by Ann Patty
We had two freshmen: Bethany, the first black student I’d seen in a Latin class, and Siobhan, a quiet young woman who hid behind her hair all semester and never spoke unless she was called on. There were three seniors: a gay young man with the Shakespearean name of Yorick who minored in drama; a gracile redhead who, as it would turn out, was a worse Latinist than I, even though she was a major about to graduate; and a flamboyant blonde, who, even as the months progressed and it got colder and colder, dressed in retro Madonna, with some part of her bra always showing. A small diamond sparkled from her left nostril. Madonna and the other seniors obviously knew one another well and squealed with delight when tall, lanky Ralph, a sophomore, whooshed in just before the professor.
This semester I was no longer the lone incana in the class. Rob Brown, an elegant Brit who’d been in the United States long enough to lose all but a trace of his accent, was my age, though he had not yet gone entirely grey. A full professor, he was a typically contained Englishman, who seemed to know everything about Latin poetry. He dressed elegantly, in neatly pressed pastel shirts and pants, often with the secret pizzazz of brightly striped or polka-dotted socks. Rob had met and married an American during a brief stay in Washington in the early seventies, and, after returning to England for a few years to get his PhD, had resided in the United States ever since. He was the senior member of the GRST department and was only two years away from retirement. He was the most formal of the professors and also the most rigorous in making certain his students truly grasped the syntax of each line we translated.
Rob began the class with a disquisition on lyric poetry (so called because it was always accompanied by a lyre) and its provenance from Greece. We would begin with Catullus (again!) and then move on to Propertius and Horace. To warm us up, Rob handed out Catullus LI, which is based on a Sappho poem.
Ille mi par esse deo videtur,
ille, si fas est, superare divos
qui sedens adversus identidem te
spectat et audit
dulce ridentem.
We had studied that poem last year, but as I struggled to remember what identidem in line 3 meant, Madonna effortlessly translated:
This man seems to me to be like a god
this man, if I may say it, seems to surpass the gods
who, sitting opposite you beholds you again and again
and listens to you laughing sweetly.
It’s a passionate poem, a jealous poem. Catullus goes on to describe his senses ripped from him, his tongue stilled, his ears ringing, and his eyes covered with night. I love the internal rhyme of identidem and ridentem—the ambiguity of Latin that allows the adverb identidem to refer to the man looking again and again, hearing again and again, or Lesbia laughing again and again, thus making Catullus even more jealous. The way Latin has the freedom to place words where they are polyvalent enchants me. As difficult as the system of inflection may be, it allows an author to place a word where it will enhance the meaning, often doubly or triply (as in identidem above). It allows an author to make his poetry dance a tarantella.
Rob assigned Catullus I, II, and III for the next class, a mere two days away. The cover of the Catullus text we were using that semester featured a large illustration from Lilla’s textbook, Zhenya Gay’s line drawing of Lesbia cradling her passer in her hands. The ever-present past, again became present and future.
I was back with the inspiring passer poems, but rather than feeling inspired, I panicked. Though I remembered the poems well, lots of the vocabulary had lapsed from my memory in one short year. I looked at the Horace odes, to which we’d be turning later in the semester. Heu! (Alas!) The first poem was entirely opaque until I’d reread it three times, as well as the eleven pages of notes in the back. There was at least one word per line (more often three) that I didn’t know and only a few lines that I could translate entirely without the dictionary. I already knew, and would be reminded throughout the semester, that it would take me many sorties through a poem to come up with a translation I felt at all confident about. Eheu! (enhanced Alas!)
Did I really want to spend three hours a day translating? I was afraid this might happen. Perhaps I should demote myself to the intermediate classes for another year. I put the Horace away, deciding I disliked him, and spent the next day pondering what to do. I figured the prof who was teaching Vassar’s intermediate class would let me audit, since I was now a known quantity in the department, but what if she said no? Should I reconsider Bard? But wasn’t that to be an advanced class also?
My mind ricocheted back and forth obsessively: Should I challenge myself in advanced Latin or consolidate in intermediate? Should I first leave one class and then try to enter another, or vice versa? Alas, thinking of that phrase soon sent me down another rabbit hole. Every time I came into contact with a Latin phrase, I had to analyze it syntactically, adding even more confounding problems to my dilemma.
Vice versa is an ablative absolute: the past tense of the verb verto, vertere (to turn about), and the noun vicis (which has no nominative form and means “change, interchange, alteration, condition, fate,” or in its transferred, metaphorical form, “position,” thus doubly enacting the expression). The American Heritage Dictionary declares vicis comes from vix, which it doesn’t—vix being an adverb meaning “hardly, only just, or scarcely.” A search through four different Latin dictionaries turned up no noun vix, vicis, so obviously even the estimable lexicographers of American Heritage were vertuntur (spun around) by this expression. Webster’s Third defines vice versa as “with the alteration being changed,” taking into account both the ablative absolute form and the preferred definition of vicis. I decided to stick to that one.
Unpacking that expression took me forty-five minutes, demonstrating forcefully why approaching advanced Latin had left me spinning about (vertebar) for a day. I could, of course, impose my own limit to homework, two hours a night perhaps, if I wanted. What did it matter if I was the worst in the class? I wasn’t being graded. Studying Latin was just something I had devised in order to have something to do, I didn’t have to beat myself up about it. What was I trying to prove?
I decided to visit Professor Brown (should I call him Rob without asking?; he was, after all, a contemporary) before Tuesday’s class. As I approached his office, I felt like a trepidatious sophomore.
He stood from behind his desk and welcomed me. Undone by his courtly graciousness, I blurted out, “I’m not sure my mastery of Latin is up to the level of your course,” as I approached his desk, “and I certainly don’t want to be any sort of drag on the class.”
“Oh no,” he reassured me, “you’ll be fine. Not all the students are as advanced as they may appear. Bethany and Siobhan come straight from high school. Don’t worry. We’ll be going over the translations each day in class, and I always find an older, experienced person has a lot to offer a class of undergraduates.”
What could I say? I felt stuck. “Here, sit down and share my doughnuts,” he offered, motioning to the chair next to his desk and sliding a Dunkin’ Donuts box in front of me. I could see the multicolored tops—pink and green glazed, sprinkled, sugared, and cinnamoned.
“As you can see, I like doughnuts,” he confessed. “These were left over from this morning’s Beginning Latin class. I find a little sugar at an early hour helps at the beginning of a semester.”
As I picked out the toasted-coconut doughnut, and tore it in half to demonstrate my womanly self-control, Rob asked, “Tell me what brings you to Latin study?” So I told him my story, in brief.
He was particularly interested in my publishing past. His daughter had briefly worked for a notorious female publisher who herself had gone to Vassar. His daughter didn’t last long; few of that particular publisher’s assistants did. Rob had heard many stories of extravagant expense-account use, foul language, sexual shenanigans, bitter competition, and female feuds. Par for the publishing course, I told
him.
As we walked to class together, he once again assured me that I would do well, reiterating that he very much wanted me to stay in his class.
Feeling somewhat encouraged, that evening I fortified myself with the admonition Catullus gives himself at the end of poem LI, in three stanzas not inspired by Sappho:
Otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est
otio exsultas, nimiumque gestis
otium et reges prius et beatas
perdidit urbes.
Leisure, Catullus, is dangerous for you
too much leisure transports you
and you run off the rails
leisure has laid waste to kings
and their once wealthy cities.
I knew that leisure would be my downfall, too. The specter of my mother playing endless and lonely solitaire games during the last years of her life, and her drinking, which started earlier and earlier in the day as the years progressed, haunted me. I memorized those cautionary lines: Otium tibi molestum est, and soldiered on.
After the next class, Rob assigned a secondary source on Catullus for us to read, accessible online, but only in the library. For the past two years, I’d felt like something of an interloper at Vassar and used the campus only for classes and to get breakfast at the Retreat before class. I entered the Frederick Ferris Thompson Memorial Library for the first time by walking under an expansive London plane tree, one of whose wide branches extends fifty feet over the sidewalk, as if nature herself had provided a beneficent arc to formalize the library’s entrance. Admission tours claim that the limb holds the title of “longest unsupported London plane limb in the world” in the Guinness Book of World Records, though no one has yet been able to find it there.
The library itself looks like a cathedral: It is an imposing stone building in the Perpendicular Gothic style, with crenellated turrets, leaded-glass windows, and a verdigris copper roof. Up the marble steps one enters a grand hall at the back of which glows the splendid stained-glass Cornaro window. It portrays Elena Lucretia Cornaro-Piscopia, the first woman ever to receive a doctorate (in 1673), defending her dissertation on Aristotle before her professors at the University of Padua. Her dress is grey, with a sash of pink satin. At its founding, Vassar’s colors had been grey and pink, though in 1974, when the college began admitting men, they changed to grey and burgundy so as not to force the male students to wear pink (even though a large portion of them were and are gay). The sweatshirts and T-shirts have lost their charm; the new colors look common, unlike the more elegant old ones.
The lights in the tracery of the Cornaro window represent Grammar, Dialectics, Music, Philosophy, Astronomy, Medicine, Geometry, and Theology, the linchpins of the humanities, before my generation had a go with “relevance.”
From that first visit onward, I went to the library for an hour or two before class to finish my homework. The computers there provided access to many online Latin translation tools. Rob Brown had even given us a link to a Horatian Odes vocabulary Web site, from which one could make flash cards or listen to a computer voice saying each word and its definition. I did not use that Web site. It made me feel less like a scholar, and the computer voice was grating in the library’s hush.
I decided to think of the library as my new office; in comparison, even my swankest publishing office—a large corner on the fourteenth floor in Rockefeller Center—seemed ordinary. There were never more than six or seven of us at the wooden tables, which could accommodate forty, and two of the regulars were grey-hairs like me. Were they auditors or professors? I never worked up the courage to ask.
We began with Catullus IV, a poem about a boat, fuisse navium celerrimus (once the fastest of ships) that nunc recondita senet quiete (now ages in its retired repose). It reminded me of myself, my fast career, and its end. If only I could age in retired repose. But I couldn’t. That’s why I was here.
In several poems, Catullus criticizes his friend’s lovers, always in terms of their looks. He was a man of his time, entirely sexist. In poem XLI he writes:
Ameana puella defututa
tota milia me decem poposcit
ista turpiculo puella naso.
That totally fucked out girl Ameana
demanded ten thousand of me
that girl of yours with the ugly nose.
He’s even more outraged in XLIII, when others call that same woman lovely and compare her with Lesbia:
Tecum Lesbia nostra comparatur?
o saeclum insipiens et infacetum!
My Lesbia is compared to you?
oh how tasteless and stupid our age!
His assessment of Varus’ girlfriend is more obliging: non sane illepidum neque invenustum (not, indeed, unattractive or without charm). This, we learn is a litotes (Greek for understatement) or damning with faint praise, a favorite device of Catullus. The neoterics strived to make liberal use of such Greek poetic devices.
Rob refers us to XLIII, where Catullus really goes to town with litotes:
Salve, nec minimo puella naso
nec bello pede nec nigris ocellis
nec longis digitis nec ore sicco
nec sane nimis elegante lingua.
Hello, girl with the not little nose
with the not beautiful foot, nor black eyes
nor long fingers nor dry mouth
and speech not very elegant.
Catullus also liked hyperbaton (Greek for “stepping over”):
Totum ut te faciant, Fabulle, nasum.
So they might make you, Fabullus, all nose.
Here totum nasum (all nose) surrounds the rest of the sentence like two nostrils.
Thus we began to acquire yet another language, which comprised poetic terms, most of them Greek: litotes, hyperbaton, anaphora (rhetorical repetition for emphasis, as in Otium . . . Otio . . . Otium in poem LI above). Many more poetic devises uniquely suitable to Latin would be arriving with Horace, who made copious and artful use of them; and then next semester, Ovid would blast them into rock ’n’ roll.
Catullus often uses diminutive versions of nouns: versiculus (little verse) rather than versus; turpiculus (a bit ugly) rather than turpis; libellus (little book) rather than liber; and ocellus (little eye) rather than oculus. I loved that one could simply add elo or ulo or ellus or culus to make a word diminutive, much as Patrick O’Higgins had done with his “pillules.” He must have known Latin.
English does the same with “ette.” I often referred to myself as George’s wifette, because I’ll never formally marry again: I’m too old to be a girlfriend, lover is too intimate a display, and partner too businesslike. Perhaps I should adopt Catullus’ expression deliciae meae (my sweetheart), though the fact that it’s always plural, and always feminine, is troublesome.
Several diminutive forms have been handed down to English, the most alarming: mus, muris (mouse), which becomes musculus (little mouse) in its diminutive form, and from there travels to English to become “muscle.” The thought of little mice running up and down my arms was almost enough to make me stop exercising!
We also learned the fascinating and very useful concept of “inalienable possession.” In Latin, as in other languages, a possessive pronoun is unnecessary before a noun of inalienable possession because those things are so much a part of you that they will always be yours—name, genus (family, class, community), body parts, coughs, shadows, spirit, breath, seedlings, and domestic animals. Husband and wife as well as in-laws are included along with blood kin. The most surprising inclusions are leader, president, and governor. I loved the concept of something so clearly belonging to you that you didn’t need to declare it, and did so only to emphasize your possession. It got me thinking about my own inalienable possessions, which were mostly absences: two former husbands, with accompanying in-laws and stepchildren, dead friends, dead parents, estranged siblings, a career and an identity a
s an editor and publisher, not to mention the signal accomplishment that launched both of the latter, which I had been forced to sign away twenty-five years ago.
In the spring of 1978, I left Dell for a new job as senior editor at Pocket Books, the paperback division of Simon and Schuster, though I was hardly qualified for the position. The publisher at the time, Peter Mayer, was committed to hiring bright young people.
Soon after I arrived at Pocket Books, Humphrey, still my best friend, who had been working for a literary agent for the past two years, gave me a short, 98-page manuscript. It was, as he put it, “awful and fabulous.” It was my first purchase at my new job and his first sale as an agent.
Flowers in the Attic, by V. C. Andrews, was the tale of four children locked in an attic while their mother attempted to win her way back into her rich father’s will. The children were overseen by their grandmother, who called them the “spawn of the devil.” Their mother had married her cousin; the incestuous relationship resulting in her being disowned. The children, Chris, thirteen, Cathy, twelve, and the five-year-old twins, would be sequestered in the attic of the family manse, for only a couple of days, Mother promised, until she had won back her father’s love. Days stretched into months, months into years. Finally, Chris and Cathy have sex, one twin dies, and they escape.
Humphrey and I were both captivated by the novel. We also goofed on it: Maybe it would become a camp classic and Humphrey could march in the Halloween Parade dressed as the evil grandmother, with me playing the mother. We never imagined that it would become not only a camp classic but also what can only be called an “awful classic.” It launched my career and one of the most successful franchises in publishing history. Though V. C. Andrews has been dead since 1985, a book bearing her byline comes out like clockwork every year, sometimes twice a year: There are now over seventy in all.
As soon as it was published, Flowers in the Attic hit the New York Times best-seller list. I was sent down to Portsmouth, Virginia, to meet the author.
