Percival Goodman, architect
One of our readers, David Bittner, who sometimes posts, in Comments, long, reflective pieces of self-induced musings not necessarily connected to the Scarriet article or poem above, has placed us in a dilemma; he has placed with us, unsolicited, both by mail and electronically, an article he has written entitled “Nostalgic Journalist’s Quest for Arcane Facts Leads to Unlocking of Iowa Synagogue’s Old Secret.”
We are utterly charmed by David Bittner; he represents something which we consider important, though we can’t quite identify it—a spirit from a bygone era: a rambling, observant, innocence—which, I think most of our readers will discern, is a spirit that differs from our cranky and beloved Scarriet.
We at Scarriet—our strangely named Blog—aspire to expound a high-sounding, credible, youthful yet scholarly, Zeitgeist of Poetry and Culture in a manner serious, Germanic, Romantic, racy, tragic, traditional, classical, critical.
Bittner offers a blast of nostalgia, humility, playfulness.
We pound. He dances. We dart. He skips. We flog. He chuckles. We romanticize. He defers.
We wish to publish him, but how can we do so, without betraying ourselves editorially? Our readers will see Bittner’s writing on Scarriet and think, ‘What the hell is going on?’
But we do pride ourselves on being inclusive. If we sometimes court controversy, we never intend to hurt; we seek to enlighten, to join hands.
We cannot turn Bittner away.
We found a solution.
We will marry his essay to remarks made by America’s greatest genius, in the fictional narration of his famous “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The solemn will be paired with the playful.
Bittner’s stated theme is “quest for arcane facts leads to unlocking…old secret…”
In Bittner’s essay, the way to the “secret” is filled with detours, and Poe perhaps can tell us why:
The mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects. We know of them, among other things, that they are always to their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a source of the liveliest enjoyment. As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting is such exercises as call his muscles into play, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles. He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his talent into play.
And so Poe introduces his tale, and before he gets to the actual mystery and its horror, Poe recounts how the narrator of the tale and his seclusive, humble companion, the amateur detective Dupin (a model for the later Sherlock Holmes) are walking along the streets of Paris together, for about fifteen minutes, without speaking:
We were strolling one night down a long dirty street, in the vicinity of the Palais Royal. Being both, apparently, occupied with thought, neither of us had spoken a syllable for fifteen minutes at least. All at once Dupin broke forth with these words:
“He is a very little fellow, that’s true, and would do better for the Théatre des Variétés.”
“There can be no doubt of that,” I replied unwittingly, and not at first observing (so much had I been absorbed in reflection) the extraordinary manner in which the speaker had chimed in with my meditations. In an instant afterward I recollected myself, and my astonishment was profound.
“Dupin,” I said gravely, “this is beyond my comprehension. I do not hesitate to say that I am amazed, and can scarcely credit my senses. How was it possible you should know what I was thinking of—?” Here I paused, to ascertain beyond a doubt whether he really knew of whom I thought.
“—of Chantilly,” said he, “why do you pause? You were remarking to yourself that his diminutive figure unfitted him for tragedy.”
This was precisely what had formed the subject of my reflections. Chantilly was a quondam cobbler of the Rue St. Denis, who, becoming stage-mad, had attempted the rôle of Xerxes, in Crébillon’s tragedy so called, and been notoriously Pasquinaded for his pains.
“Tell me, for Heaven’s sake,” I exclaimed, “the method—if method there is—by which you have been enabled to fathom my soul in this matter.” In fact I was even more startled than I would have been willing to express.
“It was the fruiterer,” replied my friend, ” who brought you to the conclusion that the mender of soles was not of sufficient height for Xerxes et id genus omne.”
“The fruiterer!—you astonish me—I know no fruiterer whosoever.”
“The man who ran up against you as we entered the street—it may have been fifteen minutes ago.”
And with that, we present David Bittner:
***
AS I enter my dotage, I have found myself eager to get answers to some questions that have had me wondering since I was young. For instance, I would like to do DNA-testing that might tell me more about my ethnicity. Raised in an observant Jewish home, am I in a straight line of descent from the ancient Israelites, or am I also partly Slavic, as I suspect? The Slavic may not show very much in my phenotype, but I think it must be there in my genotype! And what is my exact height in feet and inches? As one nurse put it to me recently, “It looks like you are 5′ 5” smack dab!”
Three years ago I took a short trip to Rockford, Illinois, which I consider my second home town. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, I spent most of my formative junior high and high school years in Rockford. Imagine the jolt I got when I went to have lunch at the Sweden House, a very nice, new restaurant in the mid-60s (and the place where my high school graduation party was held), and found a sign on the door that said, “This property is condemned.”
The next day I took a bus into Chicago to see the famous Brookfield Zoo. My mother had told me this was no doubt the origin of my dreams since childhood about a fabulous park with rectangular pools and flower beds, lots of fountains, and an old blue-uniformed ticket-taker with a white walrus mustache. Now, as I made my first visit to the Brookfield Zoo since 1957, I saw no mustachioed, old ticket-taker, but there unmistakably were the rectangular pools and flower beds and fountains that I remembered. I think that St. Helena could not have felt any surer about the holy places she identified in fourth-century Palestine, than I felt about these familiar, old features of Brookfield Zoo.
Another story that goes back to early childhood concerns the two summer vacation trips we took to Lake Okoboji, a popular resort in Iowa. On one of these two trips I accidentally dropped parts of a children’s tea-set, made by the well-known Ohio Art Company, right into Lake Okoboji. Of all the miniature metal utensils that I had just lost, I particularly liked the blue teapot and the way its blue lid fit so exactly into the top. So in the late 1980s, when I saw the very same tea set, in mint condition, on sale for $50 at a West Palm Beach, Florida flea market, I had to have it. If affects me in the same way today as it did originally. It is cunning!
And I wanted to find my all-time favorite “Peanuts” comic strip again. It was about Peppermint Patty getting drowned out by her classmates’ laughter when she got up to present her science project on “toast, before and after.” Patty began, “Now, on this board is a slice of untoasted bread, and…” The whole next panel was filled with Patty’s classmates chortling, “HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA.” It reminded me of my own ridiculous seventh grade science project. I turned my saucer sled upside down, painted it red with two big green spots for eyes, and attached two pipe-cleaners to the top for antennae. I called my creation a “Martian.” I wrote a few pages supposedly describing its locomotive, alimentary and sensory systems. I never found out exactly what grade Mr. Hill, our popular P.E. Dept. head, who also taught science, gave my project, but I can definitely tell you that it was not among those selected for display in that year’s school science fair. But it’s much more important to me now to have this cartoon drawn by Charles Schulz in 1970. I found it in “The Complete Peanuts,” volume 10. These volumes were produced surely, but slowly.
Now, related to all these Proustian tea-cakes stories and the “George Webber” story of quest for identity, told by Thomas Wolfe in his novel, “You Can’t Go Home Again,” is another story from my youth that lurked as a question mark in my mind until recently. Really intent this time on getting an answer, I found it by surfing the internet and digging through library books and journal articles.
I will explain. And now I come to the main subject of this whole article. When I was a teenager, in temple youth group in Rockford, several of us participated in “conclavette” held at Temple Emanuel in Davenport, Iowa. We were struck to see how the second half of the Shema prayer had been carved in English on the stone façade of Temple Emanuel. Of course we all knew what it was supposed to say, which was, “The Lord Our God is One.” But the two final letters of the phrase—N and E—made the whole six-word phrase, carved in the streamlined, sans serif, International style of Bauhaus, beg to be read as, “THE LORD OUR GOD IS OK.” We all noticed it and laughed. But was it real or just our imagination?
Now, I have often thought that somebody could write a good thesis on the decline of the typewriter as an instrument for creating ambiguous messages, with the rise of the computer. There used to be many traveling salesmen who took typewriters with them on the road. These typewriters were used primarily to write business reports. But once in a while you would hear the story of some distraught, lonely salesman typing a letter to his wife from the road. He would manipulate the typewriter keys to create words and messages with double meanings. For instance, he might type, sloppily, “May is beautiful. I wish you were her.” The same possibility does not exist in computer-land. (And if the computer had not largely replaced the typewriter, imagine what a field day “birthers” and other detractors of President Barack Obama could have had with the names “Omaha” and “Obama.” Participating in the Nebraska Democratic presidential caucus in 2008, I had to do a double-take when I saw certain posters and placards that were being hoisted.)
Or there is the following story that my cousin’s Harry’s sister Ruth used to relish. (Both Harry and Ruth are deceased now.) In the 1930s, Ruth served as administrative assistant to Dr. Philip Sher, president of the Jewish Federation of Omaha. While Ruth was still new to her job, she signed some of Dr. Sher’s routine correspondence with a simple abbreviation of his name: “Dr. P. Sher.” Of course Ruth had no idea that she had created an embarrassing double entendre. But it so happens that a prominent Yiddish term of endearment for a little boy is a “pisher.” My great-aunt Dora Arbitman, for instance, used to call me, “a little pisher” when I was that age. At any rate, Dr. Sher noticed the great similarity of his initial and last name to the slang Yiddish word, “pisher,” and he was not amused.
And then there was my typewritten gaffe, written accidentally on purpose, just to shake up the gals in the composition room of The Fond du Lac (WI) Commonwealth Reporter, where I was a summer intern in 1969 and 1970. In one of my accident reports, about a Mr. Puckaway’s auto mishap, I typed F instead of P. (And there really was this Mr. Puckaway, who was involved in a car-crash. I did not make him up.) Sure enough, soon three young women came running upstairs to the newsroom, ostensibly to wag their fingers at me, but it was obvious to me, from their friendly laughter, that I had actually made their morning.
Once again, opportunities and excuses for ambiguity, such as seen in most of the preceding scenarios, do not exist in Computerland. But that still leaves stonemasonry and other traditional media to offer possibilities for mischief-making and honest accidents. Touring Morocco in 1994, I was shown the tomb of a Sultan where, it was speculated, some little stars of David in the paved floor may have been the work of an unknown Jewish architect’s assistant who was just using the Star of David to scrawl the equivalent of, “Kilroy Was Here.”
Or how about the famous epitaph, “O Rare Ben Jonson,” on the grave of the great English dramatist Ben Jonson (1573—1637)? The “O” and the word-fragment, “rare,” were intended to spell the Latin word, “Orare,” which means, “Pray for.” But the “wrong” phrase has actually been considered for so much more suitable than the “right” one, that no one has disturbed it for almost 400 years. And let’s not forget Richard Nixon’s solemn criticism of black leftist youth’s “Du Bois” Clubs in California for supposedly using phonics to create unfair competition for the Boys Clubs of America. (As a private citizen in the mid-60s, Nixon served for several years as president of the Boys Clubs of America.)
Then let us consider the little blue-and-white six-pointed stars and other Jewish symbols that Berta Hummel (Sister Maria Innocentia) used freely in her artwork, upon which the later Hummel figurines were based. Some of the angels of Berta’s stars may look a bit askew compared to those of other “Mogen Dovids,” old and new, but they were still recognizable enough as “Jewish stars” to make Hitler angry at the young nun. He forbade the sale of any Hummel work in Germany. Hitler also didn’t like Sister Berta’s depictions of the Stations of the Cross. Maybe Berta’s pictures just made it plain that most of the ones doing good things were Jews, and most of the ones doing bad things were Romans! (The author’s aunt by marriage, the late Shirley Bittner, was Sister Berta’s niece or great-niece. The family is not sure which. I think it is simply not that important to them. But, a convert to Judaism, herself, my aunt certainly exhibited no anti-Semitic leanings, and she now rests in Omaha’s Mount Zion Cemetery, a very well-kept little Jewish cemetery of her own choosing.)
And now, as my favorite example of ambiguity in arts and crafts, I turn to my friendship of 40+ years with Gerard and Sonia Teller, formerly of Strasbourg, France, now of Jerusalem, Israel. I have many fond memories of them and their four children. One Friday night in the summer of 1973, we had just sat down to the ritual Sabbath Eve meal. I picked up the silver Kiddush cup (the goblet used for blessing the wine) by my place-setting and casually examined it. What should I discover it, but that stamped onto the bottom of the cup, all by itself, was the figure, 800. I think it was probably a foundry mark. But I showed the cup to Gerard and Sonia and said, “Regardez! Cela date de Charlemagne!” It gave us all a good laugh. (As any educated person ought to know, in the year 800, Charlemagne became the first Holy Roman Emperor.)
As we have seen in this example from France, ambiguity may be imposed on certain letter groups. Some people do this to make trouble, others for more humane reasons, like humor. Or, an artist like Sister Berta Hummel may use graphics to make a political statement—gambling on this statement’s whole possibility of meanings to keep her out of prison. The reasons for these bloopers just vary widely. They may include everything from damage control, to theatricality, to playfulness, to carelessness, to opportunism, to simple mistakenness, and to malice.
I think that Percival Goodman, widely acknowledged as the king of American synagogue architecture, and the man who designed Temple Emanuel of Davenport, would come under the “playful” category. Wikipedia tells us that Goodman believed in using “dramatic” and “attention-getting” “accents” to make motorists notice the new synagogues of outlying suburbia. Goodman designed more than 50 synagogues, himself, coast to coast. These “dramatic accents” and Goodman’s coy description of himself as “an agnostic converted by Hitler” make it very believable that this was a man who would think nothing of writing, “THE LORD OUR GOD IS OK” on the wall of a synagogue. Goodman said, “I don’t have any notion of what God is all about; I’m very suspicious of the whole notion of God. Therefore I can only deal with men. Well, that’s not as high an aspiration as God, and therefore the work I do will always be secular.”
And so I have satisfied myself, after 40 years of uncertainty (including the frustration of unanswered phone calls, letters, and e-mails to Temple Emanuel), that the quality of being “OK must have been an addition that Percival Goodman made to the 13 traditional attributes of God. He was a real intellectual and a well-meaning man. So was his brother, Paul Goodman, with whom Percival co-authored numerous books on philosophy and religion. And so was Somerset Maugham, the famous English author, who was hard to pin down on what he believed. At times he flaunted atheism—mostly to shock people. But during his final illness at the age of 91, he felt the return of faith and said he would accept people’s prayers. So maybe we could say something like that about Percival Goodman—that if he used sans serif to stir things up, maybe it didn’t mean that he was altogether sans seraph.
The author wishes to thank the Omaha Public Library’s reference staff for their great help in the preparation of this article. He will be happy, when possible, to furnish book and page references, for factual material cited herein.
***
So there is David Bittner’s article, carved in all its glory on Scarriet, to remain forever, side by side with Scarriet’s glorious poems. Amen. Paul Goodman, mentioned above in the article, is the illustrious author of Growing Up Absurd, and he and his brother advocated for an intimate, car-less Manhattan. Percival Goodman was not a God-man, but it seems he was an OK-man. Thank you, David Bittner, for a warm, funny, informative and delightful essay!
