Frye Boots and Friendship

Certain themes are woven into our life’s tapestry. And often these themes originate from a friendship. My melancholic theme began in 1975, when a friend at the University of Indiana showed me the Albrecht Dürer engraving Melencolia I (1514) (for the image, see last week’s newsletter Melancholia). He also introduced me to Frye Boots, a quality brand since 1863, which I still wear today.

Yet there are other things that he introduced me to that did not become themes in my life, for example, sitting on the porch of a log cabin shooting beer cans on a post (after having drunk the contents) or four-wheeling. As I describe in a journal entry from Sunday, April 24, 1977:

“Oh joy. Great joy!

I’m sitting in my sunny living room. It’s late morning. Two cups of coffee past 10:30. The old stereo Dylan and American Beauty [Grateful Dead] back again. There is even a Sunday paper and Saturday night drinking spree mess.

Oh joy. Great joy!

It marks the return of the late, great J. H. Rhodehamel—who heroically tipped the Cherokee jeep into the mud. In his own words, ‘My happiest moment of the day was when I backed that thing out of the mud. I thought for sure that we were fucked.’ He then drove it up the creek bank in a tremendous burst of adrenaline flinging chocolate chips of mud twenty feet into the air. We jumped and cheered in exultation. When he climbed out, I threw my arms around him like a damsel in distress who had just been rescued.

Once again, man conquers nature. One of the twentieth-century man’s extravagant pastimes—four-wheeling at Nebo Ridge, getting only 8 m.p.g. in the rain.”

Emma Watson (Hermione) writes in the Foreword to Tom Felton’s (Draco) autobiography Beyond the Wand (2022), “If you could boil the Harry Potter stories down to a single idea (and there are so many I am really stretching here), it would surely be about the value of friendship and how nothing of true meaning can be achieved without it. Friendships are the lynchpin of human existence.”

As I write this, I am mindful that many of you reading this newsletter are my friends. So, I take this moment to thank you for the themes that you have introduced into my life. The style of the newsletter has now become so digressive it could rival The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759), which means that it will be a very long-lived newsletter.

Poetic Melancholia

In 1981, I put together a collection of the poems that I had written from 1978 to 1981 called A Primitive Poetic Stonehenge, under the pseudonym Alice Bard. It was briefly available at A Room of One’s Own Bookstore in Madison before I withdrew it (because the poetry was bad). I feel certain that I possess the only copies of this work, so the real Alice Bards of the world need not worry. The first line of the first poem refers to Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I.

The Uneducated Imagination

I, the picture of melancholia,

Brooding darkly o’er a mysterious realm.

Little know I, of Abraham or Ulysses.

Little know I, of structure and form.

Little know I, of manners and morals.

I only know the state of my ignorance,

Pliantly unyielding,

And feel the rage of not understanding

Rising up to destruction

In accordance with the only truth

That can be known to me—a truth

That needn’t be taught—

The promptings of the unconscious mind.

The origins of the poem can be traced back to a conversation I had with my Madison housemate, shortly after we started living together in September 1977. He asserted in the condescending manner of Draco Malfoy that I was “uneducated,” despite the fact that I had a BA in geography and a Master’s degree in Public Administration. Rather than being offended, I accepted the fact that he might be right and for the next ten years I worked hard to acquire the education that I had missed by choosing vocational degrees. At times, it did seem like he was playing the role of Professor Henry Higgins and I was the flower girl Eliza Doolittle from George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (or the film version My Fair Lady). But unlike that story, I married the professor when I graduated from his tutelage and went to Oxford.

In 1980, I went to Europe for the first time with my housemate (i.e., “Professor Higgins”). He knew European history, so I imagined that he would teach me lots of things about the places we visited. But he said nothing. Back in the Rathskeller in Madison, I would listen to him talking brilliantly for hours to his fellow historian John Gerber. When I asked him why he did not talk to me in the same way, he said (not in a mean way), “You are not on my level.” I wanted to be on his level (and I was capable of being at his level), but I was not there yet.

So, I took courses in liberal arts subjects, and I read constantly—primary and secondary sources, biographies of major historical and literary figures, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, and numerous academic articles. I spent most of my time (days and evenings) at the University of Wisconsin Memorial library. (Well, to be honest, I had a student job there putting barcodes on every book in the stacks in preparation to automate the library checkout system. I was not the best worker because I would browse the contents of the book and set aside any interesting ones to read.)

After six years, I had reached the level of my housemate. We could talk for hours at the edge of thought, where drawing on the depth of your shared knowledge, two people are able to think together and move into original territory, pushing out the boundaries of what is known. But the parity was short-lived because I was about to go beyond his level.

Albrecht Dürer faced a similar problem in his married life:

“Agnes Frey thought that the man she had married was a painter in the late medieval sense, an honest craftsman who produced pictures as a tailor made coats and suits; but to her misfortune her husband discovered that art was both a divine gift and an intellectual achievement requiring humanistic learning, a knowledge of mathematics and the general attainments of a ‘liberal culture.’ Dürer simply outgrew the intellectual level and social sphere of his wife. . . . He loved the company of scholars and scientists, associated with bishops, patricians, noblemen and princes on terms of almost perfect equality, and generally preferred to domesticity the atmosphere of what might be called clubs (“Stuben”), studios, and libraries. She could not understand why he left her alone in the house and went off to discuss mythology or mathematics with his learned friends. . . . He lived in a world apart from hers, which filled her with misgivings, resentment, and jealousy.”¹

Albrecht Dürer, engraving, Saint Jerome in His Study (1514), CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

1. Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954), 7.