Dr. Metablog

Nineteenth-Century Romance

I've several times poked fun at sad instances of Victorian sexual prudery. If, gentle reader, you doubt that I'm capable of prude-pokery, check here, here and here. 

My mild animosity toward the sexual silliness of our ancestors originated in my childhood. My father, though in most things a font of good common sense, was, sexually speaking, very much a old-fashioned dyed-in-the-wool Victorian. Whenever a discussion of sex or anatomy or reproduction would arise in our house, he would immediately turn red and stumble out of the room. Early on, I learned not to ask. On the few occasions when my poor papa mumbled something before he bolted, his information was always uninformed, frequently wrong, and occasionally dangerous. 

My father inhabited an earlier psychological universe and he couldn't possibly have imagined how the  invisible worm has turned. If he were alive today, he couldn't watch movies or TV or read novels. Too much gross language, too much frankness, too much nudity, too much casual coupling. He would have been aghast and embarrassed.

Nevertheless, repression has its compensations. It is absolutely clear to me that people of his generation and earlier experienced pleasures that cannot be realized now. The brave new libertine world of hooking up and sloppy drunken sex and XXX sites gratifies the instincts, but at significant cost.

Return we now to the last years of the nineteenth century, when Helen and the great poet Edward Thomas went a-courting. In their young twenties, a couple of years into their anguished relationship, they (in Helen's words)

were sitting in the undergrowth of a little copse in a remote part of the common. Edward had said that he had never seen a woman's body, and I do not remember quite how it came about, but I quite naturally and simply without any feeling of shyness, knelt up in our secret bower and undid my clothes, and let them fall about my knees so that to the knees I was naked.  I knew my body was pretty, my breasts wre firm and round and neither too small nor too large, and my neck and shoulders made a pleasant line, and my arms were rounded and white, and though my hips were small, the line of the waist was lovely.  I was proud of my body, and took the most innocent pleasure in its lines and health and strength. So we knelt in the grass and dead leaves of the copse opposite to each other, he silent and I laughing with joy to feel the air on my skin, and to see his enraptured gaze. For as he knelt he gazed wonderstruck and almost adoring, quite still, quite silent, looking now and then in my eyes with a serious ecstatic look, his eyes full of tenderness and love, searching mine for any sign of regret or shyness. He did not touch me, but just knelt there letting hie eyes take their fill of the beauty that was filling his soul with delight. When, without a word, I lifted my clothes about me, he helping me, he only then said, 'Helen, I did not know there was such beauty.'

Scoff as you will, ungentle readers.

I know -- it's prettified and romanticized. But it's an innocence that cannot be invented. And I'm not scoffing. I don't think that there's a person on our continent or in our century as naive as Edward Thomas was in England in 1898. Nor do I think that there's anyone who could say what he said, and say it with such bedazzled and wonderful sincerity: "Helen, I did not know there was such beauty."

It's a world that we have lost.

(Helen Thomas unveils in her memoir, Under Storm's Wing).

 

Youth and Age -- Tennyson's Ulysses

It wasn't until I reached college that discovered poetry. My comic-book super-hero and baseball-infused brain was until then, poetry-wise, an almost complete tabula rasa. I say "almost" because at eight or nine eight years old I had memorized two great classics of American literature: "Casey at the Bat" and also the poem by Grantland Rice about Tinkers, Evers, and Chance. In additon, I knew the ubiquitous stercoraceous distich the first line of which is "Here I sit, broken-hearted" and a related gnomic verse that begins, "No matter how much you wiggle and dance." Then in 1956 I left Flatbush for higher education and took a course in English Literature. The rest, as they say, is history. It was sonnets and love poems of any kind, and rich luscious liquid poems by Marlowe and Keats and Hopkins that entranced me. The more intellectual poems were too taxing for my immature head. Lycidas, which I now know to be the best poem in the language, was utterly impenetrable for at least a decade, although I admit that I immediately responded to its music: "With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves." 

One of my teachers sagely observed that certain poets and certain poems were for youth, some for maturity, and some for old age. "You may no longer like then what you like now." Which has come to pass. And as an example of poetry for the latter years, he adduced Tennyson's "Ulysses." "This poem may not mean much to you now, but it will some day, if you live long enough." I remember that I was much taken with the touchstone line "Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy" but I thought that "Ulysses" was far too much about a really old guy trying to cheer himself up and I did not see it holding a place in any future I could envision. 

Well, folks, I've now arrived at the so-called golden years, or, more properly, the endgame, or extra innings (which in some sports is called sudden death) and guess what? "Ulysses" has returned, front and center, exactly as was predicted 50+ years ago. It's right on target. 

Tennyson's Ulysses is Homer's adventurer a generation older, kinging it in Ithaca, but bored, unchallenged, and unstimulated. "It little profits that an idle king,/ By this still hearth, among these barren crags,/ Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole/ Unequal laws unto a savage race,/ That hoard and sleep, and feed,/ And know not me."

To put it vulgarly, Ulysses plans to bust out of the old folks home. He's been a warrior, a hero, and a roving explorer. He "cannot rest from travel." He needs to search "beyond the utmost bound of human thought." He leaves Penelope, and he leaves the government of Ithaca to his bureaucratically-minded  son Telemachus. The last lines of the poem, the leave-taking, are most stirring:  

                           Come, my friends

"Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Though much is taken, much abides,

And though we are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts 

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Yes, I know -- the diction is a little antiquated and artificial, the urge to get away a trifle too vehement. But nevertheless I'm moved by the resilience, the perserverance. Though tear-inducing, the poem is anything but lachrymose. And it's accepting: "that which we are, we are."

It's lately become the fashion to interpret "Ulysses" as a poem about capitalism and imperialism. In this reading, Ulysses is just another white male, off to conquer and colonialize The Alien Other. Or to see it as a poem about male priviliege: he's a bad husband, abandoning the family. Or to conceive the poem as a structure of ironies, in which Ulysses doesn't realize that he undermines his own suppositions. There's a tad of truth in these arguments, as there always is, because Tennyson was caught up in a Victorian striving that he didn't fully or consciously assimilate. But frankly, I feel sorry for readers who can't hear the verve and excitement in Ulysses's expansive view of things. 

Moreover, it turns out that Tennyson was absolutely correct to proclaim that there is a time in life when "not to yield" is an act of daily heroism. 

Mannahatta

Eric Sanderson's Mannahatta (New York: Abrams, 2009) reconstructs Manhattan as it would have appeared to Henry Hudson when he sailed the Half-Moon into the harbor in 1609. The glory of the book lies in its illustrations.  Here's a conjectural reconstruction of old Manhattan island:

And here's a clever juxtaposition of ancient and modern:

In 1609, the island of Manhattan was home to between 400 and 1000 Lenape Indians. They lived on fish, shellfish (leaving behind extensive middens), deer and other wildlife, on fruits and berries. They practiced some small-scale farming of corn, squash, and beans. Sanderson estimates that the Lenape had lived on Manhattan for 10,000 years, or 400 generations.

Why so few people? The land was fertile, the seas abundant, the weather not particularly harsh. While the Lenape sat still in Manhattan, advanced civilizations were created by the Mayans, the Aztecs and the Incas. Along the banks of the Mississippi, the city of Cahokia rose and fell. And yet the Lenape never domesticated a single animal beside the dog and left behind no pottery, weaving, or metals. They remained stuck in the paleolithic. Why, I wonder. Perhaps things were too good.

On the other hand, the Lenape lived in harmony with the island for a very long time. What are the odds that our present civilization, which has totally transformed Manhattan in 400 short years, or just 16 generations, will last one tenth as long? 

 

February 24:  Still curious about the want of population growth or technological development among the Lenape, I read C. A. Weslager's The Delaware Indians, A History (1972) (Lenapes were called by their Anglo name, Delaware, for many years). Wenslager does not suggest that the Lenape ever achieved larger populations. Nor does he point to any archeological evidence of cultural achievement. Still, I'm mildly suspicious that there may be more to the story.  We know that Verrazzano contacted the Lenapes 90 years before Hudson sailed into the harbor, and no one knows what diseases he might have introduced.

Three Observations on "Books"

Charlie Dressen: "You  know something? I never read a book in my whole life... I can read newspapers and magazines. But I never read a book. You think I should?"

Jean Harlow (on her birthday): "Don't get me a book. I already got a book."

Anatole Broyard: "If it hadn't been for books, we'd have been entirely at the mercy of sex."

Two Good Reasons Not To Eat Raw Slugs on a Dare

Reason A.  Because slugs are hideous and disgusting. 

                    

Reason B:  Because slugs eat rat droppings which can carry a lungworm parasite -- a nematode called Angiostrongylus cantonensis -- which causes fatal brain swelling. According to the NYTimes, a 27-year-old Australian man "has been hospitalized for more than a month after eating the slugs on a dare."

“We hope this will help to remind others to avoid eating raw slugs," said a spokesman.

Advice for Married Folk

Reposted from January, 2007, and just as pertinent now as it was then:

High on the list of The New York Times' "most e-mailed articles" is one that's catchily titled "What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage," by a writer named Amy Sutherland. Apparently it's a well-regarded, influential essay. I think it's misleading and wrong-headed, and I think that couples who heed its advice will soon find themselves not in a happy marriage but in one that's sterile and empty.

Amy's column is at this address, and will be available unless and until the strapped and greedy Times decides to put it behind a paid wall. A summary: poor Amy is perpetually annoyed by Scott, her husband of twelve years. He loses his keys and asks her help finding them; he keeps her waiting at restaurants; he "hovers around her in the kitchen asking if she has read this or that piece in the New Yorker." She's tried nagging, but it doesn't work. As it happens, Amy is writing a book on animal training and she's watched people "do the seemingly impossible," such as 'teaching baboons to skateboard" and "hyenas to pirouette on command." She decides to adopt the animal model and "train" her husband. "If he threw one dirty shirt into the hamper, I'd thank him. If he threw in two, I'd kiss him." She rewards "approximations." She uses "least reinforcing syndrome" in which the trainer doesn't respond in any way when an animal does something wrong -- just stands and stares. When Scott loses his keys, she ignores his pleas for help, and eventually he finds them by himself. By the end of the article, Scott has changed. "After two years of exotic animal training, my marriage is far smoother, my husband much easier to love."

What's so awful about this advice? Let's take the shirts-on-the-floor crisis. Amy can imagine only two methods to deal with this problem. There's nagging, which she now rejects, and there's re-training. But there are other responses. The first is for Amy to gain a bit of perspective. Marriage isn't about whether the dirty shirts are in the hamper or on the floor. People have had long and happy marriages without resolving such issues. Amy seems to assume that getting her way about the shirts is crucial. But when she and Scott married, they agreed to love, honor, and respect each other; they didn't agree that every single shirt would immediately find its way into a hamper. Perhaps Amy should re-think her priorities and try to keep the larger picture in view. Secondly, Amy can't seem to imagine any ground between nagging and animal training. But there is -- there's an enormous territory. There's discussion, negotiation, and compromise. Amy: "It bothers me that you expect me to pick up your shirts." Scott: "I'll try not to drop them. I'll pick them up myself." Amy: "And I'll try not to make such a big deal out of it."

When Scott comes into the kitchen and wants to read to her from a New Yorker article, Amy could say, if she had any imagination, "Oh, good. Scott wants to involve me in his intellectual life. He wants to talk to me." But she doesn't see it that way; she wants him out of the room so she can "concentrate on the simmering pans." But what's important about marriage, or about life? Is it the pans, or is it the conversation? Once again, Amy has it all wrong. She cares about her cooking, and getting the soup exactly right, more than she cares about the marriage. It shouldn't be beyond her ability to stir and to listen at the same time; it's been known to happen. Amy is, let's face it, a bit of a narcissist. She wants to make Scott into an extension of herself; she wants to subordinate the marriage to her own convenience.

Readers and friends, here's my opinion. If your spouse comes to you and says, "I've lost my keys, I'm distressed," you should stop whatever you're doing and you should start searching. When you do so, you're treating your spouse with respect and you're taking your marriage seriously. And if you happen to misplace your own keys, it's perfectly fair to ask your spouse to help find them. Because sometimes finding keys is a team activity. I'll go even further: sometimes it's less important to find the lost keys than it is to search for them together.

But you should engage yourself with the problem of the keys, or the shirts, only if you want a relationship of equals. If you think that it's so important to train your spouse to stay out of your damn kitchen, then go ahead and follow Amy's advice. But you might wind up with not with a husband or wife, but with a pirouetting hyena or a skateboarding baboon.

Amy and Scott: here's some valuable advice. It comes to you courtesy of Mr. Hart, who lived a couple of houses down from us. He died at age 90, in the same month as his equally aged wife. The Harts had been married for 60 or so years. "What's the secret of a long, happy marriage," he was asked. He said, "find out what your wife wants and make sure that it happens." Which is, if you think about it for a moment, only a variation of the traditional golden rule and of its even more practical cousin: "do unto others as they want to be done unto."

Things I'll Miss

I'm reconciled to the idea that death comes to all, but nevertheless, there are a few earthly things that I'm genuinely going to miss.

Is there anything more wonderful, when you've been out early in the morning in the rain or in a heavy dew, and your feet are wet and cold, than returning home and putting on clean, dry socks, especially those excellent white cotton ones that they sell at Costco?  Definitely a moment that makes life worth living. And also: purchasing, opening and playing a new music cd -- preferably one that you've thought about acquiring for a long time. Another: watching young healthy athletic people run down the street, especially women with long ponytails a-bobbing. Also: the perennially pleasurably sound of a bat (wooden, not aluminum) connecting with a high, hard one. Rum raisin ice cream. A well-made glazed donut. The sight of the first soft, red peony of the year just as it breaks the ground. The waxy pink flower of the tamarack, always a surprise. My Swiss Felco #2 hand pruner (which our cousins across the sea call it a secateur), a friend for many seasons, which fits my hand perfectly and which if you give it an occasional oiling and sharpening, cuts absolutely true. The sound of rain on an uninsulated metal roof -- and also like the clickety-clack and pinging of the roof on a cloudy day when the sun comes in and out and the roof alternately expands and contracts -- it's an all-percussion symphony. The old downtown of an old city that I'm visiting for the first time. A one-year-old boy or girl learning to walk, at the stage when the strides are of unequal and inconsistent length, the child hovered over by admiring young parents, she with a hand outstretched, he recording the moment on tape; the child the center of the universe, thoroughly doted upon, as is exactly appropriate. A deep, luxurious weekend afternoon nap, so profound that when you wake up you don't know, for five seconds, where you are or what day it is. A sleep so deep that somnus imago mortis kicks in;  nothing more satisfying: the kind of thing that makes a guy want to live a few more years.

Brain Chemistry, Macbeth, Nihilism

Our understanding of the human brain is mighty slim.  As a consequence our therapies for insanity, for head injuries, and for dementia are primitive.

When John Donne was dying in 1633, his physicians tied pigeons to his feet. Present-day medicine offers remedies for Alzheimer's sufferers that are no more effective than pigeon tying. Brainwise, we linger in the dark ages (which, by the way, has now been rebranded as "late antiquity"). Or the early medieval period.

Not to say that nothing is known about the brain. There have been advances.

To bring myself up-to-date, I read The Tell-Tale Brain by V. S. Ramachandran, a book which has been making a stir in pop-science circles. Ramachandran's sensible thesis is that there are structures in the human brain that are either undeveloped or that simply don't exist in the brains of apes. To posit so is simply common sense. Human beings do things that apes don't: they study themselves in the mirror, they compose and play piano sonatas, and they think about their place in the universe.  

Ramachandran is an ingenious experimenter but he gets beyond his depth when he waxes philosophical -- which he does far too often. Here's an example of the kind of thinking that rubs me wrong.

"I get chills," says Ramachandran, "whenever I hear Macbeth's immortal soliloquy 'Out out, brief candle!/Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,/ And then is heard no more. It is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing.'"  He says that "these  words are one of the most profound and deeply moving remarks about life that anyone has ever made!"

I don't question Ramachandran's chills, which are his own business, but I'm bothered by his unthinking Bardolatry ("immortal solilquy"; "profound";  "that anyone has ever made").  Poor Will doesn't need any more reverent cliches to be shoveled upon him. He's already buried under heaps of them.    

Bardolatry such as Ramachandran's obstructs thinking. What does it mean to say that Macbeth's soliloquy is "profound... about life?"  Let's go to the tape.

When Macbeth says these words, he's under the spell of the witches, who are "instruments of darkness."  At their suggestion, he's murdered his king, murdered his closest friend Banquo and Banquo's son Fleance, and he's "savagely slaughtered" Macduff's wife and children ("All my pretty ones...  All my pretty chickens and their dam/ At one fell swoop"). Moreover, he's committed uncatalogued atrocities innumerable: "Each new morn/ New widows howl, new orphans cry." His brain is "filled with scorpions" and just before he utters the soliloquy that gives Ramachandran the goosebumps, he learns that his wife, burdened with guilt, has done herself in. Macbeth is not in a good way. 

Macbeth is not a role-model and his philosophical ruminations are neither insightful or profound. Quite the opposite. Though Macbeth is undeniably eloquent, he's become a shallow nihilist. Life, in fact, is not "a tale told by an idiot" and in Shakespeare's late-medieval religious universe, only someone in the throes of the deepest despair, and certain that he is damned for all eternity, would think so. Macbeth has learned exactly the wrong lesson. So, apparently, has Ramachandran.

Gosh, great literature can sometimes be dangerous, can't it?

It's no secret that the universe with its billions and billions of galaxies will go on very well without us.  Shakespeare, like everyone else, knew that when looked at from the strictly scientific point of view, human beings are no more than "many a thousand grains/ That issue out of dust."  But just because we're tiny and it's enormous, we're not compelled to admire the despairing and empty philosphy to which Macbeth subscribes.

Not while there are red wheelbarrows, winter love in dark corners, and "little nameless, unremembered acts/ Of kindness and of love." 

An Old Lesson Learned Once Again

A good friend, a distinguished biologist, asked me to read his cancer manuscript.   

When I read science books (popularizations, for the most part), I usually do so with only half a brain.  I'm lazy; I skip the hard parts.  But because I was being asked for a serious opinion, I read this book closely.  In all honesty,  It hurt my head.  The hardest chapters were those on the workings of the cell.  I last studied cells in high school biology class with Miss Goetschius.  It was 1957, before there was anything known about DNA.  We copied elementary pictures of cells from the textbook.  "You don't know how to stipple," Miss Goetschius complained.  There's a thousand times more known about cells than back then in the dark ages, and I haven't gotten any smarter. 

Cells are spectacularly complicated  -- no wonder it took billions of years for them to evolve.  Once the single cell had achieved a level of efficiency, the rest of evolution -- even including us -- was piece of cake.

Reading about the lives of cells and about cancer (which is what happens when cells go wrong) confirmed and strengthened my ideas about life and death.  Life, our life, is almost entirely accident.  It's an accident that cells incorporated pieces of bacteria to form mitochondria;  it's an accident that they agglutinated in the way that they did to form multicellular creatures;  it's an accident that we're here.  But more than that:  the success and the deterioriation of the cells that make us are part of the same process.  The end of life is implicit in its inception.  Cancer is exactly as natural as breathing. 

It's trivial;  it's what everyone knows, it's what we've always known. It's a cliche:  "death is a natural part of life."  And yet it's strangely comforting.  Whatever comes next -- cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's -- is  perfectly natural.  Of course it will lead to death.  But it's also life.  

Muff and Spot, Once Again

Every little once in a while, a mountain lion creeps into the fold and snares a lamb, a calf, or a German shepherd. At even more infrequent intervals, a mountain lion attacks a human being (usually a child).  Whenever there's a human-lion interaction, there comes a deluge of letters to the local newspaper demanding that the authorities exercise “lethal control" over the big cats. Killing catamounts is neither hard nor dangerous. They were hunted nearly to extinction in the nineteenth century. Dogs chase the animal up a tree. The brave hunter takes aim and fires.

But Is it a good idea to extirpate the mountain lion? In the United States, there’s an average of one death by mountain lion a year. Here in our county, there’s been one such death in the last hundred years. One is a very low number, especially when, in the country as a whole, snakes cause a dozen deaths each year, lightning claims seventy-five, bee and wasp stings a hundred. Dogs, when they’re not out hunting mountain lions, account for between twelve to twenty deaths a year – a couple of hundred a decade-- many of these, it's sad to say, infants in the crib. Given the numbers, It’s hard to believe that calls for the extermination of mountain lions aren’t motivated less by facts than by fear.

Domesticated dogs are responsible not only for a dozen to a score of deaths, but also for an estimated 4 to 7 million (that’s right, million!) cases of dog-bite a year, almost 800,000 of which require medical attention. Dog bites cause 368,000 emergency room visits, or (do the math!) one thousand such visits a day.  The social cost of dog bites is estimated variously, but the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta claims that the direct medical costs of dog bites per year is $165 million, with many more millions in ancillary expenses. 

Mountain lions, which are relatively harmless, inspire terror, but dogs, which are far more dangerous, are our sacred cows -- loved, in my opinion, beyond all propriety. It’s hard not to cringe when otherwise sensible people – good decent people --tell me in all seriousness that Towser is a full member of their family, or that Fido is about to undergo surgery to replace a hip -- an operation the cost of which is more than the annual medical budget of whole villages in Africa or Asia.  The run-of the-mill doggie in America enjoys a better diet and better medical care than half of the human beings on the planet -- a thoroughly indefensible skewing of resources.  Dogs are not human beings, and it’s immoral sentimentality to treat them as such. It’s embarrassing.

The ancients, following Aristotle, divided their possessions into three categories: an object was an instrumentum mutum, an animal was an instrumentum semivocale, and a slave was an instrumentum vocale.  By eliding the differences between humans and animals, the Greeks and the Romans made slavery both easy and natural.  Aristotle's notion underlay serfdom.

I used to worry that people who treated animals as humans would be tempted to treat humans as animals.  But it's not so; the people I know who are sentimental about animals and "animal rights" are extraordinarily sensitive to human rights -- but then, perhaps my sample is skewed. All of my friends are sensitive to human rights; if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be my friends.

I wonder whether the love of dangerous dogs and the fear of the cats who are by and large indifferent to us isn’t an instinct acquired slowly over the last half million years. Our ancestors, armed, at best, with flint-headed spears, spent countless millennia at the mercy of feline predators larger, more powerful and more terrifying than 100-pound mountain lions (the extinct European lion, panthera leo fossilis, was taller, stronger, and and a foot and a half longer than the modern African lion).  It was only some 50,000 years ago that an ancient Einstein conceived the idea of domesticating wolves and selecting their population for useful traits. Humans and proto-dogs started to cohabit; dwellings and caves came to be littered with coprolites. Co-evolution began, and over the course of time, dogs and humans came to be sensitive to each other's traits. Those early dogs were our first allies on this lonely, hostile planet. They could raise a ruckus when a couple or three lionesses prowled about the entrance to the cave.

We're indebted to dogs and so we tolerate their bad habits.  By the same token, we have inherited from our ancestors a primordial fear.  Hence the over-hasty cry to exterminate the mountain lion. 

Predictions for 2011

I've been inspecting the entrails of slaughtered oxen and also observing the flights of birds.  I've studied the movements of planets and tea leaves.  I can now announce my predicitons for the coming year.   

1)  there will be unusual weather patterns in North America;

2)  a famous Hollywood actress will sue for divorce;  moreover, another (or possibly the same) Hollywood star will become pregnant; another (or possibly the same) actress will gain and/or lose a great deal of weight; 

3)  a well-known athlete will be accused of taking drugs;

4)  a politician will be involved in a sex scandal;

5)  questions will be raised about America's food supply;

6)  there will be either a monsoon, an airplane crash, or a capsized ferry in Asia--perhaps all three;

7)  there will be fluctuations in the stock market;

8)  there will be turmoil in the Middle East;

9)  a religious leader will be involved in either a financial or a sexual scandal (perhaps both);

10) the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will not end. 

You read it here first.  Not for nothing that I've acquired the reputation of an inspired mystic, or shaman, or something.  Nostradamus redux. 

A Gosse-Pearlman Xmas (reposted)

The voluminous works of Edmund Gosse are not much read nowadays except by specialists in Edwardian literature, but Father and Son (1907) remains one of the all-time great autobiographies. 

Gosse's father, the biologist Philip Henry Gosse, whom Charles Darwin once called "an honest hodcarrier of science," was a leader of the Plymouth Brethren, a very strict, very puritanical branch of English Protestantism.  According to his son, P. H. Gosse held the view that the celebration of Christmas was "nothing less than an act of idolatry. The very word is Popish,' he used to exclaim, 'Christ's Mass!'  Then he would adduce the antiquity of the so-called feast, adapted from horrible heathen rites, and itself a soiled relic of the abominable Yule-Tide. He would denounce the horrors of Christmas until it almost made me [that is, son Edmund the autobiographer] blush to look at a hollyberry."  One year, young Edmund secretly ate some Christmas plum-pudding that had been offered to him by 'rebellious' servants.  Overcome with guilt and stomach-ache, he fled to his father, crying out "Oh! Papa, Papa, I have eaten of flesh offered to idols!"   Philip Henry then "ran with me into the midst of the startled servants, seized what remained of the pudding,... and ran till we reached the dust-heap, when he flung the idolatrous confectionery on to the middle of the ashes, and then raked it deep down into the mass."  Only an accomplished comic writer (steeped in Dickens) could have invented a phrase as marvelous as "idolatrous confectionery," where the triviality of the noun undermines the high seriousness of the adjective.

Objections to Christmas celebrations, though not always expressed as vigorously as father Gosse's, are a longstanding tradition.  The aggressive hawking of Christmas by right-wing fundamentalists is of recent origin. The genuine sons and daughters of the Reformation would have abhorred the materialism, the consumerism, and the tactless triumphalism of many contemporary Christians.

This is not to say that all "holiday season" celebrations are inherently offensive.  I myself honor two traditions, both musical.  The first is that I try extremely hard to avoid the odious "little drummer boy."  It takes work to do so;  I have to boycot the radio, the television, shopping malls, and department stores between Hallowe'en and New Year's Day  -- but it's well worth it.

A second custom is to listen every year to The Messiah.  The performance of choice is of course the extremely intelligent Pearlman version (Boston Baroque Orchestra and Chorus-- Martin Pearlman, Conductor [Telarc 80322]).

Blessings and honor and glory be unto George Frederick Handel and to his unsurpassed oratorio.

Ditch the Didge!!

The downtown mall is home to a motley assemblage of street buskers. Some are excellent and welcome performers: the occasional string quartet, the accomplished visiting bluegrass band, a witty gaggle of a cappella singers. Others are less excellent but still tolerable; the contortionist, the magician with the rings that divide and rejoin, the sword-swallower, the zip-code man, the fire-eater, the too-young violin student supervised by his mommy, the juggler whose act hasn't changed since the days when he was known as a joculator.  And then a step lower still: that inaudible French girl who struggles with her ukelele. Less welcome are the drummers: bang, bang, bang with no discernible rhythm, just noise great enough to set off sympathetic vibrations in your own personal pancreas. But the worst of the worst is the didgeridoo-master. After decades of practice, all that the didge player can produce is an ugly drone. One note. It goes on and on, relentlessly, and it's dull, grating and loud. If you haven't heard it, imagine a big old bagpipe, playing one note at the bottom of its range, for ever, and ever, and ever. Worse still are didgeridoo assemblies: didgetets or didgeridoo chamber orchestras. 

The didgeridoo comes to us from northern Australia, where it was invented more that 1500 years ago. Perhaps it hasn't evolved because it's thought to be sacred. While the rest of the world developed wind instruments that played a variety of colorful notes, the non-innovative didge people embraced an  unchanging and exceedingly boring drone. They are patient people. One by one, native Australians said no to the bassoon, the clarinet, the horn, the sax, the flute, the piccolo, the trumpet, the tuba, the oboe bright and cheerful, and decided that a branch of a eucalyptus tree, naturally hollowed by termites, was all that they needed in the way of wind-instruments. In another fit of imagination, they invented the bull-roarer, an instrument that hasn't yet taken a bow on the mall, but trust me, it won't be long.  

Let's face it;  the didgeridoo is an instrument that hasn't produced a pleasant sound in many thousands of years. It has no plans to do so. Didgeridooists are barking up the wrong tree -- it's never going to be music. It's always going to be noise.

Which brings me to my point, which is that would-be mall performers should not be permitted to busk until they have passed a performance test and have been granted a license.  The Board of Acceptability would consist of some of the more traditionalist faculty of both the Music School and the Department of Theater and Drama. The chairman would be an open-minded but engaged citizen, such as Me.  Approval must be unanimous. We (the Board) would strictly enforce standards of artistic excellence. Life would improve.

Dinner Conversation

A:  Do you remember Walther Peters, used to teach history at the university?

B.  Yes, he had quite the reputation.

A.  Lazy as sin, among other things.  I was his grader in the late 60s.  He never looked at a paper or at an exam.  When a girl would complain about a grade, I'd tell them to go see Professor Peters. Some of them would, some of them wouldn't dare.  There was this one young nubile maiden, very beautiful.  She had a D on the mid-term and didn't show up for the final, so of course I gave her an F.  She was one of those who were willing to see Professor Peters in his office.  I never heard back from her but eventually I took a look at the grade sheet.  He had changed her grade from F to B.  I asked him, how come?

B.  Did you get any kind of explanation?

A.  He said, I talked to her, and I felt sure she would have gotten an A on the final, if she had taken it, so I changed her grade.  He said it with a straight face.

B.  I wonder if he thought you believed him.

A.  I don't think he even cared.       

B.  Let me tell you my favorite plagiarism story.  I was handed a paper which began, "Moreover...."  Student just took a couple of paragraphs out of the middle of a chapter.  Didn't even bother to change the first word.

A.  There's also the story of the student who handed in a paper with the bill from the ghost writer still in it.

B.  Here's one I heard from Don Baker.  He was teaching in  Mississippi, early in his career.  Freshman English.  He receives identical papers from two students in the same class.  He gives an A to one and an F to the other.  This would be in the 1950s sometime.  The F student comes into his office.  He says, "Uh, uh, Mr. Baker.  I have a friend in the class.  I sometimes study with him.  He, uh, uh, handed in a paper, kind of, uh, you know, similar to mine."  Baker says, "and."  The kid says, well, he got a much better grade than I did."  Baker says, or at least he swears he says, "Oh, but  I like him.  And I don't like you."

Richard Poirier (1925-2009)

Richard Poirier died last week at age 83.  The New York Times paid tribute with a long obituary and an appreciative essay.  Poirier was a "distinguished man of letters" and also a Professor of English.

In 1960, as the juniorest and least-sophisticated graduate student in the history of the universe, I enrolled in an AmLit course taught by Poirier.  Fifty years later, I can affirm that it was the single course in my graduate career in which I performed the absolute worst -- both in the instructor's judgment and in my own.  I'm still embarrassed at the woeful mess of a paper I offered him.  I remember little of it, except its incompetence and the recollection that I used the phrase "a writer of his ilk" -- I can't remember to which I writer I referred -- and that Poirier wrote a longish exasperated note explaining to me that I did not have the standing to treat any American author with disrespect.  However, the honest-to-goodness reason why I did so badly in the course was that Poirier expected his students to think -- and thinking was not an area in which I was gifted.  I had discovered early in my educational career that my memory was far superior to most of my contemporaries, that I had an ear for language, and that I had a moderately fluent prose style.  But I never, ever, possessed a logical, orderly, or penetrating intelligence.  (I could remember sentences and phrases and whole poems, but not arguments or chains of reasoning).  My skills were sufficient for literary study -- indeed I doubt that I could have managed an academic career in any other discipline.

In fact, I did rather well in studies with most of my graduate-school professors -- distinguished and learned gentlemen all of them -- who were so happy to encounter facility that they didn't notice the want of brain.

It is curious that some of the most profoundly learned of my professors were the least adventurous of  thinkers.  I remember, for example, Douglas Bush, now a mere trivia question, but a most renowned scholar in his day, whose superficial, fey, conservative, neoChristianist-pixie observations on Spenser and Milton I duly recorded. for two endless semesters, learning absolutely nothing of worth or value.

Poirier was more serious.  Only 35 (I was 21), he was thinking deeply about the qualities that made American literature distinctive (I believe that he was in the process of formulating the ideas that came together in A World Elsewhere).  He was an intellectual rather than an academic. It would have been wise for me to have listened carefully to him. I might have learned something. 

It's shocking to me that the young, dashing lecturer whom I remember so clearly could be so old, so dead -- but ther's no denying that half a century has slipped away since I last listened to his rumbling voice.   

Aunt Harriet's Story

"I was born in 1920 in Bayonne. I had four older sisters. When I was eleven, my mother died and my father disappeared. I was taken in by my sister Jennie and her husband Jack. She was eighteen, he was nineteen. They raised me. I graduated from Bayonne High School in 1938. For years I worked for an insurance company in New York City. I started at $5 a week. I lived with Jack and Jennie in Bergenfield. I took the bus and then a train and then a subway. One of my girlfriends was seeing a guy, I can't remember his name, but he had a friend named Dave. I married Dave in 1942. He was sent overseas, I didn't see him for three years. In Oman, he was coming off a ship, they were shooting at them, he was wounded right here, if it had been an inch this way I wouldn't have any children. Dave's father had a business, Broadway Arcade on Broadway and 53rd Street. Dave took over the business. He was a good mechanic. We had Madame Esmerelda the fortune teller. Pinball, skiball. In the basement were pool tables, we sublet the space. It was a good business. We were famous for our nuts. We had two boys, Steve and Mark.  Steve ran the Arcade after we moved to Florida, Mark is a food chemist. The Arcade is closed now -- the landlord kept raising the rent. If we had bought the building I'd be rolling in it. Dave died at 68 in 1987. I play mah-jong once a week. I go bowling once a week. My team is in first place. I take my sister Sophie with me but she can't see well enough to bowl. She's ninety-six. So I've been married, it's sixty-seven years.  Hard to believe."

Actual Dialogue Captured in the Wild

Telephone conversation with an eighty-two year old cousin. 

"Evreryone down here, all they ever talk about is their pains, their doctors, their diets, their diseases.  Now I have something to talk about.  For years I went to this doctor, maybe forty years, he's almost as old as I am  Every time I go into see him, with a sore knee or pains in the chest or whatever, he'd look at it, and he'd say, 'what can you expect at your age?  You're lucky to be alive.'  I'd go in with a sore throat.  He'd say, 'Can you swallow. So what it hurts. You're too old to worry.'  If I had a headache, he'd say, 'whatever happens, happens.  You're old, enjoy the day.'  Finally he retired.  He took a job as a dance instructor on a cruise ship. I'm not kidding. He leads exercises or something.  So I went to a younger doctor.  He listens to me breathe, pokes around a bit, puts me in the hospital, and now I have three stents." 

Life Lessons from F. P Schubert

Our local chamber players, the Takacs, performed the Schubert Quintet (D.956). It's a glorious work -- one of the finest in the entire chamber repertoire -- and was brilliantly performed.  It's a turbulent, nervous, tense piece of music. With the last notes, the entire audience rose simultaneously to cheer.  There were fist-pumpings, whistles, "bravos," "yesses," and other spontaneous shouts of pleasure from the octogenarian listeners.  It was a rock and roll moment at Grusin Hall. 

I cheered too, but not so much for the Takacs as for Schubert.  It's so often the case that the interpreters are rewarded while the creator is neglected.  Here's Schubert, dead of poverty and syphilis and mercury poisoning at age 31, never having made a nickel out of his many compositions.  In desperate straits, with only two months to live, Schubert sent his new quintet to the Leipzig publisher H. A. Probst. Probst rejected it, asking instead for something "easily understandable."  The world "does not yet sufficiently and generally understand the peculiar, often ingenious, but perhaps now and then somewhat curious precedures of your mind's creations."  The quintet was first performed in 1850, twenty-two years after Schubert breathed his last.

Is there a moral?  Yes, I think there is.  If you're in the composing or painting or novel-writing business, do it your own way -- not the easy way.  If you lose, you lose.  So what?  If you win, you win big.

Sursum Corda; Brain Surgery

Last night I awoke from troubled sleep with a mysterious and  inexplicable Latin phrase drumming on my agitated brain.  As best I can remember the dream, I had taken a razor to an essay I was writing and had cut out the two words -- and I mean "cut out" as in scissored, not merely deleted -- "sursum corda."  And then there I was with a slip of paper on which the two words were inscribed  -- and now comes the nightmare part -- I couldn't translate the damn phrase.  I went so far (still in the dream!) as to hypothesize a past participle "*sursus" of the verb "surgere" (to rise) -- although, as everyone knows, the proper form would be "surrectus" -- but I still couldn't parse the phrase (*"sursum" or "risen", would be a singular, "corda," "hearts," a plural).  I forced myself out of sleep, distressed that I couldn't make sense out of what my dreamatorium was screaming was an important phrase.  So there I was in the middle of the night, checking the Latin dictionary to discover that "sursum corda" is a versicle in the Roman mass generally translated "lift up your hearts," but, inasmuch as "sursum," I can now attest, is not a participle but an adverb, might more properly come into English as something like "upward your hearts."  OK, now I understand the phrase, but why in the living bejeesus was I a) dreaming in Latin, b) dreaming a part of a mass, and c) slicing the phrase out of some papers of my own composition? 

Enough of that.  Back to bed, back to sleep and then, holy moly, another weird dream.  No more Latin, at least, but now I'm being held responsible for the low rate of pollination of apple trees.  Whose apple trees?  I can't say.  And what is the remedy. Brain surgery -- and on my brain.  The surgeon announces to me (somehow we're in a very official looking operating room) that "we're going to remove the smallest bone in the human body, which is in the hinge to the top of your head."  He takes his scalpel, cuts through my hinge, and flips opens my skull.  Inside the dome (somehow I can observe the interior) right where my brain should be, is a heap of glowing stuff that looks like orange Jell-o.

OK, that's enough.  Time to wake up once again. 

Unanswered questions.  a) why am I responsible for the fruiting of apples?  Blame the lazy bees, for goodness sake.  b) Who says the smallest bone in the body is this imaginary hinge?  The smallest bone is in the inner ear -- the stirpes, I think.  c)  what's with the Jell-o?  Just because I couldn't translate "sursum corda," it therefore follows that my brain is gelatinous?  Some of your most intelligent Wall Street investors and bank presidents couldn't translate sursum corda, and they must be the most accomplished people we have, at least to judge by their annual bonuses.

On the whole, I think that both of these dreams put me in somewhat of a bad light.   Nevertheless, I'm impressed that my unconscious is so gosh-darned creative.  Let's face it - it's a ton more imaginative than my daytime self, which doesn't much concern itself with either the Latin mass or the pollination rates of mali domesticae.  

A Pitiful Reminiscence of Academia

In an earlier life, Dr. M. served as chair of a large academic department at a state university out here in the American west.  On the whole, the teachers that Dr. M. nominally supervised did their work very well.  They were responsible, self-motivated, liked their teaching and reading and writing, and fortunately, did not expect to be lavishly rewarded either in salary or appreciation or assistance.  But there were a few employees who were difficult.  There always are.  Ten per cent of the people take 90% of your time, no matter what the enterprise.

We had very little secretarial staff -- not even enough people to take and relay telephone messages, So (this was before the advent of sophisticated electronic communication), innovative chair that I was, I took some scarce departmental funds and purchased inexpensive, tape-driven answering machines and attached one to each professorial telephone.  The theory was simple:  most of the faculty weren't in their office many hours a week (nor were they paid to be), but the new technology would allow them to come to work, listen to yesterday's telephone calls, and return messages rapidly and efficiently.  Ninety-five per cent of the faculty was happy with the new system.  But a few of them rebelled.  One particularly recalictrant member of the faculty -- let us call him RR -- categorically refused to touch his new machine.  His reasoning:  pushing the button and playing back the tape was not a "professorial responsibilty";  it was mere secretarial work, and in his view  the new system asked that a professor lower himself to the level of staff.  It would be "unprofessional" for him to listen to recorded telephone call, asserted RR..

I should mention that RR was the least distinguished member of our faculty.  He was a poor teacher and his contributions to scholarship lay somewhere between non-existent and negligible, depending on the decade.  You might think that his sense of nobility derived from a ducal or regal grandfather, but not so --he came from a working-class Kansas background, if I remember correctly.

"Professional" is a word about which I have ambivalent feelings. In its best incarnation, when it denotes adherence to an internalized set of responsible and shared values, it's a damn good word and an uplifting concept. But there are many occasions when "professional" is used to camouflage willfulness, laziness, and privilege, and then it is a word of which I am ashamed.  I take the case of RR to be an example of "professional" used in order to justify indolence.  For the rest of my faculty, it was "professional" to make ourselves available to the students whom they state paid us to educate and assist; not for RR.

I think that RR had a peculiar, retrogressive understanding of university life.  He didn't like students or scholarship, but he did enjoy ceremony.  He was the parliamentarian at meetings of the university's governing board.  And every year, at commencement, he was the person who led the procession, bearing the university's mace (or whatever the heck that strange object was).  Not a born teacher, he was a born presider at rituals.  A large, ponderous fellow, he was a terrific mace-bearer -- and a truly crappy colleague. 

I never did find a way to make him use his answering machine.  If I owned the company, I would have fired him in a flash.  But the university likes to separate responsibility from authority, so all I could do was cajole and beseech and shame -- a procedure that proved in his case to be totally without effect.  You can't shame the shameless.     

"Actively Dying"

Grandma is 96+ years old.  She's an accomplished, strong-willed, tough old lady who has survived just about everything life can throw at a person: polio in childhood, over two dozen major surgeries, diabetes, and then two times in the last decade, cancer. Now she's very close to the end.  She has been in a nursing home for four years, declining almost imperceptibly from day to day. Until last week, she could carry on a conversation of sorts. But then something happened. She lost the ability to move, even a little; she became agitated, her long-term memory collapsed, and she could not, however hard she tried, complete a thought (though she was able to say, and repeat, "This dying business doesn't bother me").  She recognized only one person, her eldest daughter, and it was not clear that she knew her own name.

For the last six months someone at the nursing home has had to help her with fork and spoon. Last week, we decided that to prop her up, sit her at the table, feed her cake and then propose that her insulin intake be increased was a senseless, bizarre procedure.  A compassionate doctor suggested that it was time for insulin and other non-palliative medicines to be withdrawn. We readily agreed. We confronted the head nurse at the nursing home; she announced to us that the home's chief of medicine would reverse the order to withdraw insulin;  Grandma must be fed ("We're a nursing home," she said, "we nurse"). Last Friday, we moved Grandma from the nursing home to our local hospice.  Grandma immediately stopped eating and drinking. I would like to think that she chose to give up food, but there's no way to know. Her eyes have a glazed, far away look on the rare occasions that she is strong enough to open them. She fumbles with the sheets.  

Nevertheless, on Monday, hospice told us that they couldn't keep her. She's not "actively dying" -- according to the official Medicare rules -- and is therefore not eligible for hospice. Where to take her?  Unclear.  We negotiated a two-week reprieve. Grandma will be allowed to remain in hospice as a private patient for fourteen days, but unless she starts "actively dying" during that period, she'll be expelled. We cried.

Yesterday, however, we were told that Grandma had taken a step forward.  She's "entered her process" --another bit of hospicespeak.  She's experiencing, we're told, sufficient pain to warrant morphine and her heartbeat has become rapid and irregular.  She is "less responsive."  Good news for Grandma, I guess.  Unless she "plateaus" and stops "actively dying," she'll be allowed to stay to the finish, which, if there's any mercy, will not be very long.  

Here's what Kent says about Lear, at the end.  "O let him pass.  He hates him/ Who would upon the rack of this tough world,/  Stretch him out longer."

January 17.  Grandma died last night, having squeezed the last drop out of life and sliced through the last shred of bureaucratic red tape.

Christmas Sermon

 It’s the end of another year – how rapidly they fly by nowadays! – and here's yet another winter solstice to regard with awe.  It’s not that I’m worried that the dragon will swallow the sun.  I’m confident that there will be another spring.  But the year’s midnight is always a sad time for me.  For one thing, it’s the anniversary of my father’s birthday.  Once again I remember that he would like to know just how well his eight grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren are progressing.  How he would have enjoyed the good news!  He was born in 1904 on the 22^nd of December.  ‘And they called his named Emanuel, God with us,’ -- but whether by accident or design, I have no idea. I’m saddened also by Christmas.  I don’t want to set myself up as a scrooge – I know that many of my friends enjoy their trees and their eggnog and their good cheer.  But a guy would have to be blind not to notice the stress and anxiety and religious chauvinism and grotesque consumerism of Christmas.  Is there not something grossly out of holiday whack when a Wal-Mart employee is trampled to death by maddened shoppers?

Moreover, I know that the profoundly religious seventeenth-century founders of our country would be shocked that it has come to this.  If our spiritual ancestors had a single favorite biblical moment, it was where the Lord (speaking through his prophet Amos), severely condemned the vanity of holidays.  “I hate,” said Yahweh in a particularly implacable mood, “I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies."  The Lord of Hosts specifically rejected the attempt to placate him by sacrificing animals (a matter of topical concern in Amos’s era).  “Though you offer me burnt offerings and meat offerings, I will not accept them, neither will I I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts.”  Nor did Mr. El rest with these easy-to-follow injunctions, but he went on to condemn all musical tributes as well.  No more chants, glees, holiday choruses, or carols.  “Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs, for I will not hear the melody of thy viols.” 

Our Puritan forefathers took these lines at face value.  They  recognized that the Lord opposed but not only ritual sacrifice and music but every single kind of formal observance and rote piety. The Ancient of Days made it abundantly clear that what moved him was not empty ceremony but genuine goodness of heart.  His prescription for happy holidays:  “Let justice come down as the waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.” Taking these uncompromising sentences as their guide, our founders dug in their heels against the ostentatious celebration of all holidays, especially Christmas.  Would they not have been reduced to furious anger by the burnt offerings and squeaking timbrels that substitute for righteousness and justice in this year of the lord 2008?  Would anything have been more odious to our spiritual forebears than the blare of “Silent Night” at a shopping mall?

Here's some two-thousand-year-old advice:  "If you bring your gift to the altar and remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift, reconcile yourself to your brother, and then return."  Here's some modern advice.  Forget the altar, return the gifts.  Talk to your brother.  And remember.  All men are brothers.  And sisters.

Another, earlier post on Christmas can be found here..

My Henry James Problem

I'm reading, or re-reading (what does it matter when it's been fifty years since the last go-around) Henry James' The Wings of the Dove. Once again, I'm variously stimulated, frustrated and infuriated.  Has there ever been a writer who cries out to be parodied more than does Hank the J?  Try to resist the impulse to make fun house mirrors of this representative, convoluted sentence.

      "Her welcome, her frankness, sweetness, sadness, brightness, her disconcerting poetry, as he made shift at moments to call it, helped as it was by the beauty of her whole setting and by the perception at the same time, on the observer's part, that this element gained from her, in a manner, for effect and harmony, as much as it gave -- her whole attitude had, to his imagination, meanings that hung about it, waiting upon her, hovering dropping and quavering forth again, like vague faint snatches, mere ghosts of sound, of old-fashioned melancholy music."

Let me guess that most of Dr. M.'s loyal readers did not finish reading the quoted bit.  They made a good faith attempt at the first few words, then whistled, threw up their metaphorical hands, and surrendered.  Or if they did get all the way to the end of the sentence, they were certainly puzzled as to whether they had fully deciphered the Jamesian code.  It's not that the sentence has no meaning, but is it worth a reader's time to parse and disentangle its many syntactic knots?  Now, dear friends, just Imagine 539 small-print pages of prose, every paragraph on every page loaded with similar abstractions, assertions, modifications, withdrawals, subordinations, and equivocations.  It's taxing.  James takes it out of you, wears you down.

And therefore let me confess that a big chunk of my Henry James problem is that it's so damn hard to keep the ol' eye on the ball when every sentence is so laborious to construe. In most novels, readers are pulled along by the plot.  You might have trouble "getting into it," but once you do, your attention is galvanized and you start to sail.  In the case of HJ, there's very little plot, very little in the way of story.  It's all hypersubtle character analysis and teasing conversation. I can't speak for every reader, but I must admit that, while reading Wings, my mind frequently took flight.  I regularly had to forcibly snap myself back to attention.  It's anything but effortless to stay with the Jamester. 

But let me return to the exemplary sentence that I quoted above. The two key words are "poetry' (line 1) and "meanings" (line 5).  To paraphrase:  she (i.e. James's character Millie Theale) has "poetry" and the situation has "meanings."  Underneath all the wobbly circumlocutions, that's kind of it.

But neither of these two crucial nouns gives much away.  What sort of poetry does Millie 'have,' you might ask?'  What particular 'meanings' inhere in the situation?  I myself want --crave, in fact -- further definition and explication.  That's the novelist's job.  If he wants to keep me happy and focused, he has to provide considerably more specificity that HJames deigns to supply.  Words such as "poetry" and "meanings" don't constrain a reader;  rather, they are empty vessels into which I, or any other reader, can pour a variety of significations.  The reader, i.e. me, is simply asked to do far too much of the work.  I resent it, some of the time. 

Which takes me back to where I came in, in the 50s and 60s, when James was the king of the American canon -- or at least he was very much the boss in the Large Eastern University where I was a graduate student in literature.  I don't know how my ever-so-civilized teachers managed it, but to appreciate and understand Henry James was framed not as a test of the author's creative skill, but as a test of the reader's sensitivity.  James, it was confidently and regularly asserted, was subtle, delicate, loaded to the gills with the most exquisite sensibility. Did I, a kid from Coney Island Avenue, possess the sophistication, the tact, the sensitivity to grasp James superfine insights and his characters' inclinations and velleities?

You know what?  I didn't. I failed the test.

James portrays a world to which I could not easily relate.  No one in Wings of a Dove works for living. The characters all live off their incomes, derived who knows how? When HJ has to bring two characters together, he has two choices and two choices only -- a dinner party or a chance encounter at a museum. Action?  Yes, the characters travel from one resort city to another.  I'm exaggerating just the tiniest bit.  There is one character in Wings who has an occupation.  Although we never see him at work, Merton Densher is a journalist.  Which is precisely his problem. How can he be a suitable mate for Kate Croy if he has a job?  How shockingly vulgar! 

It was a chore to take James seriously, especially in 1960 and especially for someone of my background.  But then, not to take James seriously, not to understand him, was presumed to disqualify a guy from the serious study of literature.  Which turned out not to be the case.   

But I'm glad to say that I persevered with Wings. If I hadn't, I never would have re-read the infinitely splendid, magnificently tawdry piece of dialogue between Densher and Croy that brings Book 8 to a conclusion -- a conversation that's as well done as anything in English since WS lay down his quill in 1613.   

Coming soon to these pages:  my Marcel Proust problem. Hint:  way worse than my James problem.

On Praise

Praise for what is not praiseworthy is mere flattery.  All the more so, if fair words gain advantage.  Praise even of the dead is suspect if it flatters survivors.  Persons in authority must be wary of false praise: be mindful that for every man who praises you, ninety-nine hold their peace or mutter imprecations aside.   A friend of long standing said to me, "You are the hardest person to praise of anyone I've ever known," by which words he meant to tax me, but which I took as compliment.  I offer praise generously when it is merited, but not for ordinary deeds.  Of a churlish man, it was justly said at his funeral, that he was a good speller;  of a sloven, that his fingernails had never been so clean. Praise need not be effusive and is most sincere if simply couched. I was once most happy to be praised, when a discreet man, looking over a landscape of which I am vain, said to a friend who marveled, "He works on it."  Of all virtues, I am most apt to praise diligence, the want of which I deplore in myself.  Children are most easy to praise as they know not irony.

The Wave

When we arrived in West Bradford forty years ago, there were lots of cows but very few people.  The main road was unpaved and aside from morning-and-evening milk trucks and the tractors pulling hay wagons, there were very few vehicles.  Now, they've run electricity out Welch's old road and must have built forty new homes and as a result there are a ton more folks who commute south. (In the 1960s, the nearest exit off the interestate was thirty-five miles away;  now, the interstate is just five miles away.)  Very few milking cows are left nowadays -- some horses, some sheep, some heifers raised for beef.  Hobby farms, mostly.  Inch by inch we've been surburbanized.  Or more properly, exurbanized. 

In the 1960s, when two cars passed on the road, the drivers would often stop to chat, knowing that it wasn't likely that another vehicle would pass by for a half an hour.  If they didn't stop to talk, they'd at least wave.  It was bad manners not to acknowledge an oncoming vehicle.  I remember that Ron Jepson, now long dead, who made a living off twelve acres and a handful of cows, complained to me once about one of our local grumps.  "He doesn't even wave when he goes by."  Not waving was an intolerable breach of road etiquette.

What's happened to the custom?  The wave is in steep decline and only survives as a vestige of an older way of life.  When we take our morning walk on South Road or on Hackett Hill Road, I make a point of waving at the oncoming drivers.  The response is inconsistent.  There's a rare  enthusiastic open palm wrist-waggle, an occasional mock salute, and sometimes a big windshield wiper wave, but more often merely a perfunctory palm lift off the steering wheel.  Sometimes the palm lift is reduced even further, to a right index finger lift -- a feeble gesture to antiquity.  Half the drivers don't wave at all;  they are recent immigrants who don't know that the wave has a history.  They're in a hurry to get where they're going, wherever that may be. 

Clearly, the great age of waving has passed. But not for all of us. That will be me out there on the side of the road, elbow raised and wrist oscillating, clinging to the customs of our forefathers.   

Something of a Fairy Tale

My granddaughter Ella, who is pushing six, is here for a brief visit.  Yesterday, after catching four salamanders, kicking the soccer ball, planting the yellow snap beans, and running in exuberant circles, she asked me to tell her a story.  I'll report only the gist of my long, detailed, but uninspired narrative. 

A young princess is born with a birthmark on her back in the shape of a red heart.  Her parents consult a wizard, who tells them that their daughter is destined to marry a powerful, handsome prince.  The parents are elated and the princess grows up with the guarantee of a blissful marriage.  However, one day, when the princess is in high school and trying out for the swimming team, one of her friends notices the birthmark and asks her why she has a birthmark on her back in the shape of a diamond.  "A diamond?" says the princess.  She consults the wizard who tells her that she's not going to marry a prince after all;  instead, she's going to have to carve out her own career.  She'll have to study her French, take her piano lessons seriously, learn arithmetic and work very hard in school.  So the princess takes the advice and becomes a very diligent and hard-working young girl and has many successes.

I was now putting myself to sleep with this highly moral and improbable tale, so I asked Ella whether she would finish the story.  "Sure," she said, " one day the diamond turned back into a heart and she married the prince and lived happily ever after."

So much for contemporary, enlightened fairy tales. 

Embarrassment is Forever

One of my childhood friends confesses to me that his otherwise peaceful early years were marred by a perfectly unnecessary bit of fighting -- which he himself initiated.  "We were in the middle of a softball game in the P. S. 217 schoolyard and I struck out with two or three men on base.  One of my teammates said something uncomplimentary to me and started to walk away.  Humiliated and frustrated, I charged after him and jumped on his back.  I'm not sure what I intended to do (my fighting skills were even worse than my softball skills)."

This less-than-earthshaking softballmachia occurred somewhere between fifty-five and sixty years ago.  It is impossible that anyone in the known universe remembers either the score, the sides, the game, the strikeout, or one boy's vault onto the back of another -- no one, that is, except the perpetrator himself, who goes on to confess that he is "embarrassed and ashamed even now."  I do not doubt for an instant that he's telling the exact truth, because even though glaciers have receded and oceans of water have passed under the bridge, embarrassment is forever.

Like my friend, and like many another poor suffering mortal, I too retain ancient memories that make me cringe.  A few of these acts, I'm sorry to say, are, like my friend's, instances of unjustified and petty violence.  A larger category:  the recollection of saying something stupid at a party or over dinner.  Or a lame, feeble, failed witticism.  An irony that was misunderstood and taken to be serious.  A mispronounced word.  The realization that my presence was unwelcome or that I had overstayed my welcome.  The largest category of all: something that I did or said that was vain or pretentious or self-aggrandizing.

My Better Half, who knows that often, half-asleep, I will suddenly recall an embarrassing moment and will vent a profound sigh or pound my fist into the pillow, confronts the problem practically.  She simply asks: "What year?"  To which I respond, for example: "1954."  And then she says:  "Everyone who heard what you said has been dead for years. Go back to sleep."  It's a good protocol and is moderately effective.  But the hallmark of authentic embarrassment is that even though the offending act was performed in public, it will be recollected in solitude years later to disorder our tranquility and to disturb our rest. Whether the witnesses have long since forgotten the event (if they noticed it in the first place) or even if they've been underground for decades doesn't seem to moderate self-flagellation.

In point of fact, embarrassment is the only natural phenomenon that has tempted me to believe, even slightly, in an afterlife.  If anything is eternal, it's embarrassment.

It is sometimes said that Western society has evolved from a shame culture to a guilt culture.  In earlier ages, social disapproval kept the lid on our transgressive impulses.  Nowadays, the theory goes, we've been psychologically transformed and have learned to internalize shame as guilt, so that we regulate ourselves without our fellow tribesman crying tut-tut and shame, shame, shame.  Perhaps there's a bit of truth to this formula, but it's simplistic.  In my own fragile ego, guilt has not supplanted shame;  both emotions are thriving rather nicely, thank you very much.

Embarrassment is neither guilt nor shame, but a third thing that combines the two emotions -- as for example in the case of Joey Valachi, mafia hit man and stool pigeon, who once told an investigating committee, and I quote verbatim,  "you can imagine my embarrassment when I killed the wrong guy."  An awkward moment for Joey V., but whether its memory would be sufficient to disturb his pleasant dreams is not for me to guess.  It is certainly embarrassing to all concerned that he would classify a murder as an embarrassment.  Compare Macbeth in the same situation:  "O full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife."

I guess I should be happy that my sleep is troubled by social gaffes rather than by crimes.  Mini-scorpions, so to speak. 

More on Contraceptives and Prudery

Last week I reported that in 1929 William Empson was expelled and expunged from Cambridge University for owning a condom, a circumstance that I judged to be an scandalous instance of ancient prudery. But in thanks to one of those fascinating moments of cultural convergence, I've just re-read, after almost fifty years, Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus, which also turns on a discovered contraceptive -- in the latter case, a diaphragm. Readers of the novella will remember that Roth's Newark alter ago, Neil Klugman, enjoys a summer romance with rich 'Cliffie Brenda Patimkin and pressures her to obtain a pessary. In due time the incriminating object is discovered by Brenda's protective, overbearing mother. Shock and outrage ensues, and the romance founders. 

When I read about the Empson-Cambridge contraceptive scandal, I felt as though I was entering an alien, distant and incomprehensible past. But Goodbye Columbus appeared in 1959, when I was an undergraduate at Cornell -- and is therefore very much a part of my conscious lifetime. Nor is Roth inaccurate about 50s sexual prudery. Contraceptives were difficult to obtain (even for married folk) and pre-marital sex was still taboo -- though, I must say, a taboo honored more in the breach than the observance. The old ways were slowly changing. In 1958, I participated in my first political demonstration -- or riot -- when Cornell authorities tried to prohibit women from visiting men's off-campus apartments. We staged a late-night moderately out-of-control protest march to the president's office. It was an all-male event because after 11 pm, women were confined to their all-female dormitories.(The action is recorded in Richard Farina's Been Down So Long It Seems Like Up to Me [1966]). It all seems so positively quaint now -- the university trying to police our sexual life and all that. Parents nowadays, at least the parents that I know, would be delighted to learn that their college-age daughters are using contraceptives.

In Goodbye, Columbus, Neil Klugman accuses Brenda of allowing her diaphragm to be discovered so that she can end the uneasy romance. Neil's argument seemed rational in 1959, but it no longer does so. From the vantage of 2007, it's clear that the many Roth alter egos have consistently been able to find justifications and excuses to end both their affairs and their marriages. Klugman, and Kepesh, and Zuckerman are never, ever, going to be more than momentarily and intermittently loyal or satisfied, but on the whole it's going to be circumstances, not their own volition, which causes them to flee. We didn't know that then. In 1959, Goodbye, Columbus seemed like a disinterested clearing of the Victorian air; now it has been transformed into a overture  to Roth's long and tormented psychosexual opera.

Foolish Prudery; Empson

It's easy to forget that our immediate forebears were absurdly prudish. Consider the case of William Empson, who ran afoul of the sex police in the late 1920s.

Empson may be the most influential literary critic of the previous century. All "close reading" was pioneered by him. Seven Types of Ambiguity, written when Empson was twenty-one years old and published in 1930, was the book with which my teachers were still wrestling well into the 1950s. Prompted by their puzzlement and by their enthusiasm, I dutifully read all about "ambiguity" and I also tried my best with the equally influential Some Versions of Pastoral (1935). In all frankness, both books were far too subtle for my blunt, unphilosophical brain. In 1961, when I was a graduate student, the pious and reactionary Douglas Bush, whose course in Milton was thrice-weekly transporting me to the caves of Morpheus, dismissed Empson's ground-breaking Milton's God (1961) as the work of the "village atheist."  (Empson thought that Christianity was a cruel and savage religion because it was grounded in scapegoating; he demonstrated that Paradise Lost became muddy and opaque when Milton struggled with the ethical basis of core Christian doctrines. In later years, the literary leviathanette Stanley Fish made his reputation by domesticating, diluting, and popularizing Empson's challenging ideas.)

Although I had lived with Empson's work since mid-century, I had absolutely no knowledge of the author's troubled private life until I read John Haffenden's William Empson, Among the Mandarins (Oxford, 2005) which at 695 pages is the first of a projected two-volume biography. (It's far too detailed; let me confess to skipping and skimming.) 

As a student at Magdalen College, Cambridge, Empson was mostly homosexual.  Haffenden says that he was interested in "male bliss and buggery." The upper-class students with whom Empson interacted were gay-tolerant and the authorities practiced a de facto "don't ask-don't tell" policy.  In 1929, Empson was elected to the prestigious Charles Kingsley Bye-Fellowship, which paid the then-splendid sum of 150 pounds annually. By that time, Empson had turned his attention to the other gender and was conducting an affair with a woman named Elizabeth Wiskemann who was seven years his senior. Somehow or other, a porter, an employee of the College, "found that Empson had some contraceptives in his possession." It was a scandal and Empson was arraigned by the college authorities for "sexual misconduct." He was stripped of his fellowship, expelled, his name expunged from the college records, and he was even banished from the city of Cambridge (by what authority Haffenden doesn't make clear).

For using contraceptives! For sexual relations with a woman! For preventing pregnancy! Clearly, Empson should have stuck to boys or kept clear of condoms.

Let us remember the situation of William Empson whenever conservative commentators trumpet "family values" and call for a return to the stricter sexual codes of previous generations. Or when we might be tempted to admire the wisdom of our ancestors.    

Words of Wisdom

"Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is," said the Great One, famously.  There you have it: perfect advice for hockey players.  It goes without saying that Gretsky's sentence applies equally well to entrepreneurs, intellectuals, artists, and in fact, to anyone who has to cope with a world in continual flux. Ah, but how can anyone know where the puck is going to be next second, or next week, or a decade hence?  Gretzky was one of those rare intuitive geniuses who did it all by instinct.  Ordinary mortals must wrack their tiny brains until their heads hurt to guess at the trajectory of their own particular puck.  Most of us, no matter how hard we try, are doomed to skate counter.  There are other people (alas, I'm one of them) who skate aimlessly, only dimly aware that somewhere out there on the field of play is a target puck.  Gretzky's wisdom deserves a prominent spot on the refrigerator of every moderately forward-looking, ambitious human being, where it can hang as both goad and frustration.

Here's another brilliant bit of Gretskyiana:  "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."

Let us now turn to wisdom from Alan Sillitoe (young 'uns might not remember Sillitoe, but he was one of the important 'angry' English writers of the 1950s).  Sillitoe blessed us with the forceful and epigrammatic truth that "all writing is fiction, especially non-fiction."  I particularly savor that uncompromising, zingy "especially."  If I understand rightly, Sillitoe meant that a) no matter how faithful to experience a writer wishes to be, the act of writing inevitably emphasizes or omits or compresses or expands and therefore transforms experience into a story, a fiction.  And he also implied that b) no matter how factual the information, if it doesn't tell a story and act as a fiction it's not going to make its point.   Moreover, and more subtly, he meant that c) any story is ineluctably influenced and shaped by common modes of storytelling, and even against a writer's will assimilates itself to existing genres.  Bloggers, for example, are willy-nilly fictioneers who can't help writing bloglike posts.  But beware:  Alan Sillitoe most definitely did not mean to imply that because all narratives are culturally and artistically determined that they are therefore equivalent in value or truth;  he was a practiced, practical writer, not some post-modern theory-soaked obscurantist.   

Here's wisdom from the great Anatole Broyard.   Of his adolescence, he wrote, memorably, "if it hadn't been for books, we'd have been entirely at the mercy of sex."  "Mercy" is the well-chosen word that makes the sentence so piquant.  Books, says Broyard, have the power to civilize all of us, even pubescents.  Books can, and did, rescue him.  As for myself, if I remember accurately, adolescence was, in spite of extra-large doses of books, merciless. 

I don't know who first said that "you can't coach seven feet," but it's a common enough saying.  It doesn't mean that that you can't coach a seven-footer, but that no matter how much instruction you offer a guy who's five-ten, he's never going to be seven feet tall or fill the space on the floor that requires a seven-footer.  As I once heard a track coach remark, "I can teach them everything but speed."  A similar sentence, of baseball pitchers: "you have to be born with the whip."  For those of us who tried to teach less exotic subjects, I can offer some parallels from my own experience.  "You can't coach brains";  "you can't coach talent." 

But you can do something.  You can, in words of great uncommon wisdom, "play the hand you're dealt."