Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick (new ebook reader txt) 📕

to teach Latin and English Poetry, to maintain order and propriety, and also to preside over chapel. His first innovation was to install a carpet over the bare cold floor of his study, and also to secure it with lock and key. His aim above all, he said, was to eliminate certain American vulgarities and to elevate our language in general. When some of the masters, and nearly all of the pupils, objected to “cell” for its aura of incarceration, he insisted that its source was, rather, ecclesial and poetical, and for proof cited Coleridge’s “the hall as silent as a cell,” whereas, he retorted, our halls rivaled in noise a dungeon of blacksmiths with hammer and tongs. I am glad to say that “cell” did not last, and neither did Mr. Canterbury. His long-serving successor was the Reverend Henry McLeod Greenhill, of Boston, who later assisted in the shutting of the Academy, and whose personal library we still retain following his passing soon afterward.

In this connection, and in one of those anomalies of unexpected confluence, the phrase “hammer and tongs” set down above was repeated a very few hours later, via a most distasteful occurrence. I was accosted at the dinner hour by three of my colleagues, who had formed a committee to denounce me. I was accused of making a racket, of disturbing the peace, of interfering with well-earned sleep, and finally of wielding hammer and tongs (these very words) at unconscionable hours. It is true that on certain days when I have, to my dismay, lost an entire afternoon through napping too long, my conscience has impelled me to take up my memoir somewhat past midnight. (Despite such efforts I remain acutely aware that beyond having uttered the name, I have yet to properly acquaint the reader with my unusual attachment to Ben-Zion Elefantin.)

In fine: I have been upbraided (I mean verbally assaulted) for the nocturnal use of my Remington, which in fact I associate most deeply with remembrance of those long-ago nights in my office. (I may have omitted to mention that the machine I own now is the very one used for many years by Miss Margaret Stimmer.) Yet I can hardly believe it is the sound of my energetic tapping that offends. Nor is it altogether envy of a skill the others do not possess. It is, instead, naked resentment: I alone appear to have progressed with my memoir, and they, or so I surmise, have been shamefully idle.

And here it may be pertinent to note that two of my three accusers are the very gentlemen already characterized in these pages as childish; and so, more and more manifestly, they are. As for the third offender, he is, shall we say, the kind of nonentity that follows the herd.

Same day, later. An architectural aside. I have alluded to the shutting of the Academy. The renovations that followed, in bringing about our present-day Temple House, required that four or five, and in one instance six, of these unheated cells be combined (i.e., razed) to create a single larger space to accommodate each new apartment. As a result, we now find ourselves in considerable comfort in the identical site of our early misery.

I ought also to add a word about the above-referenced library. The remodeling work necessitated the destruction of an area that from the earliest days of the Academy has always served as the headmaster’s personal quarters, including the office to which pupils were summoned. It was in this sanctuary that Reverend Greenhill’s library was kept. That it appeared as a bequest to the Trustees in his will was, it must be admitted, troublesome. Though his predecessors were piously, or let us say outwardly, celibate, Reverend Greenhill had come to us as a widower. He prided in his library as if (so goes the saying) it had sprung from his loins. It was his great pleasure and his even greater treasure. But to speak plainly, for the Trustees, at that time twenty-five strong and mainly men of business and law, what were we to do with these scores of volumes of theology and Greek and other such scholarly exotica? Of the several curators of the various institutes to which we offered this trove, all rejected it as an amateur’s collection, hardly unique and easily duplicated, much of it uselessly outdated. Today it is stored on dozens of shelves in the kitchen pantry. Lately, I have been leafing through a few of these old things, with their curled and speckled pages, and in one, to my delight and amazement, I discovered a paragraph naming Sir Flinders Petrie! I have since removed this book (The Development of Palestine Exploration, by one Frederick Jones Bliss, dated 1906) and display it here in my study, as a suitable companion to my father’s keepsakes. I believe it would have pleased him to see it there.

*

June 26, 1949. Once again I have been reviewing these reflections, only to increase my despondency. All is maundering, all is higgledy-piggledy, nowhere do I find consecutive logic. For this reason I have turned to my personal copy of the History, hoping to come under its superior influence. Unlike our present project, this far more compendious work was composed by committee, with the benefit of a number of orderly minds contributing both to substance and style. It is in the spirit of research, in fact, that I am immersed in these crisply written chapters: I have sought to learn whether the Academy in its lengthening past has ever permitted the enrollment of Jewish pupils. A certain Claude Montefiore, of the English Montefiores, did attend in 1866, but only briefly, during his father’s consular mission; but no others since, including up to my own father’s time.

The absence of Jewish pupils, however, does not prevent the History from mentioning Jews, which it does fairly often, in general terms, with satirical or otherwise jesting comments on the Hebrew character. There is always, I believe, a kernel of truth in