Monday 2nd

In yesterday’s Times, Ross Douthat offered an open invitation to liberal Catholic theologians to engage in civil war, with him and with Catholics who believe that “church teaching” is set in stone. Earlier in the same column, Douthat pointed out that one of the purposes of his Times pieces is to “provoke.” But provoke what? Certainly not discussion. I don’t  want to think about just what kind of warfare Douthat envisions, but presumably, like any war, it will be what happens after a breakdown in communications, when people no longer agree to disagree. My first thought was that Harvard University ought to be shut down as a public menace, because that is where Douthat went to college, and the fact that a student could undertake the course work at so eminent a school and yet still emerge willing to propose religious war means nothing less than that the teachers there aren’t doing their job. We have a long tradition of religious violence in the West, and we have learned that it accomplishes nothing but evil. I should have expected a man as worldly and sophisticated as I believe Ross Douthat to be to propose the much milder threat of schism. I suppose that he’s going to too many conservative gatherings — too much back-slapping, too much cowboy whooping: too desperate a thirst for testosterone. (I should be content if Harvard merely revoked Douthat’s diploma.)

The issue at hand is the welcoming of divorced (and remarried) Catholics to the altar rail at Communion. Hitherto, such people have been barred from the sacraments — excommunicated, as it’s called. (People who divorce but who do not remarry do not incur this penalty.) The religious history of divorce has almost nothing to tell us about our own world, which is why “church teaching” might be fatuous, designed as it was centuries ago to deal with vanished problems. Jesus appears to have regarded divorce unfavorably, but if you know anything about the difficulties that Orthodox Jewish women suffer in this connection, you can imagine that he was not concerned with the irreconcilable differences of two more or less equally-placed adults. The Church itself firmed up its position on divorce at roughly the same time that it reversed itself on bastardy. The situation that it sought to redress was a recurrence of old Jewish divorce, only now it was a matter of kings setting their wives aside in order to remarry and refresh their hopes for male offspring. There was no Catholic ritual for the setting aside of wives, and the Church declined to provide one.

When I recently pointed out to Kathleen, à propos of the Habsburgs, whom I’d been reading about, that Louis XIV’s wife, Maria Theresa of Spain, was his mother’s niece and the daughter of his uncle, the King of Spain, Kathleen looked up in shock. Surely the Church would not have permitted so incestuous a marriage! But it did so all the time. The Habsburgs wouldn’t have been the monstrously inbred Habsburgs otherwise. It has always been curious to me that the Church “got” this major element of dynastic family-building but refused to see the urgency of another one, the need to produce sons.

Divorce was a royal issue because of political exigency. It was never contemplated for lesser mortals, who had to live with Augustine’s settlement of the hash about sex. As late as 400, Augustine’s prime, the appropriateness of Christian marriage was still a lively question. Paul’s formulation — it is better to marry than to burn — turned out not to answer the question. Augustine, whom I’ve always thought had a great salesman’s eye for what the market would bear, and who, like all salesmen, didn’t have to think about tomorrow, much less the next millennium, proposed a solution by agreeing that truly holy people must remain celibate, while ordinary sinners could marry and procreate, although they were not to have carnal relations for any other purpose. This was certainly a workable compromise, politically speaking; politically, procreation was important. And of course what we call companionate marriage must have been extremely rare. Certainly as a social matter, men and women led different lives. Why would you bother even to think about how you felt about your spouse? As a member of the opposite sex, that spouse could be counted on to do all the annoying things that men and women do, especially in the eyes of women and men.

By the same token, kings did not seek divorce because they thought that they might lead richer, more meaningful lives with someone a little younger and prettier. They could fool around with younger and prettier women as they liked. Kings sought divorce for one reason only, whenever they came to believe that their queens were not going to produce a male heir.

In other words, only in modern times, with its considerable shift in the role of women in society — a development that conservatives around the world would like to undo, and one that the Church will never be able to accommodate without adapting (changing) “church teachings” to suit it — has the problem of divorce assumed the complexion with which we’re familiar. It is easy to denounce this hankering for happier married lives as “individualistic,” but if young people provide any indication of where we’re going (and of course they do), the ban on divorce tends to dishonor the idea of marriage, by forcing people to remain within it insincerely, and therefore dishonestly. So long as the status of women in society continues on its current trajectory, “church teaching” is going to appear more and more gratuitously misogynistic.

So, I think that a schism is not unlikely, and that the conservative branch will die out over several generations. The idea that the Church as we know it — the confraternity of unmarried males who regard themselves as more Christian and more religious than everybody else — will ever regain its appeal is awfully unlikely. We’re ripe for religious convulsions, much as it pains me to say that, but I fear that they will strike off in new and terrible directions (terrible to me), and not that they will re-invigorate old traditions.

I applaud the Pope for trying to do things that need to be done. I boo Ross Douthat for committing the cardinal sin of talking war for the sake of ideas that he holds dear.

***

I’m reading and re-reading a bunch of books. The new Orhan Pamuk, A Strangeness in My Mind; how I wish my Turkish were good enough to read it in the original. I know just enough about Turkish to understand that it is, for example, much further from English than Chinese is. I didn’t think that I would much care for the story of a street vendor, but the fact that the streets were in Istanbul, not far from the ones that I walked when I was there almost eleven years ago, overcame that objection. The book is charming, at least so far, and its paints an admiring portrait of the sort of Turk from the middle of nowhere whose piety is ingrained even if his observances are dodgy. The sort of man, that is, who would vote for Recep Tajjip Erdoğan. (I look forward to seeing what happens when the story crosses into this century.) Could Pamuk be trying to appeal to “Anatolians”?

And I’m rereading Susan Reynolds’s Fiefs and Vassals. I pulled the book down because I wanted to find the place where Reynolds asserts that the ideas of a “feudal system” that have influenced scholars, philosophers, and politicians since the Renaissance, was actually the concoction of Italian lawyers working on the cusp of the Twelfth and the Thirteenth Centuries — long, long after it was supposed to have been born in the Gothic mists, prior to Charlemagne. Reynolds goes so far as to claim that there never was a “feudal system.” To think that there was is to to commit a sort of fallacy of backformation. We have systems — oh dear, do we ever! — so they must have had systems, too, back in the Dark Ages. The unlikeness of this proposition betrays the human propensity to minimize the impact of change, in the interest of seeing a smoothly continuous sequence of behaviors expressive of a common human nature. When antiquarians and constitutionalists-ante-lettera began examining medieval documents in the Sixteenth Century, it was clear that medieval political arrangements were no longer functioning very well, but scholars backed away from the truth of the matter, which was that the arrangements were breaking down because they had emerged piece-meal, without much regard for other arrangements and almost always opportunistically. There was no system. But this was unacceptable; it ruled out the possibility of making one or two fundamental alterations and producing a new civil order. In the event, it took the French Revolution in all its violence to sweep away the agglomeration of taxes, duties, customs, and inconsistent local laws that made the ancien régime so irrational, with too many people vested with two many small bits of power to allow the reforms that Enlightenment figures called for, sometimes with Royal support, throughout the Eighteenth Century.

The reason I couldn’t find the statements that I was looking for was that I ignored the Introduction, where they are all set forth. I searched the chapter on Italy in vain. I really do not know how to read a book, sometimes.

But I did fish up an extremely juicy morsel.

The law of fiefs, as interpreted and used by the French scholars, could be used in other countries, as it had been in France, to organize the past and provide arguments for the present so that ideas about it gradually spread to a wider public. When what modern historians call “feudal tenures” were abolished in England in 1660 the word “feodall” was used only in an annexe to the act of parliament and only about titles to peerages. By the late eighteenth century, Francis Hargrave, editing the writings of the early seventeenth-century lawyer Edward Coke, marvelled at Coke’s ignorance of what Hargrave called “this interesting subject” and at the absence from Coke’s Institutes of “any thing like an historical illustration with the least reference to the general doctrine of feuds.” Without it, to Hargrave, it was “scarcely possible to have a just and proper idea of our law of tenures, the great part of which is founded on principles strictly feudal.” (7)

Today’s historian would be inclined (one hopes) to deduce from Coke’s silence the absence of thinking about “feudal tenures,” an absence resulting from something like nonexistence. I spent a fair amount of time in law school with pleadings in medieval property cases, and while it was clear that the cases bespoke a very different legal climate, there was nothing “medieval” about them except their dates. If there was occasional talk of vassalage or knight-service, it wasn’t because anyone cared about those things but because they offered indicia of owernship; they supported or disputed someone’s claim to a particular parcel of land. I wouldn’t say that lawsuits were ever the cheapest way of acquiring property, but sometimes they were the only way.

Reynolds gets at the inertia that underlies so much scholarship, in the form of “solved problems,” when she writes the following:

What the concept of feudalism seems to have done since the sixteenth century is not to help us recognize the creatures we meet but to tell us that all medieval creatres arre the same so that we need not other to look at them. (11)

It is wise to bear in mind that the “concept of feudalism” was developed long before modern historiography developed its best practices. Fiefs and Vassals shows that these practices are still very much under development.

***

Tuesday 3rd

On Sunday, I came down with something. Maybe it’s a mild flu; maybe it’s spider bites. More patches of red skin, with a bit of swelling; more panic about the Emergency Room. Once again, Advil proved effective. Then, something new: chills. And, in the afternoons especially, that physical anomie, rather worse than mere fatigue, for which bedrest and chicken soup seem the only cure. Seizing the occasion to launch a habit of getting to bed earlier, I took the Lunesta pill too early, and wound up with almost three hours of insomnia. This morning, I feel clear and relatively pain-free but frail. And sleepy.

In spite of everything, I went ahead with yesterday’s planned task, largely because it was a postponement from Sunday, when I couldn’t face it because the something that I was coming down with hadn’t fully hit but only made me restless. I sat down at the dining table with one of those cardboard archive boxes that we pulled out of storage a few weeks ago. This one was marked “Letters, 3/3.”

At first, going through the old papers — almost everything dated from the late Sixties or early Seventies — made me feel that blend of sadness, regret, shame, and disappointment that confrontation with the archives usually provokes. The blend is partly inherent in the documents themselves, and partly a response to them. The only purely now feeling was a gentle alienation, for the world of these letters came to an end in the mid-Seventies, or perhaps the early lates: in February, 1977, my mother died, and in the fall I went off to law school, from which experiences I date the beginning of my adult life.

The idea was to get rid of as much as possible. I could have thrown the whole lot away, of course, and every now and then, as I sorted the letters into piles, I wondered why I was not doing just that. What did these letters mean anymore? A partial answer came when I realized that I was going to wrap up the pile of letters from Fossil Darling and given them back to him. Most of them were frivolous, but a few engaged with issues in Fossil’s life, and I think he’ll be interested in the perspective. But I have no need to keep his letters from that time. I have never lost touch with him and do not need to be reminded of old times by mouldering pieces of paper. We’ve lived more than half our lives in the same town, talking several times a week if not a day, and youth is just as far from Fossil as it is from me, by which I mean that we are friends as men in our sixties, not overgrown friends from our teens. Precisely because my connection with Fossil Darling is alive and kicking, the old letters have nothing to tell me. I will keep a souvenir or two, such as the very typical postcard bearing the simple message, “G. T. H.”, provoked by who knows what nastiness on my part.

But the relationships underlying all of the other letters are cold if not dead. Doubly dead in one case: a Christmas card from a friend who died this year and his long-ago divorced first wife. They were not, to my mind, at all suited, and they did not seem to be happy. It did not last long. Much later, my friend refreshed a college friendship and entered into a long and happy second marriage. I didn’t care, yesterday, to be reminded of the first. Pitching that Christmas card was easily done.

There were several correspondences with girls. The letters from those whose names I couldn’t clearly remember were discarded without any attempt to figure out who they were. This left several friends and one romantic interest. The friends were lovely girls, but I’d grown up with them. My favorite among them was ahead of the rest of us sexually (although she was by no means fast), and when I saw what love could do to you I thought of the Greeks, who, I’d just learned, regarded romantic love as a regrettable illness. I’d much rather be friends. Hormones notwithstanding (and I cannot say that mine were ever “raging,” which is probably why I’ve never written a novel), I have never felt closer to another person, or more in love, than when we were laughing hysterically at something.

My liaison with E, the romantic interest, fizzled for this reason. She liked our talk well enough, but she wanted more in the way of manhandling. She said that I couldn’t really love her if I never went beyond kissing. I was crushed, and took this failure to heart, with unhappy consequences for later girls — girls whose letters, blushing, I threw away several culls ago.

There was a clutch of letters from Miss Marion K Nelson, a/k/a Nelsy, one of our two babysitters. When Nelsy returned to her native Portland to retire a second time (she had been a nurse before retiring to babysitting), we exchanged letters, and it was a treat to see her spidery writing, so testimonial of her Down East frugality. I intend to go through her letters with a view to copying some extracts here, after which I shall save one or two.

For, as I soon saw yesterday, I shall have to read all of those letters that I saved because they were written by certain people. I won’t know which ones to throw away otherwise. With luck, there will be one letter, and only one, from each correspondent that captures a comprehensive representation of the writer, that reminds me of who he or she really was and why I was interested. Nothing would make me happier than to come out of this archival review with no more than twenty-five pieces of paper. It’s probably not going to happen; it’s far more likely that, having dipped in to Marie Kondo in a moment of aged desperation, I shall indeed toss the lot. So often, as I went over the letters yesterday, I felt that all the storm and stress — and boredom — reflected in those letters (my storm and stress and boredom) was absolutely unnecessary. If only somebody could have assured me that, if I calmed down and stuck to what I really wanted to do, I’d fine in the end. The feeling was almost overwhelming at times. I’m not sure that I’ll ever make out whether it’s true. Did coming out fine in the end depend on those trials? For many people, there would be no doubt that it did. But, as if written in invisible ink, in almost every old letter, there is a charge of low, dishonest fraud.

For I was trying to be, if not ordinary or normal, at least friendly. Seriously, and sometimes romantically, friendly. It’s a terrible thing to be — a fake friend, a friend whose interest is self-interested in that way. I wanted to have friends because I wanted not to be weird. That’s normal in the schoolyard, but you’re supposed to outgrow it at the very time when I grew into it. It is true that my somewhat willful ventures into youthful friendship shamed me, over time, into honoring strict sincerity in important relationships. But how much better to have known that without incidentally hurting other people!

Finally, there were letters from my parents. There must be another cache of these in some other box, because I did not see — and please don’t let it be the case that I threw the letter away! — my father’s final judgment that “you have come to the end of the road with your charge account at the bookstore.” I winced as I began sorting these letters, but they turned out not to be painful to read. Most were from my mother. I read only the ones that weren’t tucked into envelopes. Although she was prone to suspicion, my mother was a positive person, and she didn’t care to write negative things. On the evidence of the letters in yesterday’s cache, I was not a disappointing son. If it turns out that I have gotten rid of the letters that paint a fuller picture, then I shall have to get rid of the ones that I’ve saved, lest they convey a very false impression.

The question remains: why do I save any of these letters, when in practice I read them only when I am trying to throw some of them away? What kind of curation is that?

***

Wednesday 4th

What kind of curation, indeed?

The question about saving the letters now is occasioned by the fact that I still have them, because I saved them long ago, instead of dropping them into the waste basket, and have been saving them ever since. Why that?

It is embarrassingly easy to answer. If there was any job description that appealed to me as a teenager, it was “man of letters.” Similarly, I was delighted to know that the Everyman Library (or was it the Modern?) classified some of its books under the heading “Belles-Lettres.” I did not know what these terms meant, exactly, probably for the good reason that they can no longer mean what they meant when they were coined. (There is too much literature — “letters” — for anyone to master all of it, or even the important bits; and what used to be “belle” is now probably fussy). But when do we fully understand anything? I was not so naive as to confuse letters in the mail with literature, but the multiple meanings of the word refracted a common glow. Letters, even letters from Fossil Darling, were writings, and writings were — special. It did not take me long to figure out that, as a man of letters, I ought to keep copies of my own; hence all the onion-skin carbons that I threw away a couple of weeks ago, as too horribly pimply even to read.

I also knew, way back then, that historians were always — “always” — advancing theories based on recovered scraps of information that nobody thought was important at the time. Old shopping lists, for example. For a while, during my early days of domestic independence, I kept my own shopping lists, on the theory that I oughtn’t to throw anything away just because I didn’t know how important it might be. I saved almost everything on paper — for a while. Most of these vital records perished when the storage bin in the basement of my father’s condominium was cleaned out while I was in law school; my stepmother told me that there had been a flood. (Far be it from me to doubt a basement flood so close to Buffalo Bayou!) I used to have some idea of what sort of papers were lost in that incident, but I no longer do. But who knew what world-clarifying advance in knowledge might hang on the discovery, several centuries from now, that the Dodge Family Wanted Me?

What is hard to believe now is that I carted this junk from one apartment to the next — there were to be eight (including two houses) — during my years in Houston. Eight abodes in five years! Having recently vacated an apartment that I shared with Kathleen for thirty-one years, I really can’t imagine surviving such a whirlwind, much less with boxes of shopping lists. But I do know that I saved everything because it was potentially either literature or “history.” How would I know?

Years passed, and — I knew. Things like the shopping lists were first to go. Printed souvenirs, such as outsized menus from remote restaurants, and advertising posters that caught my eye. Found pop art, you might call it; difficult to store and maintain. Manifestos and conference programs. Almost everything relating to a job. Out it all went. The letters, however, I didn’t touch, not until about ten years ago, the last time I tackled “papers.” It was at that time that I abandoned the idea that literature or history had anything to do with the plethora of scribbling and typing that was crammed into boxes that I no longer had room for. But I took its replacement — the idea that I was free to throw things away — rather further than I should have cared to admit.

The letters were not, by any stretch, literature. Nor were they likely to be of incidental historical interest. But they were positive records of my history, and that is precisely why a lot of them got shredded.

By throwing away correspondence that embarrassed me ten years ago, I transformed the nature of everything that I didn’t throw away. What had been my history became nothing more than my souvenirs. For how could anyone else make sense of them, without knowing what had been cut out? If the letters from my parents that I looked at the other day were the only ones to remain, they could only convey a very false impression of our relations.

So, now, if these letters were no more than souvenirs, and souvenirs of interest to me alone, then wouldn’t the importance of holding on to them be determined by how often I looked at them, at least if it was the case that, as I said, I never looked at them, unless I was trying to save space by getting rid of some of them?

Whatever the answer to that question, I shall certainly save the letter that my father sent to my sister and me when he and my mother made their first trip to Hawaii. Contact by telephone, he said, would be difficult, not least because of “a considerable time difference,” so we were asked to call his secretary, at the office or at her home, if something came up. I shall probably save my father’s letters in any case. He once urged me to be a lawyer because, he said, “You can write.” Well, so could he.

***

Thursday 5th

My reading life seems to work in two gears. In the fun gear, I’m swept off my feet by a book I can’t put down. I never know when to expect this, and it sometimes happens that I’m halfway through something before it seizes me. (Most things that haven’t seized me by the halfway point never will. But if I’ve gotten as far as halfway, I usually carry on to the end.) Nor can I tell what the after-effect of an exciting read will be. Sometimes, I forget all about it almost instantly. Sometimes, it launches a serial reading or re-reading of books that I somehow perceive to be related. This is fun, too. Sometimes, it means reading everything by one author, such as Albert Hirschman, Hannah Arendt, or Penelope Lively. Sometimes it takes me back through my library, digging out things I haven’t looked at in years, on an expedition more of discovery than of re-discovery.

In the normal gear, I’m working through several books at once. The lack of fun that’s implied by working sometimes provokes my inner spoiled brat into fitful, fruitless moments, inspiring me to read everything in the latest New York or London Review of Books. Right now, though, I’m bemused by the synergy, if that’s what it is, between the three books in current rotation. I read a bit of one, can’t take any more, and turn to another. Repeat, repeat. As one of them is much shorter than the other two, it may fall out of sequence fairly soon; but as it is also the most difficult to read, and I find myself going back more than I go forward, it may not.

The first book that I’ll mention is the new one, the recently published novel by Orhan Pamuk, A Strangeness In My Mind. Whether or not the title is going to be worked harder as the novel progresses, it has already appeared in the text. The hero, Mevlut Karatkaş, having taken to following a pretty woman whom he sometimes sees on his daily rounds in Istanbul, never approaching her but dreaming of the life that they might share, is aware of the dodginess, socially speaking, of his behavior.

Three months after their first meeting, Mevlut began to wish that Neriman would find out that he was following her and all the things he knew about her. During those three months, Mevlut had followed Neriman in the streets only seven times. It wasn’t a huge number, but of course Neriman wouldn’t be happy if she found out; perhaps she would even think he was some sort of pervert. Mevlut could accept that such a reaction would not be unwarranted. If someone in the village [back home] were to follow his sisters as he followed Neriman, he would want to beat the bastard up.

But Istanbul was not a village. In the city, that guy you thought was stalking that woman he didn’t know could turn out to be someone like Mevlut, who carried important thoughts in his head and was destined to make it beg some day. In a city, you can be alone in a crowd, and in fact what makes the city a city is that it lets you hide the strangeness in your mind inside its teeming multitudes. (106-7)

Alas, Mevlut seems destined to become a flaneur, a job description that does not fit the lack of independent means that is Mevlut’s lot. It’s because Mevlut indulges whims like following Neriman around — he doesn’t actually know her name: “Neriman” is a TV character — that he fails to complete his secondary education. Mevluk is not a bad student, just a disengaged one, and his school is certainly an unpleasant place to be. His day, or rather afternoon and evening, job, toting trays of yogurt, and later boza (a drink), through neighborhoods more affluent than his own, follows the footsteps and provides many of the encounters of a disinterested observer, and one of the little mysteries of the book is the uncertainty about just how aware Mevlut is that he cannot afford to be disinterested. But if we have difficulty fixing a readerly relationship with Mevlut, we can’t relate at all to the world in which he lives, which in Pamuk’s portrayal might well be taken as a vernacular demonstration of the adage that, while the Ottomans were ruthless conquerors, they were incompetent governors. Most of the other men in Strangeness are simply hotheads, cycling from talk through violence without actually doing anything. Those are the honest men, anyway. The few others, the successes, are sneaks. The only way to get ahead in the world is to cheat at every chance. It’s all rather depressing. You’d like to think that the novel is set in olden days of limited opportunities and cavalleria rusticana, but the action runs from 1968 to 2012.

Although I’ve read a good deal of Pamuk, I’m no critic. Although I enjoyed My Name Is Red, I didn’t understand most of it, by which I mean all the things that appeared to be happening in the background. I loved Snow, bleak as it is, because I was lucky enough to read it while I was in Turkey. Set in Kars, a city in the far east of Turkey that fell into Russian hands in the late Ottoman period, the world of Snow could not be farther from the former cosmopolis on the European side of the Bosporus, but, from the vantage point of a New Yorker, it couldn’t be closer, either. My favorite book is the nonfiction Istanbul, and I wish I could find the other book, which seems to have disappeared not only from my library but from the face of the earth, in which “The Pamuk Apartments” was published. (It appeared first in The New Yorker.) A good deal of Pamuk’s fiction can be called experimental, in that it seeks to create a Turkish foundation for literature as spacious and complex as that of the West, but without copying Western models. Strangeness is an ostensibly straightforward read — its little mysteries are indeed small ones — but I can only imagine the rich allusiveness of the tale to educated Turks. It has an old-fashioned feel, but careful readers will deduce from the many elements that are unfamiliar to us that it’s a Turkish old-fashioned feel.

So I can take only so much of Mevlut and his melancholy city before feeling gloomy myself, and at that point I turn to the second book on my table, Susan Reynolds’s Fiefs and Vassals. I am going to say only one thing about this book’s contents, aside from what’s riveting about the book’s spirit, so don’t worry about my wading into medieval property law or the underpinnings of Lohengrin. And I’ll say it later.

Fiefs and Vassals is a book in which an Oxford don (Lady Margaret) raps colleagues and predecessors on the knuckles for getting their history backwards. Reynolds never explicitly accuses anyone of gender bias, but her impatience with “feudalism” is quite exciting, once you manage to hear it. Her controlled impatience with the notion that this “feudalism” — a supposedly ancient custom emerging from the mists of Germanic antiquity and reflecting the sacredness of the “war band” in its oaths of commendation — characterized and governed the possession of property in the Middle Ages suggests a bright girl’s impatience with boys’ games.

If it is true that medieval society was bound together by a mass of individual and explicit contracts between superiors and inferiors [ie, “feudalism”], rather than by the more common implied and collective contracts, then that would certainly make it distinctive, but to conclude that it was we would need to establish the prevalence of individual contracts and the absence of collective bonds. This has not yet been done.

This has not yet been done — and yet, what every student has been and, for all I know, still is taught in school rests on the assumption that it has been done. In fact, something else has been done, something of the all-too-human variety: historians, men mostly, have read what they know from late-medieval documents into the much vaguer early-medieval ones, and on the basis of this erected a theory of how it all came about. This is the most regrettable sin that a historian can unconsciously commit, but it is formidably common. We all do it by nature, because it is very hard, if not impossible, to unlearn what we know, and to remember that we used to not know it. In the case that Reynolds is dissecting, historians began with the assumption, a correct one to make about property right up to 1789, that properties known as fiefs, whatever they might be, were held exclusively by aristocrats. Where they went wrong was in applying this assumption to much earlier times, when in fact, as Reynolds shows in page after page of examples (each of which she makes into an interesting item in her collection), it was the case that, among their many possessions, some aristocrats owned some fiefs — and that these fiefs decayed over time into holdings with pretty much the same rights and obligations as today’s suburban homeowner’s. What distinguishes early from late is the appearance of a treatise on fiefs that was compiled by Italian lawyers round about 1200. The appearance of the book marked the beginning of a transition to legal systems in which we recognize the origins of our own, with trained professionals, lawyers and judges, who specialized in resolving inconsistencies in the use of terms such as “fief” and “vassal.” So much for the Germanic mists! In this new dispensation, rulers were delighted to have a legal foundation for taxation, not to mention a rationale for confiscating the estates of traitors; while aristocrats, with typical vanity, went along with the restriction of earlier freedoms because only aristocrats owned fiefs.

I happen to take an interest in medieval history that centers directly on Reynolds’s point: how much we don’t really know about its origins, because so little was written down and because what was written down so rarely involved rigorously defined terms. In short: the Middle Ages never existed. There was a post-Roman world, grim and vulnerable to marauders. Then the wind began to blow the other way — I don’t say that it really did, but that’s the only explanation that I can come up with for what happened in the Tenth Century. No doubt it began in the Eighth, when a remarkable family, climaxing in Charlemagne, took increasing control of European affairs, only to lose it in the Ninth. After the Tenth Century, it would not be lost a second time. After the Tenth Century, Europe was an established part of the world, not a marshy wilderness far from the Mediterranean. The story that began in the Tenth Century is the story of the West that we’re still telling. As I say, no one really knows how this happened. The few things that we do know about the period force us to hypothesize, and Fiefs and Vassals, in its demolition of a once rather monumental hypothesis, is a call to get back to the drawing board.

But Fiefs and Vassals is a close read; every word counts. Reynolds writes very well but her focus on detail is strenuous. So then, at the end of the evening, I turn to my third read: Heart of Darkness. Everyone has read this, or is supposed to have read it, and everybody knows how it ends: “Oh, the horror!” and “Mistuh Kurtz, he dead.” (Except that that’s not how it ends.) But I find myself asking, this third time around, “Does anything actually happen in this story?” I’m trying to read it as Reynolds would have me read an ancient charter: as if I didn’t know what (I thought) it was supposed to say; as if I didn’t know anything about it. And so far — Marlow is fixing up his sunken steamboat — I am having a hard time keeping track of actual events. This, I think, is precisely the effect that Conrad wished to create, as if to daze his readers with the monstrous incomprehensibility (to Western eyes) not only of the Congo but of European enterprise on the Congo. Heart of Darkness is magnificently indefinite, even harder to pin down than The Golden Bowl. I catch myself blithely assuming that something has happened, but when I look back, I can’t find it: it hasn’t.

***

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Friday 6th

So intensely did I wrap myself up, last night, in Susan Reynolds’s search for fiefs and vassals in the Tenth Century, that when I switched to Heart of Darkness I really seemed to be reading the same book, just a very different chapter.

But enough about that. Let’s move into the kitchen for a spell — that vexed workspace. It’s vexed because, while we depend upon its output as human beings, there seems to be no satisfactory way to humanize it. Most cooks over most of time have been slaves, or in any case people doing a job that involves a staggering amount of drudgery, usually in ill-ventilated close quarters. Countless wives and mothers have cooked simply because it was a big part of the job description. Men generally militarize cooking, whether in the silent but deadly French manner or the Emergency Room faux chaos that Anglophones prefer. I try to conjure Alice Waters cooking just for fun, but I can’t believe it; I should think that she can cook in her sleep by now, and does, waking up now and then to appreciate a leaf of something. I suppose that that is the model: master the art so well that you don’t have to pay attention. But it hardly seems a humanist model.

I am only a few years away from seventy. My only culinary ambition is to get in and out of the kitchen as quickly as possible without serving anything disagreeable. My dinner parties (when was the last?) really are about people, which, yes, does mean that the food has to be good enough to keep guests from wondering why they have left the certain comforts of home for the dubious ones of mine; but I shudder at the thought of wowing or “impressing” anybody. The illusion that I wish to create is that I do this all the time. I am helped in this effort to deceive by the fact that I used to do it all the time.

Why, I wonder. Why did I want to be known as a good cook? Or did I, really? Perhaps I was simply confused. Perhaps I thought that you couldn’t impose on people without offering something extraordinary. You’ll note the impose. Most people look at it the other way round: you are not imposing on people when you ask them to dinner. But I disagree, and I suspect that everybody else does, if secretly. If you really want to give someone a treat, go over to her house and, without leaving a mess, make dinner for her there, and make something that she really likes. I’ve known mothers who could do this, and I’ve known fewer expressways to being taken for granted. So, if asking people to dinner is an imposition, then there had better be something special.

What I didn’t know, starting out, is what “special” might be. Like everyone else, I looked at cookbooks that were illustrated with gonzo spectaculars, such as the lobster en Bellevue in Craig Claiborne’s New York Times Cook Book. The Times ran a piece recently about the ghastly Technicolor concoctions that were “popularized,” if that’s what happened, in the Fifties and Sixties, murky gelatine salads and obscene frankfurter garnishes. It may be that Learning From Las Vegas, the book that Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown published at the time, was supererogatory: everybody already was learning from Las Vegas. Life in the heart of the American Century was an endless floor show.

So, my first party dessert was riz à l’impératrice, a tarted-up rice pudding. If you do this sort of thing often, it cuts into the time available for reading, writing, and staying sane. Now I cook almost exclusively for Kathleen and myself. In recent years, I’ve tried to figure how to make things for just us that we used to have only at parties. Fried chicken is an example. I’ve written elsewhere about the depressing side effects of deep-frying food in an airless apartment; I have a kitchen with a window now, and I don’t deep-fry anything, certainly not chicken.

(A moment of insight: our apartment usually looks ready for a party. It never looks like we just had one.)

After years and years of preparing fried chicken almost as if it were Wiener Schnitzel — soaking the pieces in buttermilk overnight, then shaking them in a bag of flour and cornmeal and seasoning, and, finally (the Wiener Schnitzel part), setting the coated chicken on a rack in the refrigerator for half an hour or more before frying — I gave batter a try. I combined equal portions of flour and cornstarch, some baking powder, cayenne, paprika, and salt, and added a double portion of water. I stirred it up and set it in the refrigerator for an hour. Then I dipped the chicken in it. I had done nothing to the chicken but brine it — soak it in a quart of water into which I had dissolved a quarter of a cup of salt — also for an hour. I fried the chicken in peanut oil as usual. When it was done, I put it on a serving dish and proceeded to boil some pasta. When the pasta was done, we sat down to dinner. The chicken was delicious. It was lighter and yet more flavorful. This was the other night. The real test came yesterday afternoon, when I could no longer resist the leftover thigh sitting unwrapped on a plate in the kitchen. From the first bite, I knew that I would never go back to the old way.

The skin did not come off in one enormous, slightly rubbery piece. The meat was neither dry nor oily, but still juicy. The flavor almost knocked me out. Finally: picnic chicken! Not leftover chicken! Chicken that improves overnight! It doesn’t improve much, but the flavor does deepen by a notch. The main thing is that it loses nothing.

Thank you, America’s Test Kitchen. And thank you, Ray Soleil, for adverting me to an online book sale. Cooking For Two, apparently the best recipes that Christopher Kimball’s culinary empire discovered in 2011, cut down to serve two, was on offer for ten dollars. I had complained to Ray about the dearth of recipes for two people, and it had not taken him long to find something. The last thing I need is more cookbooks, but I do need new ideas, and my plan is to go through the three ATK books (yes, three; I forget what the deal was, but there was a deal if you bought three), make a list of the recipes that I’m likely to try, and then try them. Run my own little test kitchen. The recipes that work will be copied, with my emendations, into Evernote, and then the books can go on to help someone else.

What I need is not new recipes as such but formulas that (a) serve two people nicely, with no leftovers, (b) can be prepped well ahead, getting everything out of the way except quick, last-minute assembly and the cooking itself, and (c) do not involve fuss at cooking time. In short, I need to get all the heavy lifting out of the way long before Kathleen gets home, no matter when that is. I’ve already got two new staples, and Kathleen is crazy about both of them. One is stir fries. Back in the Seventies, when everyone was discovering the possibility of Chinese cooking at home, I mastered stir fries, but our palates were blander back then. And when Kathleen and I settled in Yorkville, it seemed silly to go to all the work to prep a simple stir fry when we were surrounded by good Chinese restaurants, all of whom delivered.

A few years ago, however, we began to be aware of something. Food that I made at home always tasted better than stuff that we ordered in. Part of this was certainly a function of the transportation problem. (There is really no such thing as a french fry that can survive the delivery process — delay, packaging — with its glory intact.) But more than that, I knew how to cook for the two of us better than the neighborhood eateries. So I began trying to make the things that we were ordering. Stir fries were one, and I’m still working on them; there’s still something missing, although it gets smaller with every dish.

Pizza was the other. Unlike stir fries, I had no history with pizzas. Over the years, I had made perhaps five or six pizzas, and never been encouraged to keep trying. This time, working with the recipe in the 1997 Joy of Cooking, I made a pleasant, slightly boring pizza. I got a little more help with the dough from a book that I found at Amazon, Truly Madly Pizza, by Suzanne Lenzer. The pizzas got better, and I ordered a pizza stone and a peel, have left rather gruddly ones behind in the move to this apartment, and then the pizzas got much better. The basic pizza that has evolved in the past six months serves two very nicely. The tomato sauce is Agata & Valentina’s Arrabbiata Sauce. Atop this I spread a mixture of fennel sausage, mushrooms, and oil-cured black olives; the skinned sausage has been cooked and drained, and all the topping ingredients have been chopped together with a mezzaluna. Grated mozzarella goes on top. Somehow, what comes out of the oven hits all the pizza-satisfaction buttons without tasting like anything like a “slice.” At the moment, I am fine-tuning this basic pizza, and in the process internalizing the recipe so that no thought whatsoever is required, just some good music in the background.

I owe thanks for my pizza campaign to my daughter, Megan, who seems, whenever we visit her in San Francisco, to turn out tasty little pizzas in no time at all, while we’re all chatting over a glass of wine. It is true that her son, Will, makes the time fly by. Nevertheless Megan’s example convinced me that making pizza need not be an operation. When she and Will were here for an impromptu dinner one night last summer, I made what Megan told me was Will’s favorite pizza: spinach and mozzarella. Nothing else, just mozzarella sprinkled on and around baby spinach leaves. He ate it all up. Well, there was a corner that he left behind, so I ate it. I was surprised to find that it wasn’t nearly as dull as I expected it to be.

A third dish that I’m working on is not on anybody’s delivery menu, nor is it at all palatable, probably, to anyone under forty. It’s Chicken Tetrazzini, a dish that was invented in San Francisco, a few years before the earthquake, for a famous soprano. (First name: Luisa; you ought to hear her sing “Ah, non giunge” from La Sonnambula.) It is also a dish that both Kathleen and I grew up on, thanks to Stouffer’s, the frozen-food people. Bite-sized pieces of cooked chicken breast are immersed in béchamel and stirred up with parboiled green peas and broken-up cooked spaghetti. (Barilla actually sells broken-up spaghetti, a disgrace perhaps but very handy.) This mixture is poured into a gratin dish and topped with Parmesan cheese. Half an hour in a moderate oven will bring a brown blush to the cheese — maybe less, in your oven. We had this the other night, and, unfortunately, we could eat only half of it; the dish could have fed four people. So I’ll be working on that, too; the trick will be learning how to make half a cup of bechamel.

We’re having a friend to dinner tomorrow night. I’m thinking of a light soup, a simple pasta, Elizabeth David’s very straightforward way with veal cutlets (French Provincial Cooking, I think), and I-don’t-know-what for dessert. I’m very tempted to make tapioca pudding, which I haven’t had in an age and which I recently learned has been dusted off as “frozen soufflé.” We’ll see.

***

Bon weekend à tous!

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, November 2nd, 2015 at 1:40 pm.