SON OF XAVIER

Jerry Harkins


Francisco de Jasso y Azpilicueta (1506–1552) was born to an aristocratic Basque family in the Kingdom of Navarre and became one of the founders of the Society of Jesus (aka The Company) in Paris in 1534. Changing his name to Xavier in honor of the family homestead, he had some success as a missionary to India and the Far East.   He was the quintessential Jesuit, smart, tough and persistent, in some ways even more so than his friend and colleague, Ignatius of Loyola. As one result of this, there are dozens of schools around the world that bear his name one of which is a high school in New York City. (Oh, yes, Francis is also a Saint, having been beatified by Paul V in 1619 and canonized by his successor Gregory XV in 1622. Paul was the Borghese Pope and Gregory was the first Jesuit-educated Pope but sanctification does not require the moral perfection of the sanctifier.)


I attended the Xavier in New York between 1952 and 1956, the years corresponding to the first Eisenhower administration and the rise of Joseph R. “Tailgunner Joe” McCarthy who was also Jesuit-educated (Marquette University, 1935). My father had hoped I would wind up at Brooklyn Tech and when I got screwed out of a couple of Catholic school scholarships because the nuns thought we were rich, he almost pulled it off. The nuns, however, were clever. They told him they would negotiate the matter with my mother. He caved. [1]

Now the truth is I was bright enough but was and still am an indifferent student. I did well enough to be admitted to and retained in the Greek honors class but I was the bottom man. That distinction earned me the position of Beadle, a functionary charged by the Jesuits with significant responsibilities and no authority. Still, it is an honorable office with roots going back to the earliest days of the Roman Empire. It has always had a comedic aspect verging on the clownish or, in our more debased times, the slapstick. If ever a man and an office were meant for each other (think of FDR and the Presidency or, if you prefer, Sancho Panza as Squire to the Man of La Mancha), I was born to be a beadle.

I’m pretty sure there is no God but I agree wholeheartedly with Benedict XVI that Deus Est Caritas which I translate as love is god. Sister Elizabeth A. Johnson of Fordham University (another of my alma maters), building on the theology of the late Karl Rahner, SJ, says that grace is not so much the created gift of God as the primordial, dynamic presence of love in the universe. Both Sister Johnson and Father Rahner are regarded by official Catholicism as heretics, the former because she seems obsessed with the idea that God did not make a mistake when he created woman in his image, the latter because he had been involved somehow in a bizarre love triangle with a widow and a Benedictine Abbot. But I digress. [2]

Xavier in the 50’s was staffed by a hard core of eccentric Jesuits and laymen all of whom seemed to want nothing more of life than success in getting me to do something I did not want to do. Charlie Lehmkuhl, SJ was the Prefect of Discipline, a tall, ugly bastard with a bit of a beer belly and a sense of humor that managed to avoid smiling. In spite of his best efforts to hide it, Charlie was a scholar, a theologian I think, and a lover of classical music. The rumor was that he was a descendent of the Habsburg emperors. He was ugly enough but he did not have the lip and he was certainly not retarded. Still, I found myself believing it after encountering his mother, a lovely and regal woman I met after running an errand for her as partial expiation for one of my many sins.

At one point, Charlie gave up and decided he would have to expel me but I declined to write a letter of resignation from Mary’s Blue Regiment which I had somehow disgraced. [3] He demanded to see my father first thing the following Monday morning. After calming me down, my father told me to go in alone on Monday and tell Charlie that he, my dad, was too busy to deal with the trivia of high school discipline and that he had complete confidence that Charlie and I could work out an equitable solution. “It will only work if you let him know I called him Charlie. But whatever you do, don’t use the word asshole.” Charlie listened to me and then burst out laughing. Without smiling, of course. "No doubt your father thinks I'm an asshole. Well, it takes one to know one."

I was, it seemed, always in trouble with the poor, dear Prefect. In fact, he wanted to recruit me for the Society and couldn’t believe that anyone could lack the necessary vocation. Father Taylor had no such illusions. Vincent A. Taylor, SJ., a man who spent fifty years teaching English at Xavier. I had something of a reputation as a poet because I was, by a long shot, the best translator in the class. As my beloved patron, Saint Jerome, said, translation is the art of blarney. Anyway, Father Taylor thought I should be a littérateur. The only problem was that I found the great Catholic authors boring. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Ronald Knox, Evelyn Waugh and J.F. Powers. Well, maybe not the only problem. As a freshman, I had been assigned to do a book report on Anna Karenina but I took the wrong book out of the library and wrote my report on Annapurna by Maurice Herzog. The Xavier English Department never let me forget it. When asked for the name of my favorite book, I didn’t hesitate. The Catcher in the Rye. The nuns had caught me with a copy in eighth grade and had confiscated it on the ground it was on the Index.  Father Taylor added it to our reading list.

He treated every student as a serious adult which was a double fiction. For me, he was willing to concede that since I had not read Scott, Thackery and Dickens before the age of 16, these worthies probably had little to offer me. I knew he didn’t really believe that. He thought I was working my way through Mortimer Adler’s Great Books because he caught me with a paperback copy of Rousseau’s Confessions and that was my excuse. The truth was as usual somewhat different. I was really trying to find out why the Vatican had put such a boring book on the Index. (Father was not surprised that I had heard of Mortimer Adler and Jean-Jacques Rousseau but he certainly did not believe I would read a book by either one.)

I really did have a talent for translating. I understood what the author was trying to say, even if he was saying it to bore me. I could also do a credible explication de texte from having read the Classic Comic version of almost anything. Father knew I hadn’t read the book but didn’t know I had read the comic book. The perfect Jesuitical formula. Someone, possibly I, started the rumor that Father Taylor’s middle initial stood for Ascanius, son of Aeneas, of whom Apollo said, “Dis genite et geniture deos.” The son of gods will have gods for sons. We were his sons. Indeed, V. A. Taylor was the most civilized man I ever met.

Tom Guerin was a scholastic who taught Latin and Greek. Unlike Father Taylor, he looked the part he played. In preparing their famous series on The Company, the editors of Life had selected a photograph of Tom for the cover of the magazine to represent the entire Society. The picture was cropped to hide the rosary he was holding and the terrible statue of St. Ignatius hovering over him at the right of the image. He was not the best teacher I ever had but he was the one I most wanted to be like. In Junior year, he saved for me that marvelous passage in Book 17 of The Odyssey where Odysseus returns to Ithaca after twenty years and is recognized by his faithful old dog Argos. Odysseus is afraid that if he greets Argos, the shepherd Eumaeus will realize who he is and so he ignores the dog who wags his tail and dies on a dungheap. When I finished, Tom had tears in his eyes and asked me why Homer had used this story. I argued that Homer was making the point that even a great hero can be a first class son of a bitch. Tom, being a perfect straight man, challenged this. “But Odysseus must first fulfill his duty to the gods, must he not?” I replied to gasps of horror that Homer was saying that even the gods can be first class sons of bitches. Exhibit A was what God did to Job. I hadn’t actually read the Book of Job but I knew that it was a story with many parallels in pagan mythology. What good does it do to be Jesuit-educated if you don’t know stuff like that. Tom Guerin didn’t which was why I knew he wouldn’t last. He didn’t.

Tom’s buddy was another scholastic, Richard E. Doyle, who taught Latin and Greek with the enthusiasm of a cheerleader. He is best remembered as a distinguished classicist who became the Dean of Fordham Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and an editor of Traditio, one of the most important journals in classical and medieval studies. But I remember him conducting class with the help of a gavel which he would use to threaten anyone who offered a colorless translation even of something as gray as Cicero’s "Pro Archia Poeta." This is the single piece of literature that separates the academics from the human race. The former universally consider it brilliant, scintillating and even humorous. The rest of us consider it unbearably boring and the archetype of hypocrisy. Poor Archias certainly never got his money’s worth in that old M. T. Cicero skipped town without delivering it. As to Mr. Doyle, he was an enthusiast until I suggested we set up a Cicero fan club to attract cute girls from Marymount. We had all recently been to a tea dance at that esteemed institution and the class found my suggestion uproarious. Mr. D, however, was a good sport. Our next outing was to hear Edith Hamilton speak on the meaning of Greek mythology today. She was 89 that year. At the reception afterward, I found myself in a conversation with her and her sister Alice who was a Professor of Toxicology at Harvard and had been one of the key figures in Hull House. Heady stuff. It even distracted me from the justly fabled girls of Hunter College.

Leo “Twinkletoes” Paquin taught freshman Latin and coached varsity football. Then, as now, I despised the sport but I thought Mr. Paquin was a genius with the driest wit imaginable. He had been one of the Seven Blocks of Granite on the 1936 Fordham football team and the roommate of his fellow blockhead Vince Lombardi. It was many years before I encountered the 1926 silent film “Twinkletoes” but I was mildly offended by the nickname. He may have been a graceful left end for Fordham but he was a big, stolid looking man with a placid demeanor. I remember him asking our star student to conjugate the verb scire. Dougie pronounced the third person singular, scit, as skit. “Douglas, does your book say ‘skit?’ Mine says ‘shit.’”

My parents had both recommended that I become an engineer but in high school that was not even on the radar screen. Still, I enjoyed math even then and was blessed with good teachers, Mr. Nash, Mr. Finnegan and Tough Tony Karpowich in particular. Tony had been co-captain of the 1947 Fordham NIT basketball team. He gave me my first summer job selling refreshments at the Sunset Park Pool in Brooklyn and did his best to keep me safe from girls on the prowl for free ice cream. Given the way my academic career turned out, it is curious that I never thought of math as a career. When I finally did discover its joys and established the credentials to become a statistician, I pursued it as a career only briefly. I blame it on Father Taylor.

Another subject that made little impression on me was religion. Remember, this was a period of enormous theological turmoil. Among the philosophers, Jacques Maritan and Étienne Gilson were revisiting Thomism, and a whole generation of immortal theologians were at or near the prime of their work. Karl Rahner, SJ, of course, Hans Küng, Jean Danielou, S.J., Yves Congar (OP but God is all-forgiving), Henri-Marie de Lubac, SJ, Hans Urs von Balthasar, the immortal Canadian Bernard J.F. Lonergan, SJ and so many other Catholic leaders. Harvey Cox and Martin Buber among the infidels. [4] But at Xavier (and later at Fordham) theology was left to the B team. Even in France, the Jesuits were not innovators. Brilliant analysts, outstanding interpreters, even masters of biblical criticism, yes. But, except for Rahner and Lubac, dull theologians. Well, add Lonergan to the short list of Jesuit immortals but with an asterisk next to his name. The great Trinitarian was really a card-carrying empiricist and a closet mystic. I blame it on Francis Xavier and Ignatius Loyola. The latter’s Spiritual Exercises are promoted vigorously by the Society but, to me, they are no more compelling than the Baltimore Catechism. At one point in my career, I had the opportunity to work with Mircea Eliade on a proposed Book of Uncommon Prayer and came away with the impression that my Jesuit education had been deficient in the life and care of the spirit. It took me many years to rectify this problem by studying the work of Father Andrew M. Greeley, the quintessential non-Jesuit. It wasn’t easy but I blame only myself.

Joe Caruso taught French at which I was hopeless and conducted the glee club at which I was a star. Okay, a faded star. As a child, I had an angelic soprano voice and made a fair amount of money singing at weddings and funerals. No wedding was valid without my rendition of Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” no funeral complete without Mozart’s “Ave Verum.” The pastor thought the former was a Protestant hymn but he wisely decided not to resist the demands of the market. Even at Christmas concerts, the old ladies wouldn’t leave without hearing my rendition of “Danny Boy.” By sophomore year at Xavier, however, I was an insecure baritone, thoroughly depressed by my inability to hit and hold a pitch or sing a single scale without breaking at La. Mr. Caruso insisted I still had a wonderful voice and I would “grow into it” if only I practiced every day. As you may know, there is no Classic Comic on solfège and he quickly discovered my allergy to practicing anything and decided instead to teach me how to improvise around a jazz melody. I’m still not very good at it but it has given me enormous pleasure every day of my life since. I have no idea why he took the time to do what he did but it is what I am most thankful to Xavier for.

Of course, I owe a lot to Xavier. Among other things, I finally learned how to succeed in school without really trying. College turned out to be a lot easier than high school. The teachers, for the most part, were not nearly as interesting. Graduate school was tough because I had to make up so much math but, again, I knew how to get A’s.

Gertrude Stein said, “I am who I am because my little doggie knows me.” [5]

Can you imagine Ms. Stein having a doggie? She was simply embroidering Popeye’s famous line, I Yam What I Yam. Me too. Just another poor dumb sinner making his way in this vale of humiliation and looking up occasionally in wonder at the sky and the stars. I was luckier than some in both my choice of parents and the fact that I encountered at a crucial stage of life a whole choir of interesting teachers who were interested in me.

One last note: There are no original thoughts in this essay. You will find similar—virtually identical—reminiscences written by or about hundreds if not thousands of men who attended Jesuit high schools around the world. In this morning’s Times for example there is an appreciation of the life of the late Jesuit-educated football coach, Joe Paterno. Joe was class of ‘44 at Brooklyn Prep where the Prefect of Discipline was Father Frederick W. Engle, SJ, a clone of my Father Lehmkuhl except for the royal blood. Engle was a tall German “with the fists of a trained boxer.” Probably the cauliflower ears too. Anyway, here are a couple of items about that beloved but, alas, now defunct institution:

• Robert S. Bennett, class of 1957 and President Bill Clinton’s personal lawyer during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, said the school had changed his life more than Georgetown and Harvard.

• Richard J. Carter, class of ’64, a tax and estate lawyer in Manhattan, described Brooklyn Prep as “the hardest school I ever went to.” [6]

Right on!

Notes

1. The nuns thought we were rich because both my parents worked. Also, my mother had been raised by a lace curtain Irish immigrant mother so she knew how to appear rich by the standards of the community. For example, my father, a lace-curtain-Irishman-in-training, liked to serve Haig and Haig Scotch. He never noticed that mother kept his distinctive Haig and Haig “pinch” bottle filled with Teacher’s. Or maybe he did but wisely decided to say nothing.

2. “Bizarre” is not too strong a word for the possibly chaste affair Father Rahner had with Luise Rinser. They exchanged thousands of letters over a period of 22 years and she eventually published her side of the correspondence. (Sadly, The Company claimed ownership of his letters and wouldn’t let her publish them. A great loss to the now extinct world of Belles Lettres. I do not know whether there is a legally binding agreement between Jesuits and the Society as to the ownership of intellectual property and I know nothing of German copyright law but its application to personal letters is exquisitely complex. I do not believe the Society’s position would be upheld if challenged today in an American court.) The Rahner-Rinser affair took place between 1962 and his death in 1984. In her autobiography, she wrote, “We were both clearly aware of the implications of a relationship which became gradually closer, a spiritual pilgrimage along a rocky mountain edge…We did not see it as a lurid tasting of forbidden fruit but as a divine experiment, being wholly man and wholly woman, flesh and blood, and yet intent to live in a spiritual way.” The Benedictine Abbot, known only as MA, was Ms. Rinser’s Spiritual Director of whom Rahner was jealous. It should be noted that Luise was a beautiful woman and slightly weird. But she was no one’s bimbo. In her obituary, The Times of London wrote, “She remained a practicing Roman Catholic to the end of her days, but campaigned for abortion and against celibacy, as well as against the power of the priesthood. In spite of that, she counted among her personal friends Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger ... She stood for the German Presidency in 1984 at the age of 73, as the Green Party’s candidate ... and campaigned in the West for the North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung.”

3. My offense had something to do with being caught by the Cadet Colonel horsing around after a First Friday formation. My partner in crime, Bill Grant, cowered before authority but I allowed as to how I would shove his sword up where the sun didn’t shine if he didn’t stop poking me with it. I had not yet encountered John F. Kennedy’s dictum that life is unfair.

4. Twenty-eight hundred words into this essay, I should not have to admit that, in high school, I was blissfully unfamiliar with these worthies. You already know that the publishers of Classic Comics ignored them and all their works. However, you may have noted that absent from my list of distinguished theologians is the name of Joe Ratzinger who is often said to have been one of them. His Holiness is an interesting theologian (see Deus Est Caritas) but not in the same league. He was a liberal collaborator at Vatican II but definitely on the B team. He might have been better had there been a Luise Rinser in his life. Another missing name is John Courtney Murray, SJ. My only excuse for this is pure prejudice. Father Murray was a brilliant theologian, the principal author of Dignitatus Humanae, the Council’s acceptance of religious liberty. Murray’s claim that moral truth might emerge outside the church led to conflict with Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani and the eventual Vatican demand that Murray cease writing on religious freedom and stop publication of his two latest articles on the issue. He was rehabilitated by Pope John XXIII. However, he was entirely too friendly with Cardinal Spellman for which sin I have not forgiven him. A similar problem appertains to another great Jesuit, Bob Gannon, who was President of Fordham from 1936 to 1949. Father Gannon was not a theologian but was the greatest preacher the Catholic Church ever produced in America—better even than Fulton Sheen. He too was close to Spellman having written the bastard’s official and, some would say, fawning biography. Sadly, he left us little in the way of other writings. He had a marvelous self-deprecating sense of humor and a scholar’s ability to change his mind with grace. He would be the first to say he had been wrong about religious liberty in his youth and wrong about his pacifism in the run-up to World War II.

5. According to Stein scholar Ulla E. Dydo, what Stein actually wrote was, “When I am I I know I am because my little dog knows me.”  Dydo may be right but my informant’s version has the advantage of meaning something.  Anyway, she did have a dog or a doggie to keep her and Alice company during World War II, which is embarrassing enough even if you didn’t know its name was “Basket.”


6. Joseph Berger, “For Paterno, a Playbook Begun at Brooklyn Prep,” The New York Times, January 25, 2012, p. A26.

WHAT'S IN A NAMESAKE?

Jerry Harkins

Lego de spinas rosas, de terra aurum, de concha margaritum.
—St. Jerome, Letter to Eustochium, 384



SAINT JEROME was born Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus in Dalmatia, then a Greek colony in what is now Croatia, in about 340 and died in Bethlehem in 420. He is one of the early Doctors of the Church — indeed he was Maximus Doctor, the greatest teacher, and Gloriosus Doctor, the glorious teacher — a scholar and prolific writer best know for translating the Bible into Latin and recording a great deal of what we know about the sack of Rome in 410. Much of his work is brilliant. When St. Aidan and his Irish monks set out to teach the English to read and write [1], their McGuffey’s were Jerome’s Psalms and Gospels and, most especially, his commentaries on the latter. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, he was widely admired and often cited by the best and brightest thinkers. The phrase sicut beatus Hieronymus dicit [2] appears almost as an imprimatur in the works of Thomas Aquinas and others. Even Martin Luther (“I know no writer whom I hate as much as I do Jerome.”) relied heavily on the Vulgate for his own German Bible. [3] Still, Jerome was not immune to superficiality and even plagiarism [4] and he sometimes crossed the fine line between orthodoxy and heresy as, for example, in his attraction to certain of the more Stoic ideas of Pelagius. [5]

Jerome’s most important cultural contributions concern the art of translation. He codified and promoted the Roman rhetorical tradition that it is more important to convey the sense of the original than its literal meaning. This is all the more remarkable in that he was dealing primarily with what he believed to be the inspired word of God. He learned Hebrew as an adult and he mocked the pretense of the Septuagint that there had been 72 translators working separately to translate the Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek, and that, in the end, all their versions were identical. For his trouble, he was denounced by the fundamentalists of his day including his fellow Doctor — Doctor Doctoris — St. Augustine. [6]

Sad to say, Jerome was not an altogether appealing personality, making enemies with his sharp tongue wherever he went. Denouncing the gentle Pelagian theologian Jovinian, he wrote: "Whenever I see a dandy, or a man who is no stranger to a hairdresser, with his hair nicely done and his cheeks all aglow, he belongs to your herd, or rather, grunts in concert with your swine."

In spite of all this, Jerome, was a favorite subject of Renaissance painters, possibly because he had vivid erotic dreams that gave them an excuse to paint naked ladies. For example, while fasting and praying for four years in the Syrian desert, he was haunted by visions of Roman dancing girls. The young ladies are featured prominently in several otherwise pious portraits of him. In another dream he was accused by Christ of being a pagan at heart and was flogged senseless by angels. When he awoke, there were (of course) welts on his back and shoulders, a scene that today graces the walls of the Louvre in the form of a fifteenth century painting by Sano di Pietro. Another tradition has him as quite mad. Jusepe Ribera’s 1626 portrait is typical in depicting him as an ascetic with wild eyes. The best known portrait of him, St. Jerome by El Greco (c. 1590), is relatively straightforward. He appears anachronistically in the robes of a Cardinal, imagined as a Spanish don in deep and melancholy thought. [7]

He was very big on virginity. He preached on it so often that one must wonder if he was protesting too much. There were those who thought so. The Pope appointed a special prosecutor to look into the matter and, although Jerome was eventually exonerated, the wonder persists. He was surely an extremist on the subject. The wonderful line quoted at the outset (I gather roses from the thorns, gold from the earth, the pearl from the oyster) was written in the context of saying that he approved of marriage only because, without it, there would be no virgins. The recipient of this famous letter, De Custodia Virginitate, was a 16-year old girl, Eustochium Julia [8] who, with her mother, the widow Paula Julia, followed Jerome to Bethlehem. There Paula established four convents for the good doctor to supervise. Eustochium died on September 28, 420. Jerome passed to his own eternal reward two days later. At the hour of his death, his soul appeared in the company of Christ and the heavenly chorus to Augustine and a number of others who had been critical of his theology.

Custodia was by no means Jerome’s only venture in defense of virginity. Adversus Helvidium argues that Mary remained a virgin after the birth of Jesus and that, as a calling, virginity is inherently superior to the married state. In fairness, he was merely echoing here the views of St. Paul, and there are those kind souls who think both were trying to protect young women against premature marriages forced upon them by parents who thought that the single state was scandalous. The Bible is, after all, ambiguous on the question of marriage. Paul says it is better to marry than to burn which, in one sense, is obvious. Few things, after all, are worse than burning. And, in Judges 11, Jephthah delays the sacrifice of his daughter for two months so that she can bemoan the fact that she will die a virgin. “Go tell it on the mountain,” he instructs her, clearly signaling that he agrees that virginity is something to be greatly regretted.

But we can only envy anyone who has reached the age of reason believing that the Bible has a subtle feminist agenda. Bear in mind, we are not even told the name of Jephthah’s daughter. The Holy Bible is a book that names three female prophets: Miriam, the sister of Moses, Deborah, the wife of Lappidoth, and Huldah, the wife of Shallum. In each case, that’s pretty much all we know about them — the names of their closest male relatives. At least they have names. And at least two of them were not virgins.

Jerome himself was not a virgin. “I praise virginity to the skies,” he wrote to his friend Pammachius, “not because I myself possess it, but because, not possessing it, I admire it all the more.” It is not credible that anyone could conjure up such erotica as he did out of whole cloth, uninformed by experience and unfettered by embarrassment.

Jerome. The rose and the thorn. Red rose, proud rose, sad Rose of all my days! And God would bid His warfare cease,/ Saying all things were well; / And softly make a rosy peace, / A Peace of Heaven with Hell. [9]

Notes

1. Well, how did you think the English became literate? We’re not talking about the Britons who, as Celts, had been reading and writing for millennia and who are known today as the Welsh. We’re talking about the Anglo-Saxon pagans that invaded the island after the Romans left. One of these was Aethelfrith who established the Kingdom of Northumbria (North of the Humber River) in the early part of the Seventh Century. Upon his assassination, his sons, Oswald and Oswy were given sanctuary by the Irish monks of Iona. When Oswald regained the throne, he invited the monks to establish a colony on the holy island of Lindisfarne from which they sallied forth teaching and sanctifying the barbarians. Oswy who succeeded his brother, eventually betrayed the Irish in favor of the more rigid Roman version of the faith but that is a different story. It is told in a marvelous mystery novel by Peter Tremayne, Absolution by Murder, (St. Martin’s Press, 1994).

For a variety of reasons, a great deal of Jerome’s work has survived and a fair amount of it is still in print. More than a hundred of his letters, dozens of his commentaries on the major and minor prophets and his Latin translation of the Bible can all be found on the Web. My favorite compilation is that of the Loeb Classical Library, Volume 262 which includes superb translations by F.A. Wright (Harvard University Press, 1933). The first collection of the Letters appeared in Rome in 1470, a thousand and fifty years after his death and just 20 years after the Gutenberg Bible. Major editions have followed roughly once a century since. The second edition (Basle, 1520) was edited by Jerome’s great admirer, Desiderius Erasmus. There is also a very large body of literature devoted to St. Jerome but much of it is controversial. A notable exception is Saint Jerome In The Renaissance by Eugene F. Rice, Jr. of Columbia University (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). This is the sort of book every scholar wants to write, a labor of love based on long years of delightful research. I have leaned heavily on Rice whose work has given me great pleasure. Finally, Elaine Pagels treats Jerome extensively in her remarkable book, Adam, Eve and the Serpent (Random House, 1988). If you’re ever curious as to why the church turned sour on sex, this is the book to read.

2. Literally, “As Blessed Jerome says.” A modern version, preferred by the present writer would have it, “Right again, J.P.”

3. It is often said that Luther’s Bible shaped the modern German language in much the same way that the King James Version shaped English. Technically, like all other modern versions, it is a rendition of the Septuagint although Luther’s Greek was sketchy at best. You will also find claims that it “follows” the original Hebrew, but Luther’s Hebrew was worse than his Greek. In fact, the New Testament follows the second edition of Erasmus’ Latin translation of 1519 which, in turn, is more faithful to the Vulgate than contemporary critics realized. The Old Testament appears to have been based on the Brescia Hebrew Bible of 1494. Luther and his collaborators took pains to render the scriptures into ordinary language, in a sense following the practice of Jerome. Perhaps they went too far. Their work, at least to someone who struggled with German locution, seems full of awkward rhetoric and inexplicable logic. Worse, it reflects a narrow, parochial mind. For example, Luther uses Ostern, Easter, for Passover. So on the first Palm Sunday, he has Jesus saying, “In two days time, it will be Easter…” which is, of course, absurd. Luther was an anti-Semite but his avoidance of the perfectly good German word Passah is extreme by any standard. Both Jerome and Erasmus had it right as, “…post biduum pascha fiet.”

4. Jerome was a quick study and the fastest pen in the East. He is, therefore, occasionally wordy and the reader may be excused for sometimes feeling that he is being deliberately obscure or imprecise. And several of his ideas were clearly borrowed from earlier writers without attribution. Plagiarism, of course, is not nearly so serious an offense in a society that must transmit its culture through the hand copying of manuscripts. It is hardly culpable at all when translation is involved. Indeed, by creating work for subsequent generations of scholars, it may even be said to be beneficial.

5. Pelagius was a contemporary heretic of Irish origin who taught, among other things, the doctrine that we are justified or saved by faith alone (sola fides). He seems to have been congenial, brilliant and persuasive, several times charming hostile synods to his views. Both Jerome and the redoubtable Augustine weighed in with lengthy polemics against him but Jerome could not resist the closely related notion that, since God created man, man merits grace. This, of course, limits God’s power in the sense that it renders God incapable of withholding grace. The present writer has offered a different, almost opposite path to a similar conclusion: man cannot merit justification under any circumstances because man is, by nature, a poor dumb sinner. Sin, however, is defined as anything that detracts from the harmony or wholeness of God. Therefore, while man cannot merit forgiveness, God cannot withhold it. God must forgive us whether or not we ask for it. Thus, Pelagius, Jerome and I agree that God is not really omnipotent which is logical but heretical. Einstein said, “What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the universe” [Emphasis added]. He believed but could not prove that God had no choices, that physical laws are universal and that there can not be a differently ordered universe.

David Douglas quotes an unnamed Anglican priest as saying that Pelagianism is the national heresy of England (see “Amazing Grace: A Journey in Time and Faith,” The Hymn, 49:3, July 1998, pp. 9-12). Hogwash! Pelagianism is too Irish to be English anything. The traditional argument is not between faith and grace but faith and works. Luther had rendered Romans 3:28 as, “So halten wir nun dafür, daß der Mensch gerecht wird ohne des Gesetzes Werke, allein durch den Glauben.
"We maintain that man …is justified by faith alone. The Vulgate reads, “…arbitramur enim justificari hominem per fidem sine operibus legis” which is to say man is justified by faith without respect to the law. There is no solam, no allein, no only. Indeed in 23-24, Paul says, “…for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace.” In Paul’s mind, justification seems to be merely one link in a chain that includes grace and even good works which he thinks of as the “fruits of faith.”

6. Jerome was not as steadfast in this as my encomium might imply. In the Letter to Pammachius defending his translation of a letter of Epiphanius to Bishop John of Jerusalem, he says, “For I myself not only admit but freely proclaim that in translating from the Greek (except in the case of holy scriptures where even the order of the words is a mystery) I render sense for sense and not word for word.” This is simply not true; he makes no exception for scripture. However, he seems to have concluded that discretion was the better part of valor and the scriptural fight is one he chooses not to fight here.

7. This portrait proved to be a best seller for El Greco who made at least four versions of it. What is probably the first enjoys a place of honor in the Frick Museum in New York. A smaller version hangs in the Met. In both, the Saint’s hands rest on an open copy of the Bible and he appears to be contemplating a passage he has just read. The book is open near its mid-point, somewhere around the beginning of Ecclesiastes where King Solomon laments (2:15), “I too shall suffer the fate of the fool. To what purpose have I been wise?”

8. Jerome had also been spiritual advisor to Eustochium’s sister, Blaesilla, a young widow who could not overcome the grief she felt for her husband. Jerome prescribed a month of fasting and penitential prayer even though she had a high fever. She died of it.

9. William Butler Years (of course). The Rose, 1893. The first line quoted here is from “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time.” The quatrain is from “The Rose of Peace.”

JJEROME HAS UNFRIENDED FACEBOOK

Jerry Harkins



There, Jerry! Don’t you feel a lot better now? Well, Doctor, ask me again in fourteen days when my unfriending becomes final and irreversible. That’s when Facebook says it will permanently erase me. Until then I will remain under constant surveillance and my every keystroke will be reported to The Party. But two weeks from now I will be not a has-been but a non-person, possibly a never-was like all those expunged from the Soviet history books. I expect they will denounce me to every man, woman and child I ever met, just as they sang my praises when I enrolled. How proud I was that day. “JJerome has become a member!” I never knew why the two J’s but it did not diminish my pride. Now I will no doubt be disfellowshipped by many, mourned by some and ridiculed by the rest. But the clozapine was not really helping (I think it’s better for schizophrenia than paranoia anyway) and it has several really nasty side effects.

What hath God wrought? (Either Numbers 23:23 is the culmination of a really weird story about Balaam beating his donkey or I dreamt it under the influence of the clozapine.) Facebook has become the universal consciousness [1] through the simple expedient of making all seven billion of us feel guilty if we don’t constantly tune into the trivia of our friends’ lives. Some of these “friends” are actually people you know, love and admire. (That’s how FB gets a hook into you.) Some are casual acquaintances you see once a year and exchange Xmas emails with. Then there are the folks whose names you have to dredge up from the deep recesses of memory. You know, people you met at a Free Paris Hilton cocktail party five years ago. Finally there are the thousands of people Facebook insists are just dying to friend you if only you would press the right button. After all, you have a friend in common and, if you remember the six degrees of separation thing, before long you will have seven billion friends. Every one of them will send you birthday greetings and you will know what they had for breakfast this morning and whether or not they faked an orgasm last night. Oh, joy!

But I digress. Actually God is not responsible for Facebook, Mark Zukerberg is. (I do not deny the possibility that Mr. Zukerberg is God.) He and a bunch of buds were sitting around in a circle in Lowell House one afternoon studying a Girls of the Ivy League feature in Playboy and having a grand old time. In the background, a DVD was playing on the TV. It was the 1984 release of 1984. (The one with the original Dominic Muldowney score rather than the Eurhythmics trash which replaced it a week after it was released in London [in 1984].) (I wrote that last sentence specifically to try out my new emoticon—a grin and a wink. Hope you liked it.) Anyway, Mark got this billion dollar idea and, by the end of the session, they had decided to call it CircleJerk.com. The name did not survive the first meeting with the venture capitalists who proposed inyourface.com and everybody thought that was pretty good but when the sweet-smelling haze dissipated, it got dumbed down to its present form.

Like most things that emerge from Ivy League bull sessions, Facebook is not an unmixed blessing. Think about the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) which emerged full grown from the mind of another Harvard man (Henry Strangeglove Kissinger) during an earlier Lowell House tea party. Dr. Kissinger was the coach of the mixed doubles tiddlywinks team at the time. Since Harvard lacked one of the genders in 1957, they recruited transvestites of whom there was no shortage.

As I say, Facebook has a number of drawbacks. To begin with, Mayor Bloomberg wants to ban it as a public health menace because of the number of people it bores to death. When Mike Bloomberg says you’re boring… Worse still, neo-conservatives see it as a threat to national security because it has exposed America as a nation of vacuous Yahoos. (A Yahoo is a character in a boring novel by Jonathan Swift. A Yahoo! on the other hand is a Yahoo trying to be non-boring by adding an exclamation point. Yahoo! emerged from what passes for a circle jerk at non-Ivy universities, in this case Stanford. The jerks were engineering students studying a beguiling circuit diagram. Enough said!) Don Rumsfeld came out of retirement to propose a surgical strike on Palo Alto which, with a little luck, might take out Sunnyvale and Cupertino at the same time. Of course with Don’s luck the missiles would miss the valley altogether and hit downtown Brattleboro, Vermont.

In addition to being boring, Facebook is ruining the market for talk therapy and the Catholic sacrament of reconciliation by encouraging people to vent their frustrations, complaints, indiscretions, alienations and other banalities to a global audience sure to respond only with a lol or meh. Given my skepticism about talk therapy, I contributed another new emoticon (I’m really good at this). :o stands for “How did that make you feel?” It hasn’t gone viral yet.

Bad enough I needed to reply to that post about your dog’s diarrhea but first I had to spend a half hour figuring out if you were serious. Maybe this was a test of your friends’ loyalty, sympathy or intelligence. Since I only vaguely remembered you from the cocktail party (while we were being introduced, I was probably ogling Paris’ sister, Nicky). I couldn’t be sure. I tell you, bubbula, Facebook was anxiety provoking. So I’m well rid of it even if, like the Ancient Mariner, I am doomed to wonder the world telling my tale:

Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns;
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.

I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.

Scholarly Endnote

1. Otherwise known as the “collective unconscious,” an idea invented by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung in 1919. C.G. wrote a rich description of the fantastical material stored in his new mental construct but Facebook has now exposed this as utter nonsense if not culpable malpractice. The actual material of the collective unconscious is now seen to be nothing but the dregs of the most dreary, humdrum dross of daily life.

BOOK REVIEW

Jerry Harkins

BERLIN 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, And The Most Dangerous Place On Earth, Frederick Kempe, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2011. 579 pages. $29.95


This is actually two books for the price of one. The first is a carefully researched, beautifully written account of the crisis that culminated in the erection of the infamous wall around the perimeter of East Berlin. The second is a diatribe of revisionist history concerning the intelligence, morality and, in some ways, even the patriotism of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The two books are only barely related. The first one is an outstanding contribution to Cold War Studies if only because it brings together a great deal of new information and contemporary perspective for the first time. The second, blessedly much shorter, is a hatchet job.

Frederick Kempe despises JFK whom he portrays as stupid, indecisive, drug addicted and criminally promiscuous. The President gets 90% of the blame for bringing the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. Walter Ulbricht is a brilliant strategist with a very understandable problem. Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev is a master of psychological warfare whose only objectives are to improve Soviet economic performance and retain his own power. Konrad (Der Alte) Adenauer, Charles (Le Grand) de Gaulle, Lucius Clay and Dean Acheson are poor souls burdened with an inexperienced American President who refuses to allow them to decide how much American blood should be shed in defense of Berlin. All of this is, at best, simplistic.

Kempe is of the zero tolerance school. He has no sympathy whatever for either the overwhelming significance of the decisions that had to be made or for the uncertainty that invariably surrounds momentous events. In every case there is a single right answer and in every case Kennedy chooses a wrong one. Nor is this perfect hindsight. The right answer was always self-evident to all right thinkers. The major mistake was not standing up to Khrushchev’s bullying which was always mere bluffing. But ‘bullying’ is a polite way to describe the Premier’s antics and rhetoric. Like his mentor Stalin, Comrade K was or at least appeared to be certifiably crazy. This is the world leader who came to the United Nations in 1960 and started banging his shoe on his desk to protest a speech by the Philippine delegate. Kempe and many other think he was merely a shrewd peasant. With the fate of the world at stake, however, indecision does not seem beyond all understanding and caution reads as the only sane approach.

The history of the era must proceed from three unarguable facts:

• The erection of the Berlin Wall marked the obvious defeat of Communism as a rational economic system. As Kennedy said in his famous Ich bin ein Berliner speech, “There are some who say Communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin.”

• Kennedy knew and publicly admitted that he had suffered a serious setback in Berlin. But the lessons were taken to heart and contributed to what was arguably the most important victory of the Cold War in the Cuban Missile Crisis of the following year.

• Ultimately, the Wall came tumbling down in the aftermath of the fall of Communism itself. Much of the credit must go to conservative American presidents, especially Nixon and Reagan. But the global situation that prompted the end of the Cold War was set in motion by Kennedy and furthered by his successors. Kempe thinks the Communist downfall might have come faster had Kennedy not backed down in 1961 but that is pure speculation.

A reader can’t be sure that Kempe is even aware of his bias against Kennedy. Like all revisionists, he must take the view that the rest of us were hoodwinked into feeling good about America under Kennedy. Like all revisionism, it’s annoying whether it’s right or wrong. And it surely is bias. In his acknowledgments, Kempe, a son of pre-war German immigrants, says, “It is my parents who instilled in me an indignation both toward those who imposed and those who tolerated the oppressive system that encased seventeen million of their fellow Germans…” My own biases tell me that the Germans had no right to such feelings.

How bad is the bias? At the end of the disastrous Vienna summit, Khrushchev blusters about signing a separate peace treaty with East Germany in December. Kennedy says, “If that’s true, it’s going to be a cold winter.” Kempe snidely remarks, “…he got even that wrong. His troubles would come much earlier.” Even that!

SEX AND DEATH
Jerry Harkins


JOHN WARNE “BET-A-MILLION” GATES (1855-1911) was an American industrialist (U.S. Steel, Republic Steel, Texaco) whose funeral was held in the Grand Ballroom of New York’s Plaza Hotel. He was interred in an impressive mausoleum near the Jerome Avenue entrance of Woodlawn Cemetery. The bronze door is graced by a high relief partial nude sculpted by Robert I. Aitken. She is seen from the back in a posture of grief almost as though resisting the closing of the door that has brought home the finality of her lover’s death. In spite of a little strategic drapery, the sculpture has an obvious if muted erotic aspect. We see a strong well proportioned womanly body. She is graceful but not a sylph. She is young but not a teenager. She is vulnerable but not virginal. She is idealized but not unbelievable. Most interestingly, her eroticism is uncommon for an American cemetery. [1] In Nineteenth Century France and Italy, especially, nude or nearly nude women were regular features of urban cemeteries, most notably Père Lachaise in Paris and Monumentale in Milan, and the figures were often less draped than the Gates nude and more explicitly erotic. [2] Often they are, in the words of Joyce Carol Oates, “…in a pose of swooned, vulnerable abandon, as if grief were a form of erotic surrender.” [3] Although by no means pornographic, they tend to be considerably more erotic than most sculptural nudes.

Oates also implies that the sculptures and the graves they adorn “belong to the nineteenth century.” Well, of course. Prior to the Nineteenth Century, only major figures built elaborate permanent tombs. These abound in iconic women but few of them are overtly erotic. For example, the tomb of Michelangelo has three grieving women seated around his sarcophagus. All three are beautiful but there is little suggestion of eroticism. The figure on the viewer’s right wears what appears to be a diaphanous undergarment with a shawl on her right shoulder and drapery in her lap. The center figure is fully clothed in a classic pose of grief with her head resting on her right hand and arm. It is sometimes said these figures are allegorical representations—possibly Muses—of painting, sculpture and architecture. [4] If true, then these were the women who attended the artist during life and with whom he might have had a passionate if not erotic relationship. In any event, the story they tell is surely highly charged and it is not inconceivable that they symbolize a relationship that is erotic in Plato’s sense of the human yearning for ideal beauty and finality.

The faint eroticism of Michelangelo’s tomb and even that of the Gates mausoleum are subtle compared to the abandon discussed by Ms. Oates which appears to have been a short-lived vogue related perhaps to the cataclysmic social and political upheavals of nineteenth century Europe. Overt eroticism was much less common in the United States, in part because of our Puritan heritage and in part because we were preoccupied by more mundane distractions. [5] Early American grave markers were often quite ghoulish and those erected in the nineteenth century might be ornate but rarely played on the sex and death theme. Their descendants have generally sanitized all such emotions to the point that even such sex symbols as Mae West and Marilyn Monroe are interred in utterly simple wall crypts. Even when an attractive figure adorns a grave, there is no suggestion of eroticism. For example, Daniel Chester French’s Mourning Victory, the centerpiece of the Milmore Memorial in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts, is a beautiful but hardly erotic woman. [6]

The tension between Eros and Thanatos is one of the great themes of human culture, noted and discussed long before it became a central subject for Freud who associated the former with the life instinct and the latter with the desire for stasis. Freudian theory postulates that life is a constant struggle between these forces. It is fair to say that succeeding generations of philosophers and psychologists have found this notion intriguing but ultimately not compelling. It lacks a dynamic principle that allows the healthy person to resolve the conflict and lead a productive life as, in fact, most people do. Perhaps that missing element is a kind of spirituality as represented by Bacchus (Dionysus) who is often conflated with Eros even though they are distinctly different. [7] It is true that both invoke ecstasy as a means of encountering the divine. They share the epithet Eleutherios, Liberator, the one because of the liberating quality of wine, the other ecstatic sex. But Bacchus speaks for all the joys and passions of life. Sir James Frazer refers to him as the God of life-death-rebirth and alludes to the obvious parallels with the story of Jesus. Joseph Campbell, too, writes of Bacchus as the son of Persephone, Goddess of Death: “the ever-dying, ever-living slain and resurrected son, Dionysus-Baccus-Zagreus.” [8] Almost surely, this derives from the more ancient archetype of the Green Man known in more recent times in England and Ireland as John Barleycorn who represents the giving of life to others from the sacrifice of his own. Eros, then, would be a subsidiary theme in the service of this all-embracing motif. He is explicitly and sharply focused on sexuality, in some cases, homosexuality. Interestingly, he is usually depicted as a pre-pubescent child or an adolescent and his childishness is an important element of many of the stories about him. In the earliest of these, he is the son of Chaos and Gaea who embodies the force of their erotic love which is nature’s fundamental creative urge or life force. In other words, he is the product of eroticism, not its originator. Although his origins were attenuated in later versions, his primordial nature never completely disappeared. Plato proposed that he was the son of Poros and Penia, Wealth and Poverty respectively. Still later, he was said to be the son of Aphrodite and Ares, love and war. In all these incarnations, there are intimations of great force, even compulsion, and great pleasure.

It might seem that Bacchus would make a better foil for death than Eros, the totality of life vis a vis the finality of death. Actually, whenever Eros or Cupid is invoked in anything more literary than a greeting card, there is often the subtext of exactly the Bacchanalian revelry Pope Benedict XVI was complaining about in his first encyclical (see Note 7). This is evident in many funeral rituals where Eros is involved. In rural Ireland until recently it was a custom to adjourn from a wake for a death-defying interlude of heavy drinking, fighting and fornication al fresco. This custom was obviously a ritualistic way of defying death and also almost certainly a re-enactment of the symbolic sexual union of the new king with the land, a renewal ceremony in which, once again, ecstasy is a bridge between death and rebirth. Thus it would be wrong to focus on the Bacchanalian aspects of such doings which, I suspect, are a cover for the erotic undertakings. And Eros represents more than sexual release. Frazer notwithstanding, he is the symbol of rebirth, not necessarily the physical rebirth of the individual but the spiritual renewal of the community.

Rebirth and renewal are subtle ideas. In most versions of the John Barleycorn song, for example, no mention is made in the lyrics of his resurrection but in the associated dances he always springs up at the end bigger and stronger than ever, just as the barley plant did after being harvested and looking barren through the winter. Ancient and medieval farmers may not have understood the biology involved but they were awed by the annual reappearance of the crop. In some stories, Barleycorn was the king who mated with the earth, ruled for a year and was then killed so his blood might fertilize the earth. [9]

It is reasonable to suggest that the association of sex and death is not so much about either as it is about hope. We are used to hearing Hamlet’s lament, “But that the dread of something after death, / The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn / no traveler returns.” But in the First Folio it is not “dread.” The line is, “But for a hope something after death?” and the question mark seems important. For a very brief moment in the nineteenth century, cemetery art was enlisted in the service of this hope. Then, perhaps as the garden cemetery movement grew, people became embarrassed at the prospect of explaining swooning angels and ecstatic nudes to children. We will never know why it arose and why it vanished so soon. But it was not merely a passing fetish. It was an expression of one of our species’ most fundamental ideas.

Notes

1. She: erotic imagery is almost always in the form of a female figure and almost always adorns the tomb of a man. The most famous exception is the full length effigy of Victor Noir on his tomb in Cimetière du Père-Lachaise sculpted by Jules Dalou. Although M. Noir is depected as quite dead (i.e., complete with the entry wound of the fatal bullet) he nonetheless has an impressive erection which has been the object of the ministrations of successive generations of Parisian maidens hoping to find a husband. (The author is grateful to Dr. Caterina Y. Pierre for calling this story to his attention. See her article “The Pleasure and Piety of Touch in Aimé-Jules Dalou’s Tomb of Victor Noir.” Sculpture Journal, 19.2, 2010, pp. 173-85.)

2. See: Robinson, David, Saving Graces: Images of Women in European Cemeteries, W.W. Norton, 1995.

3. Ibid, p. 10.

4. There were no Muses of these arts in the classical world although later artists often contrived them. The Michelangelo sculptures were executed by three different sculptors following, perhaps, an overall plan developed by the architect Giorgio Vasari. The three figures each hold something that could be an emblem of the art they symbolize. The standardization of such emblems was a preoccupation of the period.

5. Compared to Europe, America in the nineteenth century was both a simpler and a more stable society. In addition to the Gates sculpture, there are fully clothed mourning women adorning some American grave sites, notably in the South. For example, two very female angels in the eroticized swoon described by Joyce Carol Oates stand atop the Aldigé memorial in Metirie Cemetery in New Orleans. Another example is the elaborate memorial to James “Diamond Jim” Fisk at the Prospect Hill Cemetery in Brattleboro, Vermont. Four lovely young women in various states of undress circle the base, each holding a symbol of one of his earthly interests in the manner of Michelangelo’s tomb. Fisk’s muses seem to have been money, railroads, steamship lines and the theater. The last-named was not an artistic interest but the source of most of his mistresses.

6. The Milmore Memorial is not a grave marker. The actual family plot is at a different location in the same cemetery. The woman is the angel of death who is shown interrupting the sculptor Martin Milmore at work. It is one of French’s most emotional works. She reaches out gently to stay the sculptor’s hand as if to say, “Come, it is time to rest from your labor.” A marble copy of the bronze original is prominently displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

7. I believe Pope Benedict XVI conflates Eros and Bacchus when he complains of the “divinization of eros” by which he means “…a divine madness which tears man away from his finite existence and enables him, in the very process of being overwhelmed by divine power, to experience supreme happiness.” (See his encyclical letter God Is Love: Deus Caritas Est, U.S. Conference of Bishops, 2006.)

8. There are several accounts of Bacchus’ origin. His mother is generally said to be the mortal woman Semele who was seduced by Zeus. In another version, Bacchus was conceived through an indirect, unusual and gruesome union of Zeus and Persphone. Zeus impregnated Semele in the usual way and she gave birth to Zagreus who was then killed by agents of the jealous Hera. Zeus then created mead out of the dead infant’s heart and gave it to Semele to drink which is how she became pregnant with Bacchus.

9. Frazer refers to this king as “Corn King” and it is not clear whether he is using an abbreviated form of Barleycorn or has made a typical nineteenth century mistake. Corn, of course, was not introduced into Europe until the beginning of the sixteenth century.

SING GOD A SIMPLE SONG

Jerry Harkins


People don’t sing as much as they used to. My mother was always singing. When she was a child—she was born in 1908—most middle class families had pianos. Friends and neighbors would frequently gather for “singings” in the evenings. That year, Victor Herbert was advising young swains to “Ask Her While the Band Is Playing” and the Ziegfeld Follies pleaded “Shine on Harvest Moon” so boys and girls could enjoy one more round of outdoor spooning before winter set in. (I suspect that that the meaning of spooning has changed since 1908.) In a similar vein, the swains of the day sang, "Cuddle Up A Little Closer" to the girls they fell in love with "Down By The Old Mill Stream." The older generation, tired of songs about "moon and spoon and June," urged the youngsters to "Stand Up And Sing For Your Father An Old Time Tune." Of course, the big song that year was Norworth and Tilzer’s “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” It was the beginning of the golden age of Tin Pan Alley during which sheet music became a billion dollar industry that eventually centered on West 28 Street in New York. That same year, 364,545 new pianos were sold in the United States, a record that has never been surpassed. Also that year the piano industry held a convention in Buffalo and agreed on an 11¼ inch, 88 note standard for the new player piano rolls which became the home entertainment centers before the advent of electric “Victrolas” in the mid-1920’s. But it was all downhill from there.

The end of home-made singing came swiftly with the Depression and the rise of radio and the phonograph which turned America into a nation of enthusiastic listeners. In succeeding generations, transistor radios, Walkman tape players, boom boxes and iPods of every description unleashed a global passion for songs of all kinds. But the actual singing is now left mostly to people who do it for a living. Every once in a while, there’s a do-it-yourself revival. A natural song leader like Pete Seeger comes along to remind people how much fun it is to sing together. But, by and large, the songwriters don’t bother trying to write for ordinary people anymore. There is still a fair amount of solo singing out there, or at least a fair number of young people who want to sing and think they can. Between 3 and 3.5 million guitars are sold in the U.S. each year which means about one in every hundred Americans buys one. For those with more modest goals, Guitar Hero is a best selling computer game. Karaoke is a popular entertainment. And there is an entire sub-genre of reality television devoted to singers and their bands. But the last redoubt of amateur choral singing is the Christian church and the state of that art is pretty pathetic. [1] Even as choirs have gotten better and better—which is to say more “professionalized”—congregational singing has become virtually extinct.

As an art form, song is a strange and not always comfortable hybrid of words and music. In non-classical categories alone, there are hundreds of genres and subcategories differentiated primarily by the styles in which they are meant to be sung. There are styles of musical architecture the most important of which in popular music is probably the 12-bar blues. But performance trumps everything else as a listener will sense from the different interpretations of a song as sung by different vocalists. It is hard to say exactly what makes a song a good song. The music, of course, must be “catchy” which basically means it must be easily memorable. There is also the broader quality of “singability.” Left to professionals, songs tend to become too complex for untrained singers. Even contemporary blockbuster Broadway musicals are hard for audiences to get their ears and their vocal cords around. Wicked, for example, is a wonderful show but its songs demand highly trained, almost operatic, voices. Whereas anyone can sing the songs of Oklahoma or My Fair Lady.

Lyrics are a different story. The truth is it has never been essential for songs, including hymns, to make sense. Even as important a hymn as “Tantum Ergo,” written by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, has a lyric like, “Praestet fides supplementum /
Sensuum defectui.” Let faith provide a supplement / For the failure of the senses. A supplement for a failure? Tom probably meant substitute (vicarious) or replacement (reponendus), both of which have four syllables like supplementum but neither of which rhymes with sacramentum or documentum. When you’re looking to complete a clever rhyme scheme, you take whatever the Muse lays on you.

He has trampled out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. When I was a kid, I wondered what that meant. I had an image of Jesus in a warehouse where “grapes of wrath” were kept, crushing them with his feet to make a bitter wine. Now I know better and the truth is even stranger. Julia Ward Howe [2] a Unitarian, had been raised in a strict Calvinist home so it is not surprising that she was familiar with and took inspiration from the fourteenth chapter of the Book of Revelation, the part that describes the Last Judgment. It begins by discussing the first 144,000 souls that are saved, implying that they are all celibate males. As Verse 4 tells us, “These are those who did not defile themselves with women, for they kept themselves pure.” [3] Verses 14-16 describe the first harvesting of the earth, possibly but by no means certainly, the harvesting of the elect. There follows the harvesting of those presumed damned. One angel tells another: “Take your sharp sickle and gather the clusters of grapes from the earth's vine, because its grapes are ripe.” Then,

"The angel swung his sickle on the earth, gathered its grapes and threw them into the great winepress of God's wrath. They were trampled in the winepress outside the city, and blood flowed out of the press, rising as high as the horses' bridles for a distance of 1,600 stadia." [4]

Apparently Mrs. Howe did not like the image of the winepress so she changed it to the almost comic one of Jesus crushing grapes with his bare feet. She also attributed the wrath to the grapes rather than to God, thereby turning it into an even more obscure metaphor than the Bible’s evil grapes formulation. Part of the problem is the rhyme scheme she chose: A A A B, (lord, stored, sword, on). This is at least twice as hard to create as a scheme requiring only two rhyming words. The same problem St. Thomas had. Part may also be the fact that the first five verses were written in a few hours while the author was in some sort of trance.

Mrs. Howe wrote her lyrics to a popular 1856 tune, “Canaan's Happy Shore” by William Steffe which had been borrowed in 1860 by Thomas Bishop for his even more popular marching song, “John Brown’s Body.” She heard that version at a military review on November 18, 1861 and wrote the first five verses the next morning before dawn. The dominant imagery is the horror of war: his terrible swift sword, his righteous sentence, his fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel, the trumpet that shall never call retreat and, finally, let us die to make men free. To one raised with the songs of World War II—songs like “Lily Marlene,” “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” and the “The White Cliffs of Dover”—it is hard to imagine soldiers or civilians embracing this sort of imagery but “Battle Hymn” was the most popular song of its time. As we approach its 150th birthday, it is still hugely popular but today it is more often sung in sad, reflective arrangements. Artists as different as Marilyn Horne and Judy Garland have recorded such versions. Dionne Warwick though treats it as a gospel hymn with a touch of joy and an even more joyous vocal backing. Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic play it as though it were a rousing Sousa march while the magnificent Mormon Tabernacle Choir sings it as though it were a dirge. But it is first and always a hymn even if its lyrics are bloodthirsty to the modern ear. Is anyone paying attention?

Maybe it is best not to parse the logic of hymns. What, for instance, is a “round yon virgin mother?” [5] Or why is a “mighty fortress” a suitable metaphor for a loving God? “Change and decay in all around I see.” Why associate change with decay? Is the author referring to some sort of moral entropy law? But worse is the treacle that passes for petition. For example: “From war’s alarms, from deadly pestilence,/ Be Thy strong arm our ever sure defense;/ Thy true religion in our hearts increase, / Thy bounteous goodness nourish us in peace.” Daniel C. Roberts wrote those lyrics which were chosen by George W. Warren, the organist at St. Thomas Church in New York City, to be the new “National Hymn.” [6] The music Warren wrote for them is memorable and easy to sing but how would you like to sing those lyrics before every ball game? In fact, it is still sung often by congregations as “God of Our Fathers” although the third verse quoted above is omitted as often as not. Or how about the hymn called “O Sacred Head Now Wounded?” Most of it is a maudlin translation of a maudlin text used by Bach in the St. Matthew Passion. But modern translators have made it even more embarrassing by adding verses with lines like, “Can death thy bloom de-flower” and “Thy beauty long desired…thy power all expired.”

Worst of all is when the theology gets muddied. There is a beautiful Shaker hymn called “Simple Gifts.” In 1963, the great British hymnist Sydney Carter provided a new set of lyrics based on the insightful image of Jesus as the Lord of the Dance. This is actually a fairly common medieval image first put to music in 1833 in a hymn titled “Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day.” All dance is metaphor and in this case it refers to religious ecstasy, the universal archetype also represented by Bacchus as the Liberator. The idea appears to disturb Pope Benedict XVI who commented on it at length in his first encyclical, Deus Est Caritas. Still, “Lord of the Dance” is one of the most frequently sung hymns in Christian, including Catholic, congregations in the English-speaking world.

Carter begins with a verse establishing the image. He follows with: "I danced for the scribe and the pharisee / But they would not dance and they wouldn't follow me / I danced for the fishermen, for James and John / They came with me and the Dance went on." This is unsettling because it is vaguely anti-Semitic. And wrong: James and John themselves were certainly Jewish and almost certainly Pharisees. But the third verse continues: I danced on the Sabbath and I cured the lame / The holy people said it was a shame. / They whipped and they stripped and they hung me high / And they left me there on a Cross to die. The implied “therefore” between the second and third lines is more than vaguely anti-Semitic. [7] The incident of the Sabbath curing is described at the beginning of Mark 3 and does indeed end with the Pharisees plotting how they might kill Jesus. But the plotting came to naught. As the gospels make perfectly clear, the high priests later accused Jesus of blasphemy in claiming to be the son of God and, for Pilate’s consumption, of rebellion against Caesar. [8]

Most hymns are, of course, unobjectionable and many are both musical and intellectually appealing. But times and sensibilities change. The muscular Christianity of the Nineteenth Century may strike modern listeners as bellicose blustering. “Christ, the royal Master, /
Leads against the foe; /
Forward into battle, /
See His banner go!” Indeed.

The title of this essay is taken from the first aria in Leonard Bernstein’s Mass. In performances, it follows a quadraphonic recording of a short, wild, cacophonous Kyrie for soprano and soloists. The score is marked “Tranquillo” and it is exactly that: a quiet, pensive, tonal solo for bass. The lyrics for the first section are:

Sing God a simple song: Lauda, Laude.
Make it up as you go along, Lauda, Laude
Sing like you like to sing.
God loves all simple things,
For God is the simplest of all.

In Judeo-Christian theology, God is said to be infinitely simple as opposed to composite. God does not have component attributes such as knowledge and goodness but rather is these attributes. As with every other part of Mass, there is a profound and quite orthodox point being made about the role of religion in disturbing times and the music perfectly complements this. The Times, though, was having none of it. On September 9, 1971, its senior critic Harold Schonberg called Mass pretentious and thin, cheap and vulgar. The following Sunday, he added superficial and said it was, “…the greatest mélange of styles since the ladies’ magazine recipe for steak fried in peanut butter and marshmallow sauce.” Ten years later, the paper’s dismay was unrelieved. On September 14, 1981, Donal Henahan wrote that the piece, “…finds no time to say anything worth hearing.” Moreover, “…much of the evening would sound [sic] as it were being improvised by the cast of ‘Saturday Night Live’ except that the humor is vapid and superficial.” Forty years later, it is finally being recognized as a masterpiece. “A Simple Song” has been frequently recorded and is even sung in worship services because congregations like it and because its message of simplicity provides a rich wellspring for homilies.

Hymns are important for many reasons not the least of which is the fact that these are the songs most sung and perhaps most enjoyed by ensembles of non-professional singers. They are by no means alone in being burdened with lyrics that are often bathetic or worse. Think of the mileage Paul McCartney and John Lennon got out of the line, “I wanna hold your hand.” Dumb, dumb, dumb, but, in fairness, it should be remembered that their manager, Brian Epstein, told them he wanted a song that would appeal to the American market. Did it ever! Elvis could make a line like “Y’ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog” immortal and a fellow named Oscar Rasbach could produce a lovely song out of Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees.” The first line of that poem is arguably the most memorable line of poetry ever written and is certainly an esthetic triumph compared to “I wanna hold your hand.” It exemplifies the virtue of simplicity. The problem arises in the eleven lines that follow. Most interesting is what appears to be an unintended subtext. Both tree and the earth are clearly identified as female and it is hard to avoid the metaphor of them as lovers. Kilmer almost surely meant to signify the love and nourishment of mother and child but he does not shy away from sexual imagery which suggests he is celebrating a lesbian love affair. Nonetheless, “Trees” was enormously popular as a poem and became even more so as a song set to music in 1922. Modern critics tend to despise the poem and the poet, seeing them both as simple and sentimental rubbish but, in the context of the times, “Trees” was a major accomplishment.

For really ghastly lyrics you need to turn to contemporary singer/songwriters, including Michael Jackson, the King of Pop who was widely regarded as the greatest entertainer in the world. Two of his many platinum songs are “Bad” and “Beat It.”

Because I'm Bad, I'm Bad-
Come On
(Bad Bad-Really, Really Bad)
You Know I'm Bad, I'm Bad-
You Know It
(Bad Bad-Really, Really Bad)
You Know I'm Bad, I'm Bad-
You Know It, You Know
(Bad Bad-Really, Really Bad)

Just Beat It, Beat It, Beat It, Beat It
No One Wants To Be Defeated
Showin' How Funky Strong Is Your Fight
It Doesn't Matter Who's Wrong Or Right
Just Beat It, Beat It
Just Beat It, Beat It
Just Beat It, Beat It
Just Beat It, Beat It

No one ever questioned Jackson’s musicality. Both “Bad” and “Beat It” are important contributions and the choruses quoted above drive both songs forward. They fail not as lyrics so much as English rhetoric. They do not fail because they are repetitious. Mozart used the word Alleluja thirty-three times in a row in his motet Exsultate, jubilate and Handel used Hallelujah thirty-six times in the soprano line alone of his famous chorus. “Bad” and “Beat It” fail because they lack meaning. Many classical composers encountered similar problems, especially when they looked to the Bible for inspiration. Arguably, the soprano aria "I know that my Redeemer liveth" from Handel’s Messiah is one of the greatest hymns ever written. But its attempt to link Job’s act of faith (“Yet in my flesh shall I see God” (Job 19:25) with Paul’s assertion that the risen Christ is, “the first fruits of them that sleep” (1 Corinthians 15:20) is dubious at best. [9] In Samson, "Let the bright Seraphim" which is sung just before the final chorus is a showstopper which gained worldwide popularity when Kiri Te Kanawa sang it at the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana. The music is sublime, the lyrics less so:

Let the bright Seraphim in burning row,
Their loud uplifted Angel-trumpets blow:
Let the Cherubic host, in tuneful choirs,
Touch their immortal harps with golden wires.

These words are a slightly edited version of lines taken from John Milton’s "At a Solemn Music," published in 1645 but written much earlier. He is describing heaven:

Where the bright Seraphim in burning row
Their loud up-lifted Angel trumpets blow,

And the Cherubick host in thousand quires

Touch their immortal Harps of golden wires,

This is not a train wreck even if seraphim being immolated at a row of stakes while blowing angel trumpets is hardly an edifying image. In the context of the bizarre Samson story recorded in Judges 13-16, it is only a minor aggravation. What should bother people is that while this is being sung, the stage is littered with dead Philistines and, of course, Samson himself. Why such a song was thought suitable for a royal wedding—even in England—must remain one of life’s mysteries.

Handel had a habit of celebrating events that might appeal to eighteenth century British nationalism but which strike the modern progressive ear as horrific. Another of his great arias, Oh, had I Jubal's lyre, is from the final section of the oratorio Joshua. It is a song of thanksgiving sung by Achsah whose father Caleb has just given her to his nephew (her cousin) Othniel as a reward for driving the Canaanites out of Kiriath Sepher, a town near present day Hebron (Joshua 15:13-17). Achsah sings to Othniel:

Oh, had I Jubal’s lyre,
Or Miriam’s tuneful voice!
To sounds like his I would aspire,
In songs like hers rejoice.
My humble strains but faintly show,
How much to Heaven and thee I owe.

Now this is a well read young lady. True, Miriam is of her parent’s generation and, as Moses’ sister, she would be famous. But Jubal, seven generations removed from Adam in the line descended from Cain, is obscure, mentioned in only a single line (Genesis 4:21), identified as the son of Lamech and “…the father of all who play the harp and flute.” Achsah owes exactly nothing to Othniel whose achievement was conquering a small town in the Negev desert. She is a mere pawn in her father’s empire building strategy and you are being asked to believe she was utterly delighted by it. Perhaps. Maybe, were she a twenty-first century Middle Eastern princess, she would still be delighted to be thought of as a prize for an honored warrior. But why would Handel celebrate such views?

On the other hand are many hymns based on great poetry which are still less than satisfactory as liturgy. A prime example is the lovely but now infrequently sung Christmas carol “In The Bleak Midwinter” with a text by Christina Rossetti and a tune by Gustav Holtz. The poem addresses the question of why Jesus was born in a manger and proposes that it was “Enough for him,” the eternal God whose mother worshiped her beloved with a kiss. In the second verse, however, brilliant poetry is imposed on nightmarish theology: “Heaven and earth shall flee away when he comes to reign.” Still, it is a wonderful hymn. If pastors and ministers of music are troubled by its theology, musicians of every description are attracted to it. The current catalog lists more than 50 covers including those of Julie Andrews, Allison Crowe, Cyndi Lauper, Annie Lomax, Sarah McLachlan, James Taylor, Jars of Clay and the Crash Test Dummies.

Both popular and sacred music are often denigrated because the lyrics are thought to be simple and simple is equated with simple-minded. Such high criticism misses the point of song which is to engage the imagination rather than the intellect. In his recent book of collected lyrics, the songwriter Stephen Sondheim compares two songs with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” from Oklahoma and “All the Things You Are” from Very Warm for May. The former is an eminently simple sentiment set to light, airy music by Richard Rodgers. The latter is sophisticated poetry set to the sophisticated music of Jerome Kern. [10]

You are the promised kiss of springtime
That makes the lonely winter seem long.
You are the breathless hush of evening
That trembles on the brink of a lovely song.
You are the angel glow that lights a star,
The dearest things I know are what you are.

But Mornin’ is the more successful song because, as Sondheim argues, poetry and lyrics are very different. “Poetry,” he writes, “is an art of concision, lyrics of expansion…Music straitjackets a poem and prevents it form breathing on its own, whereas it liberates a lyric.”

The difference is often clearly evident in nineteenth century art songs. Take, for example, Schubert’s song cycle Die Winterreise based on poems by Wilhelm Müller. The third song is Gefrorene Tränen. The German poetry does not translate well but here is a more or less literal rendition:

Frozen tear drops
fall from my cheeks:
Can it be that, without knowing it,
I have been weeping?

O tears, my tears,
are you so lukewarm,
That you turn to ice
like cold morning dew?

Yet you spring from a source,
my breast, so burning hot,
As if you wanted to melt
all of the ice of winter! [11]

The lover is crying without realizing it. To make sense of this, the reader must ponder the metaphors carefully, leisurely. The forced tempo of even the most sublime music prevents this and leaves the listener with the image of tears coming from the poet’s burning breast which are nonetheless frozen because they are lukewarm. Contrast this with a popular song of the 1960’s, Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

How many roads must a man walk down

Before you call him a man?

Yes, ’n’ how many seas must a white dove sail

Before she sleeps in the sand?

Yes, ’n’ how many times must the cannonballs fly

Before they’re forever banned?

The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind

The answer is blowin’ in the wind

This is not going to win the gold medal for rhetoric even if it makes a lot more sense than “Beat It.” The image of a white dove sailing is nonsensical. The notion that manliness is somehow related to walking down roads or that either is related to the central peace message of the song is far fetched. And what was Mr. Dylan thinking of when he wrote the answers are blowing in the wind? But this song was ranked Number 14 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest songs of all time. (Number One, the absolute greatest song of all time, bar none, was said to be Mr. Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” But that’s another story. [12])

As all right-thinking people know, the greatest song of all time is the hymn “Amazing Grace,” a poem by John Newton published in 1779 and set to various tunes until it was finally joined with the tune “New Britain” 56 years after he wrote it. [13] The tune is engaging and readily singable and the words are meaningful and accessible. The language, like that of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, is or sounds as though it should be biblical. The cadences are familiar and comfortable, the message is uplifting. The melody is a simple one based on the pentatonic scale common in folk, gospel and rock music. Hear it once and you can hum it on the way home.

Simplicity is often but not always the soul of a great song. Cole Porter and the Gershwin brothers, for example, often wrote songs with highly sophisticated words and music. Porter’s “So In Love” from Kiss Me Kate is a good example. It has been covered by virtually every major jazz singer and new recordings have been released every year since it was written in 1948. Millions of people recognize it instantly. Everyone likes it. But no one sings it in the shower even though they may occasionally hum the first three bars, “Strange, dear, but true, dear.”

Whenever someone notices anew that “The Star Spangled Banner” is not very singable or that its lyrics are a bit bellicose, there ensues a debate about possible replacements. No one understands “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and it would hardly appeal to southern ears. “America the Beautiful” sounds like a tourist guide. “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” uses the music of the British national anthem. “This Land Is Your Land” was written by Woody Guthrie and “God Bless America by Irving Berlin, one a Communist, the other a Jew. We must be sensitive to the delicate feelings of the right wing. In any event, “God Bless America” is, in its own words, “a solemn prayer” which might offend the left wing. Otherwise it has everything a great song needs. In fact, there was a strong movement in the 1930’s to use it in place of the Star-Spangled Banner and it is still widely used before sporting events because it is so easy to sing.

There is nothing wrong with listening to a song. When you hear Joan Sutherland sing about seraphim on fire or Kathleen Battle waxing humble about her vocal talent, you can give yourself over to euphoria without obsessing about the logic of the lyrics. But listen also to babies babbling and observe that they are (a) singing and (b) having fun. We are born to sing. You don’t have to be a medieval philosopher to know the world is made of music.

Notes

1. This is something of an exaggeration. Practically every high school and college has at least one glee club, the barbershop movement remains strong with more than 30,000 participants in the United States, and there are amateur choruses throughout the country. But these activities are highly structured and strive to sound as polished as possible. It’s like the difference between a suburban Little League and a pick-up game of stickball.

2. Mrs. Howe was one of the most accomplished Americans of her time, an abolitionist, feminist, essayist and poet of distinction who is less appreciated today than she should be. Her husband was an archetypical male chauvinist who opposed her every public action. With all she accomplished outside the home, she also raised four children who went on to distinguished careers of their own.

3. Unless otherwise noted, all biblical quotations are from the New International Version®. Copyright © 1984 by the International Bible Society.

4. One stadium equals 185 meters or about 607 feet. A typical horse would be about 5 feet (15 hands) at the withers, so the bible is talking about 1.8 million cubic feet of blood, about 11.5 million gallons. At 1.5 gallons per adult, that’s 7.6 million people.

5. There is nothing even close to a round yon virgin in the original German, the first verse of which is:
Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht!
Alles schläft. Eynsam wacht
Nur das traute heilige Paar.

Holder Knab’ im lockigten Haar,

Schlafe in himmlischer Ruh!
Which translates:
Silent Night, Holy Night,
Everyone is sleeping. Only the faithful and holy couple keeps watch.
Lovely child with curly hair
Sleep in heavenly peace.

6. Modern hymnals include this under a title taken from its first line, “God of Our Fathers.” All the lyrics are undistinguished but only the third verse is truly bilious.

7. Sydney Carter (1915-2004) was many things—poet, scholar, pacifist and theologian, and he was certainly not an anti-Semite. The analysis presented here would never have occurred to him when he was in the process of exploring one of his favorite metaphors. In an early poem which many thought of as a fitting epitaph, he wrote, “The dance is all I am, the rest is dust. /
I will believe my bones and live by what /
Will go on dancing when my bones are not.” There is evidence in the form of a note from his friend Rabbi Lionel Blum that when he realized the problem, he set out to modify several lines in the poem. Sadly, the Rabbi writes, "...before this could happen, Alzheimer's took over." See Blum's Introduction to Lord of the Dance and Other Songs and Poems, Stainer and Bell, 2002.

8. In demanding the death penalty for blasphemy, they were only following the mandate of Leviticus 24:14 which says, “Anyone who blasphemes the name of the Lord must be put to death. The entire assembly must stone him. Whether an alien or native-born, when he blasphemes the Name, he must be put to death.” Obviously, Mr. Pilate would not have been impressed by Leviticus so they had to suggest a Roman crime and call for a Roman punishment.

9. Messiah and a great deal of Christian exegesis are full of such efforts to see the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy in some New Testament event. “Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son” (Isaiah 7:14) is seen as a prediction of Matthew 1:24 which quotes it. But the Hebrew of Isaiah actually is better translated as, “a young woman has conceived,” referring to a sign from God to King Ahaz.

10. The melody is said to be, “one of the loveliest in the American repertory by no less an authority than James R. Morris, former head of the Smithsonian Institutions Division of Performing Arts. See Six Decades of Songwriters and Singers, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1984.

11. Trans. Arthur Rishi, www.recmusic.org/lieder/assemble_texts.html?SongCycleId=47

12. The lyrics are misogynist claptrap. Even the central metaphor is absurd: “How does it feel / To be on your own / With no direction home / Like a complete unknown / Like a rolling stone?” Such a stone surely has a direction—down—and is derived from the aphorism “A rolling stone gathers no moss.” It was coined by the Dutch theologian Desiderius Erasmus who clearly meant that we have to live active lives lest we get rusty.


13. The essence of both music and poetry is meter which is defined by stress patterns in both. Thus, it is not uncommon to find poems and tunes whose meters complement each other. Francis Scott Key wrote a poem which he entitled “Defense of Fort McHenry.” Several days later, his brother-in-law noticed that it “fit” the music of a popular ditty, “The Anacreontic Song” by John Stafford Smith. Eight days after the poem was written, the words and music were published together as “The Star Spangled Banner.” Similarly, there are many poems that “fit” the “New Britain” tune, among them Samuel Taylor Colderidge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Robert W. Service’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee.”

MR. ADAMS AND ME

Jerry Harkins

Let it be acknowledged at the outset that Ansel Adams (1902–1984) was one of the greatest of American photographers. His black and white landscapes are without peer and his portraits and still lifes are invariably revealing. His artistry combined a unique visual imagination with equally unique field and darkroom disciplines. Not everyone likes his images, the most famous of which tend to be too romantic for some. But everyone recognizes his genius, myself included.

There is, however, an artificial quality apparent in many of his landscapes as though he was trying to show the world not as it is but as it should be or might be if he were in charge. It is a quality that often inflates one’s first impression but that turns out to be superficial and, in the end, embarrassing. Take, for example, his signature image, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941.

Adams was driving south on what is now U.S. 84 after what he called a “discouraging” day in the Chama Valley. Around 4:00 PM he came upon the scene and instantly visualized it as a photograph. He very quickly set up his 8 X 10 view camera but could not find a light meter. Fortunately, “I suddenly realized I knew the luminance of the moon—250 c/ft2. [1] Using the Exposure Formula, I placed this luminance on Zone VII; 60 c/ft2 therefore fell on Zone V, and the exposure with the filter factor of 3X was about 1 second at f/32 with ASA 64 film.” [2] Even so, the negative proved very difficult to print in a way that would yield something close to his visualization. The concept and the physics were so out of whack that every important factor had to be manipulated in the darkroom. He burned and he dodged. He experimented with various developer-to-water sequences and was still working on it several years later, re-fixing and re-washing the negative and treating the lower section with a dilute solution of Kodak IN-5 intensifier.

He actually knew the luminance of the moon! Are you properly dazzled? Of course you are—at least until you start thinking about it. To begin with, Adams may have imagined the scene as it appears on the print, but the reality was very different. The sky was not black. It was 55 minutes before sunset. The sky was still blue, probably light blue, and the clouds were probably beginning to glow red. He was using a deep yellow filter (Wratten No. 15G) which darkened the sky without affecting the green in the shrubbery. The filter did not, however, render the sky black. We do not need to guess how much grayer it became because, in the end, it was the contrast between the sky and the clouds and the sky and the moon that Adams was interested in. He says the clouds were “two or three times as bright as the moon” which may be true but both were bathed in the light of the sun. And neither was made brighter by the filter which darkened them slightly if anything. The contrast in the print is wrong. The crosses in the cemetery were no brighter than the wall of the structure behind them or the rear wall of the church on the left, and the vegetation in the foreground was not nearly so dark. Overall, the contrast, on which the impact of the image is totally dependent, was nowhere near as high as it is in the prints.

What you have here is a striking photograph that was made almost entirely in the mind of the photographer. The camera, for all the technical talk, was incidental. I suspect a pin camera would have done as well or almost as well. I have no objection to this. Nor do I have a problem with the photographer’s visualization any more than I do with Picasso’s three-headed mistress. I really don’t care about the tensile strength of Picasso’s palate knife or even the dimensions of his brushes even if the artist thinks I need to know it. In the present case, we are dealing with what was in the artist’s head and what the results communicate to the rest of us.

Moonrise is the story of a very particular moment which is not the moment it was taken, but some moment the real moment inspired in the photographer. Whatever else it is, it is a night story, a midnight story: The pitch black sky hovers ominously over everything, occupying more than half of the image area. The laws of nature are suspended. Not even the light of the nearly full moon brightens that imaginary sky (just as the real moon did not an hour before sunset). The clouds and the grave markers are lit. We know intellectually their glow comes from the sun but that knowledge plays no part in the psychological impact of the image. It is a night image. Anything glowing must have its own internal source of light. The feeling is eerie and maybe a little scary. This is surrealism masquerading as realism or, perhaps, romanticism. The important thing, though, is that Adams visualized it all while riding along gazing out a car window—or maybe not. Maybe it was similar to William Wordsworth’s observation that, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” In Adams’ case, the tranquility was in the darkroom which, arguably, is where he “discovered” the photograph.

Monolith, The Face of Half Dome is another image made mainly in the darkroom. Taken in early afternoon on April 17, 1927, it is almost as surrealistic as Moonrise. Once again, the dark sky was created mainly in the lab. (A yellow filter again contributed to this.) The shadow on the right of the monolith is hard to explain. According to Adams, at noon the monolith was in full shadow. Nearly a month after the equinox, that’s hard to believe but, two hours later, the sun was slightly lower in the sky. This calls attention to what seems to be a shadow consisting of two shades of gray while the formation in the lower right hand corner seems to be in full sunlight. Moreover, the shadows of the trees on that formation suggest the sun is at the right rear of the picture. Why then is the right side of the monolith still in deep if not full shadow? The precisely perpendicular border of the shadow divides the image into two parts, light and dark. The same precision also suggests the line was created by a poor job of burning.

This is an early image and, unlike Moonrise, it seems to have no meaning or message beyond being a generic pretty picture. [3] Adams was attached to it, he says, because it was the first time his visualization was realized exactly in the final print. But what visualization? Is he talking about “visualizing” a perfectly straight line dividing the picture in two? I think not. This was a hard picture to take if what caught his eye was the texture of the monolith. My guess is that is precisely what Adams wanted to show and he was elated when he saw he had succeeded. Once again, I suspect his “visualizations” come largely or wholly after the fact, not before it.

Sand Dunes, Sunrise is one of the master’s greatest photographs. It is not at all romantic, although, like Moonrise, it conveys an unsettling mood. It is a hard-edged, almost abstract image taken near Stovepipe Wells in Death Valley in 1948. Unlike Moonrise, this was carefully planned well in advance and, this time, what you see is pretty much the scene as it actually was. The lab work is incidental. Here you see what happens when the process of visualization unfolds pretty much as Adams describes it. He knew in advance that the contrasts on the dunes at sunrise would create a metaphor for the feeling one experiences at moments of high anticipation.

The few minutes just before and just after the sun comes up over the horizon are what Maya Angelou called the “pulse of morning.” [4] During that brief interval, the temperature drops noticeably. In summer, the birds have been singing for about a half hour but now they pause. The wind, if there is any, freshens. If it is calm, a breeze comes up. Experiencing this tiny drama, an observer senses both the possibilities and the uncertainties of a new day. What Adams has done is to re-create these feelings using a straightforward image of a range of shades of gray with just enough context to prod the viewer. You know this is a real landscape, not an abstraction. The photographer took special care to reveal the sand ripples at the bottom of the image in what appears to be an opening in the earth. The ripples are what cues you that the scene is real. Moreover, I believe, they speak to the transience of both the moment and its meaning (although I am not oblivious to the shape of that opening). This is a beautiful image and, if I am right about its meaning, it is also a brilliant one. It is not necessary that Adams’ visualization include my “pulse of morning” analysis, only that his emotional state be consistent with it. The artist feels what the critic then tries to put into words.

Mirror Lake is one of several Adams images of the large lake-like widening in the Merced River about a mile from the trailhead behind the Ahwahnee Hotel. The fullness of the lake tells us this must have been springtime. The brightest light seems to be coming from the upper right. Assuming it is morning, the camera then is looking north. [5] It seems that little or nothing was done to change what the lens saw and it may be that Adams did not even use a filter. In other words, this is an objective photograph in the ordinary sense of the word. What he saw is pretty much what you get. Which brings us to a central problem: just exactly what is Adams trying to do?

Along with other giants of American photography in the 1920’s and 30’s, Adams thought and wrote a great deal about the medium, trying to establish an identity for it as part of the cultural scene. Naturally there were competing schools of thought and disagreements were intense. In 1934, Adams wrote, “Photography is an objective expression; a record of actuality. The photographer who thoroughly comprehends his medium visualizes his subject [as] a thing-in-itself.” [6] And Mirror Lake is objective for the most part. [7] So are his portraits and still lifes—in some cases they are painfully objective.

Joyce Yuki Nakamura, Manzanar Relocation Center, c. 1942 is a thoroughly objective picture of a pretty little girl, obviously of Japanese descent but with the long curly hair and Peter Pan collar speaking of American acculturation. A viewer must inevitably enjoy the image because it is so cloyingly cute. It is not until you realize that the child is an internee in a U.S. concentration camp that you experience any strong emotional reaction. You may then read meaning into several aspects of the picture, the lopsided smile, the partial closure of the right eye, the fancy blouse.

Contrast the portrait of Joyce Yuki Nakamura with the thoroughly non-objective photograph of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay by Berenice Abbott. Millay was a true Greenwich Village bohemian known as much for her voracious bisexual exploits as for her exquisitely sensitive poetry. The image is meant, I think, to highlight the latter and Abbott has posed it brilliantly with the man tailored shirt and tie contrasting sharply with the distant expression on the subject’s face. The same expression appears in many Millay pictures including the famous one of the 22-year old poet under a dogwood tree at Vassar by Arnold Genthe. But it is rare to see her teeth and the slight overbite that suggests vulnerability. The clincher is the knee that tells you she is wearing a skirt. The apparently masculine suit is a façade, a suit, if you will, of armor. Abbott always included the knee in the prints she made. Other darkroom technicians did not, thereby unbalancing the composition and betraying its meaning.

The difference between the two photographs is stark; the meaning of Joyce Yuki is totally dependent on the words of its title and the viewer has to know what a “relocation center” is. The meaning of the Millay portrait is entirely in the photograph. It requires no words. It may help to know who the subject was but, possibly, words would actually detract from the meaning. It is as much a product of the photographer’s conscious planning and intelligence as Moonrise or Sand Dunes and every bit as successful.

As acknowledged in the first sentence, Adams is among the greatest of American photographers. He is also the best known. Twenty-six years after his death, both his coffee table books and his technical works remain best sellers and a print of Moonrise recently sold at auction for $360,000, almost 90 times the price of an Abbott print. He deserves the gratitude of those of us who enjoy his work and those of us who try to learn from it. At the same time, it does no harm to acknowledge with Professor Harold Hill that there is a fine line between magic and flim-flam and that Mr. Adams was a masterful practitioner of both.

Notes

1. Candela per square foot. Until 1948, the measure of luminosity varied but was based on a specified candle or flame. Today it is defined as the luminous intensity (the amount of light emitted or reflected), in a given direction, of a source that emits monochromatic radiation of frequency 540 X 1012 hertz (a yellowish green) and that has a radiant intensity in that direction of 1/683 watt per steradian. (A steradian is a standardized cone-shaped solid emanating from the center of a sphere and, thus, a pin source of light. There are 12.5664 steradians in a sphere.) In other words, luminosity is the brightness of light and is independent of the source’s context, in this case, the sky. The source in Moonrise is the sun the light of which is reflected by the moon. The moon is a tiny fraction of a sterdian so its radiant intensity is a tiny fraction of 1/683 watts. What is more interesting is that business about c/ft2 falling on Zone 5. I’m not expert in Adams’ zone system but it seems a long way from 250 (Zone 7) to 60 (Zone 5) to an exposure factor of 3X with his Wrattan No. 15 (G) filter to the actual exposure. Especially if the 250 is wrong (I suspect he misplaced a decimal point and the actual figure should be 2,500). Adams of course was not the first or last great artist to bullshit people about what he did. Nor was he unaware of what he called “the compelling impulse of photographers…to discuss equipment and materials…down to the smallest detail.” It’s the fine line between the detail and the bullshit that gave him trouble.

2. Adams, Ansel, Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs, Little, Brown and Co., 1983, p. 41. I’m not sure about that ASA 64. The American Standards Association (now the American National Standards Institute) did not get into photographic standards until after 1946 so my theory is he meant to say “an ASA equivalent of 64.” That would imply a fairly fast film for the time but still agonizingly slow given that both the earth and the moon were moving.

3. Even though Half Dome is the definitive image of Yosemite, this picture could have been taken anywhere. Nothing jumps out and says Yosemite or Half Dome. Adams, of course, had climbed the Dome frequently and knew it intimately. Thus, he recognized this face of it but did not bother to communicate that to the rest of us except in the title he gave it.

4. “On The Pulse Of Morning,” Delivered January 20, 1993 at the Inauguration of President Clinton.

5. There are several untestable hypotheses here. It may be that I have invented the evidence to support a preconceived opinion about the air being not nearly as clear in the afternoon.

6. From an article titled “An exposition of my photographic technique” quoted in Eisinger Joel, Trace and Transformation: American Criticism of Photography in the Modernist Period, University of New Mexico Press, 1995 p. 68.

7. The main exception is the reflection of the tall tree in the center of the image. The tree itself is without detail, its reflection is highly detailed—exactly the opposite of what you might expect. The water at that point is considerably brighter than the sky which suggests that Adams made it brighter specifically to bring out the detail. Not any easy thing to do.

The photographs discussed in this essay are all readily available on the internet and have been omitted here for copyright reasons and because they need to be seen in a size larger than possible here.