Category: Columns

It is a pity there’s no reason to believe King Arthur actually existed. True, there was a sixth-century monk called Gildas The Wise who penned a wordy jeremiad that mentions a battle at a place called Mount Badon where the Celtic remnant of Roman Britain stemmed the tsunami of Anglo-Saxon invasion. It is also true that, long afterwards, Welsh monks with well-developed imaginations placed at Mount Badon one of the twelve victories they ascribed to Arthur. If you think that adds up to evidence for a historical Arthur, you probably also think that Saddam Hussein supported Al Qaeda.

Of course, not necessarily existing is no barrier to being influential, as critics of the Ontological Argument sometimes discover. Imaginative folk of every era since Late Antiquity have peered back into the Age of Arthur and summoned the mythical monarch from the fifth-century mists, calling into the old world to redress the balance of the new. The monks of medieval Glastonbury felt they had solid evidence that Arthur would one day return and put old England to rights when, in 1184, they discovered a lead coffin allegedly containing the king’s bones. It was inscribed with his name and the motto “rex quondam rexque futurus.” Some 300 years later a Warwickshire country gentleman called Malory, in jail awaiting trial on a long list of charges including affray, deer-stealing, and carrying off a neighbor’s wife, wrote a long and eloquent account of King Arthur and the Round Table, lamenting in marginal notes to his manuscript that the age of chivalry was dead and that knights no longer had the noble souls they had of old.

Later poets, too, have found ideals to feed their fancies at the court of the once and future king. The opera of Purcell and Dryden, King Arthur: The British Worthy, is as insubstantial as spun sugar, but no less pleasingly sweet. Alfred Lord Tennyson, gentleman-poet, sought high moral rectitude at the Round Table and found it in Sir Galahad, whose strength was as the strength of ten, because his heart was pure. (Did anyone less pure-hearted, one wonders, try to warn the old boy about his earlier line, “‘The curse has come upon me,’ cried the Lady of Shalott”?) In living memory, Charles Williams found in the Arthur stories a mystical means to understanding the coinherence of human and divine life.

And then there is Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I loathe this book. Instead of parting the curtains of time to catch sight of Merlin’s Isle of Gramarye, Mr. Twain sends there a cocksure moron of his own era, a nineteenth-century firearms manufacturer yclept Hank Morgan, who turns the armored knights into sandwich-board men advertising soap and, as a final gesture, mows down rank on rank of mounted men-at-arms using an electric fence and a nest of machine guns. The message is: Whatever happens, we have got the Gatling gun and they have not. Mr. Twain (yes, I know it is a nom de plume) is no more imaginative in this book than the creators of the Flintstones, who assimilated even the Neolithic to the contemporary suburb, a habitat as specialized in its own way as that of any dinosaur, and therefore ultimately just as fragile.

What is more, Hank Morgan’s is the sort of mechanical machismo which gives masculinity a bad name. Until his time, men in love with speed needed to develop “good hands” and a lasting relationship with a horse, an animal with more mind of its own than a supermarket trolley, willing when treated well but tricky if bullied. They could not simply pull a metal throttle and blast off into the sunset. Chivalry, as the etymology of the word suggests, involves not only strength but also the gentleness necessary for equestrian manipulation. For Arthur and his knights, manliness was more than force.

Which is why, when I describe the 2007 Sauvignon Blanc from Mount Riley in New Zealand as a masculine wine, I do not mean merely that it knocks your socks off. It is a constant surprise that New Zealanders can make from this variety of grape, so evanescent when the French turn it into Pouilly-Fumé, a wine so muscular in character. The Mount Riley Sauvignon Blanc is bright and clear, the color of pale straw. It is strong and fresh; it is not sweet, but it is not unsubtle. It made me think of the taste of peaches with the sugars taken out. I detected also hints of pepper, such as you sometimes encounter in kiwifruit. A glass or two with a hot fish stew could help redress the balance of your world.

On any list of the smaller enormities of modern life, other people’s Christmas circular letters ought to loom large. It is not the information itself that is so rebarbative. In the great scheme of things, knowing about the family’s new job/house/car/place at the lake is no more or less annoying than reading that Junior has scooped the Miss Joyful Prize for Raffia Work.

What offends is not the list of facts; it is the impersonal braggadocio which implicitly animates their recital. Other documents in life that puff one’s importance at least do so to secure some good purpose: To get a pay raise or obtain a job. But the Christmas circular is bombast in its pure form, intended to impress merely for the purpose of impressing—vanitas vanitatum.

How much more welcome than such cyclo-styled self-advertisement are a few words of personal greeting scrawled on a conventional card. One might even be happier to receive one of the un-Christmas cards sent out annually by an irascible colleague who experiences difficulty forgiving his enemies, even though he knows he really ought to. His concession to the Season of Goodwill consists of posting to the offenders plain black cards signed and inscribed in simple silver script: “I await your apology.”

At least his cards are plain. The nadir of the Christmas circular phenomenon is reached when the puff sheet is accompanied by a card showing not the Holy Family heaped onto a single donkey fleeing into Egypt, but the Nuclear Family disporting itself somewhere warm. Such an exhibition can only be intended to promote envy and uncharitableness when sent to people spending December in Minnesota.

The only one of these family snaps I have ever kept beyond Twelfth Night came from a sprightly minded graduate student the Christmas before the invasion of Iraq. The photograph showed her husband in combat fatigues standing next to his tank. Her bikini-clad form was draped deliciously across the front of the vehicle. The caption read simply “Peace on Earth.”

It is good to know the U.S. Marines do irony.

It is actually the Christians of Iraq I shall be thinking of this Christmas. These are not the converts of intrusive Victorian missionaries; they are communities as old as Christianity itself, long predating the emergence in the Western Middle Ages of Christmas as an important holiday. (In the early Church the great festivals were Easter and to a lesser extent Epiphany.) Their liturgical language is Syriac, a literary form of Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke.

During the first three centuries of Islam, Syriac Christians were a vital link in the transmission of Greek science to the scholars of the Arab world. In the three centuries before Islam, their monasteries were places of poetry and of a spiritual endeavor characterized by considerable psychological acuity. Standing outside a monastery gate on the escarpment of Mount Izla, looking south over the little Turkish border town of Nusaybin, once a great center of Syriac learning, one can sense centuries of intellectual effort wafting up on the thermals from the Mesopotamian plain.

Today the subtle symbiosis that has for centuries sustained these Christian communities is being brushed violently aside. Syriac Christians are leaving their ancestral land to live precariously as refugees in Syria and Jordan. And it’s not just Christians; the Yezidis, a small community whose principal shrine is in the mountains of northern Iraq, also live in justifiable fear. This tragedy seems to be little reported, though the Archbishop of Canterbury’s distress at what he saw when visiting refugees in Syria got some coverage on the internet.

The sober consideration of this cultural catastrophe may be lubricated by a wine that, like the landscape of northern Mesopotamia, is strong and rugged and somewhat sweet. The people of Mount Izla were making their own wines in the time of Ezekiel, but I fear that today the grapes there get turned into raki (the Turkish equivalent of ouzo) or pekmez (a sort of jam). One may substitute a Parducci Pinot Noir grown in the precipitous hills of Mendocino County in northern California, which may be had in Minnesota for about twelve dollars. The color is a good deep red; an aroma rises with the alcohol as the hand warms the glass; the taste is robust and lingering.

This wine would be good company for bread and cheese and hard thinking. Its mellowing influence might well evaporate the vanity of one’s friends. One might even start to wonder what can be done to stop the modern world from destroying all the good we inherited from the past.

Last spring brought a nasty shock. I was walking down a leafy side street off Como Avenue, hoping to admire in passing the jolly gingerbread woodwork around the eaves of the tumbledown duplex where my POSSLQ and I shared our first Minnesota home. The place was in pretty poor nick when we rented it twenty years ago; the waste pipe for the kitchen sink (located for some reason on the landing) was held together by duct tape, squirrels nested noisily in the roofing felt. But in happier times it had been a boyhood home of Governor Floyd B. Olson. Indeed, a previous tenant had tried to have it listed on the National Register of Historic Places, but apparently there was no enthusiasm in official circles for starting a Floyd B. Olson Boyhood Home Tour—the future governor’s family had moved house rather often. No doubt the authorities thought he was better remembered by half of Highway 55 and one of the world’s biggest bronze double-breasted suits.

Anyway, as I rounded the corner I saw not crumbling timber but a large brown hole. This dust inbreathèd was the house, the wall, the wainscot, and the mouse (no shortage of mice). Above the hole, memories swam suspended in a patch of sky: Roses are red/ Violets are blue/ Please will you be/ My POSSLQ. This empty air was where we opened the sherry which had been a parting gift from my previous employer; it was where we survived on short commons till the first paycheck came in, a month after our arrival.

I recall tearing into the envelope and announcing—as any Englishman might—that we should celebrate by going out for curry. Except, of course, in those days there were no curry houses in the Twin Cities. We compromised on an Afghan place, where we chose to sit on the floor cushions, feeling full of Eastern promise—the POSSLQ, fortunately, is better upholstered than I am.

Today we would have plenty of choice. The proliferation of curry houses is one of the best things to happen in the Twin Cities during the past ten years. Not that they form an oenological opportunity. I have met wines that will stand up to curry but none yet that forms as happy a marriage with it as IPA, the India Pale Ale brewed by Victorian box-wallahs for precisely that purpose.

This happy marriage is no more than you might expect. The standard curry-house menu derives, like IPA, from the long symbiosis between the peoples of the British Isles and those of the Indian subcontinent; it is not “authentically” Indian. Chicken tikka masala, now (“studies have shown”) England’s favorite national dish, was probably invented in Birmingham, not in Bombay; the balti certainly was.

The Indian restaurant menu, in fact, is the latest stage in a long relationship that is at least as much cultural as culinary. In the University Church in Oxford is a marble memorial engraved in Latin. On one side of the plaque stands a conventional Roman-style Mourning Victory, but on the other is a gent with a Yul Brynner haircut holding a writing tablet inscribed in Sanskrit. In the pediment is a Brahminic bull. The Latin commemorates Sir William Jones, an English judge in Calcutta in the eighteenth century, who, without losing his own, absorbed so much of the local civilization that he discovered the links between the Indo-European languages.

And there are older culinary links as well. You might not take to mulligatawny soup, but kedgeree is a pleasure; originally khitchri, an Indian confection of rice and beans, it became in the hands of Anglo-Indian cooks a mixture of rice, flaky fish (usually smoked haddock), sliced hard-boiled eggs, and cayenne pepper (with parsley to taste). Try it at home.

And with it try Kendall-Jackson’s Vintner’s Reserve Chardonnay, a bright, refreshing white wine with a smoky center, from the Sonoma Valley of California, available in Minnesota at around fifteen dollars. Kendall-Jackson are the New Critics of the wine world. They seem to think their product should speak for itself, and so tell you little about its history or terroir, for that is what I gather advertising folk call “backstory” and the rest of us information that might lead to a rounded appreciation (those who are ignorant of history, after all, are condemned to repeat it). Though, come to think, it is perhaps this deliberate, fresh-eyed innocence that is itself the backstory of California. Anyway, if this wine speaks for itself, what it says is “Hi.” And the kedgeree has enough history for both. They make a marriage a good deal more pleasing than the concrete confection I fear is about to rise on the site of Château Floyd B. Olson. Eheu fugaces …

A prophet is not without honor, save in her own country and among her own people. One of life’s perennial puzzles is why people in the United States do not seem to read the wonderful novels of Alison Lurie, the sharp-eyed rhapsode of Ithaca, New York.

Every good paperback emporium in England stocks Alison Lurie; you will find her even among the horrid throng and press of Gatwick Aerodrome. But in Minnesota I find her slim volumes elusive. We are divided, as is so often the case, by a common language. Perhaps Americans find Alison Lurie too cruel to be entertaining.

Or maybe it is simply a matter of size. English readers are content to fill up for the weekend with the concentrated spirit of a Penelope Lively or the Welsh wit of Alice Thomas Ellis, whereas the American has greater staying power and prefers to imbibe great Proustian draughts, like a Detroit dragon at a petrol pump. Whenever I hear the word blockbuster, it is of the engine blocks of such mighty motors that I think.

Let me, en tout cas, commend to you Professor Lurie’s Imaginary Friends, a tale of a millenarian cult in upstate New York the denouement of which (it would be deeply unkind to reveal in advance) does little for the reputation of the social science known as religious studies (as distinct from theology, Queen of the Sciences, with its lofty truths and profound heffalump traps).

Or my own particular favorite, Foreign Affairs, a novel about an American spinster professor who spends her summers reading in the British Library and has a positively Janeite capacity for observing the rest of the human race. She needs all her powers of penetration. The American characters are straightforward enough; they have one personality each. But the English all have at least two: The posh lady turns out to have a second life as a cleaning woman; even the dogs have multiple personalities. Nothing is what it seems to be. Honest folk who tell the truth are at a disadvantage.

Art reflects life. There are, after all, precious few straight lines in nature. The Monarch butterfly takes a distinctly wobbly course through life but manages to migrate successfully over many thousands of miles. To be sure, the Romans, straightforward folk, laid out their cities as tidy-minded oblongs, making their outlines instantly recognizable from the air, even when (jam seges est ubi Troia fuit) they lie now under farmers’ fields. But the Greeks knew how to marry the apparent irregularity of nature to the elegance of mathematics. Bicycle down Bryant Avenue South between Franklin and Lake and enjoy the Ionic columns that support the porches of many of the older houses. The spiral volutes at the top of each column are an ancient Greek design derived originally from rams’ horns and deliberately patterned in the pleasing ratio of 1:1.618, what they call the “golden section.” There is more in nature than meets the eye.

Which is why it is a substantial pleasure to recommend a straightforward wine that tells the truth. St. Francis “Old Vines” zinfandel from Sonoma County provides (for around twenty dollars a bottle) considerable delight but no surprises. The color is a good dark red, the nose strong and as fruity as black currants. The flavor carries through precisely the promise of the smell; an initial sweetness recalls the clarets of Pomerol. There is a good gravelly center to the taste and afterward there lingers a strong redolence of alcohol (15.8% by volume, according to the label). As the wine sits, the sweetness gives way to simple strength, but it still pleases; it does not bully. It would make pleasant company equally for roast beef or an omelet, even for Welsh Dragon Sausages (recently withdrawn from sale on the orders of the Common Market on the grounds that they contain no dragon meat. Yes, really).

Of course, there are complexities here if you want to look for them. St. Francis was not the pantheistic bunny-hugger of common supposition. Nor is the Sonoma Valley a flat Jeffersonian chessboard. More interesting, the zinfandel old vines have a history. The variety came to California from New England in the slipstream of the Gold Rush, and, in the past few years, DNA analysis has shown that it is actually the Primitivo, a grape that grows prolifically on the coastal plain running up the stocking seam of the leg of Italy; its ultimate origin seems to be a Croatian variety called crljenak kastelanski. Yes, I have spelled it right. But why worry? Pour yourself a glass and settle into a soft chair with Alison Lurie. Together they should see you through a long weekend.