Here’s to Old Ireland!

By Robin Bates | Published: March 14, 2024

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Friday

Here’s a poem in anticipation of St. Patrick’s Day weekend, with the March 17 holiday this year falling on a Sunday. Interestingly, although Jean Blewett (1862-1934) has written the kind of idealization of the “green isle” that one associates with irish expatriates, the Canadian poet herself happens to have been of Scottish descent. Still, the poem is perfect for the occasion. Enjoy.

St. Patrick’s Day
By Jean Blewett

There’s an Isle, a green Isle, set in the sea,
     Here’s to the Saint that blessed it!
And here’s to the billows wild and free
     That for centuries have caressed it!

Here’s to the day when the men that roam
     Send longing eyes o’er the water!
Here’s to the land that still spells home
     To each loyal son and daughter!

Here’s to old Ireland—fair, I ween,
     With the blue skies stretched above her!
Here’s to her shamrock warm and green,
     And here’s to the hearts that love her!I

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Jane Austen’s Thematic Use of Cards

By Robin Bates | Published: March 13, 2024

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Thursday

This evening I will be teaching the card game, featured in Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park, to a gathering at Oberlin College. Following is the talk I will be giving, which I also gave when I taught the game at Vanderbilt University Library in 2019 and at Sewanee’s Dupont Library in 2023.

The game is Speculation, a deceptively simple game. As Austen observes, Fanny Price—who never plays cards—masters the basic rules in three minutes.  Players gather around tables in groups of five or six, pay into a pot, and then receive three cards each, which are dealt face down. The next card, dealt face up, is trump. The players then reveal their cards one at a time, with the highest trump card winning the pot. Speculation enters in when, at any time, the player with the highest card may choose to buy facedown cards from the other players, thereby ensuring that his or her card remains the highest.

I will note that, no matter how lovely our setting turns out to be, super snob Mrs. Elton of Emma would find fault with it. Here’s how she judges a card gathering she attends and what she herself plans in response:

She was a little shocked at the want of two drawing rooms, at the poor attempt at rout-cakes, and there being no ice in the Highbury card-parties. Mrs. Bates, Mrs. Perry, Mrs. Goddard and others, were a good deal behindhand in knowledge of the world, but she would soon shew them how everything ought to be arranged. In the course of the spring she must return their civilities by one very superior party—in which her card-tables should be set out with their separate candles and unbroken packs in the true style—and more waiters engaged for the evening than their own establishment could furnish, to carry round the refreshments at exactly the proper hour, and in the proper order.

Turning my attention to card games in general, I will observe that literature has often used cards for thematic purposes. To cite a random example, Jules Verne makes good use of the game whist in Around the World in 80 Days. What better way to capture an effete but steely-spined Phileas Fogg than by depicting him calmly taking tricks as he circumnavigates the globe? The image brings together the decorous drawing room and Britain’s adventurous colonial expansion.

Austen definitely uses card games for thematic effect. All but Austen’s youthful novel Lady Susan make some mention of cards. Sometimes cards seem to be a married guy thing: Mr. Allen in Northanger Abbey prefers cards to dancing and leaves the ladies to their own devices. So does the crass Mr. Hurst in Pride and Prejudice, and when he can’t find people to play with, he sulks by lying down on the couch.  In Emma, there are agonized discussions about how to set up an evening affair so that dancers and card players have separate spaces. Mr. Wodehouse plays whist whenever Emma can set up a foursome, although he forgoes it when he wants to spend time talking to his other daughter during a visit.

And then there’s high stakes gambling. Wickham’s villainy is finally confirmed when it’s learned that he is a gamester. Tom Bertram in Mansfield Park also is an enthusiastic card player, which may explain how he runs into financial trouble, costing his brother a parish.

But women play cards too. Although Elizabeth turns down a card game in Pride and Prejudice, it’s because the Bingleys are playing for more than just pennies. Elsewhere we see Elizabeth playing lottery, a game that requires minimal attention and that she uses as cover to talk to Wickham.

Quadrille, on the other hand, discourages outsiders because of its complex rules, which is why the snobby Catherine de Bourgh insists upon it in Pride and Prejudice. Because of its complexity, quadrille would evolve into the simpler whist, which is what the Bennets play, as does Mr. Wodehouse.

Jane Bennet, meanwhile, knows that she and Bingley are right for each other because their simple natures prefer Vingt-un, which would evolve into blackjack, over Commerce, a forerunner of poker.

Cards is an ideal activity for this society because it gives people something to talk about. And then, when they run out of things to say, they can focus on the game. All in all, the activity is more entertaining than, say, conversing on the respective heights of Lady Middleton’s children.

But there’s another marker here. Attitudes towards cards seems to divide Austen’s classicism from her romanticism. The romantic Marianne detests cards, preferring piano playing. To be sure, card playing provides her with a way of interacting with Wickham when she’s in society—he cheats on her behalf—but she’d much rather be talking privately with him about their mutual love of Cowper’s poetry, which they can do when they’re riding or walking. Persuasion’s Anne Elliot, a deeper soul, prefers substantive conversations with Mrs. Smith to the vapid card parties of Bath.

A conversation about cards marks an important moment in Anne’s reconciliation with Wentworth:

“You have not been long enough in Bath,” said he, “to enjoy the evening parties of the place.”

“Oh! no. The usual character of them has nothing for me. I am no card-player.”

“You were not formerly, I know. You did not use to like cards; but time makes many changes.”

“I am not yet so much changed,” cried Anne, and stopped, fearing she hardly knew what misconstruction.

It’s worth that, when real love is in the air, the characters do not play cards. Elizabeth may play cards with Wickham (Pride and Prejudice) but she never does so with Darcy, nor does Emma play cards with Knightley. To be sure, Fanny Price (Mansfield Park) is in a card game with Edmund Bertram, but in that case he’s focused on Mary Crawford, not on her.

It is in this last novel that a card game receives the most thorough treatment. We know from a letter to her sister Cassandra about their nephews that Austen herself enjoyed the game:

Our evening was equally agreeable in its way. I introduced speculation, and it was so much approved that we hardly knew how to leave off.

In the game, the players ante into a pot and then are dealt three cards, all facedown. A final card is then dealt face-up, becoming the trump card. One by one the players reveal their cards, with the highest card in that suit winning the pot.

Players speculate in various ways. They may offer to buy the card from the dealer if they think it will be the final winner. The player holding the highest card at any particular moment may buy facedown cards from other players to make sure that this particular trump card holds.  Other speculative purchases are possible as well.

If the game was so popular, it may have been in part because speculation was in the air. Austen wrote her novels during the Napoleonic wars, and historian Jenny Uglow notes that national borrowing primed the pump, benefitting

 army contractors, who provided massive quantities of tents, knapsacks, canteens, uniforms, shoes, muskets, gunpowder, ships, maps, fortifications, meat, and biscuit; bankers and speculators, who funded the supplies as well as subsidies to Britain’s allies…; [and] revenue agents, who collected the wide variety of taxes imposed to finance the wars…

It’s also worth noting that Britain had banned the importation of new slaves to the colonies seven years before Mansfield Park, throwing uncertainty about the future of slavery itself. This may be why Sir Thomas must sail to the America’s to check on conditions there. It was a live question, therefore, whether one should continue to speculate on overseas plantations.

Seen through the lens of the card game, all of Austen’s major novels can be seen as featuring Speculation plots or subplots. For instance:

–In Northanger Abbey, Isabel Thorpe trades in a certain high card (William Morland) for the possibility of a higher one (Captain Frederick Tilney) but ends up with nothing;

–The opposite occurs in Sense and Sensibility. Willoughby thinks, to ensure his inheritance from Mrs. Smith of Allenham, that he must trade in Marianne, whom he loves, for Miss Grey. The marriage is unhappy and he later learns it was a needless sacrifice: had he played his cards right, he could have gotten both the Allenham estate and Marianne;

–Lucy Steele in Sense and Sensibility proves more adept at speculation, trading in the disinherited Edward Ferrars for his brother Robert;

–in Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth to proves herself a skilled speculator, passing on Mr. Collins and hauling in the far wealthier Darcy;

–her sister Lydia, on the other hand, is a reckless gambler, makes a bad bet by running off with Wickham. She is only saved from ruin by the intervention of others;

–Finally in Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Lucas does a cold-blooded analysis of the hand she has been dealt and figures that Mr. Collins is about the best she can do;

–Mary Crawford reveals her hand in Mansfield Park by showing she wants Robert Bertram to die so that the man she is set on (younger brother Edmund) will be a squire rather than a rector. Like Isabel Thorpe, she aims too high and ends up with nothing;

–Maria Bertram grabs a sure thing (Rushworth) but is so unsatisfied with him that she ruins her life. Her sister, meanwhile, grabs what she knows she can get (Yates) but only after she realizes a higher card is out of reach (Henry Crawford);

–Fanny Price passes up a certain winner (Crawford) and is rewarded with higher one (Edmund);

–Emma, playing with someone else’s money, advises Harriet to pass up a sure thing (Roger Martin) and speculate on first Mr. Elton and then Frank Churchill. Unfortunately, Emma so infuses Harriet with speculative fever that the young woman goes all in and targets Knightley—and nearly ends up with nothing at all;

–Finally, in Persuasion a young Anne Elliot makes a mistake in not speculating—she is persuaded that she be cautious rather than to marry a speculator—which is to say, to marry Captain Wentworth, who although poor is confident in his powers. The captain is sure he can parlay “a ship not fit to be employed” into a fortune and in fact he does. Anne later declares she would never counsel a young friend to hold back as she did.

Like Elizabeth Bennet and Fanny Price, Anne gambles on everything or nothing, passing up Robert Musgrove, Benwick, and Mr. Elliot. Her gamble pays off as she lands Wentworth after all. The reason these three heroines receive the payoffs they desire is that they step beyond the cash nexus altogether. Love and character count more than money. In other words, they are not moved by mere acquisition.

In this context, it’s useful to recall the scene where Crawford coaches Fanny in how to play Speculation. While she picks up the game quickly, she can’t grasp its predatory dimensions:

…for though it was impossible for Fanny not to feel herself mistress of the rules of the game in three minutes, [Crawford] had yet to inspirit her play, sharpen her avarice, and harden her heart.

In short, Speculation reenacts a pressing drama of the age–just as, say, the board game Monopoly did for several decades in America.

In the various Mansfield Park characters, we see the full range of playing styles to be found amongst Speculation players. The main lesson: When you gamble on the future, be bold but not reckless. Take calculated risks, going big but not too big. Here are the six card players and their approaches to the game:

–Poor but ambitious William Price will succeed only if he takes risks, plays a bold game, and does not hesitate to take advantage of others–who in this case include his accommodating sister;

–Fanny Price, on the other hand, allows others to exploit her, at least when it comes to cards;

–Henry Crawford, very manipulative, claims he wants to help others and to some extent does so. But given that he uses his position as coach to get close to Fanny, everything he does must be regard skeptically;

–Lady Bertram is clueless and depends on others to take care of her;

–Mary Crawford plays emotionally and recklessly, sometimes paying more for a card than the pot is worth;

–Edmund Bertram, as far as we can tell, plays a balanced game. The outcome doesn’t mean as much to him as to the less privileged William Price, which probably means he doesn’t haggle as much.

From having taught the game in the past, I could understand why Austen enjoyed it so much. It’s a noisy game with a lot of personal interaction, as players haggle over card prices and cheer or moan as a card wins or loses. Different people reveals themselves to be Fanny or William Prices, Henry or Mary Crawford, the two Bertrams.

I saw also how Speculation allows a lot of side-talk. The game doesn’t require as much concentration as, say, bridge. In that way, it serves Austen’s artistic purposes: characters can have important conversations without interrupting the flow of the action.

Above all, Speculation offers people a wonderful way to come together and spend an evening.

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Could “Dover Beach” Deter a Rape?

By Robin Bates | Published: March 12, 2024

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Wednesday

I am traveling this week and the next and so will be resorting to past essays rather than spending time away from the friends we are visiting. Here’s a post I wrote two years ago after reading an Ian McEwan novel, a time not longer after Russia had invaded Ukraine.

Reprinted from March 23, 2022

I recently finished listening to and thoroughly enjoying the Ian McEwan novel Saturday (2005). I share today an episode (major spoiler alert!) where Matthew Arnold’s famous poem “Dover Beach” (1867) deters a rape and possibly a murder. Poetry breaks through where other forms of communication fail.

One Saturday morning on his way to a squash game, neurosurgeon Henry Perowne is sideswiped by a thug and two cronies, who then prepare to beat him up. The date is February 15, 2003, the place is London, and there is a large rally underway protesting U.S. and British plans to invade Iraq. Just as he’s about to be thrashed, however, Perowne diagnoses the man (whose name is Baxter) as being in the early stages of Huntington’s disease. He disarms him and saves himself from a beating by talking to him about the illness. In listening to Perowne, however, Baxter loses face in front of his friends and later intrudes on a family dinner party to get revenge. I pick up the action after Baxter and one of his accomplices have just forced Perowne’s daughter to strip and then, as she stands before them naked, to read a poem from her upcoming book, the proofs of which she has in her possession. Although she pretends to read from the manuscript, however, Daisy instead recites “Dover Beach” and gets an unexpected response.

So that you can get the full effect of what transpires, here’s Arnold’s magnificent poem:

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

I should add that, when she strips, Daisy reveals to both the thugs and her family that she’s two months pregnant. Here’s the scene:

Henry has been through her book a few times, but there are certain poems he’s read only once; this one he only half remembers. The lines surprise him—clearly, he hasn’t been reading closely enough. They are unusually meditative, mellifluous and willfully archaic. She’s thrown herself back into another century. Now, in his terrified state, he misses or misconstrues much, but as her voice picks up a little and finds the beginnings of a quiet rhythm, he feels himself slipping through the words into the things they describe. He sees Daisy on a terrace overlooking a beach in summer moonlight; the sea is still and at high tide, the air scented, there’s a final glow of sunset. She calls to her lover, surely the man who will one day father her child, to come and look, or, rather, listen to the scene. Perowne sees a smooth-skinned young man naked to the waist, standing at Daisy’s side. Together they listen to the surf roaring on the pebbles, and hear in the sound a deep sorrow which stretches right back to ancient times. She thinks there was another time, even further back, when the earth was new and the sea consoling, and nothing came between man and God. But this evening the lovers hear only sadness and loss in the sound of the waves breaking and retreating from the shore. She turns to him, and before they kiss she tells him that they must love each other and be faithful, especially now they’re having a child, and when there’s no peace or certainty, and when desert armies stand ready to fight.

The reason Perowne only half remembers the poem is because it isn’t, of course, actually in her book. Not familiar himself with the literary canon, Perowne believes that his daughter is being “wilfully archaic” and throwing herself back into another century. In this perception, he reminds me of the narrator in Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” who commends Menard because, after having immersed himself deeply in the life of Cervantes, he is able to recreate, word for word, two and a half chapters from Don Quixote. In other words, a work that seems archaic if written in the past seems daringly new, flouting various 20th century literary conventions, when written by a modern author. Through this comic story, Borges makes the point that the same work can appear very different to readers of different eras, especially if they don’t make an historical adjustment.

But set that aside because the most remarkable thing about the scene in McEwan’s novel is the effect the poem has on Baxter, who has been holding a knife to the neck of Perowne’s wife. Baxter is dangerous because, as a man who knows his medical future, he feels he has nothing to lose. Yet he orders Daisy to read the poem again, and his mood, already prone to wild alterations because of his condition, shifts again:

It’s hard to tell, for his face is never still, but Baxter appears suddenly elated. His right hand has moved away from Rosalind’s shoulder and the knife is already back in his pocket. His gaze remains on Daisy. Baxter has broken his silence and is saying excitedly, “You wrote that. You wrote that.” It’s a statement, not a question. Daisy stares at him, waiting. He says again, “You wrote that.” And then, hurriedly, “It’s beautiful. You know that, don’t you. It’s beautiful. And you wrote it.” She dares say nothing. “It makes me think about where I grew up.”

A moment later he is telling Daisy to get dressed:

For a moment she doesn’t move, and they wait for her.

“I can’t believe it” Nigel says. “We gone to all this trouble.”

She bends to retrieve her sweater and skirt and begins to pull them on.

Earlier, while they are all listening to the second reading, Perowne imagines the effect the poem must be having on Baxter:

[Daisy] turns back a page, and with more confidence, attempting the seductive, varied tone of a storyteller entrancing a child, begins again. “The sea is calm tonight. The tide is full, the moon lies fair upon the straits—on the French coast the light gleams and is gone…”

Henry missed first time the mention of the cliffs of England “glimmering and vast out in the tranquil bay.” Now it appears there’s no terrace, but an open window; there’s no young man, father of the child. Instead he sees Baxter standing alone, elbows propped against the sill, listening to the waves “bring the eternal note of sadness in.” It’s not all of antiquity, but only Sophocles who associated this sound with the “turbid ebb and flow of human misery.” Even in his state, Henry balks at the mention of a “sea of faith” and a glittering paradise of wholeness lost in the distant past. Then once again, it’s through Baxter’s ears that he hears the sea’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, retreating, to the breath of the night wind, down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world.” It rings like a musical curse. The pleas to be true to one another sounds hopeless in the absence of joy or love or light or peace or “help for pain.” Even in a world “where ignorant armies clash by night,” Henry discovers on second hearing no mention of a desert. The poem’s melodiousness, he decides, is at odds with its pessimism.

The poem doesn’t magically end Baxter’s lethal threat. McEwan is too much of a realist to believe that literature can perform that kind of a miracle, no more that poetry can stop the U.S. and Britain from invading Iraq. For that matter, Russian poet Yevgueni Yevtushenko’s “Do the Russians Want War?”, alluded to by Ukrainian president Zelensky shortly after Putin’s invasion, did not stop the advance of Russian forces. “Dover Beach,” however, does manage to interrupt Baxter’s violent trajectory, and in that pause the family finds a way to save itself.

And the poem continues to work his magic. After Perowne and his son throw Baxter down the stairs, cracking his head open, Perowne finds himself—as the on-call surgeon—operating on the man. Reflecting on what to do next after a successful operation, Perowne decides he will try to get the man psychological and medical help rather than press charges. “[H]ere is one area where Henry can exercise authority and shape events,” the novel tells us. “He knows how the system works—the difference between good and bad care is near infinite.” He does so in part because of Baxter’s response to the poem:

Daisy recited a poem that cast a spell on one man. Perhaps any poem would have done the trick, and thrown the switch on a sudden mood change. Still, Baxter fell for the magic, he was transfixed by it, and he was reminded how much he wanted to live. No one can forgive him the use of the knife. But Baxter heard what Henry never has, and probably never will, despite all Daisy’s attempts to educate him. Some nineteenth-century poet—Henry has yet to find out whether this Arnold is famous or obscure—touched off in Baxter a yearning he could barely begin to define. That hunger is his claim on life, on a mental existence, and because it won’t last much longer, because the door of his consciousness is beginning to close, he shouldn’t pursue his claim from a cell, waiting for the absurdity of his trial to begin.

And so the book ends, with Perowne, like the figure in Arnold’s poem, looking out his window in the middle of the night with his beloved wife sleeping behind him. Indeed, “Dover Beach” shapes McEwan’s novel itself, which has come full circle since action at this same window 22 hours earlier. Then Perowne, waking early, gazed out of at the early morning sky with similar meditations. And while the world is a dangerous and often bewildering place, we also see the love he has for his wife and his children, who are now—at least temporarily—safe again. But whether safe or not, there is love. Or as Arnold puts it, “Ah love, let us be true to one another.”

It is a reminder we desperately need since we know what has happened in the almost 20 years since when the book is set. We know that mayhem will break out, not only in Iraq, but in Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Georgia, Chechnya, and now Ukraine. We are certainly on a darkling plain where armies are clashing.

I have one other thought about poetry’s role in current events. While I state above that Yevtushenko’s “Do the Russians Want War?” appears to have had no effect on Russia’s Ukraine invasion, that may not be entirely true. Granted, the poem’s assurance that any country that has endured 20 million killed in World War II cannot possibly want war seems contradicted by Putin’s warmongering.  But if Russians all over the country are, with unimaginable bravery, standing up to protest the war, it’s in part because Yevushenko and others have instilled in them a sense that war is justified only in self-defense, not as a naked power grab. They are so appalled at what is being done in their name that they are willing to give up their liberty and their futures to voice their opposition.

Just as poetry can sometimes reach through a thug’s diseased mind and stay his actions, so it can help a country get in touch with its soul and to turn its back on egotistical power trips.

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Trump as a Sadistic Steinbeck Bully

By Robin Bates | Published: March 11, 2024
Stelle and Field as Curley and Candy in Of Mice and Men

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Tuesday

It’s been several years since political scientist John Stoehr (of the blog Editorial Board) applied the descriptor of “sadist” to Donald Trump, thereby explaining both the man and why he is popular with a certain sector of the American public. More than anything else, Stoehr says, Trump supporters crave this sadism (it’s why no other GOP candidate had a chance against him). In his article, the Editorial Board editor quotes Humam Abd al-Salam on what right-wingers mean when they complain about people being “so easily offended these days.” What they’re really saying, Abd al-Salam says, is “Why can’t I bully everyone like I used to?”

Stoehr is worried that Trump’s sadism has become so normalized that the press corps no longer even sees it as worth mentioning. Perhaps a literary comparison would help us recognize, once again, the ugliness. I’m thinking of Trump as Curley in Of Mice and Men.

Before turning to Steinbeck, let’s look at a recent instance of Trump sadism. In his Saturday Georgia rally, Trump mocked Joe Biden for his stutter, saying, “I’m gonna bring the country tuh-tuh-tuh together.” Apparently the audience “roared with laughter,” prompting fascism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat to observe, “He does it to evoke the laughter that makes the crowd complicit and reinforces the culture of cruelty he requires to realize his dreams of mass repression.”

We saw an instance of him doing something similar in the 2016 campaign when he ridiculed reporter Serge Kovaleski, who has a congenital joint condition that limits movement in his arms. Trump impersonated the man by contorting his own limbs.

By normalizing or overlooking Trump’s sadism, the media makes it acceptable. Meanwhile, it underreports Biden’s kindness. Following Trump’s mockery, Stoehr notes that a 2020 video resurfaced of Biden encouraging a boy with a stutter. “I’ll tell you what,” Biden told him. “Don’t let it define you. You are smart as hell, now you really are. You can do this.”

Biden continued, “You know when I say I know about bullies. You know about bullies, the kids who make fun. It’s going to change, honey. I promise you.” Stoehr notes that Biden has been interacting with people like this for his entire political life.

There’s a similar dynamic going on in Steinbeck’s novella. Boss’s son Curley, who like Trump reeks of entitlement, “doesn’t give a damn” about others. As protagonist George says after hearing about him, “I hate that kinda bastard. I seen plenty of ’em. Like the old guy says, Curley don’t take no chances. He always wins.”

Curley thinks he’s not taking a chance when he goes after Lennie, the mentally challenged giant who dreams of raising cute little rabbits with George on a farm of their own. Curley is feeling cocky because he has married a beautiful woman—think of Trump’s trophy wives—but he’s also worried that he won’t be able to hold on to her. When both she and two of the farm hands start mocking him, he attempts to regain his manhood by going after Lennie.

And at first he gets free shots because George has instructed Lennie not to fight back. In fact, George has predicted this would happen, telling his friend, “He figures he’s got you scared and he’s gonna take a sock at you the first chance he gets.”

At first Curley encounters no resistance. Thinking that Lennie is laughing at him (he’s not), he yells,

 “Come on, ya big bastard. Get up on your feet. No big son-of-a-bitch is gonna laugh at me. I’ll show ya who’s yella.” Lennie looked helplessly at George, and then he got up and tried to retreat. Curley was balanced and poised. He slashed at Lennie with his left, and then smashed down his nose with a right. Lennie gave a cry of terror. Blood welled from his nose. “George,” he cried. “Make ‘um let me alone, George.” He backed until he was against the wall, and Curley followed, slugging him in the face. Lennie’s hands remained at his sides; he was too frightened to defend himself.

Unable to bear what he’s seeing, George finally instructs Lennie to fight back, which he does. Continuing my political parallel, he’s like Biden using his State of Union address to fight back against the GOP after months of being caricatured as a senile and doddering old fool:

Lennie took his hands away from his face and looked about for George, and Curley slashed at his eyes. The big face was covered with blood. George yelled again, “I said get him.” Curley’s fist was swinging when Lennie reached for it. The next minute Curley was flopping like a fish on a line, and his closed fist was lost in Lennie’s big hand. George ran down the room. “Leggo of him, Lennie. Let go.”

But Lennie watched in terror the flopping little man whom he held. Blood ran down Lennie’s face; one of his eyes was cut and closed. George slapped him in the face again and again, and still Lennie held on to the closed fist. Curley was white and shrunken; by now, and his struggling had become weak. He stood crying, his fist lost in Lennie’s paw.

A number of pundits have noted that Biden’s secret power is that his opponents underestimate him. They have been doing so his entire career, thinking him weak because he reaches across the aisle and prefers quiet negotiation to grandstanding. This is one reason why Republicans were so caught off guard, and why Democrats were so energized, by Biden’s combative State of the Union speech.

Trump mocking him for his stutter after the SOTU would be like Curley mocking Lennie when Lennie is no longer around. But since such a scene doesn’t occur in the book, I need to look elsewhere—to Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones—to find an example that fits the occasion. Late in the novel, Squire Western has had his ears boxed by a man whose friend he has insulted—but he doesn’t give full vent to his wrath until the man is safely out of earshot:

The captain, with some indignation, replied, “I see, sir, you are below my notice, and I shall inform his lordship you are below his. I am sorry I have dirtied my fingers with you.” At which words he withdrew, the parson interposing to prevent the squire from stopping him, in which he easily prevailed, as the other, though he made some efforts for the purpose, did not seem very violently bent on success. However, when the captain was departed, the squire sent many curses and some menaces after him; but as these did not set out from his lips till the officer was at the bottom of the stairs, and grew louder and louder as he was more and more remote, they did not reach his ears, or at least did not retard his departure.

So Trump, after Biden administered a Lennie-like beating with his address, sought to recover his dignity by making fun of Biden’s stutter. And got his sycophantic fans to join in.

Classic bully sadism.

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The Green Power of Imagining

By Robin Bates | Published: March 10, 2024
Illus. from Burnett, The Secret Garden

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Monday

Yesterday I presented a talk entitled “‘Being Alive Is the Magic’: The Spiritual Vision That Shapes Francis Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden” to our church’s Sunday Forum. One of the ideas I explored was the power of imagining to change the future.

In Friday’s post, I quoted from my friend John Gatta’s book Green Gospel, where he warns about the danger of environmental pessimism. Hopelessness, he says, can become “a self-fulfilling stance, even amounting to another form of climate denialism if it ends in passive resignation or despair.” To counter such hopelessness, he advises imagining visions of a sustainable future. In doing so, we “enlarge our capacity for hope.”

We see the power of such imagining in a moving scene in Secret Garden. Ten-year-old Colin Cravens has been convinced, by others and by himself, that he is a permanent invalid who is going to die. When Mary Lennox tells him about the secret garden, however, he begins seeing the world, and his own prospects in it, in a new way. At this stage in their relationship, however, Mary isn’t sure that she can trust him with her greatest secret, which is that she has found a way into the garden.

What she does, therefore, is engage him in a process of imagining what the garden must be like. I share the following passage because I think it can provide a model for what Gatta has in mind. If we imagine green energy policy might accomplish—and do so in a way that is not empty wish fulfillment but acknowledges the challenges involved—then perhaps we can help bring about a version of the transformations that we witness in the book: which is a dying garden brought back to life, a disagreeable girl whose heart is opened, and a young invalid who learns, not only to walk, but to run.

So here’s Mary pulling Colin into the imagining process:  

“Oh, Mary!” he said. “Oh, Mary! If I could get into it I think I should live to grow up! Do you suppose that instead of singing the Ayah song—you could just tell me softly as you did that first day what you imagine it looks like inside? I am sure it will make me go to sleep.”

“Yes,” answered Mary. “Shut your eyes.”

He closed his eyes and lay quite still and she held his hand and began to speak very slowly and in a very low voice.

“I think it has been left alone so long—that it has grown all into a lovely tangle. I think the roses have climbed and climbed and climbed until they hang from the branches and walls and creep over the ground—almost like a strange gray mist. Some of them have died but many—are alive and when the summer comes there will be curtains and fountains of roses. I think the ground is full of daffodils and snowdrops and lilies and iris working their way out of the dark. Now the spring has begun—perhaps—perhaps—”

The soft drone of her voice was making him stiller and stiller and she saw it and went on.

“Perhaps they are coming up through the grass—perhaps there are clusters of purple crocuses and gold ones—even now. Perhaps the leaves are beginning to break out and uncurl—and perhaps—the gray is changing and a green gauze veil is creeping—and creeping over—everything. And the birds are coming to look at it—because it is—so safe and still. And perhaps—perhaps—perhaps—” very softly and slowly indeed, “the robin has found a mate—and is building a nest.”

And Colin was asleep.

Because they have this hopeful vision, Colin and Mary are willing to put in the work, both to save the garden and to get well. It all begins with imagining.

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Be Empty and Cry As a Reed Instrument

By Robin Bates | Published: March 9, 2024
Ramadan begins with a new moon

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Sunday

Ramadan, the month of fasting and prayer, begins tomorrow or Tuesday (depending on the sighting of the new moon). George Washington University’s Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the Iranian philosopher and theologian, explains what Muslims achieve by prayerfully fasting from dawn to dusk for a month:

A person who fasts with complete faith becomes aware very rapidly that he is a pilgrim in this world and that he is a creature destined for a goal beyond this material existence. The world about him loses some of its materiality and gains an aspect of “vacuity” and transparence which in the case of the contemplative Muslim leads directly to a contemplation of God in His creation.

The ethereal and “empty” nature of things is, moreover, compensated by the appearance of those very things as Divine gifts. Food and drink which are taken for granted throughout the year reveal themselves during the period of fasting more than ever as gifts of heaven (ni’mah) and gain a spiritual significance of a sacramental nature.

Rumi, poet and Sufi mystic, has many poems about the power of emptying oneself out. Here’s one of them:

There’s hidden sweetness in the stomach’s emptiness.
We are lutes, no more, no less.
When the sound box is filled, no music comes forth.
When the brain and the belly burn from fasting,
every moment a new song rises out of the fire.
The mists clear, and a new vitality makes you
spring up the steps before you.
Be empty and cry as a reed instrument.

Be empty and write secrets with a reed pen.
When satiated by food and drink,
an unsightly metal statue is seated
where your spirit should be.
When you fast, good habits gather
like friends who want to help.
Fasting is Solomon’s ring.

Don’t give in to illusion and lose your power.
But even when will and control have been lost,
they will return when you fast,
like soldiers appearing out of the ground,
or pennants flying in the breeze.

A table descends to your tents, Jesus’ table.
Expect to see it, when you fast,
this table spread with other food,
better than the broth of cabbages.

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Wilmot, Women, and Sexual Pleasure

By Robin Bates | Published: March 7, 2024
Frontispiece from School of Women, by Nicolas Chorier

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Friday

The blog Lit Hub has alerted me to a recent book, Annabelle Hirsch’s A History of Women in 101 Objects, that features an object celebrated by one of British history’s most notorious libertines. The poem is Earl of Rochester John Wilmot’s “Signior Dildo,” and Hirsch obligingly includes a woodcut featuring that item. We see three women and and a man checking out a shop apparently specializing in dildos, with Hirsch reporting,

During the brief wave of libertinism, some high-society ladies did have lovers. But those who found the risk of compromising their reputation and livelihood too great (while men have always been able to cheat to great acclaim, women have not) survived attacks of acute boredom by reaching for objects like this one. The sex-toy business seems to have experienced a small boom in the seventeenth century: dildos were produced in greater numbers and various materials; some could be filled with liquid to simulate ejaculation.

Hirsch reveals that

Venice was in those days what you might call the capital of refined sex. Accordingly, the glass-blowing island of Murano was known not just for its famous chandeliers, candlesticks, glasses, and other pretty objects—but also as a dildo factory. In a well-to-do household, masturbation (if indulged in) was to be aided by the very finest glassware, if you please, despite the fact that onanism was second only to coitus interruptus—which, incidentally, is linked in the Bible to the story of Onan—as the Church’s worst nightmare.

Wilmot was very much in favor of sexually liberated women. In one of my favorite of his poems—“To a Lady in a Letter”—he encourages his mistress to go out sleep with other men while he is boozing it up with his male companions. “For did you love your pleasure less,/ You were no match for me,” he tells her before concluding,

Whilst I my pleasure to pursue,
    Whole nights am taking in
The lusty juice of grapes, take you
    The juice of lusty men.

Author Aphra Behn, among other women, was inspired by Wilmot, putting him in her play The Rover as Willmore. Protagonist Helena proves more than a match for cavalier.

But here’s the poem that came to my mind as I was reading Hirsch’s excerpt. I think it refers to actual ladies, which means that the upper class circles would have found it particularly titillating, something Charles’s court expected from Wilmot, who served as almost the official jester. The poem itself is repetitive so you may not want to read it in its entirety, but you can have fun imagining the stir it would have caused:

Signior Dildo
By John Wilmot

You ladies of merry England
Who have been to kiss the Duchess’s hand,
Pray, did you not lately observe in the show
A noble Italian called Signior Dildo?

This signior was one of the Duchess’s train
And helped to conduct her over the main;
But now she cries out, ‘To the Duke I will go,
I have no more need for Signior Dildo.’

At the Sign of the Cross in St James’s Street,
When next you go thither to make yourselves sweet
By buying of powder, gloves, essence, or so,
You may chance to get a sight of Signior Dildo.

You would take him at first for no person of note,
Because he appears in a plain leather coat,
But when you his virtuous abilities know,
You’ll fall down and worship Signior Dildo.

My Lady Southesk, heaven prosper her for’t,
First clothed him in satin, then brought him to court;
But his head in the circle he scarcely durst show,
So modest a youth was Signior Dildo.

The good Lady Suffolk, thinking no harm,
Had got this poor stranger hid under her arm.
Lady Betty by chance came the secret to know
And from her own mother stole Signior Dildo.

The Countess of Falmouth, of whom people tell
Her footmen wear shirts of a guinea an ell,
Might save that expense, if she did but know
How lusty a swinger is Signior Dildo.

By the help of this gallant the Countess of Rafe
Against the fierce Harris preserved herself safe;
She stifled him almost beneath her pillow,
So closely she embraced Signior Dildo.

The pattern of virtue, Her Grace of Cleveland,
Has swallowed more pricks than the ocean has sand;
But by rubbing and scrubbing so wide does it grow,
It is fit for just nothing but Signior Dildo.

Our dainty fine duchesses have got a trick
To dote on a fool for the sake of his prick,
The fops were undone did their graces but know
The discretion and vigor of Signior Dildo.

The Duchess of Modena, though she looks so high,
With such a gallant is content to lie,
And for fear that the English her secrets should know,
For her gentleman usher took Signior Dildo.

The Countess o’ th’ Cockpit (who knows not her name?
She’s famous in story for a killing dame),
When all her old lovers forsake her, I trow,
She’ll then be contented with Signior Dildo.

Red Howard, Red Sheldon, and Temple so tall
Complain of his absence so long from Whitehall.
Signior Barnard has promised a journey to go
And bring back his countryman, Signior Dildo.

Doll Howard no longer with His Highness must range,
And therefore is proferred this civil exchange:
Her teeth being rotten, she smells best below,
And needs must be fitted for Signior Dildo.

St Albans with wrinkles and smiles in his face,
Whose kindness to strangers becomes his high place,
In his coach and six horses is gone to Bergo
To take the fresh air with Signior Dildo.

Were this signior but known to the citizen fops,
He’d keep their fine wives from the foremen o’their shops;
But the rascals deserve their horns should still grow
For burning the Pope and his nephew, Dildo.

Tom Killigrew’s wife, that Holland fine flower,
At the sight of this signior did fart and belch sour,
And her Dutch breeding the further to show,
Says, ‘Welcome to England, Mynheer Van Dildo.’

He civilly came to the Cockpit one night,
And proferred his service to fair Madam Knight.
Quoth she, ‘I intrigue with Captain Cazzo;
Your nose in mine arse, good Signior Dildo.’

This signior is sound, safe, ready, and dumb
As ever was candle, carrot, or thumb;
Then away with these nasty devices, and show
How you rate the just merit of Signior Dildo.

Count Cazzo, who carries his nose very high,
In passion he swore his rival should die;
Then shut himself up to let the world know
Flesh and blood could not bear it from Signior Dildo.

A rabble of pricks who were welcome before,
Now finding the porter denied them the door,
Maliciously waited his coming below
And inhumanly fell on Signior Dildo.

Nigh wearied out, the poor stranger did fly,
And along the Pall Mall they followed full cry;
The women concerned from every window
Cried, ‘For heaven’s sake, save Signior Dildo.’

The good Lady Sandys burst into a laughter
To see how the ballocks came wobbling after,
And had not their weight retarded the foe,
Indeed’t had gone hard with Signior Dildo.

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Earth-Hearted Hope for Dark Times

By Robin Bates | Published: March 6, 2024
Water Ouzel as depicted by John Muir

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Thursday

Our Lenten study group continues to discuss John Gatta’s book Green Gospel, which appears particularly timely given that (following yesterday’s primaries) the GOP has all but chosen a man who promises to “drill, drill, drill” if he becomes “dictator on day one.” Even if Trump loses in November, Gatta reminds us that “we are unlikely in this century to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Centigrade and will be hard pressed, even with serious mitigation measures, to limit it to 2 degrees Centigrade.” Indeed, it appears

already be too late to reverse the overall slide toward atmospheric degradation, too late to restore the wondrous old earth of preindustrial recollection, still largely in view just a few decades ago. The radically accelerated pace of greenhouse gas absorption into the atmosphere during the last thirty years means that this momentous transformation took place during an interval when the world had already been alerted to the peril that excessive emissions posed to life as we know it. Never has the human proclivity toward denial been so disheartening and so dangerous. Without some currently unforeseen breakthrough in technology, apparently the best outcome we might expect now is an appreciative mitigation of those otherwise grave debasements of planetary life that now seem likely.

That being acknowledged, Gatta still counsels hope, and it is this aspect of his argument that I focus on today. In his chapter “Toward a Gospel of Hope, on and for Earth as It Is in Heaven,” he cites John Muir and Emily Dickinson to advocate for what he calls “earth-hearted hope.”

Gatta asks how we are to survive what Mary Evelyn Tucker calls “a tsunami of sadness,” which “engulfs everyone cognizant of the immense losses already suffered or projected to arrive in the wake of climate change.” Hopelessness, he warns, can become “a self-fulfilling stance, even amounting to another form of climate denialism if it ends in passive resignation or despair.”

For a more positive response, Gatta has suggestions. As a Christian, he looks towards religious faith. Theologian Jürgen Moltmann, he notes, articulated a “theology of hope” that “strains after the future” and that, while it seeks inspiration beyond the world as we know it, “does not suppress or skip the unpleasant realities.” One figure buoyed by such faith-based hope, he says, was William Wilberforce, who agitated tirelessly against slavery for much of his life and finally saw it abolished shortly before he died. His faith sustained him throughout “decades of rejection and discouragement.”

 But one can also look to nature, and it is here where Muir and Dickinson come in:

Creatures from the animal realm, too, can teach us something about single-minded persistence. John Muir was much taken, for example, by the irrepressible vigor and endurance of the water ouzel, a diminutive bird of the Sierra who impressed Muir by flying fearlessly into mountain torrents, and by continuing to sing sweetly regardless of storm or seasons. In a similar vein, poet Emily Dickinson chose a bird’s tenacious bearing as her figure of active resolve when she wrote of how “Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul / And sings the tune without the words /And never stops at all.”

The full poem, as you probably know, goes as follows:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –

And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm

I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.

By imagining visions of a sustainable future, Gatta says, “we might look together not only to express but also to enlarge our capacity for hope.” Such sustainability includes new forms of renewable energy and efforts “to develop regenerative modes of agriculture, a rewilding of ecosystems and ruined landscapes, and the restorative designation of oceanic ‘no fish zones.’”

Gatta also suggests three personal ways to develop earth-hearted hope. First, one can intensify one’s commitment to pursuing “early-friendly patterns of daily living for oneself,” focusing on “our relation to energy and land use, housing and transportation, toxic consequences of our domestic habits, and our inevitable involvement in food acquisition and consumption.”

Second, one can engage in activism geared toward environmental remediation, at the very least through voting deliberately and offering financial support. Finally, there is “earth-engaged personal meditation, Rule of Life, and sacramental worship.” All of these strengthen our hope muscles.

It so happens that yesterday I was reading a blog post by Rev. Daniel Schultz on how feelings of doom—or DOOM—can function like a virus. As Schultz notes,

DOOM spreads easily: Our brains are tuned to the negative, hyperalert to threat, focused on the evil that may befall us. Expressions of despair and maximal cynicism are quickly picked up and transmitted. The disease vectors of social media make sure of that.

But (and here’s where he agrees with Gatta), he says that hope too is a virus, one which spreads through giving and receiving support. Writing about a 4th century Christian monk who grappled with “acedia” or “a state of restless futility,” Schultz notes that Evagrius Ponticus offered the simple and practical advice “to divide ourselves in two,” with one part to encourage and the other part to be encouraged. “Thus,” Evagrius said, “we are to sow seeds of a firm hope in ourselves.” 

“Figuring out how to keep ourselves in the game,” Schultz adds, “helps us to understand what it will take to win other battles.”

As literature professor Gatta knows well, sometimes poetry aids us in that endeavor.

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Quiz: Beowulf or Ikea?

By Robin Bates | Published: March 5, 2024
Poster of the Beowulf-Breca swimming contest

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Wednesday

My cousin Phoebe Conant sent me the following Beowulf quiz from the University of Chicago alumni magazine. Since we give pride of place to the Anglo-Saxon epic in this blog—even though it functions as a metonym for literature in general—I thought I’d pass it along. Although I’ve read the poem dozens of times, I did not achieve a perfect score:

Beowulf character or Ikea product?
1. Beanstan
2. Eanmund
3. Gradvis
4. Breca
5. Froda
6. Starreklinte
7. Bergtunga
8. Nereby
9. Ingeld
10. Korvmoj
11. Ecglaf
12. Elan
13. Malm
14. Scyld
15. Ingabritta
16. Skurar
17. Fitela
18. Balungen
19. Merewing
20. Flisat

Answers

The fun part of the quiz is that some of the Ikea products do indeed sound like Beowulf characters. The quiz offers extra points for identifying the particular Ikea products, and I’m proud to say that I failed that part utterly. I’m less proud of having missed three Beowulf characters although (in my defense) Beanstan, Elan, and Merewing don’t show up in either the Seamus Heaney or the Burton Raffel translations of Beowulf. Beanstan is the father of Breca, whom Beowulf bests in a swimming contest; according to Wikipedia Elan is (thanks to a corrupted document) an incomplete name for Yrsa, Hrothgar’s sister; and Merewing is a different spelling of Merovingian, another name for the Franks. Wiglaf predicts that the Merovingians will be invading Geatland now that Beowulf is dead.

Here are the answers (B for Beowulf, I for Ikea)

1-B; 2-B; 3-I(design line: planters, vases, mister); 4-B; 5-B; 6-I (rug); 7-I (cutting board); 8-I (wall shelf set); 9-B; 10-I (veggie dog); 11-B; 12-B; 13-I (design line: furniture); 14-B; 15-I (throw blanket); 16-I (candle holder); 17-B; 18-I (bathroom accessories); 19-B; 20-I (playroom items)

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