Mercedes from Hugo Vickers

Between 1920 and 1935 Mercedes was married to the painter Abram Poole, but she refused to be described as Mrs. Poole, remaining resolutely Mercedes de Acosta. Nor' did her marriage prevent her from pursuing various ladies. She even claimed to have taken a girlfriend with her on her honeymoon. She had remarkable success in this regard. Alice B. Toklas wrote of her, "A friend said to me one day—you can't dispose of Mercedes lightly—she has had the two most important women in US—Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich." Shortly before her death at the age of one hundred, "Dickie" Fellowes-Gordon, Elsa Maxwell's lifelong friend, recalled that Mercedes used to boast, "I can get any woman from any man,"and there is considerable evidence to support this claim. Truman Capote was one of those fascinated by Mercedes's sex life. "Truman thought up a game he called International Daisy Chain, the point of which was to link people sexually, using as few beds as possible," recalls the art historian John Richardson. "He used to say that Mercedes was the best card to hold. You could get to anyone—from Cardinal Spellman to the Duchess of Windsor."

Mercedes always dressed in either black or white, or a combi-nation of the two. She favored cloaks, and tricorn hats, and well-cut jackets. She operated with champagne, lilies, and caviar, and if necessary would fill a room with such delights, giving no thought to cost in the cause of seduction. She was variously fascinated by many famous and complicated women—the Italian diva with the tragic face, Eleonora Duse, whom she first saw passing in a gondola in Venice when she was eleven and who died in Pittsburgh and whose body she arranged to have lie in the Dominican Catholic Church on Lexington Avenue; the Russian ballerina Tamara Karsavina; and Isadora Duncan.

Garbo's return had done nothing to alleviate Mercedes's depressions, and during a particularly acute bout she went out in her car with one of her maids, saying, "I wish to God a car would hit us and kill me." Her foolish wish was almost granted, and she was at that instant the victim of a serious accident, being propelled from the car and landing on her head. She found herself in Santa Monica Hospital and only just escaped permanent disfigurement. Dietrich telephoned from Paris and offered to pay Mercedes's expenses. Later Dietrich inquired, "How are my scars?" Mercedes recovered from her accident, though she needed consider-able plastic surgery on her face, often necessitating her going around with bandages on.

and Truman Capote on Garbo:
I'm afraid she will never be a satisfactory person, because she is so dissatisfied with herself and dissatisfied people can never be emotionally serious. They simply don't believe in anything- except their own limitations

Ugh... math

Leibniz's mathematical investigations initially centered on the summation of infinite series. The concern with indivisibility and the infinitely small was linked in his mind to some fundamental, meta-physical truths about the nature of substance, matter, and mind. His intuition told him that the problem of how to make sense of the infinity of points on a line was an instance of the problem of how to make sense of the relation between indivisible, pointlike souls and the continuum of the material world. For roughly the same reason that no number of points could ever be strung together to make up a line, he believed that purely physical or material principles could not account for everything in the material world, and that therefore an incorporeal or "mental" principle- "substance"—was required to explain the unity and activity of phenomena. He called this complex of ideas "the labyrinth of the continuum." Pursuing these premises through one end of the labyrinth, he would discover calculus; off in the opposite direction, he would envision a world comprised of nothing but an infinite number of pointlike, immortal souls. All of Leibniz's mathematical achievements in later life, and much of his metaphysics as well, had their origin in the ideas conceived in Paris before he turned thirty.

Operation Shylock again

Really the novel is a collection of diatribes in multiple voices- each carried away with its own eloquence- here is George, the Palestinian friend of the narrator:

First—according to George's historical breakdown of the cycle of Jewish corruption—were the pre-Holocaust, postimmigration years of 1900 to 1939: a period of renouncing the Old Country for the New; of dealienization and naturalization, of extinguishing the memories of families and communities abandoned, of forgetting parents left to age and die without their most adventurous children to com-fort and console them—the feverish period of toiling to construct in America, and in English, a new life and identity as Jews. After this, the period of calculated amnesia, 1939 to 1945, the years of the immeas-urable catastrophe, when, with lightning speed, those families and communities from which the newly, incompletely Americanized Jews had voluntarily severed their strongest ties were quite literally oblit-erated by Hitler. The destruction of European Jewry registered as a cataclysmic shock on American Jews not only because of its sheer horror but also because this horror, viewed irrationally through the prism of their grief, seemed to them in some indefinable way ignited by them—yes, instigated by the wish to put an end to Jewish life in Europe that their massive emigration had embodied, as though be-tween the bestial destructiveness of Hitlerian anti-Semitism and their own passionate desire to be delivered from the humiliations of their
European imprisonment there had existed some horrible, unthink-able interrelationship, bordering on complicity. And a misgiving very similar, an undivulgeable self-denunciation perhaps even more omi-nous, could be imputed to the Zionists and their Zionism. For were the Zionists without contempt for Jewish life in Europe when they embarked for Palestine? Didn't the militants who pioneered the Jew-ish state feel an even more drastic revulsion for the Yiddish-speaking masses of the shtetl than did those practical-minded immigrants who'd managed their escape to America without the blight of an ideology like Ben-Gurion's? Admittedly, migration, and not mass mur-der, was the solution proposed by Zionism; nevertheless, disgust for their own origins these Zionists made manifest in a thousand ways, most tellingly in choosing as the official tongue of the Jewish state the language of the remote biblical past rather than the shaming European vulgate that issued from the mouths of their powerless forebears. So: Hitler's slaughter of all those millions whom these Jews had unwittingly abandoned to their fate, the destruction of the humiliat-ing culture whose future they had wanted no part of, the annihilation of the society that had compromised their virility and restricted their development—this left the unimperiled Jews of America as well as Israel's defiantly bold founding fathers with a legacy not only of grief but of inexpungible guilt so damning as to warp the Jewish soul for decades thereafter, if not for centuries to come. Following the catastrophe came the great period of postwar nor-malization, when the emergence of Israel as a haven for the surviving remnant of European Jewry coincided precisely with the advance of assimilation in America; the period of renewed energy and inspira-tion, when the Holocaust was itself still only dimly perceived by the public at large and before it had infested all of Jewish rhetoric; the years before the Holocaust had been commercialized by that name, when the most popular symbol for what had been endured by Euro-pean Jewry was a delightful adolescent up in the attic diligently doing her homework for her daddy and when the means for contemplating everything more horrible were still generally undiscovered or suppressed, when in Israel it would be years before a holiday was offi-cially proclaimed to commemorate the six million dead; the period when Jews everywhere wished to be known even to themselves for something more vitalizing than their victimization. In America it was the age of the nose job, the name change, the ebbing of the quota system, and the exaltations of suburban life, the dawn of the era of big corporate promotions, whopping Ivy League admissions, hedonis-tic holidays, and all manner of dwindling prohibitions—and of the emergence of a corps of surprisingly goylike Jewish children, dopey and confident and happy in ways that previous generations of anxious Jewish parents had never dared to imagine possible for their own. The pastoralization of the ghetto, George Ziad called it, the pasteur-ization of the faith. "Green lawns, white Jews—you wrote about it. You crystallized it in your first book That's what the hoopla was all about. 1959. The Jewish success story in its heyday, all new and thrilling and funny and fun. Liberated new Jews, normalized Jews, ridiculous and wonderful. The triumph of the untragic. Brenda Pa-timkin dethrones Anne Frank. Hot sex, fresh fruit, and Big Ten bas-ketball—who could imagine a happier ending for the Jewish people?" Then 1967: the Israeli victory in the Six Day War. And with this, the confirmation not of Jewish dealienization or of Jewish assimilation or of Jewish normalization but of Jewish might, the cynical institu-tionalization of the Holocaust begins. It is precisely here, with a Jew-ish military state gloating and triumphant, that it becomes official Jewish policy to remind the world, minute by minute, hour by hour, day in and day out, that the Jews were victims before they were conquerors and that they are conquerors only because they are vic-tims. This is the public-relations campaign cunningly devised by the terrorist Begin: to establish Israeli military expansionism as histori-cally just by joining it to the memory of Jewish victimization; to rationalize—as historical justice, as just retribution, as nothing more than self-defense—the gobbling up of the Occupied Territories and the driving of the Palestinians off their land once again. What justifies seizing every opportunity to extend Israel's boundaries? Auschwitz. What justifies bombing Beirut civilians? Auschwitz. What justifies smashing the bones of Palestinian children and blowing off the limbs of Arab mayors? Auschwitz. Dachau. Buchenwald. Belsen. Treblinka. Sobibor. Belsec. "Such falseness, Philip, such brutal, cynical insincer-ity! To keep the territories has for them one meaning and only one meaning: it is to display the physical prowess that made the conquest possible! To rule the territories is to exercise a prerogative hitherto denied—the experience of oppressing and victimizing, the experi-ence now of ruling others. Power-mad Jews is what they are, is all that they are, no different from the power-mad everywhere, except for the mythology of victimization that they use to justify their addic-tion to power and their victimizing of us. The famous joke has it exactly right: 'There's no business like Shoah business.' During the period of their normalization there was the innocent symbol of little Anne Frank, that was poignant enough. But now, in the era of their greatest armed might, now at the height of their insufferable arro-gance, now there are sixteen hours of Shoah with which to pulverize audiences all over the world, now there is 'Holocaust' on NBC once a week, starring as a Jew Meryl Streep! And the American Jewish leaders who come here, they know this Shoah business very well—they arrive here from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, these officials of the Jewish establishment, and to those few Israelis who still have some truthfulness in them and some self-respect, who still know how to utter something other than the propaganda and the lies, they say, `Don't tell me how the Palestinians are becoming accommodating. Don't tell me how the Palestinians have legitimate claims. Don't tell me how the Palestinians are oppressed and that an injustice has been done. Stop that immediately! I cannot raise money in America with that. Tell me about how we are threatened, tell me about terrorism, tell me about anti-Semitism and the Holocaust!' And this explains why there is the show trial of this stupid Ukrainian—to reinforce the cornerstone of Israeli power politics by bolstering the ideology of the victim. No, they will not stop describing themselves as victims and identifying themselves with the past. But it is not exactly as though the past has been ignored—the very existence of this state is evidence of that. By now surely this obsessive narrative of theirs has come to violate their sense of reality—it certainly violates ours. Don't tell us about their victimization! We are the last people in the world to understand that! Of course Ukrainian anti-Semitism is real. There are many causes that we all know, having to do with the role the Jews played there in the economic structure, with the cynical role as-signed to them by Stalin in the farm collectivization—all this is clear. But whether this stupid Ukrainian is Ivan the Terrible is not at all clear, it can't be clear after forty years, and so, if you have any honesty as a nation, any respect left at all for the law, you let him go. If you must have your vengeance, you send him back to the Ukraine and let the Russians deal with him—that should be satisfaction enough. But to try him here in the courtroom and over the radio and on the television and in the papers, this has only one purpose—a public-relations stunt a la the Holocaust-monger Begin and the gangster Shamir; public relations to justify Jewish might, to justify Jewish rule by perpetuating into the next one hundred millennia the image of the Jewish victim. But is public relations the purpose of a system of criminal justice? The criminal-justice system has a legal purpose, not a public-relations purpose. To educate the public? No, that's the pur-pose of an educational system. I repeat: Demjanjuk is here to main-tain the mythology that is this country's lifeblood. Because without the Holocaust, where are they? Who are they? It is through the Holo-caust that they sustain their connection to world Jewry, especially to privileged, secure American Jewry, with its exploitable guilt over being unimperiled and successful. Without the connection to world Jewry, where is their historical claim to the land? Nowhere! If they were to lose their custodianship of the Holocaust, if the mythology of the dispersion were to be exposed as a sham—what then? What happens when American Jews shed their guilt and come to their senses? What happens when American Jews realize that these people, with theirincredible arrogance, have taken on a mission and a mean-ing that is utterly preposterous, that is pure mythology? What hap-pens when they come to realize that they have been sold a bill of goods and that, far from being superior to Diaspora Jewry, these Zionists are inferior by every measure of civilization? What happens when American Jews discover that they have been duped, that they have constructed an allegiance to Israel on the basis of irrational guilt, of vengeful fantasies, above all, above all, based on the most naive delusions about the moral identity of this state? Because this state has no moral identity. It has forfeited its moral identity, if it ever had any to begin with. By relentlessly institutionalizing the Holocaust it has even forfeited its claim to the Holocaust! The state of Israel has drawn the last of its moral credit out of the bank of the dead six million—this is what they have done by breaking the hands of Arab children on the orders of their illustrious minister of defense. Even to world Jewry it will be clear: this is a state founded on force and maintained by force, a Machiavellian state that deals violently with the uprising of an oppressed people in an occupied territory, a Ma-chiavellian state in, admittedly, a Machiavellian world, but about as saintly as the Chicago Police Department. They have advertised this state for forty years as essential to the existence of Jewish culture, people, heritage; they have tried with all their cunning to advertise Israel as a no-choice reality when, in fact, it is an option, to be examined in terms of quality and value. And when you dare to examine it like this, what do you actually find? Arrogance! Arrogance! Arrogance! And beyond the arrogance? Nothing! And beyond the nothing—more arrogance! And now it is there for the whole world to see every night on television—a primitive capacity for sadistic violence that has finally put the lie to all their mythology! 'The Law of the Return'? As if any self-respecting civilized Jew would want to `return' to a place like this! 'The Ingathering of the Exiles'? As if 'exile' from Jewishness begins to describe the Jewish condition anywhere but here!

American Manhood by Rotundo

While middle-class ideas and experience took different forms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, recent research has shown that there was far more to the history of Victorian sexuality than a reign of re-pression. The repressive reputation of the nineteenth century grew out of ide-ology more than behavior. Middle-class moralists preached the doctrine of sexual restraint from the pulpit, in the medical press, and on the lec-ture circuit. They started from the assumption that nature had endowed men with tremendous sexual passion while leaving women with little or perhaps with none at al1.27 Working from there, the preachers of purity urged manly self-control. They called not only for premarital chastity but for complete mastery of sexual feeling. One important step in this process was the suppression of masturba-tion. The missionaries for self-control insisted that this "solitary vice" would lead to the breakdown of intellect and the destruction of will, and thus to effeminacy, to insanity, and even to premature death.28 Even if he never touched a woman, a man's sexual desires could ruin him: he had to cut them off at the source to save his own body and soul. Clever men, concerned with the welfare of youth, invented tools to help young males tame their impulses. One such device, when worn by a man, would cause a bell to ring every time he got an erection.29 Even with such technical help, the individual male bore the burden of responsibility for suppressing his sexual desires. Sylvester Graham, one of the leading missionaries for self-control, declared that "LASCIVI-OUS DAY-DREAMS" amounted to "unchastity of thought." He warned that "this adultery of the mind, is the beginning of immeasurable evil to the human family." Such fantasies, by their very nature, were subject only to self-control. Graham and others like him set an immense task for men: to master their behavior by subduing their feelings and even by suppressing their daydreams. One historian has rightly called the ideal of the nineteenth-century sex advisers an "athlete of continence" who was constantly "testing his manliness in the fire of self-denial.'N This stringent code developed in the early nineteenth century, when the expansion of commerce lured young men away from the traditional values and communal vigilance of small towns. The ideology of sexual repression offered an alternative to the unchecked selfishness of the marketplace; it provided a sense of personal control and a form of moral discipline at a time when ethical chaos seemed imminent.3' This doc-trine of self-control hardened into a public orthodoxy once the migration
Love, Sex, and Courtship 121 from country to city became a steady, permanent flow. The twentieth-century view of nineteenth-century sexuality is based largely on that re-pressive Victorian orthodoxy. But historians have begun to uncover a different set of male sexual values. In fact, the very existence of the ideology of self-control—and the vehemence with which it was asserted—might have suggested long ago to historians that an opposite doctrine existed. The quiet, powerful opposition to the orthodoxy of self-denial came from an ethic of male aggression. Although this doctrine was rarely articulated on paper, it made its power felt in many ways. We can guess that such an ethos of sexual aggression existed at the start of the nineteenth century simply by look-ing at the premarital pregnancy rate. Between 1761 and 1800, roughly one American bride in three went to the altar pregnant. The rate for the next forty years dropped to one in four. Even with the rate in decline, it is clear that many young men were ready to engage in coitus before marriage. Presumably, some of those young men were from the Northern middle class. Another kind of evidence for the doctrine of sexual aggression comes from the testimony of those who opposed it. Many evangelicals com-plained of the widespread pressure on young men to experiment with sex before marriage, and a late-century American physician railed against fathers who tickled the penises of their baby sons into a state of erection to assure themselves that their sons were "robust." Purity advocates pointed out time and again that the ethos of sexual aggression had its roots in two widespread assumptions—that nature had endowed the male with an immense sexual appetite, and that it was necessary for him to satisfy that appetite. A physician who joined the purity movement of the late 1800s denounced "those among the males of our generation, who attribute to men an inherent natural need to gratify passions, claiming that the weaker sex understands it to be necessary to man's nature, and willingly tolerate lustful ante-nuptial and post-nuptial practices." Observations of a general tolerance and encouragement of male sexual aggression came from individuals in their private writing as well as from public advocates in books and speeches. MA.ud Rittenhouse, an Illi-nois woman, lamented in her diary that "boys are taught all their lives that purity is only for women (some women) and vice a necessity to them and 'natural.'" The assumption was widely held in nineteenth-century America that males had urgent sexual passions; the next logical step was the belief that it was natural and necessary for men to express those pas-sions. An assumption like this may not be quite the same thing as a moral imperative, but its effect on behavior (by discouraging opposition to male sexual expression) was probably much the same. It provided a basis in belief that encouraged aggressive sexuality in men.34 The existence of an ethic of sexual aggression is also consistent with the experience of males during boyhood. Boys certainly learned from each other that aggressive expression of impulse was appropriate male behavior. This vital lesson could easily be applied to sexual drives. Since boys often expressed their affectionate feelings toward each other through physical aggression, the experience of boy culture helped pre-pare a growing male to accept a code of sexual conduct that stressed the aggressive expression of impulse. There were no tracts that taught this ethic of assertive sexuality, and no preachers who urged its virtues, but its strength is clear by evidence and by inference. Middle-class men, in sum, were confronted by two ethics of sexual conduct, one urging the "natural" expression of aggressive impulses and the other demanding stringent self-control. Charles Rosenberg, who was the first historian to identify these conflicting codes, has observed that "few males were completely immune from the reality of both." 35 How did these two codes develop within the life of a young male? To what ex-tent did they conflict during boyhood? The evidence about the sex education of middle-class boys is thin, but there are enough fragments of data to permit a few informed guesses. A boy's exposure to contradictory sexual attitudes probably began at an early age. The rise of moral motherhood in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries must have focused women's attention on the nascent sexuality of their children.36 The masturbation phobia that gripped the middle class during the 1800s would have provided special encouragement for mothers to stop children from stimulating their own sexual pleasure. On the other hand, we have already seen that purity advocates complained of fathers who tickled their infant sons' penises into a state of erection to assure themselves of the next generation's virility. By the time a boy reached the age of six or seven, he was also subject to a constant and increasing influence from boy culture, which persistently stressed the expression of aggressive physical impulses. If this cursory sketch of boyhood sexual influences is correct, the forces of suppression and expression were already dividing up along gen-der lines during boyhood. As was so often the case in middle-class culture, "female" meant restriction and "male" meant release. Long before adult sexual feeling had surfaced, conflicting pressures—with strong overtones of gender—were building up around sexuality. Then puberty arrived and brought these emotions to the surface. A male youth encountered an intense barrage of sexual advice from ministers, purity crusaders, and an abundant advice literature. This barrage added public anxiety to the forces that already bore upon a young man's burgeoning sexuality. By the time such a young man approached his first romantic relationship, he had been assailed by pressures and counterpressures of great strength. Given the welter of feelings and the tangle of advice attached to sexu-ality, how did young men actually govern their sexual behavior? What happened when they were confronted by a real relationship with an ac-tual woman? Some simply ignored one line of sexual counsel and fol-lowed the other. This pattern was sufficiently common that "neat cate-gories of 'clean men' and libertines" seemed reasonable to thoughtful people. One man wrote about the kind of "boy who was not afraid to tri-fle with the most forward of girls," and who was thereby "esteemed above his years and almost [as] a man." These were the "libertines," the young men who ignored counsels of purity and responded to the social encouragement of aggressive male sexuality. The "clean men" defined themselves in contrast to the sexually active ones. These "athletes of continence" took pride in being "those who practiced [sex] not at all." They constructed barriers of self-denial which Daniel Webster referred to as "the restraints which youth, with infinite pains, imposes on its pas-sions." Young men who embodied the pure types of self-denial or sexual ag-gression were distinctly visible to their peers, but it may have been the exceptional nature of their behavior that made them stand out. Very lit-tle evidence survives to help us make judgments about the frequency of sexual activity among middle-class youth, or about what percentages of this group held various attitudes about sex. The limited testimony avail-able does suggest that the young man who heeded only one extreme of sexual counsel was exceptional. Most seemed to search for a way to obey one sexual ethic without violating the other. As they struggled with this conflict, young men developed different patterns of thought and behavior to help them abide by both codes at once. These strategies—for, unconsciously, they were strategies—were distinct but not mutually exclusive. Young men might use any or all of them, depending on their needs and inclinations. One of the ways in which male youth reconciled the conflicting codes of sexual behavior was by thinking of love in a way that drained its erotic content.

Leibniz... the cad

The aspiration to promote the general good; the desire to be seen to promote the general good; the quest for truth; the yearning for recognition; the love of money and titles; competitive rivalry; and sheer, untrammeled curiosity—all of these impulses and others typically shuffled around in the background of whatever it was that Leibniz said he was doing at any one point in time. Behind some of his apparently selfish motives one may often discover some public-spirited ones; and the inverse, unfortunately, is also true. And yet, as one peels back each layer of purposivity to arrive at the next, the suspicion grows that the process will never end—that there is no self-consistent package of intentions that explains the complex totality of Leibniz's behavior. The truly disconcerting prospect is that, at the end of the day, one will find not a "mean" spirit, but no spirit at all. The alarming fact about Leibniz is not that he did not always tell the truth, but that he was, in a certain sense, constitutionally—or per-haps metaphysically—incapable of telling the truth. In his handling of his first contact with Spinoza, to cite the most pressing example, what we observe is not straightforward duplicity, but a much more com-plex phenomenon that deserves the name "multiplicity" that is, showing a variety of related but mutually incompatible faces, none of which seems to enjoy the privilege of being entirely "true" or entirely "false." From Leibniz's multidirectional correspondence on the subject of Spinoza, we may conclude neither that he was an anti-Spinozist intending to lure the sage of The Hague into a trap, nor that he was a crypto-Spinozist who concealed his true identity from his orthodox colleagues. Rather, he was—always to some degree, depending on the listener, the context, and the particular purposes in play a subtle and indeterminate mixture of both. As Lewis White Beck has said, he was "all things to all men"; but the price paid for such omnidexterity was that he was no one thing to everybody. Leibniz's apparent corelessness stands for a fundamental philosoph-ical problem, a quandary that reaches to the foundations of his system of philosophy. In the metaphysics he later presented to the world, Leibniz claimed that the one thing of which we can all be certain is the unity, permanence, immateriality, and absolute immunity to out-
side influence of the individual mind. In identifying the mind as a "monad"—the Greek word for "unity"—he positioned himself in direct opposition to Spinoza, whose allegedly materialist philosophy of mind he adamantly rejected. And yet, the philosopher who made the unity of the individual the fundamental principle of the universe was himself incomparably fragmented, multiplicitous, exposed to the influence of others, and impossible to pin down. How could a monad be so multifarious, not to say nefarious?

and on Paris...

 Paris came of age in the seventeenth century. After stagnating through the Middle Ages, the city tripled in land area and doubled in population to half a million during the course of the Grand Siecle. Most of the growth took place in the second half of the century, after Louis XIV ascended the throne. Paris under the Sun King had the spirit of a boomtown: "Everything here is going from good to better, regardless of where one turns; Paris was never so fine or stately as today" gushed one of Leibniz's correspondents, the famous theater critic Samuel Chappuzeau. Dr. Martin Lister, an English traveler, said in 1698 that Paris was "a new City within this forty years." Voltaire later remarked "there is little that was not either re-established or created in [Louis XIV's} time." "Vanity," "opulence," and "elegance" are the words that recur most frequently in seventeenth-century travelers' descriptions of the French capital. Dr. Lister—his awe overwhelming any moral reservations—called Paris a "whirlpool of luxury" Aside from the new mansions, palaces, gardens, and plazas, visitors could feast their eyes on a flock of white swans, imported at considerable expense by Louis himself in order to bring grace and beauty to the slimy banks of the Seine. Among the most visible (and audible) signs of the new wealth were the carriages. In 1594, there were eight carriages in all Paris, according to one count. By the end of the seventeenth century, there were as many as twenty thousand. The new vehicles were icons of progress not just in number but in quality. Voltaire enthused that the glass windows and new suspension systems of modern carriages ren-dered the earlier models obsolete. Among "people of quality," the right kind of carriage became a coveted status symbol. The new test of eligibility for a marriageable male was: What kind of carriage does he drive? While the King thought of improving the city by means of swans, monuments, and other gestures redolent of the Middle Ages, his more forward-thinking deputies, led by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, began to look at the challenges of urban planning in a modern way. They dou-bled the number of public water fountains and refurbished the ailing sewers. To improve circulation on the city's congested streets, they invested heavily in pavement, and on the newly hardened thorough-fares they inaugurated a novel form of public transport: the public carriage, or omnibus. In the year before Leibniz's arrival, the municipal authorities also began installing street lamps, bringing light and security into the night. For perhaps the first time in the modern era, a cadre of professionals took a comprehensive approach to the matters of sanitation, water supply, transportation, security, health, education, and aesthetics.The historian Pierre Lavedan dates the start of the urban sciences from seventeenth-century Paris. Despite the signs of progress, there was no tidy escape from the Middle Ages. Henri Sauval, a chronicler of the times, said that, although no city was better paved than Paris, none was muddier. This was no ordinary mud: it was "black, stinking, of an intolerable odor to strangers," and easily detectible at a distance of ten miles. After every rain—and often, inexplicably, without any aid from the heav-ens at all—the malodorous mire would ooze up from the gutters and claim the city streets, paralyzing carriages and pedestrians alike. "It clings like the mud of Paris," was the common way of describing any-thing that frustrated all efforts at eradication. Paris stank, too, and not just on account of the high sulfur content of its inescapable mud. The pig farms, slaughterhouses, starch factories, and even ill-tended graveyards in the city center all contributed to the fumes. It cannot have helped that many Parisians were in the habit of emptying their chamber pots out the window—a practice as illegal as it was universal, for, as one police source complained, it occurred mainly at night "at a time when one cannot readily see from whence came the contravention." In the tumultuous streets of Paris in 1672, an omniscient historical observer might well have detected the silent forces at work that were setting the stage for a tremendous clash between the medieval world and the modern world, a conflict that would radically trans-form the context within which human experience would take place. Such forces, however, were not always in the forefront of conscious-ness at the time, not even among the new breed of itinerant diplomat-philosophers, who nonetheless must be numbered among the most important agents of change. Leibniz settled on the Left Bank, in the Faubourg St. Germain, home to the hard core of Paris's new class of theatergoers. During his four years in Paris, he lived in guesthouses of the sort patronized mainly by young men from abroad—businessmen, diplomats, stu-dents, and other people of quality in search of favor and fortune. The Hotel des Romains on the rue Ste. Margarite, the philosopher's resi-dence for about two years, had a reputation as a German colony.
Within his valise the twenty-six-year-old privy counselor of Mainz brought with him the ultraconfidential Egypt Plan. There, alas, the vaunted plan remained. Perhaps because he never received Leibniz's epic paper, Louis XIV had already opted to invade nearby Holland rather than faraway Egypt, having secured an alliance with the English monarch for the purpose. But Boineburg and Leibniz were not going to let such a dramatic change in political circumstances get in the way of their manifest destiny. The philosopher revised his paper so as to present the conquest of Egypt not as an alternative to the invasion of Holland, but as the logical next step: Holland was just the appetizer, Leibniz now claimed; only Egypt could satisfy the imperial hunger of France.

and back to Leibniz

It was one of those ages in which the men dressed far better than the women. Men of quality sported feathered hats, long jackets, silk cravats, ornamented vests, culottes or breeches ending at the knee and tied by a ribbon, silk stockings, leather boots, liberal doses of per-fume, and elaborate gauntlets truly worthy of being thrown down. In the early 1670s, just as Louis XIV began to lose his hair, wigs came into high fashion, and soon no head of any standing was complete without false curls extending to the shoulders or below. Leibniz delighted in the whole costume. He became recognizable for the exceptionally long, black wig that always warmed his prematurely bald dome. In the beguiling but treacherous salons of the city, the young German also learned his manners. Superficiality was prized, lightness in tone was de rigueur, and passionate disputes were taken as a sure mark of inferiority. Leibniz even adopted a characteristically Parisian tenor in his French. "I speak in Parisian, as you can see," he jokes with one correspondent. The philosopher's sparkling exterior, sadly, could not entirely mask the fact that his body fell somewhat short of the Olympian ideal. His limbs, we know from Eckhart, gyrated awkwardly whenever he moved. He had a protrusion on his head about the size of a quail's egg, and it may well be that he took to the luxurious coif as a means of hiding this deformity. Baron von Boineburg, who tended to be blunt at times, felt compelled to introduce his protege to the French foreign minister in somewhat apologetic terms: "He is a man who, despite his insignificant outward appearance, is in a position to per-form what he promises." Leibniz himself liked to tell a story about the time he visited a Paris bookshop and was received in a hostile way by the shop clerks, who judged from his appearance that he was unworthy of their attentions. Then, a well-known publisher and acquaintance walked in, greeted him, and spoke most favorably to the store owner of his intellectual prowess. The snooty clerks suddenly became very helpful, and the philosopher was left to ponder the fact that human beings attach such inordinate importance to the merely physical properties of individuals. From the only early portrait (made in 1680, when he was thirty-four) it seems that in this part of his life, at least, the smallish Leibniz was well fed. His second chin spreads generously under and around the first and joins seamlessly with the ruddy cheeks. The rest of his portraits, all dating from his late fifties on, however, indicate a thinning out with age—perhaps the consequence of later digestive troubles that reduced his diet chiefly to milk. Eckhart, who knew him in his last two decades, calls him "more lean than fat." Aside from noting its effect on others, Leibniz demonstrated remarkably little interest in his own corporeality. To judge from his writings, purely private sensations concerned him very little. He abhorred physical exertion and led a sedentary life. "He never sweats," he once wrote proudly of himself in the third person, blissfully unaware of the price he would have to pay in later years for such neglect. He was content to eat porridge.
Disappointingly, there is no convincing evidence that Leibniz ever shared his bed with any other human being.

Where Angels Fear To Tread

A house was finally taken for her at Sawston, and there for three years she lived with Irma, continually subject to the refining influences of her late husband's family. During one of her rare Yorkshire visits trouble began again. Lilia confided to a friend that she liked a Mr Kingcroft extremely, but that she was not exactly engaged to him. The news came round to Mrs Herriton, who at once wrote, begging for information, and pointing out that Lilia must either be engaged or not, since no intermediate state existed. It was a good letter, and flurried Lilia extremely. She left Mr Kingcroft without even the pressure of a rescue-party. She cried a great deal on her return to Sawston, and said she was very sorry. Mrs Herriton took the opportunity of speaking more seriously about the duties of widowhood and motherhood than she had ever done before. But somehow things never went easily after. Lilia would not settle down in her place among Sawston matrons. She was a bad house-keeper, always in the throes of some domestic crisis, which Mrs Herriton, who kept her servants for years, had to step across and adjust. She let Irma stop away from school for insufficient reasons, and she allowed her to wear rings. She learned to bicycle, for the purpose of waking the place up, and coasted down the High Street one Sunday evening, falling off at the turn by the church. If she had not been a relative, it would have been entertaining. But even Philip, who in theory loved outraging English conventions, rose to the occasion, and gave her a talking which she remembered to her dying day. It was just then, too, that they discovered that she still allowed Mr Kingcroft to write to her as a gentleman friend', and to send presents to Irma. Philip thought of Italy, and the situation was saved. Caroline, charming sober Caroline Abbott, who lived two turnings away, was seeking a companion for a year's travel. Lilia gave up her house, sold half her furniture, left the other half and Irma with Mrs Herriton, and had now departed, amid universal approval, for a change of scene. She wrote to them frequently during the winter — more frequently than she wrote to her mother. Her letters were always prosperous. Florence she found perfectly sweet, Naples a dream, but very whiffy. In Rome one had simply to sit still and feel. Philip, however, declared that she was improving. He was particularly gratified when in the early spring she began to visit the smaller towns that he had recommended. 'In a place like this,' she wrote, 'one really does feel in the heart of things, and off the beaten track. Looking out of a Gothic window every morning, it seems impossible that the Middle Ages have passed away.' The letter was from Monteriano, and concluded with a not un-successful description of the wonderful little town. `It is something that she is contented,' said Mrs Herriton. 'But no one could live three months with Caroline Abbott and not be the better for it.' Just then Irma came in from school, and she read her mother's letter to her, carefully correcting any grammatical errors, for she was a loyal supporter of parental authority. Irma listened politely, but soon changed the subject to hockey, in which her whole being was absorbed. They were to vote for colours that afternoon — yellow and white or yellow and green. What did her grandmother think? Of course Mrs Herriton had an opinion, which she sedately expounded, in spite of Harriet, who said that colours were un-necessary for children, and of Philip, who said that they were ugly. She was getting proud of Irma, who had certainly greatly improved, and could no longer be called that most appalling of things — a vulgar child. She was anxious to form her before her mother returned.

and

"But pardon me, Miss Abbott; of most of your conduct you
have given a description rather than an explanation."
He had fairly caught her, and expected that she would
gape and collapse. To his surprise she answered with some
spirit, "An explanation may bore you, Mr. Herriton: it drags
in other topics."
"Oh, never mind."
"I hated Sawston, you see."
He was delighted. "So did and do I. That's splendid.
Go on."
"I hated the idleness, the stupidity, the
respectability, the petty unselfishness."
"Petty selfishness," he corrected. Sawston psychology
had long been his specialty.
"Petty unselfishness," she repeated. "I had got an idea
that every one here spent their lives in making little
sacrifices for objects they didn't care for, to please
people they didn't love; that they never learnt to be
sincere--and, what's as bad, never learnt how to enjoy
themselves. That's what I thought--what I thought at Monteriano."

and

"Is the young person mad?" burst out Philip as soon as
she had departed. "Never in my life have I seen such
colossal impertinence. She ought to be well smacked, and
sent back to Sunday-school."
His mother said nothing.
"But don't you see--she is practically threatening us?
You can't put her off with Mrs. Theobald; she knows as well
as we do that she is a nonentity. If we don't do anything
she's going to raise a scandal--that we neglect our
relatives, &c., which is, of course, a lie. Still she'll
say it. Oh, dear, sweet, sober Caroline Abbott has a screw
loose! We knew it at Monteriano. I had my suspicions last
year one day in the train; and here it is again. The young
person is mad."
She still said nothing.
"Shall I go round at once and give it her well? I'd
really enjoy it."
In a low, serious voice--such a voice as she had not used
to him for months--Mrs. Herriton said, "Caroline has been
extremely impertinent. Yet there may be something in what
she says after all. Ought the child to grow up in that
place--and with that father?"
Philip started and shuddered. He saw that his mother
was not sincere. Her insincerity to others had amused him,
but it was disheartening when used against himself.
"Let us admit frankly," she continued, "that after all
we may have responsibilities."
"I don't understand you, Mother. You are turning
absolutely round. What are you up to?"
In one moment an impenetrable barrier had been erected
between them. They were no longer in smiling confidence.
Mrs. Herriton was off on tactics of her own--tactics which
might be beyond or beneath him.
His remark offended her. "Up to? I am wondering
whether I ought not to adopt the child. Is that
sufficiently plain?"
"And this is the result of half-a-dozen idiocies of Miss
Abbott?"
"It is. I repeat, she has been extremely impertinent.
None the less she is showing me my duty. If I can rescue
poor Lilia's baby from that horrible man, who will bring it
up either as Papist or infidel--who will certainly bring it
up to be vicious--I shall do it."
"You talk like Harriet."
"And why not?" said she, flushing at what she knew to be
an insult. "Say, if you choose, that I talk like Irma.
That child has seen the thing more clearly than any of us.
She longs for her little brother. She shall have him. I
don't care if I am impulsive."
He was sure that she was not impulsive, but did not dare
to say so. Her ability frightened him. All his life he had
been her puppet. She let him worship Italy, and reform
Sawston--just as she had let Harriet be Low Church. She had
let him talk as much as he liked. But when she wanted a
thing she always got it.
And though she was frightening him, she did not inspire
him with reverence. Her life, he saw, was without meaning.
To what purpose was her diplomacy, her insincerity, her
continued repression of vigour? Did they make any one
better or happier? Did they even bring happiness to
herself? Harriet with her gloomy peevish creed, Lilia with
her clutches after pleasure, were after all more divine than
this well-ordered, active, useless machine.
Now that his mother had wounded his vanity he could
criticize her thus. But he could not rebel. To the end of
his days he could probably go on doing what she wanted. He
watched with a cold interest the duel between her and Miss
Abbott. Mrs. Herriton's policy only appeared gradually. It
was to prevent Miss Abbott interfering with the child at all
costs, and if possible to prevent her at a small cost.
Pride was the only solid element in her disposition. She
could not bear to seem less charitable than others.
and
"Absurd nonsense they talk about the heat," said Philip,
as they drove from the station. "Supposing we were here for
pleasure, what could be more pleasurable than this?"
"Did you hear, though, they are remarking on the cold?"
said Harriet nervously. "I should never have thought it cold."
And on the second day the heat struck them, like a hand
laid over the mouth, just as they were walking to see the
tomb of Juliet. From that moment everything went wrong.
They fled from Verona. Harriet's sketch-book was stolen,
and the bottle of ammonia in her trunk burst over her
prayer-book, so that purple patches appeared on all her
clothes. Then, as she was going through Mantua at four in
the morning, Philip made her look out of the window because
it was Virgil's birthplace, and a smut flew in her eye, and
Harriet with a smut in her eye was notorious. At Bologna
they stopped twenty-four hours to rest. It was a FESTA, and
children blew bladder whistles night and day. "What a
religion!" said Harriet. The hotel smelt, two puppies were
asleep on her bed, and her bedroom window looked into a
belfry, which saluted her slumbering form every quarter of
an hour. Philip left his walking-stick, his socks, and the
Baedeker at Bologna; she only left her sponge-bag. Next day
they crossed the Apennines with a train-sick child and a hot
lady, who told them that never, never before had she sweated
so profusely. "Foreigners are a filthy nation," said
Harriet. "I don't care if there are tunnels; open the
windows. "He obeyed, and she got another smut in her eye.
Nor did Florence improve matters. Eating, walking, even a
cross word would bathe them both in boiling water. Philip,
who was slighter of build, and less conscientious, suffered
less. But Harriet had never been to Florence, and between
the hours of eight and eleven she crawled like a wounded
creature through the streets, and swooned before various
masterpieces of art. It was an irritable couple who took
tickets to Monteriano.
and
She kept her promise, and never opened her lips all the
rest of the way. But her eyes glowed with anger and
resolution. For she was a straight, brave woman, as well as
a peevish one.
Philip acknowledged her reproof to be true. He did not
care about the baby one straw. Nevertheless, he meant to do
his duty, and he was fairly confident of success. If Gino
would have sold his wife for a thousand lire, for how much
less would he not sell his child? It was just a commercial
transaction. Why should it interfere with other things?
His eyes were fixed on the towers again, just as they had
been fixed when he drove with Miss Abbott. But this time
his thoughts were pleasanter, for he had no such grave
business on his mind. It was in the spirit of the
cultivated tourist that he approached his destination.
One of the towers, rough as any other, was topped by a
cross--the tower of the Collegiate Church of Santa Deodata.
She was a holy maiden of the Dark Ages, the city's patron
saint, and sweetness and barbarity mingle strangely in her
story. So holy was she that all her life she lay upon her
back in the house of her mother, refusing to eat, refusing
to play, refusing to work. The devil, envious of such
sanctity, tempted her in various ways. He dangled grapes
above her, he showed her fascinating toys, he pushed soft
pillows beneath her aching head. When all proved vain he
tripped up the mother and flung her downstairs before her
very eyes. But so holy was the saint that she never picked
her mother up, but lay upon her back through all, and thus
assured her throne in Paradise. She was only fifteen when
she died, which shows how much is within the reach of any
school-girl. Those who think her life was unpractical need
only think of the victories upon Poggibonsi, San Gemignano,
Volterra, Siena itself--all gained through the invocation of
her name; they need only look at the church which rose over
her grave. The grand schemes for a marble facade were never
carried out, and it is brown unfinished stone until this
day. But for the inside Giotto was summoned to decorate the
walls of the nave. Giotto came--that is to say, he did not
come, German research having decisively proved--but at all
events the nave is covered with frescoes, and so are two
chapels in the left transept, and the arch into the choir,
and there are scraps in the choir itself. There the
decoration stopped, till in the full spring of the
Renaissance a great painter came to pay a few weeks' visit
to his friend the Lord of Monteriano. In the intervals
between the banquets and the discussions on Latin etymology
and the dancing, he would stroll over to the church, and
there in the fifth chapel to the right he has painted two
frescoes of the death and burial of Santa Deodata. That is
why Baedeker gives the place a star.
Santa Deodata was better company than Harriet, and she
kept Philip in a pleasant dream until the legno drew up at
the hotel. Every one there was asleep, for it was still the
hour when only idiots were moving. There were not even any
beggars about. The cabman put their bags down in the
passage--they had left heavy luggage at the station--and
strolled about till he came on the landlady's room and woke
her, and sent her to them.

The genius of Anatole Broyard- on sex and other things

Saul reminded me of a boy named Meyer who was in my class in the fourth grade at P.S. 44 in Brooklyn. Meyer was thin, with dark crinkly hair and high, per-petually shrugged shoulders. His features were so em-phatically articulated that even when he wasn't doing anything he looked hysterical. When the teacher called on him Meyer would stand up in the aisle and throw his head back and gasp for air, pulling his voice unwillingly through his throat and sinuses and forcing it out of his nose. Once he got it out, his speech was extremely pre-cise. He bit off his consonants and spat them into the room, and I remember thinking, though not in those terms, that it was the jagged precision of the words he used that made them pass with such difficulty. There were two or three other boys like Meyer in the school—skinny, with hawklike faces, curved noses, and strangled voices. They were all Jewish and I as-sumed in my mechanistic eight-year-old way that their trouble in speaking had something to do with the struc-ture of their noses. I thought that speech was a kind of wailing for them, a cry of rage and despair. They were torn between the desire to hurl their words in our faces and a tradition of secretiveness. Their speech got as far as their noses, like a head cold, and stopped there. Though I was a good student, I knew I could never be as smart as those Jewish boys who were strangled by their smartness. They were bred to it—their minds had the quickness of racehorses. They had another advantage too: While I was essentially cheerful, filled with a
distracting sociability, there was a brooding sadness in the most brilliant of the Jewish boys that turned them inward and made them thoughtful. I saw them as Mar-tians, creatures from a more advanced planet. Next to them I would always be a southerner, a barbarian. They were at home in the city in a way that I wasn't. Their racing minds were part of its teeming. You can't say such things now without being called anti-Semitic—yet even with all my Catholic mythologies I don't think that I was anti-Semitic. In the 1920s in New York City everyone was ethnic—it was the first thing we noticed. It was as natural to us as our names. We accepted our ethnicity as a role and even parodied it. To us it was always Halloween. Most of our jokes were ethnic jokes—we hardly knew any other kind. We found our differences hilarious. It was part of the adventure of the street and of the school yard that every-one else had grown up among mysteries. Because we were always surprising to one another, there was an element of formality in our friendships. I still felt some of this surprise, this formality, this mystery, when I was with Saul. He too had a face like an exclamation and a curved nose that the mustache tried to soften. He was small and slight and already balding, as if he had talked his hair off, had raised his eyebrows so many times that his hair had been pushed back once and for all. Saul was one of the last of a line of romantic intellec-tuals. Not satisfied to change the way people thought, he wanted to change the way they felt, the way they were, their desires. He was a reformer at heart, but it was not people's politics he wanted to influence; it was their sensibilities. He thought such changes could be brought about by making distinctions. He saw everything as a making of distinctions. He amassed them the way other people amassed money or possessions. He pursued them as some men pursued women. One day when all the distinctions were made we would know what beauty was, and justice.
     and

It's as if the human brain and the five senses were at an earlier stage of development. In 1947, American life had not yet been split open. It was still all of a piece, intact, bounded on every side, and, above all, regulated. Actions we now regard as commonplace were forbidden by law and by custom. While all kinds of things were censored, we hadn't even learned to think in terms of censorship, because we were so used to it. The social history of the world is, in some ways, a history of censorship. Nineteen forty-seven was a time when any sugges-tion of extramarital sex in a movie had to be punished, just as crime had to be punished. To publish a picture of pubic hair was a criminal offense. Lady Chatterley's Lover and Tropic of Cancer were banned and Portnoy's Complaint was twenty-two years away. There was no birth-control pill, no legal abortion—yet none of this tells you what sex at that time was like. The closest I can come to it is to say that sex was as much a supersti-tion, or a religious heresy, as it was a pleasure. It was a combination of Halloween and Christmas—guilty, tor-mented, clumsy, unexamined, and thrilling. It was as much psychological as physical—the idea of sex was often the major part of foreplay. A naked human body was such a rare and striking thing that the sight of it was more than enough to start our juices flowing. Peo-ple were still visually hungry; there was no sense of déjà vu as there is now. As a nation, we hadn't lost our naïveté. Of course, I'm talking about middle- and upper-middle-class people—that's where the girls I met came from. They were "good" girls whose sexuality had
been shaped by their mothers and by the novels of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, perhaps even Henry James. They wore padded bras and pantie girdles and they bought their bathing suits a size too large. The suggestion of a nipple through a sweater or a blouse or a panty seam through a skirt would have been considered pornographic. Sex was the last thing such a girl gave a man, an ultimate or ultimatum. It was as much a philosophical decision on her part as an emotional one and it had to be justified on ethical and aesthetic grounds. To sleep with a man was the end of a long chain of behavior that began with calling yourself a liberal, with appreciating modern art—sex was a modern art—and going to see foreign films. Sex too was foreign. It was a postwar thing, a kind of despairing democracy, a halfhearted form of suicide. It was a freedom more than a pleasure, perhaps even a polemic, a revenge against history. Still, there had to be love somewhere in it too—if not love of a particular man, then love of mankind, love of life, love of love, of anything. In a way I was just as inhibited as they were by my upbringing, which condemned me to a combination of boredom and desire. Like most young men, I hadn't yet learned how to just be with girls, to exist alongside them, to make friends—and so once my desire was sat-isfied, I was bored. To make it worse, I suffered from a kind of boyhood chivalry and politeness that kept me from being natural, so that I was acting all the time, and that was fatiguing. I was guiltily aware that I was using girls badly—yet to use them well would have been to love them, and I didn't have the time or space in my life for that. For all these reasons, there was always an aura of disappointment between us as we kept renewing a bad bargain. In Portnoy's Complaint, Portnoy says that underneath their skirts girls all have cunts. What he didn't say—and this was his trouble, his real complaint—was that underneath their skirts they also had souls. When they were undressed, I saw their souls as well as their cunts. They wore their souls like negliges that they never took off. And one man in a million knows how to make love to a soul. Sex in 1947 was like one of those complicated toys that comes disassembled, in one hundred pieces, and without instructions. It would be almost impossible for someone today to understand how far we were from explicit ideas like pleasure or gratification. We were more in the situation of Columbus wondering whether the world was flat or round. Because they didn't know how to make love, girls made gestures. They offered their idiosyncrasies as a kind of passion. In their ner-vousness, they brought out other, totally dissociated forms of extremity. They gave me their secret litera-ture, their repressed poems and stories, their dances. One of the things we've lost is the terrific coaxing that used to go on between men and women, the man pleading with a girl to sleep with him and the girl plead-ing with him to be patient. I remember the feeling of being incandescent with desire, blessed with it, of talk-ing, talking wonderfully, like singing an opera. It was a time of exaltation, this coaxing, as if I was calling up out of myself a better and more deserving man. Perhaps this is as pure a feeling as men and women ever have. What an effort we used to make. And how gladly, joyously, we made it. Nothing was too much, too preposterous. I remember one night, or rather a morning, a freezing January morning at about 2:00 A.M.-I was running through the dark, sleeping streets, running as fast as I could. I was wearing only a sweater, and I had no socks on. I didn't want to stop to put on socks. There was a girl in my apartment who insisted that I wear a condom and I was afraid she would change her mind and leave before I could get back from the all-night drugstore, which was half a mile away. I kept thinking of her as I ran, I saw her rising from the bed, pulling on her stockings, shaking her dress down over her head. I had wanted to take her dress or her shoes with me so she couldn't leave, but I thought this might antagonize her. Though she wasn't a girl whom I loved, I would have done anything for her that night. It was crazy, and I was aware that I was acting crazy as I ran through the streets—yet I kept running. Until we be-came sophisticated about it, sex was everything Freud said it was. The energy of unspent desire, of looking forward to sex, was an immense current running through American life. It was so much more powerful then because it was delayed, cumulative, and surrounded by doubt. It was fueled by failures, as well as by successes. The force of it would have been enough to send a million rockets to the moon. The structure of desire was an immense cathedral arching inside of us. While sex was almost always disappointing in retrospect, the promise of it ennobled and abstracted us; it made us pensive. Before sex was explained to us in the sixties, we had to explain it to ourselves, and our versions were infi-nitely better. Sex seemed so much more extreme before it was explained to us—we reached back into our imaginations and brought out the unheard-of. It was like the sex jokes I was told when we moved from New Orleans to Brooklyn. I was seven years old and when I went out into the street to play, the other kids told me sex jokes. Apart from the fact that I didn't know anything about sex, these jokes all had a surrealistic cast. They con-tained elements of fairy tales, science fiction, and horror movies. Perhaps sex is most wonderful when it preserves a bit of that grotesqueness we all feel in the beginning. It's the surrealistic moments that frighten and elate you with a kind of impractical, unenactable love, a love that you can't bring down to earth. I remember a girl, for example, a modern dancer, who had studied with Mar-tha Graham. One day in class Martha Graham had said, Girls, you must breathe with your vaginas. And this girl made up her mind to do this with me. She thought that if it was true for dancing, it must be true for sex too. What could be more natural? She told me that she had tried breathing with her vagina when she was alone and it was a marvelous feeling, like being lighter than air, like filling her lungs with sex. I was very turned on by the idea and I did my best to cooperate. But though we were energetic, it never happened. She was stubborn and she was strong, but at least she gave up. No, she said, her voice full of regret, I can't do it with you. She lay there thinking; her face was a diagram of thinking. Then she got out of bed and took up a position in front of the bookcase. I had painted the bookcase black and she looked magnificent against the black and the books. She drew herself up very straight—she was tall and muscular. I could see her gathering herself, her muscles rippling. I can't do it with you, she said, but I can do it by myself. Watch—give me a minute or two. She spread her feet a little and relaxed her knees. Now, she said, I'm doing it now. And she did—I saw her and there wasn't the slightest doubt in my mind.
With a girl, there was always the definition of terms: what getting into bed meant to her and what it could mean to me. Why are we doing this? she would ask, and I would have to make up a lie because I didn't know the answer. As we pressed up against the idea of love, as we felt its heat and blinked in its light, the personal and the philosophical met in a blur. I would be seized with an incredible sincerity, and while I knew that this sincerity was temporary, there was a sense in which it was eternal too. The girl and I were like two bows bent all the way back, with only one arrow between us. Seduction was a touching and beautiful genre, the most heartfelt literature of the self. At such times, I saw myself as I might be, as lovable. And I think the girl saw herself at her best too, as inspiring. There was a wonderful embarrassment about it all, a moral nakedness. A contemporary writer, a psycho-therapist, defined embarrassment as radiance that doesn't know what to do with itself—and that's what we had. We had radiance. When people are embarrassed, it's as if they've fallen out of their compulsive rhythms and are framed for a moment in an absolute, undefended stillness. Undressing was a drama in itself. A girl standing with her arms behind her back, at the clasp of her bra, had some of the beauty of a crucifixion. She also looked as if she was hiding something behind her, a gift. Paus-ing, gazing past me into the middle distance, her arms still back, handcuffed by hesitation and desire, she was trying to see the future or the end of love. And when at last her breasts sprang loose, she looked down at them with as much amazement as I did. When a girl took off her underpants in 1947, she was more naked than any woman before her had ever been. It was as if time or history itself had been evolving toward her nakedness, yearning for it. The men of my generation had thought obsessively about her body, had been elaborately prepared for it, led up to it by the great curve of civilization. Her body was on the tip of our minds, a pinup on the brink of our progress, our free-dom. We'd carried it, like a gun, all through the war. The nakedness of women was such an anticipated object that it was out in front of American culture, like the radiator ornament on the hood of a car. We were at that point in our social evolution where we had taken in as much awareness of women's bodies as we could stand without going mad. We were a nation of voyeurs. Perhaps, when she had undressed, a girl would apologize for her body, say that it was too thin or fat, that her breasts were too small. It was always she who had to measure up, who had to justify men's furious imaginings. If she had dared to refer to it, she might have apologized for her sex—its wetness, its pungency, its hairiness, its peculiar, almost furtive location. She might end her undressing with a little shrug, as if to say, This is all I have. I loved the awkwardness of these girls. There were times when it broke my heart. Afraid to take any sort of initiative, they hovered and fumbled, loitered and digressed. This awkwardness was, for me, a kind of sublime, an unconscious statement of their innocence. I remember a girl whose awkwardness took the form of stepping in dog shit in the street when we were on the way to my apartment. It happened three or four times and I asked her, Don't you see where you're going? But that was precisely what she didn't want to do. She didn't want to see. Stepping in dog shit was like re-treating all the way back to the pregenital. It was a proof of her inadvertence, her sublimity.
In 1947, high cheekbones were the best thing a girl could have, better than big breasts or great legs. Cubism had reached the human face and people in the Village liked to talk about bone structure.

Broyard on Jazz

 I had never written anything but notes to myself. I was always scribbling on little pads I carried around, jotting down ideas, phrases, images. Half of the young men in the Village were writing such notes. They wrote them in cafes, in the park, even on the street. You'd see them stop and pull out their pads or notebooks to jot down something that had just struck them—the color of the sky, the bend of a street, an incongruity. These notes were postcards to literature that we never mailed. I took Milton's proposal very seriously. I would go upstairs in my parents' house and listen to jazz for hours, playing records over and over. It suited my mood, which was like the lyrics of a blues song. I had always liked old jazz—from Louis Armstrong to Lester Young—but I hadn't made up my mind about Charlie Parker, who was everybody's hero at that time. While he could be brilliant, I found in Parker's style a hint of the garrulousness that would soon come over black culture. Also, it seemed to me that jazz relied too much on improvisation to be a full-fledged art form. Nobody could be that good on the spur of the moment. And there was too much cuteness in jazz. It stammered and strained. It took its sentimentality for wisdom. I tried to imagine what Meyer Schapiro would say about jazz. Was it like Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, a frac-turing of music, like the splitting of the atom? But there was something momentous, something world-shaking, about the Demoiselles that jazz didn't have. It seemed to me that jazz was just folk art. It might be terrific folk art, but it was still only local and temporary.
I found a parallel for jazz not in Schapiro's class but in Gregory Bateson's. Bateson loved to tell stories, and he told them very well. He was in New Guinea, he said, living with the Iatmul tribe, sleeping in a thatched but on tall stilts, when one morning he was awakened at daybreak by a sound of drumming. He got up and looked out and saw a lone man walking beneath the clustered huts of the village, beating a drum. He walked in a curious way, this man, in a sawtooth pattern—not turning around to keep to his pattern but stepping backward, heels first. And in counterpoint to his drum-ming, he chanted a sad, staccato recitative. Bateson learned that this man had suffered a griev-ance that he could not get settled. The tribe had rejected his plea for redress and so he got up every morning and rehearsed his complaint to the village. He tried to wake them, to disturb their rest, invade their dreams. Think-ing about jazz, I remembered this man and I thought that jazz musicians were something like that.

Vitalism from the Age of Wonder

In fact Vitalist ideas had been stirring for over a generation. Ever since the 1790s the new developments in Romantic medical science and theory had begun to raise fundamental questions about the nature of life itself. What distinguishes organic from inorganic (`dead') matter, or vegetable life from animal life? Was there some form of animating power through-out nature, and if so, was it identical to — or analogous with — electricity? These led on, inevitably, to an enquiry about the nature of mind, spirit and the traditional concept of 'the soul': how could this be explained or defined in scientific terms, or should it simply be dismissed? Such questions, traditionally the province of theologians and philoso-phers, were now increasingly considered by physicians, science writers, and those who studied what Coleridge called 'the science of mind'.22 They had already been the subject of ingenious scientific experiments in Europe, which gave rise to increasingly fierce debates surrounding the work of Luigi Galvani in Italy and Franz Anton Mesmer in France. By 1792 Galvani's supposedly 'magnetic' frog experiments were proved to be erroneous by Alessandro Volta: the mysterious 'vital electrical fluid' came not from the animal itself, but from the chemical action of the metal plates to which it was attached during experiments. Similarly, the French Academie des Sciences had appointed a scientific commission in 1784, headed by Franklin and Lavoisier (both experts in electrical phenomena), to examine the claims of 'animal magnetism'. They set up a series of elegant 'blind' trials, in which mesmerists were asked to identify objects that had been previously filled with 'vital fluid, including trees and flasks of water. They signally failed to do so. The commissioners then went on to examine the supposed curing of 'mesmerised' patients. As with the Montgolfier trials, Franklin wrote in detail to Banks of their find-ings. With impressive precision, the commission concluded that some `mesmerised' patients did actually show marked signs of improved health. But this was not because of any'rnagnetic' influences or 'vitalising' electrical fluids. It was simply because the patients believed they would be cured.
But speculation continued to flourish in Germany, where a group of young writers, gathered at the University of Jena, began to explore the philosophical ideas of Friedrich Schelling and what he called Naturphilosophie. This doctrine, perhaps best translated as 'science mys-ticism, defined the entire natural world as a system of invisible powers and energies, operating like electricity as a series of 'polarities. According to Schelling's doctrine, the whole world was indeed replete with spiritual energy or soul, and all physical objects 'aspired' to become something higher. There was a 'world-soul' constantly 'evolving' higher life forms and 'levels of consciousness' in all matter, animate or inanimate. All nature had a tendency to move towards a higher state. So carbon for example 'aspired' to become diamond; plants aspired to become sentient animals; animals aspired to become men; men aspired to become part of the Zeitgeist or world spirit. Evolutionary, idealist, electrical and Vitalist ideas were all evidently tangled up in this system, which had an obvious appeal to imaginative writers in the Jena circle like Novalis, Schiller and Goethe, as well as experimental physiologists like Johann Ritter. It had its attractions, not least in its optimism and its sense of reverence for the natural world. But it also constantly teetered on the brink of idiocy. One of its wilder proselytisers, the Scandinavian geologist Henrick Steffens, was said to have stated that 'The diamond is a piece of carbon that has come to its senses'; to which a Scottish geologist, probably John Playfair, made the legendary reply: `Then a quartz, therefore, must be a diamond run mad: These ideas gradually crossed the Channel to Britain, though not of course escaping the sceptical, all-weather eye of Banks. In January 1793 the radical journalist John Thelwall gave a hugely controversial public lecture on 'Animal Vitality' organised by the Physical Society at Guy's Hospital, under the auspices of the surgeon Henry Cline. The topic was so popular among the medical students that discussions were renewed over five subsequent and increasingly rowdy meetings.25 'Citizen' Thelwall had become known for his wish to 'demystify' various forms of authority and received opinions, and the following year, in May 1794, he was to be prosecuted for Political sedition, a charge which carried the death penalty. It was partly the support of Cline, and the young Astley Cooper, which saved him from the gallows.' Attacking what he saw as the potential mystifications in Hunter's theories, Thelwall proposed an openly materialist thesis that no `spark of life' was divinely conferred, and that no soul was implanted by some external source. Yet he did not believe, like Hunter, that a 'life principle' could be simply explained by blood passing through the lungs. On the other hand he also maintained that 'Spirit, however refined must still be material: But what then was its source, if not blood — and not God? Here Thelwall raised the Vitalist question which haunted a whole generation of Romantic writers. 'What is this something — this vivifying principle? — Is it atmospheric air itself? Certainly not ... It has been proved by experiment, that in the arteries of the living body there is no air. Something, however, it must be, that is contained in the atmosphere, and something of a powerful and exquisitely subtle nature: 27 Attempts to define this exquisite but powerful 'something' deeply concerned the young poets Thelwall came to meet after his release from prison, when he fled with his wife to the West Country in 1797. But for them it still seemed more a psychological than a physiological question. Coleridge in his conversation poems was exploring the metaphysical notion of a 'one Life' that unified all living forms; while Wordsworth in `Tintern Abbey' wrote tentatively and beautifully of 'a sense sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused/Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns. Both writers, at this most radical point in their lives, were trying to avoid an explicit reference to God, while retaining their intuitions of a 'spiritual' power — whatever that might be — both within man and within the natural universe. It was a balancing act that, perhaps, could only be performed in poetry. All these Vitalist speculations were dramatically brought back to life, ten years after Thelwall's lecture, by an astonishing and brutal series of public experiments performed in London on 17 January 1803. The per-petrator, as Banks noted grimly, was another Italian, the Professor of Anatomy from Bologna, Giovanni Aldini. Banks had received earlier reports from Charles Blagden in Paris of Aldini 'experimenting on ani-mals' with voltaic batteries the previous year, but remained dubious about his authenticity. There were unconfirmed rumours of Aldini daz-zling the Galvanic Society with his 're-animation' exhibitions, but also of what Blagden called his 'excessive puffings and pretensions'.28 In London, surrounded by eager publicity, Aldini attempted to revive the body of a murderer, one Thomas Forster, by the application of electrical charges six hours after he had been hanged at Newgate. His demonstrations were graphically and melodramatically reported in the press: 'On the first application of the [electrical] arcs, the jaw began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and the left eye actually opened ... The conductors being applied to the ear, and to the rec-tum, excited muscular contractions much stronger ... The arms alter-nately rose and fell ... the fists clenched and beat violently the table on which the body lay, natural respiration was artificially established ... A lighted candle placed before the mouth was several times extinguished ... Vitality might have been fully restored, if many ulterior circumstances, had not rendered this — inappropriate.'29 That small, grotesque detail of the opening eye may well have caught a young novelist's imagination. Later experiments involved oxen's heads, dogs' bodies, and another human corpse which was said to have laughed and walked. The reports eventually caused such a public outcry that the experiments were banned, and Aldini forced to leave the country in 1805.
3
So when Abernethy and Lawrence began to clash in 1816, it was not entirely surprising that their angry exchanges quickly revived the old Vitalism debate in renewed form. For all its misgivings, the Royal College of Surgeons must have been glad to have raised a subject which brought such publicity. The exchanges were now closely followed by such serious literary journals as the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review. At its base there lay a theological question: whether the 'super-added' force, if it existed, was the same as a spirit or soul, or some 'intermediary' element between body and spirit, or some form of 'vital' electrical fluid? By 1819, and the publication of both Abernethy's original lectures and Lawrence's Natural History of Man, the issues had also become heavily politicised. Here was humane, pious English science fighting against cruel, reduc-tive, atheistical French science. The conservative Quarterly Review found a more personal line of attack: `We at the Quarterly Review, would ask what is it that Mr Lawrence, who is generally in the habit of smiling at the credulity of the world, modestly requires us all to believe? That there is no difference between a man and an oyster, other than that one possesses bodily organs more fully developed than the other! That all the eminent powers of reason, reflexion, imagina-tion, and memory — the powers which distinguish a Milton, a Newton, and a Locke, — are merely the function of a few ounces of organized matter called the brain! ... Mr Lawrence considers that man, in the most important characteristics of his nature, is nothing more than an orang-outang or an ape, with "more ample cerebral hemispheres"! ... Mr Lawrence strives with all his powers to prove that men have no souls! ... Mr Lawrence has the sub-lime confidence to tell us that it is only "the medullary matter of the brain" that thinks or has spiritual consciousnessr3° As such questions caught the public imagination, they also spread among writers and artists. The influential idea that the group of writers first known as the 'Lake Poets' (with the later addition of the 'Cockney School') were particularly opposed to all scientific advance seems to have begun at precisely this time. This gradually hardened into the dogma that the 'Romantic poets' (as they eventually became known) were funda-mentally anti-scientific. The myth can be observed forming on one signal occasion at a dinner party hosted in his north London studio in December 1817 by the painter and diarist Benjamin Haydon. This subsequently became known as the 'Immortal Dinner' (though it was in fact an extended, rather drunken luncheon). Indeed, it has been thought to exemplify the permanent, instinctive, deep-seated antagonism between Romantic poetry and science. But the truth seems rather different. The poets present included Wordsworth, Charles Lamb and John Keats (but not, significantly, Coleridge, Byron or Shelley). Its aim was to celebrate the first stage of Haydon's enormous oil painting Christ's Entry into Jerusalem, upon which he had been labouring for three years, and which would take him another three to complete. His subject was the dominion of religion over the arts and sciences. Haydon had laid his dinner table directly beneath the huge rectangular canvas. A triumphant,
youthful, bearded Christ rides at evening through the ancient city of Jerusalem, surrounded by a mob of enthusiastic disciples. The whole crowd sweeps downwards towards the viewer. But in one remote corner, set apart at the right of the picture, appear unmistakeable portraits of Wordsworth, Newton and Voltaire. Newton here represents analytic sci-ence, Voltaire godless French philosophical scepticism, and Wordsworth natural English piety. Haydon, perhaps provokingly, had dressed his old friend in a kind of monkish robe. There is one other striking figure just behind them. The young John Keats, his mouth wide open with a kind of shout of wonder, appears in animated profile from behind a pillar. During the increasingly rowdy dinner-table discussion that developed, the painting provoked a debate about the powers of Reason versus the Imagination. The destructive and reductive effects of the scientific outlook were mocked. Warming to the theme, Lamb mischievously described Newton as 'a fellow who believed nothing unless it was as clear as the three sides of a triangle'. Keats joined in, agreeing that Newton had `destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to a prism'. Haydon jovially records: 'It was impossible to resist them, and we drank "Newton's health, and confusion to Mathematics." 'Keats was wittily referring to the classic experiment in Newton's Optics, already much criticised in an essay by Goethe, in which a shaft of sunlight was passed through a prism, and separated out into the rainbow light of the spectrum. In fact the point of the experiment was that when the separated rain bow colours were individually passed through a second prism, they did not revert to white sunlight, but remained true colours (that is, in mod-ern terms, they remained at the same wavelength). The rainbow was not a mere scientific trick of the glass prism. It genuinely and beautifully existed in nature, through the natural prism of raindrops, although paradoxically it took a human eye to see it, and every human eye saw it differently. It seems unlikely that Keats did not know this; but perhaps he did not wish to admit that Newton had actually increased the potential poetry by showing it was not merely some supernatural sky writing as asserted in Genesis. "it shall be for a token of a covenant between Me and the earth. This playful and eventually drunken attack on the reductive effects of science was orchestrated and eagerly recorded by Haydon in his diary. Unlike the others, he was a passionate fundamentalist Christian, and believed that most science was inevitably godless, and probably blasphemous. Shelley had already baited Haydon for his religious superstitions remarking on that most "detestable religion, the Christian".

The Honorary Consul

Not one of Greene's entertainments- the distinction being readily clarified in pages of speculation on the nature of God and the sullenness of prostitutes, and vice versa.

." "Then where do you suppose he is?" Doctor Plarr asked. "He is probably dead in the river or else he is hidden nearer home. What were you doing in Buenos Aires?" It was a polite question, not a police question. He was no more interested than Escobar. "I wanted to see the Ambassador about Fortnum." "Yes. What did he have to say?" "I interrupted his siesta, poor man. He said the trouble is that no one's really interested." Colonel Perez said, "I assure you I am. Yesterday I wanted to organize a thorough search of the barrio popular, but the Governor thought it too dangerous. He does not want shooting if possible. Ours has been a very quiet province up till now except for a little trouble from those third world priests. He sent me off to Buenos Aires today to talk to the Minister of the In-terior. I think the Governor hopes to delay matters. If he can postpone action long enough and we are lucky Fortnum's body may be found outside the province. No one can complain then that we acted imprudently. The blackmail will have failed. Everyone will be happy. Except myself. Even your government will be happy. I hope they will pay a pension to the widow?" "I doubt it. He was only an Honorary Consul. What did the Minister say?"
"He is not afraid of shooting, that man. We could do with more like him. He advises the Governor to go ahead whatever happens and to use troops if necessary. The President wants everything settled before the Gen-eral finishes his fishing. What else did your Ambassador say?" "He said if the papers made enough fuss . . ." "Why should they? Have you heard the afternoon radio? A BOAC plane has crashed. A hijacker let off his grenade this time. There are a hundred and sixty-seven deaths—a hundred and sixty-seven Fortnums, and one of them a film star. No, Doctor Plan, we have to admit that ours is a very small affair." "Do you want to give up then?" "Oh no—I have dealt all my life in small affairs, and I have always preferred to see them settled. Un-finished dossiers take up a lot of room. A smuggler was shot yesterday on the river, so we have been able to close his file. Somebody has stolen a hundred thousand pesos from a bedroom in the Nacional—but we have our eyes on the man. And early this morning there was a small bomb found in the church of La Cruz. A very small bomb—for we are a very quiet province—and it was set to go off at midnight when the church was empty. If it had exploded, though, it might have de-stroyed the miraculous cross—and that would have been real news in El Litoral, even if not in the Naci6n. Perhaps it may become news in any case. There are rumors already that Our Lady herself got down off her altar and defused the bomb with her own hands and the Archbishop has visited the scene. You know the cross was first saved—years before Buenos Aires even existed—when lightning killed the Indians who were going to burn it." The door of the lavatory opened. "You know my colleague Captain Velardo, doctor? I was telling the doctor about our new miracle, Ruben."
"you may laugh, but the bomb did not go off"
"I think the fuse was badly set"
"And why was the fuse badly set? How can we be sure that it was not the hand of Our Lady guiding the hand?"
"All the same I prefer to believe we are kept in the air by the engines rather than divine intervention"

God's Secretaries again

Essentially, for all the extravagance of the king and parliament's voluble assertion of its ancient rights, peace reigned. In diocese after diocese in England, the records show that neither Catholics nor extreme Puritans were being hunted down. Pax and Concordia reigned rather sleepily over the country and, on the whole, in quiet corners, without much inter-vention or harassment, English men and women were getting on with their lives and their religion. Revolution, martyrdom, the heroism of exile — these hardly featured in the landscape. The country was relatively fat on a series of good harvests, pursuing its interests, in many ways sharing a common idea of what was good: a Christian, orderly commonwealth. As if on cue, in 1608, golf was introduced from Scotland for the first time, played around a 5-hole course on Blackheath, south of London. The leather balls, stuffed with feathers, lasted no more than one game each, particularly if it rained. At 5 shillings a time, it was a ruinously expensive but a strangely consoling pursuit, fitted to a country replete with contentment. That is not how it looks from America. For Americans, the spring and summer of z6o8 burns in the history of religious belief and the struggle for freedom of conscience as the months in which those Separatists who would later sail for New Ply-mouth on the Mayflower, known to us (but never to them) as the Pilgrim Fathers, finally gave up the struggle of living in England, unable to tolerate its oppressions any longer, and left, after great travails, for the freedoms of Amsterdam and then Leiden. How can this be explained? How can one of the most pacific moments in English history be the source of something which, in retrospect, looks like one of its greatest ruptures? It is, in part, a question of scale and of perspective. From the point of view of the English establishment, the events in the small agricultural communities around Scrooby and Gainsborough, on the borders
of Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire, were no more than minor irritations at the outer edge of their concerns. There was a tiny cell of radical thinking here — with strong Cambridge connec-tions, a stream of fire-breathing preachers coming north from the university city — wedded to all those extreme Puritan beliefs which the broadly tolerant English Church and state felt unable to accommodate. The Separatists' model was the ancient church of Antioch, in which there had been neither bishop nor clergy of any kind, and which was ruled 'by the Spirit', manifesting itself through the congregation. It was the congregation that appointed and ordained its own pastors, teachers, lay elders and deacons. In these gatherings, often in stables and outhouses, away from the sight of the church authorities, the priesthood of all believers was a living reality. Their services might last four hours, much of which was spent in prayer, often extempore, with no help from any prayer book, an unregulated, private spirit guiding the prophesyings of the faithful. Anyone, whether artisan or peasant, could expound the meaning of the scriptures. They held as their guiding sign the words of St Peter to all members of the church: But yee are a chosen generation, a royall Priest-hood, an holy nation, a peculiar people, that yee should shewe forth the praises of him, who hath called you out of darknes into his marueilous light.' The accompanying note in the Geneva Bible, which the Scrooby Separatists would have read, makes it quite clear. People like them, it reassured them, were God's elect. They were the true believers and the rest of the world, who clearly did not attend as closely as they did to the very word of God, would be damned to hell. 'And lest any man should doubt whether he is chosen or not, the apostle calls us back to the voice of the gospel sounding both in our ears and minds.' Listen to the words of the Bible and you will be saved. Nothing else is necessary. It is that singularity of conviction which drove the Puritan and pilgrim experience. Of course, those words of Peter's carry an explosively subversive charge.

and.... an association I never thought of:
 that preservation of his teeth at a time when the English, awash with sugar from their new slave-worked plantations in the Caribbean, were embarking on their long career of oral decay.

also...

The idea, in fact, was not to make a new translation, Smith maintained, but to make 'out of many good ones, one principal good one'. And that was their triumph: a polished collation, a refinement of a century's translating, a book that became both clear and rich. Of course, what they delivered to Robert Barker was not entirely good. The Hebrew and particularly the Greek texts the were working from were not the most accurate, even by tl-standards of their own time. Theodore Beza, Calvin's successor as the head of the church in Geneva, had prepared an edition of the New Testament some forty years earlier based on a more ancient and less corrupt manuscript. The English scholars were still a little adrift on tenses in Hebrew, while koine, the form of rubbed down and difficult Greek in which the New Testament is written, so unlike the Greek of Plato and Aristotle, still held mysteries for them, which only later translations would correct. And there are some parts of the King James Bible, particularly in the dense and difficult passages of Paul's Epistles, that are now, and to some extent were then, virtually unintelligible. A famous example is 2 Corinthians 6: I i —13 :
O yee Corinthians, our mouth is open vnto you, our heart is enlarged. Yee are not straitened in vs, but yee are straitened in your owne bowels. Nowe for a recompense in the same, (1 speake as vnto my children) be ye also inlarged. Even though Tyndale's effort was even more opaque, this is clearly a translation done by people who didn't really understand what they were translating, and in those circumstances rhythmic language and interesting vocabulary can do very little to save the situation. As modern translations make clear, Paul is asking the Corinthians, as a father might ask his children, to be more open with him, since he feels he has been open with them him-self, but no one would have divined that simple meaning from the muddle which (at least in this instance) the Jacobean Translators served up.
Some form of text was handed over to Robert Barker, 'Printer to the King's Most Excellent Maiestie', perhaps an annotated version of the Bishops' Bible, perhaps a manuscript. What was said to be the 'manuscript copy of the Bible' was sold twice in the seventeenth century, once to Cambridge University Press, once to a firm of London printers, but has now disappeared. According to one romantic theory, it was burnt in the Great Fire of London. Barker's printshop began to apply its own level of chaos to the production process. It seems to have been a sort of anarchy. Either two editions were produced one after another; or both at the same time and sheets from each edition were bound together in single volumes. As a result no copy of the 161 z Bible is like any other. And they were riddled with mistakes. The Translators had intended that any word inserted to improve the sense should be printed in a different face. In fact, that principle became confused early on and if a word is in italics in the printed Bible, there is often no telling if it is in the original Greek or Hebrew or not. Marginal references to other relevant parts of the Bible are highly inaccurate, particularly in the Psalms, where references are made to the numbering system used in the Vulgate, not the numbering system in this Bible itself. Calmly elegant Bibles in Roman typefaces had been in pro-duction in France and Switzerland for decades. This Bible, look-ing back to an imagined antiquity before the modern age, was given a heavy, antique feel with its dense blackletter typeface, a `Gothic', non-Roman typeface, and a certain airlessness on the page. It may be that because the Geneva Bibles were printed in open and accessible Roman type, and the Bishops' Bible, which this was intended to replace, had itself been in blackletter, that Barker made this retrograde decision. Although editions of the King James Bible were appearing in Roman type within a few years, blackletter editions continued to be printed and sold, well into the first years of the eighteenth century. Even at its birth, this was sold as the Bible of Old England. And it was littered with misprints, `hoopes' for `hookes', 'she' for 'he', three whole lines simply repeated in Exodus, and alarm-ingly 'Judas' for 'Jesus' in one of the Gospels. None of these was quite so catastrophic as a misprint that would appear in a 163 I edition, the so-called Wicked Bible, which failed to put the word `not' in Exodus 2o:14, giving the reading 'Thou shalt commit adultery', but the degree of muddle is scarcely what a modern scholarly text would tolerate. When, finally, in the nineteenth century, Dr F. Scrivener, a scholar working to modern standards, attempted to collate all the editions of the King James Bible then in circulation, he found more than 24,000 variations between them. The curious fact is that no one such thing as `The King James Bible' — agreed, consistent and whole — has ever existed.

The book crept out into the public arena. Being only a revision of earlier translations, and not a new work, there was no need for it to be entered in the Stationers' Register, which recorded only new publications and so, in addition to this most famous book having no agreed text, it also has no publication date. Nor is it known how many were printed of the first big folio edition for use in churches. When the first state Bible, the so-called Great Bible, was issued in 1540, 20,000 copies were run off, more than enough to provide one for every parish church in England, costing 1 o shillings each, 12 shillings bound. For the King James Bible, though, there is no record of either print-run or price. Everything that could have been done for it had been done. Something approaching three hundred and fifty scholar years had been devoted to its excellence; the Crown and state church had given it their imprimatur; a laudatory preface and dedication, by permission, to the king, had been included. Any publisher would have hoped for the most enormous success. They didn't get it. Some critics thought its dependence on a kind of English which seemed sixty or seventy years out of date (although its English was in fact a form no one had ever spoken) made it ridiculous and bogus. Hugh Broughton, a cantankerous and aggressive Puritan Hebrew scholar, who had wanted to be part of the great committee, sending papers and suggestions to Bancroft, but barred because of his incivility, lambasted the translation for its errors and its slavish following of the old Bishops' Bible. In the opening words of his Preface, Miles Smith had predicted such a reaction. `Zeale to promote the common good', he had begun — and there is no phrase which encapsulates more Precisely the ideals of the project — 'findeth but cold intertainment in the world.' Broughton castigated the Translators. Their understanding of Hebrew was inadequate; where they had stumbled on something worthwhile, they had usually relegated it to the margins. These worldly divines, he said, were interested only in promotion in the church and crawl-ing to royal authority. Blasphemy, most damnable corruptions, intolerable deceit and vile imposture were terms scarcely bad enough to describe the depths of their degeneracy. 'The late Bible', he wrote, was sent to me to censure: which bred in me a sadness that will grieve me while I breathe, it is ill done. Tell His Majesty that I had rather be rent in pieces with wild horses, than any such translation by my consent should be urged upon poor churches . . . The new edition crosseth me. I require it to be burnt. Not that Broughton was in any way bitter; these accusations were, he said, not 'the dictates of passion, but the just resentment of a zealous mind'. The Geneva Bible continued to hold its position in English affections, at least partly because it was so useful for its notes and appendices, a guidebook to the world of the divine. It con-tinued to flood off the presses: a folio and a quarto in 1611, another folio in 1612, three quartos in 1614, two more in 1615 and a folio in 1616. Then, in 1616, the king put a halt to it, or at least attempted to: no more editions of the Geneva Bible were to be printed. The King James Bible (henceforth known as the Authorised Version, although no document authorising its use by the king, Council or anyone else survived the 1619 Whitehall fire) was to become, by order, the only English Bible. But the appetite for the Geneva text could not be so easily denied. Presses in Amsterdam and Dort started to roll, producing Geneva Bibles for the English market well into the 163os. All too significantly, Robert Barker, printer to the king, a chaotic man who would end up in debtors' prison, bought up the Dutch Geneva editions, added a title page with the fraudulent date 1599 clearly stamped on it, and flogged them to a ready market. The King James Bible languished on the side, a royal project, whose language it seemed was not the language of the people.
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Hath God forgotten to be gracious? Even more strangely, given the sanctity with which the text of the King James Bible has been regarded in later ages, the very people who might have championed it continued to use the Geneva Bible. Lancelot Andrewes nearly always took his sermon texts from the Geneva. Even William Laud, the most anti-Calvinist bishop in the church, quoted from the Geneva. Most extraordinarily of all, Miles Smith, in the Preface to the new translation, quotes from the very Geneva Bible which it was, in part, intended to replace. And in the Separatist congregations in Amsterdam, Leiden and eventually on the Mayflower, it was of course the Geneva Bible they took with them. Geneva Bibles continued to be printed until 1644, and only after the Restoration in 166o did the King James Bible, hallowed now as something that had its origins before the great rupture of the Civil War, redolent of monarchy and antiquity, come t take its place as the Bible itself, the national text and the symb of England as God's country. In America, a slightly different process occurred, but with the same effect. Calvinist Christianity is inherently fissive. Its emphasis on the primacy of a vengeful God constantly throws into doubt the validity of worldly government, and its repeated emphasis on the difference between the elect, who would be saved, and the rest, who would be damned, is no basis on which to found a nation. These radically disruptive ideas are the repeated threnody of the Geneva Bible, the food and fuel on which the whole phenomenon of Separatism and the emergence of the Pilgrim Fathers was based. As the American settlements widened and deepened, and their political processes matured, the need for a separatist gospel ebbed. The relationship of ,Puritan church and Puritan state in early America soon became, strangely enough, as close as any relationship between the Jacobean Crown and the Church of England. In early Massachusetts, heresy, witchcraft, profanity, blasphemy, idolatry and breaking the Sabbath were all civil offences, to be dealt with by civil courts. The new Americans may have dispensed with bishops, surplices and the Book of Common Prayer, but they had not replaced them with a Utopia of religious freedom. Seventeenth-century America was a country of strictly enforced state religion and as such needed a Bible much more attuned to the necessities of nation-building than anything the Separatists' Geneva Bible could offer. It is one of the strangest of historical paradoxes that the King James Bible, whose whole purpose had been nation-building in the service of a ceremonial and episcopal state church, should become the guiding text of Puritan America. But the translation's lifeblood had been inclus-iveness, it was drenched with the splendour of a divinely sanc-tioned authority, and by the end of the seventeenth century it had come to be treasured by Americans as much as by the British as one of their national texts.
The churches and biblical scholarship have, by and large, aba doned the frame of mind which created this translation. T social structures which gave rise to it — rigid hierarchies; a lo of majesty; subservience; an association of power with glory have all gone. The belief in the historical and authentic truth the scriptures, particularly the Gospels, has been largely aba doned, even by the religious. The ferocious intolerances of ti pre-liberal world have been left behind — it is inconceivable nc that a Henry Barrow would be executed, or a Henry Garnet, that the Scrooby Separatists would have been forced to leave home and country — and perhaps as a result of that Chang
perhaps as a symptom, religion, or at least the conventional religion of ordinary people, has been drained of its passion. There is no modern language that can encompass the realities which the Jacobeans accepted as normal. Modern religious rhetoric is dilute and ineffectual, and where it isn't, it seems mad and aberrational. It is an appalling fact that the manner of speech which approaches most nearly to the language of these Jacobean divines comes from the mouths of murderous fundamentalists. When asked by a reporter in October 2001 if he was responsible for the anthrax attacks then occurring in the United States, Osama bin Laden answered: 'These diseases are a punishment from God and a response to oppressed mothers' prayers in Leb-anon, Iraq, Palestine and everywhere.' That is the kind of remark which would not have raised an eyebrow in Jacobean England. This is not to suggest that the Translators of the King James Bible would have approved of religious terrorism. They certainly wouldn't; their reactions to 5 November prove that. Even so, there is something that connects the God-shaped mentality of Jacobean England more intimately with the world of modern Muslim fundamentalists than with our own softened, liberal tolerance. These men, and their Bible, exist on the other side of a gulf, which can be labelled liberal, secular, democratic modernity. We do not live in the same world. It is impossible now to experience in an English church the enveloping amalgam of tradition, intelligence, beauty, clarity of purpose, intensity of conviction and plangent, heart-gripping godliness which is the experience of page after page of the King James Bible. Nothing in our culture can match its breadth, depth and universality, unless, curiously enough, it is something that was written at exactly the same time and in almost exactly the same place: the great tragedies of Shakespeare. That is no chance effect. Shakespeare's great tragedies and the King James Bible are each other's mirror-twin. Both emerge from the ambitions and terrors of the Jacobean world.