TILL I SEE WHAT I SAY

Walter Wells

Emily Dickinson          “Seeing is believing,” the old adage goes.  But it’s much too simple.  To “see” can also mean to “understand” (as in “I see your point”),  so “seeing” can also lead to disbelief, if understanding take you in that direction.

          It’s the kind of verbal roundabout that no one relished more than the great American poet, Emily Dickinson.  Not that she would have put it quite that way about seeing and believing.  Her way was so much the more eloquent --and at the same time boldly, even shockingly original.  With the arguable exception of Walt Whitman, no American poet innovated more radically than Dickinson, his reclusive contemporary.  Her way with words, though --nearly antithetical to his-- was fuller of that supreme artistic virtue, surprise.  While his burgeoning free verse bore multitudes of image and idea:

                              Do I contradict myself?
                              Very well then I contradict myself,
                              (I am large, I contain multitudes.) 

Dickinson’s much more reticent poems, each cut and polished like an individual diamond, contain multiplicities.  They are more nearly inimitable.  Consider one of them:

                              I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –
                              The Stillness in the Room
                              Was like the Stillness in the Air –
                              Between the Heaves of Storm – 

                              The Eyes around – had wrung them dry –
                              And Breaths were gathering firm
                              For that last Onset – when the King
                              Be witnessed – in the Room –

                              I willed my Keepsakes – Signed away
                              What portion of me be
                              Assignable – and then it was
                              There interposed a Fly –

                              With Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz –
                              Between the light – and me –
                              And then the Windows failed – and then
-- when the King / Be witnessed in the Room                              I could not see to see.

          What have we here?  Beyond the jolting persona of a narrator who can speak to us from the Great Hereafter, this little jewel of a poem begins with what seems a momentary irritant appearing at a somber, altogether conventional death watch: a fly happens into the room where mourners, in the minutes before the death of the afflicted, await with traditional Christian expectation that God (the King) will appear to host the newly deceased’s ascendancy on High.  The narrator remembers too that, before her death, she had written her will, signing away all earthly belongings (that portion of herself that be “assignable”) in readiness for that same theophany.

          But the King never appears.  Only the fly, who suddenly, in the last five lines of this posthumous remembrance, assumes the leading role in a massive bait-and-switch.  God is expected, but only the fly appears, interposing itself  between the dying narrator and the light. 

          The Light.  For Christians another name for Christ, the Light is ironically obscured for her at the moment of her passing by the “Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz” of an insect who not only inspires revulsion as a feeder on rot and excrement, and as a carrier of disease, but who symbolizes the anti-Christ himself, a stand-in for Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies.  Dickinson certainly knew him well from his appearances in II Kings, the Testament of Solomon, the respective Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Beelzebub, as depicted in de Plancy's Dictionnaire Infernal, 1863and Paradise Lost wherein, in Milton’s inverted hierarchy, none sat higher except for Satan.  Quite by coincidence, the illustration at left appeared as the depiction of Beelzebub in Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal, published in Paris in 1863, a year after Dickinson wrote her characteristically untitled poem.

          Its final lines raise the questions with which this essay began, about “seeing,” “believing” and/or “disbelieving.  Literally, the sight of the poem’s narrator is fading;  metaphorically, though, it’s the windows toward which she gazes that fail.  The metaphor is not simply one of transference.  It’s an acknowledgement that, archetypally, windows are eyes.  (The word itself comes from the Old Norse vindauga, or “wind-eye.”)  Symbolically, windows are portals through which mind and soul look outward, and portals through which light and truth from outside enter the mind and spirit within.  Poetically, when windows fail, both directionals go dark.      

          And as they darken, our narrator concludes that she “could not see to see.”  The verb seems oddly doubled.  At the fateful moment, she realizes that she can neither literally see, nor can she understand --in the King's absence, and the Fly's uncertain, stumbling presence-- her posthumous destiny.  The poem becomes a terse agnostic ode.

                                                                            _____________

          Dickinson was prolific.  During a lifetime that ended in her fifty-sixth year, she wrote almost eighteen hundred poems, nearly half of them in a four-year period coincident with the American Civil War.  Fewer than a dozen (and none of her best) were published during her lifetime in local, mostly ephemeral journals.  (Her private letters, on the other hand, teem with her genius.)    Her range of subjects was vast (she often alluded to her wide human “circumference”).  Her outlooks, from poem to poem, typically contradict one another.

          Which is to say that, throughout her work, she seems unbound by philosophical, religious or ideological preconception.  While brought up in a mid-19^th century tradition of New England Protestantism, Dickinson turns to religion more as a subject of poetic experiment.  In one poem, she says she

                               . . . never spoke with God
                               Nor visited in Heaven –
                               Yet certain am I of the spot
                               As if the Checks were given –

Yet in another, she cautiously writes,

                               “Faith” is a fine invention
                               When Gentlemen can see –
                               But Microscopes are prudent
                               In an Emergency.

“Let Emily sing for you,” she wrote in condolence to a friend, “because she cannot pray.”  Indeed, her poem of the buzzing, uncertain fly treats the traditional Christian attitude toward death with a searing irony.  But that outlook is no more consistent in her poetry than any other.

          Dickinson’s range of subjects was vast (that wide "circumference" of hers).  Yet it’s equally apt to see in her poetry a single, omnipresent subject: language itself. She approached, as the scholar Charles Anderson once noted, “like an explorer of new lands.”  Acutely attuned to her own time, as well as history, ideas and human behavior, she nonetheless inclined –and this quite consistently—to allow ideas to yield to the power and vagaries of the English language.  She used words, as Anderson put it, "as if she were the first to do so, with a joy and an awe largely lost to English poetry since the Renaissance.  Also with a creator’s licence: coining with a free hand, boldly maneuvering her inherited vocabulary, collapsing the syntax, springing the rhythm, slanting the rhyme."

          In the manuscript of one poem, we see Dickinson ending with the lines,

                              What confusion would cover the innocent Jesus
                              To meet so enabled a man!

But she ends it thusly only after trying out, in that concluding line, the adjectives religious, accomplished, discerning, accoutred, established and conclusive, before she settles on enabled.  The meanings are different, of course.  But it's words, not thoughts, that are preeminent for her.  As E.M. Forster would later write: “How can I know what I think till I see what I say?”

          And while experimenting with words, Dickinson also worked to eliminate as many of them as possible.  She was a compulsive economizer.  While her contemporary, Whitman, inundated his reader with language, building voracious (and at times almost limitless) incantations on the page, she sought maximum ellipsis, the tightest structural compression her language could achieve.  Witness here, on the matter of psychosis:

                              One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted –
                              One need not be a House –
                              The Brain has Corridors – surpassing
                              Material Place –
                              . . . . . . . . .
                              Ourself behind ourself, concealed –
                              Should startle most –
                              Assassin hid in our Apartment
                              Be Horror’s least.

Even words that one might expect grammatically are excised.  Only the most essential ones remain.  

          Then, there's her metaphor.  “The Brain has Corridors,” “Doom is the House without the Door,” “My Life had stood a Loaded Gun,” “Presentiment is that long Shadow on the Lawn,” “the little Tippler Leaning against the Sun,” “Pain has an Element of Blank”. . . the list goes and on and on, her jarring metaphors multiplying as we read.  Dickinson’s figurative leaps, often so surprising and unexpected, match, in their vividness, the conceits of Donne, Marvell and the other metaphysical poets of the 17^th century.  What T.S. Eliot said of Andrew Marvell can as well be said of her, that she "plays with a fancy which begins by pleasing and leads to astonishment. . . .  [She provides] a succession of concentrated images, each magnifying the original fancy.  [In the end] the poem turns suddenly with that surprise that has been one of the most important means of poetic effect since Homer."  Her metaphor may be the grandest element of her genius.

          Still, surveying her various poetic innovations, Charles Anderson felt that her finest creative stroke was, not her jewel-like compression, nor her word play, nor her metaphoric boundlessness, but rather her having adopted, with deceptive simplicity, a traditional 4-3-4-3 hymn stanza as her most frequent metrical form.  We see it here in the Bay Psalm Book’s version of the 23^rd Psalm,

                              The Lord to mee a shepherd is,               (4)
                                    want therefore shall not I.                   (3)
                              He in the folds of tender grasse              (4)
                                    Doeth cause mee down to lie . . .       (3)

and in Watt’s Christian Psalmody (a copy of which was in the Dickinson family library),

                              God moves in a mysterious way,
                                     His wonders to perform;
                              He plants His footsteps in the sea,
                                     And rides upon the storm.

The stanza’s rhythms (and attendant sentiments) were deeply familiar to the churchgoing Christian society in which the poet grew up.  (Everyone was also familiar with the 4-3-4-3 meter that had prevailed in Mother Goose rhymes since the 17^th century: “Sing a Song of Six-pence,/ A pocket full of rye; / Four and twenty Blackbirds / Baked in a Pie.”)

          The rude simplicity of this sing-song meter –the same meter that anchors her four-stanza’d Fly poem-- was turned by Dickinson into a vehicle of poetic surprise, transporting her novel vocabulary, jarring images, intense compression and intricate ideas, instead of the ordinary banalities and platitudes of faith.  Her poems were not, says Anderson, “traditional anthems . . . or pious psalms entuned in a Puritan nose," but rather "the thin pipings of praise that were still possible for an estranged modern religious sensibility, diminished, tangential, sometimes actually cancelled by doubt. . . .  Her bold experimentations out from this center would have dismayed the formal precisionists from whose pious hymns she took her start."

          Indeed, this “estrangement” --in a sense not confined to her lightly defiant tampering with words and forms—may be the single most important key for us, in our own very different time, to Dickinson’s durable poetic genius.  “I’m Nobody!” she wrote sardonically (posing as a demure but questioning outsider),

                                                 . . . Who are you?
                              Are you – Nobody – Too?
                              Then there’s a pair of us?
                              Don’t tell!  they’d advertise – you know!   

           She may have been a child of relatively pious mid-19^th century New England; but her work –for all its metaphoric fireworks-- emits a peculiarly 20^th- and 21^st-century sense of alienation.  Critic Walter Sutton suggests that, while Dickinson inherited the Emersonian idea of nature as an illusion, there lay behind it, not the ultimately benificent Oversoul of Emerson and Whitman (a period remnant), but the abyss of an unplumbed self to be confronted with fear and courage.

          How very modern.

____________________________________________

WALTER WELLS, founding editor of The Fickle Grey Beast, is professor Emeritus of English and Humanities at California State University, Dominguez Hills.  His most recent book is Silent Theater:  The Art of Edward Hopper.  See: www.emilydickinsoninternationalsociety.org,  www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org, and www.edwardhopperhouse.org.  

GROUCHOISMS

Walter Wells

Groucho and Margaret Dumont in the stage version of Animal Crackers, 1928
          As of our publication date this month, Groucho Marx would have been precisely 123 years, seven months and five days old.  “But look, to be remembered,” he might well have cracked, “who the hell needs an anniversary?”   Certainly not Julius Henry Marx, third of five sons born to Minnie and Sam Marx on New York’s upper east side well before the turn of the 20th century.  With his brothers, he was destined for stardom.  But Minnie called Julius “the dark one.”

          And well remembered, Groucho is.  (The word “immortal” sniffs and scratches at the door here, wanting in.)  Besides the thirteen movies he made with his equally zany siblings, and his later television show, a solo affair called You Bet Your Life, he’s probably best known for having refused to join a certain private watering hole, quipping “I don’t care to belong to any club that accepts someone like me as a member” –or some approximation thereof, the verbatim having been lost in the fog of countless retellings.  (Inspired by this cod self-deprecation, London’s exclusive Groucho Club first opened its well-protected doors in Soho in 1985.)  
Groucho with wife, Ruth, newborn daughter Myriam, and son Arthur, in Great Neck on Long Island, 1927. "My kid is only half Jewish. Can he go in up to the waist?"
          Not that he was insensitive to status and its slights.  With a less well-advertised bon mot brought about by the manager of a swimming club on Long Island informing him that, despite his celebrity, Jews could not be admitted, Groucho snapped back: “How about my kid?  He’s only half Jewish.  Can he go in up to the waist?”

          His quips, those Grouchoisms that have come down to us, are rarely mellow.  They are legion.  And many are aimed below the belt, combatively and priapically--  “Women should be obscene and not heard.”  “A man is only as old as the woman he feels.” “Some people claim that marriage interferes with romance.  Correct.  Anytime you have a romance, your wife is bound to interfere.”

          About the muscular Victor Mature, who had starred in Paramount’s Samson and Delilah, Groucho complained that he lost interest in any movie “where the leading man’s tits are bigger than the leading lady’s.”  Having been sold a topical crème to prevent premature ejaculation, he shot back (when asked if it had helped): “No, I came rubbing it on.”

       Though he’d left school at twelve, Groucho became something of an autodidact.  He could wield his Freud as well as the next guy.  One of his TV guests (so the recollection goes) was a woman who had given birth to twenty-two children.  She explained to him sheepishly, “I love my husband.”  “I love my cigar too,” Groucho replied, “but I take it out once in awhile.”  

       Now whether he did or didn’t really say that on national television (in the McCarthyite ‘fifties, no less!) is wide open to question --and therein lies the problem with much Grouchiana.  Legend has it that he said it, and many claim that they heard it.  But simple logic (it would have been deleted), a lack of evidence (tapes and recordings do not contain it), and Groucho’s own later denial do tilt the scale elsewise.  

       Groucho also, despite the numerous attributions, did not say, “I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.”  (That was Oscar Levant.)  Nor, “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana” (which comes Groucho, at left at age 15 in 1905. And above, in the center at age 22, with brothers Harpo behind him and Gummo at right, 1912.from a 1960s textbook illustrating the problems of computers attempting to parse grammatical ambiguities).  In all likelihood, he also did not say, “Alongside a dog, a book is man’s best friend.  Inside a dog, it’s too dark to read.”  But, in this case, he may have.  And so . . . .

       Alongside the frequent sexual innuendo (“and don't forget the exuendo,” he might insist), Groucho was also not averse to waxing philosophic.  (Never mind his car.)  “Money can’t buy happiness, but it lets you choose your own form of misery.”  “Humor is reason gone mad.”   “Blessed are the cracked, for they shall let in the light.”  “I’m not crazy about reality, but it’s still the only place to get a decent meal.”

          And when he thought actions spoke loudest, he did not hesitate –in one instance climbing atop the rubble of Adolf Hitler’s bunker in Berlin and dancing a two-minute Charleston.

          Despite his formidable reputation (he did, throughout his life, remain Minnie’s dark one), he was not a stranger to self-deprecation, as his rejection of club membership suggests.  “The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing,” he said, “and if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”  “A child of five could understand this!  Will someone please get me a child of five.”  “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them. . . I’ve got others.”  “No one,” he mused, “is completely unhappy at the failure of his best friend.”

          It was, however, as an insult artist, as a master of the snide retort and the potent put-down that he achieved near-perfection.  “I have nothing but respect for you –and not much of that.”  “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening –but this wasn’t it.”  “I never forget a face, but in your case, I’ll make an exception.”  Then again, these are lines from the films, and mostly farcical films at that.  “He was always ‘on,’” his brother Chico said of him.  “He would insult a king to make a beggar laugh.”  

          The Fickle Grey Beast’s dear friend, the late Dave Fine, recounted earlier in our pages his youthful encounter with Groucho long ago in the stands of Gilmore Field in Hollywood before a baseball game.  At his father’s urging, he’d gone down to the box seats at field level, waited till the Chico and Harpo Marx, on the set of Animal Crackers. "My brothers and I will have our attorney sue you."great man turned to him, and asked tentatively, “Are you Groucho Marx?”  “No,” was the growling reply he got, “are you?”  It was Groucho’s way. 

    Years later, when the journalist, Richard J. Anobile, approached an aging Groucho about a Marx Brothers book he was preparing, and asked him whether he might consider writing the introduction to it, he got an extended version of the same reply.  Groucho snarled, “You’re invading my privacy and you have no right to do anything with our films!  My brothers and I will have our attorney sue you.  We have nothing more to talk about.  Goodbye.”

    A little later, Anobile called him and politely persisted: “I’ve gone over the various contracts for your films and am positive I can proceed without your approval.”  The writer recounts the conversation, in which Groucho replied,

                                     “What’s this book going to be called?”

                                     “Why a Duck?  The title is taken from a scene in your first film.”

                                     “It would probably be a better seller if you called it Why a Fuck?”

                                     “Well, I’ll discuss that possibility with my publisher but in the
                              meantime I’d still like you to do the introduction.”

                                     “Okay, but you can’t use my name.”

                                     “What should it say: ‘Introduction by an Anonymous Marx
                              Brother’?”

                                     “Say what you want, but you can’t use my name!”

          After another short while, it was Anobile’s phone that rang.

                                     “Long distance calling Mr. Anobile.  Will you accept a collect call
                              from Groucho Marx?”

                                     “I guess so.”

                                     “Hellooo!  I like the piece I wrote for your book so you can use
                              my name on it, as long as my name is bigger than yours.”

                                     “No problem, no one has ever heard of me.”

                                     “If you play your cards right, it’ll stay that way.”
    
          “And so,” wrote Anobile, “began my acquaintance with Groucho Marx.”

Harpo, Groucho and Chico with Irving Thalberg (seated). One day, frustrated with waiting to see the acclaimed producer, "we got some potatoes," said Groucho, "and we all went into his office, took off our clothes and began roasting the things. When Thalberg came, he found the three of us naked around a fire roasting potatoes in the middle of the room. He never kept us waiting again!"          It was an acquaintanceship that would lead not long after to a second book by Anobile (and by Groucho, though this time their names are the same size; Groucho’s does come first however).  It’s a compendium of photos, letters, print memorabilia, and extended interviews entitled The Marx Brothers Scrapbook.  “As Groucho and I got to know each other,” says Anobile, “I began to realize that there are few performers who are alive today who can give us an impression of an era long gone . . . . [and] by one of America’s greatest humorists.”  Anobile devoted the next few years to the pursuit.

          The Scrapbook contains interview-recollections by each of the five Marx brothers as well as writers, producers and directors with whom they worked.  The most numerous –and vivid— of those recollections, though, are Groucho’s.  They are not only as valuable as Anobile had hoped, but they leap from the page with all the verve and wit and temerity of the more compact Grouchoisms we’ve come to know.

          Of their early days in vaudeville, for example, when the brothers had to augment their meagre earnings, Groucho recalled:

                              . . . by this time I was pretty sick of sandwiches and bananas.  Chico
                              was playing the piano for a music club in Pittsburgh and doing a lot
                              of fucking.  Harpo was a bellboy.  He didn’t have any specific talent
                              and he couldn’t talk well.
                                     You see, I could talk.  Chaplin once said to me, “I wish I could
                              talk on screen the way you do.”  The last time I met him was when
                              [in 1972] they gave him the Oscar.  We were both at the same party
                              and he came up to me and said, “Keep warm.”  I knew what he meant
                              by that because when you get old like us you get cold.  I never forgot
                              that . . . .

          But back in the early days,

                              [i]n every town we’d stop at, we’d go first to the poolroom and
                              then find a hotel.  Chico would offer to play anyone in town for five
                              dollars, and he usually won.  I think it was in Winnipeg, in Canada,
                              when I decided one day that I wasn’t going to hang around the poolhall.
                              Instead I went for a walk down the main street where I came on a
                              nickelodeon.  I think they charged 10 cents to get in.  It was a real dump.
                              Chaplin was doing an act there called A NIGHT AT THE CLUB.  I
                              never heard an audience laugh like he made that audience laugh.  I
                              went back to tell the boys about him.  “I just saw the greatest comedian
                              in the world.  I don’t know who he is, but you have to meet him.”  We
                              had to leave for the next town but we managed to get acquainted with
                              him there.  He was getting $25.00 a week and was dressing with five
                              other guys in one room.  The stink of stale makeup was awful . . . .
                              I remember once when we were all in Salt Lake City.  We went to
                              a whorehouse.  But Chaplin was so shy that he wouldn’t go with any
                              of the girls.  So he spent all evening sitting on the floor playing with
                              the madam’s dog. . . .  When we got to the West Coast he was offered
                              a job in the movies by Mack Sennett.  You’ve heard of him?
                                     Anyway, he didn’t take the job and when I saw him the next time
                              I asked him why.  He said, “Nobody can be good enough for $200 a
                              week.”
                                     Five years later I went back to California and he was living in a
                              huge home and fucking all the leading ladies.  And he became the
                              world’s greatest comedian.

          As things happened, the storyteller himself didn’t fare so poorly either.
______________________________________
WALTER WELLS is Professor Emeritus of English and former chairman of American Studies at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and editor of The Fickle Grey Beast.  The book referred to, from which the article's extended quotations and several of the pictures are drawn are drawn, is Groucho Marx and Richard J. Anobile, The Marx Brothers Scrapbook (New York: Darien House, 1973).  A detailed and entertaining account of Groucho’s alleged “cigar” remark to the woman with 22 children is available at www.snopes.com/radiotv/tv/grouchocigar.asp.

BITE OF THE SPIDER

Walter Wells


                                                    Gente del Sud spesso derisa e tacciata di
                                                    superstizione immobili.

The region of Salento (in red)          Most of us fancy the map of southern Italy as a boot --its spiky heel, the Salentine peninsula, on the east, and its Calabrian toe kicking Sicily westward toward some unseen goalpost in the sea.  But look again, and that same map can as easily be seen as the gaping jaws of a venomous creature, a spider perhaps, poised to fend off any intrusion from below.  Near the back of the creature’s palate (where Salento begins) is the port of Taranto, which long ago gave its name to the large and hairy arachnid called tarantula, which flourishes in the nearby hills.  Tarantulas, in turn, have long given us the exuberant dance we know as the tarantella.  

          The dance originated, according to regional folklore, in the tarantula’s bite, which happened unexpectedly (though not infrequently) to local workers in the fields.  Curiously, its victims (the tarantata) were almost exclusively women.  What ensued was an urgent and frenetic dance to make the sufferer sweat away the venom, thereby “exorcizing” the poison.  (That the bite was only mildly toxic greatly aided survival.  And as most of the dancers survived, so too did the dance.)

          In the strictest sense, both tarantula and tarantella are generic terms.  They are categories.  Nine hundred or so species of large, hairy spider all qualify as tarantulas (family name: Theraphosidae), only a  few of them more than mildly toxic.  Similarly, the term tarantella embraces a number of upbeat folk dances in southern Italy: the sono a ballu of Calabria, the tammuriata of Campania, the pizzica of Salento, and others.  

          I had participated in a verbal exchange about "tarantella," remembered a native Salentine long after.  It degenerated into a fistfight between groups from various parts of the Taranta area who felt that the dance belonged exclusively to them, as well as the music . . . .

          Even within its regional types, there is considerable variety.  Some tarantelle are danced individually, others in couples, a few in larger groupings.  A handful of the dances, like the courtship Playing the tamburello, the soul of pizzica. Photograph by Tony Rizzo, from Focus on Taranta.tarantella, are less frenetic than the rest.  Some locals also argue a distinction between tarantella and taranta, arguing that only the latter insinuates the spider bite.  But the terms have, for the most part, become interchangeable in common parlance.

          And as dance requires music, there have emerged characteristic taranta melodies: rhythms, lyrics and instrumentalizations that accompany --and occasionally even compete with-- the spontaneous (or seemingly spontaneous) choreography.  Mandolin, guitar, accordion and (most especially) the tamburello are fundamental to tarantella.  Flutes, fiddles, trumpets and clarinets also come into play.  Singing is essential --much of it in Griko, the indigenous Greek-based dialect, which is difficult even for most Italians to understand.

          I knew, said a Japanese journalist, Natsuko Kawaguchi, that the name "Taranta" came from the poison of a spider, the tarantula, which would bite the women of the Salento region while they worked in the fields and I know that the Pizzica music would cause these women to dance until they were fully exhausted in order to rid themselves of the poison: the music would induce a trance . . . .

Dancing maenad. Detail from an ancient Greek skyphos (wine cup), c.330-320 BC.          The pizzica . . . a trance . . . .

          In its predominant forms, tarantella has roots in the Dionysiac cults of ancient Greece with their wildly entranced, frenetically dancing maenads, those female devotees of Dionysus.  While Euripides’ are best known to us, there are even earlier documents linking spider bites and musical exorcism.  Tarantism –which specifically establishes the music-driven dance of Taranto and the Salento region as antidote to the spider’s bite-- is seen by some historians as part of the broader phenomenon of “dancing mania.”  It is mentioned in documents as early as the 1200s.  In the centuries since, taranta in its various forms has become more ritualized and, as ritual dance quite detached from the actual tarantula, widely celebrated.

                                                 Do you remember an Inn, Miranda,
                                                 Do you remember an Inn? . . .                              
                                                 And the hip! hop! hap!                 
                                                 Of the clap  
                                                 Of the hands to the swirl and the twirl    
                                                 Of the girl gone chancing,     
                                                 Glancing,           
                                                 Dancing,       
                                                 Backing and advancing,      
                                                 Snapping of the clapper to the spin                   
                                                 Out and in--      
                                                 And the ting, tong, tang of the guitar! . . .        
                                                                             --from Hilaire Belloc, “Tarantella”

Hendrik Hondius, engraving based on a drawing by Pieter Brueghel of the dancing mania of 1564 in Flanders.         Then too, the question remains.  Had most tarantata (those victimized women) really been spider bitten? –any more than Lucy, or Mina, or the countless other victims of Dracula and his progeny were real-life prey to the vampiric tooth?  Or were they victims of a much more persistent hysteria, one bred by the pressures of gender subordination?  Were they, at wits’ end, succumbing to (or feigning) frenetic madness that was, in fact, a sublimated rage, contagious among the sisterhood of the suppressed, and placated only by the exhaustion with which all manic dancing concludes?  

          One observer of the Salentine tradition, Enza Pagliara, intimates as much.  “Tarantata,” she says simply, “no longer exist.  With women’s emancipation now established, one of the basic principles of this music is missing: the tarantula’s bite.”  Some might disagree, of course, irrespective of the dance.  

          Whatever its source or mythic underpinning, tarantella has also been adapted over the years and transformed into music of a different order.  In the 19th century, Chopin, Mendelssohn, From George Balanchine's TarantellaTchaikovsky, Saint-Saens, Rossini, Liszt, all incorporated its rhythms and tempos into their work.  Schubert (not least in his “Death and the Maiden” Quartet) was particularly fond of the form.  In the 20th century, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Britten, Malcolm Williamson and others have incorporated it; as have Mark-Anthony Turnage  and Michael Williams in the twenty-first.  Ibsen built the tarantella into A Doll's House, as did Coppola in the Godfather, and Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann in North by Northwest.  George Balanchine’s remarkable ballet, Tarantella, first performed in 1964, is set to Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s Grand Tarantelle, composed exactly a century earlier.  Clearly, while the tarantula himself may have disappeared, the music and dance inspired by his nip endure, and flourish.  

          In fact, Tarantism, the music and dance that emerged from that putative bite, has experienced a resurgence over the past decade on the Salentine peninsula where it originated.  Fifteen summers ago an annual celebratory festival was created: La Notte della Taranta.  It has since become the largest of all European festivals devoted to traditional music –to pizzica in particular, and to the traditional tarantella to which pizzica is devoted.  This coming summer, the festival (a “night” that actually extends over 2½ weeks) will commence on August 6th with concerts in various locations in Salento.  It will climax in a grand concertone on the 24th in the town of Malpignano near the tip of the Italian heel.

"The rhythm is a trance of possession, you are lanced by shudders of pleasure, you cannot remain inert . . ." Photograph by Tony Rizzo, from Focus on Taranta          The festival has inspired both the creation of a research institute, la Fondazione Notte della Taranta, and the publication last year of a remarkable bilingual book entitled Focus on Taranta, featuring some wonderfully intimate photographs by Tony Rizzo of performers at la Notte, and insightful backgrounding and interviews by Barbara De Finis and Emilia Sfilo of a broad array of dancers, singers, instrumentalists, organizers, folklorists and other appassionatos present at the 2011 festival.  Rizzo refers to them all as “a multi-coloured caravanserai.”  He, De Finis and Sfilo all bring to the work the double sensibility of Salentines who have left the place of their birth, then returned after several decades for an intimate look at what "The tarantula has bitten again!" Photograph by Tony Rizzo, from Focus on Tarantathe region, the antique home of tarantella, has more recently accomplished to bring that spirited cultural artifact to the broader world.

          It must be cautioned too that while many Salentines, like the book’s authors, embrace the revival, there are others who feel that transforming what is traditionally a therapeutic and spiritual ritual into stage performance eviscerates the tradition.  “Unfortunately,” says one close observer, Cesare Dell’Anna, “some musicians have completely changed the roots of their music . . . they have associated the tradition of Salentine music solely with Notte della Taranta.”  Another skeptic, Enzo Petrachi, complains that “tarantismo no longer exists, even if we continue to play every summer on the mystery of the mythical spider.”

          But play on it la Notte certainly does, to increasing numbers of both Salentines and captivated visitors.  A six-minute video (at www.guardian.co.uk/travel/video/2012/nov/20/salento-notte-della-taranta-video) goes some way in demonstrating tarantella’s allure. . . as well as le superstizione della gente del sud.
____________________________________
WALTER WELLS is the founding editor of The Fickle Grey Beast, Professor Emeritus of English and Humanities at California State University, Dominguez Hills --and one of Taranta’s many seductees.   The book in question is: Tony Rizzo, in collaboration with Barbara De Finis and Emilia Sfilio, Obiettivo/Focus on Taranta (Bari: Gelsorosso, 2012).  See www.gelsorosso.it. 

IGNOSTICISM

Walter Wells



                                          As we blithely pass through Vanity Fair,
                                          On the King's Highway to Who knows Where. . . .

          A show of hands, please--  Who believes in the existence of God?  

          A large question, perhaps the large Question, often asked, and variously answered.  (In recent years, of course, some very vocal public nay-sayers have stolen much of our attention.)

          If we strip away numerous categorical and subcategorical distinctions and rhetorical refinements, it’s fair to say, I think, that the three most basic responses-- when the Question is posed personally-- are the theist’s (“Yes, God exists”), the atheist’s (“No, there is no God”), or the agnostic’s (“Hard to say. The evidence is insufficient, and might well remain so”).  One might even borrow Alex Ross’s phrase and call all the rest “noise.”

          Except that it isn’t.  While harboring a personal inclination among these three thumbnail replies, I don’t actually feel that any one of them identifies my own predilection satisfactorily.  For one thing, the scheme of labelling insists that if I’m not a “theist” (a believer in God), my creed necessarily comes down to a negation of sorts:  I’m either an atheist (that is, not a theist), or I’m agnostic (that is, without gnosis, or knowledge, knowledge of the mystical sort that enables such belief).  I’m defined by negation.  

          Etymologically, the term agnostic owes to T.H. Huxley, who coined it in 1869 for the principle that, lacking rationally derived evidence, one simply cannot conclude (therein, the negative) that God –or anything else beyond the reach of empirical demonstration—exists.  The proposition is arguable, but my lexical objection is that both atheists and agnostics are thusly labelled on the basis of a putative absence: either their lack of belief in God, or their lack of the proof needed to embrace that belief --"God" is the benchmark.  And I’m not a negative sort of guy.  Nor are my beliefs.

Martin Rowson, God and Richard Dawkins (2009)          Beyond these semantic sensitivities, however --and even more objectionable about this epistemological “trinity” of belief-types-- is that they all, if we parse their thumbnail replies closely, presume to understand the meaning of the Question: Do you believe in God?  It's deceptively simple, comprised of a single verb and a single noun, combined interrogatively.  To answer it coherently --as our confident theist, atheist and agnostic above all seem to-- they presumably understand what both that verb (exist) and that noun (God) actually mean.    

          Which I don't.  And frankly, my own personal gnosis begins with the proposition that I’d better understand the Question --any question-- before trying to answer it.  So I try defining its operative words:  existence (an abstract term), and God (a synthesizing metaphor).  Can’t do it, especially the latter.  Separately, each harbors very elusive denotation.  Together, they’re impossible --for me at least.  (Vague + Vague = Utter Incomprehension.)  I simply don’t understand what the Question means.    

          What, then, does that make me (besides a bore at my local debating club, or in this intentionally short essay)?  It makes me, in a word, ignostic.  I ascribe to the creed of "Ignosticism."  Not for an instant do I claim to have invented the term, or the belief, though I find it not very well known, even amongst the theologians of my acquaintance, amateur or otherwise.

          Ignosticism is the position (the refuge, if you prefer) of the thinking person who finds the fundamental question, “Does God exist?” lacking in meaning.  While the term was coined in 1960 by Rabbi Sherwin Wine in his personal evolution from Reform to Humanistic Judaism, intimations of the Question’s vacuity long predate it.  As far back as Spinoza, we find a glimmer of doubt.  That doubt takes on more candlepower in Shelley, whom Spinoza inspired, and still more in Kierkegaard, and Kierkegaard’s direct descendants, the mid-20th-century existentialists.

          In more recent times, a leading secular humanist, the American, Paul Kurtz, preferred the term igtheism to ignosticism, introducing it in his book, The New Skepticism (1992).  It was Kurtz, more than anyone else, who had elevated “secular humanism” from the pejorative it had been for Christian conservatives, stressing its ethical powers, which he argued were greatly energized in the liberating absence of supernaturalism.

Sherwin Wine          In 1998, Theodore Drange, the American religious philosopher, demonstrated –with a remarkable minimum of sophistry—that if we give the word “God” a bouquet of tentative, uneccentric definitions (just four, in fact), we could plausibly conclude that the very same person (a Paul Kurtzphilosopher, no doubt) was either a theist, an atheist, an agnostic, or an “noncognitivist” –that is, an ignostic—depending on the definition of "God" being invoked.  

          I, however, unlike our imaginary fourfold philosopher, am unequivocally ignostic, content to believe that the definitions necessary to answer the Question meaningfully are not only not at hand, but less likely to happen by than Beckett's Godot.  I simply don’t understand it.  But my ignostic creed goes further.  I’m disinclined to condemn religion per se (ignostics ought not to) because of the hurtful excesses of some of its adherents, either historically or more recently.  (I am quick, however, to call for suppression of those excesses and of those who commit them, as some my fellow ignostics are not).  My ignosticism also embraces the fact that theism (i.e. religious belief) manifests deep personal need  --a need for Theodore Drangethe spiritual comforts and assurances religion offers, for the social possibilities it opens up, or for the warm glow of conformity (or platform for stridency) it provides.  As one who knows and feels the pressure of need every day of my life, I understand the impulse toward religion: it’s among humanity’s most normal and routine.  (That my needs are different doesn’t alter the understanding.)  I’m also conscious of being deeply enriched, personally, by many of that impulse’s tangible manifestations: Notre Dame, the Messiah of Handel, Ecclesiastes, the Sistine ceiling, to name but a few within the single tradition in which I was raised.  And those enrichments extend far beyond that tradition.

          So, does one believe in God?  Once taken beyond the sentimental contexts in which "God" is often invoked, the Question is incomprehensible prima facie.  It's meaningless.  Would that it weren’t.  Please, make clear to me what the operative terms mean, then I can answer the Question sensibly.  Once I can, maybe this committed, card-carrying ignostic will prove to be a theist, or an atheist, after all.
______________________________________

WALTER WELLS is Emeritus Professor of English and Humanities, and former Chairman of American Studies at California State University, Dominguez Hills.  He now lives and works in London, where he edits The Fickle Grey Beast.   Wikipedia's discussion of Ignosticism is quite good.  That ignosticism (under one label or another) compels many becomes clear on www.autodidactproject.org/guidathe.html.

POE'S CASK OF VENGEANCE

Walter Wells



          It is, I believe, the richest, most nearly perfect story of revenge in the English language.  A timeworn French aristocrat named Montresor recounts the evening, half a century earlier, when he carried out his meticulous plot against an acquaintance named Fortunato in retribution for some Edgar Allen Poeunspecified, yet grievous insult.  The plan works perfectly, and his revenge proves horrific.  The tale is Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” first published in 1846.

          Played out during pre-Lenten Carnival, Montresor cold-bloodedly exploits the evening’s revelry, appealing to the ego of his inebriated victim to lead him through the nitre-encrusted catacombs beneath the palazzo Montresor to his doom.  Fortunato, as Montresor well knew, “prided himself on his connoisseurship in wine.”  He would therefore insist, despite suffering from a cold, that only he, and no one else, could validate Montresor’s newly purchased barrel of wine as genuine Amontillado.  With feigned reluctance and humility, Montresor escorts his prey downward, presumably toward the cask, their descent as abundant in Poe's beloved puns and ironies as with the bones of Montresor’s ancestors.  These catacombs, originally meant for family interments, but now used to store vintages, would once again become a burial tomb –this time for burial alive.

          Once at the bottom, Montresor recalls that Fortunato

                              had reached the extremity of the niche, and finding his progress
                              arrested by the rock stood stupidly bewildered.  A moment more
                              and I had fettered him to the granite.

"In pace requiescat"          Shackled and confused, his intoxication waning, Fortunato thinks it all a joke.  But Montresor, pushing aside a pile of bones, “uncover[s] a quantity of building stone and mortar” he’s hidden there, and proceeds, layer by layer, “to wall up the entrance of the niche,” entombing the terrified Fortunato within.  Concluding his story, Montresor remembers that “[a]gainst the new masonry I re-erected the old rampart of bones.  For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them.  In pace requiescat.”

          Of the more than seventy short tales Poe wrote, none has evoked more critical assessment over the years.  Every sentence, every image, every bit of dialogue resonates with a rich suggestiveness.  Questions go subtly unanswered.  Was Montresor’s revenge, for example, entirely successful?  Objectively, yes.  But he’d insisted early in the story that he must “not only punish, but punish with impunity.”  Defining his mission thusly, he sets out impunity’s double requirement: contending that “a wrong” goes

                              unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser.  It is equally
                              unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to
                              him who has done the wrong.

          And at the end, it’s true, we cannot be sure if Montresor, obsessed with retribution, fails to meet his own criteria.  There is no evidence, for one thing, that Fortunato, once chained, ever understands the reason for his demise.  Montresor, never mentioning the insult, simply mocks his victim’s every scream with a louder scream.  Some critics have argued too that the crystal clarity with which he tells his story fifty years later suggests that the deed has haunted him ever since, and that his final words (“In pace requiescat”) reflect, not vengeful satisfaction, but a wish to be absolved of guilt for that long-ago crime.  Did he not address the tale, at its start, to “You, who so well know the nature of my soul” –-as though in the throes of Catholic confession?

          And indeed, despite appealing primarily to the nightmare of living burial, the tale, more narrowly, is one of 19th-century French-Catholic resistance to Italian ascendancy, fuelled as that ascendancy was by anti-papist Freemasonry.  While Poe wrote other stories of living burial (indeed, he seemed compelled by the theme), only “The Cask” is built around religious antipathy.  The antipathy, moreover, unfolds in an Nice, on the Mediterranean, near the French-Italian border.unnamed location that was almost certainly, in its author’s mind, the Mediterranean city of Nice –during pre-Lenten Carnival.  Carnival’s uninhibited revelry yields, of course, to the holiest six weeks in the Christian calendar, the festival being a largely pagan response to the onsetting Christian imperative.  Nice’s Carnival, one of the largest and certainly the oldest in Christendom, dates back to at least the 13th century.

          During the centuries preceding the tale’s composition, neither France nor Italy had assumed their present boundaries; Nice, near the current border between them, had bounced back and forth between French and Italian sovereignty.  For most of the 18th century, it had been part of the Italian Kingdom of Sardinia, which included mainland Savoie.  Then, in 1796, exactly fifty years before “The Cask” was written, Napoleon’s army retook Nice, incorporating the city into France’s predominantly Catholic First Empire.  “The Cask,” written in 1846, ends of course with a revanchist Frenchman “redressing” an Italian “insult” in the catacombs of his own ancient French family estate exactly “half of a century” before.            

Fortunato, his head "surmounted by a conical cap and bells," his fate not only personal but political.          Why then is the tale not more triumphant in tone?  Perhaps because, by the time it was written (during the culminating stages of the Italian Risorgimento), Nice had once again become Italian.  Following Napoleon’s abdication and exile 32 years earlier (in 1814), the Congress of Vienna had returned the city to Sardinia, in the hands of whose king --and his Masonic supporters-- the city would remain for the rest of Poe’s life.

          Montresor’s horrific revenge on Fortunato, then, is not only personal, but political.  And religious.  Walking unsteadily toward his doom, Fortunato pauses to drink from a bottle that Montresor has “knocked off the neck of” (recalling it to have been “a flagon of De Grave”).  “He laughed,” says Montresor, “and threw the bottle upwards with a gesticulation I did not understand” --a secret Masonic sign.
               
                                       I looked at him in surprise.  He repeated the movement –a
                              grotesque one.
                                       “You do not comprehend?” he said.
                                       “Not I,” I replied.
                                       “Then you are not of the brotherhood.”
                                       “How?”
                                       “You are not of the masons.”
                                       “Yes, yes,” I said, “yes, yes.”
                                       “You?  Impossible!  A mason?”
                                       “A mason,” I replied.
                                       “A sign,” he said, “a sign.”
                                       “It is this,” I answered, producing from beneath the folds of
                              my roquelaire, a trowel.
                                       “You jest,” he exclaimed, recoiling a few paces.

Montresor hardly jests.  Ironically, he will use the tool of a workaday mason to seal up this confraternal mason in his living tomb.

          Once he does so, his victim screams and pleads from behind the newly erected wall, “For the love of God, Montresor!”  At which Montresor snarls back at him, “Yes. . . for the love of God!”  Indeed, the insult did have to do with “the love of God,” and discord between two men, the Frenchman and the Italian, in this disputed Franco-Italian place, over doctrinally different ways of loving Him.              

          Nice continued, in fact, after Poe’s death in 1849, to shift back and forth between the two political cultures.  In 1860, the Treaty of Turin gave the city back to France in thanks for Napoleon III’s assistance to Italy in its war of independence against Austria.  In 1942, Nice fell again under Italian occupation, only Masonic insignia: God the Architect, the Great Geometer.to revert to France in ’45 at the end of World War II.  And while the longstanding issue of Nicean sovereignty now seems settled, antipathy between Catholics and Freemasonry remains unresolved to this day.  In 1738, a papal bull by Clement XII had expressly forbidden Catholics from joining the Masons.  The doctrinal grounds were complex, but they came down to Masonic refusal to recognize the Vatican as the seat of the true Christian church.  For Catholics, Masonic references to God as the Great Architect of the Universe, or the Great Geometer, smelled of a rational, arm’s-length Deism and were hence anathema to the more desirable mysteries.  As recently as 1983, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (crowned Pope Benedict XVI in 2006) issued an unequivocal declaration:

                              [T]he Church’s negative judgment in response to Masonic associations
                              remains unchanged since their principles have always been considered
                              irreconcilable with the doctrine of the Church and therefore membership
                              in them remains forbidden.  The faithful who enroll in Masonic associations
                              are in a state of grave sin and may not receive Holy Communion.

Indeed, Masonic membership in some Catholic quarters still invites excommunication.

          But there is yet more to “The Cask of Amontillado” than divergent Christianity, Nice, Franco-Italian politics or the Risorgimento --more even than its author’s timeless and terrifyingly baroque imagination.  We move back, transatlantically, to Poe’s own country and see that, almost certainly, the story would not have been written were not for his enlistment in the U.S. Army twenty years earlier, and his curiosity about a gravestone he came across at Fort Independence in Boston Harbor, where he briefly served.  

Fort Independence, Boston Harbor          Its inscription read:  Beneath this stone are deposited the remains of Lieut. ROBERT F. MASSIE, of the U.S. Regt. Of Light Artillery.  The stone also told that it was [n]ear this spot, ten years earlier, that Massie fell.  There had been no war then.

          Intrigued, Pvt. Poe inquired of everyone he could find who had long served at the Fort.  Piecing together his responses, he learned that the young officer, Massie, popular amongst most of his fellows, had died in a duel defending himself against a captain named Green who had accused him, wrongly it seems, of cheating at cards.  It was a Christmas morning.  The captain, a dangerous swordsman and a bully, overpowered Massie and ran him through.  By afternoon, the young man was dead, mourned by his friends at the fort as a gallant officer and good man.  It was they who had erected the monument that Poe encountered a decade later, and their hatred for Capt. Green festered.

          Some months after, Green inexplicably vanished from Fort Independence, and was ultimately written off as a deserter.  Poe, however, doggedly uncovered a different denouement.  Feigning good cheer, Massie’s friends, it seems, had one evening plied Capt. Green with wine till he was helplessly drunk.  Carrying him down into the fort’s subterranean dungeons, they there forced him into a tiny casemate.  Green awakened from his stupor and demanded explanation and redress.  But they’d already shackled him, hand and foot, in irons riveted into the stone.  Using bricks and mortar they’d hidden close at hand, they sealed Green into the windowless casemate and left him there shrieking and begging for mercy.  No mercy was forthcoming.

          When, a decade later, Private Poe’s superiors learned of the questions he’d been asking, he was summoned to the post commander’s room.  The commander confronted him over his interest in the monument, the duel, and Capt. Green’s disappearance.  Once clear that Poe had accurately pieced the story together, the commander ordered him never to repeat it outside the fort.  Strictly speaking, Poe obeyed.  He waited almost two decades; changed the setting, the characters and the underlying motive, reshaping the tale to accommodate the more far-reaching thematic resonances; and wrote “The Cask of Amontillado,” a jewel-like masterpiece.  Unfortunately, within two years, Poe himself was dead --of causes completely unrelated.

          In 1905, more than a half-century later, workers making repairs at Fort Independence found only a blank wall where their plans indicated a dungeon should be.  By lantern light, they chipped away at old mortar, uncovered an aperture into a casemate, and discovered within it a skeleton shackled to the floor, remnants of an old army uniform clinging to its bones.  The remains could not be identified, and were buried in a nearby cemetery, this grave marked “Unknown.”

          All of this, it must be said, hardly exhausts the riches of this remarkable gothic tale.  The question of whether, by his own criteria, Montresor’s revenge was complete, teases the intellect.  The tale’s historical and religious implications add other substantive dimensions to it, and deepen our appreciation --as do other approaches (rhetorical, psychological, deconstructive, etc.) that go unpursued here.  But it is certainly the methodical cold-bloodedness with which the story plays out, and the articulate restraint with which it’s told, that achieve, I think, what Poe most wished for it: to have us experience what another great 19th-century American writer referred to as “zero at the bone.”

_____________________________

WALTER WELLS is Emeritus Professor of English and Humanities at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and former chairman of the University’s American Studies program.  See: www.csudh.edu/univadv/dateline/archives/20090813/facstaffnews/walterwells.htm.  He’s the author, among other works, of Mark Twain's Sure-Fire Programmed Guide to Backgrounds in American Literature; and founding editor of The Fickle Grey Beast.
       The account of Capt. Green and Lt. Massie, and Poe’s pursuit of the facts surrounding their doubly fatal encounter, is drawn from Austin N. Stevens, Mysterious New England (Yankee Books, 1971)

OUR MAN OF THE MONTH

Walter Wells

    
       Of course.  Who else but Santa Claus? --born on the Ides of March in the year 270 on the southern coast of Turkey.  That’s a datum (or factoid, if you prefer) that you can confidently recite at your upcoming office Christmas party –best, however, to hold off till at least half way through the festivities.

       You can admit moreover that, sure, he was not known as “Santa Claus” at the time, nor was Turkey “Turkey.”  And it wasn’t necessarily on the Ides (that is, the 15th  day of that fateful month, more often associated with the death of Caesar) that he was born.  It was, however, somewhere around the middle St. Nikolaos (270-343 AD), Bishop of Myra (13th-century Russian icon).of March, in the midst of Rome’s 3rd-century Imperial Crisis, when Asia Minor had become a contested region on the Empire’s eastern edge.  The boy, called Nikolaos, was born the only son of wealthy parents, amongst fellow Greeks in Patara, a port on the Mediterranean.  
       After both of his parents died in an epidemic, he was raised by his uncle, the Bishop of Patara, who encouraged and tutored the boy’s natural religiosity.  Nikolaos later moved to the nearby city of Myra where he became, in turn, a church reader, a priest and, at a very young age, Bishop of Myra.  (One story has it that an angel appeared before Myra's presiding cardinal, and ordered the consecration.)  As Bishop, Nicholas ultimately helped convene the Council of Nicaea in 325, which managed –disputatiously, but nonetheless--to cobble together no less than the New Testament.              
    
       Even in life, the man’s reputation grew unto reverence, among both Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians.  Many facts of his life yielded promptly unto legend—

       In 311 and 312, Myra suffered a great famine.  Nevertheless, one ship anchored in port was loaded with wheat to its brim, earmarked for the Emperor’s stores at Constantinople.  The persuasive Nicholas St. Nicholas resurrecting three murdered boys from a pickling vat (Oak statue, South Netherlands, c.1500). Metropolitan Museum of Art.pleaded with the captain to unload some of it for the local citizenry before sailing.  The captain agreed, having his sailors remove enough to last Myra’s citizens for two full years, but only after the good Bishop assured him that somehow no loss would be suffered for his help.  Once the ship arrived in Constantinople, the ship and its payload were weighed and found to be not an ounce less than had originally been loaded.  

       In the depths of that famine, there was a butcher (ancestor, perhaps, to the demon barber of Fleet Street) who lured three schoolboys into his house and promptly slaughtered, butchered and pickled them, thinking to portion them off as meat pies.  Nicholas shrewdly saw through the crime and, with the power of prayer alone, resurrected the boys, intact.  

       There was also the poor parishioner in Myra who could afford no dowry for any of his three daughters.  Secretly, so as not to embarrass the man, Nicholas went to their house after dark and, through an open window, threw three bags full of his own gold coins.  A variant of the tale (such is the elasticity of the Bishop’s reputation) has Nicholas dropping a gold-filled bag down the man's chimney, where it fell into one daughter's newly washed stocking, which she'd hung over the embers to dry.  

       Nicholas, the man, died on the 6th of December in 343, aged 73.  But the legends surrounding him only grew.  Actually, “Saint” Nicholas was never officially canonized; the practice wasn’t common in the early church.  Devoted followers simply spread the word of his righteousness and his generosity, and his following grew.  His “sainthood” evolved over the centuries.  By the Middle Ages (Rome by then long fallen), Nicholas had come to be venerated as a saint of “the people,” and as patron saint across a wide social array: of sailors, merchants, archers, students, and any number of towns and cities across the land, even the patron saint of thieves.  Churches were named in his honor, as were towns and villages.  Nicholas also, most prophetically, became the patron saint of children.       

       In the latter decades of the 11th century, some seven hundred years after the good man walked the earth, the Byzantine Empire found itself struggling against repeated Islamic incursion.  Taking advantage of the turmoil, sailors from Bari on the Italian peninsula seized a sizable portion of Nicholas's remains from the church in Myra and brought them back home, installing them there in an existing shrine to the pagan goddess St. Nicholas Basilica at Bari on the Adriatic, resting place (for now) of the good Bishop's relics.Pasqua Epiphania.  Grandmother Pasqua, as she was known, was also revered  for filling the stockings of local children with gifts.  It was a marriage made in Heaven, her worshippers easily merging with those of the bishop from Myra.  She effectively became Mrs. St. Nicholas, the Archbishop’s wife.  

       Those of his remains the sailors from Bari had failed to seize at Myra were soon after stolen by Venetian sailors --hence the present day Church of San Nicolo al Lido in Venice, where they rest.  While it’s easy to dismiss both sequesterings as pure legend, recent forensics have shown the two caches of sacred bone, at Bari and Venice, to contain the same DNA.  (The saint's bones may or may not remain undisturbed, however, at either place, as Turkish officials only three years ago formally requested the Italian government to repatriate the relics back to Myra, now called Demre on the Mediterranean.  Now, queues of Russians young and old can be found there, almost any day, waiting more or less reverently to rub the bronze (and quite shiny) left foot of Saint Nicholas.  But that gets us ahead of our story.)

       From Asia Minor and the Mediterranean, the Nicholas cult spread north, being adopted by German and Celtic pagans, and ultimately by Lutherans and other Protestants.  (Luther himself tried discouraging Woden, who rode a horse through the heavens.Nicholas-worship by promulgating “Kristkindl,” a gift-giving sprite who much more nearly resembled the infant Jesus, his desired icon.  Over the years, though, Kristkindl became “Kris Kringle” and, as at Bari, the identities merged.)  

       Northern pagans, of course, worshipped a whole pantheon of gods, led by Woden, chief among them, who was also the father of Balder, Thor and Tiw (these last two the founders of Thursday and Tuesday, respectively).  Woden had a long, white beard and rode a horse through the heavens one evening each autumn, passing judgment over the villages below --which had done well, and which had not?  When Nicholas merged with Woden, he shed his Mediterranean appearance, grew a big beard, mounted a flying horse, rescheduled his flight for December (the month of his birth), and donned heavy winter clothing.

       Jump ahead now to the early 1800s.  The many inspirations and incarnations of St. Nicholas have undergone expansion and revision over the centuries, and even for a brief time suppression by Calvinist worthies.  In his popular Knickabocker's History of New-York (1809), Washington Irving refers several times to the white bearded St. Nicholas atop a flying horse.  He gives him the Anglicized version of his Dutch name, Sinterklaas --Santa Claus.  

       A few years later, Clement Clark Moore, a professor at the General Theological Seminary in New York, either wrote or hijacked from an earlier versifier (the jury is out) the now-immortal jingle, “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” better known to us by its opening line, “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.”  First published anonymously in 1823, its verses portrayed Santa much as Knickabocker's History had --but for the first time equipped him with a sleigh and eight reindeer, and a down-the-chimney modus operandi.  The poem also bestowed names upon the reindeer, the last two of them called (in the poem’s original version) Dunder and Blixem, the Dutch words for thunder and lightning.

Thomas Nast, a self-portrait       Late in 1862, the Bavarian-American illustrator, Thomas Nast, nearly completed the picture we have of Santa Claus today with his Harper's Weekly images of a kindly St. Nicholas memorializing the grievous sacrifices of Union soldiers and their families in the darkest days of the American Civil War.  Nast drew Santa many times in the years that followed, images based not only on the verbal constructs of Irving Thomas Nast, Santa Claus (1881)and Moore, but on native German traditions of the 4th-century bishop known for his kindness and generosity, and of busy elves, who were now relocated to a workshop at the North Pole.  

       In 1889, almost a millennium after the “marriage” of St. Nicholas and Pasqua Epiphania at Bari, Katherine Lee Bates, who’d earlier written the lyrics to “America, the Beautiful,” popularized Santa’s wife, Mrs. Claus, in her poem, “Goody Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride.”  

       Eight years later, at the popular New York newspaper, The Sun, one of its editors, the former war correspondent Francis Pharcellus Church, wrote what was to become the most reprinted editorial in the English language, gently and thoughtfully answering a young reader’s query with the immortal words, “Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus.”

       In the 1890s, American children also began visiting the first of the department-store Santas.

       Two years after his publication of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the prolific L. Frank Baum added laurels to the modernized incarnation of St. Nicholas with a book called The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (1902).  Baum's young Claus, born mortal, was a foundling taken in by Ak, Master Woodman of the World, who ultimately exposes him to all the misery and poverty of other mortal children in the world.  Once grown, the young man commits himself to bringing joy into their lives, doing good deeds and inventing toys, which he eventually brings to them with the help of ten reindeer who leap in bounds so enormous they resemble flight.  In old age, as the Spirit of Death approaches him, Claus is both canonized and deemed immortal by the godlike people amongst whom he’d been was raised: another informal sainthood.  Now “Santa Claus” would live forever.

Santa enjoys a Coke, 1931       Three decades later, in 1931, the Coca-Cola Corporation commissioned the creation of a cola-drinking Santa whose fur-trimmed suit had to be made a bright Coca-Cola red.  The image went public and our modern conception of Santa Claus –aka St. Nicholas to this day-- was now complete. 

       It remained only for Montgomery Ward, the now-defunct retail chain, to augment his traditional eight-deer team with a ninth reindeer, which they did in a wildly popular children’s book handed out at Christmastime in 1939.  This new beast of burden’s glittering popularity was enhanced by a theatrical cartoon film in 1944, and made cornily unforgettable by Gene Autry’s 1949 recording of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

       So there we have him.  Our man of the month, St. Nicholas.  Santa Claus.  His origins are, above all, ecclesiastic, but they're also pagan, mythic, folkloric, literary, artistic, journalistic, commercial.  From sacred miracle worker and consort of the gods, to grief therapist, object of infantile wonderment (helped along by parental scam), and utterly ubiquitous marketing pitchman --he has evolved.  Come December, he’s everywhere, and usually (if not universally) welcome.  Francis Pharcellus Church at The Sun was surely right in assuring Virginia, and us.  There is a Santa Claus.  Over these next few weeks, just try to ignore him.
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WALTER WELLS, founding editor of The Fickle Grey Beast, is Emeritus Professor of English and Humanities, and former Chairman of American Studies, at the California State University, Dominguez Hills.  For an edifying collection and discussion of five early pictures of Santa Claus by Thomas Nast, see www.sonofthesouth.net/Original_Santa_Claus.htm .   The holiday icon that goes unmentioned above, the Christmas tree, is the subject of a small, richly informative volume by Bernd Brunner, Inventing the Christmas Tree (Yale University Press, 2012).

EDWARD HOPPER, COMEDIAN

Walter Wells



       One critic to hand here recently wrote that Edward Hopper “is a painter without any sense of humor.”  He called it “a troubling fact: Hopper paints,” he said, “without wit, without self- awareness.”  My own snap judgment is that the critic (who shall remain nameless) writes without looking very closely.  To be fair, though, he’s not alone in making that claim.  

Edward Hopper, NIGHT WINDOWS (1928)       Consider the artist’s Night Windows, a painting that usually evokes the commonplaces of Hopper criticism: "a somber moodpiece," "a study in loneliness," "an image of sexually charged vulnerability in which the flutter of a curtain hints of a heartbeat in an otherwise coma-like silence."  Indeed, many of Hopper’s images do convey these feelings; they are the artist’s existential benchmarks.  So much so that they occasionally obstruct our view of something else in his work: a wry and subtle, even at times a vulgar sense of humor, as is the case here.  Night Windows, one of his earlier depictions of a woman alone in her bedroom, minimally clad, is painted with the artist’s tongue deep in his cheek.  

Edward Hopper, TRAIN AND BATHERS (1920)       Bending over, the woman in the picture (at least the bottom half of her) is visible to us from the darkness outside through an upper-story window of her room.  Thus described, one might think it a picture both Edward Hopper, DRUG STORE (1927)sexually charged and patently voyeuristic.  Yet the image is utterly without erotic charge.  It is as much a product of Hopper’s well-calibrated drollery as several of his earlier ones: the etching Train and Bathers, for example, (which chugs comedically past two nymphs with a grin beneath its cyclopean headlight), or his 1927 canvas, Drug Store, which encases its brightly lit reds, whites and blues --a nod to the patriotic colors of his native land-- in a shop window dominated by an ad for a laxative.
                                                                                            
Edward Hopper, RECLINING NUDE (c.1924-27)       Night Windows also reflects, it seems to me, the artist’s occasional impulse to self-parody.  (That he paints “without self-awareness” is simply a preposterous claim.)  In her Francois Boucher, ODALISQUE BRUNE (1745)diaries, Hopper’s wife, Jo, makes clear his penchant for the feminine behind.  From the start of their marriage, Jo protested not only her husband’s sexual selfishness but his “attacks from the rear.”  Various of his paintings and cartoons of Jo (who was his only female model for forty years) are clearly posterior-centric: his sensual Reclining Nude, for example, (which hearkens Edward Hopper, JOSIE LISANT UN JOURNAL (c.1935)back to Boucher’s Odalisque brune of 1745), or the hastily sketched Josie lisant un journal (c.1935).  So too is Hopper’s later and more perplexing Excursion Into Philosophy, in which a book tossed on the bed visually echoes the naked derriere of the sleeping woman.

       In Night Windows, the female posterior is what we get.  Hidden partially by the building’s outer wall, a woman in her slip bends attentively over something out of our view.  Unaware, or simply unconcerned, she shows her ample buttocks toward her window and our voyeuristic vantage point.  (Usually, as in his Morning Sun, or Eleven A.M. or Morning in a City, a woman’s head is turned toward a window.  Here, though, it is unequivocally the other end.)  In an earlier Hopper canvas, New York Restaurant, a waitress similarly inclines her bottom toward the center of the picture.

Edward Hopper, NEW YORK RESTAURANT (c.1922)Edward Hopper, EXCURSION INTO PHILOSOPHY (1959)

       The room in Night Windows is much too brightly lit to be seductive in itself, and the woman’s bed too small to be of any erotic consequence.  Even more emphatically than the book on the bed in Excursion Into Philosophy, the rounded corner of the building in Night Windows reiterates the rounded rear end in the window above it.  As he often does, Hopper seems here to be linking bright light and wind synesthetically: the “force” of interior light seeming to blow the curtain in the left-hand window outward into the night.

       But is it the light that moves it?  It’s more likely, I think, that the same turn of mind that, only a year before, placed that Ex-Lax sign over the reds, whites and blues in Drug Store’s window, is here mischievously suggesting –or from Jo’s standpoint, maliciously—a great gust of curtain-moving flatulence.  The angles are right for it.  (The oddly "flame"-filled window on the right, presumably resulting from a lamp behind a red curtain, is probably part of the joke.) 

       The notion also explains New York Restaurant.  Both of the diners seated directly behind the waitress lean perceptibly away from her.  So does the potted plant immediately behind them.  That shadowy figure in the picture’s foreground, who is also downwind, seems hastily (by virtue of cropping) to be exiting even the picture itself.  He is gone with the wind.  Meanwhile, the waitress’s rear end, topped by that delightfully oversized bow, can only be read as a nicely wrapped gift to all behind her.  

George Cruickshank, LOYAL ADDRESSES AND RADICAL PETITIONS (1819)       Raunchy perhaps, but Hopper’s sense of humor also has admirable lineage.  Both pictures, Night Windows and New York Restaurant, evoke the crude whimsy of a long-ago image like George Cruikshank’s satirical etching, Loyal Addresses and Radical Petitions (1819), wherein a large-bottomed Prince Regent, soon to become England’s George IV, simultaneously patronizes his sycophants and farts tempestuously at the hoi polloi behind him.  

       The comic voyeurism of Night Windows also echoes a 1910 etching by the American “ashcan” artist, John Sloan –a picture called (not surprisingly) Night Windows.  It was hardly a coincidence: Sloan had taught Hopper at art school in New York, and championed his early work.  Sloan’s numerous depictions of prostitutes probably also influenced Hopper’s artistic perception of women through the years.  Hopper readily admitted to admiring Sloan’s art.

John Sloan, NIGHT WINDOWS (1910)       In his own Night Windows, Sloan silhouettes a boy perched on a tenement rooftop enjoying a masturbatory fantasy over the naked and shapely woman pinning her hair in a nearby window.  This boy-man is a voyeur in the strict sense of that much overused term, peering furtively into someone’s private moment to derive a sexual charge.  Adjacent rooftops abound in phallic chimneys and stovepipes.  Below, in the foreground, another generously endowed woman, no less naked, hangs her wash out in the sultry night air.  Despite the closely etched darkness of that night, there is a comic lightness about the image.  The figure on the roof enjoys the same voyeuristic angle as Hopper’s on his well-rounded woman in pink.  Both images leaven voyeurism with levity, though Hopper’s more subtly so.

       What, then, does one say to viewers who feel that Hopper and his art are humorless?  That they don’t get it?

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WALTER WELLS is the author of Silent Theater: The Art of Edward Hopper, winner of the 2009 Umhoefer Award for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities.  He is Emeritus Professor of English and Humanities at the California State University, Dominguez Hills, and founding editor of The Fickle Grey Beast.
    The Edward Hopper House in Nyack, New York, the artist’s childhood home, is now a not-for-profit art center offering exhibitions, educational programs, talks, readings, and an archive of the artist’s papers and effects.  See www.edwardhopperhouse.org.