Pieces of Soap

by Stanley Elkin

  C. P. Snow liked to talk about the two Cultures. Alarmed by the distance humanists and scientists put between one another, by the scientific illiteracy of the liberally educated, and by poetic tone deafness in the laboratory, Lord Snow wrote his famous essay decrying this mutual ignorance. We were growing apart, he said. Competence in one area usually bespoke incompetence in the other, though the suggestion was always there that it was the humanists who had blinked first, that the language of technology, if not superior to iambic pentameter, was at least more rigorous. Your traditionally well-rounded man could not roll downhill. The curriculum would have to be overhauled. Those already out of school would have to catch up, take crash courses in physics, hydraulics, recover the natural laws, learn light, article themselves to matter, gravity, trajectory, the stars. For their part, the scientists would practice metaphor and urban planning, would get by heart the heart.

  But I’ve already said. Two cultures? Two? There are two thousand. Two million. Too many.

  And oh, oh, the bicameral mind, the chambered competencies, the left hand that doesn’t know what the right hand is up to. Biology damns us, seals us off, apartheids our will, and sends us to spend our life in some South Africa of the soul. Giving with one chromosome what it takes away with the other. Am I athletic? Then I can’t read sheet music. Can I read sheet music? I can’t follow a recipe. Or I follow a recipe but am a bad driver. I’m a good driver but can’t carry a tune. I carry a tune but pick rotten wallpaper. My wallpaper’s sound but I can’t tell a joke. I tell fine jokes but get lost in a forest. I find my way home but I can’t get French. My French is pure but I don’t know trees. I know all trees but I can’t nail wood. I nail wood great but don’t like fruit. I adore fruit but I’m allergic.

  For all gifts are Indian finally, and each of us lives the negotiated life, traffic’d, transacted, haggled and higgled, trading up, trading down, offering bullish hopes in bearish circumstances. “Look what they gave me for the cow,” says Beanstalk Jack to the poor widow, his mom, and shows her his garish, shining beans like some savage hick primping dime-store beads and factory feathers on real estate no longer in the family.

  No one’s to blame, no one, not even ourselves. Who, ourselves? Ourselves? Who’d cut the best deal we could, who’d buy cheap and sell dear and grow tall and push up the whitest teeth and run fleet miles and squeeze the bejesus out of the other guy’s hand when we’re introduced and get the girls and have big houses in the best neighborhoods of the finest cities and claim the prizes and give that dollar to research that breaks the cancer code? Or settling for less, say, all we’d want would be to live forever without pain? Ourselves? Get outta here.

  What’s done is done by nature, by the parameters of condition, by genetics and God. I’m left-handed not right, a man not a woman. Do I know my antiques? I can’t ride a horse. Am I psychic? Heights give me the willies. Could I learn lines in a play? I don’t hold my liquor, my children are spoiled. I’m worthless on skis, I can’t pick good wines. I’ll wash, you dry.

  And oh, oh, the more-than-bicameral culture, its sealed rooms and mazed space like a Pharaoh’s tomb.

  As if the curricula could ever be changed. As if we wouldn’t go BOOM in the crash course. And we might as well make three wishes, and we might as well say prayers.

  Because the secret of life is . . . come closer . . . the secret of life is to specialize.

  The Newberry Library, at 60 West Walton Street on Chicago’s Near North Side, is the stone-gray color of a blackboard and looks like a Romanesque cave, the kind of place the Dead Sea Scrolls might have been stashed. Which, to get my own act of scholarship—right off the Newberry’s fact sheet—out of the way, would be outside the purview of a collection whose particular speciality is, as we scholars say, well, Western Civ.

  Most of the Newberry’s 1.4 million volumes, 5 million manuscript pages, and 60,000 historic maps relate to the Italian Renaissance, English Renaissance literature, the histories of music, cartography, printing, and railroads; sixteenth- and seventeenth-century American history, American Indian history, Brazilian and Mexican, the American West; calligraphy, philology, bibliography, midwestern American literature, and extensive holdings in local and family history and genealogy. It is privately funded and its books, maps, and manuscripts—valued at about $300 million—are noncirculating, but it’s essentially a public library. The Newberry, equal to if not greater than the best independent research libraries in the United States—the Folger in Washington, the Huntington in California, the Morgan in New York, and the Research Division of the New York Public Library—has the broadest special collections and, except for the New York Public Library, more books than any of the other thirteen most important unaffiliated research libraries in the country. It has an endowment of about $30 million, and gives away about $350,000 to $400,000 a year in fellowships for scholars to come to Chicago to work at the Newberry, and spends an additional $600,000 or so to add to its collections. It sponsors research projects and administers courses in the Newberry’s Lyceum Seminars. From 9,000 to 10,000 people a year use the library.

  Here are four of them.

  Jean Gottlieb is sixty-three, trim, with short gray hair, and rather elegant. She is a Newberry Library Fellow and is preparing a checklist for the library on Renaissance science.

  “My field is actually eighteenth-century English drama. At least that’s what I got my Ph.D. in at the University of Chicago. My specialty was textual studies and bibliography. I began working on the checklist as a result of an exhibit I helped to assemble about the influence of Giordano Bruno—an Italian Hermeticist and mystic—on Sir Philip Sidney and his literary circle. The exhibit was a sort of crossover between literature and science. I knew nothing about the history of science at that point, but Allen Debus, a historian of science, gave me a list of perhaps 100 books that were in the Newberry. He said he thought there were quite a few more books besides those he’d used for his research and that it would be a good idea to write an article about the hidden science in this humanistic collection. I started looking. We knew there was quite a bit about witchcraft because William Frederick Poole, the Newberry’s first librarian, was very interested in it, and along with that came alchemy and so on. But then, as I began to read in the field of early science, I found all kinds of things that no one really knew were here—books on botany, books on anatomy with magnificent illustrations that had been classified as the history of printing.

  “I’ve been working on this on and off for about ten years, and in the last two or three I’ve been working on it almost constantly, and I’ve now got a list of about 2,500 titles, science books I’ve found here that were written between about 1470 and 1750. I don’t go beyond 1750 because then science becomes a much more cut-and-dried and less humanistic discipline. In a sense, the nature of this work is deflection because my first obligation is to make a decision about what constitutes science for this period. Well, for me it’s not going to be architecture, it’s not going to be military science in the sense of the deployment of troops. I’m looking for humanistic science, I’m looking for a science that’s kind of hidden—Phineas Fletcher’s anatomical/allegorical poem about the human body, “The Purple Island”; works that discuss the Creation and attempt to reconcile the biblical account with, let’s say, Copernican astronomy; attempts to explain life and death, the growth of plants, the change of seasons.

  “I read in all the volumes to the best of my limited ability. I had high-school Latin, which, with a dictionary, is standing me in good stead now. I can handle French, Italian, Spanish, English. I get Heinz Bluhm, a colleague here, or someone on the staff who speaks German, to help me with any German translations. My plan is to examine every book on this list.

  “I’m making more of a checklist, really, than a bibliography because I’m not giving collations or the typography of the books and all that sort of thing. I’m simply going to give the author, title, publication information, and something about what each of the 2,500 books
is about.

  “I’m an unaffiliated Fellow here at the Newberry. They give me a carrel and use of the facilities, but basically I’m sponsoring myself. I’ve thought about stopping the work to attempt to get a grant but decided I’d rather finish the work. I’ve written a couple of short articles describing what’s in the collection in a sort of overview and naming a few of the more unusual or distinguished books, and I’ve had expressions of interest from a lot of historians of science who are surprised that anything is here and are eager to know what all else is, and the Newberry is interested in publishing the checklist when it’s finished. I’d love to be sponsored, but I don’t really want to take the time to try, so I’m just swinging along with this on my own. As I say, the last three years I’ve worked on it full-time. Before that I had other jobs and would come in on Saturdays, or late in the afternoon, or on holidays, and work when I could.

  “There’s a lot of interest in the history of science as a humanistic discipline, in returning it to the place it really belongs, which is as part of the history of society, the history of the arts, the history of civilization. Alchemical symbolism played a big part in the work of people like Miró, for example—the symbols for things like mercury. Alexander probably had an astrologer; and King Rudolf, who was a contemporary of Kepler, was very interested in astrology, as was Kepler, as was Newton. Superstition has discredited a lot of things that were really parts of science and were believed in and were seen as legitimate expressions of how the world came to be the way it is, how it got its curly tail.

  “God created the universe so man could make sense of it. I mean, isn’t that why He put man here—why, Garden of Eden or no Garden of Eden, He didn’t put any restrictions on man about how he should find out? Now, the Church got nervous about that, of course, but the development of the first notions that there was order and number supposedly came from the Egyptians, and when the Renaissance Italians picked up on that, they had this bright idea about the importance of the universe and man’s place in it and how it was all an arcane, very obscure, very mystical kind of symbolical business run by a series of mystical numbers, and there were certain ways you could ask it questions and receive answers to all things. The purpose of the universe was to be perfect, as the purpose of the triangle was to be the perfect shape, and the purpose of gold to be the perfect metal, and mathematics and geometry the perfect disciplines to take you into the meaning of the universe.

  “It’s astonishing to me that people we revere as scientists—I guess Isaac Newton is the prime example—were very much interested in alchemical activity, and while they might not have believed you could turn lead into gold, there were many other things you could learn along the way that would be useful to mankind. What the alchemists really did was to search for ways to understand the human body. It was a long time before people understood that disease was an entity in itself that came from outside. They didn’t really see disease as something else. Their effort was to try chemicals they thought would affect the humors, and since all chemicals had a certain humoral quality to them—some were hot and dry, some were cold and wet, some were cold and dry, and so on—they would use these in conjunction with the diagnosis of an individual’s condition to attempt to ameliorate it. Urine and pulse were two of the ways in which diagnoses were made. The whole way the medical lineup worked was quite different then. An apothecary examined the urine and pulse and would sometimes call in the physician. The physician consulted his books and never touched the patient. The surgeon did all the whacking and hacking. It was in the late fifteenth century that the first anatomical books began to appear and that people began to look at the world in a way that is perhaps more congenial to our way of thinking—the world as something to be seen, as opposed to something that was just there or some extension of one’s self.

  “It’s fascinating stuff. I mean we’ve only been talking about medicine. I haven’t talked about astronomy, I haven’t talked about mathematics. You began by asking me about alchemy. I got off the track. I said the nature of this work is deflection, maybe the nature of all scholarship is—a sort of paper trail to reality and truth.

  “Generally I’m here every day now. I get here when the library opens and stay till fairly late in the afternoon. I examine the books on my list alphabetically. I look at maybe ten to twelve books a day. If I find a book and I’m not really sure whether it’s science or not, I can look in one of my reference books. If I still don’t have a clue, if I’m not sure whether it’s talking about something that’s more theological than scientific—sometimes it’s hard to tell—I’ll look in one of the bibliographies I have in my carrel, and, well, sometimes I just have to make a judgment call. There’s a book by a man named du Bartas that is really theological. He’s not included in a lot of the science bibliographies I look at, but I’m going to put him in.

  “I really started looking at books and stopped hunting for more a year ago last June, so it’s taken me this long to do A and B and start C.

  “This is a daunting job, and a humbling job, and nobody told me to do it. I decided that I wanted to, so I have no one to blame but myself. That’s what keeps me sane. Not being affiliated means that I am really a part of this library family, and this library family has been very good to me. I have no other loyalties. I wouldn’t mind being affiliated, but if I were I would probably have to hurry this up, I think.”

  Mary Quinlan-McGrath is a dark, slim woman with cropped hair and looks as if she is in her early thirties. She seems athletic, like someone on a track team, say, limber on the scaffolds she must climb to examine and photograph the frescoes in the tall Renaissance rooms she studies as an art historian. Currently she is at the Newberry working on a guide to the Villa Farnesina.

  “The Villa Farnesina is a wonderful villa on the Tiber in Rome. It was built by Baldassare Peruzzi for Agostino Chigi in the early sixteenth century. I came upon it almost by accident. I knew Raphael’s Galatea was there, and his Cupid and Psyche frescoes. My sister and I were just leaving Rome that day, and we took a quick cab ride from the Vatican to look at it. We were there all alone, without guards really. It was just closing, and I think whoever was supposed to be taking care of it had left early. We walked from room to room.

  “The place is almost unvisited even though it has those Raphaels and the Peruzzi frescoes and other very famous Renaissance artists.

  “My particular line is to try to recapture what the artists were thinking, by reading texts of the period. I don’t know why some art historians don’t like to get into literary texts. They don’t mind doing all kinds of document work, but they don’t like to sit down and read the Ovids and Virgils.

  “Because of the wonderful Renaissance collection here at the Newberry, I was able to, well, decode the frescoes on the vault of the garden loggia ceiling. I had to get into these awful Renaissance astrology texts because I knew the ten Peruzzi panels I was interested in had to do with the patron’s—Chigi’s—birthday, but I couldn’t figure out what the rest of them were. I looked into antique Renaissance astrological, astronomical—it all meant the same thing then—texts to try to see if there was any correlation between the subject matter of the paintings and the texts. Well, I finally found a passage in Aratus that seemed very closely related, and I started reading Renaissance commentaries on how you worked out a horoscope in the Renaissance, and I figured out that what the other frescoes referred to wasn’t Chigi’s birth but the time of his conception. Once I had figured that out, it explained other parts of the villa too.

  “I sent an article to the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, and they wrote back saying they’d just had a request to publish a document from Siena. They’d found Chigi’s exact birth date in the baptismal records, and the time of day he was born, and told me that I was twenty minutes off!

  “Chigi was a little bit like the Renaissance popes, I think, in the sense that he had to create great works in order to be remembered. I’m not sure he trusted in his lineage, and it’s
always seemed to me that the villa itself, with all its elaborate paints, was to speak for him. And you see the first vault that was built? It was his horoscope!

  “The art historian’s fallback position is often that something is decorative. And the panels in the Villa Farnesina are decorative, there’s no doubt about it, but why would you have this sort of specificity? Chigi had two long poems commissioned to celebrate his villa, one in 1511, and the other, probably also written in 1511 but published in 1512, to carry on his name. If you think about it, most of the poems about antiquity speak about ruins. What they knew about ancient Rome, which they adored, was now mostly a sheep pasture. So when Chigi had his villa built he made damn sure that the poems told about the villa, because the poets assumed, and he probably did, too—they say it over and over again—that the villa would turn to dust but the poems would remain. Well, the villa is glorious, and people visit it, but there are perhaps only half a dozen copies of the poems in existence.