by Joshua Cohen
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IT’S TELLING THAT, having perused numerous chronicles of this cipherous School, I have yet to find one that seems definitive, or even convincing.
What appears to be the case is that the Toledo School was actually two schools, diverse in era and errand. The first was founded by Raymond, archbishop of the city called Toledo between 1126 and 1151, which years Muslims call 519 and 545, while the second—the resurrection—was picked up a century later under the reign of Alfonso X. The first was a church institution, operating out of the Toledo Cathedral, with a team that included Jews, Mozarabians (Arab Christians who hewed to the liturgy of the Visigothic Church), and monks from the Order of Cluny, translating—together, separately, successively, however—from Arabic into Latin, or from Arabic into Castilian into Latin, which meant that their works were intended for clergy and educated audiences abroad, because the local laity couldn’t read Latin. The second incarnation, however, was a government institution, in which the king himself served an editorial role: Alfonso X insisted, apparently, on jettisoning the church’s Latin for the people’s Castilian, which meant that the works being translated were now intended to be readable by all people who sought education, the “general public.”
The history of the Toledo School or schools can be read in the microcosmos of its major nonliterary achievement: namely, the compilation of the Toledan Tables—astronomical charts, lastingly referred to as “Ephemerides,” that were used to predict the movements of the sun, moon, and planets, or the five planets that had been identified at the time and deified as Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The bounty of the Toledan Tables was assembled by Al-Zarqali, called Arzachel, a Muslim astronomer of the city called Toledo, whose work was translated by Gerard of Cremona around the year 1140, and then revised—with the help of the Jewish astronomers Yehudah ben Moshe and Yitzhak ibn Sid—and redubbed the Alfonsine Tables, around the year 1270.
It was these Tables that set the standard for Renaissance astronomy, and though their compilers had accepted the Ptolemaic model that set our earth as the fixed center of all Creation, the Tables’ data were so comprehensive and accurate that Copernicus, at the dawn of the sixteenth century, used them to disprove that geocentric misnomer and assert the systemic fixity of our sun and the universal fact of heliocentrism.
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A MILLENNIUM LATER, the Toledo School remains mostly mythic: a dream of an almost logical comity. So much is unclear, and never will be clear—such as, given all of the School’s literary and, if you’ll excuse me, STEM-related industry, why was no university ever established at the city called Toledo? And, were those among the School’s translators who, as it’s said, “had” Arabic willing collaborators with their European counterparts, or were they impressed into service, forced to translate their culture’s books for their foreign masters in the interests of mere survival? I confess to being attracted to the cruel romance of this hypothesis: I imagine an inky office employing only editor-slaves and a publisher-king.
To be sure, translators have never had it easy, and it might even constitute an insult to contemporary practitioners of the discipline that those who are trying to kill them now are not royalty but plebs—we writers who kill our translators by our thanklessness, as much as by our thankfulness, which is to say by our obtuseness: such is the tribute that our renderers receive for giving our imperfect work a progressively less imperfect future.
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OF ALL THE LEGENDS of the city called Toledo, there is only one about which I am certain—rather, there is only one that I am certain cannot be disproven.
It states: The world is a place but has no places. It tells us: The things of this world can have no name that isn’t constantly in the process of changing.
It was never the Creator’s intention that our cities should be fixed to the ground. It was never the Creator’s intention that our cities should be immovable.
The Creator decreed that what we now call locations—our present-day cities, towns, villages—inhere not in the earth but in the heavens.
At the moment of Creation, then, the constellation that Ptolemy called, and that we call, Centaurus emerged low in the sky directly over the spot where the city that we call Toledo now stands. This means that wherever Centaurus was the week after Creation was Toledo, and wherever Centaurus was the month after creation was Toledo, and so on, the city—or the perfect form of the city, which is the only form that we can recognize—remaining in constant galloping motion over the earth, remaining in constant trotting transit around us, while we, the earth’s sad and evil people, persisted in ignoring this cyclical cartographical imperative.
We ignored it, and then, at some darkly aged point, we forgot it.
We lost all knowledge of where exactly the stars were in relation to the earth at the moment of Creation, and so, to this very day, we have no way of knowing the names—the true precise precessional and changing names—of where we dwell.
Tonight, because it is night already somewhere, Toledo might be anywhere. It might even be here, above us, now.
Let us be greedy and call to it, then, in all of our languages.
Let us call it down.
IN PARTIAL DISGRACE
ON CHARLES NEWMAN
PARTIALNESS
IN PARTIAL DISGRACE IS THE book’s title, though the emphasis should be on that intermediary word—that unstable, pieceworkish, double-definitioned “partial.” Charles Hamilton Newman—among the best, and best-neglected, of American authors—had intended to write a novel-cycle of three volumes, each volume containing three novels, for a total of nine. But when he died, in 2006 at age sixty-eight, all that had been completed was an overture—or just the blueprints for a theater, the scaffold for a proscenium.
ARCADIA
Charles Newman was born in 1938 in St. Louis, city of the Mississippi, of Harold Brodkey, William S. Burroughs, T. S. Eliot—three eminences who’d left. Newman never had that privilege. His father made the decision for him, moving the family—which stretched back two centuries in St. Louis, to when the town was just “a little village of French and Spanish inhabitants”—to a suburban housing tract north of Chicago, adjacent to a horseradish bottling plant. The prairie, the imagination, lay just beyond. A talented athlete, Newman led North Shore Country Day School to championships in football, basketball, baseball. Yale followed, where he won a prize for the most outstanding senior thesis in American history. He befriended Leslie Epstein, novelist, and Porter Goss, future director of the CIA under Bush II (more on “intelligence” later). Study at Balliol College, Oxford, led to a stint as assistant to Congressman Sidney R. Yates (D, Ninth District, Chicago), which lasted until Newman was drafted into the Air Force Reserve, which he served as paramedic. Korea was avoided.
In 1964, Newman returned to Chicago: “I have been forced by pecuniary circumstances to deal with other men’s errors and nature’s abortions, to become…an educationist!” He became a professor in the English department at Northwestern, where he turned the campus rag, TriQuarterly, into the foremost American lit journal of the second half of the century—weighty words for weighty writers like Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Czesław Miłosz, E. M. Cioran, Frederic Jameson, Susan Sontag, Robert Coover, John Barth. TriQuarterly was the journal that notified the city—New York, publishing’s capital—of the progress in the provinces. Academia would resurrect American letters, at least relicate it in library stacks amid the slaughterhouses, the grain and missile silos. The counterculture usurping the culture, standards in decline, artistic degradation—the complaints of Newman’s essays, A Child’s History of America (1973), and The Postmodern Aura (1985), could also be used to rationalize his behavior: the dalliances with coeds, the boozing, the pills. With his job in jeopardy, his journal too, in 1975 Newman moved to Baltimore, where he directed the Johns H
opkins Writing Seminars.
This is where the account, or just Newman, gets hazy. He quit Hopkins, or was fired again, or quit before he was fired, or was fired before he could quit, went off to raise hunting dogs in the Shenandoah Valley (more on the dogs too, in a bit). The failure of that venture, or a feud with a neighbor that left him wounded in a shovel attack—either that or a brief bout of sobriety, or its attendant hypochondria that required better health insurance—led him back, by a commodius rictus of recirculation, to St. Louis, city of Brodkey (a stylistic peer), Burroughs (with whom he shared a tolerance for self-abuse), Eliot (whose adoption of a foreign identity prefigured Newman’s own interest in Hungary—about which, again, stay tuned). After Chicago, this was his second homecoming, third chance. Fortune smiled gap-toothed. Newman was already the author of New Axis (1966, a novel following three generations of a Midwestern family from Depression striving, through middle-class success, to a striven-for, successful-because-failed, Aquarian rebellion), The Promisekeeper: A Tephramancy (1971, a novel that risks, as its subtitle suggests, a divination of the ashes of the American Dream, forecasting a country unable to communicate except in media references, satire, parody), and There Must Be More to Love Than Death (1976, a collection of three texts, of a series of twelve that would remain unfinished, each in a different vein: A junkie veteran suffers naturalism, an operatic baritone frets over farce, a photographic-memory prodigy is worried by the very concept of nonfiction). White Jazz—Newman’s best completed novel, in which an overconsuming computer programmer finds satisfaction in his function as a mere line of code in the program of this country—had just been published. The year was 1985. Reagan had just been whistled for an encore.
For this act—Newman’s last—let’s green the stage, let loose a rolling hilly verdancy to billow as backdrop, caster the trees into position, dolly hedges to their marks, creating a clearing, a nymph’s grove of sorts, surrounding a ruin—a folly—risen from the floor’s trapdoor. Literature students wandered into this grove and declothed, quaffed grape, toked a strange lotosine weed. The demigods who organized, or disorganized, these pagan proceedings were called by the names William H. Gass, Stanley Elkin, Howard Nemerov. This secret Arcadia hid under the ineffable epithet Washington University. But Eden is not to be returned to. Paradise, especially if one’s birthplace, can never be regained. (At Newman’s memorial service, Gass suspected the deceased “would find faults in paradise, because they sprayed their trees.”)
It wasn’t just that Newman loathed Wash U, or the suburban complacency that had taken hold outside the ivy tower—rather, it’s that he felt most alive when bitching or blurbing the uncontainability of his own genius. Or resuming his cryptodipso routine, insulting fellow teachers and deans, setting himself on fire in class (an accident? or to prove what point?). Newman broke friendships, collapsed marriages, wore himself out in the constant commute between classes and his writing studio/apartment in cramped, indispensable-to-his-vanity-but-insulting-of-his-vanity Manhattan, and in the perpetual writing of this book, the perpetual rewriting of the books that would become this book as if it would sober him finally, which it didn’t—fiction never does.
The dramatization—the self-dramatization—of Newman’s finale should be accompanied by flute and harp, out of sync, out of tune in a disconcerting mode. An exit dance might be hazarded, but the steps should stagger, the bows should be falls, passing out. Let’s clear the set—reel in the prop foliage, crank to the rafters those deae ex machinis of ever-fresher, ever-younger student lovers. All that should be left onstage is that ruin, that folly—the size of a respectable state university, the size of a respectable state, but abandoned in midbloom—this masterpiece in pieces, this partial.
RURITANIA
For Newman—the peripatetic New Man—the imagined place was always a proxy, or preparatory study, for a reimagination of the self. The move to Chicago turned his family from prosperously rooted burghers to panting arrivistes; his sojourn in Virginia turned a genuine wildman into a playacting gentleman farmer, and it was his first trip to Hungary, in 1968, that turned an intellectual citizen of an unintellectual republic into an adventurer, or apprentice dissident—a champion of everyone’s free speech because a champion of his own.
Hungary, the Midwest of the Continent: the Magyar state, Pannonia to Antiquity and Cannonia to Newman, is located at the very middle of Mitteleuropa, an East/West crossroads of Teutons and Slavs. The second crownland of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was carved into thirds and landlocked—losing its only port, called Fiume/Rijeka—after WWI. The brief communist coup of 1919 gave way, in 1920, to a parliamentary government subservient to a sham regent whose most notable previous credential was his inept admiralty in Austro-Hungary’s sinking joke of a navy. Miklós Horthy allied his nation with Hitler, who returned the compliment by invading in 1944. Nearly half a million Hungarians perished in WWII—nearly a million if Jews can be counted, or counted themselves, Hungarian. Soviet occupation, backing the puppet regime of Mátyás Rákosi, was challenged in 1956 by the election of Imre Nagy—a marionette who snipped his own strings. A multiparty system was, temporarily, restored; Hungary withdrew, for a breath, from the Warsaw Pact; revolution simmered in the streets. Moscow responded with tanks. Twenty thousand people died in the fighting. After crushing the resistance, the Kremlin installed János Kádár in a dictatorship that lasted until 1989, to the fall of the original “Wall”—not the concrete slabs of Berlin, toppled in the fall of that year, but the dismantling of the barbed-wire fence along the Hungarian/Austrian border, earlier, in spring.
The country Newman arrived in had just dragged itself out from under the treads, dusted off, and limped back to the factories. 1968 was the year of Kádár’s New Economic Mechanism, an appeasement measure introducing certain free-market principles—giving nationalized businesses a modicum of control over what products they produced, in what quantities, even over what prices the products would be sold at—to an economy whose central planning was increasingly outsourced to Budapest. This was the period of “Goulash Communism”; Hungary was “the happiest barrack in the socialist camp” (whether these descriptions originated in Hungary or Moscow, or even in the West, and whether they were intended seriously or in jest, are still matters of musty debate). Hungarians could choose to buy either domestic crap or foreign pap in a selection unprecedented since the kaisers; they could even travel widely—from Moscow to Yalta, Kamchatka to Havana. The Hungarian press was less strict than that of any other Soviet satellite. All of which would account for how Newman got into the country. None of which would account for what he was doing there.
He was, crazily, editing a literary journal out of Budapest. Newman’s New Hungarian Quarterly published samizdat literature but not in samizdat—in public. It disseminated English-language versions of poems, stories, and essays whose Hungarian (and Czech and Slovak and Polish, etc.) originals were banned. Though Newman never became fluent in Hungarian, he did become expert at editing, for free, translations, also offered for free, more accurate and artistic than anything being produced at the time by the Western capitalist publishers and the university faculties that slaved for them—institutions that though they (mostly) lacked contacts with their Hungarian counterparts, anyway (mostly) followed the example of their Hungarian counterparts and chose the works they rendered based as much on politics as on aesthetics (not to mention the criteria of “marketability”—an American term translating to “censorship”). How Newman got away with it all, I don’t know. Neither do I know how he managed to make repeated trips to Hungary throughout the ’70s and ’80s, nor how he managed to smuggle into the States a brace of the Hungarian dogs he’d breed—Uplanders, also called wirehaired vizslas—and two of his three Hungarian wives (Newman met his third Hungarian wife in the States; another wife was Jewish; yet another longtime companion, Greek).
I can only wink, drop the name “Porter Goss,” and refer to a scrap of paper stuc
k in a crack of Newman’s Nachlass: “An intelligence officer’s most obsessive thought, and I ought to know, is whether his time behind the lines, in deep cover, is going to be counted toward his annuity” (italics mine). If Newman wasn’t in the CIA, he was certainly interrogated by it. If Newman wasn’t an agent, or even an agent-manqué, he would certainly have enjoyed pretending to be one, or the other, or both—shadowing in and out of character for his Hungarian hosts and for the KGB stooges who tailed them (after 1956, Hungary was the only communist country not to have its own secret police).
