The Book of Anonymities

CHAPTER ONE-1

CHAPTER ONE

From the time Harriet had entered graduate school, she expected to write her thesis on Marie de France under Dr. Watkins, the foremost female medievalist. But halfway through her research, Harriet changed her mind and chose instead the redoubtable problem of Chrétien de Troyes' identity. Her interest in him had been stimulated by an insignificant footnote which stated that Chrétien may have been a Jewish physician who had converted to Christianity.

Everyone tried to dissuade her from changing her thesis topic, and their arguments were impressive. She had already done so much research on Marie de France, why throw it away? And why risk the ire of Dr. Watkins, the expert on medieval female writers?

Over a lunch of cheese and salad, Laurel argued with imprisoning clarity. "A thesis topic isn't supposed to intrigue you. It's supposed to get you through your doctoral program. Marie de France is a great subject for a woman. We need scholars to write about medieval women writers, not about medieval male writers who have had a ton of research done on them already. What's more, Professor Watkins will be your enemy forever if you drop her pet topic. The point is to make the bureaucracy work for you so that you can get on with the work you love. You hate what you do for three or four years so that you can do what you want to do the rest of your life."

There were no dark corners in Laurel's decision about her thesis on an obscure female poet in 18th century Tennessee: "The Feminine Bard in Pre-Revolutionary America." To Harriet, Laurel seemed to live in an academic frictionless world. She had gone from high school to Smith College with the blessings of two professional parents, while Harriet had gone to a small college on Long Island over her mother's disapproval who felt she had had enough education and should get a job. Her older sister had not gone to college, her mother pointed out, and was not unhappy. Her brother had gone to college and was weird. A creature of obsessions, Harriet had always to argue her case against practical wisdom and her arguments, like all visions, mystified her friends and teachers. Even David, though he never argued with her. You do not argue with a consuming passion. You domesticate it. When Harriet was willful, he stepped aside. A footnote lying below the mounds of history and literary criticism had revealed a complicated vista to her: It was odd that the most famous writer in twelfth century France should have been a Jew who had converted to Christianity. The footnote intrigued her, then it haunted her, then it obsessed her. She nodded obligingly to Laurel's pragmatism, re-assembled her notes, and submitted a new thesis outline to Professor Connell.

He was not displeased by her apostasy from Watkins, but his pedagogic responsibility constrained him to point out to Harriet that her change of direction was not wise. She resisted his arguments, as he knew she would. He had noticed her as a fledgling graduate student, bright, a conscientious scholar but impulsive, attractive, very stubborn and combative, which he felt was part of the modern female make-up, cut on the template of an avenging angel. He had learned the lesson, well or ill, that academic women were sensitive about what they considered to be their intellectual prerogatives. Still, he persisted with the avuncular feelings he indulged himself in for his favorite student. He reminded Harriet that the Chrétien field was littered with scholars, the competition was "harrowing" and it was unlikely that she would be able to make an original contribution to the field.

"Chrétien's identity is lost, gone," he said, as if referring to the poet's hair. "At least, with Marie de France you have something to grab hold of, two possible identifications, both situated in the thick of the social context."

That was the problem. Marie de France had either been an English nun in the twelfth century, perhaps a certain Mary, abbess of Shaftesbury in England, or she had been a member of the French aristocracy, educated and urbane, the inestimable Marie de Champagne, with all the dizzying associations of being the daughter of Louis V11 and his immortally discontented wife, Elinor of Aquitaine. You could smack your lips on a lineage like that. But who was Chrétien? A brilliant poet but an elusive nobody, a footnote, his genius embedded in a dispersal of identities. She intended to reconstruct them, using Marie de France, the more likely Marie, as her lens through which to see Chrétien in his literary and social contexts.

Professor Connell sniveled with dark warning. A scarred warrior-scholar, chair of the department and respected in the field, he was aging crankily, having had his theory of Chrétien as a Christian manqué challenged by Holmes' theory that Chrétien had written the Percival as a conversion poem tract; and having had his Celtic theory of the grail sources wrenched from him by the followers of Jessie Weston. He did not wish to see his star pupil sink into a quagmire of theories. He preferred to relinquish her to Watkins, much as he disliked feminist theories of medieval writing. Literature had enough influences without creating gender motivations. The great influences to him were national and demographic. Henry ll was already in the habit of giving away Irish acres to his loyal followers in the twelfth century. "And," as he had written in over three dozen articles, "Elinor of Aquitaine was Henry's wife after she had had her marriage to Louis annulled. It took no great intellectual leap to see how Celtic literature had gotten into France. Irish scholarship, Irish Christianity, had always stayed closer to its pagan myths than had Latin Christianity. As soon as the colonists from Henry ll's entourage had stepped into Ireland, the poetry flowed into their frozen Saxon veins." The transmission of grail material was obvious to him. It followed the flag, and that flag had been planted in the twelfth century in Irish soil, and then into French hearts when the British lay claim to Brittainy.

He knew what lay in store for Harriet if she crossed over into Chrétien territory: shoeboxes full of index cards, cartons full of notebooks, an attic full of acrimonious rebuttals and a lifetime of answering them. Is that what she should take upon herself? He knew she would. She was fearfully single-minded, doing combat with academia, like St. Agnes with the corruption of Avignon. Serious, very serious, earnest, intensely earnest, she always fooled him with her blonde-headed angel face and her blue eyes because he knew there was this other side to her, the lean, rapier side which roller-bladed in the streets, the modern female side with no spare fat, the tenacious side which waited for him to sign his agreement to her proposal. There was no frivolity in Harriet, no flirtation, no cunning wedding pictures of her and David feeding each other cake or throwing her garter through the air. In the family wedding portraits Harriet and David faced the camera guardedly, conscious of the abyss between their cultures. Her mother was lost in pink chiffon, her fading blonde hair crimped in a new permanent that looked like a bad wig. Barely five feet tall, she was smothered by everyone around her like a dinghy in the shadow of yachts, her paranoid gaze at the camera fiercely insulted. Harriet's Swedish father loomed gigantic in his dark suit, his gangly arms searching for a boom to give him ballast. Her sister Dawn hid her two hundred twenty pounds behind her husband, while her elfish brother Lionel grinned maniacally and held up two fingers at his hip to make the hex sign. David's mother, Elsbeta, Betty to a few people whose Americanisms she had made up her mind to live with, expressed the autocracy of good grooming which had carried her from Austria to Brooklyn, down the social scale and up again; his father Ira, a mathematics professor, poised with the affability of his Jewish generation, with layers of behavior over those he had inherited; Aunt Yetti, recently retired from her fourth marriage to a pharmacist, up from Florida for her favorite nephew’s wedding, her frizzy red hair looming over his shoulder, and Laurel, her maid of honor, amused in her bronze colored dress, her defiance against sentimentality. The faces of David's brother Kenneth and his Japanese wife Leela, occupied the background as a sign of their indifference to middle class celebrations. They had been married by a Justice of the Peace and had not had a wedding which, in Elsbeta’s view, made it mandatory that David should. Harriet did not smile for the camera, and David's eyes still bled shock, having just signed off from his academic career, releasing Harriet to pursue passions which were a mystery to him.

Professor Connell wanted to know what motivated Harriet's interest in this implausible affair between Marie de France and Chrétien. An ancient literary relationship? Someone else's love affair? It was not clear who Chrétien and Marie were, much less if they had known each other, and whether Harriet’s inquiry was a suitable finale to his last supervision of a doctoral thesis before he retired.

Harriet pointed out the poetic parallels in Chrétien and Marie de France, and both their concerns with identity. Anonymity was common for medieval writers, a fate which could happen to any talent, but was more likely to happen in the medieval world to a woman or a Jew. Marie was edgy about her identity. In one poem she insisted on her aristocratic lineage, that she be addressed as "Dame Marie," and that no one else claim her poetry. In La Vol Sainte Audre, she had written: "Here I write my name, Marie, that I may be remembered." In an age when there were no last names, no hall of records, no DNA to trace identity, she wrote what words she could concerning her impassioned identification: "Marie is my name and I am of France." But she was not remembered. The same had happened to Chrétien. He had boldly identified with the growing national French literature of chivalry.

"Our books have informed us that the pre-eminence in chivalry and learning once belonged to Greece. Then chivalry passed to Rome, together with the highest learning which now has come to France. God grant that it may be cherished here."

Prophetic words, considering that France was not yet a nation, only the idea of a nation, the expansion of royal powers which would be implemented half a century later in 1215 with the conquest of southern France, the prized Midi. In 1180, scarce a century after the first crusade, and thirty years after the second, with events fostering the emergence of France, Marie and Chrétien shared a political posture: national identification even before the nation existed, pre-national ardor similar to the pre-national ardor of the American colonies, a sense of what winds were blowing. France came into being and remained. The identities of these poets disappeared.

But they had once existed. In spite of their descent into anonymity, they had once existed and had been famous and feted. They had been flesh, blood, bones, and souls filled with the power of their talents and their longing for fame. In their time people knew who they were. Harriet believed it should not be impossible to trace their stories. If Chrétien was the Chrétien most scholars thought he was, he had become a cleric late in life in the abbey of St. Loupe in Troyes and the aristocratic Marie was his patron, the lady of the castle who held the key to the world of culture and recognition which every writer craves, and perhaps to his s****l longings. Amy Kelly had called Chrétien "Marie's literary vassal." It is the part played by Launcelot in his poem, "The Knight of the Cart," who is made to travel in a wagon that was used to carry dung or prisoners, forever stigmatized with that original status no matter how many jousts he won and no matter how high he rose. The queen tells him that he will pay dearly for even thinking of making love to her. Chrétien was pitched between options in identity, pitched as the medieval ages were pitched between monastery and worldliness, between the reclusive life and the life of knighthood.