Bringing Back the Games of Yesteryear

By Robin Bates | Published: June 28, 2021
Bruegel, Children’s Games

Tuesday

Our household is in turmoil at the moment. My nine-year-old grandson arrived on Friday, only to see his 95-year-old great grandmother loaded into an ambulance that evening with a fractured pelvis. Rest, physical therapy, and more frequent meals is all they can prescribe, but she’ll be in the hospital for a while. She will appreciate how Alban and I are fulfilling my father’s vision for the house, however.

We’ve been playing many of the games my father loved. There’s a shuffleboard court on one side of the house, a ping pong table on the screen porch, and we’ve taken on chess and checkers on the deck off the dining room. We’re currently reading a course my father read to us–Cecil Day-Lewis’s Otterbury Incident–and yesterday we went swimming in the lake that our house overlooks, spending some time in my father’s rowboat. We haven’t yet set up the foosball table, and his vision of bat mitten and ring toss on the upper deck had to be abandoned years ago when the roof developed leaks. Poison ivy also abounds around the horseshoe court so we’ll probably pass that up. Still, my father would love to see what we’re up to.

I’m gratified that Alban is also enthusiastic about my own passion, which is tennis. He had a very successful lesson with Sewanee’s wondrous tennis coach, John Shackelford, and we’ve been doing his tennis exercises since then.

To get a sense of my father’s vision, here’s one of his Christmas poems that I’ve shared in the past. It’s a parody of the famous Francois Villon poem, which I’ve included for comparison purposes.

 I can report that Alban hasn’t lamented our lack of video games.

Ballad of the Games of Yesteryear
By Scott Bates

Oh, tell me where, in what fair lands
Lie all the games we used to play,
The gliders launched with rubber bands,
Trucks, trains, and marbles, kites, croquet,
Diabolo and bilboquet,
Kick the Can and Ducks and Deer;
Where are the toys of yesterday?
Where are the games of yesteryear?

The stockings stuffed with jelly beans
We used to open starry-eyed
Now swell with murderous machines
Designed for kiddy fratricide;
Malevolent monsters lurk inside
The packages of Christmas cheer
Angrily waiting to get untied . . .
Where are the games of yesteryear?

Computer wars are grimly in
And guts and gore are all the go,
Death Stars invade the Planet Minh,
And cosmic killers run the show;
“As Barbie’s kissing G.I. Joe,
Six slimy aliens appear…”
(Which costs, of course, a lot of dough)–
Where are the games of yesteryear?

ENVOI

Consumer Parent, spare thy purse,
Waste not thy wealth on guns and gear;
Go buy a book—you could do worse—
And dream of games of yesteryear.

Ballad of the Ladies of Bygone Times
By Francois Villon

Tell me where, or in what land
is Flora, the lovely Roman,
or Archipiades, or Thaïs,
who was her first cousin;
or Echo, replying whenever called
across river or pool,
and whose beauty was more than human?
But where are the snows of yesteryear?

Where is that brilliant lady Heloise,
for whose sake Peter Abelard was castrated
and became a monk at Saint-Denis?
He suffered that misfortune because of his love for her.
And where is that queen who
ordered that Buridan
be thrown into the Seine in a sack?
But where are the snows of yesteryear?

Queen Blanche, white as a lily,
who sang with a siren’s voice;
Big-footed Bertha, Beatrice, Alice,
Arembourg who ruled over Maine;
and Joan, the good maiden of Lorraine
who was burned by the English at Rouen —
where are they, where, O sovereign Virgin?
But where are the snows of yesteryear?

Prince, do not ask in a week
where they are, or in a year.
The only answer you will get is this refrain:
But where are the snows of yesteryear?

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Coping with Pain

By Robin Bates | Published: June 27, 2021
Michael Ancher, The Sick Girl (1882)

Monday

We ask for your prayers as my 95-year-old mother fell and fractured her pelvis on Friday. While I think we’ll get her back next week—no surgery is required—she’s currently in a local hospital. This pain poem helps me sympathize with her condition and also prompts me to bless the existence of morphine.

A Poem about Pain
By David Budbill

I can feel myself slipping away, fading away, withdrawing
from this life, just as my father did. When the pain you’re in

is so great you can’t think about or pay attention to anything
but your own pain, the rest of the world and all other life

don’t matter.

I think about my friends with dementia, cancer, arthritis, and
how much more pain they are in than I am, but it does no good,

their pain is not mine, and therefore, no matter how magnanimous I might want to be, their pain is not as important to me as my own.

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David and Jonathan’s Love

By Robin Bates | Published: June 26, 2021
David and Jonathan, detail from window in St. Mark’s Portobello, Scotland

Spiritual Sunday

In today’s lesson from the Hebrew Bible (2 Samuel: 1, 17-27), David laments the death of King Saul and of Jonathan, Saul’s son and David’s best friend. David cries out in agony, “How the mighty have fallen” and then spells out what Jonathan meant to him:

Jonathan lies slain upon your high places.
I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan;

greatly beloved were you to me;
your love to me was wonderful,
passing the love of women.

 The 17th century poet Abraham Cowley has a poem celebrating their love, although in his mind it can’t be a homosexual love, which would be tainted by, well, sexuality. Rather, it is a pure homosocial love such as that celebrated by Plato. That being said, however, Plato’s love between men also had a sexual component. It was just less important to him than the marriage of elevated minds.

I’m not bothered if David and Jonathan’s union was sexual as well as spiritual. In my mind, but not in Cowley’s, marriage between a husband and wife can be just as elevated as that between David and Jonathan, with sexuality adding to rather than detracting from the chemistry. Freud’s process of sublimation may be at work in Cowley’s conception, with repressed homosexual urges manifesting themselves in something which seems pure and elevated because they are repressed. (As Wikipedia explains sublimation, it is “the process of deflecting sexual instincts into acts of higher social valuation.”) While, in Cowley’s eyes, the joys of sex between a man and woman are “full of dross, and thicker far,” the love of Jonathan and David, since it doesn’t involve physical intimacy (“matter”), is “clear and liquid.”

But aside from my objections to the sentiments in the second half of the poem, I like the poet’s description of David and Jonathan’s deep bond: “They mingled Fates, and both in each did share,/ They both were Servants, they both Princes were.” We can celebrate such friendships, whatever form they take.

David and Jonathan
By Abraham Cowley

Still to one end they both so justly drew,
As courteous Doves together yok’d would do.
No weight of Birth did on one side prevaile,
Two Twins less even lie in Natures Scale,
They mingled Fates, and both in each did share,
They both were Servants, they both Princes were.
If any Joy to one of them was sent;
It was most his, to whom it least was meant,
And fortunes malice betwixt both was crost,
For striking one, it wounded th’other most.
Never did Marriage such true Union find,
Or men’s desires with so glad violence bind;
For there is still some tincture left of Sin,
And still the Sex will needs be stealing in.
Those joys are full of dross, and thicker far
These, without matter, clear and liquid are.
Such sacred Love does he’avens bright Spirits fill,
Where Love is but to Understand and Will,
With swift and unseen Motions; such as We
Somewhat express in heightened Charity.
O ye blest One! whose Love on earth became
So pure that still in Heav’en ’tis but the same
There now ye sit, and with mixt souls embrace,
Gazing upon great Love’s mysterious Face,
And pity this base world where Friendship’s made
A bait for sin, or else at best a Trade.

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Holmes and Lupin, a Comparison

By Robin Bates | Published: June 24, 2021
Omar Sy in Netflix’s Lupin

Friday

Like many Netflix viewers, our family has fallen in love with Lupin, an updated version of the famous “gentleman burglar.” France’s answer to Sherlock Holmes but working the other side of the law, Arsene Lupin only steals from those who deserve it or can spare the money. Often he breaks the law to make sure that justice is done.

Like the BBC series Sherlock, Lupin has entered the age of the internet. The central character is not actually Lupin himself but Assane Diop, the son of a Senegalese immigrant. The Diops are passionate fans of the Maurice Leblanc novels, and when the elder Diop is framed for a diamond theft by his wealthy employer Pellegrini (who needs the insurance money), he sends a Lupin-type code to his son. He is murdered in prison before Assane is old enough to decipher the code, but when young Diop comes of age, he devotes his life to exposing Pellegrini. Since the millionaire has powerful friends, however, burglary and other Lupin-type tactics are Assane’s only options.

The thrill of the series is watching Assane break the law and get away with it, all without harming anyone truly innocent. (For instance, some of the diamonds he steals at one point are blood diamonds from a lady who doesn’t care.) Those who help him or need his help sometimes find themselves the unexpected possessors of a diamond.

The Sherlock Holmes comparison actually comes up in the stories (although not in the Netflix series). Leblanc wrote a few stories where Lupin outwits Holmes, and when Doyle complained about copyright infringement, he changed the name to Herlock Sholmes (a lack of subtlety not at all worthy of Lupin). I wonder if this was a case of Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence,” where authors, desiring to be original, attack or otherwise disparage those who most influenced them.

We see Doyle himself doing this in the early pages of Study in Scarlet, where Watson first meets Holmes. Holmes has just, after a quick glance, informed Watson of his entire life history and then explained how he did it:

“It is simple enough as you explain it,” I said, smiling. “You remind me of Edgar Allen Poe’s Dupin. I had no idea that such individuals did exist outside of stories.”

Sherlock Holmes rose and lit his pipe. “No doubt you think that you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin,” he observed. “Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends’ thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour’s silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine.”

“Have you read Gaboriau’s works?” I asked. “Does Lecoq come up to your idea of a detective?”

Sherlock Holmes sniffed sardonically. “Lecoq was a miserable bungler,” he said, in an angry voice; “he had only one thing to recommend him, and that was his energy. That book made me positively ill. The question was how to identify an unknown prisoner. I could have done it in twenty-four hours. Lecoq took six months or so. It might be made a text-book for detectives to teach them what to avoid.”

I felt rather indignant at having two characters whom I had admired treated in this cavalier style. I walked over to the window, and stood looking out into the busy street. “This fellow may be very clever,” I said to myself, “but he is certainly very conceited.”

Harold Bloom would affirm that Holmes does in fact leave his predecessors in the dust since Dupin reads as a pale imitation of Doyle’s detective. Poe may have invented the detective story but Doyle perfected it. Leblanc’s attempt at surpassing his predecessor is less successful, I think. Lupin–perhaps a cross between Dupin and the French word for wolf (loup)–is no Sherlock.

Nevertheless, it’s fun to read—and now watch—a charismatic burglar at work. To give you a quick taste of Dupin at work, here’s the conclusion of “Madame Imbert’s Safe,” a story reminiscent of Doyle’s “Scandal in Beohemia” in that, like Holmes, Lupin finds himself unexpectedly bested by a woman. In his early days before becoming famous, he takes a job with a couple thinking he is the one about to do the robbing. We he discovers their wealth is all counterfeit and that, to boot, the woman has robbed of his meager student savings, he is at first furious and then genuinely amused. The narrator reports,

I could not refrain from laughter, his rage was so grotesque. He was making a mountain out of a molehill. In a moment, he laughed himself, and said:

“Yes, my boy, fifteen hundred francs. You must know that I had not received one sou of my promised salary, and, more than that, she had borrowed from me the sum of fifteen hundred francs. All my youthful savings! And do you know why? To devote the money to charity! I am giving you a straight story. She wanted it for some poor people she was assisting—unknown to her husband. And my hard-earned money was wormed out of me by that silly pretense! Isn’t it amusing, hein? Arsène Lupin done out of fifteen hundred francs by the fair lady from whom he stole four millions in counterfeit bonds! And what a vast amount of time and patience and cunning I expended to achieve that result! It was the first time in my life that I was played for a fool, and I frankly confess that I was fooled that time to the queen’s taste!”

Doyle himself once put Holmes on the wrong side of the law. In “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton,” he and Watson break into a blackmailer’s home to retrieve correspondence that would compromise a client. Watson has convinced Holmes to let him come, leading Holmes to reply,

Well, well, my dear fellow, be it so. We have shared this same room for some years, and it would be amusing if we ended by sharing the same cell. You know, Watson, I don’t mind confessing to you that I have always had an idea that I would have made a highly efficient criminal. This is the chance of my lifetime in that direction.

As with Lupin, we get a good chuckle when Holmes plays with the police, who have received a report of them:

“Criminals?” said Holmes. “Plural?”

“Yes, there were two of them. They were as nearly as possible captured red-handed. We have their footmarks, we have their description, it’s ten to one that we trace them. The first fellow was a bit too active, but the second was caught by the under-gardener, and only got away after a struggle. He was a middle-sized, strongly built man—square jaw, thick neck, moustache, a mask over his eyes.”

“That’s rather vague,” said Sherlock Holmes. “My, it might be a description of Watson!”

“It’s true,” said the inspector, with amusement. “It might be a description of Watson.”

Needless to say, Holmes refuses to help, and his rationale pretty much sums up Netflix’s Lupin:

I think there are certain crimes which the law cannot touch, and which therefore, to some extent, justify private revenge. No, it’s no use arguing. I have made up my mind. My sympathies are with the criminals rather than with the victim, and I will not handle this case.”

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Eternally Damned after Reading a Book

By Robin Bates | Published: June 23, 2021
Rossetti, Paulo and Francesca

Thursday

Yesterday, drawing from the chapter in my book where I examine Jane Austen’s critique of literature that can lead people astray, I focused on how Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price may have used Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa to retain her moral compass. I should have mentioned, by way of contrast, that those around her are using a racy play by Elizabeth Inchbald to engage in inappropriate behavior. Most notably, Henry Crawford uses the play to cuckold Maria Bertram’s fiancé, casting her in a role where he himself can have an intimate moment with her.

Today, drawing from the same chapter, I make a comparison between how Marianne and Willoughby use poetry in their courtship and how Paulo and Francesca do in Dante’s Inferno. Austen herself doesn’t have Dante in mind but the parallels are illuminating, as are the contrasts.

Dante shows the two famous lovers trapped in the second circle of Hell, reserved for the lustful. The couple is based on an actual incidents of lovers caught in an adulterous affair and killed by the husband. (Francesca notes that he is destined for one of Inferno’s lower circles.) The two are blown about perpetually by the winds of their desire, never finding a point of stability. As Dante puts it (in John Ciardi’s translation),

And now the sounds of grief begin to fill
My ear; I’m come where cries of anguish smite
My shrinking sense, and lamentation shrill –

A place made dumb of every glimmer of light,
Which bellows like tempestuous ocean birling
In the batter of a two-way wind’s buffet and fight.

The blast of hell that never rests from whirling
Harries the spirits along in the sweep of its swath,
And vexes them, forever beating and hurling.

When they are borne to the rim of the ruinous path
With cry and wail and shriek they are caught by the gust.
Railing and cursing the power of the Lord’s wrath.

Into this torment carnal sinners are thrust.
So I was told – the sinners who make their reason
Bond thrall under the yoke of their lust.

A major culprit for their transgression, Francesca tells Dante, was the Arthurian tale about Lancelot’s love for Guinevere. Until they encountered that story, all was well:

But if there is indeed a soul in Hell
to ask of the beginning of our love
out of his pity, I will weep ad tell:

On a day for dalliance we read the rhyme
of Lancelot, how love had masted him.
We were alone with innocence and dim time.

After that, as it were, all hell broke loose:

Pause after pause that high old story drew
our eyes together while we blushed and paled;
but it was one soft passage overthrew

Our caution and our hearts. For when we read
how her fond smile was kissed by such a lover,
he who is one with me alive and dead

breathed on my lips ahd tremor of his kiss.
That book, and he who wrote it, was a pander.
That day we read no further.

Reading is also a key part of Willoughby and Marianne’s relationship. It begins romantically—he rides up out of the mist when she has sprained an ankle and carries her home—and continues on in the same vein:

His society became gradually her most exquisite enjoyment. They read, they talked, they sang together; his musical talents were considerable; and he read with all the sensibility and spirit which Edward had unfortunately wanted.

We know what they’re reading because Marianne’s older sister Elinor and Elinor’s admirer Edward, both on the sense side of the sense-sensibility spectrum, good-naturedly tease her about her favorite poets:

“Well, Marianne,” said Elinor, as soon as he had left them, “for one morning I think you have done pretty well. You have already ascertained Mr. Willoughby’s opinion in almost every matter of importance. You know what he thinks of Cowper and Scott; you are certain of his estimating their beauties as he ought, and you have received every assurance of his admiring Pope no more than is proper. But how is your acquaintance to be long supported, under such extraordinary despatch of every subject for discourse? You will soon have exhausted each favourite topic. Another meeting will suffice to explain his sentiments on picturesque beauty, and second marriages, and then you can have nothing farther to ask.

Edward, meanwhile, weighs in during a conversation about how the family would spend a large fortune were they suddenly to inherit one:

What magnificent orders would travel from this family to London,” said Edward, “in such an event!…[A]s for Marianne, I know her greatness of soul, there would not be music enough in London to content her. And books!—Thomson, Cowper, Scott—she would buy them all over and over again: she would buy up every copy, I believe, to prevent their falling into unworthy hands; and she would have every book that tells her how to admire an old twisted tree. 

For a while, Marianne and Willoughby are as absorbed in each other as Paulo and Francesca, so much so that they rudely ignore everyone else.  There’s a real danger that Marianne, blown by the same winds, could lose her way. That’s because Willoughby is not one of Scott’s admirable heroes but a cad who has ruined one woman (Colonel Brandon’s Ward) and who will dump Marianne for an heiress. After he does, Marianne sinks into the melancholic self-absorption that Cowper helped romanticize and that alarmed many parents. To cite two instances, Cowper writes in Book III of The Task,

I was a stricken deer that left the herd
Long since; with many an arrow deep infixt
My panting side was charged when I withdrew
To seek a tranquil death in distant shades.

And in “The Castaway,” about a young man who falls overboard, Cowper concludes,

No voice divine the storm allay’d,
        No light propitious shone;
When, snatch’d from all effectual aid,
         We perish’d, each alone:
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he.

This is heady stuff for a moody, heartbroken 16-year-old. Thomson’s The Seasons, meanwhile, is the kind of poem that encouraged long walks in nature, and Marianne, venturing out despite a threat of rain, catches a chill and almost dies. In other words, one could say that Scott almost ruins her, Cowper almost drives her mad, and Thomson almost kills her.

If Marianne doesn’t lose herself entirely in a Paulo and Francesca passion, it’s because she is grounded. She has, for a guide, a wise older sister and, for additional reading material, the poetry of Alexander Pope, whose heroic couplets (say, in Essay on Man) urge a balance between reason and emotion.  Marianne may have only a grudging appreciation for Pope, but she has at least read him.

And so Marianne does not end up in an Inferno of endless desire but in a good, if not tempest-like, marriage. Those readers wishing she had ended up with Willoughby should consult Dante.

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Lit Steels Spines in Face of Pressure

By Robin Bates | Published: June 22, 2021
Francis Hayman, illus. of Lovelace preparing to abduct Clarissa

Wednesday

As I continue to revise my current book project (Better Living through Literature: A 2500-Year-Old Debate), I am looking into how literature may have come to the aid of Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price at her darkest hour. Fanny is the most well-read of all Austen’s heroines, and while Austen doesn’t specifically mention that her reading assists her when the Bertram family pressures her to marry the problematic Henry Crawford, I’m now convinced that Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa helps steel her resolve.

Although Fanny has been denigrated by any number of readers for being mousy and “insipid” (this from Austen’s own mother), she rises to the occasion when confronted with more pressure than that encountered by any Austen heroine. Unsympathetic readers, who would prefer an Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse or Anne Elliot, underestimate her situation. A poor dependent, she is subject to the whims of the Bertram family at all times. She comes into the household as a child and is either ignored, bullied, or exploited by all but her older cousin Edmund.

As she grows older, they continue to thoughtlessly make use of her and to assume that her needs don’t matter. She is deprived of a fire in her room when it’s cold (by the malicious Aunt Norris) and made to run errands in the scorching heat (by the thoughtless Lady Bertram). Even Edmund, without thinking, takes away her horse when a woman he admires (Mary Crawford) wants to ride.  All of this Fanny endures without complaint, and it’s noteworthy that the one time she pushes back—when she refuses the Crawford marriage—she is sent back to her impoverished family. Her attempts to remain invisible at all times are a survival tactic.

That’s why her rebellion, when it comes, is so remarkable. Accustomed to downplay her own rights as a human being, she asserts them here. The Bertrams and Crawfords are astounded by her decision. In their eyes, Henry’s proposal is extraordinary considering his wealth and her poverty. It’s the prince proposing to Cinderella.

Only Crawford is no prince. Fanny has seen how, beneath his charming exterior, he is hollow, self-absorbed, manipulative, at times even cruel. He may be everything that society admires, but that’s because society itself has faulty values. If Fanny can see through him whereas others can’t, it’s partly because her position as a dependent makes it necessary to assess those who are above her. But it may also be because she’s acquainted with Richardson’s Robert Lovelace.

Lovelace is the charming rake in Clarissa who first courts her, then kidnaps her, and finally rapes her. Always promising to reform and never doing so, he deludes many. In fact, many 18th century readers wanted Richardson to end the novel with a marriage (even after the rape), just as many readers want Fanny to marry Crawford. I myself did at one point. But Richardson resisted reader pressure and Fanny resists Bertram family pressure, even though Fanny’s beloved Edmund pleads with her and Sir Thomas, hoping that a dose of poverty will bring her “to her senses,” sends her back to her family.

It would be easy for her to decide that her own needs don’t matter, as she has been doing all her life, and succumb. That way she would please everyone, and she’d get an upper class life as a reward. Yet she resists.

Clarissa provides the model for doing so. Clarissa’s family puts unrelenting pressure on her to marry the odious Mr. Soames, sometimes more brutally and with coarser language than that encountered by Fanny. Yet Clarissa remains true to herself and holds firm, just as Clarissa does with Lovelace’s non-stop sexual overtures (which is why he finally resorts to rape). After that, though much of the world condemns Clarissa—they see her as having run off with Lovelace—she knows the truth. In the end, she dies, at which point Richardson practically canonizes her. One can see how having such a literary model would strengthen Fanny.

To be sure, Austen doesn’t actually mention that Fanny has read Clarissa, but it would be strange if she hadn’t, given how much of a reader she is. Richardson was Austen’s favorite author, and Clarissa is arguably the greatest English novel of the 18th century. Women would disappear for days into their private chambers to read the million-word novel, neglecting household duties to do so.

In his article “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Reader,” my dissertation director J. Paul Hunter says that the novel form generally, and Clarissa in particular, ushered in a new kind of solitude, upsetting people who were used to more social interactions. It was like kids disappearing into video games. Husbands were particularly upset at losing their wives’ services, but perhaps they were even more upset at the way the novel promotes female selfhood.

In any event, the thought of Fanny reading Clarissa helps me better understand how she withstands the pressure put on her.

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Putin Quoting Tolstoy? Puleeze!

By Robin Bates | Published: June 21, 2021
Vladimir Putin

Tuesday

Last week when Joe Biden was meeting with Vladimir Putin, Russia’s autocrat claimed to be quoting Leo Tolstoy when he responded to a reporter’s question about whether there was a “growing trust and happiness” between him and America’s president. “There is no happiness in life, only a mirage of it on the horizon, so cherish that,” Putin said

Commentators were unable to find any instances of Tolstoy saying or writing this, nor does it sound like something that Tolstoy would say. In fact, his characters often find genuine moments of happiness. The closest MSNBC’s Laurence O’Donnell could come was a passage from War and Peace, but Prince Andrei has something very different in mind that Putin.

Having lost his wife as well and seeing his proposals for military reform dashed, Andrei is feeling particularly discouraged. He begins to experience new hope after meeting Natasha, however:

“Pierre was right when he said one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and now I do believe in it. Let the dead bury their dead, but while one has life one must live and be happy!” thought he.

To be sure, this happiness will not be long-lasting. After accepting his marriage proposal, Natasha will renege and then Andrei will almost die when fighting Napoleon and almost die. Although he will in fact die, before he does he will experience a vision of absolute love. (Now there’s a vision of happiness that eludes Putin.) Andrei also forgives Natasha, and he does not so much surrender to death as accept it as a new adventure.

His best friend Pierre, to whom he attributes the observation, is the novel’s existentialist, constantly pondering the meaning of life. Yet happiness awaits him as well as, after he and Natasha mourn Andrei, they fall in love (this after Pierre escapes execution). We see them enjoying a contented family life as the book comes to its conclusion.

While it’s not Tolstoy, what Putin said serves his purposes. If Russians believe that life is inevitably unhappy, then they won’t blame Putin’s kleptocracy for tanking the Russian economy. They will just continue to suck it up, as they have been doing for hundreds of years.

In Putin’s defense, the reporter’s question was strange. What does happiness have to do with the Biden-Putin relationship? Indeed, Russians and Americans may have very different visions of what constitutes happiness. For Americans, the word appears in the most important sentence of their founding document: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

These are the words of a people who think they can start fresh in a new world. It’s the vision of a young and optimistic people, a belief that one can erase the past. This vision has been embraced by each successive wave of immigrants and is integral to the American Dream, that which makes America America.

Russia, on the other hand, has experienced hardship after hardship. For them, there’s no easy way out. We see plenty of suffering in War and Peace when Napoleon invades, and the 20th century alone dumped on the Soviet Union more than almost any other nation. That Russians have been hardened in a way that optimistic Americans have not may contribute to Russia’s literary greatness. In any event, I can see why Putin would be taken aback by the question.

Incidentally, his response reminds me of Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” He too represents a response to facile American optimism. After he and gang have just murdered a Georgia family, one of his men complains that he’s not having much fun. In the line that ends the story, the Misfit replies, “Shut up, Bobby Lee. It’s no real pleasure in life.”

The Misfit and Putin are both clear-eyed realists with blood on their hands. The issue of soul gets raised with both as well. When meeting with Putin as vice-president in 2011, Biden reported the following:

“I said, ‘Mr. Prime Minister, I’m looking into your eyes, and I don’t think you have a soul,’” Biden told the New Yorker at the time. “He looked back at me, and he smiled, and he said, ‘We understand one another.'”

Biden’s remark was a follow-up to George W. Bush’s fatuous statement, made ten years before, about his meeting with Putin: “We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul. He’s a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country and I appreciate very much the frank dialogue and that’s the beginning of a very constructive relationship.”

Both Putin and the Misfit have buried their souls so deep that they cannot respond to the humanity of others. It is because the Misfit momentarily sees the soul at work in the otherwise shallow grandmother that he freaks out and shoots her. By reaching out to him with tenderness and love, even though he has just had her family killed, she shakes his cynical world view to its foundations. When Bush thought he could reach out similarly, however, Putin ran circles around him. Biden knows a lost cause when he sees one.

In any event, Putin represents everything that Tolstoy was against. The writer spoke from the beating heart of his country whereas the autocrat just twists words for his cynical ends.

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Sumer Is i-Cumin In

By Robin Bates | Published: June 20, 2021
Herbert Arnould Olivier, Summer Is Icumen In

Monday – First Day of Summer

This being the first full day of summer, the famous mid-13th century lyric “Sumer is i-cumin in” is a must. My father, who was both a bird watcher and a lover of nature, lamented that the French couldn’t match the English for nature imagery, and this poem pulsates with the sounds, sights, and smells (“verteth” means farts) of early summer. The Middle Ages may have been a particularly spiritual age but it was also very earthy. These two aspects make for wonderful creative tension in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer.

There’s no such tension in “Sumer is i-cumin in,” however. This lyric is all earth all the time. You should be able to make out most of the middle English, but here are words you may need translated:

Nu – now
Med – meadow
Wude – wood
Awe – ewe
Lhouth- cow
Lu – lows
Sterteth – starts up
Verteth – farts
Bucke – male goat or deer

The last line means “never stop now.”

Sing, cuccu, nu. Sing, cuccu.
Sing, cuccu. Sing, cuccu, nu.

Sumer is i-cumin in—
Lhude sing, cuccu!
Groweth sed and bloweth med
And springth the wude nu.
Sing, cuccu!

Awe bleteth after lomb,
Lhouth after calve cu,
Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth—
Murie sing, cuccu!
Cuccu, cuccu,
Wel singes thu, cuccu.
Ne swik thu naver nu!

Bonus Poem:

While looking up the lyric on Wikipedia, I came across a very funny parody by A.Y. Campbell, a classic scholar who composed it in the 1920s or 1930s:

Plumber is icumen in;
Bludie big tu-du.
Bloweth lampe, and showeth dampe,
And dripth the wud thru.
Bludie hel, boo-hoo!

Thaweth drain, and runneth bath;
Saw saweth, and scrueth scru;
Bull-kuk squirteth, leake spurteth;
Wurry springeth up anew,
Boo-hoo, boo-hoo.

Tom Pugh, Tom Pugh, well plumbes thu, Tom Pugh;
Better job I naver nu.
Therefore will I cease boo-hoo,
Woorie not, but cry pooh-pooh,
Murie sing pooh-pooh, pooh-pooh,
Pooh-pooh!

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Father God, I Want to Sit on Your Knees

By Robin Bates | Published: June 19, 2021
Guercino Giovan Francesco Barbieri, God The Father

Spiritual Sunday – Father’s Day

When I attended church as a child, I came away with the impression that God was an old man who was angry all the time. It didn’t help that our rector, as I learned later, was a fire and brimstone Episcopalian (they’re fairly rare). I was also freaked out by the confessional of the time, especially the lines, “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us.” (The language was softened in the 1979 prayer book revision.) Christianity, as I experienced it, seemed to do little more than exacerbate my already strong sense of guilt. I would have agreed with William Blake’s depiction of such a God as “Nobodaddy,” a “silent & invisible Father of jealousy” who hides in “darkness and obscurity.”

The end result was that I stopped going to church when I hit high school and didn’t return until my late thirties.

It helped in my return that I started thinking of God as female rather than male. This gender shift opened up possibilities that had seemed closed off before. I also appreciated that Julian of Norwich, whom I taught in the British Literary survey, refers to Jesus as a mother.

Katherine Mansfield’s poem “God the Father,” however, provides a more positive view of a paternal God. She too appears to have had negative feelings until, after having been beaten about by life, she arrives at a new appreciation.

We can’t help but anthropomorphize the deities we worship, but literature helps us expand the range of our metaphors.

To God the Father

By Katherine Mansfield

To the little, pitiful God I make my prayer,
The God with the long grey beard
And flowing robe fastened with a hempen girdle
Who sits nodding and muttering on the all-too-big throne
of Heaven.
What a long, longtime, dear God, since you set the
stars in their places,
Girded the earth with the sea, and invented the day and night.
 And longer the time since you looked through the blue window of Heaven
To see your children at play, in a garden….
Now we are all stronger than you and wiser and more
arrogant,
In swift procession we pass you by.
“Who is that marionette nodding and muttering
On the all-too-big throne of Heaven?
Come down from your place, Grey Beard,
We have had enough of your play-acting!”

It is centuries since I believed in you,
But to-day my need of you has come back.
I want no rose-colored future,
No books of learning, no protestations and denials–
I am sick of this ugly scramble,
I am tired of being pulled about–
O God, I want to sit on your knees
On the all-too-big throne of Heaven,
And fall asleep with my hands tangled in your grey
beard.

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