On an April day in 1746 at the grand con-
vent of the Carthusians in Paris, about two
hundred monks arranged themselves in a long, snaking
line. Each monk held one end of a twenty—f1ve—foot iron
wire in each hand, connecting him to his neighbor on ei-
ther side. Together, the monks and their connecting wires
formed a line over a mile long.
Once the line was complete, the abbé ]ean—Antoine
Nollet, a noted French scientist, took a primitive electrical
battery and, without warning, connected it to the line of
monks—giving all of them a powerful electric shock.
Nollet did not go around zapping monks with static
electricity for fun; his experiment had a serious scientific
objective. Like many scientists of the time, he was measur-
ing the properties of electricity to find out how far it could
be transmitted along wires and how fast it traveled. The
simultaneous exclamations and contortions of a mile—long
line of monks revealed that electricity could be transmit-
ted over a great distance; and as far as N ollet could tell, it
covered that distance instantly.
This was a big deal.
It suggested that in theory, it ought to be possible to
harness electricity to build a signaling device capable of
sending messages over great distances incomparably faster
than a human messenger could carry them.
At the time, sending a message to someone a hundred
miles away took the best part of a day—the time it took a
messenger traveling on horseback to cover the distance.
This unavoidable delay had remained constant for thou-
sands of years; it was as much a fact of life for George
Washington as it was for Henry VIII, Charlemagne, and
Iulius Caesar.
As a result, the pace of life was slow. Rulers dis-
patched armies to distant lands and waited months for
news of victory or defeat; ships sailed over the horizon on
epic voyages, and those on board were not seen or heard
from again for years. News of an event spread outward in
a slowly growing circle, like a ripple in a pond, whose edge
moved no faster than a galloping horse or a swift—sailing
ship.
To transmit information any more quickly, something
that moved faster than a horse or a ship was clearly re-
quired. Sound, which travels at a speed of about twelve
miles per minute, is one means of speedier communica-
tion. lf a church bell strikes one olclock, a monk standing
in a field half a mile away knows what time it is about
two seconds later. A horse—borne messenger, in contrast,
setting out from the church precisely on the hour to de—
liver the message "It is one o’clock,” would take a couple
of minutes to cover the same distance.
Light also offers an expeditious way to communicate.
If the monk has keen eyesight and the air is clear, he may
be able to make out the hands of the church clock. And
since light (which travels at nearly 200,000 miles per sec-
ond) covers short distances almost instantly, the informa-
tion that it is a particular time of day effectively travels
from the clock face to the monk in what seems to be no
time at all.
Now experiments by Nollet and others showed that
electricity also seemed capable of traveling great distances
instantaneously. Unlike light, electricity could be trans-
mitted along wires and around corners; a line of sight
from one place to another was not needed. This meant that
if an electric shock was administered at one o’clock via a
half—mile—long wire running from the church to a distant
monk, he would know exactly what time it was, even if he
was underground or indoors or otherwise out of sight of
the clock tower. Electricity held out the promise of high-speed signaling.
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
From 'Tilt'
Galileo was by then aged, infirm, nearly totally blind and
living the interior exile imposed by the Inquisition in 1633
for being “vehemently suspected of heresy.’.’* The master
was still lucid, however, and desperately in need of a
secretary-scribe. Recognizing this, his inquisitors lifted the
str-ict seclusion to which he had been sentenced in order to
admit Viviani. For three years, Galileo rambled and
recited as Viviani furiously took down everything—corre-
spondence, dialogues, mathematical problems, physical
theories, discourses, and, all the while, the recollections of a
long life marked by equal measures of triumph and humil-
iation.
By all accounts, Viviani was as exemplary and devoted a
disciple as any master could hope to find, and not just dur-
ing those few years by Galileo’s side. For although Viviani
would go -on to achieve considerable fame in his own right,
becoming court mathematician to the grand duke of Tus-
cany and publishing a good many competent, if less than
pioneering, works on geometry, throughout his life he
dedicated much of his energies to vindicating his mentor’s
name and propagating Galilean scientific theories. It was
Viviani who edited the first collection of Galileo’s works
and wrote the first biography of the astronomer, mathe-
matician, and physicist, the Vita di Galileo, which became
(Galileo-was condemned of heresy in I633 by the tribunal of the Inqui-
sition in the basilica of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome. The
charge arose from Galileo’s defense of the Copernican theory of the
solar system which he published in The Dialogue Concerning the Two
Chief World Systems, Florence, 1632.)
something of a best-seller throughout Europe. Moreover,
Viviani was the driving force behind Leopold de’ Medici’s
establishment of the Accademia del Cimento, a scientific
institution dedicated to experimenting with the theories of
the late, great master, in Florence in 1657. The ever-
grateful Viviani even left money in his will for the con-
struction of a sepulchral monument to Galileo in
Florence’s church of Santa Croce, to place Galileo along-
side Michelangelo, Machiavelli, and Leonardo Bruni. And
finally, and not least significantly, it was Vincenzo Viviani
who first placed Galileo atop the Tower of Pisa, a place
where he would remain more or less fixed, at least in the
collective Western imagination, for centuries to come-
this despite the fact that in none of Galileo’s writings, nor
any, of his personal correspondence, is the Pisan carnpanile
mentioned, never mind anything about conducting a single
experiment from its heights. Nor, for that matter, did any‘
of the other “teachers and philosophers, and the whole
assembly of students” from the university of Pisa whom
Viviani places there have anything at all to say on the mat-
ter. Perhaps the only plausible explanation for such
resounding silence aboutGalileo’s groundbreaking, and
quite public, scientific discovery at the tower-—here, after
all, was a lone genius‘ shattering an Aristotelian dictum
honored for millennia, all before a veritable throng, and,
what’s more, “with repeated experiments”——is that the
events, quite simply, never took place. In all likelihood, the
timeworn and assiduously reported image of Galileo drop-
ping objects from the summit of the Tower is the stuff of pure myth.
Thursday, December 19, 2013
Byron and Shelley and Pisa
From "Tilt" a history of the Tower of Pisa:
Romanticism has been called, among other things, the
cult of the extinct,” and the romantics were never better
occupied than when scrambling about ancient ruins. The
remains of Rome, Greece, and Etruria evoked images of
some prelapsarian,'heroic age that the poets and artists
were eager to resurrect.* Granted, Pisa wasn’t Rome, but
there were ruins enough to help to conjure up the glorles
of the past and inspire sublime reverie. The monuments in
the Campo dei Miracoli were already centuries old and
thus sufficiently hoary to arouse the curiosity of the Pisa
Circle. Shelley, Leigh Hunt, and Lord Byron especially
were fond of visiting the Camposanto to examine
Oreagna’s Triumph of Death; they admired Nicola and Gio-
vanni Pisano’s pulpits in the baptistery and the duomo; and
they gazed in wonder at the tower, which, at latest count,
leaned twelve feet, six and a quarter inches askew. “Pisa
with its hanging tower and Sophia-like dome remind me,”
said Byron, “of an eastern place.” ,
The romantic vision of the Tower of Pisa couldn’t have
differed more profoundly from that of more scientifically
inclined men like Edward Cresy and George Taylor. If, as
one would suspect, the English architects had lamented the
campanile’s slanted state -in the name of the classical ideals
of order and symmetry, it was precisely the anomaly of the
tower’s tilt that the romantics embraced. That the cam-
panile was singular, wondrous, irregular, brimming with
pathos, and suggestive of “an eastern place” was, to the
romantic sensibility, at least, cause for admiration and cele-
bration. Indeed, one of romanticism’s greatest contribu-
tions to aesthetics was its ethos that discovered beauty in
unconventional places like a storm-tossed sea, a desolate
heath, a ruin, or a crooked tower.
For all of their impact, however,_the romantics’ stay in
Pisa was actually quite short. On Iuly 8, I822, Percy Bysshe
Shelley and Edward Williams boarded the less-than-
seaworthy Don ]uan and set sail across the Gulf of Spezia.
Edward Trelawny was there to see them off, along with a
Genoese sailor who, as the boat slipped away, is said to
have commented, “Look at those black lines and the dirty
rags hanging on them out of the sky——they are a warning;
look at the smoke on the water; the devil is brewing mis-
chief.” They were the last ones to see Shelley and Williams
alive. The poet’s body was washed ashore ten days later,
Williams’s soon followed. In a highly charged rite that no
doubt would have pleased the poet, Lord Byron had the
bodies cremated on the beach at Viareggio, north of Pisa.
“We have been burning the bodies of Shelley and Williams
on the seashore,” he wrote to Margaret Iane King Moore,
another member of the Pisa Circle. “You can have no idea
what an extraordinary effect‘ such a funeral pile has, on a
desolate shore, with mountains in the background and the
sea before, and the singular appearance the salt and frank-
incense gave to the flame.”
Not surprisingly, the Pisa Circle soon broke up. Byron,
Teresa Gamba, Mary Shelley, and Leigh Hunt and his
family all moved on to Genoa, while _Pisa reverted to its
somnolent self. The legacy of the romantics, however, lin-
gered on, and not just in the works composed by the
Circle while there. Thanks in large part to these works_—
including much of Byron’s Don ]uan (cantos six through
ten, at least); “Adonais,” Percy Shelley’s elegy on the death
of Keats; and Mary Shelley’s novel Valperga: Or t/are Lzfe
and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca-and the
posthumous fame of both Shelley and Byron (the latter
died just two years after Shelley, fighting for Greek inde-
pendence from the Ottoman empire), Pisa became a de
rigueur stop on a romantic pilgrimage trail. Soon a steady
stream of travelers, poets, students, and nonconformists of
every stripe turned up to pay homage at the haunts where
the Pisa Circle had lived and played in their Paradise of
Exiles. One such pilgrim-traveler was the French poet and _
novelist Louise Colet, whose diary of her stay at Pisa pro- -
vides an intimate glimpse of life in the town in the mid-
nineteenth-century. A passage on her visit to the Tower of
Pisa is particularly revealing, saying much about the evo-
lution of the tower and the shifting sentiments of
observers toward it:
I was anxious to climb this famous leaning tower’
that now stoodbefore me, graceful and weightless, '
standing out against the blue sky with its; eight cylin-
drical galleries of columns; but when I wanted them
to open the door to let me up, difficulties began. No
less than three people at a time are allowed up, I’m
told, since two travellers (likely lovers) jumped over
the rail at the top of the tower tocommit suicide.
I call to my cab-driver and look for a third person _
in the deserted square, but to no avail. While I
debate with the intransigent keeper, a cab arrives
delivering a visitor; the man joins us, and at ‘length
we are allowed up. The tower is 184 ft. tall, and
completely sheathed in marble; the foot slips on the
smooth stone; giddiness overcomes one as you
progress between these open galleries and the eye is
dazzled by the intensity of the light on a summer
day, embracing the vast horizon that stretches out all
around; the body, as if attracted towards the
precipice, staggers through the space between the
columns; I am compelled to lean on the arm‘ of my
accidental companion. i
Once on the platform, an incommensurable
expanse is revealed to our eyes; the blue sea merges
with the sky to the south-west, and in this twofold.
blue the little islands ’ of Gorgona and Caprara v
emerge; further away, the uncertain lines of Corsica
and Elba can be made out; on a closer plane, Liv'orno ~
stands out right by the edge of the waves; following
the coastline you can see the spot where Byron
burned Shelley’s body on the funeral pyre. . . .
I descend reluctantly, despite the queasiness
which the seeming oscillation of the monument pro-
vokes in me. The tower feels unsteady to me, as if it
would drag us along in its fall. It is a known fact that
stretching a rope from its summit to the ground, on
the leaning side, the topwill extend over the base by
over 9 ft. This inclination was used by Galileo in his
experiments on the falling of heavy bodies.
There is a good deal to glean from Colet’s account. On a
tragic note, it seems that travelers (lovers?) were already
turning to the Tower of Pisa asa suitably dramatic setting
from which to leap to their deaths (a sadly persistent tradi-
tion). They were overcome, one presumes, with Zc mal du
siécle, that wholly romantic malady consisting of more or
less equal doses of the jadedness of Byron’s Childe Harold,
the revulsion of Chateaubriand’s René, and the u/eltsc/zmerz
of Goethe’s Werther. As could well be expected in such cir-
cumstances, the Pisan authorities were obliged to restrict
access to the campanile (although it is hard to understand
how the measure of allowing no less than three visitors at a
time would. help to prevent suicides).
*In this regard it is interesting to note that in his memorial portrait of
Percy Bysshe Shelley, the painter Joseph Severn tellingly set the Poet in
a landscape replete with ruins. The canvas, entitled Shelley Composzng
“Prometheus Unbound" in the Baths of Caracalla, shows a surprisingly
boyish rebelpoet drawing inspiration from the Roman ruins f0f 1115
dramatic poem on Prometheus’s own revolt against the gods
Romanticism has been called, among other things, the
cult of the extinct,” and the romantics were never better
occupied than when scrambling about ancient ruins. The
remains of Rome, Greece, and Etruria evoked images of
some prelapsarian,'heroic age that the poets and artists
were eager to resurrect.* Granted, Pisa wasn’t Rome, but
there were ruins enough to help to conjure up the glorles
of the past and inspire sublime reverie. The monuments in
the Campo dei Miracoli were already centuries old and
thus sufficiently hoary to arouse the curiosity of the Pisa
Circle. Shelley, Leigh Hunt, and Lord Byron especially
were fond of visiting the Camposanto to examine
Oreagna’s Triumph of Death; they admired Nicola and Gio-
vanni Pisano’s pulpits in the baptistery and the duomo; and
they gazed in wonder at the tower, which, at latest count,
leaned twelve feet, six and a quarter inches askew. “Pisa
with its hanging tower and Sophia-like dome remind me,”
said Byron, “of an eastern place.” ,
The romantic vision of the Tower of Pisa couldn’t have
differed more profoundly from that of more scientifically
inclined men like Edward Cresy and George Taylor. If, as
one would suspect, the English architects had lamented the
campanile’s slanted state -in the name of the classical ideals
of order and symmetry, it was precisely the anomaly of the
tower’s tilt that the romantics embraced. That the cam-
panile was singular, wondrous, irregular, brimming with
pathos, and suggestive of “an eastern place” was, to the
romantic sensibility, at least, cause for admiration and cele-
bration. Indeed, one of romanticism’s greatest contribu-
tions to aesthetics was its ethos that discovered beauty in
unconventional places like a storm-tossed sea, a desolate
heath, a ruin, or a crooked tower.
For all of their impact, however,_the romantics’ stay in
Pisa was actually quite short. On Iuly 8, I822, Percy Bysshe
Shelley and Edward Williams boarded the less-than-
seaworthy Don ]uan and set sail across the Gulf of Spezia.
Edward Trelawny was there to see them off, along with a
Genoese sailor who, as the boat slipped away, is said to
have commented, “Look at those black lines and the dirty
rags hanging on them out of the sky——they are a warning;
look at the smoke on the water; the devil is brewing mis-
chief.” They were the last ones to see Shelley and Williams
alive. The poet’s body was washed ashore ten days later,
Williams’s soon followed. In a highly charged rite that no
doubt would have pleased the poet, Lord Byron had the
bodies cremated on the beach at Viareggio, north of Pisa.
“We have been burning the bodies of Shelley and Williams
on the seashore,” he wrote to Margaret Iane King Moore,
another member of the Pisa Circle. “You can have no idea
what an extraordinary effect‘ such a funeral pile has, on a
desolate shore, with mountains in the background and the
sea before, and the singular appearance the salt and frank-
incense gave to the flame.”
Not surprisingly, the Pisa Circle soon broke up. Byron,
Teresa Gamba, Mary Shelley, and Leigh Hunt and his
family all moved on to Genoa, while _Pisa reverted to its
somnolent self. The legacy of the romantics, however, lin-
gered on, and not just in the works composed by the
Circle while there. Thanks in large part to these works_—
including much of Byron’s Don ]uan (cantos six through
ten, at least); “Adonais,” Percy Shelley’s elegy on the death
of Keats; and Mary Shelley’s novel Valperga: Or t/are Lzfe
and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca-and the
posthumous fame of both Shelley and Byron (the latter
died just two years after Shelley, fighting for Greek inde-
pendence from the Ottoman empire), Pisa became a de
rigueur stop on a romantic pilgrimage trail. Soon a steady
stream of travelers, poets, students, and nonconformists of
every stripe turned up to pay homage at the haunts where
the Pisa Circle had lived and played in their Paradise of
Exiles. One such pilgrim-traveler was the French poet and _
novelist Louise Colet, whose diary of her stay at Pisa pro- -
vides an intimate glimpse of life in the town in the mid-
nineteenth-century. A passage on her visit to the Tower of
Pisa is particularly revealing, saying much about the evo-
lution of the tower and the shifting sentiments of
observers toward it:
I was anxious to climb this famous leaning tower’
that now stoodbefore me, graceful and weightless, '
standing out against the blue sky with its; eight cylin-
drical galleries of columns; but when I wanted them
to open the door to let me up, difficulties began. No
less than three people at a time are allowed up, I’m
told, since two travellers (likely lovers) jumped over
the rail at the top of the tower tocommit suicide.
I call to my cab-driver and look for a third person _
in the deserted square, but to no avail. While I
debate with the intransigent keeper, a cab arrives
delivering a visitor; the man joins us, and at ‘length
we are allowed up. The tower is 184 ft. tall, and
completely sheathed in marble; the foot slips on the
smooth stone; giddiness overcomes one as you
progress between these open galleries and the eye is
dazzled by the intensity of the light on a summer
day, embracing the vast horizon that stretches out all
around; the body, as if attracted towards the
precipice, staggers through the space between the
columns; I am compelled to lean on the arm‘ of my
accidental companion. i
Once on the platform, an incommensurable
expanse is revealed to our eyes; the blue sea merges
with the sky to the south-west, and in this twofold.
blue the little islands ’ of Gorgona and Caprara v
emerge; further away, the uncertain lines of Corsica
and Elba can be made out; on a closer plane, Liv'orno ~
stands out right by the edge of the waves; following
the coastline you can see the spot where Byron
burned Shelley’s body on the funeral pyre. . . .
I descend reluctantly, despite the queasiness
which the seeming oscillation of the monument pro-
vokes in me. The tower feels unsteady to me, as if it
would drag us along in its fall. It is a known fact that
stretching a rope from its summit to the ground, on
the leaning side, the topwill extend over the base by
over 9 ft. This inclination was used by Galileo in his
experiments on the falling of heavy bodies.
There is a good deal to glean from Colet’s account. On a
tragic note, it seems that travelers (lovers?) were already
turning to the Tower of Pisa asa suitably dramatic setting
from which to leap to their deaths (a sadly persistent tradi-
tion). They were overcome, one presumes, with Zc mal du
siécle, that wholly romantic malady consisting of more or
less equal doses of the jadedness of Byron’s Childe Harold,
the revulsion of Chateaubriand’s René, and the u/eltsc/zmerz
of Goethe’s Werther. As could well be expected in such cir-
cumstances, the Pisan authorities were obliged to restrict
access to the campanile (although it is hard to understand
how the measure of allowing no less than three visitors at a
time would. help to prevent suicides).
*In this regard it is interesting to note that in his memorial portrait of
Percy Bysshe Shelley, the painter Joseph Severn tellingly set the Poet in
a landscape replete with ruins. The canvas, entitled Shelley Composzng
“Prometheus Unbound" in the Baths of Caracalla, shows a surprisingly
boyish rebelpoet drawing inspiration from the Roman ruins f0f 1115
dramatic poem on Prometheus’s own revolt against the gods
Moncure Conway and Emerson
After dinner, the two men went for a stroll around
Walden Pond. Conwa found his mentor had reached a fairl
pragmatic view of religion—a minister, Emerson supposed, was
still moderately useful in the world. Not for saving souls, but “to
a conscientious man to sit on school committees, to help at
meetings, to attend the sick and the dead.” As Conway
mused over the fine points of Divinity School curriculum, Emer-
son cleared away the undergrowth of conversation with one
sentence:"An actually existent fly is more important than a possibly
existent angel."
..............................from Collins' The Trouble With Tom
and finally.....
I can well remember,” the critic Augustine Birrell wrote a
century ago, when an asserted intimacy with the Writings of
Thomas Paine marked a man from his fellows and invested him
in children’s minds with a horrible fascination. The Writings them-
selves were only seen in bookshops of an evil reputation and when
hastily turned over with furtive glances, proved to be printed in
small type and on villainous paper.”
Walden Pond. Conwa found his mentor had reached a fairl
pragmatic view of religion—a minister, Emerson supposed, was
still moderately useful in the world. Not for saving souls, but “to
a conscientious man to sit on school committees, to help at
meetings, to attend the sick and the dead.” As Conway
mused over the fine points of Divinity School curriculum, Emer-
son cleared away the undergrowth of conversation with one
sentence:"An actually existent fly is more important than a possibly
existent angel."
..............................from Collins' The Trouble With Tom
and finally.....
I can well remember,” the critic Augustine Birrell wrote a
century ago, when an asserted intimacy with the Writings of
Thomas Paine marked a man from his fellows and invested him
in children’s minds with a horrible fascination. The Writings them-
selves were only seen in bookshops of an evil reputation and when
hastily turned over with furtive glances, proved to be printed in
small type and on villainous paper.”
Fowler's phrenologists
Fowler and
his brother Lorenzo pounded out books arguing against tight-lacing
in women’s clothes, and for daily bathing. Convinced that the
plasticity of the brain meant that there could be no such thing as
permanent depravity, Orson pestered the head of Sing Sing prison
to turn prisons into reforming institutions, and “declared war on the
gallows” with campaigns against capital punishment; he pointedly
published a magazine titled The Prisoners Friend, and vociferously
argued for the educability of the retarded and insane. And if, he
wondered aloud and loudly, we may all progress in our mental
development, what cause was there any longer for holding back
women? Or blacks?
Reformers flocked to the Fowler & Wells publishing house.
Margaret Fuller became one of Fowler’s authors: so did Thomas
Wentworth Higginson, Horace Greeley, and Susan B. Anthony.
Clara Barton, founder of the Red Cross, considered her youthful
consultations with Orson’s brother and ‘partner phrenologist Lor-
enzo as nothing short of a conversion (experience: “How can the
value of the results of that month, extending through a lifetime, be
put into words?” Educational titan Horace Mann went so far as to
name his own son after pioneering phrenologist George Combe,
explaining, “I declare myself a hundred times more indebted to
Phrenology than to all the metaphysical works I ever read.” As they
visited the Broadway store, these enthusiasts might have even
noticed one ardently idealistic Fowler employee—well, all of them
were ardent idealists. But this one, John, was especially exercised
over slavery—~“as though his own soul hard been pierced,” Frederick
Douglass marveled after meeting him. He eventually moved to
Kansas, joining a wave of reformist settlers struggling to outnumber
pro-slavery settlers. And it was that quiet and intense Fowler clerk
who, armed with two hundred “Beecher’s Bibles”-rifles financed
by New England reformists—made a disastrous raid upon the
federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia.
John Brown’s last letter before he was led to the gallows was to
. . . his phrenologist.
If John Brown couldn’t achieve utopia with guns, Orson Fowler
would through books. Fowler readers woke up in the morning and
bathed themselves according to the precepts of Fowler’s Water Cure
Library; after tending to a garden raised from seed packets sold by
Fowler’s Broadway store, they then ate a virtuous breakfast of
porridge and cold water from The Economy of Food: Or, What Shall
We Eat (‘Without exception, both rich and poor in America eat
extravagantly of animal food . . . Every family should eat beans and
peas”); then they could go to the job they’d been phrenologically
directed toward by the Fowler Sc Wells career guide Choice sf
Pursuits, and comport themselves brilliantly thanks to their Fowler
Manual of Business and Guide to Success. After jotting a few business
meeting notes in Fowler shorthand learned from his Phonographic
Teacher, they could go to lunch on food prepared from the Hydro-
pathic Cooh—Book, perhaps while perusing a volume of poetry or a
novel from Fowler’s press. Then, once their day was done, they
could work out in a Fowler—approved gymnasium, and finally arrive
back home to the gigantic octagonal mansion they had built in
accordance with Fowler’s blueprints in Home for All: Or a New,
Cheap, Convenient, and Superior Mode of Building.
This last book left Fowler’s most visible legacy. Scattered across
the United States to this day are a motley collection of half-baked
gingerbread Victorians built by Fowler's disciples. They go by local
like the Bandbox, the Inkwell, or—less imaginatively——
the Octagon House. They are the living remnants of a vision that
Fowler as he prepared to build his own family mansion in
upstate New York in the 1840s. “In looking about for some
plan,” he wrote, “I said to myself, ‘Why not take our pattern from
NATURE? Her forms are mostly SPHERICAL . . . What should
we think of a square apple, or right-angled egg?”’ Building a truly
spherical house with all the walls bent like a barrel, he reasoned,
would be beyond the skills of most local carpenters. But an
octagon—why, that should be hardly any trouble at all.
The idea was not a new one: the Founding Fathers whose skulls
Fowler so admired were all well familiar with the form. The ruling
gentry in Thomas Paine’s hometown had their own octagonal
temple, and Thomas Iefferson had built an octagonal house for
his daughter. In fact, Jefferson was so delighted with the result that
he also built her a pair of octagonal outhouses to accompany it. But
Fowler brought a new and nearly religious fervor to octagons. They
allowed more windows and thus were lighter, healthier structures,‘
he insisted—and his readers all knew how essential good health was
to the moral improvement of the world. Fowler imagined cement
and glass houses builtiaround a strange array of new inventions—an
inviting showcase kitchen that formed the center of the house, taps
with running hot and cold water, a central heating system, and most
shocking of all, indoor toilets. “To squeamish maidens and fasti-
dious beaux this point is not submitted,” Fowler snapped, “but
matrons, the aged and the feeble, are asked is not such a closet a real
household necessity and luxury?”
Home for All was a hit: the eight-sided panacea was immediately
demanded by fashionable homebuilders across the country. Henry
Ward Beecher built himself an octagonal house; so did P. T.
Barnum. Clarence Darrow spent his childhood in one. In many
towns, the builders of these homes came from the two intersecting
groups of readers that Fowler’s works had always appealed to:
doctors and ministers. Some of the latter wryly claimed that the
octagonal form was ideal because they couldn’t be cornered by the
devil—and, as was alleged of one minister in upstate New York, “so
he could see the Lord coming from any angle.” Imitators upped the
ante to twelve— and even sixteen-sided houses.
Circulars distributed from Fowler’s store in 1855 announced a
Vegetarian Settlement Company, a joint-stock venture to create an
“Octagon City” in Kansas of four miles square—or rather, almost
square, as it was to be a giant octagon—~in which vegetarian settlers
living on octagon—shaped parcels of land would build octagonal
farmhouses that radiated outward from an octagonal downtown of
octagonal public buildings, culminating in one immense central
octagonal structure and an octagonal public green. Octagon City
was also raising capital to construct “A I-lydropathic Establishment,
an Agricultural College, a Scientific Institute, a Museum of Curi-
osities and Mechanic Arts, and Common Schools”—all octagonal,
of course. It was to be a glorious vision of the progressive future,
with neither slavery, meat, nor alcohol tainting its purity. Checks
poured into 308 Broadway, with prospective settlers committing
anywhere from $50 to $10,000 in funds toward the project.
Right here, along this Manhattan counter—this mahogany
counter that no longer exists, that wind blows through——and filed
in these rolltop desks that our eyes can no longer see, the letters
came each day, excited and hopeful. A blacksmith from Rahway, a
maprnaker from Philadelphia, a printer from Tennessee, and a
whole contingent of farmers from Pontiac, Michigan; envelopes
both scrawled out and finely inscribed by idealistic tradesmen and
farmers rolled in from across the nation. Utopia at last!
What families transported by their Fowler magazine articles into
visions of pure country life among the glorious octagons found at the
end of the trail, though, was not quite what the woodcut illustra-
tions in the Phrenological journal had pictured. Settlers had been
promised working gristmills, fine public buildings, and a veritable
fairyland of Kansan natural beauty. Vl/‘hat they got was mud and
desolation. The splendiferous Central Octagon building proved to
be a windowless mud—plastered cabin of about two hundred square
feet . . . and it was square. The founders had promised tools for every
farmer: settlers found precisely one plow provided for the entire
city. The bewildered vegetarian pioneers contemplated these woes
in wretched lean-tos and huts built of bark, shivering miserably on
their dirt floors, since there were only two stoves for one hundred
settlers. The promoter fled, and his eager and trusting Octagonians
were quickly decimated by malaria and Indian raids. The settle-
ment’s few survivors lacked even the wood to build coffins for their
dead children.
By the following spring, all trace of Octagon City was gone.
Bedraggled Octagonians returning back East found yet more
death and despair. The Panic of 1857 hit Fowler’s business badly,
and he was forced to rent out his own giant octagonal family home
as a boardinghouse. It was not a great success. His newfangled
cement walls had been improperly sealed, with fecal matter from the
house’s cesspool seeping through the walls and into the drinking
water. The tenants of his octagonal palace—-the healthiest building
in America—died in fevered agony, killed off in a horrific plague of
typhoid.
his brother Lorenzo pounded out books arguing against tight-lacing
in women’s clothes, and for daily bathing. Convinced that the
plasticity of the brain meant that there could be no such thing as
permanent depravity, Orson pestered the head of Sing Sing prison
to turn prisons into reforming institutions, and “declared war on the
gallows” with campaigns against capital punishment; he pointedly
published a magazine titled The Prisoners Friend, and vociferously
argued for the educability of the retarded and insane. And if, he
wondered aloud and loudly, we may all progress in our mental
development, what cause was there any longer for holding back
women? Or blacks?
Reformers flocked to the Fowler & Wells publishing house.
Margaret Fuller became one of Fowler’s authors: so did Thomas
Wentworth Higginson, Horace Greeley, and Susan B. Anthony.
Clara Barton, founder of the Red Cross, considered her youthful
consultations with Orson’s brother and ‘partner phrenologist Lor-
enzo as nothing short of a conversion (experience: “How can the
value of the results of that month, extending through a lifetime, be
put into words?” Educational titan Horace Mann went so far as to
name his own son after pioneering phrenologist George Combe,
explaining, “I declare myself a hundred times more indebted to
Phrenology than to all the metaphysical works I ever read.” As they
visited the Broadway store, these enthusiasts might have even
noticed one ardently idealistic Fowler employee—well, all of them
were ardent idealists. But this one, John, was especially exercised
over slavery—~“as though his own soul hard been pierced,” Frederick
Douglass marveled after meeting him. He eventually moved to
Kansas, joining a wave of reformist settlers struggling to outnumber
pro-slavery settlers. And it was that quiet and intense Fowler clerk
who, armed with two hundred “Beecher’s Bibles”-rifles financed
by New England reformists—made a disastrous raid upon the
federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia.
John Brown’s last letter before he was led to the gallows was to
. . . his phrenologist.
If John Brown couldn’t achieve utopia with guns, Orson Fowler
would through books. Fowler readers woke up in the morning and
bathed themselves according to the precepts of Fowler’s Water Cure
Library; after tending to a garden raised from seed packets sold by
Fowler’s Broadway store, they then ate a virtuous breakfast of
porridge and cold water from The Economy of Food: Or, What Shall
We Eat (‘Without exception, both rich and poor in America eat
extravagantly of animal food . . . Every family should eat beans and
peas”); then they could go to the job they’d been phrenologically
directed toward by the Fowler Sc Wells career guide Choice sf
Pursuits, and comport themselves brilliantly thanks to their Fowler
Manual of Business and Guide to Success. After jotting a few business
meeting notes in Fowler shorthand learned from his Phonographic
Teacher, they could go to lunch on food prepared from the Hydro-
pathic Cooh—Book, perhaps while perusing a volume of poetry or a
novel from Fowler’s press. Then, once their day was done, they
could work out in a Fowler—approved gymnasium, and finally arrive
back home to the gigantic octagonal mansion they had built in
accordance with Fowler’s blueprints in Home for All: Or a New,
Cheap, Convenient, and Superior Mode of Building.
This last book left Fowler’s most visible legacy. Scattered across
the United States to this day are a motley collection of half-baked
gingerbread Victorians built by Fowler's disciples. They go by local
like the Bandbox, the Inkwell, or—less imaginatively——
the Octagon House. They are the living remnants of a vision that
Fowler as he prepared to build his own family mansion in
upstate New York in the 1840s. “In looking about for some
plan,” he wrote, “I said to myself, ‘Why not take our pattern from
NATURE? Her forms are mostly SPHERICAL . . . What should
we think of a square apple, or right-angled egg?”’ Building a truly
spherical house with all the walls bent like a barrel, he reasoned,
would be beyond the skills of most local carpenters. But an
octagon—why, that should be hardly any trouble at all.
The idea was not a new one: the Founding Fathers whose skulls
Fowler so admired were all well familiar with the form. The ruling
gentry in Thomas Paine’s hometown had their own octagonal
temple, and Thomas Iefferson had built an octagonal house for
his daughter. In fact, Jefferson was so delighted with the result that
he also built her a pair of octagonal outhouses to accompany it. But
Fowler brought a new and nearly religious fervor to octagons. They
allowed more windows and thus were lighter, healthier structures,‘
he insisted—and his readers all knew how essential good health was
to the moral improvement of the world. Fowler imagined cement
and glass houses builtiaround a strange array of new inventions—an
inviting showcase kitchen that formed the center of the house, taps
with running hot and cold water, a central heating system, and most
shocking of all, indoor toilets. “To squeamish maidens and fasti-
dious beaux this point is not submitted,” Fowler snapped, “but
matrons, the aged and the feeble, are asked is not such a closet a real
household necessity and luxury?”
Home for All was a hit: the eight-sided panacea was immediately
demanded by fashionable homebuilders across the country. Henry
Ward Beecher built himself an octagonal house; so did P. T.
Barnum. Clarence Darrow spent his childhood in one. In many
towns, the builders of these homes came from the two intersecting
groups of readers that Fowler’s works had always appealed to:
doctors and ministers. Some of the latter wryly claimed that the
octagonal form was ideal because they couldn’t be cornered by the
devil—and, as was alleged of one minister in upstate New York, “so
he could see the Lord coming from any angle.” Imitators upped the
ante to twelve— and even sixteen-sided houses.
Circulars distributed from Fowler’s store in 1855 announced a
Vegetarian Settlement Company, a joint-stock venture to create an
“Octagon City” in Kansas of four miles square—or rather, almost
square, as it was to be a giant octagon—~in which vegetarian settlers
living on octagon—shaped parcels of land would build octagonal
farmhouses that radiated outward from an octagonal downtown of
octagonal public buildings, culminating in one immense central
octagonal structure and an octagonal public green. Octagon City
was also raising capital to construct “A I-lydropathic Establishment,
an Agricultural College, a Scientific Institute, a Museum of Curi-
osities and Mechanic Arts, and Common Schools”—all octagonal,
of course. It was to be a glorious vision of the progressive future,
with neither slavery, meat, nor alcohol tainting its purity. Checks
poured into 308 Broadway, with prospective settlers committing
anywhere from $50 to $10,000 in funds toward the project.
Right here, along this Manhattan counter—this mahogany
counter that no longer exists, that wind blows through——and filed
in these rolltop desks that our eyes can no longer see, the letters
came each day, excited and hopeful. A blacksmith from Rahway, a
maprnaker from Philadelphia, a printer from Tennessee, and a
whole contingent of farmers from Pontiac, Michigan; envelopes
both scrawled out and finely inscribed by idealistic tradesmen and
farmers rolled in from across the nation. Utopia at last!
What families transported by their Fowler magazine articles into
visions of pure country life among the glorious octagons found at the
end of the trail, though, was not quite what the woodcut illustra-
tions in the Phrenological journal had pictured. Settlers had been
promised working gristmills, fine public buildings, and a veritable
fairyland of Kansan natural beauty. Vl/‘hat they got was mud and
desolation. The splendiferous Central Octagon building proved to
be a windowless mud—plastered cabin of about two hundred square
feet . . . and it was square. The founders had promised tools for every
farmer: settlers found precisely one plow provided for the entire
city. The bewildered vegetarian pioneers contemplated these woes
in wretched lean-tos and huts built of bark, shivering miserably on
their dirt floors, since there were only two stoves for one hundred
settlers. The promoter fled, and his eager and trusting Octagonians
were quickly decimated by malaria and Indian raids. The settle-
ment’s few survivors lacked even the wood to build coffins for their
dead children.
By the following spring, all trace of Octagon City was gone.
Bedraggled Octagonians returning back East found yet more
death and despair. The Panic of 1857 hit Fowler’s business badly,
and he was forced to rent out his own giant octagonal family home
as a boardinghouse. It was not a great success. His newfangled
cement walls had been improperly sealed, with fecal matter from the
house’s cesspool seeping through the walls and into the drinking
water. The tenants of his octagonal palace—-the healthiest building
in America—died in fevered agony, killed off in a horrific plague of
typhoid.
Thursday, December 12, 2013
Phrenology and the afterlife
national movement led by Fowler. Practical Phrenology, his distilla-
tion of road lectures and innumerable pamphlets, went through at
least sixty-two printings in the nineteenth century.
There were phrenological children’s books, phrenological alma-
nacs, and a monthly American Phrenological journal, largely written
by Orson himself; you could piously peruse Phrenology and the
Scriptures, or you could examine the heads of your favorite celebrities
in Popular Phrenology. Hundreds of such titles burst forth from the
press of Fowler’s Manhattan shop. You could even study the
phrenology of wild animals in guides copiously illustrated with
grinning cat skulls, hollowed—out sparrow heads, and macerated
monkey mandibles. Indeed, one of Abraham Lincoln’s first employ-
ers, Denton Offutt, was for many years more famous for authoring 'A
New and Complete System of Teaching t/Je Horse on Phrenalogical
Principles' than for mentoring the gangly young manic-depressive
he'd kept in his law office.
*
Beginning in the 1830s, a curious tendency arose in fiction: authors
were expected to introduce their characters with a detailed descrip-
tion of their physical appearance, particularly the shape of their
heads. Rochester of Jane Eyre is granted a noticeably squarish
forehead and “a decisive nose,” while in Moby Dick Melville has
Ishmael declare that Queequeeg “reminded me of General Wash-
ington’s head, as seen in the popular busts of him. It had the same
long regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows, which
were likewise very projecting, like two long promontories thickly
wooded on top.” These were not mere splashes of scene—painting:
such descriptions prefigured the morals and actions of a character.
Oddly, these detailed headscapes of jutting jaws and well-defined
temples can still appear in modern character descriptions, rather like
an ancient coelacanth turning up in a chlorinated swimming pool:
hack authors still use these absurdly detailed cerebral topographies
without the faintest idea of why such a tradition once existed. They
might as well be detailing their characters’ balance of the four
medieval humors while they’re at it. Today it is household objects-
brand names- t/aingr—that have taken the place of heads as a
writer’s means of implicitly delineating character. An old Volvo
Station wagon and an L.L. Bean barn jacket mark out a man as
surely as a high brow and a weak chin once did.
*
Once you ponder the implications of this statement, as Fowler
himself did endlessly, strange things start happening. Fowler's
philosophy is all about the possibility and the real hope of change.
Calvinistic predestination and hellfire are swept away in an instant;
if the brain and its resultant behavior is malleable throughout one’s
life, then nobody is fated to remain bad: they can mend their ways
and their selves.
Suddenly, too, the shaping influence of one’s physical develop-
ment- of one’s diet and exercise and behavior—become of para-
mount importance. “Behold, moreover, the great procuring cause of I
man’s depravity, and consequent wretchedness,” Fowler explains in
his guide Se§’Culz‘ure. “Namely, MORBID PHYSIOLOGY. An .
irritated or abnormal state of the body morbidly affects the brain.”
Bad actions become the correctable result of improper development,
rather than machinations of some cloven—footed prat with a fiery
pitchfork. Prayer was not the answer, Fowler snapped: “Ministers
may preach, and revivals be multiplied to any extent, without laying
the ax at the ROOT of the tree of vice. Mankind must also abandon I
flesh, condiments, narcotics, gluttony, and fermented liquors, and
substitute farinaceous food, cold water, and a light diet—must learn if
how to EAT AND LIVE.”
What Fowler holds out is nothing less than the promise of:
redemption. Will it surprise you at all when, at long last Fowler
tears aside his scientific lineaments, and reveals what he has been all
along: a minister leading his flock heavenward? “[Let us] redouble
our efforts for . . . that high and holy destiny hereafter as such
by this great principle of ILLIMITABLE PROGRESSION’
Indeed. Look carefully around this empty plaza: what you see is
nothing less than the birthplace of American progressivism
The publication of Thomas Paine’s spirit—memoir in 1852 came at
the apex of phrenology’s fame. Their fashionable interest in the
latest craze of séances and spirits, though, left some Wondering just
how serious the Fowlers were. Orson’s much younger brother
Edward had suddenly proclaimed himself a spirit medium, and
held nightly conferences on electricity with Ben Franklin, who
would obligingly show up with a spectral set of batteries and wires.
Other poltergeists, less scientific and civic-minded, amused them-
selves by mysteriously moving furniture while the room’s lights were
out. Edward’s spirit interviews were duly published by Fowler &.
Wells in a two-volume edition, though the tome’s copious notes did
not include one Fowler relative’s observation that he’d seen Edward
secretly moving furniture and tossing sofa pillows around when he
thought nobody was looking.
No matter. Lippard’s and Fowler’s resurrection of Paine had
occurred just as dead people themselves were making a curious sort
of comeback: or as -much of a comeback as dead people can make
People could now imagme being dead because they’d just gained,
with the1846 debut of ether anesthesia, the remarkable ability to
sink into a temporarily living death. Ether arrived to find. a culture
already well primed for exploring liminal states: Americans and
Europeans alike had already been fascinated for decades by mes-
s claims of being able to produce states of suspended
animation; newspapers eagerly reprinted Wildly unsourced stories of
frogs found living eons inside geological formations, “mummy
wheat" seeds that sprouted anew after millennia inside the pyramids
of Egypt, and bugs that reanimated themselves from deep inside
household furniture generations after the original tree had been cut
down.
With the dead becoming more than sloughed-off shells of the
spirit, cemeteries developed into respectable places, modeled after
parks and plazas; dead children and adults had postmortem formal
portraits taken by daguerreotypists, so that unseeing eyes could gaze
at you in shades of silver nitrate. For a while, the mysterious realms
of photography and death even had a strange overlap; some believed
that corpse retinas retained their last image for forty—eight hours
after death, so that photographers could capture this dying image on
film. In 1857 the New York Observer went so far as to quote
experiments on a murder victim by a “Dr. Sanford”—“[I used] a
weak solution of atrophine, which evidently produced an enlarged
state of the pupil . . . We now applied a powerful lens, and
discovered in the pupil the rude worn—away figure of a man in a
light coat, beside whom was a round stone standing, or suspended in
the air, with a small handle stuck as it were in the earth . . .
[perhaps] the exact figure of the murderer.” So . . . dead men do tell
tales.
Posthumous narrators made their presence felt with the infinitely
reprinted and pirated stories of Blackwood Magazine, and even
Emily Dickinson began to toy around this same year with unnerving
ghostly narrators: “I heard a fly buzz, when I died . . .” So it’s little
surprise that just three month’s after Paine’s spirit-memoirs ap—
peared, yet another found its way into stores. The author of 14 Series
of Communications, Jacob Harshman, admitted that he, too, was
skeptical when he heard about those spirits writing books up in New
York, but- wouldn’t you know it?- now he’d been getting them
too, swooping down upon his home in Dayton, Ohio,
Puss and Mew
What if, Carlile’s shop assistants reasoned, you couldn’t see your bookseller?
Customers entering the Blasphemy Machine: a gigantic clockwork mechanism with nary a
human in sight. A dial listed the names of all the store’s many illicit
publications-The Rights of Man, say, or an issue of Carlile’s
newspaper The Republican. With the dial set to the right title,
and money dropped into a slot, a book or newspaper would come
clattering down into a receptacle.
It is soberin to think that the freedom of the press once
depended upon a mechanism now used to vend Mars bars. But
the “invisible shopman” wasn’t an entirely new concept: during a
crackdown on unlicensed gin in 1737, London taxmen found
themselves confounded by the disappearance of gin shops, despitefji
the streets being as full of outrageously drunk louts as ever. It took
months for taxmen to discover the existence of primitive manned
vending machines called the “puss and mew.” A customer coming
up to one whispered “Puss,” whereupon a vendor crammed inside
answered “Mew.” A hidden drawer popped out to receive coins,
withdrew, and then slid back out with a dram of the demon drink. if
Like the puss and mew, the Temple of Reason’s vending machine
proved only a temporary distraction to authorities, rather like
overturning a chair in the path of someone chasing you; soon they
stepped around it and rounded up employees from behind
clockwork.
Customers entering the Blasphemy Machine: a gigantic clockwork mechanism with nary a
human in sight. A dial listed the names of all the store’s many illicit
publications-The Rights of Man, say, or an issue of Carlile’s
newspaper The Republican. With the dial set to the right title,
and money dropped into a slot, a book or newspaper would come
clattering down into a receptacle.
It is soberin to think that the freedom of the press once
depended upon a mechanism now used to vend Mars bars. But
the “invisible shopman” wasn’t an entirely new concept: during a
crackdown on unlicensed gin in 1737, London taxmen found
themselves confounded by the disappearance of gin shops, despitefji
the streets being as full of outrageously drunk louts as ever. It took
months for taxmen to discover the existence of primitive manned
vending machines called the “puss and mew.” A customer coming
up to one whispered “Puss,” whereupon a vendor crammed inside
answered “Mew.” A hidden drawer popped out to receive coins,
withdrew, and then slid back out with a dram of the demon drink. if
Like the puss and mew, the Temple of Reason’s vending machine
proved only a temporary distraction to authorities, rather like
overturning a chair in the path of someone chasing you; soon they
stepped around it and rounded up employees from behind
clockwork.
Saturday, December 07, 2013
Tom Paine
Sometimes the old pieties were still visited upon them. Hearing
that Paine was ailing, ministers and well-meaning folk were forever
stopping by to pester him, hoping to get him to recant his heresies
and to accept Jesus Christ as his savior. Jarvis was usually able to
keep them out of the studio, but on one occasion let his guard down
when a knock came at the door shortly after dinner. Jarvis opened it
to find a very old woman, wrapped in a large scarlet cloak, and
asking piteously to meet Thomas Paine.
He's asleep, Jarvis explained—he always takes his nap after dinner.
“I am very sorry for that,” she said, “for I wanted to see him very
particularly.”
It seemed a shame to force a frail and elderly lady to make the trip
a second time, and Jarvis relented. Leading her inside and back to
Paine’s room, the painter woke up the slumbering infidel.
“He rose on one elbow”—it was recalled soon afterward with
some mirth—“with an expression of eye that staggered the old
woman.”
“What do you want?” he demanded.
“Is your name Paine?” the old woman asked solicitously.
“Well, then,” she began kindly. “I come from Almighty God to tell
you that if you do not repent of your sins and believe in our h/erred Savior
Jesus Christ, you will he damned and—”
“Pooh! Pooh!” Paine stopped her cold. “It is not true. You were
not sent with any such impertinent message.”
“Jarvis,” Paine sighed, “make her go away. Pshaw, God would not
send such a foolish ugly old woman as you about with his message.
Go away. Go back.” And then, preparing to return to sleep, he
added, “Shut the door.”
The old lady left thunderstruck. Jarvis was enough of a gentle-
man that he probably withheld his laughter until the woman was
out of earshot of his house. He was not unsympathetic to her
piety; he had been raised in a strict religious family himself, and
though he had little use for them now, he thought churches served
a worthy purpose for the rest of society. But as for himself—well,
he was busy. He had paintings to paint and wine to drink. Late in
the evenings, after Paine had had his nap, the two would
Philosophize over a bottle; once after a long conversation deep
Into the night at Ja.rvis’s table, the painter retired for a while, only
upon returning at four A.M. to find Paine still at table——or rather,
underneath it.
“I have the vertigo, the vertigo,” moaned Paine from the floor.
"Yes," Jarvis cracked, raising an eyebrow at the remains of the
bottle, ‘You have it deep- deep!”
that Paine was ailing, ministers and well-meaning folk were forever
stopping by to pester him, hoping to get him to recant his heresies
and to accept Jesus Christ as his savior. Jarvis was usually able to
keep them out of the studio, but on one occasion let his guard down
when a knock came at the door shortly after dinner. Jarvis opened it
to find a very old woman, wrapped in a large scarlet cloak, and
asking piteously to meet Thomas Paine.
He's asleep, Jarvis explained—he always takes his nap after dinner.
“I am very sorry for that,” she said, “for I wanted to see him very
particularly.”
It seemed a shame to force a frail and elderly lady to make the trip
a second time, and Jarvis relented. Leading her inside and back to
Paine’s room, the painter woke up the slumbering infidel.
“He rose on one elbow”—it was recalled soon afterward with
some mirth—“with an expression of eye that staggered the old
woman.”
“What do you want?” he demanded.
“Is your name Paine?” the old woman asked solicitously.
“Well, then,” she began kindly. “I come from Almighty God to tell
you that if you do not repent of your sins and believe in our h/erred Savior
Jesus Christ, you will he damned and—”
“Pooh! Pooh!” Paine stopped her cold. “It is not true. You were
not sent with any such impertinent message.”
“Jarvis,” Paine sighed, “make her go away. Pshaw, God would not
send such a foolish ugly old woman as you about with his message.
Go away. Go back.” And then, preparing to return to sleep, he
added, “Shut the door.”
The old lady left thunderstruck. Jarvis was enough of a gentle-
man that he probably withheld his laughter until the woman was
out of earshot of his house. He was not unsympathetic to her
piety; he had been raised in a strict religious family himself, and
though he had little use for them now, he thought churches served
a worthy purpose for the rest of society. But as for himself—well,
he was busy. He had paintings to paint and wine to drink. Late in
the evenings, after Paine had had his nap, the two would
Philosophize over a bottle; once after a long conversation deep
Into the night at Ja.rvis’s table, the painter retired for a while, only
upon returning at four A.M. to find Paine still at table——or rather,
underneath it.
“I have the vertigo, the vertigo,” moaned Paine from the floor.
"Yes," Jarvis cracked, raising an eyebrow at the remains of the
bottle, ‘You have it deep- deep!”
FLW and Ayn Rand
In the dining room of the Plaza, under faked wooden ceiling beams
that Wright much admired, we would drink Irish whiskey, always with
the same difficulty in ordering it. Wright would tell the waiter, “Old Bush-
mill’s neat, please,” and then add, with emphasis, “That means I want no
ice.” “Of course, sir,” the waiter would reply. As the waiter went off to
the bar, Wright would lean toward me and say, “They never listen. Watch,
now. There will be ice.” Back would come the waiter with the Irish whiskey,
in a glass filled with ice cubes. Wright would pick up a spoon and, lifting
out the ice cubes one by one, proceed to flip them across the green-carpeted
floor, to the astonishment and pleasure of other patrons of the Plaza:
Foxy Grandpa on a rampage. Sometimes we would meet in the ground-
floor bar at “2l,” whose preposterous decor—its dusky low ceiling hung
with model airplanes, model buses, and the Lord knows what—was again
a source of admiring comment from Wright. One day a tiny figure whose
head was topped by a dark velvet beret waved to us from a distant banquette.
“Oh, God!” Wright exclaimed in dismay. “Ayn Rand!”
Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, published in 1943, has been one of
the leading best-sellers of all time (over four million copies have been
sold), and its hero, an architect named Howard Roark, is widely supposed
to have been based upon Wright, though Rand denied it many times and
so, with reason, did Wright. Rand was bent upon preaching the gospel of
individualism as a political and ethical ideal and denouncing the false doc-
trine of humanitarianism; to the ancient question “Am I my brother’s
keeper?” she answered with a ringing “No!” She decided to use the profes-
sion of architecture as a vehicle for dramatizing her then generally unpopu-
lar right-wing, anti-altruistic principles. As it happened, she knew little or
nothing about either architecture or Wright when she began writing her
trashy classic, but through friends she was able to persuade the distinguished
New York City architect Ely jacques Kahn to provide her with a “cover”
job in his office while she boned up on the nuts and bolts of the profession.
(According to Rand’s biographer, Barbara Branden, it was Kahn who gave
Rand the idea of using a housing project as a major factor in the plot of
The Fountainhead.) Kahn arranged for Rand to meet Wright at a banquet
held in New York. Rand told Wright that she was writing a novel about
an architect and would like to interview him; to her disappointment, Wright
begged off with some vague words about the uncertainty of his future plans
P _ Rand sent Wright the first three chapters of the novel and he wrote
to her saying that he liked nothing about them. After the publication of
The Fountainhead, she met Wright in Los Angeles, at the home of his son
Lloyd, and on that occasion they got on well. He had not yet read the
novel, but he recalled that among the things he had disliked in the first
three chapters was the fact that Roark had been described as being tall
and with red hair, and he had wanted him to be short, with white hair.
Lloyd Wright laughed and said, “Oh, Father, Miss Rand wasn’t writing
your biography!” Subsequently, Wright read the novel and praised it to
Rand but refused to issue a public endorsement of it. He invited Rand
and her husband to visit Taliesin North; the shabby condition of the house
and the social conditions under which the Fellowship operated were, it
appears, a shock to Rand. Individualism as a theory was one thing, but
the benign tyranny practiced at Taliesin was quite another. Nevertheless,
she commissioned a house from Wright and was delighted with the designs
he furnished her; it remained only a project in part because she wasn’t
sure where she wished to build it and in part because she couldn’t afford
it. As usual, Wright found these reasons unacceptable. He assured her
that with minor changes the house could be built in Connecticut, Texas,
Arizona, or Florida. As for affording it, “My dear lady,” he said, “that’s
no problem at all. Go out and make more money
The Guggenheim
These figures were Solomon R. Guggenheim, Baroness Hildegard Re-
bay von Ehrenwiesen (more commonly known as Hilla Rebay), and Wright.
Guggenheim, who was born in 1861 and died in 1949, a decade before
his museum was completed, was a member of the celebrated copper-mining
family; like any American millionaire of the period, having proved himself
in the world of business, he started to prove himself in the world of culture
by collecting Old Masters. His wife, Irene Rothschild Guggenheim, pre-
ferred collecting contemporary art. (So did other wives; it was in large
part the taste of millionaires’ wives that led to the founding of the Museum
of Modern Art.) In 1927, Mrs. Guggenheim purchased some collages by
a young German artist named Rebay (1890-1967), who was having her
first American show at Marie Sterner’s gallery on Fifty-seventh Street. Later,
Rebay met the Guggenheims at the home of James Speyer, a banker,
philanthropist, and patron of the arts. Rebay and Irene Guggenheim be-
came friends. The following year, Rebay painted a portrait of Solomon
Guggenheim—a realistic likeness of an elderly, pleasant-faced man in knick-
erbockers and knit hose. As Joan M. Lukach says in her biography Of
Rebay, “Convincing Guggenheim to sit for a vivacious, witty, sophisticated
European noblewoman cannot have been difficult.” Rebay took advantagfi
of the sittings to interest Guggenheim in a genre of painting that sh6
had first encountered among her artist-colleagues in Europe and that she
was determined to introduce to the New World; she called the genre “non-
objective” and distinguished it from “abstract” painting as being conceived
by intuition within the mind of its maker and not abstracted from anything
in nature. ‘
In a small studio that Rebay rented in Carnegie Hall were hung works
by such painters as Kandinsky, Klee, and Rudolf Bauer (Bauer was for
many years her lover; Lukach is able to demonstrate that a more disagreeable
and demoralizing companion can scarcely ever have lived). Soon enough,
Guggenheim became a disciple of non-objective art——indeed, the most eager
and generous of disciples, addressed with affection by his newfound artist
friends as “Guggi.” Under Rebay’s vigorous tutelage, Guggenheim put
together an assemblage of paintings that, besides the artists mentioned
above, came to include Chagall, Moholy-Nagy, Gleizes, Mondrian, Delau-
nay, and Balcomb Greene. Within a couple of years, Guggenheim and
Rebay were faced with the problem of finding appropriate shelter for his
ever-expanding collection. According to Lukach, Guggenheim thought at
first of bequeathing it at his death to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This solution to the problem would have angered Rebay, since the collection
would then have passed out of her control; luckily, it didn’t appeal to
Guggenheim for long, as he glanced about and noticed how many of his
fellow millionaires—Freer, Frick, Huntington, and Mellon—were taking
care to provide monuments to themselves in the form of museums. Why
shouldn’t he do the same, and all the more so because of the little-appreci-
ated nature of his collection? When it came to the buying and selling of
art in the early thirties, his artists were more or less orphans; he had
reason to wish to protect their handiwork after his death, as well as to
protect the joyous, eccentric, and sometimes irascible Rebay.
By coincidence, in 1930 some of Rebay’s artist-colleagues contemplated
founding a utopian artists’ colony in a village outside Paris. The colonists
would build a museum to contain their works, and the designer of the
museum would be Le Corbusier, whom Rebay had already met. Le Corbu-
sier wished to design his museum in the shape of a spiral within a square;
its galleries would be connected by ramps and would have moveable walls,
and it would omit the grand entrance and grand staircases that museums
of an earlier day had found indispensable. The little colony never came
into existence, thanks in large part to the Great Depression, but Rebay
continued to speculate on the design of an ideal museum building—a
temple or dome of non-objective art (Lukach assumes that Rebay wrote
“dome” in English as a translation of Dom, German for “cathedral”), where
space would be found for a library, a movie theatre, a shop for the sale
of educational materials and reproductions of paintings, and where the
music of Bach and other classic composers would provide a continuous
accompaniment.
bay von Ehrenwiesen (more commonly known as Hilla Rebay), and Wright.
Guggenheim, who was born in 1861 and died in 1949, a decade before
his museum was completed, was a member of the celebrated copper-mining
family; like any American millionaire of the period, having proved himself
in the world of business, he started to prove himself in the world of culture
by collecting Old Masters. His wife, Irene Rothschild Guggenheim, pre-
ferred collecting contemporary art. (So did other wives; it was in large
part the taste of millionaires’ wives that led to the founding of the Museum
of Modern Art.) In 1927, Mrs. Guggenheim purchased some collages by
a young German artist named Rebay (1890-1967), who was having her
first American show at Marie Sterner’s gallery on Fifty-seventh Street. Later,
Rebay met the Guggenheims at the home of James Speyer, a banker,
philanthropist, and patron of the arts. Rebay and Irene Guggenheim be-
came friends. The following year, Rebay painted a portrait of Solomon
Guggenheim—a realistic likeness of an elderly, pleasant-faced man in knick-
erbockers and knit hose. As Joan M. Lukach says in her biography Of
Rebay, “Convincing Guggenheim to sit for a vivacious, witty, sophisticated
European noblewoman cannot have been difficult.” Rebay took advantagfi
of the sittings to interest Guggenheim in a genre of painting that sh6
had first encountered among her artist-colleagues in Europe and that she
was determined to introduce to the New World; she called the genre “non-
objective” and distinguished it from “abstract” painting as being conceived
by intuition within the mind of its maker and not abstracted from anything
in nature. ‘
In a small studio that Rebay rented in Carnegie Hall were hung works
by such painters as Kandinsky, Klee, and Rudolf Bauer (Bauer was for
many years her lover; Lukach is able to demonstrate that a more disagreeable
and demoralizing companion can scarcely ever have lived). Soon enough,
Guggenheim became a disciple of non-objective art——indeed, the most eager
and generous of disciples, addressed with affection by his newfound artist
friends as “Guggi.” Under Rebay’s vigorous tutelage, Guggenheim put
together an assemblage of paintings that, besides the artists mentioned
above, came to include Chagall, Moholy-Nagy, Gleizes, Mondrian, Delau-
nay, and Balcomb Greene. Within a couple of years, Guggenheim and
Rebay were faced with the problem of finding appropriate shelter for his
ever-expanding collection. According to Lukach, Guggenheim thought at
first of bequeathing it at his death to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This solution to the problem would have angered Rebay, since the collection
would then have passed out of her control; luckily, it didn’t appeal to
Guggenheim for long, as he glanced about and noticed how many of his
fellow millionaires—Freer, Frick, Huntington, and Mellon—were taking
care to provide monuments to themselves in the form of museums. Why
shouldn’t he do the same, and all the more so because of the little-appreci-
ated nature of his collection? When it came to the buying and selling of
art in the early thirties, his artists were more or less orphans; he had
reason to wish to protect their handiwork after his death, as well as to
protect the joyous, eccentric, and sometimes irascible Rebay.
By coincidence, in 1930 some of Rebay’s artist-colleagues contemplated
founding a utopian artists’ colony in a village outside Paris. The colonists
would build a museum to contain their works, and the designer of the
museum would be Le Corbusier, whom Rebay had already met. Le Corbu-
sier wished to design his museum in the shape of a spiral within a square;
its galleries would be connected by ramps and would have moveable walls,
and it would omit the grand entrance and grand staircases that museums
of an earlier day had found indispensable. The little colony never came
into existence, thanks in large part to the Great Depression, but Rebay
continued to speculate on the design of an ideal museum building—a
temple or dome of non-objective art (Lukach assumes that Rebay wrote
“dome” in English as a translation of Dom, German for “cathedral”), where
space would be found for a library, a movie theatre, a shop for the sale
of educational materials and reproductions of paintings, and where the
music of Bach and other classic composers would provide a continuous
accompaniment.
FLW and the mortuary
Of course I had to
“research” a good deal and that nearly got me down. I would come back
home, now and then, wondering if I felt as well as I should. But Nick
had a way of referring to the deceased always as “the merchandise,” and
that would cheer me up. I pulled through. . . .
This series of chapels (seating seventy-five to a hundred people), each
chapel with its own garden (all gardens in a garden) stands elevated upon
the mass of shale now composing the unique site. The plan of the whole
was an attempt to take some of the curse off the customary undertaker’s
official proceeding. I didn’t expect to make even the funeral of one’s
enemies exactly cheerful, but I did think I could give the obsequies some
beauty without destroying their integrity.
Here five simultaneous funerals may be so conducted that one is
- not too aware of another. All preparation and disposal of the deceased
is from down below in chambers independent of the ceremonial arrange-
ments for special mourners. The place of mourning for the families called
the “slumber room” caused most trouble, as the chief mourners do not
care to be seen, though they do want to see. And inasmuch as for some
time before the funeral the deceased must lie in a private room at their
convenience as mourners, the processes of one funeral immediately follow-
ing another, the proper allocation of this space became a major problem.
Here the synthesis is fairly complete and the business of the undertaker’s
funeral arrangements, choice of caskets, flowers, etc., is located in an inde-
pendent building at the entrance to the chapel yard . . . a colorful, happy
environment abundant with music . . . has been provided . . . the empha-
sis is here laid not on Death but on Life.1O
One readily detects in Wright’s words the pleasure—-the almost boyish
glee-—-that he took in working out a puzzle worthy of him. To keep five
totally immobile articles of “merchandise” from bumping into one another
as they rose and fell from the chambers below to the chambers above,
and to bestow on the mourning relatives of that merchandise the near-
miraculous capacity to see without being seen—! Only the supreme master
of three-dimensional thinking could have brought it off, and only a master
ironist (a peer of Waugh himself) would have dared to claim that in doing
so he had produced “a colorful, happy environment” in a veritable sea of
coffins and corpses. Alas, the cost of this necrophiliac fantasy proved too
much for Daphne’s purse; if it had been built, it would surely have rivaled
in popularity the Wee Kirk 0’ the Heather, in Forest Lawn Cemetery,
in Los Angeles, where happiness in the presence of the dead loved one is
the only emotion that one is expected to feel.
“research” a good deal and that nearly got me down. I would come back
home, now and then, wondering if I felt as well as I should. But Nick
had a way of referring to the deceased always as “the merchandise,” and
that would cheer me up. I pulled through. . . .
This series of chapels (seating seventy-five to a hundred people), each
chapel with its own garden (all gardens in a garden) stands elevated upon
the mass of shale now composing the unique site. The plan of the whole
was an attempt to take some of the curse off the customary undertaker’s
official proceeding. I didn’t expect to make even the funeral of one’s
enemies exactly cheerful, but I did think I could give the obsequies some
beauty without destroying their integrity.
Here five simultaneous funerals may be so conducted that one is
- not too aware of another. All preparation and disposal of the deceased
is from down below in chambers independent of the ceremonial arrange-
ments for special mourners. The place of mourning for the families called
the “slumber room” caused most trouble, as the chief mourners do not
care to be seen, though they do want to see. And inasmuch as for some
time before the funeral the deceased must lie in a private room at their
convenience as mourners, the processes of one funeral immediately follow-
ing another, the proper allocation of this space became a major problem.
Here the synthesis is fairly complete and the business of the undertaker’s
funeral arrangements, choice of caskets, flowers, etc., is located in an inde-
pendent building at the entrance to the chapel yard . . . a colorful, happy
environment abundant with music . . . has been provided . . . the empha-
sis is here laid not on Death but on Life.1O
One readily detects in Wright’s words the pleasure—-the almost boyish
glee-—-that he took in working out a puzzle worthy of him. To keep five
totally immobile articles of “merchandise” from bumping into one another
as they rose and fell from the chambers below to the chambers above,
and to bestow on the mourning relatives of that merchandise the near-
miraculous capacity to see without being seen—! Only the supreme master
of three-dimensional thinking could have brought it off, and only a master
ironist (a peer of Waugh himself) would have dared to claim that in doing
so he had produced “a colorful, happy environment” in a veritable sea of
coffins and corpses. Alas, the cost of this necrophiliac fantasy proved too
much for Daphne’s purse; if it had been built, it would surely have rivaled
in popularity the Wee Kirk 0’ the Heather, in Forest Lawn Cemetery,
in Los Angeles, where happiness in the presence of the dead loved one is
the only emotion that one is expected to feel.
Sunday, December 01, 2013
Lacuna
Another Agatha Christie. A Poirot: The Hollow or Murder After Hours. The victim is found with a fatal gunshot wound- his wife, Gerda, is standing over him with a pistol but it is not the pistol that killed him and she is too dim-witted to explain herself so the police let it go at that, and do
not press her for an explanation. Of course she is not dim-witted at all and switched pistols. Hmm.
Then watched the beautifully photographed Peter Ustinov film adaptation of 'Evil Under The Sun'. Again, a big hat is crucial to concealing the victim and the murderer. Honestly! As a young girl, Agatha Christie must have been startled by a haberdasher.
Then watched the beautifully photographed Peter Ustinov film adaptation of 'Evil Under The Sun'. Again, a big hat is crucial to concealing the victim and the murderer. Honestly! As a young girl, Agatha Christie must have been startled by a haberdasher.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Wright eagerly defended the principle of conscien-
tious objection; many of the apprentices became C.O.’s, and several of
them ended up in prison. Wright enlisted the aid of colleagues and famous
acquaintances in an attempt to persuade the authorities in Washington
that the Fellowship was at work upon a project indispensable to the future
well-being of the country and that the apprentices should therefore be
exempted from the draft. To this end, he drew up a grandiloquent document
called the Broadacre City Petition, which, submitted to the White House
in the darkest moments of the war, rivals in grotesque self-importance
the letter that James joyce is reputed to have sent to the King of England
during the First World War, asking His Majesty to put aside less important
tasks in order to locate a pair of trousers that had been mailed to ]oyce
from Dublin and that, passing through enemy territory, had failed to reach
him in Zurich. Wright’s petition:
We, the undersigned, respectfully ask that the Administration of our Gov-
ernment authorize Frank Lloyd Wright to continue the search for Demo-
cratic FORM as the basis for a true capitalistic society now known as
Broadacre City. We believe that work should immediately be declared a
worthy national objective and the necessary ways and means freely granted
him to make such plans, models, and drawings as will enable our citizens
and otherpeoples to comprehend the basic ideas the plans, models, and
drawings represent and which, without political bias or influences will be
invaluable to our people when peace is being considered}
Astonishingly enough, Wright was able to accumulate hundreds of distin-
guished signatories to this petition, including Thomas Benton,]ohn Dewey,
Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, Carl Milles, Charles A. Beard, Joseph
Brewer, Norman Bel Geddes, Mies van der Rohe, Georgia O’Keeffe (the
only woman), Walter Gropius, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Thornton Wilder,
and Wright’s cousin by marriage Robert Moses. The petition fell upon
deaf ears, and the Fellowship dwindled to a scant four or five apprentices.
Eccentrics attract eccentrics, and one of Wright’s new friends during
the war period was the musicologist and promoter Carleton Smith, who
somehow or other had achieved a close personal relationship with many
of the great ones of the earth, or boldly claimed to have done so. (In the
late nineteen-seventies, Smith talked the Pritzker family of Chicago into
setting up the Pritzker Architecture Prize, partly on the basis of a discussion
he said he had once had with the King of Sweden, in which they had
both lamented the absence of a Nobel Prize in architecture. In fact, Smith
had no particular interest in architecture; he had fallen back upon it alpha-
betically as a field of endeavor worthy of receiving a prize when he could
find nobody willing to set up a prize for agriculture. If the Pritzkers had
not bit on architecture, Smith had planned to take his chances with astron-
omy.) In an unpublished autobiography, Smith tells of his friendship with
President Roosevelt’s mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, and of how she intro-
duced him to her son with the admonition, “Franklin knows nothing about
music. You must teach him what he ought to know.” According to Smith,
on one occasion Mrs. Roosevelt was indignant with her son because a
speech he made at the launching of a battleship interrupted a Saturday
afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcast to which she had been looking
forward. She asked the butler to get her son on the telephone, in order
to give him a good scolding; after a brief delay, the butler reported that
the battleship wasn’t picking up.
When the government was in need of housing for workers at the
atomic energy plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Smith recommended Wright
to the President, saying that Wright would be able to design half a dozen
basic houses that could then be prefabricated by the thousands. Roosevelt
expressed interest in seeing Wright’s designs, but when weeks passed and
no designs appeared, he urged Smith to bring Wright to Washington to
talk things over face to face. Smith’s memoirs contain a vivid description
of the encounter (which, like so many of the encounters described in
Wright’s autobiography, may never have taken place):
. . . so I took him [Wright] to Washington and he wore a cloak over his
shoulders and had a big cane and never took his hat off when he came
into the Oval Room and he stopped at the door with great drama and
said, so the President could hear, “You know, Carleton, I’ve always told
you I would rather be Wright than President,” and then he wheeled around
and came up to the President’s desk and shook hands with him and he
sald—and I Wlll never know whether he thought this out in advance or
whether it came naturally—he said, “Franklin,” or “Frank,” he called him
“Frank,” he said, “you ought to get up out of that chair and look around
at what they re doing to your city here, miles and miles of Ionic and
Corinthian columns!”
Rarely do we hear of two consecutive feats of tactlessness in which the
Second so‘ convincingly—and so shockingly—surpasses the first. Roosevelt
had an aristocratic distaste for being addressed in an over-familiar fashion,
and to be called‘ by his first name, or, still worse, by a diminutive of his
first name (making it a duplicate of Wright’s) must have enraged him,
but to be urged in his paralyzed condition to get up out of his chair and
look around—l Smith’s memoirs are, alas, silent in regard to what followed;
it is certainly the case that Wright had no part in the housing of workers
at Oak Ridge.
tious objection; many of the apprentices became C.O.’s, and several of
them ended up in prison. Wright enlisted the aid of colleagues and famous
acquaintances in an attempt to persuade the authorities in Washington
that the Fellowship was at work upon a project indispensable to the future
well-being of the country and that the apprentices should therefore be
exempted from the draft. To this end, he drew up a grandiloquent document
called the Broadacre City Petition, which, submitted to the White House
in the darkest moments of the war, rivals in grotesque self-importance
the letter that James joyce is reputed to have sent to the King of England
during the First World War, asking His Majesty to put aside less important
tasks in order to locate a pair of trousers that had been mailed to ]oyce
from Dublin and that, passing through enemy territory, had failed to reach
him in Zurich. Wright’s petition:
We, the undersigned, respectfully ask that the Administration of our Gov-
ernment authorize Frank Lloyd Wright to continue the search for Demo-
cratic FORM as the basis for a true capitalistic society now known as
Broadacre City. We believe that work should immediately be declared a
worthy national objective and the necessary ways and means freely granted
him to make such plans, models, and drawings as will enable our citizens
and otherpeoples to comprehend the basic ideas the plans, models, and
drawings represent and which, without political bias or influences will be
invaluable to our people when peace is being considered}
Astonishingly enough, Wright was able to accumulate hundreds of distin-
guished signatories to this petition, including Thomas Benton,]ohn Dewey,
Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, Carl Milles, Charles A. Beard, Joseph
Brewer, Norman Bel Geddes, Mies van der Rohe, Georgia O’Keeffe (the
only woman), Walter Gropius, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Thornton Wilder,
and Wright’s cousin by marriage Robert Moses. The petition fell upon
deaf ears, and the Fellowship dwindled to a scant four or five apprentices.
Eccentrics attract eccentrics, and one of Wright’s new friends during
the war period was the musicologist and promoter Carleton Smith, who
somehow or other had achieved a close personal relationship with many
of the great ones of the earth, or boldly claimed to have done so. (In the
late nineteen-seventies, Smith talked the Pritzker family of Chicago into
setting up the Pritzker Architecture Prize, partly on the basis of a discussion
he said he had once had with the King of Sweden, in which they had
both lamented the absence of a Nobel Prize in architecture. In fact, Smith
had no particular interest in architecture; he had fallen back upon it alpha-
betically as a field of endeavor worthy of receiving a prize when he could
find nobody willing to set up a prize for agriculture. If the Pritzkers had
not bit on architecture, Smith had planned to take his chances with astron-
omy.) In an unpublished autobiography, Smith tells of his friendship with
President Roosevelt’s mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, and of how she intro-
duced him to her son with the admonition, “Franklin knows nothing about
music. You must teach him what he ought to know.” According to Smith,
on one occasion Mrs. Roosevelt was indignant with her son because a
speech he made at the launching of a battleship interrupted a Saturday
afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcast to which she had been looking
forward. She asked the butler to get her son on the telephone, in order
to give him a good scolding; after a brief delay, the butler reported that
the battleship wasn’t picking up.
When the government was in need of housing for workers at the
atomic energy plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Smith recommended Wright
to the President, saying that Wright would be able to design half a dozen
basic houses that could then be prefabricated by the thousands. Roosevelt
expressed interest in seeing Wright’s designs, but when weeks passed and
no designs appeared, he urged Smith to bring Wright to Washington to
talk things over face to face. Smith’s memoirs contain a vivid description
of the encounter (which, like so many of the encounters described in
Wright’s autobiography, may never have taken place):
. . . so I took him [Wright] to Washington and he wore a cloak over his
shoulders and had a big cane and never took his hat off when he came
into the Oval Room and he stopped at the door with great drama and
said, so the President could hear, “You know, Carleton, I’ve always told
you I would rather be Wright than President,” and then he wheeled around
and came up to the President’s desk and shook hands with him and he
sald—and I Wlll never know whether he thought this out in advance or
whether it came naturally—he said, “Franklin,” or “Frank,” he called him
“Frank,” he said, “you ought to get up out of that chair and look around
at what they re doing to your city here, miles and miles of Ionic and
Corinthian columns!”
Rarely do we hear of two consecutive feats of tactlessness in which the
Second so‘ convincingly—and so shockingly—surpasses the first. Roosevelt
had an aristocratic distaste for being addressed in an over-familiar fashion,
and to be called‘ by his first name, or, still worse, by a diminutive of his
first name (making it a duplicate of Wright’s) must have enraged him,
but to be urged in his paralyzed condition to get up out of his chair and
look around—l Smith’s memoirs are, alas, silent in regard to what followed;
it is certainly the case that Wright had no part in the housing of workers
at Oak Ridge.
More Frank Lloyd Wright by Brendon Gill
Small as the house was—fifteen hundred square feet in all—the many
ingenuities of its plan made it seem at least twice that size. In the shape
of an L, with the base of the L parallel to the street and embracing the
living room, workroom, bathroom, and entry, and the upright of the L
paralleling the northern boundary of the property and embracing the three
bedrooms, it presented a harsh, even a forbidding, aspect to the street,
having only a narrow band of clerestory windows at the point where the
blank house wall and the overhang of the flat roof met. The family car
would occupy most of what in conventional houses would be a front porch,
while the front door, being set at right angles to the street, was nearly
invisible. If the street facade of the house was uninviting (and must have
distressed the _]acobses’ neighbors, who were used to glancing into one
another’s windows), the inner facade was an unexpected and delightful
expanse of high glass doors, opening from the living room onto a sunny
eastern terrace; the bedrooms looked south through matching high glass
doors and shared with the living room a view of the ample garden.
The house gained an almost instant fame, in part because of the public-
ity aroused by its low cost (emerging from the Great Depression, hundreds
of thousands of Americans were eager to possess a house in the five-
thousand-dollar range), in part because of its unprecedentedly open design,
and in part because of the curious nature of its construction—nobody
had ever tried living on a slab before or had ever tried cooking in something
called a workspace, lit from above and scarcely to be distinguished from
the adjacent dining space. It was all very odd and perhaps, given the
past history of the architect who had designed it, faintly scandalous; so
great was the number of people who came to peer and poke about and
shake their heads as the house went up that, once the Jacobses had moved
in, they decided to charge admission to the premises: twenty—five cents.
&&&&&&&&&&&
One might quarrel with Wright and say of the Jacobs house that it
was Usonia Three, having been preceded by houses designed in the Usonian
vein for the Hoult family, in Wichita, Kansas, in 1935, and for the Lusk
family, in Huron, South Dakota, later in the same year. Both houses, which
never got beyond the planning stage, owed a good deal to the Willey
house of 1934, which must then be categorized as ur-llsonlan, OT even
Premature Usonian. All such labels, creating boundaries in a process that
by its nature is without boundaries, are nonsensical; nevertheless, Wright
himself was willing to establish periods and affix dates-—on occasion, to
alter dates—whenever it served a sufficiently advantageous (and sufficiently
devious) purpose. He invented the term Prairie House foria kind Of house
that had little to do with the prairie and much to do with the suburbs,
and he invented the term Usonian in order to‘ impose an American name
on a style of house having far more to do with the structures that Mies
van der Rohe and other architects in Middle Europe were designing than
it did with the design of houses in Middle America.
As we have seen, Wright plucked the word Usonia from some as yet
unidentified source; what matters is not where the word came from but
the weight that Wright meant it to carry, and why. He was always placing
his literary and oratorical gifts at the service of his profession; often, he
wrote things and said things that were mere repetitious bombast and yet
they were the means—clumsy, indirect, too high in pitch—that enabled
him to accomplish something of value in his career. “Usonian” staked a
claim on behalf of the work that was far more than a mask for whatever
foreign strains may have entered into it. So in its time did “Broadacre
City,” which if Wright hadn’t stamped it as his own would have struck us
as a wisecracking book-title by the sour likes of Sinclair Lewis.
Throughout his entire career, Wright was determined to place an
authentic American stamp upon his work. Drawing inspiration, as well as
certain major principles of scale and volume, from a score of foreign sources
(Austria, Scotland, japan, Mexico), he sedulously covered his tracks with
allusions to an American past drawn not from history—Wright was shaky
on American history——but from American letters.
ingenuities of its plan made it seem at least twice that size. In the shape
of an L, with the base of the L parallel to the street and embracing the
living room, workroom, bathroom, and entry, and the upright of the L
paralleling the northern boundary of the property and embracing the three
bedrooms, it presented a harsh, even a forbidding, aspect to the street,
having only a narrow band of clerestory windows at the point where the
blank house wall and the overhang of the flat roof met. The family car
would occupy most of what in conventional houses would be a front porch,
while the front door, being set at right angles to the street, was nearly
invisible. If the street facade of the house was uninviting (and must have
distressed the _]acobses’ neighbors, who were used to glancing into one
another’s windows), the inner facade was an unexpected and delightful
expanse of high glass doors, opening from the living room onto a sunny
eastern terrace; the bedrooms looked south through matching high glass
doors and shared with the living room a view of the ample garden.
The house gained an almost instant fame, in part because of the public-
ity aroused by its low cost (emerging from the Great Depression, hundreds
of thousands of Americans were eager to possess a house in the five-
thousand-dollar range), in part because of its unprecedentedly open design,
and in part because of the curious nature of its construction—nobody
had ever tried living on a slab before or had ever tried cooking in something
called a workspace, lit from above and scarcely to be distinguished from
the adjacent dining space. It was all very odd and perhaps, given the
past history of the architect who had designed it, faintly scandalous; so
great was the number of people who came to peer and poke about and
shake their heads as the house went up that, once the Jacobses had moved
in, they decided to charge admission to the premises: twenty—five cents.
&&&&&&&&&&&
One might quarrel with Wright and say of the Jacobs house that it
was Usonia Three, having been preceded by houses designed in the Usonian
vein for the Hoult family, in Wichita, Kansas, in 1935, and for the Lusk
family, in Huron, South Dakota, later in the same year. Both houses, which
never got beyond the planning stage, owed a good deal to the Willey
house of 1934, which must then be categorized as ur-llsonlan, OT even
Premature Usonian. All such labels, creating boundaries in a process that
by its nature is without boundaries, are nonsensical; nevertheless, Wright
himself was willing to establish periods and affix dates-—on occasion, to
alter dates—whenever it served a sufficiently advantageous (and sufficiently
devious) purpose. He invented the term Prairie House foria kind Of house
that had little to do with the prairie and much to do with the suburbs,
and he invented the term Usonian in order to‘ impose an American name
on a style of house having far more to do with the structures that Mies
van der Rohe and other architects in Middle Europe were designing than
it did with the design of houses in Middle America.
As we have seen, Wright plucked the word Usonia from some as yet
unidentified source; what matters is not where the word came from but
the weight that Wright meant it to carry, and why. He was always placing
his literary and oratorical gifts at the service of his profession; often, he
wrote things and said things that were mere repetitious bombast and yet
they were the means—clumsy, indirect, too high in pitch—that enabled
him to accomplish something of value in his career. “Usonian” staked a
claim on behalf of the work that was far more than a mask for whatever
foreign strains may have entered into it. So in its time did “Broadacre
City,” which if Wright hadn’t stamped it as his own would have struck us
as a wisecracking book-title by the sour likes of Sinclair Lewis.
Throughout his entire career, Wright was determined to place an
authentic American stamp upon his work. Drawing inspiration, as well as
certain major principles of scale and volume, from a score of foreign sources
(Austria, Scotland, japan, Mexico), he sedulously covered his tracks with
allusions to an American past drawn not from history—Wright was shaky
on American history——but from American letters.
FLW
True, the setting
of Wingspread is a landscape of rolling meadows, interrupted here’ and
there by adroitly planted clumps of pines, while the settings of most of
Wright’s turn-of-the-century Prairie Houses were comparatively cramped
suburban lots and therefore not authentically of the prairie at all; neverthe-
less, “Prairie House” evokes a sense of ground-hugging simplicity of form
and, within that form, the prospect of an equal simplicity in the conduct
of life. Wingspread evokes something very different; it is an exceedingly
large mansion, having a floor area of fourteen thousand square feet and
shouldering the sky with the self-important eccentricity of some mock-
Gothic castle in the Thousand Islands. A true folly, it imposes itself upon
its site instead of accommodating to it. Wright may well have sensed this
(to him) unwelcome fact, since he took care to praise Wingspread for the
opposite reason: he boasted that its presence improved the site, giving it
a charm that it lacked when it was merely so much untampered-with nature.
When Wingspread was under construction, Johns0n’s wife died and
Johnson was tempted for a time to abandon the project. At Wright’s urging,
both for the sake of the children and as a memorial gesture to his dead
wife,Johnson finished the house and occupied it for twenty years, accepting
with good humor the fact that it leaked as profusely as the Administration
Building ‘(lid and that its scale was far too grand for the family shelter he
had had in mind. Johnson was an ideal client in his willingness to forgive
the defects that Wright’s buildings almost invariably possessed~defects
that Wright managed in most cases to turn into proof of his high aesthetic
intentions. (At the beginning of the Administration Building project,John-
son visited the house that Wright had designed for his cousin Richard
Lloyd Jones, in Tulsa; innumerable tubs and canning jars were scattered
throughout the house to catch water leaking through the roof. Mrs. Lloyd
Jones apologized to her guest with a kindly witticism: “This is what happens
when you leave a work of art out in the rain.”
&&&&&&&&&
More than a quarter of a century has passed since the Wingspread
Center was dedicated. Today it flourishes under the direction of William
B. Boyd, husband ofJohnson’s daughter Karen (for whom Wright designed,
in 1954, a pleasantly romantic house on a bluff above the Racine River).
It was to Karen that Wright once extended a remarkable invitation. Visiting
Wingspread, he fell ill after lunch and mistook indigestion for a mortal
heart attack. He lay down on a couch in the living room, composed himself,
beckoned to Karen, and said splendidly, “Come and watch how a great
man dies.”
of Wingspread is a landscape of rolling meadows, interrupted here’ and
there by adroitly planted clumps of pines, while the settings of most of
Wright’s turn-of-the-century Prairie Houses were comparatively cramped
suburban lots and therefore not authentically of the prairie at all; neverthe-
less, “Prairie House” evokes a sense of ground-hugging simplicity of form
and, within that form, the prospect of an equal simplicity in the conduct
of life. Wingspread evokes something very different; it is an exceedingly
large mansion, having a floor area of fourteen thousand square feet and
shouldering the sky with the self-important eccentricity of some mock-
Gothic castle in the Thousand Islands. A true folly, it imposes itself upon
its site instead of accommodating to it. Wright may well have sensed this
(to him) unwelcome fact, since he took care to praise Wingspread for the
opposite reason: he boasted that its presence improved the site, giving it
a charm that it lacked when it was merely so much untampered-with nature.
When Wingspread was under construction, Johns0n’s wife died and
Johnson was tempted for a time to abandon the project. At Wright’s urging,
both for the sake of the children and as a memorial gesture to his dead
wife,Johnson finished the house and occupied it for twenty years, accepting
with good humor the fact that it leaked as profusely as the Administration
Building ‘(lid and that its scale was far too grand for the family shelter he
had had in mind. Johnson was an ideal client in his willingness to forgive
the defects that Wright’s buildings almost invariably possessed~defects
that Wright managed in most cases to turn into proof of his high aesthetic
intentions. (At the beginning of the Administration Building project,John-
son visited the house that Wright had designed for his cousin Richard
Lloyd Jones, in Tulsa; innumerable tubs and canning jars were scattered
throughout the house to catch water leaking through the roof. Mrs. Lloyd
Jones apologized to her guest with a kindly witticism: “This is what happens
when you leave a work of art out in the rain.”
&&&&&&&&&
More than a quarter of a century has passed since the Wingspread
Center was dedicated. Today it flourishes under the direction of William
B. Boyd, husband ofJohnson’s daughter Karen (for whom Wright designed,
in 1954, a pleasantly romantic house on a bluff above the Racine River).
It was to Karen that Wright once extended a remarkable invitation. Visiting
Wingspread, he fell ill after lunch and mistook indigestion for a mortal
heart attack. He lay down on a couch in the living room, composed himself,
beckoned to Karen, and said splendidly, “Come and watch how a great
man dies.”
Saturday, November 23, 2013
FLW by Gill
To this day in Spring Green one hears stories not of Wright’s greatness but of his purported fiscal skuldug-
gery. lf the Wrights’ attitude toward money was a notable aberration in
the Oak Park of the nineties, so was their profligacy in respect to childbear-
ing, Few of the ambitious young couples in that community were hurling
child after child into the world; the white Protestant upper-middle-class
world had achieved a few more or less successful methods of birth control
by that time and six or more children were beginning to be regarded as
evidence of a deplorable carelessness, not to say lubricity.
++++++++++
Meanwhile, furniture for the Administration Building was being con-
structed according to Wright’s designs. As he had done in the case of the
Larkin building, Wright had persuaded Johnson that the building and its
contents must be seen to be of one nature. The furniture that he designed,
mostly of metal, shared the same streamlining as the building: desks and
chairs were either rounded or curved and in their emphasis upon horizontal-
ity somewhat resembled the biplanes and triplanes designed by aeronautical
engineers early in the century—heavy as the furniture might be, one sus-
pected it of being capable of flight. Despite much advice to the contrary
Wright insisted ondesigning a chair with three legs, remarkable for its
instability. With his usual gift for employing any argument, however implau-
sible, in order to have his way, Wright claimed that the chair would improve
the alertness and efficiency of the employees by forcing them to adopt a
correct posture in order not to tip over. The chair having spilled enough
people unceremoniously onto the floor (Wright himself is said to have
been one of them), he was at last obliged to approve the design of a
comparatively normal four-legged chair.
The Administration Building officially opened in May 1939 after
almost three years of construction and at a cost approaching three million
dollars. Neither time nor money mattered—the building was an instanta-
neous triumph, both with the executives and employees of the company
and with the world at large. To this day, it gives delight and no amount
of criticism, whether of its oddity in aesthetic terms or its elitism in philosoph-
ical terms, is likely to diminish that delight. As far as I know, few writers
have concerned themselves with the question of Wright’s sudden and unex-
pected espousal of streamlining, which he carried to such extraordinary
lengths in the Administration Building and, later, in the Research Tower.
(In the Capital’ journal project, upon which the Administration Building
was based, the shell of the building was severely rectilinear.)
Streamlining was known to be of practical value in the design of automo-
biles, airplanes, and trains, but in the nineteen thirties it became the fashion
to design stationary objects whether large or small (refrigerators, furnaces
electric toasters, and even pencil sharpeners) with so-called aerodynamic
contours; the fashion spread to architecture, colliding with the weaponlike
Zigzags of Art Deco and sometimes marrying them. But what has streamlin-
ing to do with architecture except as an expression of meretricious faddish-
negss? The Administration Building wasn’t going anywhere and had no
need for reduced wind resistance; in its relentless multiplicity of suave
roundnesses, it embodied some playful whim in Wright’s unconcious-
one that was wholly at odds with the no less playful whim that led to the
vivid angularities of Fallingwater, designed at precise the same time.
is tempting to find a clue to Wright’s streamlining of the ]ohnson Wax
building in the fact that Hib Johnson and he, both devotees of fine cars
owned Lincoln Zephyrs, which have entered ‘history as among
handsome streamlined cars ever designed. Wright claimed, without adduc-
ing proof ilhat he was the first to apply the term “streamlining” to build-
ings—the,first use of the term, according to the Oxford English Dictionary,
goes back to the early years of the present century—and he certainly took
pride in the virtuosity with which he manipulated it. He was delighted
when Life magazine described the interior of the building as “like a woman
swimming naked in a stream”
gery. lf the Wrights’ attitude toward money was a notable aberration in
the Oak Park of the nineties, so was their profligacy in respect to childbear-
ing, Few of the ambitious young couples in that community were hurling
child after child into the world; the white Protestant upper-middle-class
world had achieved a few more or less successful methods of birth control
by that time and six or more children were beginning to be regarded as
evidence of a deplorable carelessness, not to say lubricity.
++++++++++
Meanwhile, furniture for the Administration Building was being con-
structed according to Wright’s designs. As he had done in the case of the
Larkin building, Wright had persuaded Johnson that the building and its
contents must be seen to be of one nature. The furniture that he designed,
mostly of metal, shared the same streamlining as the building: desks and
chairs were either rounded or curved and in their emphasis upon horizontal-
ity somewhat resembled the biplanes and triplanes designed by aeronautical
engineers early in the century—heavy as the furniture might be, one sus-
pected it of being capable of flight. Despite much advice to the contrary
Wright insisted ondesigning a chair with three legs, remarkable for its
instability. With his usual gift for employing any argument, however implau-
sible, in order to have his way, Wright claimed that the chair would improve
the alertness and efficiency of the employees by forcing them to adopt a
correct posture in order not to tip over. The chair having spilled enough
people unceremoniously onto the floor (Wright himself is said to have
been one of them), he was at last obliged to approve the design of a
comparatively normal four-legged chair.
The Administration Building officially opened in May 1939 after
almost three years of construction and at a cost approaching three million
dollars. Neither time nor money mattered—the building was an instanta-
neous triumph, both with the executives and employees of the company
and with the world at large. To this day, it gives delight and no amount
of criticism, whether of its oddity in aesthetic terms or its elitism in philosoph-
ical terms, is likely to diminish that delight. As far as I know, few writers
have concerned themselves with the question of Wright’s sudden and unex-
pected espousal of streamlining, which he carried to such extraordinary
lengths in the Administration Building and, later, in the Research Tower.
(In the Capital’ journal project, upon which the Administration Building
was based, the shell of the building was severely rectilinear.)
Streamlining was known to be of practical value in the design of automo-
biles, airplanes, and trains, but in the nineteen thirties it became the fashion
to design stationary objects whether large or small (refrigerators, furnaces
electric toasters, and even pencil sharpeners) with so-called aerodynamic
contours; the fashion spread to architecture, colliding with the weaponlike
Zigzags of Art Deco and sometimes marrying them. But what has streamlin-
ing to do with architecture except as an expression of meretricious faddish-
negss? The Administration Building wasn’t going anywhere and had no
need for reduced wind resistance; in its relentless multiplicity of suave
roundnesses, it embodied some playful whim in Wright’s unconcious-
one that was wholly at odds with the no less playful whim that led to the
vivid angularities of Fallingwater, designed at precise the same time.
is tempting to find a clue to Wright’s streamlining of the ]ohnson Wax
building in the fact that Hib Johnson and he, both devotees of fine cars
owned Lincoln Zephyrs, which have entered ‘history as among
handsome streamlined cars ever designed. Wright claimed, without adduc-
ing proof ilhat he was the first to apply the term “streamlining” to build-
ings—the,first use of the term, according to the Oxford English Dictionary,
goes back to the early years of the present century—and he certainly took
pride in the virtuosity with which he manipulated it. He was delighted
when Life magazine described the interior of the building as “like a woman
swimming naked in a stream”
Futility by Gerhardie
All is tumbling, going to ruin. In a month or so all business
will stop, works will close down. The rouble will be value-
less. There will be nothing. . . ’
‘ Now don’t lose courage, Nikolai,’ said Fanny Ivanovna
hopefully. ‘ We shall pull through; somehow we shall;
and then on the other side of the grave we shall be safe.’
‘ Her most optimistic moment in lifel ’ jeered Nikolai
Vasilievich.
‘ It’s a surprising thing what the human soul will stand,
Andrei Andreiech,’ she said. ‘ I can venture only this
explanation; it is habit. You see, the cup is ever filled to
the brim, but—1o I the miracle l the cup expands. No
trouble. None !—And here we are.’ '
‘ Life gets you,’ came from the window ; ‘ sooner or later
it gets you all the same.’
‘ I don’t know what it’s for, why, or who wants it. It
seems so unnecessary, useless, even silly. And yet I cannot
think that it’s all in vain. There must be—perhaps a larger
pattern somewhere in which all these futilities, these shifting
incongruities are somehow reconciled. But shall we know P
Shall we ever know the reason? ’
‘ Philosophy l ’ jeered Nikolai Vasilievich mildly.
‘ Perhaps,’ I said, ‘ when we awaken on the other side of
death and ask to be told the reason, they will shrug their
shoulders and say, “ We don’t know. It is beyond us. D
-------
Admiral in person and asked for two additional coupés, to
accommodate her and the three sisters. The Admiral was a
sailor and a gentleman. He promised her two coupés.
I forget which wing of the family was the next to apply.
I remember that every day that week our waiting-room was
crowded with petitioners. The Admiral said No. He found
himself saying No innumerable times each day. Now it is an
intrinsic part of the Russian character that it does not accept
No for No. It is constitutionally incapable of doing so. Its
institutions are all a negation of that principle. And what
is more, it refuses to confine that fact to within the Russian
border. It regards it in the light of world-wide applica-
tion, assuming that it is indeed nothing less than human
nature.
The Admiral still said N0. He held that it was not human
nature but just Russian nature, and as an illustration of his
point he meant to show that when an Englishman says No
he does mean N 0. But none of them would understand the
Admiral’s interpretation of No. They had all grown up
with the idea that N o meant Yes after an adequate amount
of pressure and insistence. The pressure was of various
kinds, according to the age, sex and nature of the applicant.
There were tears, entreaties. There were questions, such as
the ‘ object ’ of the Allies in Siberia, since they monopolized
the best trains and refused to help the Russians in their
primary needs. There were direct questions which it was
thought must needs shatter the impregnability of the
Admiral’s N 0, such as, for instance : Did the Admiral wish
to starve them, as he evidently did, by cutting them adrift
from Nikolai Vasilievich, the bread~winner?
The Admiral still said that No was No, and would they
please understand it ? They all replied that No was not the
point, the point being: What were they to do without Nikolai
Vasilievich? Whereon the Admiral replied that when he
said a thing he meant it, this being the sterling value of
British character. But they persisted all the same, treating
him as if he were just human like the rest of them. Then the
Admiral became a little angry. It annoyed him that they
should fail to understand the primary fact that an English-
man was not a Russian and that hence any laxity that held
good in Russian character did not hold good in that of a
native of the British Isles. But the Russians hammered on
in spite of all; till the Admiral was heartily amused that
they should indeed know no better than to think that he
would give in just because they persisted, for the ignorance
of human nature that, he thought, such a belief implied-
a quaint and childish ignorance—began to fascinate him. He
looked at them and looked at them again, as they poured
forth their woes—and marvelled. Indeed, their touching
innocence fascinated him so much that finally he felt he
wanted to humour them, as one is inclined to humour quaint,
unreasonable children who know no better. And it was by
way of humouring them that the Admiral gave way. No
(for once only) was to mean Yes. They thanked him cordi-
ally. He sighed and wiped his forehead with his handker-
chief. The Russian character had won the day.
will stop, works will close down. The rouble will be value-
less. There will be nothing. . . ’
‘ Now don’t lose courage, Nikolai,’ said Fanny Ivanovna
hopefully. ‘ We shall pull through; somehow we shall;
and then on the other side of the grave we shall be safe.’
‘ Her most optimistic moment in lifel ’ jeered Nikolai
Vasilievich.
‘ It’s a surprising thing what the human soul will stand,
Andrei Andreiech,’ she said. ‘ I can venture only this
explanation; it is habit. You see, the cup is ever filled to
the brim, but—1o I the miracle l the cup expands. No
trouble. None !—And here we are.’ '
‘ Life gets you,’ came from the window ; ‘ sooner or later
it gets you all the same.’
‘ I don’t know what it’s for, why, or who wants it. It
seems so unnecessary, useless, even silly. And yet I cannot
think that it’s all in vain. There must be—perhaps a larger
pattern somewhere in which all these futilities, these shifting
incongruities are somehow reconciled. But shall we know P
Shall we ever know the reason? ’
‘ Philosophy l ’ jeered Nikolai Vasilievich mildly.
‘ Perhaps,’ I said, ‘ when we awaken on the other side of
death and ask to be told the reason, they will shrug their
shoulders and say, “ We don’t know. It is beyond us. D
-------
Admiral in person and asked for two additional coupés, to
accommodate her and the three sisters. The Admiral was a
sailor and a gentleman. He promised her two coupés.
I forget which wing of the family was the next to apply.
I remember that every day that week our waiting-room was
crowded with petitioners. The Admiral said No. He found
himself saying No innumerable times each day. Now it is an
intrinsic part of the Russian character that it does not accept
No for No. It is constitutionally incapable of doing so. Its
institutions are all a negation of that principle. And what
is more, it refuses to confine that fact to within the Russian
border. It regards it in the light of world-wide applica-
tion, assuming that it is indeed nothing less than human
nature.
The Admiral still said N0. He held that it was not human
nature but just Russian nature, and as an illustration of his
point he meant to show that when an Englishman says No
he does mean N 0. But none of them would understand the
Admiral’s interpretation of No. They had all grown up
with the idea that N o meant Yes after an adequate amount
of pressure and insistence. The pressure was of various
kinds, according to the age, sex and nature of the applicant.
There were tears, entreaties. There were questions, such as
the ‘ object ’ of the Allies in Siberia, since they monopolized
the best trains and refused to help the Russians in their
primary needs. There were direct questions which it was
thought must needs shatter the impregnability of the
Admiral’s N 0, such as, for instance : Did the Admiral wish
to starve them, as he evidently did, by cutting them adrift
from Nikolai Vasilievich, the bread~winner?
The Admiral still said that No was No, and would they
please understand it ? They all replied that No was not the
point, the point being: What were they to do without Nikolai
Vasilievich? Whereon the Admiral replied that when he
said a thing he meant it, this being the sterling value of
British character. But they persisted all the same, treating
him as if he were just human like the rest of them. Then the
Admiral became a little angry. It annoyed him that they
should fail to understand the primary fact that an English-
man was not a Russian and that hence any laxity that held
good in Russian character did not hold good in that of a
native of the British Isles. But the Russians hammered on
in spite of all; till the Admiral was heartily amused that
they should indeed know no better than to think that he
would give in just because they persisted, for the ignorance
of human nature that, he thought, such a belief implied-
a quaint and childish ignorance—began to fascinate him. He
looked at them and looked at them again, as they poured
forth their woes—and marvelled. Indeed, their touching
innocence fascinated him so much that finally he felt he
wanted to humour them, as one is inclined to humour quaint,
unreasonable children who know no better. And it was by
way of humouring them that the Admiral gave way. No
(for once only) was to mean Yes. They thanked him cordi-
ally. He sighed and wiped his forehead with his handker-
chief. The Russian character had won the day.
Flaubert by Brown
Excerpts:
Dismayed by their son’s self-squander, her unhappy marriage, and their
rootless life in a community of privileged transients, Elisa showed signs of
mental derangement. Everything caused her pain: people’s conversation,
slight breezes, birdsong. Unable to cry, to read, to write, to wash herself, to
assuage stinging pains in her arms or banish the idea that her veins had been
emptied of blood, she was committed to a sanatorium near Achern
in Wurttemberg. The staff diagnosed her as a hypersensitive melancholic
whose recovery called for a period of complete separation from an in-
compatible husband.
+ + +
Born to minor gentry rooted in the western Loire valley,
Marie-Sophie lived near Angers on property that afforded her an inde-
pendence and knew almost nothing of the world beyond Anjou except
through books. Catholicism, socialism, and literature had variously guided
her mind to the cul-de-sac in which she found herself when Madame Bo-
vary entered her life. Educated at convent school, where live embers of joy
had been efficiently stamped out, she devoted herself well past her twenties
to a mother guilt-ridden for having divorced her first husband during the
Revolution, when divorce briefly became legal and easily accomplished,
Marie Catherine Leroyer de Chantepie exacerbated Marie-Sophie’s reli-
gious scruples with her own obsessive fear of damnation. During the 18305
an alternative faith presented itself in the form of socialism, to which
Marie-Sophie was led by her physician. George Sand, with whom she ini-
tiated a correspondence as prolific as the one with Flaubert, encouraged her
social radicalism, and after the death of Marie Catherine, Marie—Sophie
estate, Tertre Saint-Laurent, became a ramshackle phalanstery housing
fourteen dependents, among them her godson, an adopted orphan, and
Polish refugee. “They have no livelihood and count on me for
they need,” she told Flaubert. “My father left me ten thousand francs of
come from farmland, which isn’t enough to support a throng that
sumes without earning. I must have recourse to expedients and deny
everything.” Everything included conjugal love. She had been in love
an opera singer named Eugene, and there had been one or two prospects
marriage, but her misgivings gained the upper hand when George
whom she asked for advice, declared marriage to be an “odious”
tion. Fourteen people did not fill the emotional void. Nor had
freed her from the influence of Catholic demonology. Haunted by
even for imaginary sins, she could neither confess them nor cease to
absolution.
Dismayed by their son’s self-squander, her unhappy marriage, and their
rootless life in a community of privileged transients, Elisa showed signs of
mental derangement. Everything caused her pain: people’s conversation,
slight breezes, birdsong. Unable to cry, to read, to write, to wash herself, to
assuage stinging pains in her arms or banish the idea that her veins had been
emptied of blood, she was committed to a sanatorium near Achern
in Wurttemberg. The staff diagnosed her as a hypersensitive melancholic
whose recovery called for a period of complete separation from an in-
compatible husband.
+ + +
Born to minor gentry rooted in the western Loire valley,
Marie-Sophie lived near Angers on property that afforded her an inde-
pendence and knew almost nothing of the world beyond Anjou except
through books. Catholicism, socialism, and literature had variously guided
her mind to the cul-de-sac in which she found herself when Madame Bo-
vary entered her life. Educated at convent school, where live embers of joy
had been efficiently stamped out, she devoted herself well past her twenties
to a mother guilt-ridden for having divorced her first husband during the
Revolution, when divorce briefly became legal and easily accomplished,
Marie Catherine Leroyer de Chantepie exacerbated Marie-Sophie’s reli-
gious scruples with her own obsessive fear of damnation. During the 18305
an alternative faith presented itself in the form of socialism, to which
Marie-Sophie was led by her physician. George Sand, with whom she ini-
tiated a correspondence as prolific as the one with Flaubert, encouraged her
social radicalism, and after the death of Marie Catherine, Marie—Sophie
estate, Tertre Saint-Laurent, became a ramshackle phalanstery housing
fourteen dependents, among them her godson, an adopted orphan, and
Polish refugee. “They have no livelihood and count on me for
they need,” she told Flaubert. “My father left me ten thousand francs of
come from farmland, which isn’t enough to support a throng that
sumes without earning. I must have recourse to expedients and deny
everything.” Everything included conjugal love. She had been in love
an opera singer named Eugene, and there had been one or two prospects
marriage, but her misgivings gained the upper hand when George
whom she asked for advice, declared marriage to be an “odious”
tion. Fourteen people did not fill the emotional void. Nor had
freed her from the influence of Catholic demonology. Haunted by
even for imaginary sins, she could neither confess them nor cease to
absolution.
Sunday, November 17, 2013
And endlessly quotable
that speculation had become a substitute for religious exaltation, the Bourse
a profane temple, the broker a shaman, financial jargon an incantatory lan-
guage, and the mass of French a worshipful throng.
More conservative writers did not quarrel with Zola’s metaphor, inclined
though some might have been to qualify it or turn it against the godless
doctrine on which he relied for the grand design of his fictional saga. Tra-
dition had unquestionably been dealt a blow by circumstances beyond any-
body’s control. Where bourgeois wisdom held that the virtuous man
planned, labored, saved; that he placed his faith in tangible things; that he
found the reward for all he begrudged himself in his children’s advance-
ment; and that he set posterity a shining example of the golden rule, cir-
cumstances now urged men to believe that the magic attending stock
market numbers augured a new dispensation. Paris swarmed with immi-
grants from provincial France who had come by railroad seeking fortune in
the capital, only to end up in some squalid tenement outside the customs
barrier eating dust all the days of their life. More Parisians than not went to
bed hungry at night. But a gambler could always cite that other swarm on
whom fortune had smiled, the golden dustmen who had struck it rich, the
parvenus who justified Tocqueville’s contention, “There is no longer a race
of wealthy men, just as there is no longer a race of poor people; the former
emerge every day from the bosom of the crowd and constantly return to
it.” Not since Revolutionary days, when the Convention made sang, or
aristocratic blood, and naissance, or high birth, obsolete by decreeing
Year 1, had Frenchmen with nothing to lose, but something to wager;‘]j1i';/
greeted so warmly the prospect of losing their past. v i
. Otherwise, dra-
matic art went into serious decline, as interest shifted from theater to con-
jury, with playwrights relying more and more on the technician who
devised special effects. Victor Séjour’s The Madonna of the Roses, for exam-
ple, owed its entire success to a fire simulated with bengal lights, bellows,
“spark,” and lycopodium. When Dennery’s The Battle of Marengo played at
the Chatelet, the manager requisitioned several four-inch artillery pieces
from the War Ministry and arranged to have their gun crews fire blank
shells, without any assurance that the theater’s glass roof could withstand
the shock wave. A production of Meyerbeer’s The African I/l/01/nan at the
Opera took place on a stage transformed into an enormous ship that was
made to rock fore and aft by hands working machinery underneath it. King
Carrot, a féerie, or extravaganza, written by Victorien Sardou and Jacques
Offenbach, in which an old magician who is dismembered and burned
piecemeal emerges from the fire a young man, inspired devices of the ut-
most ingenuity. “The machinist’s art uses all its resources in the construction
of tmcs. Some of them are veritable masterpieces,” declared one technician.
“The machinist is at once a carpenter, a cabinetmaker, and a mechanic. The
study of design and of dynamics is indispensable to him. Physics and even
chemistry furnish him many effects.”
While the church was accrediting Bernadette’s vision at Lourdes in hopes
of recovering something of its authority from science, theater was discred-
iting occultism with gimmicks that enhanced the prestige of the engineer.
Those who turned a deaf ear to Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors got all the magic
they wanted on the Boulevard, where the supernatural, like everything else,
became big business. Behind the backdrop and beneath the floorboards of
several dozen stages, machinists and electricians, scene painters and uphol-
Sterers, locksmiths and blacksmiths, smoke-and-fire makers, fountain keep-
§Y$, and lighting masters all did yeomen work in the service of yet another
industry, the entertainment industry, which made fairy-tale scenes for the
Caffiage trade, manufacturing them with the same fastidiousness that
Vlollet-le-Duc applied to his restoration of medieval fortresses and
Napoleon III to the trappings of Napoleonic glory.
* * * * * *
“This publication has convinced me once
again of women’s deep—seated immorality,” he declared to Feydeau, sparing.
not even those women whom we know he held in high esteem. “You will
object that that one [Louise Colet] is a monster, which I deny. There aren’t
any monsters, alas, and if there were, as many men could fill the role as
women. But one thing no man would do is treat a former mistress as she has
her ex-lover. Women have no notion of rectitude. The best among them
have no compunctions about listening at doors, unsealing letters, counsel-
ing and practicing a thousand little deceits, etc. It all goes back to their
organ. Where man has an Eminence, they have a Hole! That eminence is
Reason, Order, Science, the Phallus-Sun, and the hole is night, humidity,
confusion.”
a profane temple, the broker a shaman, financial jargon an incantatory lan-
guage, and the mass of French a worshipful throng.
More conservative writers did not quarrel with Zola’s metaphor, inclined
though some might have been to qualify it or turn it against the godless
doctrine on which he relied for the grand design of his fictional saga. Tra-
dition had unquestionably been dealt a blow by circumstances beyond any-
body’s control. Where bourgeois wisdom held that the virtuous man
planned, labored, saved; that he placed his faith in tangible things; that he
found the reward for all he begrudged himself in his children’s advance-
ment; and that he set posterity a shining example of the golden rule, cir-
cumstances now urged men to believe that the magic attending stock
market numbers augured a new dispensation. Paris swarmed with immi-
grants from provincial France who had come by railroad seeking fortune in
the capital, only to end up in some squalid tenement outside the customs
barrier eating dust all the days of their life. More Parisians than not went to
bed hungry at night. But a gambler could always cite that other swarm on
whom fortune had smiled, the golden dustmen who had struck it rich, the
parvenus who justified Tocqueville’s contention, “There is no longer a race
of wealthy men, just as there is no longer a race of poor people; the former
emerge every day from the bosom of the crowd and constantly return to
it.” Not since Revolutionary days, when the Convention made sang, or
aristocratic blood, and naissance, or high birth, obsolete by decreeing
Year 1, had Frenchmen with nothing to lose, but something to wager;‘]j1i';/
greeted so warmly the prospect of losing their past. v i
. Otherwise, dra-
matic art went into serious decline, as interest shifted from theater to con-
jury, with playwrights relying more and more on the technician who
devised special effects. Victor Séjour’s The Madonna of the Roses, for exam-
ple, owed its entire success to a fire simulated with bengal lights, bellows,
“spark,” and lycopodium. When Dennery’s The Battle of Marengo played at
the Chatelet, the manager requisitioned several four-inch artillery pieces
from the War Ministry and arranged to have their gun crews fire blank
shells, without any assurance that the theater’s glass roof could withstand
the shock wave. A production of Meyerbeer’s The African I/l/01/nan at the
Opera took place on a stage transformed into an enormous ship that was
made to rock fore and aft by hands working machinery underneath it. King
Carrot, a féerie, or extravaganza, written by Victorien Sardou and Jacques
Offenbach, in which an old magician who is dismembered and burned
piecemeal emerges from the fire a young man, inspired devices of the ut-
most ingenuity. “The machinist’s art uses all its resources in the construction
of tmcs. Some of them are veritable masterpieces,” declared one technician.
“The machinist is at once a carpenter, a cabinetmaker, and a mechanic. The
study of design and of dynamics is indispensable to him. Physics and even
chemistry furnish him many effects.”
While the church was accrediting Bernadette’s vision at Lourdes in hopes
of recovering something of its authority from science, theater was discred-
iting occultism with gimmicks that enhanced the prestige of the engineer.
Those who turned a deaf ear to Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors got all the magic
they wanted on the Boulevard, where the supernatural, like everything else,
became big business. Behind the backdrop and beneath the floorboards of
several dozen stages, machinists and electricians, scene painters and uphol-
Sterers, locksmiths and blacksmiths, smoke-and-fire makers, fountain keep-
§Y$, and lighting masters all did yeomen work in the service of yet another
industry, the entertainment industry, which made fairy-tale scenes for the
Caffiage trade, manufacturing them with the same fastidiousness that
Vlollet-le-Duc applied to his restoration of medieval fortresses and
Napoleon III to the trappings of Napoleonic glory.
* * * * * *
“This publication has convinced me once
again of women’s deep—seated immorality,” he declared to Feydeau, sparing.
not even those women whom we know he held in high esteem. “You will
object that that one [Louise Colet] is a monster, which I deny. There aren’t
any monsters, alas, and if there were, as many men could fill the role as
women. But one thing no man would do is treat a former mistress as she has
her ex-lover. Women have no notion of rectitude. The best among them
have no compunctions about listening at doors, unsealing letters, counsel-
ing and practicing a thousand little deceits, etc. It all goes back to their
organ. Where man has an Eminence, they have a Hole! That eminence is
Reason, Order, Science, the Phallus-Sun, and the hole is night, humidity,
confusion.”
So beautifully written....
In admiration of Frederick Brown:
Flaubert’s last chapters round out a perfectly coherent vision. His heroines? »
suicide and the way she kills herself are of a piece with her desire for some-
thing transcendently fulfilling, which had shaped her character around a des-Q?‘
perate emptiness. Poison suits Emma. Throughout the novel food tends toi‘ 1
sicken her or, on the contrary, to lose all material relevance in her
world. When guests at her wedding feast eat, she sees peasant mouths
stuffed, but when patricians at the Andervilliers chateau gather around a
with victuals piled high amid bouquets of flowers, cut crystal, and
cloches, she sees a beautiful tableau mort. The woman who starves, hating
body, cannot nourish others, least of all the unwanted daughter farmed
to a wet nurse for suckling. Only once does she eat with appetite, and that
the meal she makes of death. “[She] seized the blue jar, tore out the
stuck her hand inside and, bringing out a fistful of arsenic, wolfed down
white powder.” The anorexic gluttony of her last supper prepares one for
incorporeal lust of her farewell. “The priest got up with a crucifix in
whereupon she craned her neck as if to have her thirst quenched and
all that was left of her strength in one last kiss, the most passionate she
ever given, planting her lips on the body of the Man-God.“
*Many years later, answering a questionnaire from Hippolyte Taine about the
fl
After Emma’s ultimate Charles’s n grie , an erein s
the conceptual beauty of Madame B01/ary. Forming a circle of incompre-
hension, it begins with Charles the dim-witted country boy mocked by
younger classmates at a Rouen collegiate school and ends with Charles the
mourner bereft of a wife he had never known, whose infidelities, once re-
vealed to him, make her at once more inaccessible and more desirable. As
Emma had always sought reality in romantic communion with paltry stand-
ins for the Man-God, so had poor Charles always sought his own image in
the opaque mirror of his idol’s mind. Especially poignant is Flaubert’s de-
scription of Charles as a young husband peering into Emma’s eyes when
she opens them in the morning.
Mornings lying face-to-face, he’d watch the sunlight play over the golden down
on her cheeks, partly covered by the scallops of her nightcap. Seen from so close,
her eyes loomed large, especially when she fluttered her lids upon awakening.
Black in the shade and dark blue in broad daylight, it’s as if their color were lay-
ered in depth, more opaque toward the back but brightening as it approached
the enameled surface. His own eye got lost in these depths, where he saw him-
self from the shoulders up, a miniature bust with a silk scarf wrapped around his
head and his nightshirt open.
The mineral cave of her inner being sightlessly reflects a tiny, insignificant
votary. Idols don’t see, they reflect, like the “inscrutable Sphinx” in Baude-
laire’s poem “La Beauté,” who fascinates her “docile lovers” with “pure
mirrors that make everything more beautiful.” (In a letter to Baudelaire
about Les Fleurs du mal, Flaubert singled out “La Beauté” for praise.) ‘After
Emma’s death, Charles still loses himself in her eyes. The mirror remains, as
Charles, trying to resuscitate Emma in his very person, strikes poses that
might have won him her approval. “To please her, as if she were still alive,
he embraced her predilections, her ideas. He bought patent leather boots,
he took to wearing white cravats, he slicked his mustache with perfumed
Wax, he signed promissory notes, as she had done. She was corrupting him
from beyond the grave.” Finally each dies in character, she by her own
hand, he passively, of a broken heart, hopelessly entranced by the woman
who visited herself on him like a whirlwind, rendering him unfit for a life
proportionate to his nature.
Flaubert’s last chapters round out a perfectly coherent vision. His heroines? »
suicide and the way she kills herself are of a piece with her desire for some-
thing transcendently fulfilling, which had shaped her character around a des-Q?‘
perate emptiness. Poison suits Emma. Throughout the novel food tends toi‘ 1
sicken her or, on the contrary, to lose all material relevance in her
world. When guests at her wedding feast eat, she sees peasant mouths
stuffed, but when patricians at the Andervilliers chateau gather around a
with victuals piled high amid bouquets of flowers, cut crystal, and
cloches, she sees a beautiful tableau mort. The woman who starves, hating
body, cannot nourish others, least of all the unwanted daughter farmed
to a wet nurse for suckling. Only once does she eat with appetite, and that
the meal she makes of death. “[She] seized the blue jar, tore out the
stuck her hand inside and, bringing out a fistful of arsenic, wolfed down
white powder.” The anorexic gluttony of her last supper prepares one for
incorporeal lust of her farewell. “The priest got up with a crucifix in
whereupon she craned her neck as if to have her thirst quenched and
all that was left of her strength in one last kiss, the most passionate she
ever given, planting her lips on the body of the Man-God.“
*Many years later, answering a questionnaire from Hippolyte Taine about the
fl
After Emma’s ultimate Charles’s n grie , an erein s
the conceptual beauty of Madame B01/ary. Forming a circle of incompre-
hension, it begins with Charles the dim-witted country boy mocked by
younger classmates at a Rouen collegiate school and ends with Charles the
mourner bereft of a wife he had never known, whose infidelities, once re-
vealed to him, make her at once more inaccessible and more desirable. As
Emma had always sought reality in romantic communion with paltry stand-
ins for the Man-God, so had poor Charles always sought his own image in
the opaque mirror of his idol’s mind. Especially poignant is Flaubert’s de-
scription of Charles as a young husband peering into Emma’s eyes when
she opens them in the morning.
Mornings lying face-to-face, he’d watch the sunlight play over the golden down
on her cheeks, partly covered by the scallops of her nightcap. Seen from so close,
her eyes loomed large, especially when she fluttered her lids upon awakening.
Black in the shade and dark blue in broad daylight, it’s as if their color were lay-
ered in depth, more opaque toward the back but brightening as it approached
the enameled surface. His own eye got lost in these depths, where he saw him-
self from the shoulders up, a miniature bust with a silk scarf wrapped around his
head and his nightshirt open.
The mineral cave of her inner being sightlessly reflects a tiny, insignificant
votary. Idols don’t see, they reflect, like the “inscrutable Sphinx” in Baude-
laire’s poem “La Beauté,” who fascinates her “docile lovers” with “pure
mirrors that make everything more beautiful.” (In a letter to Baudelaire
about Les Fleurs du mal, Flaubert singled out “La Beauté” for praise.) ‘After
Emma’s death, Charles still loses himself in her eyes. The mirror remains, as
Charles, trying to resuscitate Emma in his very person, strikes poses that
might have won him her approval. “To please her, as if she were still alive,
he embraced her predilections, her ideas. He bought patent leather boots,
he took to wearing white cravats, he slicked his mustache with perfumed
Wax, he signed promissory notes, as she had done. She was corrupting him
from beyond the grave.” Finally each dies in character, she by her own
hand, he passively, of a broken heart, hopelessly entranced by the woman
who visited herself on him like a whirlwind, rendering him unfit for a life
proportionate to his nature.
Sunday, November 10, 2013
Education Sentimental
Everything is energy and bustle on a boat that clearly epitomizes the in-
dustrial age, everything except Frederic, standing by himself, motionless.
While the vessel puffi, sweats, and trembles from the exertion of moving its
cargo forward, against the current, Frederic, who is destined to accumulate
missed opportunities, looks backward amorously at Paris and its unidentifi-
able landmarks as at a beautiful passerby he couldn’t bring himself to ap-
proach. Distance goes hand in hand with immobility. His fellow travelers,
ordinary people living in the moment, contemplate riverine cottages and
wreathe domestic fantasies around them. Some, writes Flaubert, would
have liked to own one and make it their permanent home, “with a good
billiard table, a rowboat, a wife, or some other dreamed—of possession.” Not
Frederic, whose mind is elsewhere. Flaubert’s dreamer sees nothing of the
passing scene, or sees it through an inner fog. His sketchbook remains
blank. “He mused on the room he would occupy [in Nogent], on the plot
for a drama, on subjects for painting, on future passions.” And when he
does move, the impulse to do so is a private twinge rather than an urge to
mingle. “He felt that the happiness that his excellence of soul had earned
him was slow in coming. He recited melancholy verse to himself; he
crossed the deck in rapid steps; he walked right up to the bow, on the bell
side.” It’s as if this jerky sequence, punctuated by sernicolons, were keeping
the beat of inner turmoil. Frederic can be either motionless or rapid. .
His walk across the deck proves to be fateful. Regaling people at the bow
end is jacques Arnoux — a demonstrative character, part bon vivant and
part mountebank, modeled after Macaire (Daumier’s, if not Frederick
Lemaitre’s) as well as Maurice Schlesinger. Frederic meets Arnoux, then
spies his little daughter and his wife, Marie, who instantly becomes an ob-
ject of rapturous scrutiny. “Her whole person was silhouetted against a
background of blue air” is how Flaubert, using the same image that had
Served fifteen years earlier to describe his first glimpse of Kuchiuk-Hanem
at Esna,* introduces the woman Frederic will woo in vain.
Never had he seen anything like the splendor of her dusky complexion, the se-
ductiveness of her figure, fingers so delicate that light passed through them. He
regarded her workbasket with astonishment, as no common object. What was
her name? Where did she live? What had her life been, her past? He wanted to
acquaint himself with the furniture in her room, all the dresses she had ever
worn, the people she habitually saw. Subdued by some deeper longing, the de-
sire for physical possession gave rise to a painful and unlimited curiosity.
just as young Gustave saved Elisa Schlesinger’s shawl from the sea, so here
Frederic saves Mme Arnoux’s from the Seine, in a gesture that prefigures his
fantasy of rescuing the beloved herself from a vulgar, unfaithful husband.
Her laconic acknowledgment of his gallantry only reinforces his convic-
tion that he is a superfluous man. To contemplate his idol is to feel all the
more irrelevant. “The more he regarded her, the more he felt abysses open-
ing between them,” writes Flaubert. “He thought that it would soon be
necessary to part, before extracting a word from her, even before leaving
any memory of himselfl” When at length they reach Nogent, he sees her
lost in thought at the spot he had occupied earlier. “On the quay, Frederic
turned around. She was standing near the tiller. He packed a glance with his
entire soul and sent it toward her. She remained motionless, as if he hadn’t
done anything whatever.”
It makes perfect sense that a young man who runs before himself or lags
behind should experience the voyage most vividly when it’s over, in his
mind’s eye. The entire episode is relived, as by a novelist seeing more at
an imaginative remove than close up.
he career of this feckless dreamer drifting in a
WOr1d that spoils his dreams and pretentions at every turn can then 1-@Sun'le_
However different in other respects, Flaubert’s protagonists are alike in
their sentimental ineducability. Feeling at one with the world or falling out
iisilt, they svgell or deflate but never really. grow. Where everything is bound-
Y one t mg Or another—an oceanic fullness or a Sahara of depriva-
tion— there is hardly room for development. Adventures are redundant,
experience does not beget maturity or knowledge, and, indeed, the
Flaubertian novel tends to come full round, like horses on a carousel. The
white dress Emma wore as a virgin at convent school is the white dress in
which she has herself buried. Salammbé begins with a feast in Carthage for
the victorious mercenaries at which Matho is transfixed by Salammbé; it
ends with another feast at which a chained, flayed Matho remains transfixed,
his battles having been waged for naught. The last chapters of L’E/ducation
sentimentale find Frederic Moreau adrift in middle age and revisiting his ado-
lescent transports, first in a reunion with Mme Arnoux, then in conversation
with Charles Deslauriers, his bosom friend since childhood, who has also
run a futile course through life. They agree that their lackluster existence is
to be blamed on chance, on circumstances, on France, on the nineteenth
century. Then they evoke naive school days and delightedly recall their visit
to a whorehouse just outside Nogent on a Sunday during Vespers when
townspeople wouldn’t see them, all dressed up, carrying bouquets for the
bawd. It came to nothing. “The summer heat, fear of the unknown, a kind
of remorse and even the pleasure of seeing at a glance so many women at his
disposal made such an impression on him that he turned pale and stood there
motionless, dumbstruck.” Charmed by his embarrassment, the women had
burst into laughter, which to him sounded like mockery. He turned tail and
fled, with Charles following, and their misadventure became an article‘ of lo-
cal lore. “That’s when we had it best!” Frederic exclaims. “Yes, maybe so,
that’s when we had it best!” Charles concurs in a closing whimper. Nogent,
seen at the outset as Frederic’s oppressive destination, thus reappears at the
end as the prelapsarian homeland from which he fell into his pursuit of an
unachievable consummation. He had fallen into history, into the quotidian,
and into Paris. “He moved in society, and he had other loves,” writes
Flaubert, “but his persistent memory of the first one rendered all that fol-
lowed insipid. And when the vehemence of desire abated, the bloom went
off it. His intellectual ambition had likewise failed. Years passed, and he came
to tolerate the unemployment of his mind and the inertia of his heart.”
dustrial age, everything except Frederic, standing by himself, motionless.
While the vessel puffi, sweats, and trembles from the exertion of moving its
cargo forward, against the current, Frederic, who is destined to accumulate
missed opportunities, looks backward amorously at Paris and its unidentifi-
able landmarks as at a beautiful passerby he couldn’t bring himself to ap-
proach. Distance goes hand in hand with immobility. His fellow travelers,
ordinary people living in the moment, contemplate riverine cottages and
wreathe domestic fantasies around them. Some, writes Flaubert, would
have liked to own one and make it their permanent home, “with a good
billiard table, a rowboat, a wife, or some other dreamed—of possession.” Not
Frederic, whose mind is elsewhere. Flaubert’s dreamer sees nothing of the
passing scene, or sees it through an inner fog. His sketchbook remains
blank. “He mused on the room he would occupy [in Nogent], on the plot
for a drama, on subjects for painting, on future passions.” And when he
does move, the impulse to do so is a private twinge rather than an urge to
mingle. “He felt that the happiness that his excellence of soul had earned
him was slow in coming. He recited melancholy verse to himself; he
crossed the deck in rapid steps; he walked right up to the bow, on the bell
side.” It’s as if this jerky sequence, punctuated by sernicolons, were keeping
the beat of inner turmoil. Frederic can be either motionless or rapid. .
His walk across the deck proves to be fateful. Regaling people at the bow
end is jacques Arnoux — a demonstrative character, part bon vivant and
part mountebank, modeled after Macaire (Daumier’s, if not Frederick
Lemaitre’s) as well as Maurice Schlesinger. Frederic meets Arnoux, then
spies his little daughter and his wife, Marie, who instantly becomes an ob-
ject of rapturous scrutiny. “Her whole person was silhouetted against a
background of blue air” is how Flaubert, using the same image that had
Served fifteen years earlier to describe his first glimpse of Kuchiuk-Hanem
at Esna,* introduces the woman Frederic will woo in vain.
Never had he seen anything like the splendor of her dusky complexion, the se-
ductiveness of her figure, fingers so delicate that light passed through them. He
regarded her workbasket with astonishment, as no common object. What was
her name? Where did she live? What had her life been, her past? He wanted to
acquaint himself with the furniture in her room, all the dresses she had ever
worn, the people she habitually saw. Subdued by some deeper longing, the de-
sire for physical possession gave rise to a painful and unlimited curiosity.
just as young Gustave saved Elisa Schlesinger’s shawl from the sea, so here
Frederic saves Mme Arnoux’s from the Seine, in a gesture that prefigures his
fantasy of rescuing the beloved herself from a vulgar, unfaithful husband.
Her laconic acknowledgment of his gallantry only reinforces his convic-
tion that he is a superfluous man. To contemplate his idol is to feel all the
more irrelevant. “The more he regarded her, the more he felt abysses open-
ing between them,” writes Flaubert. “He thought that it would soon be
necessary to part, before extracting a word from her, even before leaving
any memory of himselfl” When at length they reach Nogent, he sees her
lost in thought at the spot he had occupied earlier. “On the quay, Frederic
turned around. She was standing near the tiller. He packed a glance with his
entire soul and sent it toward her. She remained motionless, as if he hadn’t
done anything whatever.”
It makes perfect sense that a young man who runs before himself or lags
behind should experience the voyage most vividly when it’s over, in his
mind’s eye. The entire episode is relived, as by a novelist seeing more at
an imaginative remove than close up.
he career of this feckless dreamer drifting in a
WOr1d that spoils his dreams and pretentions at every turn can then 1-@Sun'le_
However different in other respects, Flaubert’s protagonists are alike in
their sentimental ineducability. Feeling at one with the world or falling out
iisilt, they svgell or deflate but never really. grow. Where everything is bound-
Y one t mg Or another—an oceanic fullness or a Sahara of depriva-
tion— there is hardly room for development. Adventures are redundant,
experience does not beget maturity or knowledge, and, indeed, the
Flaubertian novel tends to come full round, like horses on a carousel. The
white dress Emma wore as a virgin at convent school is the white dress in
which she has herself buried. Salammbé begins with a feast in Carthage for
the victorious mercenaries at which Matho is transfixed by Salammbé; it
ends with another feast at which a chained, flayed Matho remains transfixed,
his battles having been waged for naught. The last chapters of L’E/ducation
sentimentale find Frederic Moreau adrift in middle age and revisiting his ado-
lescent transports, first in a reunion with Mme Arnoux, then in conversation
with Charles Deslauriers, his bosom friend since childhood, who has also
run a futile course through life. They agree that their lackluster existence is
to be blamed on chance, on circumstances, on France, on the nineteenth
century. Then they evoke naive school days and delightedly recall their visit
to a whorehouse just outside Nogent on a Sunday during Vespers when
townspeople wouldn’t see them, all dressed up, carrying bouquets for the
bawd. It came to nothing. “The summer heat, fear of the unknown, a kind
of remorse and even the pleasure of seeing at a glance so many women at his
disposal made such an impression on him that he turned pale and stood there
motionless, dumbstruck.” Charmed by his embarrassment, the women had
burst into laughter, which to him sounded like mockery. He turned tail and
fled, with Charles following, and their misadventure became an article‘ of lo-
cal lore. “That’s when we had it best!” Frederic exclaims. “Yes, maybe so,
that’s when we had it best!” Charles concurs in a closing whimper. Nogent,
seen at the outset as Frederic’s oppressive destination, thus reappears at the
end as the prelapsarian homeland from which he fell into his pursuit of an
unachievable consummation. He had fallen into history, into the quotidian,
and into Paris. “He moved in society, and he had other loves,” writes
Flaubert, “but his persistent memory of the first one rendered all that fol-
lowed insipid. And when the vehemence of desire abated, the bloom went
off it. His intellectual ambition had likewise failed. Years passed, and he came
to tolerate the unemployment of his mind and the inertia of his heart.”
Politics and religion from 'Flaubert'
IN THE early 1870s, when the National Assembly couldn’t bring itself to
leave Versailles and monarchists held out against the official proclamation of
a republic, France was obsessed with parliamentary debate about this fun-
damental issue. The fact that politics could bother him, Flaubert wrote to a
friend in january 1873, was a sure sign of decadence. “I am exasperated
with the Right, to the point of understanding why the communards
wanted to burn down Paris.” Raving madmen were preferable to idiots in
his opinion, if only because their reign did not generally last as long.
What had parliamentary debate accomplished since the fall of the Com-
mune? Observers who thought that the entire left had been fatally com-
promised Were soon proven wrong. By-elections held on ]uly 2, 1871, saw
republicans emerge victorious, the most prominent among them being
Léon Gambetta. After five mute months he had found his voice again,
though civil war had meanwhile persuaded him that only a republic built
along conservative lines stood any chance of surviving opposition from
rnonarchist ranks. It soon became obvious that the fallen demagogue was
determined to find his account in making common cause with the adroit
strategist of conservative republicanism, Adolphe Thiers. These two formed
a tenuous marriage of convenience. Gambetta minded himself during par-
liamentary debate but felt freer outside the Assembly, and on campaigns
through provincial France he made speeches that could not fail to rattle
Thiers in Versailles. “Haven’t we seen laborers in the cities and fields win
the vote?” he asked a sympathetic crowd at Grenoble. “Don’t the omens
suggest that our land, which has tried every other alternative, intends at last
to risk a republic and call upon the new social reserves [now/elles souches so-
ciales]? Yes, I descry, I feel, I proclaim the emergence of new social re-
serves.” Thiers was later to complain that Gambetta never had the clear-cut
ideas of a real statesman, that he always retreated into the role of tribune,
which he played most naturally.
Lest the “new social reserves” emerge right away, the heterogeneous
right, which still greatly outnumbered the left, sought to act in concert. At
daggers drawn since 1830, Legitimists (supporting the Bourbon pretender,
Charles X’s childless heir Henri, comte de Chambord) and Orleanists (sup-
porting Louis-Philippe’s grandson, the comte de Paris) now agreed that
Chambord should reign as a constitutional monarch and be succeeded by
the comte de Paris. What this arrangement, called fusion, did not consider
was the obstinacy of Chambord, who lived in a castle near Vienna, as cut off
from the world as a Pirandellian solipsist. Chambord wanted all or nothing.
Either restoration would be a faithful restoration of the kingdom France had
abolished in 1830 along with Charles X, or it would enthrone someone
other than himself. His absolute proviso was that the country raise the white
lily-spangled flag, and rational heads tried in vain to make him compromise
when he came home after four decades abroad. “[That flag] has always been
for me inseparable from the absent fatherland; it flew over my cradle, I want
it to shade my tomb,” he declared in a statement published on July 6 by the
royalist paper Union. “[Under that flag] the unification of the nation was
achieved; with it your fathers, led by mine, conquered Alsace—L0rraine,
Whose loyalty will be the consolation of our misfortunes . . . I have received
it as a sacred trust from the old king, my grandfather, dying in exile . . . In
the glorious folds of this unblemished standard I shall bring you order and
liberty! Frenchmen! Henri V cannot abandon the flag of Henri IV!” Eighty
die—hard Legitimists in the parliament stood firm behind Chambord, but a
majority of conservative deputies dissociated themselves from his manifesto.
As patriotic gentlemen repelled by anachronism on the one hand and revo-
lution on the other, they pledged allegiance to the tricolor flag and
paigned for a state that would be neither lily-white nor republican blue_
an age of dumb ideas, Flaubert wrote to Sand in 1873, that of fusion was
crowning stupidity, an assertion upon which he enlarged two months
in a letter to his niece. “How ignorant of history can one be to believe 513111
in the efiicaciousness of one man, to await a Messiah, a Savior! Long live the
good Lord and down with Gods! Can one brush against the nap of a whole
nation? Deny eighty years of democratic development? Return to the age
charters granted by the high and mighty? Chambord’s partisans being ang
with their liege lord is a comic spectacle . . . No matter! Saint-Louis’s de_
scendant . . . spared us some major disasters.” The restoration of monarch
and the Commune were both historical inanities, he asserted. So he thou 112,
was a Napoleon IV l g ’
The schism in conservative ranks involved not only monarchical abSO_
lutism but Catholic orthodoxy, and here the manifesto that divided the par;
ties was a papal bull. Seven years earlier, in his Syllabus ofErro1/s, Pius IX had
declared war against secular Europe by denouncing the separation of
church and state; claiming for his church control of all culture and science;
rejecting freedom of faith, conscience, and worship; enumerating eighty
“errors” altogether; and insisting that the pontiff neither could nor should
make any concession whatever to progress, liberalism, and modern civiliza-
tion. The Syllabus marked France profoundly. Cultivated prelates resisted
Rome, but the lower clergy embraced popish obscurantism with fervor,
and in rural parishes, where miraculous visitations were regularly reported,’
it was the lower clergy who made themselves heard. “Of all the mysteries
that fill Church history, I don’t know any that equals or surpasses this swift
and complete transformation of Catholic France into a farmyard annex of
the Vatican’s anticamera,” one liberal Catholic wrote shortly before the Vat-
ican Council proclaimed the pope to be infallible and his episcopate uni-
versal. “I won’t immolate justice and truth, reason and history in a sacrificial
offering to the idol whom lay theologians have enthroned at the Vatican.”
While accumulating multifarious religious creeds for La Tlmtation de Saint
Antoine, Flaubert inveighed against Lamennais’s Essai sur l’indQ%rence, in
which the church is represented as the repository of all truth.
War did not halt the ultramontane movement. On the contrary, it gave it
further impetus, as Catholic clergy used France’s defeat to advance the view
that God had thus punished a wayward child. The imperial saturnalia was
over, repentance was in order, and devout souls, many of whom wore the
insignia of the Sacred Heart, flocked to holy sites throughout France.
Flaubert thought that Catholicism, with its worship of sacred entrails, had
come to resemble the cult of Isis. In 1873 a national pilgrimage sponsored
by the Assumptionists saw thousands descend upon Lourdes, La Salettfi,
Pontmain, Mont-Saint-Michel, Chartres, and Paray-le-Monial for eXpia-
gory demonstrations that became political rallies. “Suspended in midair,
equally incapable of adopting the republican format that promises terror
and the monarchical format that demands obedience and respect,” declared
Monsignor Pie at Chartres, “the French are a people [who] await a leader,
who invoke a master.” One hundred fifty deputies heard Pie preach this
message and soon afterward went farther afield to hear Monsignor de Lese-
leuc bless them at Paray-le-Monial. “Since assembling in Versailles, you
have often asked forgiveness of God for France’s crimes,” said the bishop.
“You have often made honorable amends to the Sacred Heart of Jesus for
the ingratitude shown him, especially during the last eighty years.” It did
not escape those present that eighty years earlier, in Year 1 according to the
Revolutionary calendar, Louis XVI had been guillotined.
Liberal Catholics as well believed that France would fall apart if she did
not harness herself to religious principles, and the quasi-official term for
the government they exercised, l’Ordre Moral, bespoke their staunchly pa-
triarchal agenda. Men like Albert de Broglie, who was eventually to replace
Thiers as prime minister, regarded the church as society’s frontline defense
against havoc wrought in the name of liberty, fraternity, and equality—
above all, equality Universal suffrage exasperated them. (But it also exas-
perated anticlerical elitists like Flaubert, who insisted that when the masses,
being collectively devoid of intelligence, ceased to believe in the Immacu-
late Conception, they would, none the wiser, vest their belief in the hocus-
pocus of spiritualist seances.)
leave Versailles and monarchists held out against the official proclamation of
a republic, France was obsessed with parliamentary debate about this fun-
damental issue. The fact that politics could bother him, Flaubert wrote to a
friend in january 1873, was a sure sign of decadence. “I am exasperated
with the Right, to the point of understanding why the communards
wanted to burn down Paris.” Raving madmen were preferable to idiots in
his opinion, if only because their reign did not generally last as long.
What had parliamentary debate accomplished since the fall of the Com-
mune? Observers who thought that the entire left had been fatally com-
promised Were soon proven wrong. By-elections held on ]uly 2, 1871, saw
republicans emerge victorious, the most prominent among them being
Léon Gambetta. After five mute months he had found his voice again,
though civil war had meanwhile persuaded him that only a republic built
along conservative lines stood any chance of surviving opposition from
rnonarchist ranks. It soon became obvious that the fallen demagogue was
determined to find his account in making common cause with the adroit
strategist of conservative republicanism, Adolphe Thiers. These two formed
a tenuous marriage of convenience. Gambetta minded himself during par-
liamentary debate but felt freer outside the Assembly, and on campaigns
through provincial France he made speeches that could not fail to rattle
Thiers in Versailles. “Haven’t we seen laborers in the cities and fields win
the vote?” he asked a sympathetic crowd at Grenoble. “Don’t the omens
suggest that our land, which has tried every other alternative, intends at last
to risk a republic and call upon the new social reserves [now/elles souches so-
ciales]? Yes, I descry, I feel, I proclaim the emergence of new social re-
serves.” Thiers was later to complain that Gambetta never had the clear-cut
ideas of a real statesman, that he always retreated into the role of tribune,
which he played most naturally.
Lest the “new social reserves” emerge right away, the heterogeneous
right, which still greatly outnumbered the left, sought to act in concert. At
daggers drawn since 1830, Legitimists (supporting the Bourbon pretender,
Charles X’s childless heir Henri, comte de Chambord) and Orleanists (sup-
porting Louis-Philippe’s grandson, the comte de Paris) now agreed that
Chambord should reign as a constitutional monarch and be succeeded by
the comte de Paris. What this arrangement, called fusion, did not consider
was the obstinacy of Chambord, who lived in a castle near Vienna, as cut off
from the world as a Pirandellian solipsist. Chambord wanted all or nothing.
Either restoration would be a faithful restoration of the kingdom France had
abolished in 1830 along with Charles X, or it would enthrone someone
other than himself. His absolute proviso was that the country raise the white
lily-spangled flag, and rational heads tried in vain to make him compromise
when he came home after four decades abroad. “[That flag] has always been
for me inseparable from the absent fatherland; it flew over my cradle, I want
it to shade my tomb,” he declared in a statement published on July 6 by the
royalist paper Union. “[Under that flag] the unification of the nation was
achieved; with it your fathers, led by mine, conquered Alsace—L0rraine,
Whose loyalty will be the consolation of our misfortunes . . . I have received
it as a sacred trust from the old king, my grandfather, dying in exile . . . In
the glorious folds of this unblemished standard I shall bring you order and
liberty! Frenchmen! Henri V cannot abandon the flag of Henri IV!” Eighty
die—hard Legitimists in the parliament stood firm behind Chambord, but a
majority of conservative deputies dissociated themselves from his manifesto.
As patriotic gentlemen repelled by anachronism on the one hand and revo-
lution on the other, they pledged allegiance to the tricolor flag and
paigned for a state that would be neither lily-white nor republican blue_
an age of dumb ideas, Flaubert wrote to Sand in 1873, that of fusion was
crowning stupidity, an assertion upon which he enlarged two months
in a letter to his niece. “How ignorant of history can one be to believe 513111
in the efiicaciousness of one man, to await a Messiah, a Savior! Long live the
good Lord and down with Gods! Can one brush against the nap of a whole
nation? Deny eighty years of democratic development? Return to the age
charters granted by the high and mighty? Chambord’s partisans being ang
with their liege lord is a comic spectacle . . . No matter! Saint-Louis’s de_
scendant . . . spared us some major disasters.” The restoration of monarch
and the Commune were both historical inanities, he asserted. So he thou 112,
was a Napoleon IV l g ’
The schism in conservative ranks involved not only monarchical abSO_
lutism but Catholic orthodoxy, and here the manifesto that divided the par;
ties was a papal bull. Seven years earlier, in his Syllabus ofErro1/s, Pius IX had
declared war against secular Europe by denouncing the separation of
church and state; claiming for his church control of all culture and science;
rejecting freedom of faith, conscience, and worship; enumerating eighty
“errors” altogether; and insisting that the pontiff neither could nor should
make any concession whatever to progress, liberalism, and modern civiliza-
tion. The Syllabus marked France profoundly. Cultivated prelates resisted
Rome, but the lower clergy embraced popish obscurantism with fervor,
and in rural parishes, where miraculous visitations were regularly reported,’
it was the lower clergy who made themselves heard. “Of all the mysteries
that fill Church history, I don’t know any that equals or surpasses this swift
and complete transformation of Catholic France into a farmyard annex of
the Vatican’s anticamera,” one liberal Catholic wrote shortly before the Vat-
ican Council proclaimed the pope to be infallible and his episcopate uni-
versal. “I won’t immolate justice and truth, reason and history in a sacrificial
offering to the idol whom lay theologians have enthroned at the Vatican.”
While accumulating multifarious religious creeds for La Tlmtation de Saint
Antoine, Flaubert inveighed against Lamennais’s Essai sur l’indQ%rence, in
which the church is represented as the repository of all truth.
War did not halt the ultramontane movement. On the contrary, it gave it
further impetus, as Catholic clergy used France’s defeat to advance the view
that God had thus punished a wayward child. The imperial saturnalia was
over, repentance was in order, and devout souls, many of whom wore the
insignia of the Sacred Heart, flocked to holy sites throughout France.
Flaubert thought that Catholicism, with its worship of sacred entrails, had
come to resemble the cult of Isis. In 1873 a national pilgrimage sponsored
by the Assumptionists saw thousands descend upon Lourdes, La Salettfi,
Pontmain, Mont-Saint-Michel, Chartres, and Paray-le-Monial for eXpia-
gory demonstrations that became political rallies. “Suspended in midair,
equally incapable of adopting the republican format that promises terror
and the monarchical format that demands obedience and respect,” declared
Monsignor Pie at Chartres, “the French are a people [who] await a leader,
who invoke a master.” One hundred fifty deputies heard Pie preach this
message and soon afterward went farther afield to hear Monsignor de Lese-
leuc bless them at Paray-le-Monial. “Since assembling in Versailles, you
have often asked forgiveness of God for France’s crimes,” said the bishop.
“You have often made honorable amends to the Sacred Heart of Jesus for
the ingratitude shown him, especially during the last eighty years.” It did
not escape those present that eighty years earlier, in Year 1 according to the
Revolutionary calendar, Louis XVI had been guillotined.
Liberal Catholics as well believed that France would fall apart if she did
not harness herself to religious principles, and the quasi-official term for
the government they exercised, l’Ordre Moral, bespoke their staunchly pa-
triarchal agenda. Men like Albert de Broglie, who was eventually to replace
Thiers as prime minister, regarded the church as society’s frontline defense
against havoc wrought in the name of liberty, fraternity, and equality—
above all, equality Universal suffrage exasperated them. (But it also exas-
perated anticlerical elitists like Flaubert, who insisted that when the masses,
being collectively devoid of intelligence, ceased to believe in the Immacu-
late Conception, they would, none the wiser, vest their belief in the hocus-
pocus of spiritualist seances.)
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