Counting sheep

Last night, whilst being softly serenaded by my owl, I reflected upon the sheer range and number of different forms of transportation that I have been lucky enough to experience in the course of a busy life of almost constant travel. I have flown in everything from a rusty old Douglas DC-3 at uncomfortably low altitudes through shocking turbulence and dense tropical cloud all the way across the Owen Stanley Ranges in Papua New Guinea to a luxurious private jet from Adelaide to Birdsville, Moomba, Innamincka, and back; from a tiny four-seat Helicopter at Cooper Creek to an Airbus A380 (alas downstairs); from a six-seat Cessna fragilely circling over what remains of the Franz Josef Glacier in New Zealand to sundry clapped-out Fokker Friendships, and innumerable trusty Boeing 747s, beginning in 1975—when our first stop was the old Kai Tak in Hong Kong. The sensory residues of that childhood experience will remain with me until the day I die. Air bridges were then still an exciting novelty, and far more often one descended the stairs in the re-invigorating open air: on that occasion a unique combination of tropical heat, wetness, and the fragrance of jet fuel, dung, coca-cola, sea air, and frying food. I have sailed in everything from a home-made Sabot to the Empress of Tasmania (when, in a ridiculous instance of Australian prudery, the menu for the first sitting featured “chicken chest”; this was at Eastertide in 1971—how vividly I recall my grandmother’s unrestrained laughter on that occasion); from Bangkok riverboats to gondolas and traghettos in Venice, the shotover jet near Queenstown in New Zealand, the family Jubilee, Uncle David’s Top Hat, a channel hovercraft, the Sydney to Manly hydrofoil, a banana boat, an outrigger canoe in Fiji, and innumerable ferries, large and very small. I have taken rickshaws, tuks-tuks, funicular and narrow-gauge railways, cable-cars (several of them revolving), chair-lifts, and, of course, conventional trains on four continents, including several steam trains, the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Kyoto, and the fabled Blue Train from Cape Town to Pretoria. For years I have driven so often on the left and right hand sides of the road (as required), in other words on all five, that I am now completely ambidextrous. For several years I had the privilege of learning by example the various tricks deployed by two lovable professional chauffeurs in vice-regal service, both of whom had taken advanced military instruction in crisis and anti-terrorist driving. I have been aboard a submarine, and several tall ships, though admittedly I never sailed in any. I have ridden several horses and ponies, innumerable bicycles, and on the back of a zippy little Suzuki motorbike in Rome. Many different sorts of bus, tram, underground railway, Ferris wheel, golf buggy, punt, pod, and horse- and ox-drawn vehicle further diversify the picture. I have never been in a hot-air balloon, but I have driven a Victorian Railways diesel locomotive (between Ararat and Stawell), and a clapped-out Vespa in Naples. I have been on an elephant, a dromedary, and in the front cabin of many different trucks with air-bag suspension, usually accompanying shipments of works of art—with one of which I passed through the Mont Blanc tunnel; and more often than I care to remember all the way across the Hay Plain, in both directions. And I have flown in numerous freight aircraft, more often than not with horses and other livestock, tended by a qualified vet with a loaded rifle (should any beast take fright and need to be destroyed; I am told that a horse is easily capable of kicking a hole in the side of a Boeing 747). Going on the big dipper as a child at Luna Park in St. Kilda proved to me that once was definitely enough: never again. Nor do hang-gliding, bungy-jumping, white-water rafting, sky-diving, nor any form of motor-racing, hold any appeal. However, I have lately been inspired to take lessons for my motorcycle license—the better to explore the pretty country roads of New England in late spring, summer, and the fall, ever mindful of the danger and, of course, carefully attending to the various risks—none greater than Connecticut motorists.

London vignette

Some months ago I was having dinner alone in my London hotel. There were a few other solo diners that evening, who, like me, were obviously traveling on business. In that perfect English way we were keeping ourselves to ourselves, despite the sort of proximity that can so often here in America give rise to spontaneous and friendly chat between strangers. Each mode may be delightful in its context, but in England I find keeping oneself strictly to oneself feels right.

However, there was also a couple in the dining room that evening, in comfortable possession of early middle age—he had on a dark suit and tie, and she wore a slightly racy dark blue cocktail dress, draped, with sequins at the bosom, which was generous. Their conversation was hushed, no more than a murmur, but there came a point when, rising above the demure clinking of several other pairs of knives and forks, the sound of occasional pouring, the discreet shuffle of an apron-wearing waiter, and all the other soothing background noises of a peaceful London dining room, the lady’s voice became distinctly audible, and a single sentence floated out, fully rounded, slightly pained, mildly exasperated, but also matter-of-fact, as if the contents had to be spelled out for the benefit of one who had thus far been pretty slow on the uptake.

“Look,” she said, “you’re not the one in a witness protection program.”

Just like that: a single sentence, but what a sentence! It seemed in so many ways, Runyon-like, to hoist a wonderfully provocative question mark, challenging the rest of us to respond. For a fraction of a second my eyes met those of the unaccompanied lady diner opposite, a senior copy editor of scientific textbooks I guessed. In that moment I suspect that what passed through both our minds was that each of us was sitting squarely between the easily accessible ground floor window looking in from the bleak, wet, ill-lit pavement of George Street and the table occupied by the couple, which just then struck one as almost as far from the window as it was possible to sit, such that a rain of retributive automatic gunfire would certainly take us out before it took out them.

Yet, still reclining somewhat restively in a cocoon of English privacy, one’s thoughts raced onward. Surely it is axiomatic that those temporarily or indeed permanently consigned to witness protection programs are firmly discouraged from broadcasting the fact. More, what ghastly crimes might the lady have witnessed, she whose spangly sequins also suggested that whatever stresses and strains such a serious situation might impose, she was nevertheless bearing up pretty well under the burden of it? Three hearty courses and a decent bottle of Côtes du Rhône, I noticed.

Did it have something to do with Russian oligarchs? The Mexican drug trade? Could it be investment banking irregularities, or money-laundering? This last because a few seconds later, I caught the unaccompanied gentleman with the newspaper diagonally opposite, a semi-retired stockbroker—no doubt about it—stealing a self-disciplined but hawkish glance (shrewd in its careful focus) towards our fugitive couple, but he straightaway caught me catching him, and swiftly resumed his study of the financial pages. I, too, cast my eyes downward, very Barbara Pym, feeling somehow as if I had wandered into the poor man’s lavatory. Thenceforth I concentrated on finishing the rest of my dinner.

This, I reflected over coffee, having noted a few intermittent gusts of reassuring laughter emanating from the sequined lady, was a London vignette of exquisitely novelistic potential—though alas I am not yet a novelist.

Pink 2

On October 4, 1762, at Newmarket the stewards of the Jockey Club announced a resolution the purpose of which was to register specific racing colors to each of its members. “For the greater Conveniency of distinguishing the Horses in Running, as also for the Prevention of Disputes, arising from not knowing the Colours worn by each Rider,” specific colors were registered for their use. The Duke of Cumberland opted for the royal purple; the Duke of Grafton chose sky blue; the Duke of Devonshire straw (which is still in use); the Duke of Kingston crimson; the Duke of Ancaster buff; the Duke of Bridgewater garter blue; the Marquess of Rockingham green; the Earl of Waldegrave deep red; the Earl of Orford purple and white; the Earl of March white; the Earl of Northumberland deep yellow; the Earl of Gower blue (with a blue cap); Viscount Bolingbroke black; Sir John Moore darkest green; Mr. Grevile brown trimmed with yellow; Lord Grosvenor orange; and, satisfactorily adding a final, canonical colour to the first group ever adopted for the owners of thoroughbred racehorses, Mr. Jenison Shafto of Wratting Park, Cambridgeshire (c. 1728–1771), sometime Member of Parliament for Leominster, chose pink.

Pink

In yesterday’s advice column in the Paris Review Daily, to which I turn each Friday with considerable pleasure, a reader raised the question of pink, and I was inspired to add the following comment:

The whole question of pink in eighteenth-century culture is to be the subject of exhaustive treatment in an exhibition currently being organized by my excellent colleague Cassandra Albinson here at the Yale Center for British Art, and my suspicion is that even then that color enjoyed a particular association with the betrothal of young ladies. Nor are modern concerns arising from the terminology of pink restricted to men only. For example, when in the mid-1950s Lady Churchill wore the mantle of Dame Grand Cross of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, it was widely reported as being “petunia” in hue, and not pink. Assuming that the representatives of Fleet Street were not wearing sunglasses, there appears to have been some widespread need on this occasion to avoid the term “pink,” though undeniably pink is synonymous with petunia. Perhaps “pink” was felt to lean too heavily toward the sort of wild gestures captured by Kay Thompson soon afterwards in the famous “Think Pink” sequence from Funny Face (1957). I agree with Sadie, though, that orange is an entirely different kettle of salmon than pink.

Tossing and turning overnight (because of my owl), I further reflected that there is one area in which pink has been an acceptably masculine color—that of racing colors. Yet I was also reminded of an unguarded remark in her playful For My Grandchildren (London: Evans Brothers, 1966, p. 286), in which Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, recalled a vignette during the coronation in 1953: “Before our turn came to leave Buckingham Palace in the procession we watched the rulers of states under Her Majesty’s protection, including sultans from Malaya and Zanzibar resplendent in their national costumes. But it was the statuesque figure of Queen Salote of Tonga, swathed in the voluminous pink mantle of the Order of the British Empire, who stole the limelight and caught the public eye” [my italics].)

I wonder if it was simply carelessness that led Princess Alice to draw careful attention to the petunia mantle which Queen Sālote was entitled to wear on account of her G.B.E.—in other words technically petunia, and not “pink.” Although at this date the Queen of Tonga shared that honor with Lady Churchill, nevertheless Princess Alice knew better than most how many finely chiseled notches separated it from the more senior Orders of the Thistle, and the Garter, which most definitely have nothing to do with pink.

Ralph Tailor's Summer

I have just read Ralph Tailor’s Summer: A Scrivener, his City and the Plague, by my colleague and friend Keith Wrightson. It is an extraordinarily absorbing account of the grim work undertaken by a resourceful young man in 1636, the first year of his professional life, when an outbreak of the plague caused almost complete devastation to the northern English port city of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. In one sense, the cataclysm was widely accepted, according to conventional religious belief, as a terrible judgment upon its citizens by God, yet one of the most remarkable themes that emerges from the author’s close study of the wills, probate documents, and proceedings of the ecclesiastical and other courts, is that even while this was true, ordinary people—one might well and better say extraordinary people—remained throughout this appalling calamity dutifully en poste, transcribing the wills and testamentary arrangements of the dying, sometimes dictated through an open window, or passed on by an intermediary (for the time being marooned in a quarantined sick house) and that those arrangements invariably revealed a measure of selfless concern for the welfare of other people, not merely heirs, relicts, and so on, but friends and more distant acquaintances and professional colleagues as well. Many of the wills contain dozens of tokens of friendship and mutual regard, even as the desperate illness raked through entire parishes, and to some extent at times rendered such bequests obsolete almost as soon as they were attested. Ralph Tailor, the scrivener, evidently fell silent for several months, which may suggest that he was dangerously ill but at length recovered, and simply resumed his work. Another point that is striking about this close study of a seventeenth-century English city in the grip of the plague is that the modes of transmission of the disease were more or less correctly understood. Physical contact with the sick and dying (fleas), and also airborne contagion (from coughing and spluttering) were dealt with by quarantine; the price paid for that by members of a single household could be heavy, but it seems likely that the appalling rate of mortality (as much as 47% of the entire population of Newcastle in that year alone) might have been even greater without it.

Ralph Tailor’s work involved not only the preparation of wills, but also the compilation of inventories of households devastated by the plague, and this in turn made of the scrivener a professional identifier of different sorts of property, goods, and chattels, and also an assessor of quality, and of money value. As Keith remarks of Tailor: “He knew an ‘ordinary dansk chist’ when he saw it, and the superior nature of a ‘wainscott table,’ a ‘wainsckott chaire,’ a ‘wanded chaire,’ matching ‘greene chairs,’ ‘fyne chairs,’ or a ‘London bedstead. He recognized ‘Dansk potts’ among the pewter, and knew that if cushions were commonplace, those that were ‘velvett,’ ‘needleworke,’ ‘sowed,’ ‘leather,’ or ‘gilt leather’ merited identification as such.” This young man, who survives in merely a few dozens of public documents, was, if you think about it, an approximate combination of certain of the roles now performed by social workers, coroners, policemen (called out, in other words, in the midst of some domestic crisis), lawyers, and representatives of Bonham’s, and, like my beloved late father, long afterwards Ralph Tailor assumed the office of “notary public.” As Keith himself remarked to me some time ago, one is to some degree attracted to a man such as Ralph Tailor because someone rather like him was once mightily present in your own life. Such are the emotional roots of the historical disciplines, and thank goodness for those!

The Oscars

The night before last I watched the Oscars, including the strange red carpet rituals beforehand. Am I the only person who caught sight of the following, genuinely startling vignette? Purely by chance it could be observed in the foreground, down at the very bottom of the screen, in the middle of one of the many elevated and relatively prolonged shots of the full extent of the red carpet, not too far distant from this vantage point adjacent to the Kodak Theater. With considerable ingenuity, a tuxedo-wearing gentleman, who was guiding his frail-looking lady companion’s wheelchair, stopped; hauled her up onto her decidedly wobbly legs; darted around to take her place in the same wheelchair; eased her back down into his lap so that together they could be photographed in that awkward, evidently uncomfortable, and curiously unorthodox pose. Presumably he may have been unaware that this maneuver, indelicate in a whole variety of ways, could be seen by millions across the globe, but neither he nor she seemed particularly incommoded, so let us assume that the only discomfiture was my own. Still, rather strange—yes?

Ping again

Ping’s home was “was a boat with two wise eyes.”

The custom of painting eyes close to and on both the port and starboard sides of the bowsprit was widespread in China, but also in ancient Greece and Rome. Here is Odysseus’s ship on the famous Siren Vase in the British Museum; many small Maltese boats continue to display eyes that are much like this one. I wonder where else this practice was maintained, and how far back it goes. I suppose the reason for it is not hard to find: Sailors have always been inclined to anthropomorphize their craft—to endow it (her) with gender, for example, so the provision of eyes that guide through heavy weather; watch for shoals and reefs; stare down sea-monsters, and in so many other respects equip the boat with innately protective qualities is merely a delightfully vivid elaboration of that.

110 years ago, in the pages of Notes and Queries, a lively correspondence was prompted by the proposal of N. Hancock Prenter of Trinity College, Dublin, that the speech of Enobarbus in Act II, scene ii of Antony and Cleopatra, made explicit reference to the same ancient custom, following Plutarch: Referring to the Egyptian Queen, Enobarbus says: “Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides, / So many mermaids, tended her i’ the eyes / And made their bends adorning: at the helm / A seeming mermaid steers: the silken tackle / Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands / That yarely frame the office.” The context is Cleopatra’s barge of state, and, taking into consideration the helm, steering, and tackle, Prenter reasoned: “If we ask any seaman what he means by ‘the eyes,’ he will tell us that they are the ‘hawse holes’—i.e. the holes or eyes in the bow through which the anchor cables are run. Again, any good dictionary informs us that in olden days ships were adorned with painted eyes on the bows—a supposed protection against ‘the evil eye.’ This custom is still extant in the Mediterranean, and, I believe, in Chinese waters. ‘The eyes,’ then, signify ‘the bow.’” A nice try, but I suspect that this is certainly not the only reading.

Marjorie Flack was hardly a sinologist, but evidently leaned heavily on her German expatriate illustrator, Kurt Wiese, who spent a number of years in China immediately prior to the outbreak of World War I. Being at that stage allies and not adversaries, the Japanese interned Wiese as an enemy civilian, and turned him over to the British for the duration of the war; he spent several of those years detained in Australia. Returning afterwards to Germany, Wiese soon fled the shambles of Weimar, and sailed to Brazil where he started his career as a professional illustrator. He migrated to the United States in 1927, where five years later he was ideally placed to furnish Miss Flack with a suitably accurate mise-en-scène for The Story of Ping, and inter alia to make sure that Ping’s junk on the Yangtze (now Yangzi) had “two wise eyes.”

Ping

While lunching with colleagues last week in San Francisco, California, the conversation turned to multimedia in art museums. This is a sphere of almost limitless potential, and some institutions are much farther ahead than others. I remarked that as regards my own knowledge and experience of new, web-based technologies at times I feel rather like Ping, Ping the duckling. To my astonishment an excellent colleague from the Legion of Honor Museum fully appreciated the reference because he, too, had a vivid memory of The Story of Ping, the children’s story by Marjorie Flack and Kurt Wiese, with its lovely lithographic illustrations, which was first published in 1933.

Ping was a beautiful young duck who “lived with his mother and father and two sisters and three brothers and eleven aunts and seven uncles and forty-two cousins. Their home was a boat with two wise eyes on the Yangtze River.” The daily routine was simple: In the early morning Ping and his family left the boat, and went foraging “for snails and little fishes and other pleasant things to eat” until, in the evening, hearing the call of “La-la-la-la-lei” from the duck-herding boatman, they trooped back home and, one by one, waddled up the gangplank. The last duck back on board got a spank on his back with a cane—evidently the boatman’s firm incentive to maintain a brisk pace. One day, Ping was momentarily distracted by some submarine morsel, and, surfacing, realized that he would be the last duck back on board. Wishing above all not to be spanked with the cane, Ping hid in the rushes. In the deepening gloom his boat, with all his family, sailed off, leaving Ping quite alone. The next day Ping went in search of his family and his boat, and encountered many strange sights and sounds, among them a boy splashing about in the yellow waters of the Yangtze, with a tasty rice cake. The boy’s father caught Ping, and put him in a bamboo cage—duck for supper! But a little while later the boy took pity on Ping, and quietly set him free, at which point Ping heard the familiar call of “La-la-la-la-lei,” the call from his own boat, the one with the two wise eyes. This time Ping paddled with all his might, and, despite the certain knowledge that he would be last back on board, gratefully scrambled up the gangplank and—SPANK!—rejoined his family.

Is there any greater terror in early childhood than that of being left behind, or getting lost? Perhaps this is why Ping has stayed with my colleague and me for more than forty years. One might look askance at the freewheeling manner in which Flack and Wiese so gleefully played on such fears—and, in the process, admitted of corporal punishment, the risk of being eaten for supper, and other dubious points with which to disturb the very fertile imagination of little children. Yet—having now retrieved a copy—I am amazed by how vividly the recollection of certain of the illustrations has remained etched upon my consciousness, none more so than this especially haunting one. I suppose it is hardly surprising, therefore, that when confronted by current advances in the realm of multimedia, my natural instinct is to hide in the rushes, for fear of being the last on board and getting spanked with a cane.

Scarlet heels again

When a big chunk of your working life is spent immersed in the historical disciplines, occasionally you notice a collective blind spot in the culture of the present. Take, for example, the almost universally abused term aristocratic. A visitor from Mars might presume, based on current usage, that things aristocratic—everything from norms of behavior all the way down to particular quirks of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fashion such as scarlet heels—reflect nothing more particular than ostentation deriving from wealth. Indeed these days the term is often thrown around without regard to the more nuanced concept of high rank absolutely and exclusively defined by noble birth. A thrilling exception to this trend is the article by Meredith Blake about the present Countess of Carnarvon and Highclere Castle in today’s Paris Review Daily. The problem is actually an old one, and is brought forward in the article on aristocracy, n., in the Oxford English Dictionary, where the Greek etymology is telling: αριστος best + -κρατία rule, in other words “the government of a state by its best citizens.” The gradual drift from this ancient notion to “that form of government in which the chief power lies in the hands of those who are most distinguished by birth or fortune” is, in a sense, the history of Europe in the past two and a half millennia boiled down to a single sentence, and indeed its last three words form something of a précis of one of the the central tensions of the Age of Revolution. The O.E.D. goes on to define aristocracy more narrowly as “the class to which such a ruling body belongs, a patrician order; the collective body of those who form a privileged class with regard to the government of their country; the nobles. The term is popularly extended to include all those who by birth or fortune occupy a position distinctly above the rest of the community.” True, a little space is then reserved for “fig. …those who are superior in other respects,” and this appears to be the conceptual basket into which many drafters of labels and wall texts (among other writers) now choose to put most if not all their eggs, and that basket is more often than not labeled money. Yet prior to the last century money was not at all the same thing as fortune, which was far more likely to mean land, for centuries the reserve currency of aristocracy. So it goes.

As I mentioned some years ago, the truly aristocratic credentials of the scarlet heel seem to have congealed around the court of Louis XIV and his eighteenth-century successors; the specimen above belonged to Louis XVI in the splendid coronation portrait at Waddeston. It (the scarlet heel) therefore became a rather convenient target in the revolutionary years. For example, as its title suggests, the pamphlet Le Portefeuille d’un talon rouge; contenant des anecdotes galantes et secrètes de la cour de France (Paris: Impr. du comte de Paradès, l’an 178* [daté “de Versailles le 18 juin 1779,” but “envoyé au pilon sur l’ordre de Lenoir le 19 mai 1783”]) attacks the wallet, i.e. wealth, of the “red-heel,” meaning aristocrat, and thus provided a convenient pretext for a surprisingly vicious attack upon Queen Marie-Antoinette herself. Yet the scarlet heel has a far longer, more complicated, and even foggy history, morphing thence into the greyer areas of middling rank, social mobility, and decidedly non-aristocratic wealth. Various anecdotes about the origins of the habit swirl unhelpfully around the blogosphere, though the general suggestion that red or scarlet heels at different times denoted the claims of wealth, sometimes but not always distinct from the privileges of noble birth, is, I think, undeniably true. Now thanks to Christian Louboutin, we have scarlet soles, which though certainly plutocratic is most definitely not aristocratic. One need only glance at who ends up wearing them.

Iconoclasm

The Republic of the Maldives consists of a string of twenty-six coral atolls in the Indian Ocean, roughly two thousand little islands spread over an immense area of 35,000 square miles, running roughly from north to south, starting not too far (approximately 250 miles) southwest of the southern tip of India. In the past week the country’s political troubles have been in the news, but what has not been widely reported until this morning is the destruction of a very large proportion of the country’s pre-Islamic archaeological heritage. Last Tuesday, a group of politically motivated vandals entered the National Museum in Male, the capital, and set to work systematically smashing dozens of objects that survive from the country’s distant Buddhist past. These included a remarkable five-faced coral stela inscribed with a Vajrayana Buddhist mantra in Nagari script that dates from the 9th–10th century A.D., the oldest such inscription in the Maldives; a hitherto well-preserved head of Buddha that dates from before the 11th century A.D., which was recovered from the Dagoba in Alifu Atoll Thoddoo; a finely crafted hard coral stupa from Nilandhoo; various other Buddhist stupas, limestone blocks, discs, and slabs; a decorated coral stone casket, and the figure of a lion―all either badly damaged, or smashed to pieces and entirely beyond repair. Those of us who work in art museums and care about the objects entrusted to our care can only feel sick to the stomach at what has been done by a bunch of ignorant thugs, apparently in the name of Islam. One can only imagine the feeling of helplessness and despair that our colleagues in that far-off institution must feel; according to the New York Times although several men were caught inside the museum that day no arrests have been made, nor charges laid. In a world in which life is so cheap, one might well place the destruction of cultural property on a rung of atrocity far lower than wholesale slaughter, or genocide. Yet following upon the destruction in March 2001 of the colossal Bamiyan buddhas in Afghanistan, the trend is horrifying. When before has cultural property been more vulnerable to the unimpeded rampages of zealots? Twenty or thirty years ago one would have said that such things only ever happened in the Dark Ages, or in the wars of Iconoclasm, or at the height of idol-smashing fervor, or some other benighted period in which the lamps of civilization began to be extinguished, one by one. To make matters worse, the Maldives are where very rich westerners go to sun themselves on pristine beaches, and to enjoy the privacy of desert islands. No harm in that, I suppose, but if something as profoundly destructive to its cultural identity can happen to a comparatively peaceful little country with a population of barely 300,000 people, then who is safe? Our past is part of ourselves; our built environments, our art, our cultural artifacts, are the mirror we hold up to our society, yet they are frighteningly easy to smash. We should not suppose that what has happened lately in the Republic of the Maldives could not or cannot in due course happen to us.