A story half dream, all remembrance, evoked by the memories of high-school Latin class I shared earlier in the week:
I go off to college, Latin medal in hand. Because the scholarship I’ve earned seems to be premised on majoring in theology (I had to write something on the form, when it asked about my plans for a major), I seem locked into a theology major.
I go off to college, Latin medal in hand. Because the scholarship I’ve earned seems to be premised on majoring in theology (I had to write something on the form, when it asked about my plans for a major), I seem locked into a theology major.
But I don’t like theology. I like Latin. I love Latin, in fact.
And so someone somewhere tells me I have to receive permission from the chair of the theology department to drop the theology major and switch to classics. I spot him reading his breviary, pacing on the high balcony that looks out over the front lawn of the university into the live oaks and bayous of the park across the street. The back of his cassock sweeps dramatically around as he turns, one end of the heavily pilastered balcony to the other.
As he reads and paces, he retrieves a cigarette from the elegant signature gold cigarette case for which he’s known, lights it, continues with the breviary. Puffs of smoke now accompany the swooping of the cassock skirt. When he’s finished (with both the praying and the cigarette), I muster courage to approach him.
No. No. You absolutely cannot switch your major. Your scholarship was given for theology. If you drop theology as your major, you lose your scholarship, he tells me.
No. No. You absolutely cannot switch your major. Your scholarship was given for theology. If you drop theology as your major, you lose your scholarship, he tells me.
I go to my academic adviser in desperation. That’s bullshit. He’s lying, the adviser tells me. A dean’s scholarship isn’t given for any major. It’s given to pay your tuition throughout college. You can change your major as many times as you like and still keep your scholarship if you keep your GPA in the right range.
And so I declare the major in Latin and Greek. But there’s a problem. Only one person, a priest, teaches all classes in Latin and Greek. For all four years of the program.
And so I declare the major in Latin and Greek. But there’s a problem. Only one person, a priest, teaches all classes in Latin and Greek. For all four years of the program.
And I find him, well, terrifying. He’s the scion of one of the aristocratic families that escaped Versailles at the time of the French Revolution, he tells students the first day of class. A bunch of them moved to his corner of southwest Louisiana. Bunch is my word and not his. He probably said coterie. He’s tall, thin, utterly impassive except when he wants to show cruelty: an aristocrat par excellence.
A Jesuit par excellence, I wonder? They’re an entirely new species. To me, at least.
And his teaching methods are, well, eccentric. In high school, we had read Latin texts and translated them on sight at the direction of the teacher. Here, we spend most of the class listening to Fr. Versailles’s bitter reminiscences about the years he spent confined to the novitiate, teaching Latin and Greek to priests-to-be. Or we turn English texts into Latin and Greek.
And his teaching methods are, well, eccentric. In high school, we had read Latin texts and translated them on sight at the direction of the teacher. Here, we spend most of the class listening to Fr. Versailles’s bitter reminiscences about the years he spent confined to the novitiate, teaching Latin and Greek to priests-to-be. Or we turn English texts into Latin and Greek.
Which we then receive back from the hand of Fr. Versailles and his sole assistant, an elevated young woman with pencils stuck all around through her hair like Medusa with her serpents, marked all over in tiny squiggles. The squiggles tell us that we have never done the job quite right, quite elegantly enough.
Our translations are technically correct.
Our translations are technically correct.
They’re just not U. They’re Simon Cowell trying to speak Latin. Not Rupert Everett declaiming it with languid ease. No charm. No class. No aristocratic heft to our translations.
Better luck next time.
As he reminisces and scribbles, Fr. Versailles smokes, long, thin cigarettes that show off his long, thin hands to advantage. Cigarettes whose invisible specks of ash he picks from his black clerical outfit throughout class. All the Jesuits who teach me in that first year smoke while teaching.
As he reminisces and scribbles, Fr. Versailles smokes, long, thin cigarettes that show off his long, thin hands to advantage. Cigarettes whose invisible specks of ash he picks from his black clerical outfit throughout class. All the Jesuits who teach me in that first year smoke while teaching.
Well, I take that back. One pulls a snuffbox from his prepossessing ruffled long sleeves and pinches snuff to sniff as he talks about Goya and Zipoli and Jean-Paul Sartre and how they somehow all connect. This is in a course called something like “The Meaning of Everything in Western Culture in One Semester.”
It’s taught exclusively by Jesuits, Jesuits from various disciplines who come into the class on a revolving basis, talking to each other across their disciplinary lines as we sit and listen. Most of the others in the class are Jesuit scholastics. They occasionally ask questions. I sit in silence, invisible.
It’s taught exclusively by Jesuits, Jesuits from various disciplines who come into the class on a revolving basis, talking to each other across their disciplinary lines as we sit and listen. Most of the others in the class are Jesuit scholastics. They occasionally ask questions. I sit in silence, invisible.
At the end of the semester, Fr. Ruffles tells me with astonishment that I’ve done better on my exam than the scholastics have done. I somehow connect Goya and Zipoli and Sartre and Copernicus and see the threads of meaning that bind them together but elude even the elect.
The Latin and Greek become impossible. It’s impossible to be wrong all the time.
Impossible to be told you’re wrong when you’re right, to be told in fine, endless tiny annotations that your translation is correct but just not good enough.
It’s impossible, most of all, to hear one more story about the waste of Fr. Versailles’ talent when he was immured for years at the novittiate, where he taught increasingly dull Latin and Greek scholars year upon year rather than promising scholars at Loyola.
Impossible to be told you’re wrong when you’re right, to be told in fine, endless tiny annotations that your translation is correct but just not good enough.
It’s impossible, most of all, to hear one more story about the waste of Fr. Versailles’ talent when he was immured for years at the novittiate, where he taught increasingly dull Latin and Greek scholars year upon year rather than promising scholars at Loyola.
I drop out. I change my major—English, this time. I’m satisfied with the plebian reaches of Joyce and Flannery O’Connor, since the empyrean heights of Aeschylus and Pliny evidently escape me even when I can read them in their original languages without a hitch.
My four years at Loyola come to an end.
A few weeks before graduation, I pass Fr. Versailles in the rose garden he loves to tend, in the garden he tends very lovingly—something that has made me want to continue approaching and talking to him throughout my years at Loyola, even though I know I’ll hear something like, Oh, you read Plato in that philosophy class in translation. Pity.
A few weeks before graduation, I pass Fr. Versailles in the rose garden he loves to tend, in the garden he tends very lovingly—something that has made me want to continue approaching and talking to him throughout my years at Loyola, even though I know I’ll hear something like, Oh, you read Plato in that philosophy class in translation. Pity.
Or, They’re greener behind the ears and more callow with each incoming class.
As we chat, I look down. Fr. Versailles is snipping his roses wearing open-toed sandals.
Protruding from the sandals are toenails painted with bright red nail polish.
I walk away. Wonderment. Bafflement. Amusement. Dread.
Another squiggle to add to the well-annotated text.
My lessons are complete.
They’ve just begun
as I receive my college diploma.
The graphic, which is from the website of the New York Jesuit province, shows Jesuits at the Holy Name parade, St. Peter's Prep, New Jersey, 1941.
