“I feel in some way that I’m communicating with the dead, that they’re not dead. These frescoes are in an important villa. They’ve been written about since 1550 and never entirely understood. Astrological and astronomical degrees don’t deviate, the planets don’t deviate, the stars don’t deviate. When you’re onto something that’s more than a confluence of coincidences, you feel the documents and paintings and poetry are telling you things. People live through their work. Chigi’s work—he was a banker; he had great mining operations, shipping operations—was his villa, and he lives on through it. Those who come to it will ask, as I did, what the painting on the ceilings mean. I suppose I feel I’m speaking for them, speaking for those people who are dead.
“You know, when Machiavelli was sent into exile, even though it was only to a place outside Florence, he still felt his exile. He no longer had political prestige, he no longer had position, and he described his life as that of a peasant among other peasants, stopping at the inn and chatting with whoever happened to be around. But he says that at night, at night he went into his study, dressed in his best clothes, and read the ancients. He just sat there reading them. Well, that’s how I feel. I come here and read the ancients.”
Paul Saenger, pale, thin, vaguely professorial, in his early forties, has sharp angular features and dark, graying hair. Like most people at the Newberry, he wears glasses.
“I am the curator of rare books and collection development coordinator, so I’m responsible for acquisitions. Probably the most important part of our effort comes in the reading of antiquarian catalogues and contact with rare-book dealers. I spend six weeks a year in Europe. There are certain antiquarian book fairs I’d like to go to, but in general I find it more useful to visit book dealers in their shops, because when they go to a book fair they take only a small percentage of their stock. It’s a fraternal kind of relationship, friendly and amicable, yet there’s a certain gamesmanship involved. . . .
“Our budget is about $600,000 a year and we try to spend at least 60 percent of it on antiquarian material. We try to devote a significant part of this to buying materials that are sources for the past and as close as possible to their original state. Our concern is as much with the artifact itself as with the text. That’s why we exist. Many advanced graduate students start studying medieval history, Renaissance history, the history of early modern Europe and have never seen what a letter or a document looked like in the age of Louis XIV. And there are many quite well established scholars who are really uncomfortable with original source material. One of the underlying truths about the library is that the text itself is not sufficient. By collecting material in its original state, the Newberry keeps scholarship honest. Even for a text that is printed and well known, the manuscripts and early printed editions remain important for the integrity of the text.
“For example, in antiquity, texts were transcribed without word separation. A completely accurate edition of Tacitus would be scriptura continua, without separation, without punctuation. People read aloud in antiquity—I happen to be working on this subject just now—to keep information in their minds while they unraveled it. Oral expression, the sound of prose, was very important. The kind of reference reading important to us, consulting, looking for information, starting in the middle of a book, finding your way in a volume you haven’t read end to end, was not a habit of ancient Rome. It was the medieval period that changed our notion of reading.
“The New Testament had divisions that facilitated consultation, but the Old Testament didn’t receive standard divisions until the twelfth century. Throughout the Middle Ages our distinction of verses in the Bible didn’t exist; names of characters were not set off in the plays of antiquity; the convention of writing with capitals didn’t begin until the eighth and ninth centuries. Medieval readers themselves had a sense that texts were being corrupted. Scribes got proper names wrong, misunderstood them, or confused them with words or parts of words. And so you found this impulse to divide script into words, to use different signs that would complement word separation, like the capitalization of proper names. Another aspect of writing associated with the development of word separation is the hyphen at the end of a line. The hyphen shows continuity and is a change in mentality in the eleventh century—accent marks, diacritical marks, grammatical marks were added by a reader trying to elucidate a text. At the time, scribes did not put these in, but it’s common to find them worked into medieval texts, even into early printed books, especially books in monastic libraries. The monks went through them word for word and repunctuated, accented words, and added things like hyphens at the end of lines. It wasn’t the printer who did this; it was the reader. This adds great historical value and often lowers the cost of a book. That’s why the Newberry is lucky, because our values are not necessarily the values of the marketplace. In the world of rare books, what is prized is a clean copy because collectors like that, whereas the book that’s been annotated, reworked, even if it’s just a clarification of a grammatical meaning, tells you something about the mentality that it survives. Last summer, in France, we bought a printed book of Franciscan piety mixed with annotations. Even if we had had the same printed book, we would have bought the volume.
“People who come to the library are attracted to our medieval manuscripts because they’re the most beautiful, but there are other books, quite humble in appearance, even ugly, that are significant because they offer insights into the very notion of reading.
“I’m convinced it leads to a more profound understanding to see the way a text was presented to people who were contemporary. A dramatic example would be St. Thomas. If one reads St. Thomas in a Modern Library edition, one gets a great deal, but one loses a great deal. One doesn’t understand how the text was presented in the fourteenth century. In general, pages weren’t numbered before the sixteenth century. I would say that of all manuscripts from the fifteenth century and earlier, fewer than 15 percent have numeration on the folios. Chapters and distinctions within the chapter preceded numeration. That’s why St. Thomas is organized in terms of parts. It’s cross-referenced, a very sophisticated form of text division. That’s a Christian contribution, a redefining of books into substructures. At the end of the Middle Ages people got fed up with this system. It was too complex, and they went to a direct numbering of the leaves, to a number system based on the physical properties of a book rather than on its intellectual division. And that’s a very important change.
“I showed a famous French scholar some of our new acquisitions and tried out some of my theories on him. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the trouble with you, Saenger, is that you only buy books to conform with your thesis!’
“Well, that’s not true. I have to be very careful of that.”
Heinz Bluhm is an energetic, pleasant, courteous, perhaps even courtly seventy-nine-year-old man who looks a couple of decades younger. His parents emigrated from Germany in 1925 when he was seventeen. He did his graduate work at the University of Wisconsin and earned his Ph.D. in 1932, doing a dissertation on Goethe’s literary reception in England. For thirty-one years he taught at Yale, and now, years past retirement, he still teaches the Goethe course at Boston College to classes of at least one hundred seniors. Professor Bluhm first came to the Newberry thirty years ago. Though today he has on a suit and tie, I’m told that he usually comes to the library wearing slacks, a sport shirt, and sneakers. His speech is lightly accented with a sort of gentle German burr.
“I had been in England as a Guggenheim Fellow, and in Cambridge I was told that there was a copy of the famous 1534 Miles Coverdale Bible at the Newberry Library, so I decided I would stop in Chicago and look at it. I did. Then I usually ask the good question: ‘Do you have anything in German literature?’ And the lady in charge of the rare-book room said, ‘Yes, we have the papers of Goethe’s daughter- in-law, Ottilie von Goethe.’ My interest, of course, was aroused. She showed me six immense boxes filled with her diaries and letters, the engagement letters between Goe
the’s son, August, and Ottilie, and also letters and diaries of Goethe’s grandchildren.
“I was invited back for the summer to start editing the Ottilie von Goethe papers, which I did, and they are published in six volumes. It took eight years to publish the six volumes, and then, a few weeks ago, I received another batch from Weimar—since I’m apparently the one who is most knowledgeable about the Goethe family at this stage of the game, they probably sent it to me rather than to one of their own people, or to my colleagues at Harvard, who would like to do it—which no one knew anything about, and so I was asked to come back to try to integrate the new material with the old. We had certain lacunae toward the end of her life. There’s something in 1854 and then there’s a gap. Now I have those of 1862, which I am deciphering. (She has an awful hand.) I came three weeks ago and brought the Xerox copies with me from Boston. To my great surprise and astonishment, I found that there are about seventy-five pages of material from Ottilie’s diary during the last six years of her father-in-law’s life. Of course, Goethe’s diaries have been published and are available, so I can now make the comparison between what she reports and what the old man reports. And she reports many things that he didn’t report, so I get some real insight into what life was like in the Goethe house. There were many problems. She entertained very loudly, so Goethe occasionally had to send a servant up to say, ‘Please. Be quiet. I’m writing a few more lines of the second part of Faust.’
“Is there anyone more significant in modern literature? Remember Carlyle? The spirit of the world has entrusted more to this man than to any other mortal!’ The author of Faust, the author of Wilhelm Meister. Magnificent. The monarch of letters . . . A model life, in the sense that it was given to intellectual pursuits. And he is a modern man. I know no one else I would be able to put into that class. It’s claimed that only Leonardo da Vinci was able to survey the intellectual world as Goethe was. Presumably Goethe was the last who could still survey the entire field of human knowledge. He guided A. R. Hohlfeld, my mentor at Wisconsin, through ninety years of his life, and he’s guided me, so far, through seventy-nine.
“Though, as a matter of fact, my real work now is on Luther. To try to understand what he would have done if he had been faced with the Bible as a human document. But Luther is greater than the Lutherans. The dogma doesn’t make sense. His reason rejected Christianity 100 percent, but he said ‘Since God revealed himself in the Bible, I sacrifice my reason.’
“I read his sermons, the most wonderful sermons ever given. There must be at least a thousand of them. Have you seen the Weimar edition of Luther? It’s 110 folio volumes. You know, there’s a marvelous story how it began. After Germany was victorious over France in the Franco-Prussian War—1870 to ’71—the German emperor, William I, was going to offer something to both churches, the Roman Catholic and the Lutheran. ‘Because you have prayed for me, German arms have won over France,’ something of that sort. And so he said, ‘You can ask me for whatever you want,’ and the Catholics said, ‘We would like to see the Cathedral of Cologne finished.’ That was a tremendous expense. You see, it was just an unfinished Gothic building. And so it was finished at the expense of His Imperial Majesty. And the Lutherans said, ‘We want the greatest edition that any human being ever received. We would like that done for Martin Luther.’ And so the emperor said yes, and this edition was finished in 1983, a hundred years after it was begun. 110 folio volumes. I have been an adviser, but I am not an editor. They use only Europeans for that, but I am doing something else.
“I have four research assistants in Boston. We are compiling an index verborum of Luther’s German works. Not every word is understood, and even the great Grimm’s dictionary doesn’t work and so from 1946 to 1967—which was twenty-one years—this was started at Yale. Then that fund was exhausted, and a friend of mine at Boston College heard of this and said, ‘You know, I think the Jesuits at Boston College would help you if you’re willing to leave Yale.’ Of course it was a difficult decision, but I said, ‘If I can finish this index verborum I’ll go there.’ So I went. With a certain reserve. I wasn’t quite sure. But I’m so devoted to Luther that I couldn’t let him down.
“And the Jesuits have lived up to every word. Oh, yes, I must tell you this, the Jesuits have given me a whole house for an office, so my research assistants are able to work there, and the living room is part of my library—which is immense, about 15,000 books—and the sun porch, which they’ve also taken over, and the whole dining room is filled with index cards in wonderful steel cabinets. (At the beginning every word was written out on a three-by-five card.) The project is finished. It took another fifteen years. Now we are in the process of getting it ready for publication. But we’ve only reached the letter G.
“Here in Chicago I get up at six. I shower and shave—that’s all. And I don’t dress until I’m ready to go. I have no breakfast and I have no lunch. At 6:15 I’m at my desk. I read a chapter of the Bible. At this time I’m on Isaiah. Then I read half a book of Homer—the Iliad. Then I read a little Hegel. A little Immanuel Kant. At eight I get dressed and leave at 8:15 and am here at 8:28 and have to wait, because they don’t admit us until 8:30. So at 8:30 I’m here and I go upstairs, but I’m not admitted to Special Collections because that doesn’t open until nine. So I go to my carrel and read a sermon of Luther’s. And then I move over to Special Collections. Then I start to work on Ottilie von Goethe, deciphering the manuscripts. So I’m here, and then I work till 12:00 with a coffee break at ten o’clock. If I don’t show up, my colleagues are angry with me upstairs, so I have to be there at the dot of ten, because they take fifteen minutes, sometimes twenty when the conversation gets too good. At 12:00 I go back to my room. I don’t really know what I do. I stay home for just a few minutes. Then I take my daily constitutional to the Goethe Institute and look at The New York Times and one or two other periodicals. And then I go upstairs to the public library just to see what’s new—they have a shelf of new books—and I come back here to the Newberry usually by two or so. But today I went to the Art Institute because, you know, scholars are not the world’s richest people, and Tuesdays are free admission. On Thursdays I sometimes go to the Field Museum because that’s their free day. And then I’m back here. I have to turn in my manuscripts at 4:30. I leave at 5:00 because Special Collections closes at 5:00. So I go for another long walk, and I get my meal. I have a couple of favorite restaurants by this time. Then I go for another little walk. It’s about 8:30. And then I stay up until midnight, reading.
“I read Schiller, especially the treatises on aesthetics, which are some of the greatest ever written. I read Schopenhauer, Nietzsche. Thomas Mann’s diaries are in the midst of publication, and even now there are six volumes out and they’ve reached only 1947 and he lived to 1955. And these are immense volumes. I’ll read those for a solid hour or so, since I knew him personally. I’m waiting to find the reference where he mentions me, but that won’t be until 1952.
“I have no objection to my life, none whatsoever. I’ve found it interesting. And I’m reappointed for next year, so Faust will have another turn.”
I feel like crying.
Because Jean Gottlieb chips away at her ABC’s and Quinlan-McGrath decodes the interior decoration in an early sixteenth-century house. Because Linda P. Austern wonders about the relation of music to the English Renaissance controversy on women is why. Because Hal Barron studies half a century of rural life in the United States is. Because Winstanley Briggs learns about le Pays des Illinois and Christine Clark-Evans considers language in Diderot, while Elistine P. Holly gets up early black Chicago musicians. And Dan Katz, Johannes de Muris’s Libellus cantus mensurabilis. And Ahmad Y. Majdoubeh works on the Orientalism of Washington Irving. And Mary Odem is interested in adolescent sexuality in America between 1880 and 1930, and Philippe Forêt in mapping the Great Wall of China. While Elaine Kruse studies divorce in Paris from 1792 to 1804. While William Hawk traces Matinnecock tribal history. While Rima Schultz regards
the role of the businessman in the settlement of the West, and Gail Geiger, art and spirituality in Renaissance Florence.
Because Nancy L. Hagedorn is finding out about Indian interpreters among the Iroquois is why; because Roger Schlessinger is an expert on André Thevet is. And meanwhile, meanwhile, Jo Mano contemplates the significance of water symbolism in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century maps.
And who shapes curiosity? And who customizes interest? And what whets these sweet-toothed, busybodied, any-old-topic tropisms? Who seeds our brains like clouds? What triggers this itch, hey?
THE LAW OF AVERAGE
There used to be movies, I recall the premise, about people so average you could make money off them. You spread different jellies on their toast and watched expectantly to see which one made them smile; you dipped assorted flavors into their ice-cream cones and held your breath until they licked and went yum-yum. Sometimes you ran them for president. They were blessed by the law of averages, kissed in their cradle by the Witch of the Typical. Attention corrupted, and somewhere along the line they lost it. Broken, they went home to Kansas.
What do I know? When I read Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown for a freshman sociology course in college, I thought Middletown was somewhere in Connecticut. I also read Babbitt that year and had the idea that Zenith was in Connecticut, too. Connecticut—that’s where the action was, where the boobs spoke only to the hicks and the hicks spoke only to the rubes.
Now I’m told—I live in St. Louis—that I’m the rube, a middle American, stripped of ethnicity, some rude, rawboned WASP of a thing. McDonald’s has my number. Baskin-Robbins does—my tastes paced off like land worked over by the surveyors, my habits known, my mating dance noted as choreography, my heart an open book, all my affiliations and sympathies plumbed, my market researched. I am computer linked. (My junk mail, for example. The guys in the other party have written me off. How do they know I’m for gun control? How do they know I’d like to save the whale? Who told them my common causes?)
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