been to some extent a realm of meritocracy.  Not every disadvantaged scholar was a Jude the Obscure.  In the thirteenth century John Pechkam, born in a peasant’s cottage, became the learned primate of England.  Ernest Renan, this hick from the sticks, was from the same mold. 

volumes from the Collection Nelson