Ships

 The president thinks that the US Navy should move the islands (the superstructures) on aircraft carriers farther back, apparently so that they would look better to him. It seems to me unlikely that this will happen.

Robert Lowell's father was an officer of the US Navy, as were assorted family connections. Not all, perhaps, had the keenest judgment. One of the senior Lowell's Annapolis classmates said of a Lowell cousin that he

was really plotting to put aircraft carriers in square sails to stem the tide of our declining Yankee seamanship

("31 Revere Street", collected in Life Studies.)  One doubts the cousin had any such notion. In any case he never reached a position that would have required the Navy to pay attention to his ideas.

The president is also a fan of battleships and would like to see more of them built. During the Twentieth Century, US battleships bore the names of states, but apparently the new series would bear the names of presidents, starting with the incumbent. The fondness for battleships, long after their prime tactical years, is not unusual, it is true, but the fondness used to exhaust itself in finding new armaments and tasks for the Iowa-class battleships. There was some considerable cost involved, but nothing compared to the building of new ships. I do not believe that these will ever be built. 

An Obsolete Offence

 At my high school, a couple of old two-story buildings in white brick survived from the days when an orphanage had occupied the property. The ground floor of the building to the north was called "the freshman lounge". I don't remember spending much time there as a freshman. My only memory of it, was that it had at least one soft-drink machine.

One day, all the freshmen were assembled to be told off by Brother Benedict, FSC. Someone had gone to collect the take from a soft-drink machine, and found many filed-down pennies where dimes should have been. Brother Benedict let us know that this was conduct unbecoming. He must have issued threats, but what they were I have long forgotten. Those of us--the great majority of us--who had not filed down pennies resented this.

Back then there were no Dremels. If you wished to file down a penny, you needed a vice and a file. By then the minimum wage was $1.60 per hour. To earn that by filing down pennies to dime-size, you would have had to file down sixteen pennies each hour, roughly one every three and a half minutes. Never having put file to penny, I don't know whether the rate was possible or sustainable.

The Best and the Brightest

 A Little Free Library around the corner yielded a paperback of David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest. I was interested to find it in a "quality" paperback format; fifty years ago I saw it in mass-market format, more or less cubical, with a badly curved spine and the pages tending to fan out, worn at the edges--a housemate's copy, I suppose. I was not surprised that a couple of young acquaintances who came along had never heard of it. But in the 1970s it was much talked of.

Halberstam gives his account of the way that the Kennedy and then the Johnson Administrations found their involvement in Vietnam increasing, helped along the way by the stars that Kennedy had recruited to his administration, the "best and the brightest". Most had good to excellent credentials: McGeorge Bundy was Dean of Harvard College, Robert McNamara the head of the Ford Motor Company; Maxwell Taylor had been Army Chief of Staff during the Eisenhower Administration, and so on. Yet somehow events controlled them, and they oversaw an increase in military commitment, from advisers, to bombing, to the commitment of US ground forces.

The book is very readable, but very long: 665 pages to the end matter in this printing. The biographical sketches, though interesting, might have been spared or at least pared: Dean Rusk's childhood in Georgia and education at Davidson College; the schooling of innumerable (well, five or six) men at Groton; William Westmoreland's time at the Citadel and West Point. A bit of trimming there might have shortened the book by thirty pages.

I wonder about some of the interpretations. The Kuomintang forces that faced the Red Army in 1948 had been through a very hard ten years. Did they lose because they were a feudal army, or because the best of their divisions had been chewed up by the Japanese? Would the portrayal of the People's Republic of China have been as neutral ten years later, when the effects of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, etc., was known? Is Stilwell's reputation still what it was in the 1970s?

I also wonder about the author's confidence, expressed in a foreword for the twenty-fifth anniversary edition, that his book had been not just purchased but read, "did not just sit on coffee tables." It is, as I say, a very long book, and the likely audience consisted largely of very busy people (students perhaps apart). When Michael Kinsley was editor of The New Republic, he developed a skepticism about the extent to which the most talked-of books were in fact read, and he would slip into bookstore copies notes redeemable for $20 at The New Republic office. He never had to pay up.

Gained in Translation

 A friend has mentioned the legend that German students of philosophy would learn English to be able to read Norman Kemp Smith's translation of The Critique of Pure Reason. Last week, in reading Foucault's Discourse on Language, I encountered the paragraph

First, Hyppolite took the trouble to give some presence to this great, slightly phantomlike shadow that was Hegel, prowling through the nineteenth century, with whom men struggled in the dark. He gave Hegel this presence with his translation of the Phenomenology of the mind; proof of the extent to which Hegel came to light in this text was the number of Germans who came to consult this text in order to understand what, for a moment at least, had become the German version.

 Perhaps; but I don't think I will be ordering La Phénoménologie de l'esprit anytime soon. It is not clear from the Albertine website that one can conveniently order Hyppolite's version.

Artisanal English

 From Sunday's New York Times, I learned of "the maelstrom unleashed" by the writer Rachel Cusk's divorce memoir. I might not have noticed this but for the Charybdis of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey. How does one unleash or leash a whirlpool? It reminded me of a passage from one of T.S. Eliot's essays. I had to use the internet to find it, for the essay on Byron is not in the books I have:

Just as an artisan who can talk English beautifully while about his work or in a public bar, may compose a letter painfully written in a dead language bearing some resemblance to a newspaper leader, and decorated with words like ‘maelstrom’ and ‘pandemonium’: so does Byron write a dead or dying language.

 I don't think that the Times in general employs a dead or dying language: but bits of its language are in poor shape.

Gladstone on Macaulay

 I have never read Macaulay's histories. In his essays, I tend to be aware of the thumb on the scale, confident that someone could work from the same documents and come up with a very different interpretation. In his biography of Gladstone, Roy Jenkins mentions in passing, as judicious, a notice of Macaulay that Gladstone wrote, a review of The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay. It is possible to find this on line, via the University of Pennsylvania's Online Books Page, and eventually HathiTrust. (If your IP address indicates that you are outside the US, this may not work.)

The review is quite long (the life and letters ran to two volumes), and with many interesting passages. A fair sample is

Hence arose, it seems reasonable to believe, that charge of partisanship against Macaulay as a historian, on which much has been, and probably much more will be, said. He may not have possessed that scrupulously tender sense of obligation, that nice tact of exact justice, which is among the very rarest, as well as the most precious, of human virtues. But there never was a writer less capable of intentional unfairness. This, during his lifetime, was the belief of his friends, but was hardly admitted by his opponents. His biographer has really lifted the question out of the range of controversy. He wrote for truth; but, of course, for truth as he saw it; and his sight was coloured from within. This colour, once attached, was what in manufacture is called a mordant; it was a fast colour; he could not distinguish between what his mind had received, and what his mind had imparted. Hence, when he was wrong, he could not see that he was wrong; and of those calamities which are due to the intellect only, and not the heart, there can hardly be a greater. The hope of amending is, after all, our very best and brightest hope; of amending our works as well as ourselves. Without it we are forbidden revocare gradus, superasque evadere ad aurus, when we have accidentally, as is the way with men, slipped into Avernus. While, as to his authorship, Macaulay was incessantly labouring to improve, in the substance of what he had written he could neither himself detect his errors, nor could he perceive him when they were pointed out.

I will remark that Macaulay had once published an unfavorable, very well written review of a pamphlet of Gladstone's; but Gladstone had long moved on from the views he professed there. 

Popular Down the Hall, Part II

 Sunday's New York Times Book Review included a review by Clancy Martin of Emily Eakin's The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory, a book on the French postmodernists. I was interested to read Martin's personal take. He had dropped out of a graduate program in philosophy at the University of Texas, defeated by the emphasis on the postmodernists. After a few years away, having done his best to read them, he returned but found

Bad news for Clancy. You guessed it: Not even a decade later, the fashion had changed. As one of my friends at the time, now a professor at the University of Texas, told me: "It's so sad that you showed up thinking we'd all still be reading Rorty. You should've gone to the English department."

(Now I think of it, my very slight acquaintance with the postmodernists about fifty years ago came from an English class.)

It is interesting to see a confirmation, or at least reiteration, of Quine et al.'s complaint about Derrida. It is also interesting to read that Richard Rorty, who for some years seemed to be the house philosopher of The New Republic, was involved in postmodernism. Another gap in my reading.