Union-shop pro-
visions were the keystone of the entire edifice—so the right-to-work fight was
the centerpiece of the effort to do “Reutherism” in. That 1955 GM contract,
Clarence Manion railed in one of his first broadcasts, “moved Mr. Reuther
close up to the supreme dictatorship of American organized labor as a prelude
to a try for the presidency of the United States.” It was “offered at the point of
a strike threat to practically every big industry in the country by a labor monop-
oly that is exempt from the antitrust law and can, therefore, callously disregard
the public interest that every other person, corporation, and organization is
obliged to serve.” (Reuther, of course, saw it just the opposite: the entire goal
of the labor movement was to dignify the individual by removing him from the
vagaries of market competition. This was the public interest.)
Manion and Kohler could rage at Reuther. But he was a useful adversary;
years later conservatives should have lifted a glass in his honor. There would
have likely not been much of a conservative movement without him as catalyst.
The audience for sweaty appeals for isolationist anticommunism was shrinking
with every passing month. The fight against Reuther, on the other hand, was
one that everyone who owned a business-—and everyone who aspired to own-
ing a business—could understand. And the timing was propitious. In the South,
the struggle against the civil rights carpetbaggers was also turning moderates
into conservatives.
##
That aftemoon, he admitted, he was
going to denounce his President on the floor of the Senate.
It was a crucial moment in the fiscal history of the United States. Conven-
tional wisdom had always been that the symbol and substance of national eco-
nomic health was a balanced budget. But with the Great Depression, Keynesian
ideas began creeping into the thinking of the Democrats—that in times of stag-
nant private investment, government spending in excess of revenues could, by
sloshing the citizenry in surplus cash, serve to “pump-prime” the economy
back into life. For most Republicans such notions remained heresy. Now
Eisenhower, buoyed by his landslide victory in November to break with the old
Republican shibboleths and weighing the advice of his economic advisers that
a recession was around the corner, had just submitted a record budget in March
for FY 1958 of $71.8 billion. '
And on April 8 Barry Goldwater stood up in a nearly empty Senate cham-
ber and delivered himself of a tirade. “Until quite recently,” he began, “I was
personally satisfied that this administration was providing the responsible and
realistic leadership so vital to the maintenance of a strong domestic economy
which, in turn, is a vital factor in maintaining world peace.
“Now, however, I am not so sure. A $71.8 billion budget not only shocks
me, but it weakens my faith.”
He addressed “Mr. President” directly——to tell Eisenhower that he was a
betrayer of the people’s trust and a quisling in thrall to the Democrats’ “eco-
nomic inebriation.” The President had embraced “the siren song of socialism,”
“govemment by bribe,” “squanderbust govemment.” And Goldwater was only
Warming up. ’
The junior senator now found himself cast in the press as the key player in
the war rivening the GOP’s left and right wings. Time ran another profile:
below file photographs of dumpy Joe McCarthy, William Ezra Jenner, and
George Malone, whom Time labeled “The Neanderthals,” young Goldwater
was pictured in the cockpit of a fighter plane.
##
The Manionites’ conservatism was a conservatism of fear. They harped
endlessly on the “communistic income tax,” how the economy would be dec-
imated by inflation every time workers got a raise. (Taft Republicans, joked
The Nation, feared “only God and inflation.”) Their scapegoats were unnamed
subversives who were invisibly destroying the system from within: “I am at a
loss to understand the current public attitude deflating the inflation psychol-
ogy,” Fred Koch wrote in a self-published pamphlet. “Perhaps it is propa-
ganda, of which we have been fed much of late—-pink propaganda, in as much
as, in my opinion, Russia’s first objective is to destroy our economy through
inflation.” Politically the philosophy lost when it won: if you removed the fear
of subversion by catching subversives, you ended the fear that brought you to
power in the first place—although, of course, you could never catch all the
subversives, for the conspiracy was a bottomless murk, a hall of mirrors, a
tlflenace that grew greater the more it was flushed out. “The Communists have
lnfiltrated both the Democrat and Republican Parties for many years,” Koch
Wrote. “If, we could only see behind the political scenes, I am sure we would
be shocked.”
' Conscience of a Conservative didn’t blame invisible Communists for
Amenca’s problems. It blamed all-too-visible liberals. Its anticommunism was
not about raising nameless dreads but about fighting—hard and in the open.
,Amel‘i°a, said Conscience, was not losing the Cold War because of Alger Hiss,
fi“H"$ Rosenberg, or the striped-pants diplomats of the State Department. The
enemY was in the mirror. “A craven fear of death is entering the American con-
sciousness.” It “repudiates everything that is courageous and honorable and
dignified in the human being. We must—as the first step toward saving Amer~
ican freedom—affirm the contrary view and make it the comerstone of our for-
eign policy: that we would rather die than lose our freedom.”
The Cold War had whipsawed since I955 when President Eisenhower and
Premier Khrushchev met in Geneva for the first East-West summit conference.
The I956 GOP platform boasted: “The threat of global war‘ has receded. The
advance of Communism has been checked and, at key points, thrown back.”
Then came Hungary; then, on the eve of the elections, French and English
bombs pounded Egypt for nationalizing the Suez Canal, and Russia threatened
to intervene on Egypt’s behalf. There was a glimmer of hope when Russia
ceased nuclear testing in October of I958. Then, in November, Khrushchev
first threatened to take over Berlin. Now he had just been mollified by his I959
American visit. Was peace finally at hand?
Conscience of a Conservative answered that Soviet expansionism was
enabled by the fantasy of coexistence. Russia was “determined to win the con-
fiict, and we are not.” So the Kremlin used arms control agreements and testing
suspensions and the rest to seduce the American populace with romantic fan-
tasies of peace. “The Kremlin can create crisis after crisis, and force the U.S.,
because of our greater fear of war, to back down every time.” Then the Soviets
looked forward happily to the next phase of coexistence—legitimating their
crimes-by relabeling them “disagreements” amenable to “negotiation.”
“If an enemy power is bent on conquering you, he is at war with you: and
you——unless you contemplate surrender—are at war with him. Moreover——
unless you contemplate treason--your objective, like his, will be victory.”
The logical conclusion: “A tolerable peace . . . must follow victory over Com-
munism.”
Conscience of a Conservative drew to a close by ticking off the tenets of
American foreign policy, asking of each: “Does it help us defeat the enemy?”
Alliances were important—but since our alliances did not yet girdle the globe
and were defensive in outlook, we must be willing to act alone. Foreign aid
(unconstitutional unless it could be shown to promote the national interest)
should be limited to military and technical support. Diplomatic ties to the
Soviet Union should be reexamined: “I am quite certain that our entire
approach to the Cold War would change for the better the moment we
announced that the United States does not regard Mr. Khrushchev’s murderous
claque as the legitimate rulers of the Russian people or any other people.” The
United Nations, which reduced the struggle for world freedom to the lowest
common denominator agreement of eighty-odd nations, should be looked upon
longer in a position to threaten it.” Since the Soviets understood the nature of
circumspectly. As for arms talks: “No nation in its right mind will give up the
means of defending itself without first making sure that hostile powers are no
the conflict, they wouldn’t dismantle their nuclear weapons despite assurances
to the contrary; then, once we dismantled ours, “aggressive Communist forces
will be free to maneuver under the umbrella of nuclear terror.”
To prevent that, Conscience of a Conservative offered a quietly extraordi-
nary argument, in a few short paragraphs passing blithely over the simple,
awful paradox of the Cold War: in a world where weapons possessed the
power to destroy civilization, to attack an enemy with the most effective
weapon at your disposal would be to ensure your own destruction through
retaliation. This was the “balance of terror” experts believed kept the Cold War
peace, but Conscience insisted it did no such thing: the Communists tested us
in Hungary, in the Suez, in West Berlin because they knew we wouldn’t stop
them. We feared any military altercation might escalate to the unthinkable.
‘The audacious solution: make nuclear war more thinkable—“perfect a variety
of small, clean nuclear weapons,” designed to be used locally, on the battle-
field. “Overt hostilities should always be avoided,” Conscience averred, “espe-
cially is this so when a shooting war may cause the death of many millions of
people, including our own. But we cannot, for that reason, make the avoid-
ance of a shooting war our chief objective. If we do that”—if War is rendered
unthinkable—“we are cormnitted to a course that has only one terminal point:
surrender.”
V To many young readers the argument had almost a Gandhian appeal-the
same appeal, on the left, held by valiant Southem blacks laying their bodies on
the line for the freedom to eat where they wished. Freedom was indivisible. It
Was worth dying for. Thus Conscience of a Conservative reached its stirring
‘dénouement, read, one imagines, by our pimply freshman with steadily mount-
ilflg glandularthrust:
The future, as I see it, will unfold along one of two paths. Either the
Communists will retain the offensive; will lay down one challenge
after another; will invite us in local crisis after local crisis to choose
between all-out war and limited retreat; and will force us, ultimately,
h $0 Surrender or accept war under the most disadvantageous circum-
‘ stances. Or we will summon the will and the means for taking the ini-
tiative, and wage a war of attrition against them—and hope, thereby,
_ " YO bring about the international disintegration of the Communist
empire.
Sunday, August 31, 2014
Barry
He was the company’ s master promoter, modest (he worked in
a tiny basement office) and generous (always handing out advances, advice,
and outright gifts to whatever supplicant should ask), who became famous by
introducing the “antsy-pants” fad to the nation—boxer shorts printed with the
critters scampering up the front and back.
Goldwater called himself a conservative, but Alsop marveled that
besides books, there wasn’t a thing that was old in this house, all angles and
odd shapes, a masterpiece of high desert modernism complete with a TV, bur-
glar alarm, and outside lights that Goldwater could work from controls on the
headboard of his bed. This was not a man who habitually looked backward.
“Out here in the West,” Goldwater told him, “we’re not harassed by the fear of
what might happen.” Goldwaters, he said, “have always taken risks.”
Some of it was even true. Reading profiles of Goldwater written in the eight or
so years of his uninterrupted honeymoon with the press as a young senator is a
bit like driving that stretch of desert interstate: the illusion of autonomy came
courtesy of dollars and leadership from Washington; the sweeping view that
seems to encompass the horizon hides everything beyond a narrow ribbon of
reality. Barry Goldwater once wrote that flying an airplane is “the ultimate
extension of individual freedom.” He neglected to note that a pilot not hemmed
in by the intricate regulatory apparatus of the skies may get only as far as the
plane he collides with in midair.
Of his family he would say, “We didn’t know the federal government.
Everything that was done, we did it ourselves.” But Big Mike’s rise came from
knowing the federal government intimately. The Arizona Territory he traveled
to in I860 to follow a gold strike developed as a virtual ward of the federal
government, used as a base for fighting the Indian Wars. (“Hostilities in Ari-
zona are kept up with a view of protecting inhabitants,” a general sardonically
observed, “most of whom are supported by the hostilities.”) The money to
build Big Mike’s first Goldwater’s store in I872 came largely from contracts
for provisioning Army camps and delivering mail. Pioneering days were long
Past, at any rate, by the time his grandchildren came along: Barry, born in
I909, and his sister and brother grew up with a nurse, chauffeur, and live-in
maid. He hardly needed to take over at the store after his father’ s death because
8 hired manager, not Baron Goldwater, ran it; Barry later admitted he left col-
lege because he didn’t like it. He never carried cash growing up; when he
Wanted to make a purchase in any store in Phoenix, he could charge it to his
father.
His generation’s coming marked the greatest confluence of all of federal
lafgesse to Arizona and Goldwater fortune: the Roosevelt Dam, begun in I905.
The population of nearby Phoenix, fattened by construction money, doubled in
five years. During World War I, thanks to the call for stepped-up production of
the state economy's Three C s —cotton, copper, and cattle—it boomed some
more. During the 1920s, three more reclamation projects gave federal handouts
to farmers and ranchers, and federal outlays for health and highways and voca-
tional education made up 15 percent of Arizona’s economy, and the population
of Phoenix nearly tripled.
Then came the New Deal. The economic development of the South and the
west was one of Franklin Roosevelt s most cherished goals. Washington oper-
ated fifty different federal agencies in Arizona, in addition to the Hoover Dani
project. Federal funds totaling $342 million went to the state, and less than $16
million in taxes were remitted in return.
By then Barry Goldwater and a brother were in charge of the family enter-
prise. They did not profess gratitude for the federal government’s help. In
I934 they removed the blue eagle emblem of Roosevelt’s National Recovery
Administration from the windows of their stores to protest its price dictates.
Their response to the Depression was that private citizens should take care of
theirown, the way they did: Goldwater’s paid higher than the industry wage;
provided health, accident, life, and pension benefits; provided profit sharing, a
store psychiatrist, and a formal retirement plan. Later came a twenty-five-acre
farm for employee recreation, and a day camp for children. The family allowed
employees to examine the company’s books whenever they wished.
In June of I938, when the Works Progress Administration was putting
money to spend in department stores in the hands of sixteen thousand WPA
construction workers, Barry greeted the passage of the Fair Labor Standards
Act, raising the minimum wage from 25 to 40 cents and limiting working hours
to forty-four a week, with his first public political pronouncement, an open let-
ter to the President in the Phoenix Gazette. “My friend,” Goldwater began,
mocking Roosevelt’s fireside chat salutation, “you have, for over five years,
been telling me about your plans; how much they were going to do and how
much they were going to mean to me. Now I want to tum around and ask you
just what have they done that would be of any value to me as a businessman
and a citizen.” He complained of astronomical taxes and alphabet-soup agen-
cies; he argued that workmen had been able to win higher wages only because
Roosevelt’s economic policies forced factories to operate for fewer hours; he
charged that the President had “turned over to the racketeering practices of ill-
organized unions the future of the workingman. Witness the chaos they are cre-
ating in the Eastern cities. Witness the men thrown out of work, the riots, the
bloodshed, and the ill feeling between labor and capital, and then decide for
yourself if that plan worked.”
“I would like to know just where you are leading us,” he concluded. “I like
the old-fashioned way of being an American a lot better than the way we are
headed for now.” ~
The ideal politician, it has been written, is an ordinary representative of his
class with extraordinary abilities. Goldwater wrote as a member of an imagi-
nary republic of beneficent businessmen-citizens just like himself. It was not
for him to observe that the operating deficits brought on by the Goldwater’s
stores’ generous benefits package were covered out of interest generated from
his wife’s trust fund. (Indiana-born Peggy was an heiress of the Borg-Warner
fortune. Her family vacationed in Arizona, where they socialized with the most
prominent local family-the Goldwaters—as a matter of course.)
a tiny basement office) and generous (always handing out advances, advice,
and outright gifts to whatever supplicant should ask), who became famous by
introducing the “antsy-pants” fad to the nation—boxer shorts printed with the
critters scampering up the front and back.
Goldwater called himself a conservative, but Alsop marveled that
besides books, there wasn’t a thing that was old in this house, all angles and
odd shapes, a masterpiece of high desert modernism complete with a TV, bur-
glar alarm, and outside lights that Goldwater could work from controls on the
headboard of his bed. This was not a man who habitually looked backward.
“Out here in the West,” Goldwater told him, “we’re not harassed by the fear of
what might happen.” Goldwaters, he said, “have always taken risks.”
Some of it was even true. Reading profiles of Goldwater written in the eight or
so years of his uninterrupted honeymoon with the press as a young senator is a
bit like driving that stretch of desert interstate: the illusion of autonomy came
courtesy of dollars and leadership from Washington; the sweeping view that
seems to encompass the horizon hides everything beyond a narrow ribbon of
reality. Barry Goldwater once wrote that flying an airplane is “the ultimate
extension of individual freedom.” He neglected to note that a pilot not hemmed
in by the intricate regulatory apparatus of the skies may get only as far as the
plane he collides with in midair.
Of his family he would say, “We didn’t know the federal government.
Everything that was done, we did it ourselves.” But Big Mike’s rise came from
knowing the federal government intimately. The Arizona Territory he traveled
to in I860 to follow a gold strike developed as a virtual ward of the federal
government, used as a base for fighting the Indian Wars. (“Hostilities in Ari-
zona are kept up with a view of protecting inhabitants,” a general sardonically
observed, “most of whom are supported by the hostilities.”) The money to
build Big Mike’s first Goldwater’s store in I872 came largely from contracts
for provisioning Army camps and delivering mail. Pioneering days were long
Past, at any rate, by the time his grandchildren came along: Barry, born in
I909, and his sister and brother grew up with a nurse, chauffeur, and live-in
maid. He hardly needed to take over at the store after his father’ s death because
8 hired manager, not Baron Goldwater, ran it; Barry later admitted he left col-
lege because he didn’t like it. He never carried cash growing up; when he
Wanted to make a purchase in any store in Phoenix, he could charge it to his
father.
His generation’s coming marked the greatest confluence of all of federal
lafgesse to Arizona and Goldwater fortune: the Roosevelt Dam, begun in I905.
The population of nearby Phoenix, fattened by construction money, doubled in
five years. During World War I, thanks to the call for stepped-up production of
the state economy's Three C s —cotton, copper, and cattle—it boomed some
more. During the 1920s, three more reclamation projects gave federal handouts
to farmers and ranchers, and federal outlays for health and highways and voca-
tional education made up 15 percent of Arizona’s economy, and the population
of Phoenix nearly tripled.
Then came the New Deal. The economic development of the South and the
west was one of Franklin Roosevelt s most cherished goals. Washington oper-
ated fifty different federal agencies in Arizona, in addition to the Hoover Dani
project. Federal funds totaling $342 million went to the state, and less than $16
million in taxes were remitted in return.
By then Barry Goldwater and a brother were in charge of the family enter-
prise. They did not profess gratitude for the federal government’s help. In
I934 they removed the blue eagle emblem of Roosevelt’s National Recovery
Administration from the windows of their stores to protest its price dictates.
Their response to the Depression was that private citizens should take care of
theirown, the way they did: Goldwater’s paid higher than the industry wage;
provided health, accident, life, and pension benefits; provided profit sharing, a
store psychiatrist, and a formal retirement plan. Later came a twenty-five-acre
farm for employee recreation, and a day camp for children. The family allowed
employees to examine the company’s books whenever they wished.
In June of I938, when the Works Progress Administration was putting
money to spend in department stores in the hands of sixteen thousand WPA
construction workers, Barry greeted the passage of the Fair Labor Standards
Act, raising the minimum wage from 25 to 40 cents and limiting working hours
to forty-four a week, with his first public political pronouncement, an open let-
ter to the President in the Phoenix Gazette. “My friend,” Goldwater began,
mocking Roosevelt’s fireside chat salutation, “you have, for over five years,
been telling me about your plans; how much they were going to do and how
much they were going to mean to me. Now I want to tum around and ask you
just what have they done that would be of any value to me as a businessman
and a citizen.” He complained of astronomical taxes and alphabet-soup agen-
cies; he argued that workmen had been able to win higher wages only because
Roosevelt’s economic policies forced factories to operate for fewer hours; he
charged that the President had “turned over to the racketeering practices of ill-
organized unions the future of the workingman. Witness the chaos they are cre-
ating in the Eastern cities. Witness the men thrown out of work, the riots, the
bloodshed, and the ill feeling between labor and capital, and then decide for
yourself if that plan worked.”
“I would like to know just where you are leading us,” he concluded. “I like
the old-fashioned way of being an American a lot better than the way we are
headed for now.” ~
The ideal politician, it has been written, is an ordinary representative of his
class with extraordinary abilities. Goldwater wrote as a member of an imagi-
nary republic of beneficent businessmen-citizens just like himself. It was not
for him to observe that the operating deficits brought on by the Goldwater’s
stores’ generous benefits package were covered out of interest generated from
his wife’s trust fund. (Indiana-born Peggy was an heiress of the Borg-Warner
fortune. Her family vacationed in Arizona, where they socialized with the most
prominent local family-the Goldwaters—as a matter of course.)
Saturday, August 23, 2014
Vestal Fire
Archie Macadam was in the Nortons" big salon: this
afternoon, and the two old ladies, who loved nothing so
much as to give people what they wanted, loved to give
him all the brandy he could drink. This afternoon he had
arrived at the stage of well-oiled subtlety when the riddle
of the universe appears so perfectly simple to oneself that
one longs to explain the Theory of Relativity. In those
days the theory had not been invented, so Macadam was
trying to get up an argument with Austin Follett whether
the monkey goes round the pole or the pole goes round
the monkey. Follett, whose politeness Wlll have been
noticed, was looking as solemnly interested as if he were
listening to a profound exposition of Manicheism _that
might have been of service to his thesis on the origin of
Evil.
“ What you observe, Mr. Macadam, is very interesting.”
“ It is,” Macadam agreed gloomily. He was a tall clean-
shaven man of the explorer type, always very neatly dressed.
“ It is interesting, because .it’s unanswerable. What is
unanswerable must by the nature of things be more inter-
esting than what is answerable. Take God for instance.
You see what l’m driving at ? Of course you do. Well,
that’s exactly what I mean about this problem of the
monkey and the pole.”
During this last speech of Macadam’s Follett was aware
that somebody was digging him in the ribs to an accompani-
ment of suppressed chuckles. He did not dare to withdraw
his eyes from Macadam’s glassy stare, because he had reached
the point, which one often reaches in an argument with a
drunken man, of supposing that it would be extremely
imprudent to do so. However, the digs and chuckles became
so insistent that at last he had to turn round and risk
Macadam’s catching him a crack on the head with the
decanter. He then discovered that his neighbour was Mrs.
Ambrogio, to whom he had been introduced when he came in.
Mrs. Ambrogio was a handsome woman of about forty,
ample in the style of feminine beauty that was so much
admired when King Edward VII was Prince of Wales. She
was the type that used to look so queenly in silver and
plush photograph-frames on the occasional tables of houses
untainted by aestheticism. Indeed, there were people to
assure you that as a young woman she was a rival of the
Jersey Lily herself. There was an element of mystery
about her which Mrs. Ambrogio, had she wanted to, was
incapable of dispelling, because she was incapable of stringing
together a sufficiently intelligible long sentence. She had
certainly been married before, but whether she divorced
‘her husband or he divorced her, whether she had been a
widow when she married Pietro Ambrogio, a Neapolitan
lawyer practising in Sirene, or whether she had eloped from
England with him nobody on the island had ever discovered.
There were twenty legends in Sirene of her origin, which
varied from the unrepeatable to the faintly suggestive.
*
Miss Virginia fell in love with
a coachman. Stole all her money and ran away. Tell’
you lots of stories about the foreigners here, but never talk.
Peter’s sake. Mustn’t talk if you marry a lawyer. Used
to talk a lot before I married dear old Peter. Never talk
now. Bad for his business. Weren’t you chatting to Mrs.
Neave just now? Dear woman! Had an aflair . with
Duncan Maxwell last year. Only repeat what other people
tell me. Hate scandal. You walked down with , Nigel
Dawson. Such a dear boy! One of those. But what
does it matter P Why shouldn’t he be ? Don’t care what
anybody is. Love everybody.”
“ I had the good fortune to meet Mr. Maxwell in Bavaria
recently,” said Follett.
“ Isn’t he a dear? I like him so much. If you hear
that he steals people’s geraniums, don’t believe it. Don’t
believe anything you hear in Sirene.”
“ But why should people accuse a highly intellectual man
like Mr. Maxwell of stealing their geraniums ? ” Follett
asked in amazement.
“ People here accuse you of anything. I was accused of
keeping a disorderly house in Naples. 'Don’t care what they
say. Married the only honest lawyer in Italy, so don’t care
a damn what they say now.” e
“ But geraniums 2 ” F ollett persisted.
“ Building a house. Making a garden. Must get gera-
niums somewhere. Engaged three boys with spades and
large baskets. Worked all night. Next morning all the
geraniums in Sirene growing in Mr. Maxwell’s garden.
Other pe0ple’s gardens nothing but feetmarks, footmarks,
feetmarks. Don’t know which you say. No grammar.
No brains. Footmarks everywhere. Major Natt was so
angry. That’s Major Natt over there. Like him so much.
Mean as he can be. Such an old darling. Weighs out the
sugar for the kitchen himself every morning. Has hundreds
of naughty books. Wish I could read them. Can’t read.
Love reading, but can’t read. No brains. Lethis villa
this year-—Major Natt, I mean—and the tenants kept
chickens in the bathroom.”
“ Chickens?” Follett gasped. “ Why, I could under-
stand keeping ducks in a bathroom, but chickens . . .”
“ No water. Driest place in the house. Major Natt cut
OE the water from the bathroom before he went away.
Sells it to the contadini at ten centesimi a bottlei Goes to
Switzerland every Summer to save money. Say he milks
Swiss peasants’ cows himself tosave paying for his lunch.
Don’t believe a word of it. Don’t you believe it. Such
lies. Plenty of cherry brandy when you go there to tea.
Love him. There’s Peter!” She waved excitably, her
face crimsoning, to a neatly dressed little Italian who came
in from the garden at that moment. “Peter! Peter!
V ous venn, Peter ! ” She turned back to Follett. .“ Always
speak French to Peter. Peter can’t speak English and'I
can’t speak Italian. Servants understand me perfectly and
I understand them. Peter made love to my dear Assunta.
Turned her out atonce. Wouldn’t stand it. Caught him
kissing her and he said he was spongeing the statue of Venus.
Such lies. Hate lies! Most truthful woman in Sirene.
afternoon, and the two old ladies, who loved nothing so
much as to give people what they wanted, loved to give
him all the brandy he could drink. This afternoon he had
arrived at the stage of well-oiled subtlety when the riddle
of the universe appears so perfectly simple to oneself that
one longs to explain the Theory of Relativity. In those
days the theory had not been invented, so Macadam was
trying to get up an argument with Austin Follett whether
the monkey goes round the pole or the pole goes round
the monkey. Follett, whose politeness Wlll have been
noticed, was looking as solemnly interested as if he were
listening to a profound exposition of Manicheism _that
might have been of service to his thesis on the origin of
Evil.
“ What you observe, Mr. Macadam, is very interesting.”
“ It is,” Macadam agreed gloomily. He was a tall clean-
shaven man of the explorer type, always very neatly dressed.
“ It is interesting, because .it’s unanswerable. What is
unanswerable must by the nature of things be more inter-
esting than what is answerable. Take God for instance.
You see what l’m driving at ? Of course you do. Well,
that’s exactly what I mean about this problem of the
monkey and the pole.”
During this last speech of Macadam’s Follett was aware
that somebody was digging him in the ribs to an accompani-
ment of suppressed chuckles. He did not dare to withdraw
his eyes from Macadam’s glassy stare, because he had reached
the point, which one often reaches in an argument with a
drunken man, of supposing that it would be extremely
imprudent to do so. However, the digs and chuckles became
so insistent that at last he had to turn round and risk
Macadam’s catching him a crack on the head with the
decanter. He then discovered that his neighbour was Mrs.
Ambrogio, to whom he had been introduced when he came in.
Mrs. Ambrogio was a handsome woman of about forty,
ample in the style of feminine beauty that was so much
admired when King Edward VII was Prince of Wales. She
was the type that used to look so queenly in silver and
plush photograph-frames on the occasional tables of houses
untainted by aestheticism. Indeed, there were people to
assure you that as a young woman she was a rival of the
Jersey Lily herself. There was an element of mystery
about her which Mrs. Ambrogio, had she wanted to, was
incapable of dispelling, because she was incapable of stringing
together a sufficiently intelligible long sentence. She had
certainly been married before, but whether she divorced
‘her husband or he divorced her, whether she had been a
widow when she married Pietro Ambrogio, a Neapolitan
lawyer practising in Sirene, or whether she had eloped from
England with him nobody on the island had ever discovered.
There were twenty legends in Sirene of her origin, which
varied from the unrepeatable to the faintly suggestive.
*
Miss Virginia fell in love with
a coachman. Stole all her money and ran away. Tell’
you lots of stories about the foreigners here, but never talk.
Peter’s sake. Mustn’t talk if you marry a lawyer. Used
to talk a lot before I married dear old Peter. Never talk
now. Bad for his business. Weren’t you chatting to Mrs.
Neave just now? Dear woman! Had an aflair . with
Duncan Maxwell last year. Only repeat what other people
tell me. Hate scandal. You walked down with , Nigel
Dawson. Such a dear boy! One of those. But what
does it matter P Why shouldn’t he be ? Don’t care what
anybody is. Love everybody.”
“ I had the good fortune to meet Mr. Maxwell in Bavaria
recently,” said Follett.
“ Isn’t he a dear? I like him so much. If you hear
that he steals people’s geraniums, don’t believe it. Don’t
believe anything you hear in Sirene.”
“ But why should people accuse a highly intellectual man
like Mr. Maxwell of stealing their geraniums ? ” Follett
asked in amazement.
“ People here accuse you of anything. I was accused of
keeping a disorderly house in Naples. 'Don’t care what they
say. Married the only honest lawyer in Italy, so don’t care
a damn what they say now.” e
“ But geraniums 2 ” F ollett persisted.
“ Building a house. Making a garden. Must get gera-
niums somewhere. Engaged three boys with spades and
large baskets. Worked all night. Next morning all the
geraniums in Sirene growing in Mr. Maxwell’s garden.
Other pe0ple’s gardens nothing but feetmarks, footmarks,
feetmarks. Don’t know which you say. No grammar.
No brains. Footmarks everywhere. Major Natt was so
angry. That’s Major Natt over there. Like him so much.
Mean as he can be. Such an old darling. Weighs out the
sugar for the kitchen himself every morning. Has hundreds
of naughty books. Wish I could read them. Can’t read.
Love reading, but can’t read. No brains. Lethis villa
this year-—Major Natt, I mean—and the tenants kept
chickens in the bathroom.”
“ Chickens?” Follett gasped. “ Why, I could under-
stand keeping ducks in a bathroom, but chickens . . .”
“ No water. Driest place in the house. Major Natt cut
OE the water from the bathroom before he went away.
Sells it to the contadini at ten centesimi a bottlei Goes to
Switzerland every Summer to save money. Say he milks
Swiss peasants’ cows himself tosave paying for his lunch.
Don’t believe a word of it. Don’t you believe it. Such
lies. Plenty of cherry brandy when you go there to tea.
Love him. There’s Peter!” She waved excitably, her
face crimsoning, to a neatly dressed little Italian who came
in from the garden at that moment. “Peter! Peter!
V ous venn, Peter ! ” She turned back to Follett. .“ Always
speak French to Peter. Peter can’t speak English and'I
can’t speak Italian. Servants understand me perfectly and
I understand them. Peter made love to my dear Assunta.
Turned her out atonce. Wouldn’t stand it. Caught him
kissing her and he said he was spongeing the statue of Venus.
Such lies. Hate lies! Most truthful woman in Sirene.
Sunday, August 17, 2014
The Vagaries of Being Clare Booth Luce
in 1934, starlet Dorothy Hale and Clare Booth Luce accompanied Isamu Noguchi on a road trip through Connecticut in a car Noguchi had designed with Buckminster Fuller, the Dymaxion car (which rode on three wheels and held eleven passengers). The threesome stopped to see Thornton Wilderin in Hamden, Connecticut, before going on to Hartford to join Fuller for the out-of-town opening of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts.
By 1937, Hale was involved in a serious romance with Harry Hopkins, WPA administrator and Franklin D. Roosevelt's top adviser.[3] Anticipating a "White House wedding" Hale moved into Hampshire House, a 27-story apartment building at 150 Central Park South, and began putting together atrousseau, but Hopkins abruptly broke off the affair. Luce said in later years that the White House was not happy about the Hopkins/Hale engagement rumors, and that may have been the cause of the break.[4] The gossip columnists who had been reporting the engagement rumors played up the cruel jilting, causing Hale great embarrassment.[3] Hopkins would eventually marry Lou Macy, a close Roosevelt associate.
In 1938, another benefactor and abandoned suitor, Bernard Baruch, advised Hale that, at 33, she was too old for a professional career and that she should look for a wealthy husband. Baruch even gave her $1,000 with the instructions, "... to buy a dress glamorous enough to capture a husband."
Hale became despondent over her stalled career, constant debt, and unhappy love life. At 5:15 am on October 21, 1938, Hale threw herself out of the window of her apartment. She was found still wearing her favorite Madame X femme-fatale black velvet dress with a corsage of small yellow roses, given to her by Noguchi.
Luce, an ardent admirer of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, almost immediately commissioned Kahlo to paint a "recuerdo" (remembrance) portrait of their deceased mutual friend, so that in Kahlo's words: "her life must not be forgotten".[3] Luce understood a recuerdo to be an idealized memorial portrait and was doubtless expecting a conventional over-the-fireplace portrait for her $400. After being shown in March in Paris, the completed painting arrived in August 1939: Luce claims she was so shocked by the unwrapped painting that she "almost passed out."[ What Kahlo created was a graphic, narrative "retablo", detailing every step of Hale's suicide. It depicts Hale standing on the balcony, falling to her death while also lying on the bloody pavement below.[10] Luce was so offended that she seriously considered destroying it; but instead she had the sculptor Isamu Noguchi paint out the part of the legend that bore Luce's name.
Friday, August 08, 2014
Also read...
Alan Hollinghurst's "The Stranger's Child" from which I cannot pull a quote, though it gives every appearance of containing faultless prose. If Sebastian and Charles in Brideshead Revisited made it to first base, George and Cecil certainly proceed to second, but it is hardly more explicit. Sexuality is chimerical here too, attraction mercurial, the flamboyant Cecil making a seedy, pederastic grope of George's 16-year-old sister while at the family home boning George in sylvan ecstasies. Cecil eventually marries Daphne, and promptly dies in the great war while George settles down with a plodding mannish lady academic. The plot hiccups and advances every fifteen or twenty years or so. It was compulsively readable if ultimately disappointing.
Also "Wolf Hall", by Hilary Mantell which, again was compelling but a disappointment. From Wolf Hall:
"He cannot lock us all up"
"He has prisons enough"
"For bodies, yes. But what are bodies? He can take our goods but God will prosper us. He can close teh booksellers, but there will still be books. They can have their old bones, their glass saints in windows, their candles and shrines, but God has given us the printing press.
and
on Anne:
She is selling herself by the inch. The gentlemen all say that you are advising her. She wants a present in cash for every advance above her knee. Not like you Mary. One push backward and, good girl, here's fourpence.
Anne has very long legs. By the time he comes to her secret part he will be bankrupt.
Also "Wolf Hall", by Hilary Mantell which, again was compelling but a disappointment. From Wolf Hall:
"He cannot lock us all up"
"He has prisons enough"
"For bodies, yes. But what are bodies? He can take our goods but God will prosper us. He can close teh booksellers, but there will still be books. They can have their old bones, their glass saints in windows, their candles and shrines, but God has given us the printing press.
and
on Anne:
She is selling herself by the inch. The gentlemen all say that you are advising her. She wants a present in cash for every advance above her knee. Not like you Mary. One push backward and, good girl, here's fourpence.
Anne has very long legs. By the time he comes to her secret part he will be bankrupt.
Thursday, August 07, 2014
Vestal Fire and Compton Mackenzie
From an article in the Spectator:
On Capri in 1925 Scott Fitzgerald met his ‘old idol’ Compton Mackenzie and found him ‘cordial, attractive and pleasantly mundane.
You get no sense from him that he feels his work has gone to pieces. He’s not pompous about his present output. I think he’s just tired. The war wrecked him as it did Wells and many of that generation.’ Fitzgerald himself survives, on the strength of two and a half novels and perhaps a dozen short stories, but, except in Scotland, Mackenzie is, I surmise, more or less forgotten, and even in Scotland it’s only Whisky Galore and perhaps his Highland farces which keep his name alive. It will surprise many to learn that Fitzgerald once idolised him, but This Side of Paradise, his first novel, is very much son of Mackenzie’s Sinister Street.
The 1914-18 war, in which he worked as an intelligence officer in Greece, may indeed have left Mackenzie tired, but it hardly ‘wrecked him’. Indeed, within a couple of years of Fitzgerald’s dismissive judgment, he would publish Vestal Fire, the first of two Capri extra-vaganzas. The other is Extraordinary Women, scandalous at the time on account of its lesbian theme. Both books remain amusing and readable. If not as good as Norman Douglas’s South Wind, they survive better than Aldous Huxley’s comparable novels of conversation.Mackenzie was 13 years older than Fitzgerald, but outlived him by 32, writing to the end. Not bad going for someone ‘wrecked’ half a century earlier.
He made his reputation as an English Edwardian novelist; too much gush in his first books. Sinister Street was banned by libraries and highly praised by Henry James. This irritated Hugh Walpole, who saw himself as James’s pet young novelist and was jealous of Mackenzie. ‘Mackenzie, in spite of his cleverness, is no good,’ he wrote, indignantly. ‘Anyone who prefers Sinister Street to Sons and Lovers!’ Well, I do. Sinister Street — splendid title — has its longueurs, but ranks with Maugham’s Of Human Bondage as the best of the quasi-autobiographical English novels of the period. Ford Madox Ford thought it ‘possibly a work of real genius’.
Friday, August 01, 2014
The Greenacres and the Lookalofts and the finale
Mrs. Greenacre, much as she reverenced Miss Thorne, and highly as she respected her husband's landlord, could not but look on this as an act of injustice done to her and hers. Hitherto the Lookalofts had never been recognized as being of a different class from the Greenacres. Their pretensions were all self-pretensions, their finery was all paid for by themselves and not granted to them by others. The local sovereigns of the vicinity, the district fountains of honour, had hitherto conferred on them the stamp of no rank. Hitherto their crinoline petticoats, late hours, and mincing gait had been a fair subject of Mrs. Greenacre's raillery, and this raillery had been a safety-valve for her envy. Now, however, and from henceforward, the case would be very different. Now the Lookalofts would boast that their aspirations had been sanctioned by the gentry of the country; now they would declare with some show of truth that their claims to peculiar consideration had been recognized. They had sat as equal guests in the presence of bishops and baronets; they had been curtseyed to by Miss Thorne on her own drawing-room carpet; they were about to sit down to table in company with a live countess! Bab Lookaloft, as she had always been called by the young Greenacres in the days of their juvenile equality, might possibly sit next to the Honourable George, and that wretched Gussy might be permitted to hand a custard to the Lady Margaretta De Courcy.
The fruition of those honours, or such of them as fell to the lot of the envied family, was not such as should have caused much envy. The attention paid to the Lookalofts by the De Courcys was very limited, and the amount of entertainment which they received from the bishop's society was hardly in itself a recompense for the dull monotony of their day. But of what they endured Mrs. Greenacre took no account; she thought only of what she considered they must enjoy, and of the dreadfully exalted tone of living which would be manifested by the Rosebank family, as the consequence of their present distinction.
"But did 'ee zee 'em there, dame, did 'ee zee 'em there with your own eyes?" asked poor Mrs. Greenacre, still hoping that there might be some ground for doubt.
"And how could I do that, unless so be I was there myself?" asked Mrs. Guffern. "I didn't zet eyes on none of them this blessed morning, but I zee'd them as did. You know our John; well, he will be for keeping company with Betsey Rusk, madam's own maid, you know. And Betsey isn't none of your common kitchen wenches. So Betsey, she come out to our John, you know, and she's always vastly polite to me, is Betsey Rusk, I must say. So before she took so much as one turn with John she told me every ha'porth that was going on up in the house."
"Did she now?" said Mrs. Greenacre.
"Indeed she did," said Mrs. Guffern.
"And she told you them people was up there in the drawing-room?"
"She told me she zee'd 'em come in — that they was dressed finer by half nor any of the family, with all their neckses and buzoms stark naked as a born babby."
"The minxes!" exclaimed Mrs. Greenacre, who felt herself more put about by this than any other mark of aristocratic distinction which her enemies had assumed.
"Yes, indeed," continued Mrs. Guffern, "as naked as you please, while all the quality was dressed just as you and I be, Mrs. Greenacre."
and
Bertie immediately gave his arm to Eleanor, walking between her and his sister. He had lived too long abroad to fall into the Englishman's habit of offering each an arm to two ladies at the same time — a habit, by the by, which foreigners regard as an approach to bigamy, or a sort of incipient Mormonism.
and finally....
We must now take leave of Mr. Slope, and of the bishop also, and of Mrs. Proudie. These leave-takings in novels are as disagreeable as they are in real life; not so sad, indeed, for they want the reality of sadness; but quite as perplexing, and generally less satisfactory. What novelist, what Fielding, what Scott, what George Sand, or Sue, or Dumas, can impart an interest to the last chapter of his fictitious history? Promises of two children and superhuman happiness are of no avail, nor assurance of extreme respectability carried to an age far exceeding that usually allotted to mortals. The sorrows of our heroes and heroines, they are your delight, oh public! — their sorrows, or their sins, or their absurdities; not their virtues, good sense, and consequent rewards. When we begin to tint our final pages with _couleur de rose_, as in accordance with fixed rule we must do, we altogether extinguish our own powers of pleasing. When we become dull, we offend your intellect; and we must become dull or we should offend your taste. A late writer, wishing to sustain his interest to the last page, hung his hero at the end of the third volume. The consequence was that no one would read his novel. And who can apportion out and dovetail his incidents, dialogues, characters, and descriptive morsels so as to fit them all exactly into 930 pages, without either compressing them unnaturally, or extending them artificially at the end of his labour? Do I not myself know that I am at this moment in want of a dozen pages, and that I am sick with cudgelling my brains to find them? And then, when everything is done, the kindest-hearted critic of them all invariably twits us with the incompetency and lameness of our conclusion. We have either become idle and neglected it, or tedious and overlaboured it. It is insipid or unnatural, overstrained or imbecile. It means nothing, or attempts too much. The last scene of all, as all last scenes we fear must be,
Is second childishness, and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
I can only say that if some critic who thoroughly knows his work, and has laboured on it till experience has made him perfect, will write the last fifty pages of a novel in the way they should be written, I, for one, will in future do my best to copy the example. Guided by my own lights only, I confess that I despair of success.
The fruition of those honours, or such of them as fell to the lot of the envied family, was not such as should have caused much envy. The attention paid to the Lookalofts by the De Courcys was very limited, and the amount of entertainment which they received from the bishop's society was hardly in itself a recompense for the dull monotony of their day. But of what they endured Mrs. Greenacre took no account; she thought only of what she considered they must enjoy, and of the dreadfully exalted tone of living which would be manifested by the Rosebank family, as the consequence of their present distinction.
"But did 'ee zee 'em there, dame, did 'ee zee 'em there with your own eyes?" asked poor Mrs. Greenacre, still hoping that there might be some ground for doubt.
"And how could I do that, unless so be I was there myself?" asked Mrs. Guffern. "I didn't zet eyes on none of them this blessed morning, but I zee'd them as did. You know our John; well, he will be for keeping company with Betsey Rusk, madam's own maid, you know. And Betsey isn't none of your common kitchen wenches. So Betsey, she come out to our John, you know, and she's always vastly polite to me, is Betsey Rusk, I must say. So before she took so much as one turn with John she told me every ha'porth that was going on up in the house."
"Did she now?" said Mrs. Greenacre.
"Indeed she did," said Mrs. Guffern.
"And she told you them people was up there in the drawing-room?"
"She told me she zee'd 'em come in — that they was dressed finer by half nor any of the family, with all their neckses and buzoms stark naked as a born babby."
"The minxes!" exclaimed Mrs. Greenacre, who felt herself more put about by this than any other mark of aristocratic distinction which her enemies had assumed.
"Yes, indeed," continued Mrs. Guffern, "as naked as you please, while all the quality was dressed just as you and I be, Mrs. Greenacre."
and
Bertie immediately gave his arm to Eleanor, walking between her and his sister. He had lived too long abroad to fall into the Englishman's habit of offering each an arm to two ladies at the same time — a habit, by the by, which foreigners regard as an approach to bigamy, or a sort of incipient Mormonism.
and finally....
We must now take leave of Mr. Slope, and of the bishop also, and of Mrs. Proudie. These leave-takings in novels are as disagreeable as they are in real life; not so sad, indeed, for they want the reality of sadness; but quite as perplexing, and generally less satisfactory. What novelist, what Fielding, what Scott, what George Sand, or Sue, or Dumas, can impart an interest to the last chapter of his fictitious history? Promises of two children and superhuman happiness are of no avail, nor assurance of extreme respectability carried to an age far exceeding that usually allotted to mortals. The sorrows of our heroes and heroines, they are your delight, oh public! — their sorrows, or their sins, or their absurdities; not their virtues, good sense, and consequent rewards. When we begin to tint our final pages with _couleur de rose_, as in accordance with fixed rule we must do, we altogether extinguish our own powers of pleasing. When we become dull, we offend your intellect; and we must become dull or we should offend your taste. A late writer, wishing to sustain his interest to the last page, hung his hero at the end of the third volume. The consequence was that no one would read his novel. And who can apportion out and dovetail his incidents, dialogues, characters, and descriptive morsels so as to fit them all exactly into 930 pages, without either compressing them unnaturally, or extending them artificially at the end of his labour? Do I not myself know that I am at this moment in want of a dozen pages, and that I am sick with cudgelling my brains to find them? And then, when everything is done, the kindest-hearted critic of them all invariably twits us with the incompetency and lameness of our conclusion. We have either become idle and neglected it, or tedious and overlaboured it. It is insipid or unnatural, overstrained or imbecile. It means nothing, or attempts too much. The last scene of all, as all last scenes we fear must be,
Is second childishness, and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
I can only say that if some critic who thoroughly knows his work, and has laboured on it till experience has made him perfect, will write the last fifty pages of a novel in the way they should be written, I, for one, will in future do my best to copy the example. Guided by my own lights only, I confess that I despair of success.
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