Uncle Matthew fell asleep practically at the
dinner-table. He would then doze in his business-room
for an hour or so before dragging himself, in a somnam-
bulist trance, to bed, Where he slept the profound sleep of
one who has been out of doors all day until cockcrow the
following morning, when he became very much awake.
This was the time for his never-ending warfare with the
housemaids over wood-ash. The rooms at Alconleigh
were heated by wood fires, and Uncle Matthew main-
tained, rightly, that if these were to function properly, all
the ash ought to be left in the fireplaces in a great hot
smouldering heap. Every housemaid, however, for some
reason (an early training with coal fires probably) was
bent on removing this ash altogether. When shakings,
imprecations, and being pounced out at by Uncle Mat-
thew in his paisley dressing-gown at six a.m., had con-
vinced them that this was really not feasible, they became
absolutely determined to remove, by hook or by crook,
just a little, a shovelful or so, every morning. I can only
suppose they felt that like this they were asserting their
personalities.
The result was guerrilla warfare at its most exciting.
Housemaids are notoriously early risers, and can usually
count upon three clear hours when a house belongs to
them alone. But not at Alconleigh. Uncle Matthew was
always, winter and summer alike, out of his bed by five
a.m., and it was then his habit to wander about, looking
like Great Agrippa in his dressing-gown, and drinking
endless cups of tea out of a thermos flask, until about
seven, when he would have his bath. Breakfast for my
uncle, my aunt, family and guests alike, was sharp at eight,
and unpunctuality was not tolerated. Uncle Matthew was
no respecter of other people’s early morning sleep, and,
after five o’clock one could not count on any, for he raged
round the house, clanking cups of tea, shouting at his
dogs, roaring at the housemaids, cracking the stock whips
which he had brought back from Canada on the lawn
with a noise greater than gun-fire, and all to the accom-
paniment of Galli Curci on his gramophone, an abnor-
mally loud one with an enormous horn, through which
Would be shrieked “Una voce poco fa”—-“The Mad
Song” from Lucia—“L0, here the gen-tel lar-ha-hark”—
and so on, played at top speed, thus rendering them even
higher and more screeching than they ought to be.
Nothing reminds me of my childhood days at Alcon-
ltfigh so much as those songs. Uncle Matthew played them
incessantly for years, until the spell was broken when he
Went all the way to Liverpool to hear Galli Curci in
Person. The disillusionment caused by her appearance was
$0 great that the records remained ever after silent, and
Were replaced by the deepest bass voices that money
could buy,
and
THE engagement was duly announced in The Timex.
The Kroesigs now invited the Alconleighs to spend a
Saturday to Monday at their house near Guildford. Lady
Kroesig, in her letter to Aunt Sadie, called it a Week-end,
and said it would be nice to get to know each other bet-
ter. Uncle Matthew flew into a furious temper. It was one
of his idiosyncrasies that, not only did he never stay in
other people’s houses (except, very occasionally, with
relations), but he regarded it as a positive insult that he
should be invited to do so. He despised the expression
“week-end,” and gave a sarcastic snort at the idea that it
would be nice to know the Kroesigs better.
and
He did not succeed in making an asset out of Linda.
Poor Linda was incapable of understanding the Kroesig
point of view; try as she might (and in the beginning she
tried very hard, having an infinite desire to please) it re-
mained mysterious to her. The fact is that, for the first
time in her life, she found herself face to face with the
bourgeois attitude of mind; and the fate often foreseen for
me by Uncle Matthew as a result of my middle-class ed-
ucation had actually befallen her. The outward and visible
signs which he so deprecated were all there—the Kroesigs
said notepaper, perfume, mirror and mantelpiece, they
even invited her to call them Father and Mother, which,
in the first flush of love, she did, only to spend the rest of
her married life trying to get out of it by addressing them
to their faces as “you,” and communicating with them by
postcard or telegram. Inwardly their spirit was utterly
commercial, everything was seen by them in terms of
money. It was their barrier, their defence, their hope for
the future, their support for the present, it raised them
above their fellowmen, and with it they Warded off evil.
The only mental qualities that they respected were those
Which produced money in substantial quantities, it was
their one criterion of success, it was power and it was
glory. To say that a man was poor was to label him a rot-
ter, bad at his job, idle, feckless, immoral.
and
She was far too young to be interested in politics, which were
anyhow, in those days before Hitler came along to brighten
them up, a very esoteric amusement.
and
Linda looked at the list of families. It took the form Qf
a card index, the head of each family having a card on
which was written the number and names of his depend-
ents. ~
“It doesn’t give their ages,” said Linda. “How am I to
know if there are young babies?”
“That’s a point,” said Robert. “HoW is she to?”
“Quite easy,” said Christian. “With Spaniards you can
always tell. Before the war they were called either after
saints or after episodes in the sex life of the Virgin-
Annunciata, Asuncion, Purificacion, Concepcion, Consal-
acion, etc. Since the Civil War they are all called Carlos
after Charlie Marx, Federico after Freddie Engels or Es-
talina (very popular until the Russians let them down
with a wallop), or else nice slogans like Solidaridad-Ob-
reara, Libertad, and so on. Then you know the children
are under three. Couldn’t be simpler, really.”
Saturday, January 31, 2015
Sunday, January 25, 2015
Norman, oh Norman..
Mailer was right to insist in his essay that the hipster took his
key, his beat, from the Negro, and that the two shared a place
on the margin of a society which, though free, constantly
threatened them. He omitted to stress a crucial distinction,
however: the hipster refused to accept conventional society;
the Negro was refused by it. Mailer’s essay is bursting with
insight, but his black man was still an invisible man. He did
not pause to consider what the negro Negro thought about all
this white Negro stuff. His new-found friend from Paris,
Baldwin, whomhe began to see regularly back in New York,
was about to inform him. '
Baldwin, though he had friends who considered themselves
beatniks or hipsters (Mailer’s distinction was that hipster was
a beatnik who reads), was inclined to be contemptuous of their
‘we-gotta-go’ ways of conceiving freedom. To him, being free
could never be a matter of dropping out of school, or giving up
your job, and hitching a lift to Denver. The people Baldwin
had grown up with in Harlem had little chance of getting in to
school. And he could hardly ever find a proper job. At the end
of the 1940s, Baldwin had had difficulty getting a place to rent
in Greenwich Village (supposedly the most liberal section of
New York), and not because of a shortage of rooms.
And now the bars and streets were overrun with white kids
saying ‘man’ and ‘cool’ and digging chicks and smoking
reefers and blowing horns and looking for kicks and bringing
down squares as a drag — as if these things had just been dis-
covered. Chester Himes may not have been able to give a
baroque definition of ‘cool’, but he knew what it meant. He
had learned it ‘in the body’. Compare what Mailer wrote
about the white hipster’sreaction to ‘ever-threatening danger’
with how Himes responded to the danger he felt surrounded
him, even in the free atmosphere of Paris:
I remained the same, a thinking animal, filled with regrets, experi-
encing hunger, stirred by anger along with the acceptance of the
necessity to live. . . . I had become very violent, dangerous, with a
wild skyrocketing temper. Sex and violence held me in a vice.
In ‘The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy’, a personal essay
about Mailer written in 1960, Baldwin looked back on their
Paris nights fondly, but he could not help a little weariness
creeping in when forced to consider his friend’s intellectual
romance with the outlaw. Baldwin administered a gentle but
effective put-down, which was, however, intended to make a
serious point about Hip and the different perspectives of black
and white. I
‘I could not, with the best will in the world,’ Baldwin wrote,
‘make any sense out of “The White Negro”.’ In searching for the
likely spark of Mailer’s essay, he recalled their nights in Paris:
" the Negro jazz musicians, among whom we sometimes found our-
selves, who really liked Norman, did not for an instant consider
him as being even remotely ‘hip’ and Norman did not know this
and I could not tell him. He never broke through to them . . . and
they were far too ‘hip’, if that is the word I want, even to consid-
er breaking through to him. They thought he was a real sweet ofay
cat, but a little frantic.
Baldwin is having fun, but it s hardly surprising that he
should have taken up an attitude before ‘The White Negro’.
What makes hip language a special language, Mailer wrote, ‘is
that it cannot really be taught’. Which is just what Baldwin
was trying to tell him.
key, his beat, from the Negro, and that the two shared a place
on the margin of a society which, though free, constantly
threatened them. He omitted to stress a crucial distinction,
however: the hipster refused to accept conventional society;
the Negro was refused by it. Mailer’s essay is bursting with
insight, but his black man was still an invisible man. He did
not pause to consider what the negro Negro thought about all
this white Negro stuff. His new-found friend from Paris,
Baldwin, whomhe began to see regularly back in New York,
was about to inform him. '
Baldwin, though he had friends who considered themselves
beatniks or hipsters (Mailer’s distinction was that hipster was
a beatnik who reads), was inclined to be contemptuous of their
‘we-gotta-go’ ways of conceiving freedom. To him, being free
could never be a matter of dropping out of school, or giving up
your job, and hitching a lift to Denver. The people Baldwin
had grown up with in Harlem had little chance of getting in to
school. And he could hardly ever find a proper job. At the end
of the 1940s, Baldwin had had difficulty getting a place to rent
in Greenwich Village (supposedly the most liberal section of
New York), and not because of a shortage of rooms.
And now the bars and streets were overrun with white kids
saying ‘man’ and ‘cool’ and digging chicks and smoking
reefers and blowing horns and looking for kicks and bringing
down squares as a drag — as if these things had just been dis-
covered. Chester Himes may not have been able to give a
baroque definition of ‘cool’, but he knew what it meant. He
had learned it ‘in the body’. Compare what Mailer wrote
about the white hipster’sreaction to ‘ever-threatening danger’
with how Himes responded to the danger he felt surrounded
him, even in the free atmosphere of Paris:
I remained the same, a thinking animal, filled with regrets, experi-
encing hunger, stirred by anger along with the acceptance of the
necessity to live. . . . I had become very violent, dangerous, with a
wild skyrocketing temper. Sex and violence held me in a vice.
In ‘The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy’, a personal essay
about Mailer written in 1960, Baldwin looked back on their
Paris nights fondly, but he could not help a little weariness
creeping in when forced to consider his friend’s intellectual
romance with the outlaw. Baldwin administered a gentle but
effective put-down, which was, however, intended to make a
serious point about Hip and the different perspectives of black
and white. I
‘I could not, with the best will in the world,’ Baldwin wrote,
‘make any sense out of “The White Negro”.’ In searching for the
likely spark of Mailer’s essay, he recalled their nights in Paris:
" the Negro jazz musicians, among whom we sometimes found our-
selves, who really liked Norman, did not for an instant consider
him as being even remotely ‘hip’ and Norman did not know this
and I could not tell him. He never broke through to them . . . and
they were far too ‘hip’, if that is the word I want, even to consid-
er breaking through to him. They thought he was a real sweet ofay
cat, but a little frantic.
Baldwin is having fun, but it s hardly surprising that he
should have taken up an attitude before ‘The White Negro’.
What makes hip language a special language, Mailer wrote, ‘is
that it cannot really be taught’. Which is just what Baldwin
was trying to tell him.
Ginsburg and the Awful, Awful Beats
Nevertheless, they smell all right. The audience was clean and
Ginsberg was clean and Corso was clean and Orlovsky was clean.
Maybe Ginsberg says he doesn’t bathe or shave; Corso, I know,
declares that he has never combed his hair; Orlovsky has a line in
one of the two poems he read . . . ‘If I should shave, I know the bugs
would go away.’ . . . Kerouac, in crisis, didn't appear, but if he had
V come he would have been clean and shaven too. . . . And anyway,
there’s nothing dirty about a checked shirt or a lumberjacket and
blue jeans, they're standard uniform in the best nursery schools.
When Ginsberg dedicated a poem to her husband, Mrs
Trilling was surprised by how much she liked it - she heard it
as a ‘passionate love poem’. (Ginsberg had actually intended
the dedication ironically.) She was also impressed by the way
in which. Ginsberg resisted attempts during the question-
answer period to make him speak about the ‘philosophy’ of the
Beat Generation, explaining his production instead in terms of
inspiration, ecstasy, illumination. She was less taken with
Orlovsky, who, the audience was told, had read only two
poems because he was still writing his third, and with Corso
whom she saw as a small boy carrying on a private battle
against powerful grown-ups. But of Ginsberg, she wrote, in
one of her ever-spreading, encompassing sentences, with a
kind of motherly impatience:
Ginsberg, with his poems in which there was never quite enough
talent or hard work, and with his ambiguous need to tell his
teacher exactly what flagrancy he was now exploring with his
Gide-talking friends at the West End Café had at any rate the dis-
tinction of being more crudely justified in his emotional distur-
banceythan most; he had also the distinction of carrying mental
unbalance in the direction of criminality, a territory one preferred
to leave uncharted by student or friend.
Withoutquite intending to, Diana Trilling managed to pin to
the floor with one stroke of the pen two of the fakirs of the era
in store: the poet-as-psychopath and the poet-as-outlaw.
Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, the first book by a major poet
(apart from Howl itself) to make its subject matter the mental
disturbance of the poet, was published in 1959, the same year
as her essay appeared. Other contemplations of the poet’s own
psychopathology — by Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Anne
Sexton — would follow.
’ But it was the parallel career — poet-as-outlaw - that was
taken by the Beats, Ginsberg’s stay in the mental ward
notwithstanding. His poems do not so much explore illness in
the hope of healing the poet, as they seek to do to social norms
and intellectual conventionality what, he wrote to Fer-
linghetti, he had wanted to do to his old university on the
night of the poetry reading: ‘break its reactionary back’. It was
society's requirement of uniform behaviour and its rejection of
aliens which was, Ginsberg believed, the cause of his mental
crisis. Instead of accepting the doctors and professors’ opin-
ions (this was what Mrs Trilling failed to understand) and try-
ing to ‘adjust’, he should embrace his maladjustedness in the
cause of ultimate self-fulfilment. He wanted the freedom of
his visions, the freedom to write poems with titles like ‘Under
the World There s a Lot of Ass, a Lot of Cunt’, containing
‘lines such as ‘There’s a lot of Shit under the world, flowing
beneath cities into rivers,/a lot of urine floating under the
‘world,/a lot of‘ snot’, and to write about his mother’s vagina
and his own anus. He wanted the freedom to undress in front
of the camera, or anywhere else, to make love in the street if he
felt like it, and not to pretend in interviews that his literary
focus was purely intellectual, or even that his literary habits
were purely literary: ‘As I often do, I had been jacking off
while reading,’ he told an interviewer, momentarily interrupt-
ing an exposition of Supreme Reality with a capital S and R .
With nothing of the hard criminal in him, this was
Ginsberg’s way of chipping at the stubborn, bland, smother-
ing social fabric. Some of his friends had been more orthodox
in their ways of subversion. Corso, a genuine streetboy, had
spent three years in prison. Lucien Carr, another member of
the circle, though not a writer, had also done time for stabbing
and killing a man who made a pass at him (the motive for the
crime, and its ramifications, inspired Baldwin’s‘early drafts for
Giovanni ’s Room). William Burroughs had shot his wife in the
head in 1951 during a game of ‘William Tell’, though he man_
aged to convince the police that her death was an accident, and
escaped punishment. Neal Cassady, the original for Dean
Moriarty in On the Road, was a larger-than-life, irresponsible
sponger, with an appetite for women and cars and petty crime.
The Beats found other ways of being outside the law,
Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Burroughs and occasionally Cassady were
sexual ‘criminals’, being homosexual, or bisexual, while
Burroughs and several of his less literary (but more authenti-
cally ‘beat-up’) friends were junkies. Kerouac was more inter-
ested in drink than in drugs, and in women than in men, but
he cut loose from everyday regulation by taking flight with
Cassady and writing On the Road to the rhythm of the inter-
nal-combustion engine.
The Beat Generation raises its head as the suppressed
demon in ordinary American life, as the urge for total anar-
chical freedom, without respect for laws or civilizing norms.
The form which they gave to this impulse was not only in
verse and prose, but in a lifestyle. Ginsberg and Kerouac did
not just write about ways to be free; they were free. Life mag-
azine had caught them in the act. And American youth real-
ized, much more quickly than its elders, that the pre-eminent
characteristics of the Beat Generation were not beards and
uncleanliness, as Diana Trilling seemed to think, but rebellion
and eroticism, and the beguiling dance between the two.
While the Beat writers were still unknown and largely
unpublished, Hollywood provided a prototype. Marlon
Brando in On the Waterfront is casual in manner and style,
unimpressed by authority, if not downright disrespectful of it,
conferring some sort of nobility on the rebel which he had pre-
viously wanted. Until then, the rebel, in modern myth, had
been the feckless hobo or the always ambiguous red. Brando
also made it clear - as James Dean did — that sex existed as
more than an immobile screen kiss, or as bait used by women
to ensnare husbands. Their sexual language was body lan-
guage, but the Beats transferred the knowledge to the lan-
guage of poetry and prose. A large amount of Beat Generation
sexuality is homosexuality, which remains an unexplored part
of its appeal, although a simple explanation would be to say
that the clubbing together of boys, unencumbered by domes-
ticating girls, creates an ethos of freedom and the promise of
adventure which might lead to misadventure.
They gained their education, of course, not only from
Parisian writers, but from writers who could only be pub-
lished in Paris, mainly Henry Miller and Jean Genet. ‘Have
Genet’s foumal of a Thief [sic] in English,’ Burroughs wrote
from Tangier to Ginsberg in New York in 1955, ‘and have
read it over many times. I think he is the greatest living writer
of prose.’
If Miller is the father of the Beat Generation, Genet is its
transvestite mother. An outlaw of the pre-war world, Genet
committed himself to his criminality and homosexuality as
articles of faith: he pledged to serve them. So Ginsberg tried
to keep faith in his visions, and, later, to be as open about his
homosexuality in public as about blowing his nose. ‘I decided
to be what crime made of me,’ Genet had said, and Ginsberg
and Kerouac might have appropriated and adapted the phrase:
‘I decided to be what being beat made of me.’
From its outpost in Paris, the movement which had begun
in New York as a fraternity of unsuccessful writers began to
spread, leaving traces everywhere. No country in the Western
world was untouched by the liberal revolution which the Beat
Generation had started.
A monument survives on rue Git-le-coeur, where, for ever
after, Mme Rachou’s establishment would be known as the
Beat Hotel.
Ginsberg was clean and Corso was clean and Orlovsky was clean.
Maybe Ginsberg says he doesn’t bathe or shave; Corso, I know,
declares that he has never combed his hair; Orlovsky has a line in
one of the two poems he read . . . ‘If I should shave, I know the bugs
would go away.’ . . . Kerouac, in crisis, didn't appear, but if he had
V come he would have been clean and shaven too. . . . And anyway,
there’s nothing dirty about a checked shirt or a lumberjacket and
blue jeans, they're standard uniform in the best nursery schools.
When Ginsberg dedicated a poem to her husband, Mrs
Trilling was surprised by how much she liked it - she heard it
as a ‘passionate love poem’. (Ginsberg had actually intended
the dedication ironically.) She was also impressed by the way
in which. Ginsberg resisted attempts during the question-
answer period to make him speak about the ‘philosophy’ of the
Beat Generation, explaining his production instead in terms of
inspiration, ecstasy, illumination. She was less taken with
Orlovsky, who, the audience was told, had read only two
poems because he was still writing his third, and with Corso
whom she saw as a small boy carrying on a private battle
against powerful grown-ups. But of Ginsberg, she wrote, in
one of her ever-spreading, encompassing sentences, with a
kind of motherly impatience:
Ginsberg, with his poems in which there was never quite enough
talent or hard work, and with his ambiguous need to tell his
teacher exactly what flagrancy he was now exploring with his
Gide-talking friends at the West End Café had at any rate the dis-
tinction of being more crudely justified in his emotional distur-
banceythan most; he had also the distinction of carrying mental
unbalance in the direction of criminality, a territory one preferred
to leave uncharted by student or friend.
Withoutquite intending to, Diana Trilling managed to pin to
the floor with one stroke of the pen two of the fakirs of the era
in store: the poet-as-psychopath and the poet-as-outlaw.
Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, the first book by a major poet
(apart from Howl itself) to make its subject matter the mental
disturbance of the poet, was published in 1959, the same year
as her essay appeared. Other contemplations of the poet’s own
psychopathology — by Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Anne
Sexton — would follow.
’ But it was the parallel career — poet-as-outlaw - that was
taken by the Beats, Ginsberg’s stay in the mental ward
notwithstanding. His poems do not so much explore illness in
the hope of healing the poet, as they seek to do to social norms
and intellectual conventionality what, he wrote to Fer-
linghetti, he had wanted to do to his old university on the
night of the poetry reading: ‘break its reactionary back’. It was
society's requirement of uniform behaviour and its rejection of
aliens which was, Ginsberg believed, the cause of his mental
crisis. Instead of accepting the doctors and professors’ opin-
ions (this was what Mrs Trilling failed to understand) and try-
ing to ‘adjust’, he should embrace his maladjustedness in the
cause of ultimate self-fulfilment. He wanted the freedom of
his visions, the freedom to write poems with titles like ‘Under
the World There s a Lot of Ass, a Lot of Cunt’, containing
‘lines such as ‘There’s a lot of Shit under the world, flowing
beneath cities into rivers,/a lot of urine floating under the
‘world,/a lot of‘ snot’, and to write about his mother’s vagina
and his own anus. He wanted the freedom to undress in front
of the camera, or anywhere else, to make love in the street if he
felt like it, and not to pretend in interviews that his literary
focus was purely intellectual, or even that his literary habits
were purely literary: ‘As I often do, I had been jacking off
while reading,’ he told an interviewer, momentarily interrupt-
ing an exposition of Supreme Reality with a capital S and R .
With nothing of the hard criminal in him, this was
Ginsberg’s way of chipping at the stubborn, bland, smother-
ing social fabric. Some of his friends had been more orthodox
in their ways of subversion. Corso, a genuine streetboy, had
spent three years in prison. Lucien Carr, another member of
the circle, though not a writer, had also done time for stabbing
and killing a man who made a pass at him (the motive for the
crime, and its ramifications, inspired Baldwin’s‘early drafts for
Giovanni ’s Room). William Burroughs had shot his wife in the
head in 1951 during a game of ‘William Tell’, though he man_
aged to convince the police that her death was an accident, and
escaped punishment. Neal Cassady, the original for Dean
Moriarty in On the Road, was a larger-than-life, irresponsible
sponger, with an appetite for women and cars and petty crime.
The Beats found other ways of being outside the law,
Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Burroughs and occasionally Cassady were
sexual ‘criminals’, being homosexual, or bisexual, while
Burroughs and several of his less literary (but more authenti-
cally ‘beat-up’) friends were junkies. Kerouac was more inter-
ested in drink than in drugs, and in women than in men, but
he cut loose from everyday regulation by taking flight with
Cassady and writing On the Road to the rhythm of the inter-
nal-combustion engine.
The Beat Generation raises its head as the suppressed
demon in ordinary American life, as the urge for total anar-
chical freedom, without respect for laws or civilizing norms.
The form which they gave to this impulse was not only in
verse and prose, but in a lifestyle. Ginsberg and Kerouac did
not just write about ways to be free; they were free. Life mag-
azine had caught them in the act. And American youth real-
ized, much more quickly than its elders, that the pre-eminent
characteristics of the Beat Generation were not beards and
uncleanliness, as Diana Trilling seemed to think, but rebellion
and eroticism, and the beguiling dance between the two.
While the Beat writers were still unknown and largely
unpublished, Hollywood provided a prototype. Marlon
Brando in On the Waterfront is casual in manner and style,
unimpressed by authority, if not downright disrespectful of it,
conferring some sort of nobility on the rebel which he had pre-
viously wanted. Until then, the rebel, in modern myth, had
been the feckless hobo or the always ambiguous red. Brando
also made it clear - as James Dean did — that sex existed as
more than an immobile screen kiss, or as bait used by women
to ensnare husbands. Their sexual language was body lan-
guage, but the Beats transferred the knowledge to the lan-
guage of poetry and prose. A large amount of Beat Generation
sexuality is homosexuality, which remains an unexplored part
of its appeal, although a simple explanation would be to say
that the clubbing together of boys, unencumbered by domes-
ticating girls, creates an ethos of freedom and the promise of
adventure which might lead to misadventure.
They gained their education, of course, not only from
Parisian writers, but from writers who could only be pub-
lished in Paris, mainly Henry Miller and Jean Genet. ‘Have
Genet’s foumal of a Thief [sic] in English,’ Burroughs wrote
from Tangier to Ginsberg in New York in 1955, ‘and have
read it over many times. I think he is the greatest living writer
of prose.’
If Miller is the father of the Beat Generation, Genet is its
transvestite mother. An outlaw of the pre-war world, Genet
committed himself to his criminality and homosexuality as
articles of faith: he pledged to serve them. So Ginsberg tried
to keep faith in his visions, and, later, to be as open about his
homosexuality in public as about blowing his nose. ‘I decided
to be what crime made of me,’ Genet had said, and Ginsberg
and Kerouac might have appropriated and adapted the phrase:
‘I decided to be what being beat made of me.’
From its outpost in Paris, the movement which had begun
in New York as a fraternity of unsuccessful writers began to
spread, leaving traces everywhere. No country in the Western
world was untouched by the liberal revolution which the Beat
Generation had started.
A monument survives on rue Git-le-coeur, where, for ever
after, Mme Rachou’s establishment would be known as the
Beat Hotel.
Richard Wright, Idiot
From Paris, Interzone:
Wright was not in disagreement with the point about roots.
But he had no intention of returning to America to reconnect
with them. He wished to trace different and, he hoped, deep-
er roots.'The African project had had a long gestation. To his
journal six years earlier, he had pledged to write ‘the only book
about Africa that will be written in my time’ (maybe he meant
the only ‘good’ book). And he gave his text a splendidly
heraldic title: Black Power.
But Wright was lost in Africa, where he had hoped to find
himself. His mind was of a different cast from that of the
Africans he met, and of a different century. Even the colour of
his skin, he discovered, could not be said. to be the same as
theirs: in Africa, shades of brown_tended to be locally specif-
ic, whereas the Afro-American experience had melded them.
He tried hard to identify with the people, but the people hard-
ly recognized the point of his identification. He was the
Outsider here.
Wright may have had pioneering insights into the political
future of African peoples, but his ideas about progress are
frozen in their era, and some sound startling now, coming
from one who considered himself a liberal thinker. In a letter
addressed directly to Nkrumah and postscripted to Black
Power, Wright referred to ‘our people’ — the people of the
Gold Coast — who ‘must be made to walk, forced draft, into
the twentieth century. The direction of their lives, the duties
they must perform to overcome the stagnancy of tribalism, the
sacrifices that must be made - all of this must be placed under
firm social discipline!’
It's possible that this exclamatory call grew out of his own
sensation of having lost his grip on reality in Africa. As he
admitted in his book, everything from the religion (‘juju’ and
ancestor worship) to the nudity he witnessed in the villages,
either appalled him or left him wondering how to reconcile
this ancient ‘stagnancy’ with the progressive demands of mod-
ern society to which he believed the new African nations must
aspire. Seeing men holding hands and dancing together in an
club, he immediately blamed ‘the vices of the English public-
school system. . . . Just as the African had taken inordinately
to alcohol, had he taken to this too? . . . I leaned toward” my
host and whispered: “Look here. What's going on?’”
That ‘Look here’ is pertinently phrased, and speaks vol-
umes. Wright was not an African: he was an American, with at
least as many ties to modern Europe as to his ancestral home-
land. His host assured him that he had not landed in a scene
from James Baldwin’s latest novel, but that the men’s physical
intimacy was an aspect of traditional tribal dancing, a part of
the culture. Wright’s response was to want to see the culture
changed. The ‘progressive’ thinker on Third World issues was
to find, over the coming years, that Third World thinkers
themselves considered his ideas reactionary.
i
Wright chose to write about the Gold Coast, rather than any
other African country, for several reasons: first, because of its
early struggle to gain independence; then because it was
British and thus permitted him reflections on the slave trade
(he began his journey to Africa in Liverpool); and, of course,
because of his personal connection with Nkrumah.
But there was another reason: the Gold Coast was not
French. Had the first African state to cry out for self-rule been
a part of the French empire, Wright would have left it alone.
There was a war going on at that very moment involving a
French Third World ‘property’, Vietnam. And when the
French got out of that frying pan, itwas only to land in the fire
of Algeria. Wright then had an African colonial revolution tak-
ing place on his doorstep, posing the ‘black or white’ question
in terms of the immediate vicinity. But far from answering the
question apropos of Algeria, Wright never even asked it.
Wright was not in disagreement with the point about roots.
But he had no intention of returning to America to reconnect
with them. He wished to trace different and, he hoped, deep-
er roots.'The African project had had a long gestation. To his
journal six years earlier, he had pledged to write ‘the only book
about Africa that will be written in my time’ (maybe he meant
the only ‘good’ book). And he gave his text a splendidly
heraldic title: Black Power.
But Wright was lost in Africa, where he had hoped to find
himself. His mind was of a different cast from that of the
Africans he met, and of a different century. Even the colour of
his skin, he discovered, could not be said. to be the same as
theirs: in Africa, shades of brown_tended to be locally specif-
ic, whereas the Afro-American experience had melded them.
He tried hard to identify with the people, but the people hard-
ly recognized the point of his identification. He was the
Outsider here.
Wright may have had pioneering insights into the political
future of African peoples, but his ideas about progress are
frozen in their era, and some sound startling now, coming
from one who considered himself a liberal thinker. In a letter
addressed directly to Nkrumah and postscripted to Black
Power, Wright referred to ‘our people’ — the people of the
Gold Coast — who ‘must be made to walk, forced draft, into
the twentieth century. The direction of their lives, the duties
they must perform to overcome the stagnancy of tribalism, the
sacrifices that must be made - all of this must be placed under
firm social discipline!’
It's possible that this exclamatory call grew out of his own
sensation of having lost his grip on reality in Africa. As he
admitted in his book, everything from the religion (‘juju’ and
ancestor worship) to the nudity he witnessed in the villages,
either appalled him or left him wondering how to reconcile
this ancient ‘stagnancy’ with the progressive demands of mod-
ern society to which he believed the new African nations must
aspire. Seeing men holding hands and dancing together in an
club, he immediately blamed ‘the vices of the English public-
school system. . . . Just as the African had taken inordinately
to alcohol, had he taken to this too? . . . I leaned toward” my
host and whispered: “Look here. What's going on?’”
That ‘Look here’ is pertinently phrased, and speaks vol-
umes. Wright was not an African: he was an American, with at
least as many ties to modern Europe as to his ancestral home-
land. His host assured him that he had not landed in a scene
from James Baldwin’s latest novel, but that the men’s physical
intimacy was an aspect of traditional tribal dancing, a part of
the culture. Wright’s response was to want to see the culture
changed. The ‘progressive’ thinker on Third World issues was
to find, over the coming years, that Third World thinkers
themselves considered his ideas reactionary.
i
Wright chose to write about the Gold Coast, rather than any
other African country, for several reasons: first, because of its
early struggle to gain independence; then because it was
British and thus permitted him reflections on the slave trade
(he began his journey to Africa in Liverpool); and, of course,
because of his personal connection with Nkrumah.
But there was another reason: the Gold Coast was not
French. Had the first African state to cry out for self-rule been
a part of the French empire, Wright would have left it alone.
There was a war going on at that very moment involving a
French Third World ‘property’, Vietnam. And when the
French got out of that frying pan, itwas only to land in the fire
of Algeria. Wright then had an African colonial revolution tak-
ing place on his doorstep, posing the ‘black or white’ question
in terms of the immediate vicinity. But far from answering the
question apropos of Algeria, Wright never even asked it.
Donleavy and The Ginger Man from Campbell's Paris
The Ginger Man switches between straightforward third-per-
son narration and the disconnections of interior monologue,
sometimes without signalling. Even in the minds of publishers
who had rejected the work as unsaleable, there must have been
little doubt that The Ginger Ma,n was serious, a Joycean
picaresque There could be no mistaking the quality of the
writing. There certainly could be no mistaking it for a work of
pornography.
And yet, The Ginger Man, which Donleavy went on revis-
ing obsessively, was turned down by one American publisher
after another. ‘Sheer rejection,’ Donleavy called it. It led to his
quitting his native country for good“.
Donleavy was an American who had studied in Dublin and
now lived in London. Convinced of his literary destiny, he had
pledged never to distract himself with a job. He spent a lot of
his time, though, drinking in London pubs with the likes of
Brendan Behan, and it was from him that Donleavy first heard
about the Olympia Press. Behan recommended Girodias’s
firm as publishers for books that had proved unpublishable.
Donleavy had read Beckett, and he knew that Beckett, like
Joyce, had been published in Paris: Ioyce (in small amounts)
by Kahane, and Beckett by Kahane’s son. So when Girodias
accepted his novel, Donleavy was pleased to think that his
name would sit next to Beckett’s on the Collection Merlin list,
and perhaps in spirit beside ]oyce’s.
This was late in 1954, before Girodias had created the
Traveller’s Companion series, at a time when it could be seri-
ously argued that the good outweighed the bad in Olympia
production. Nabokov’s retrospective sneer at ‘the common
grave of Traveller's Favourites or whatever Olympia’s little
green books were called’ lacks his characteristic accuracy, for
in its first edition Lolita was not published in the Traveller’s
Companion series but under the plain imprint of the Olympia
Press, which at the time included Apollinaire, Bataille,
Beckett, Genet, Miller, Restif de la Bretonne and Sade. It was
only in their first or second reprints that Nabokov, Beckett,
Genet and all the rest were drafted into the Traveller’s
Companion series.
This may seem a fine point to some, but not to J. P.
Donleavy, for whom it became a structural beam of prolonged
legal argument.
There was no contract for The Ginger. Man. Nabokov. was
M; unusual among Olympia authors in having a proper Written
agreement with the publisher, as Girodias preferred to rely on
informal methods. His fullest explanation of this came in his
autobiography, published in Paris in 1990:
Dgnleavy would have wished to have had a classic contract, but .
_ _ _ sinee the beginning of Olympia, I had dealt directly with peo-
ple who had the same reservations as I did about contracts, and
who preferred to protect their anonymity in view of our irregular
‘ legal situation. Drawing up a contract seemed to me useful only in
special situations, such as that of the fifth volume of Frank Harrls
memoirs. For the rest, I managed with simP1° Pieces °f Papa’
and, more often, with verbal agreements. To those who were sur-
prised by this, I explained pompously that contracts, like virgins,
called irresistibly to be violated. The more clauses you strung
together, the more room for dispute you created; the agreements
became constraints, from which it became a matter of urgency to
free oneself. . . . The charm of my enterprise lay in its unsophisti-
’ catedness' when working with friends, a handshake would suffice.
I was persuaded that if Donleavy were to come to Paris, the ques-
tion of a contract could be cleared up.
/
On this last point, he was to be proved right — at first — and
then seriously wrong. ‘ _
son narration and the disconnections of interior monologue,
sometimes without signalling. Even in the minds of publishers
who had rejected the work as unsaleable, there must have been
little doubt that The Ginger Ma,n was serious, a Joycean
picaresque There could be no mistaking the quality of the
writing. There certainly could be no mistaking it for a work of
pornography.
And yet, The Ginger Man, which Donleavy went on revis-
ing obsessively, was turned down by one American publisher
after another. ‘Sheer rejection,’ Donleavy called it. It led to his
quitting his native country for good“.
Donleavy was an American who had studied in Dublin and
now lived in London. Convinced of his literary destiny, he had
pledged never to distract himself with a job. He spent a lot of
his time, though, drinking in London pubs with the likes of
Brendan Behan, and it was from him that Donleavy first heard
about the Olympia Press. Behan recommended Girodias’s
firm as publishers for books that had proved unpublishable.
Donleavy had read Beckett, and he knew that Beckett, like
Joyce, had been published in Paris: Ioyce (in small amounts)
by Kahane, and Beckett by Kahane’s son. So when Girodias
accepted his novel, Donleavy was pleased to think that his
name would sit next to Beckett’s on the Collection Merlin list,
and perhaps in spirit beside ]oyce’s.
This was late in 1954, before Girodias had created the
Traveller’s Companion series, at a time when it could be seri-
ously argued that the good outweighed the bad in Olympia
production. Nabokov’s retrospective sneer at ‘the common
grave of Traveller's Favourites or whatever Olympia’s little
green books were called’ lacks his characteristic accuracy, for
in its first edition Lolita was not published in the Traveller’s
Companion series but under the plain imprint of the Olympia
Press, which at the time included Apollinaire, Bataille,
Beckett, Genet, Miller, Restif de la Bretonne and Sade. It was
only in their first or second reprints that Nabokov, Beckett,
Genet and all the rest were drafted into the Traveller’s
Companion series.
This may seem a fine point to some, but not to J. P.
Donleavy, for whom it became a structural beam of prolonged
legal argument.
There was no contract for The Ginger. Man. Nabokov. was
M; unusual among Olympia authors in having a proper Written
agreement with the publisher, as Girodias preferred to rely on
informal methods. His fullest explanation of this came in his
autobiography, published in Paris in 1990:
Dgnleavy would have wished to have had a classic contract, but .
_ _ _ sinee the beginning of Olympia, I had dealt directly with peo-
ple who had the same reservations as I did about contracts, and
who preferred to protect their anonymity in view of our irregular
‘ legal situation. Drawing up a contract seemed to me useful only in
special situations, such as that of the fifth volume of Frank Harrls
memoirs. For the rest, I managed with simP1° Pieces °f Papa’
and, more often, with verbal agreements. To those who were sur-
prised by this, I explained pompously that contracts, like virgins,
called irresistibly to be violated. The more clauses you strung
together, the more room for dispute you created; the agreements
became constraints, from which it became a matter of urgency to
free oneself. . . . The charm of my enterprise lay in its unsophisti-
’ catedness' when working with friends, a handshake would suffice.
I was persuaded that if Donleavy were to come to Paris, the ques-
tion of a contract could be cleared up.
/
On this last point, he was to be proved right — at first — and
then seriously wrong. ‘ _
Saturday, January 17, 2015
More Vestal Fire by Compton Mackenzie
-‘ No, I won’t do it, my dear woman,” he declared. “ No f
ee-aw! ]oseph’s getting a damned bore. He is really.
I can’t stand any more of his blasted Dante. I really can’t.
Besides, Joseph himself doesn’t care a button about Dante.
He simply takes a geographical interest in Hell because he
thinks he’ll go there one day. He just uses the Divine
Commedia as a kind of Baedeker. No, I won’t spend the
evening with him.”
“ Oh, Mr. Maxwell,” the wife expostulated, “how can
you talk so? It’s most unkind.”
“ People are a jolly sight too kind to Joseph. That’s
the trouble with him. He just lives on kindness and gruel
and purgatives. No, you ask Scudamore to dine with him
and keep him amused. And that’ll be a kindness to poor
old Scudamore, because every dinner he gets without Nita’s
cooking will keep him alive for a few days longer.”
and
“I beg your pardon,” Bookham exclaimed. “ But do
you mean Count Marsac ? ”
“That’s right. Marsac-Lagerstrom, to give it him in
full. What does Sirene make of bim ? ”
“Well, I think we all liked him very much at first,”
Bookham replied, “ though I hear that one or two people
have been a little inclined to give him the cold shoulder
lately. I believe there has been some rumour about his
having been mixed up in a rather unsavoury mess in Paris.
But I keep myself as free as I can from gossip. You see,
I’m the senior British resident here, and somebody’s got to
set an example, don’t you know.”
“ Did you never hear of the Lagerstrom scandal ? ”
The little American leaned across the table and lowered
his voice to remind Bookham what that had been.
“ Miners ? ” the churchwarden bellowed. “ Good lord,
what a degenerate brute! Not coalminers surely ? ”
“ Minors not miners,” the little lawyer made haste to
explain.
Bookham mopped his crimson brow with a purple handker-
chief. '
“ Well, that’s bad enough,” he rumbled.
“ The Napoleonic code, however, regards it, and rightly
I cannot help feeling, as more reprehensible than the other.
and
It was not even a moderately good novel, and in justice
to Marsac it should be said that he could write a good deal
better than this when he expressed himself in verse. The
poems in La V ictime Ravie, however embarrassing as an
exhibition of hysteria, had at least a directness which,
granted that one could stand directness on such a topic,
occasionally achieved a kind of tortured beauty. La
Statue Mutilee had all the hysteria without any of the
sincerity of the poems, and the tawdry prose with which
it was bedizened made that insincerity nauseating. Any-
body who knew the story of Madame Protopopesco would
recognize that she was really the Hungarian count. As for
the wicked young American girl, she was Carlo dressed up
in the petticoats of Angela Pears. And Marsac like so many
writers of his temperament attributed to two young people
supposed to be normal the characteristics of an abnormal
passion. It is remarkable how nearly always fatal prose is
to the pretentiously styled Uranian temperament, which
time after time shirks honest self-revelation in such a
medium, but continually seeks by an endogenous under-
standing of women, an almost uterine intelligence, to atone
for its inability to create men. One day a novelist with
that temperament will have the courage to write about
himself as he is, not as he would be were he actually Jane
or Gladys or Aunt Maria. And that will be a novel worth
reading, not an obstetrical feat. However, for this story
the importance of La Statue Mutilee did not _lie in the
quality of its literary style or of its psychological fancy-dress,
but in the bitterness of the personal attacks, so thinly
disguised as hardly to be disguised at all, upon various
residents interspersed with abuse of Christianity, eulogies
of paganism, and florid apostrophes menacing the island
itself with destruction. In spite of that flattering exordium,
by the time the author came to the end of his book he had
worked himself up into such _a phrenzy of rage over the
thought of Carlo’s seduction, the affair of the cistern, and
the opposition to his statue of Tiberius, that he was making
his hero address the island in these terms:
‘ Land of murder, of vice and luxury, listen to tbe voice
of one w/Jo will conquer t/Jee at last. One day despite t/Jy
scents and sound ofjoy, despite tby perfumed slopes and gleam-
ing wbite terraces, despite (a page of overloaded description),
thou s/salt disappear, O Sirene, because t/Jau art no more
tbyself, because tbou bast denied that wbicb made tbee great.’
This was followed by a denunciation of Woman, and a
particular word of warning to the young men of Sirene
who by persisting in kneeling before that shameless Mother
of Calamities would end by destroying all that made them
Virgin Kings.
But it is idle to quote any more. There was hardly a
person or a profession, a nationality or an individual on Sirene
that did not find something to insult him in Marsac’s book.
A hive of bees robbed of their honey could not have
buzzed more furiously than the people of Sirene thus robbed
of their reputations. Everybody was walking about the
Piazza reading to one another the insulting descriptions of
his neighbour. We may agree with La Rochefoucauld that
nothing gives us greater pleasure than to hear of the mis-
fortunes of our friends, but the aphorist would have to
admit that nothing makes us more indignant than to read
about their misfortunes in a novel, whether we read about
our own at the same time or not.
ee-aw! ]oseph’s getting a damned bore. He is really.
I can’t stand any more of his blasted Dante. I really can’t.
Besides, Joseph himself doesn’t care a button about Dante.
He simply takes a geographical interest in Hell because he
thinks he’ll go there one day. He just uses the Divine
Commedia as a kind of Baedeker. No, I won’t spend the
evening with him.”
“ Oh, Mr. Maxwell,” the wife expostulated, “how can
you talk so? It’s most unkind.”
“ People are a jolly sight too kind to Joseph. That’s
the trouble with him. He just lives on kindness and gruel
and purgatives. No, you ask Scudamore to dine with him
and keep him amused. And that’ll be a kindness to poor
old Scudamore, because every dinner he gets without Nita’s
cooking will keep him alive for a few days longer.”
and
“I beg your pardon,” Bookham exclaimed. “ But do
you mean Count Marsac ? ”
“That’s right. Marsac-Lagerstrom, to give it him in
full. What does Sirene make of bim ? ”
“Well, I think we all liked him very much at first,”
Bookham replied, “ though I hear that one or two people
have been a little inclined to give him the cold shoulder
lately. I believe there has been some rumour about his
having been mixed up in a rather unsavoury mess in Paris.
But I keep myself as free as I can from gossip. You see,
I’m the senior British resident here, and somebody’s got to
set an example, don’t you know.”
“ Did you never hear of the Lagerstrom scandal ? ”
The little American leaned across the table and lowered
his voice to remind Bookham what that had been.
“ Miners ? ” the churchwarden bellowed. “ Good lord,
what a degenerate brute! Not coalminers surely ? ”
“ Minors not miners,” the little lawyer made haste to
explain.
Bookham mopped his crimson brow with a purple handker-
chief. '
“ Well, that’s bad enough,” he rumbled.
“ The Napoleonic code, however, regards it, and rightly
I cannot help feeling, as more reprehensible than the other.
and
It was not even a moderately good novel, and in justice
to Marsac it should be said that he could write a good deal
better than this when he expressed himself in verse. The
poems in La V ictime Ravie, however embarrassing as an
exhibition of hysteria, had at least a directness which,
granted that one could stand directness on such a topic,
occasionally achieved a kind of tortured beauty. La
Statue Mutilee had all the hysteria without any of the
sincerity of the poems, and the tawdry prose with which
it was bedizened made that insincerity nauseating. Any-
body who knew the story of Madame Protopopesco would
recognize that she was really the Hungarian count. As for
the wicked young American girl, she was Carlo dressed up
in the petticoats of Angela Pears. And Marsac like so many
writers of his temperament attributed to two young people
supposed to be normal the characteristics of an abnormal
passion. It is remarkable how nearly always fatal prose is
to the pretentiously styled Uranian temperament, which
time after time shirks honest self-revelation in such a
medium, but continually seeks by an endogenous under-
standing of women, an almost uterine intelligence, to atone
for its inability to create men. One day a novelist with
that temperament will have the courage to write about
himself as he is, not as he would be were he actually Jane
or Gladys or Aunt Maria. And that will be a novel worth
reading, not an obstetrical feat. However, for this story
the importance of La Statue Mutilee did not _lie in the
quality of its literary style or of its psychological fancy-dress,
but in the bitterness of the personal attacks, so thinly
disguised as hardly to be disguised at all, upon various
residents interspersed with abuse of Christianity, eulogies
of paganism, and florid apostrophes menacing the island
itself with destruction. In spite of that flattering exordium,
by the time the author came to the end of his book he had
worked himself up into such _a phrenzy of rage over the
thought of Carlo’s seduction, the affair of the cistern, and
the opposition to his statue of Tiberius, that he was making
his hero address the island in these terms:
‘ Land of murder, of vice and luxury, listen to tbe voice
of one w/Jo will conquer t/Jee at last. One day despite t/Jy
scents and sound ofjoy, despite tby perfumed slopes and gleam-
ing wbite terraces, despite (a page of overloaded description),
thou s/salt disappear, O Sirene, because t/Jau art no more
tbyself, because tbou bast denied that wbicb made tbee great.’
This was followed by a denunciation of Woman, and a
particular word of warning to the young men of Sirene
who by persisting in kneeling before that shameless Mother
of Calamities would end by destroying all that made them
Virgin Kings.
But it is idle to quote any more. There was hardly a
person or a profession, a nationality or an individual on Sirene
that did not find something to insult him in Marsac’s book.
A hive of bees robbed of their honey could not have
buzzed more furiously than the people of Sirene thus robbed
of their reputations. Everybody was walking about the
Piazza reading to one another the insulting descriptions of
his neighbour. We may agree with La Rochefoucauld that
nothing gives us greater pleasure than to hear of the mis-
fortunes of our friends, but the aphorist would have to
admit that nothing makes us more indignant than to read
about their misfortunes in a novel, whether we read about
our own at the same time or not.
Cleo by Stacy
Even when
they are neither tendentious nor tangled, the accounts are often over-
blown. As has been noted, there were no plain, unvarnished stories in
antiquity. The point was to dazzle. I have not attempted to fill in the
blanks, though on occasion I have corralled the possibilities. What
looks merely probable remains here merely probable—though opin-
ions differ radically even on the probabilities. The irreconcilable
remains unreconciled. Mostly I have restored context. Indeed Cleopa-
tra murdered her siblings, but Herod murdered his children. (He
afterward wailed that he was "the most unfortunate of fathers”) And
as Plutarch reminds us, such behavior was axiomatic among sovereigns.
(Even the fiction writers cannot agree about Caesar and Cleopatra. He loves her (Han-
del) he loves her not (Shaw); he loves her (Thornton Wilder)).
Cleopatra was not necessarily beautiful, but her wealth’— and
her palace—left a Roman gasping. All read very differently on one
side of the Mediterranean from the other. The last decades of research
on women in antiquity and on Hellenistic Egypt substantially illumi-
nate the picture. I have tried to pluck the gauze of melodrama from
the final scenes of the life, which reduce even sober chroniclers to
soap opera. Sometimes high drama prevails for a reason, however.
Cleopatra’s was an era of outsize, intriguing personalities. At-its end
the greatest actors of the age exit abruptly. A world comes crashing
down after them.
WHILE THERE IS a great deal We do not know about Cleopatra, there
is a great deal she did not know either. She knew neither that she was
living in the first century BC nor in the Hellenistic Age, both of them
later constructs. (The Hellenistic Age begins with the death of Alex-
ander the Great in 323 BC and ends in 30 BC, with the death of Cleopa-
tra. It has been perhaps best defined as a Greek era in which the Greeks
played no role.) She did not know she was Cleopatra VII for several
reasons, one ofwhich is that she was actually the sixth Cleopatra. She
never knew anyone named Octavian. The man who vanquished and
deposed her, prompted her suicide, and largely packaged her for pos-
terity was born Gaius Octavius. By the time he entered Cleopatra’s
life in a meaningful way he called himself Gaius Julius Caesar, after
his illustrious great-uncle, her lover, who adopted him in his will. We
know him today as Augustus, a title he assumed only three years after
Cleopatra’s death. He appears here as Octavian, two Caesars remain-
ing, as ever, one too many.
and
BEHIND EVERY GREAT fortune, it has been noted, is a crime; the Ptole-
mies were fabulously rich. They were descended not from the Egyp-
tian pharaohs whose place they assumed but from the scrappy,
hard-living Macedonians (tough terrain breeds tough men, Herodo-
tus had already warned) who produced Alexander the Great. Within
months of Alexander’s death, Ptolemy—the most enterprising of his
generals, his official taster, a childhood intimate, and by some
accounts a distant relative—had laid claim to Egypt. In an early dis-
play of the family gift for stagecraft, Ptolemy kidnapped Alexander
the Great’s body. It had been headed for Macedonia. Would it not be
far more useful, reasoned young Ptolemy, intercepting the funeral
cortege, in Egypt, ultimately in Alexandria, a city the great man had
founded only decades earlier? There it was rerouted, to be displayed
in a gold sarcophagus at the center of the city, a relic, a talisman, a
recruiting aid, an insurance policy. (By Cleopatra’s childhood, the sar-
cophagus was alabaster or glass. Strapped for funds, her great-uncle
had traded the original for an army. He paid for the substitution with
his life.)
The legitimacy of the Ptolemaic dynasty would rest on this tenu-
ous connection to the most storied figure in the ancient world, the
one against whom all aspirants measured themselves, in whose man-
tle Pompey had wrapped himself, Whose feats were said to reduce
Caesar to tears of inadequacy. The cult was universal. Alexander
played as active a role in the Ptolemaic imagination as in the Roman
one. Many Egyptian homes displayed statues of him. So strong was
his romance—and so fungible was first-century history—that it
would come to include a version in which Alexander descended from
an Egyptian wizard. Soon enough he was said to have been related to
the royal family; like all self-respecting arrivistes, the Ptolemies had a
gift for reconfiguring history.* Without renouncing their Macedonian
heritage, the dynasty’s founders bought themselves a legitimacy-
conferring past, the ancient~world equivalent of the mail-order coat of
arms. What was true was that Ptolemy descended from the Macedo-
nian aristocracy, a synonym for high drama. As a consequence, no
one in Egypt considered Cleopatra to be Egyptian. She hailed instead
from a line of rancorous, meddlesome, shrewd, occasionally unhinged
Macedonian queens, a line that included the fourth-century Olym-
pias, whose greatest contribution to the world was her son, Alexander
the Great. The rest were atrocities.
‘If outside Egypt the Ptolemies held to the Alexander the Great nar-
rative within the country their legitimacy derived from a fabricated
link with the pharaohs. This justified the practice of sibling marriage,
Understood to be an Egyptian custom. Amid the Macedonian aristoc-
racy there was ample precedent for murdering your sibling, none for
marrying her. Nor was there a Greek word for “incest.” The Ptolemies
carried the practice to an extreme.
*
Alexander the Great consulted a famed oracle about his parentage. He had some
questions, which is what happens when your mother is said to have mated with a snake.
Wisely he left his entourage outside the
ttmple and submitted a bribe in advance. he was, the oracle assured him, the son of Zeus.
they are neither tendentious nor tangled, the accounts are often over-
blown. As has been noted, there were no plain, unvarnished stories in
antiquity. The point was to dazzle. I have not attempted to fill in the
blanks, though on occasion I have corralled the possibilities. What
looks merely probable remains here merely probable—though opin-
ions differ radically even on the probabilities. The irreconcilable
remains unreconciled. Mostly I have restored context. Indeed Cleopa-
tra murdered her siblings, but Herod murdered his children. (He
afterward wailed that he was "the most unfortunate of fathers”) And
as Plutarch reminds us, such behavior was axiomatic among sovereigns.
(Even the fiction writers cannot agree about Caesar and Cleopatra. He loves her (Han-
del) he loves her not (Shaw); he loves her (Thornton Wilder)).
Cleopatra was not necessarily beautiful, but her wealth’— and
her palace—left a Roman gasping. All read very differently on one
side of the Mediterranean from the other. The last decades of research
on women in antiquity and on Hellenistic Egypt substantially illumi-
nate the picture. I have tried to pluck the gauze of melodrama from
the final scenes of the life, which reduce even sober chroniclers to
soap opera. Sometimes high drama prevails for a reason, however.
Cleopatra’s was an era of outsize, intriguing personalities. At-its end
the greatest actors of the age exit abruptly. A world comes crashing
down after them.
WHILE THERE IS a great deal We do not know about Cleopatra, there
is a great deal she did not know either. She knew neither that she was
living in the first century BC nor in the Hellenistic Age, both of them
later constructs. (The Hellenistic Age begins with the death of Alex-
ander the Great in 323 BC and ends in 30 BC, with the death of Cleopa-
tra. It has been perhaps best defined as a Greek era in which the Greeks
played no role.) She did not know she was Cleopatra VII for several
reasons, one ofwhich is that she was actually the sixth Cleopatra. She
never knew anyone named Octavian. The man who vanquished and
deposed her, prompted her suicide, and largely packaged her for pos-
terity was born Gaius Octavius. By the time he entered Cleopatra’s
life in a meaningful way he called himself Gaius Julius Caesar, after
his illustrious great-uncle, her lover, who adopted him in his will. We
know him today as Augustus, a title he assumed only three years after
Cleopatra’s death. He appears here as Octavian, two Caesars remain-
ing, as ever, one too many.
and
BEHIND EVERY GREAT fortune, it has been noted, is a crime; the Ptole-
mies were fabulously rich. They were descended not from the Egyp-
tian pharaohs whose place they assumed but from the scrappy,
hard-living Macedonians (tough terrain breeds tough men, Herodo-
tus had already warned) who produced Alexander the Great. Within
months of Alexander’s death, Ptolemy—the most enterprising of his
generals, his official taster, a childhood intimate, and by some
accounts a distant relative—had laid claim to Egypt. In an early dis-
play of the family gift for stagecraft, Ptolemy kidnapped Alexander
the Great’s body. It had been headed for Macedonia. Would it not be
far more useful, reasoned young Ptolemy, intercepting the funeral
cortege, in Egypt, ultimately in Alexandria, a city the great man had
founded only decades earlier? There it was rerouted, to be displayed
in a gold sarcophagus at the center of the city, a relic, a talisman, a
recruiting aid, an insurance policy. (By Cleopatra’s childhood, the sar-
cophagus was alabaster or glass. Strapped for funds, her great-uncle
had traded the original for an army. He paid for the substitution with
his life.)
The legitimacy of the Ptolemaic dynasty would rest on this tenu-
ous connection to the most storied figure in the ancient world, the
one against whom all aspirants measured themselves, in whose man-
tle Pompey had wrapped himself, Whose feats were said to reduce
Caesar to tears of inadequacy. The cult was universal. Alexander
played as active a role in the Ptolemaic imagination as in the Roman
one. Many Egyptian homes displayed statues of him. So strong was
his romance—and so fungible was first-century history—that it
would come to include a version in which Alexander descended from
an Egyptian wizard. Soon enough he was said to have been related to
the royal family; like all self-respecting arrivistes, the Ptolemies had a
gift for reconfiguring history.* Without renouncing their Macedonian
heritage, the dynasty’s founders bought themselves a legitimacy-
conferring past, the ancient~world equivalent of the mail-order coat of
arms. What was true was that Ptolemy descended from the Macedo-
nian aristocracy, a synonym for high drama. As a consequence, no
one in Egypt considered Cleopatra to be Egyptian. She hailed instead
from a line of rancorous, meddlesome, shrewd, occasionally unhinged
Macedonian queens, a line that included the fourth-century Olym-
pias, whose greatest contribution to the world was her son, Alexander
the Great. The rest were atrocities.
‘If outside Egypt the Ptolemies held to the Alexander the Great nar-
rative within the country their legitimacy derived from a fabricated
link with the pharaohs. This justified the practice of sibling marriage,
Understood to be an Egyptian custom. Amid the Macedonian aristoc-
racy there was ample precedent for murdering your sibling, none for
marrying her. Nor was there a Greek word for “incest.” The Ptolemies
carried the practice to an extreme.
*
Alexander the Great consulted a famed oracle about his parentage. He had some
questions, which is what happens when your mother is said to have mated with a snake.
Wisely he left his entourage outside the
ttmple and submitted a bribe in advance. he was, the oracle assured him, the son of Zeus.
Harold Stassen et al.
In Indiana the “anything but” vote went to the redoubtable Harold E.
Stassen: boy-wonder governor of Minnesota in I936, a presidential prospect in
1940, the loser in an upset to Dewey in I948, sold out by a young lawyer
named Warren Burger in his favorite-son bid in I952, architect of a failed
Richard Nixon purge in I956, the losing candidate for governor of Pennsylva-
nia and mayor of Philadelphia in the years since——the Republican Party’s
embarrassing old Don Quixote. (When he announced he was running for Pres-
ident once more, a politically precocious youngster in Queens dubbed his soap-
box derby car “Harold Stassen’s Ticker Tape Parade”) Stassen had managed
to find his name the only other one on the Indiana Republican ballot besides
Goldwater’s. He financed a raft of brochures promising “progress for all along
the middleway, avoiding both extremes,” and asserting that a Stassen delega-
tion would “open the door at the convention to consideration of the other five
Republican candidates: Ambassador Lodge, Richard Nixon, Govemor Rocke-
feller, Governor Romney, and Governor Scranton.” Anyone-but-Goldwater
and the middle-of-the-road: that was all it took foroafish Harold Stassen to
siphon off an embarrassing 27 percent of the votes from Goldwater in one of
the most conservative states in the country. And thanks to Kleindienst’s inabil-
ity to put up a publicity firewall, commentators continued to refer to Gold-
water’s “wretched showing” in a primaiy where he won upwards of 70 percent
of the vote.
At any rate, few were paying attention to the Republican race. Indiana was
George Wallace’s stand-or-fall battle. Open-primary Wisconsin could be writ-
ten off as a fluke. But party loyalty was sacred in Indiana. If Wallace could pee]
off significant numbers from Johnson’s stand-in, Governor Matthew Welsh,
that would mean the backlash was for real. Dozens of print and television CO]:
“respondents descended on the Hoosier State; Walter Cronkite moved his news-
cast to a storefront in downtown Indianapolis. Wallace’s act had been polished
until it gleamed; at Butler University, his kickoff speech began to jeers and
closed with 56 percent of those present saying he had their vote.
‘ Since taking the podium in front of Bronco Gruber and his friends in Mil-
waukee’s Serb Hall, Wallace drew sustenance from a new theme. A crime
upsurge was now the obsession of barrooms and water coolers across the land:
on March 27 the New York Times reported that in a white middle-class neigh-
borhood in Queens, thirty-eight neighbors were awakened by the screams of a
young woman named Kitty Genovese as she was raped and murdered over the
course of an hour, and no one bothered to call the police. That the perpetrator
was black, although the Times did not print the fact, soon became well known.
And Wallace began playing the attendant fears like a violin.
“If you are knocked in the head on a street in a city today, the man who
knocked you in the head is out of jail before you get to the hospital,” he said.
“They’re building a new bridge over the Potomac for all the white liberals
fleeing to Virginia.”
“Anyone here from Philadelphia? You know, they can’t even have night
football games anymore because of the trouble between the races. And that’s
the city of brotherly love!”
The message was moving voters. Governor Welsh wamed thousands of
patronage employees that they backed Wallace on pain of their jobs. Regis-
tered Republicans requesting a Democratic ballot were forced to pledge to vote
for the Democratic candidate for President in November (and were threatened
with having their names published). The state’s two Democratic senators sent
out franked letters pronouncing that a vote for Welsh was a vote for the mem-
ory of John F. Kennedy.
In Indiana Wallace beat his Wisconsin totals by 5 percentage points. He
earned almost three-quarters of the vote in one Gary steelworkers’ district.
“The noises you hear now,” he declared, “are the teeth falling out in Indiana.”
It was a good thing few people were paying attention to the Republicans
in Indiana, because by now it appeared that White was presiding over a coup.
He didn’t count the number of delegates he’d secured anymore; he counted
down from the 655 needed to nominate. His secret ledger read 400, four-fifths of
those chosen to date. He claimed 250 publicly. He wanted to have at least I72
with which to surprise the public if Rockefeller won California on June 2. But
once more undisciplined Arizonans spilled the secret. Not long ago Time had
deglaféd Goldwater “flat on his back.” Now the magazine reported: “Suddenly,
fike a brush fire racing out of control, the word crackled among informed
Republicans: _Goldwater’s almost got it. . . . Goldwater kept collecting dele-
gates while the unavoweds and disavowed collected press clippings.”
Though how the party would sell a candidate to the nation that polls sug-
gested only I4 percent of Republicans supported, White did not appear to con-
sider.
“Far more united and at peace with itself, except over the issue of Negro rights,
than it has been for a long time ”: future generations might be excused for won-
dering how many conflagrations need burn, or how few votes Bill Scranton
need win, before columnists would break down and concede the point that
America was a nation deeply divided against itself. But the architecture of their
thought would not permit it.
and
The candidate landed, exhausted, to a Goldwater circus. Only after Kitchel
screamed in his face, “Dammit, Parry, you’re a national figure!” did Goldwater
stride out to receive his adoration. A reporter poked a microphone in his snoot;
Goldwater scowled. A pretty young thing tried to plop a big white cowboy hat
on his head; he shoved her away. A guy was peddling a canned soft drink with
the unfortunate name of “Gold Water” (“The Right Drink for the Conservative
Taste”) from the tailgate of his truck. Goldwater was offered a sip. He spit it
Out. “This tastes like piss! I wouldn’t drink it with gin!”
and
Now, with nearly as many reporters covering the reporters as were covering the
results, for the first time CBS News was using Lou Harris’s new computer-
sampling exit poll techniques to attempt to call the race before the polls closed
at 7 p.m. local time——during, that is, prime time in the East.
With three hours to go, news chief Bill Leonard and Fred Friendly pored
over printouts that showed Rockefeller with a small but significant lead. A few
minutes later new numbers came in: Goldwater had pulled ahead with 51.6 per-
cent. They started sweating: 51.6 was just barely on the safe side of their mar-
gin of error. A few more samples came in; the Goldwater trend was confirmed.
It was 7:15 Pacific standard time.
Leonard turned to Lou Harris: “I want to be 100 percent sure.” Harris shot
back confidently, “We’re within our guidelines.”
Leonard called Cronkite in Washington—and, at 7:21 p.m., astonishment
evident in his voice at both the news and speed with which he was able to
deliver it, Cronkite told America that CBS News was projecting Barry Gold-
water as the winner.
Several hours passed. No other network called the race. Friendly and
s final samplings arrived: Goldwater, still—but this time below their
error. The actual precinct tabulations flooding in were distinctly.
ockefeller.
Fred Friendly had to get on a plane to make an important meeting in New
York the next morning. He fell asleep and awoke to the pilot’s voice: “Good
morning, ladies and gentlemen. We’re just about to make our approach into the
New York City area, and it’s going to be a beautiful day. . . . And by the way,
if you’re interested, Governor Rockefeller has won the Califomia primary.” '
Walter Cronkite, it turned out, was not nearly as trusted a man as CBS had
thought. The wire services, using their old-fashioned methods, had called the
election for Rockefeller; so did the CBS local station in New York City, hours
after Cronkite gave the race to the Arizonan senator on the national broadcast.
It was only the counting of the absentee ballots that gave the race officially to
Barry Goldwater, 1,120,403 votes to 1,052,053. The tumout was 72 percent.
Rus Walton’s polling suggested that Goldwater got 20 percent more votes in
precincts where A Choice Not an Echo had been distributed. Scores of wob-
bling delegates in other states committed for Goldwater. It was now hard t0
imagine a scenario in which Barry Goldwater would not be nominated. H6
responded to the news by drinking so much he had to be helped onto the plane
back to Washington. Rockefeller refused to quit the race, promising, “Fm
going right down the line no matter what happens.”
Goldwater people celebrated as if they were witnessing the risen Lord. But
hating Barry Goldwater was taking on transcendent overtones, too: in Missis-
sippi, Freedom Summer organizers found sharecroppers who were terrified that
a Goldwater victory would give locals license to shoot them in their homes.
Everywhere cartoonists pictured Goldwater’s base as “little old ladies in tennis
shoes”-——an image California attorney general Stanley Mosk used in his report
on the John Birch Society in 1961 to portray conservatives as the kind of peo-
ple taken in by aluminum-siding salesmen (and for which Mosk received angry
packages filled with loafers, sandals, and pumps for weeks on end). The Glas-
gow Herald called Goldwater “stupid to a degree that is incredible”;,the Lon-
don Times keened over “a major party endorsing and promoting a man so
blatantly out of touch with reality, so wild in his foreign policy, so backward in
his domestic ideas, and so inconsistent in his thinking”; and the Frankfurter
Rundschau called Goldwater “a confused and weak man who hides his weak-
ness and uncertainty with fiery speeches”—no small thing coming from Ger-
many, then witnessing a dramatic suicide epidemic among old men threatened
by new “dc-Nazification” trials.
Graham Molitor, unwinding from the Califomia bout at a religious retreat,
confessed ashamedly to a divine that when he first came to Washington in the
1950s, Goldwater had been his hero. Now he had worked to destroy the man’s
very name. The priest replied that considering the gravity of the situation,
Molitor had done no wrong.
from Before the Storm
Stassen: boy-wonder governor of Minnesota in I936, a presidential prospect in
1940, the loser in an upset to Dewey in I948, sold out by a young lawyer
named Warren Burger in his favorite-son bid in I952, architect of a failed
Richard Nixon purge in I956, the losing candidate for governor of Pennsylva-
nia and mayor of Philadelphia in the years since——the Republican Party’s
embarrassing old Don Quixote. (When he announced he was running for Pres-
ident once more, a politically precocious youngster in Queens dubbed his soap-
box derby car “Harold Stassen’s Ticker Tape Parade”) Stassen had managed
to find his name the only other one on the Indiana Republican ballot besides
Goldwater’s. He financed a raft of brochures promising “progress for all along
the middleway, avoiding both extremes,” and asserting that a Stassen delega-
tion would “open the door at the convention to consideration of the other five
Republican candidates: Ambassador Lodge, Richard Nixon, Govemor Rocke-
feller, Governor Romney, and Governor Scranton.” Anyone-but-Goldwater
and the middle-of-the-road: that was all it took foroafish Harold Stassen to
siphon off an embarrassing 27 percent of the votes from Goldwater in one of
the most conservative states in the country. And thanks to Kleindienst’s inabil-
ity to put up a publicity firewall, commentators continued to refer to Gold-
water’s “wretched showing” in a primaiy where he won upwards of 70 percent
of the vote.
At any rate, few were paying attention to the Republican race. Indiana was
George Wallace’s stand-or-fall battle. Open-primary Wisconsin could be writ-
ten off as a fluke. But party loyalty was sacred in Indiana. If Wallace could pee]
off significant numbers from Johnson’s stand-in, Governor Matthew Welsh,
that would mean the backlash was for real. Dozens of print and television CO]:
“respondents descended on the Hoosier State; Walter Cronkite moved his news-
cast to a storefront in downtown Indianapolis. Wallace’s act had been polished
until it gleamed; at Butler University, his kickoff speech began to jeers and
closed with 56 percent of those present saying he had their vote.
‘ Since taking the podium in front of Bronco Gruber and his friends in Mil-
waukee’s Serb Hall, Wallace drew sustenance from a new theme. A crime
upsurge was now the obsession of barrooms and water coolers across the land:
on March 27 the New York Times reported that in a white middle-class neigh-
borhood in Queens, thirty-eight neighbors were awakened by the screams of a
young woman named Kitty Genovese as she was raped and murdered over the
course of an hour, and no one bothered to call the police. That the perpetrator
was black, although the Times did not print the fact, soon became well known.
And Wallace began playing the attendant fears like a violin.
“If you are knocked in the head on a street in a city today, the man who
knocked you in the head is out of jail before you get to the hospital,” he said.
“They’re building a new bridge over the Potomac for all the white liberals
fleeing to Virginia.”
“Anyone here from Philadelphia? You know, they can’t even have night
football games anymore because of the trouble between the races. And that’s
the city of brotherly love!”
The message was moving voters. Governor Welsh wamed thousands of
patronage employees that they backed Wallace on pain of their jobs. Regis-
tered Republicans requesting a Democratic ballot were forced to pledge to vote
for the Democratic candidate for President in November (and were threatened
with having their names published). The state’s two Democratic senators sent
out franked letters pronouncing that a vote for Welsh was a vote for the mem-
ory of John F. Kennedy.
In Indiana Wallace beat his Wisconsin totals by 5 percentage points. He
earned almost three-quarters of the vote in one Gary steelworkers’ district.
“The noises you hear now,” he declared, “are the teeth falling out in Indiana.”
It was a good thing few people were paying attention to the Republicans
in Indiana, because by now it appeared that White was presiding over a coup.
He didn’t count the number of delegates he’d secured anymore; he counted
down from the 655 needed to nominate. His secret ledger read 400, four-fifths of
those chosen to date. He claimed 250 publicly. He wanted to have at least I72
with which to surprise the public if Rockefeller won California on June 2. But
once more undisciplined Arizonans spilled the secret. Not long ago Time had
deglaféd Goldwater “flat on his back.” Now the magazine reported: “Suddenly,
fike a brush fire racing out of control, the word crackled among informed
Republicans: _Goldwater’s almost got it. . . . Goldwater kept collecting dele-
gates while the unavoweds and disavowed collected press clippings.”
Though how the party would sell a candidate to the nation that polls sug-
gested only I4 percent of Republicans supported, White did not appear to con-
sider.
“Far more united and at peace with itself, except over the issue of Negro rights,
than it has been for a long time ”: future generations might be excused for won-
dering how many conflagrations need burn, or how few votes Bill Scranton
need win, before columnists would break down and concede the point that
America was a nation deeply divided against itself. But the architecture of their
thought would not permit it.
and
The candidate landed, exhausted, to a Goldwater circus. Only after Kitchel
screamed in his face, “Dammit, Parry, you’re a national figure!” did Goldwater
stride out to receive his adoration. A reporter poked a microphone in his snoot;
Goldwater scowled. A pretty young thing tried to plop a big white cowboy hat
on his head; he shoved her away. A guy was peddling a canned soft drink with
the unfortunate name of “Gold Water” (“The Right Drink for the Conservative
Taste”) from the tailgate of his truck. Goldwater was offered a sip. He spit it
Out. “This tastes like piss! I wouldn’t drink it with gin!”
and
Now, with nearly as many reporters covering the reporters as were covering the
results, for the first time CBS News was using Lou Harris’s new computer-
sampling exit poll techniques to attempt to call the race before the polls closed
at 7 p.m. local time——during, that is, prime time in the East.
With three hours to go, news chief Bill Leonard and Fred Friendly pored
over printouts that showed Rockefeller with a small but significant lead. A few
minutes later new numbers came in: Goldwater had pulled ahead with 51.6 per-
cent. They started sweating: 51.6 was just barely on the safe side of their mar-
gin of error. A few more samples came in; the Goldwater trend was confirmed.
It was 7:15 Pacific standard time.
Leonard turned to Lou Harris: “I want to be 100 percent sure.” Harris shot
back confidently, “We’re within our guidelines.”
Leonard called Cronkite in Washington—and, at 7:21 p.m., astonishment
evident in his voice at both the news and speed with which he was able to
deliver it, Cronkite told America that CBS News was projecting Barry Gold-
water as the winner.
Several hours passed. No other network called the race. Friendly and
s final samplings arrived: Goldwater, still—but this time below their
error. The actual precinct tabulations flooding in were distinctly.
ockefeller.
Fred Friendly had to get on a plane to make an important meeting in New
York the next morning. He fell asleep and awoke to the pilot’s voice: “Good
morning, ladies and gentlemen. We’re just about to make our approach into the
New York City area, and it’s going to be a beautiful day. . . . And by the way,
if you’re interested, Governor Rockefeller has won the Califomia primary.” '
Walter Cronkite, it turned out, was not nearly as trusted a man as CBS had
thought. The wire services, using their old-fashioned methods, had called the
election for Rockefeller; so did the CBS local station in New York City, hours
after Cronkite gave the race to the Arizonan senator on the national broadcast.
It was only the counting of the absentee ballots that gave the race officially to
Barry Goldwater, 1,120,403 votes to 1,052,053. The tumout was 72 percent.
Rus Walton’s polling suggested that Goldwater got 20 percent more votes in
precincts where A Choice Not an Echo had been distributed. Scores of wob-
bling delegates in other states committed for Goldwater. It was now hard t0
imagine a scenario in which Barry Goldwater would not be nominated. H6
responded to the news by drinking so much he had to be helped onto the plane
back to Washington. Rockefeller refused to quit the race, promising, “Fm
going right down the line no matter what happens.”
Goldwater people celebrated as if they were witnessing the risen Lord. But
hating Barry Goldwater was taking on transcendent overtones, too: in Missis-
sippi, Freedom Summer organizers found sharecroppers who were terrified that
a Goldwater victory would give locals license to shoot them in their homes.
Everywhere cartoonists pictured Goldwater’s base as “little old ladies in tennis
shoes”-——an image California attorney general Stanley Mosk used in his report
on the John Birch Society in 1961 to portray conservatives as the kind of peo-
ple taken in by aluminum-siding salesmen (and for which Mosk received angry
packages filled with loafers, sandals, and pumps for weeks on end). The Glas-
gow Herald called Goldwater “stupid to a degree that is incredible”;,the Lon-
don Times keened over “a major party endorsing and promoting a man so
blatantly out of touch with reality, so wild in his foreign policy, so backward in
his domestic ideas, and so inconsistent in his thinking”; and the Frankfurter
Rundschau called Goldwater “a confused and weak man who hides his weak-
ness and uncertainty with fiery speeches”—no small thing coming from Ger-
many, then witnessing a dramatic suicide epidemic among old men threatened
by new “dc-Nazification” trials.
Graham Molitor, unwinding from the Califomia bout at a religious retreat,
confessed ashamedly to a divine that when he first came to Washington in the
1950s, Goldwater had been his hero. Now he had worked to destroy the man’s
very name. The priest replied that considering the gravity of the situation,
Molitor had done no wrong.
from Before the Storm
Thursday, January 15, 2015
California from Perlstein
When he
wasn’t on the road for G.E. or on the set, he spread the gospel in front of any
audience that invited him. His family hardly saw him. “The inescapable truth is
that we are at war,” he would say, “and we are losing that war simply because
we don’t or won’t realize we are in it. We have ten years. Not ten years to make
up our mind, but ten years to win or lose—by I970 the world will be all slave
or all free.”
In Orange County that kind of talk was making Reagan a hero. He was like
them—a Midwestem transplant, from small-town Illinois. He almost belonged
more to them than he did to Hollywood.
It was first said in the nineteenth century that Califomia was “America, only
more so.” Orange County was California, only more so. It had been the com-
mandment to Americans after World War II to go forth and multiply. Orange
County listened, and exploded. The govemment said to fight Communism.
Orange County listened, and went berserk.
California had always been a territory of booms and busts. Orange
County’s boom came during World War II. Opening up to the Pacific, pos-
sessed of a mild climate, southem California was the perfect place for defense
installations. As in Phoenix, the aircraft manufacturers followed. Unions were
weak. Venture capital was abundant. And when the jet and missile age arrived
in the 1950s, it turned out that southern Califomia had a competitive advan-
tage: unlike more established companies back East, which preferred safe con-
struction contracts, the tinkerers in Califomia welcomed long-tenn research
and development deals. New York State lost 34 percent of its share of the
Defense Department’s procurement between I950 and I956; by I965 Califor-
nia would have almost a quarter of the Defense Department’s prime contracts
and 41 percent of NASA’s. Aerospace accounted for astaggering 10 percent of
all personal income in the state of Califomia and perhaps a quarter of its eco-
nomic growth. And Orange County, the formerly rural area south of Los’Ange-
les—whose municipalities were so eager to play host to the War Department
that the town of Santa Ana leased the U.S. govemment a 412-acre former berry
ranch for a‘ dollar a year—did best of all. Orange County’s population, 100,000
in I940, approached a million by I960. Washington had called forth a new
suburban civilization in southem California. Orange County was its hub.
Real estate speculators turned ranches into subdivisions virtually over-
night—an entire municipality, Irvine, from a single orange grove. Men who g0i
a taste of the Sunshine State as Pacific Theater veterans flocked back after the
war to settle there with their families; all you had to do was visit a real estate
office af the edge of some fonner citrus grove, point to a site on a tract map,
and lay down a $200 down payment (less if you were a veteran), and you’d
vbgught yourself a house. But with mortgage debt a constant, silent presence,
r-the new homesteaders were not keen on squandering their precious salaries,
their only assets, on high taxes to help out the other guy. In I959 Orange
County congressman James Utt reintroduced an effort to add a “Liberty
XAmendment” to the Constitution-—which would repeal all federal income,
‘estate, and gift taxes and ban all government enterprises that competed with the
private sector. Utt likened the federal government to a “child molester who
offers candy before his evil act.”
Orange County had always been a Republican stronghold. As in the rest of
southem Califomia suburbia, much of the county’s population hailed from
Taft’s Midwest (every year a massive “Iowa Day” celebration was held in
L.A.’s Griffith Park). The first time a Democratic President carried the county
was I932, the last 1936. That was twoitimes too many for Raymond Cyrus
Hoiles, publisher of the Santa Ana Register, who said the world would have
I been better off if Franklin D. Roosevelt had never leamed to read or write.
Hoiles’s editorials railed against the government stake in what he called “tax-
supported schools, roads, and parks”——and called for an end to child labor and
pure food and drug laws. As for the area’s racial attitudes, in I954 a Korean-
‘American Olympic Gold Medal winner was able to purchase a home in Garden
Grove only after an outcry in the international media, and the Magnolia Dis-
trict’s first black teacher was forced to quit after a year when she couldn’t find
housing. Orange County tended to draw people who found such politics ami-
able. Once there, they often moved further to the right.
New postwar migrants, unmoored from the familiar Main Streets of their
youth, burst the churches of conservative preachers like “Fighting Bob” Wells
at the seams. Many were fundamentalists and Evangelicals of a new kind: they
mixed politics with religion, a diversion much more associated with liberal
clergymen.
and
The men who led their families on weekends to Knott’s Berry Farm as if to
secular worship were like Walter Knott’s boysenberries: in a way not quire
apparent to the naked eye, they were welfare cases. Veterans who retumed
home from World War II to a country terrified of sinking back into depression
benefited mightily from federal scheines to boost consumer spending by subsi-
dizing homeownership; before the war, a typical mortgage required a down
payment of 50 percent and came due in ten years; now a mortgage involved a
down payment of IO percent, was financed at 4 percent, lasted three decades,
and was tax deductible—one of the most generous redistributions of wealth in
American history. The irrigation projects that were the lifeline of the arid
region were funded by taxes from the forty-nine other states. People like James
Wallace cursed Washington at John Birch Society meetings after spending
their days inside finns built lock, stock, and barrel with government contracts
and after earning their engineering degrees in Califomia’s tuition-free, state-
run university system, or buying them with GI Bill money. They delighted in
Ronald Reagan’s sparkling professions of free-market faith. But even his faith
had its limits. When Reagan began saying that the Tennessee Valley Authority
drained the U.S. Treasury better than its own basin, he was reminded that G.E.
had a $50 million bid in for TVA generators. Reagan gladly dropped the refer-
ence.
wasn’t on the road for G.E. or on the set, he spread the gospel in front of any
audience that invited him. His family hardly saw him. “The inescapable truth is
that we are at war,” he would say, “and we are losing that war simply because
we don’t or won’t realize we are in it. We have ten years. Not ten years to make
up our mind, but ten years to win or lose—by I970 the world will be all slave
or all free.”
In Orange County that kind of talk was making Reagan a hero. He was like
them—a Midwestem transplant, from small-town Illinois. He almost belonged
more to them than he did to Hollywood.
It was first said in the nineteenth century that Califomia was “America, only
more so.” Orange County was California, only more so. It had been the com-
mandment to Americans after World War II to go forth and multiply. Orange
County listened, and exploded. The govemment said to fight Communism.
Orange County listened, and went berserk.
California had always been a territory of booms and busts. Orange
County’s boom came during World War II. Opening up to the Pacific, pos-
sessed of a mild climate, southem California was the perfect place for defense
installations. As in Phoenix, the aircraft manufacturers followed. Unions were
weak. Venture capital was abundant. And when the jet and missile age arrived
in the 1950s, it turned out that southern Califomia had a competitive advan-
tage: unlike more established companies back East, which preferred safe con-
struction contracts, the tinkerers in Califomia welcomed long-tenn research
and development deals. New York State lost 34 percent of its share of the
Defense Department’s procurement between I950 and I956; by I965 Califor-
nia would have almost a quarter of the Defense Department’s prime contracts
and 41 percent of NASA’s. Aerospace accounted for astaggering 10 percent of
all personal income in the state of Califomia and perhaps a quarter of its eco-
nomic growth. And Orange County, the formerly rural area south of Los’Ange-
les—whose municipalities were so eager to play host to the War Department
that the town of Santa Ana leased the U.S. govemment a 412-acre former berry
ranch for a‘ dollar a year—did best of all. Orange County’s population, 100,000
in I940, approached a million by I960. Washington had called forth a new
suburban civilization in southem California. Orange County was its hub.
Real estate speculators turned ranches into subdivisions virtually over-
night—an entire municipality, Irvine, from a single orange grove. Men who g0i
a taste of the Sunshine State as Pacific Theater veterans flocked back after the
war to settle there with their families; all you had to do was visit a real estate
office af the edge of some fonner citrus grove, point to a site on a tract map,
and lay down a $200 down payment (less if you were a veteran), and you’d
vbgught yourself a house. But with mortgage debt a constant, silent presence,
r-the new homesteaders were not keen on squandering their precious salaries,
their only assets, on high taxes to help out the other guy. In I959 Orange
County congressman James Utt reintroduced an effort to add a “Liberty
XAmendment” to the Constitution-—which would repeal all federal income,
‘estate, and gift taxes and ban all government enterprises that competed with the
private sector. Utt likened the federal government to a “child molester who
offers candy before his evil act.”
Orange County had always been a Republican stronghold. As in the rest of
southem Califomia suburbia, much of the county’s population hailed from
Taft’s Midwest (every year a massive “Iowa Day” celebration was held in
L.A.’s Griffith Park). The first time a Democratic President carried the county
was I932, the last 1936. That was twoitimes too many for Raymond Cyrus
Hoiles, publisher of the Santa Ana Register, who said the world would have
I been better off if Franklin D. Roosevelt had never leamed to read or write.
Hoiles’s editorials railed against the government stake in what he called “tax-
supported schools, roads, and parks”——and called for an end to child labor and
pure food and drug laws. As for the area’s racial attitudes, in I954 a Korean-
‘American Olympic Gold Medal winner was able to purchase a home in Garden
Grove only after an outcry in the international media, and the Magnolia Dis-
trict’s first black teacher was forced to quit after a year when she couldn’t find
housing. Orange County tended to draw people who found such politics ami-
able. Once there, they often moved further to the right.
New postwar migrants, unmoored from the familiar Main Streets of their
youth, burst the churches of conservative preachers like “Fighting Bob” Wells
at the seams. Many were fundamentalists and Evangelicals of a new kind: they
mixed politics with religion, a diversion much more associated with liberal
clergymen.
and
The men who led their families on weekends to Knott’s Berry Farm as if to
secular worship were like Walter Knott’s boysenberries: in a way not quire
apparent to the naked eye, they were welfare cases. Veterans who retumed
home from World War II to a country terrified of sinking back into depression
benefited mightily from federal scheines to boost consumer spending by subsi-
dizing homeownership; before the war, a typical mortgage required a down
payment of 50 percent and came due in ten years; now a mortgage involved a
down payment of IO percent, was financed at 4 percent, lasted three decades,
and was tax deductible—one of the most generous redistributions of wealth in
American history. The irrigation projects that were the lifeline of the arid
region were funded by taxes from the forty-nine other states. People like James
Wallace cursed Washington at John Birch Society meetings after spending
their days inside finns built lock, stock, and barrel with government contracts
and after earning their engineering degrees in Califomia’s tuition-free, state-
run university system, or buying them with GI Bill money. They delighted in
Ronald Reagan’s sparkling professions of free-market faith. But even his faith
had its limits. When Reagan began saying that the Tennessee Valley Authority
drained the U.S. Treasury better than its own basin, he was reminded that G.E.
had a $50 million bid in for TVA generators. Reagan gladly dropped the refer-
ence.
The John Birch Society
From Before the Storm
the room in diamond fonnation, an old Communist trick to give the appear-
ance of greater number to manufacture acclaim for their speakers. The next
day, the surprising degree of conservatism among college students was widely
noted in newspapers around the country. Murray Kempton would write in The
Progressive, “We must assume that the conservative revival is the youth move-
ment of the ’6os.” And another wave of disaffected young collegians read the
reports and signed on with the battalions‘Ban'y Goldwater was not sure he
wanted to lead.
The day Young Americans for Freedom rallied in New York, an issue of Time
reporting on a group that made YAF look tame found its way to mailboxes.
The John Birch Society, apparently, believed General Dwight David
Eisenhower to be a secret agent of the Intemational Communist Conspiracy.
The group’s absolute leader was a man named Robert Welch; there was a gov-
erning council (including Manion and several of his Americans for Goldwater
stalwarts, and three past presidents of the National Association of Manufactur-
ers), but it was said that its main purpose was to choose a successor should
Welch be assassinated by Communists. Every year the Society published a
“scoreboard” of how far down the road to complete Communist subversion
country was; the United States was 50 to 60 percent, Iceland 80 to I00
According to Time, the John Birch Society was “a goose step away
formation of goon squads.”
To congressmen, the eerily uniform flood of letters they had been receiv-
ing calling for the impeachment of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren
finally made sense: that was one of the Society’s four goals—along with saving
HUAC, abolishing the income tax, and banning the sale of goods manufactured
in Communist countries. The media coverage opened the eyes of community
groups whose meetings were being disrupted by unfamiliar faces shouting
“republic!” every time someone called America a “democracy” (it was Society
doctrine that “democracy” meant rule by mob, and Society tactics to press the
case through heckling) and the eyes of PTA leaders who had learned to rue
sudden spikes in membership: Welch urged members to join the local PTA and
“go to work to take it over.”
By April of I961 you had to have been living in a cave not to know about
Robert Welch and his John Birch Society. The daily barrage of reports left
Americans baffled and scared at this freakish power suddenly revealed in their
midst. It also left some eager to leam where they could sign up.
Robert Harold Winbome Welch was born in I899 on a farm in Chowan
County, North Carolina. His people were simple farmers and Southern Baptist
' ‘sters. Young Robert was a genius. He left home to enroll at the state uni-
at twelve then eamed a commission to the Naval Academy when he
verslgalventeen. He decided he wanted to be a writer. The Navy being over-
Zgfzked with officers at the close of the Great War, he was let go. But his nerve
failed him. He enrolled at the Harvard Law School instead—then quit to
quickly raise the means to win the hand of the daughter of a wealthy Akron,
Q1110, businessman. His brother had a candy business outside Boston. So candy
it would be. _
Welch specialized in sales. The frustrated writer’s first book, in I941, The
Road to Salesmanship, proclaimed selling a profession more important than
law or medicine. “Instead of the bread and circuses handed out to idle mobs by
politicians,” salesmen drove progress itself by inducing Americans to want
more things and then to strive to better themselves in order to earn enough to
buy them. Wartime experience as an Office of Price Administration consultant
for the candy industry hardened Welch’s conservatism; lobbying as chair of the
Washington Committee of the National Confectioners Association (he was
named Candy Industry Man of the Year in 1947) petrified it. He masteredthe
signal vocation of America’s domestic Cold Warriors: compiling, organizing,
and cross-referencing files—who had belonged to what? who had been where?
who knew whom‘? He devoured history, newspapers, socialist organs; and
became convinced (incredulous that anyone would want to deliver more power
into the hands of an all-powerful central government) that Westem Europe’s
welfare states were products of a Communist conspiracy—and that the con-
spiracy was gaining ground here, too. He began taking longer and longer trips
abroad, winning audiences with men like Chiang Kai-shek and Konrad Ade-
nauer. In 1950 Welch ran for the Republican nomination for lieutenant gover-
nor of Massachusetts. He declared his platform the United States Constitution.
He came in fourth. Elective office would not be his métier.
‘ The next April, President Truman relieved General MacArthur of his com-
inand in Korea. There followed an unprecedented outpouring of popular emo-
tion for the general—he was, said one Republican congressman, “a great hunk
Of God in the flesh”—-and a triumphant national tour. Alongside McCarthy’s
Ongoing inquisition, it marked a new tendency on the American right: it was
that much easier to believe you were doing patriotic work even-—perhaps espe-
bially-—if you defied the govemment. In I951 Welch traveled New England
decrying the aid and comfort Dean Acheson’s State Department was providing
the Communists. In one town a listener wrote a critical open letter to a local
Wasn’t McCarthyism fast becoming a political liability for ‘the
Party? Welch, compelled to answer, spent the next two weeks in a
stupor.
and
By the time of the John Birch Society’s sudden national coming-out in the
spring of 1961, they had 20,000 members (or 60,000, or 100,000; eStiInates
van'ed—-but even 20,000 was greater than the membership of the Communist
Party of the United States in its i93os heyday). An office down the road from
Welch’s fieldstone~and-frame home in the Boston suburb of Belmont employed
some twenty-eight full-time staffers and an equal number of volunteers, who
dumped $4,000 worth of mail each week at the Belmont post office next door.
An Iowa pen company gave an expensive fountain model as a premium to each
new member. Centralia, Missouri, was a virtual Birch fiefdom; the owner of
the factory that employed half the town’s workforce made membership practi-
cally a condition for advancement. By I962 Welch was raising over a million
dollars a year. '
Since McCarthy’s day, liberals had been wondering why apparently intel-
ligent people could believe that the wrong kind of politics in the United States
would inexorably hasten its takeover by the USSR. It was concluded that these
were people who feared for their status in a rapidly changing, complex urban
society, who pined for a simpler past (they were for the “repeal of industrial-
ism,” said Commentary, which was odd, since most Birch leaders were
industrialists). The cognoscenti neglected the simplest answer: people were
afraid of internal Communist takeover because the govemment had been
telling them to be afraid—at least since I947, when George F. Kennan argued
in “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” the founding document of U.S. Cold War
doctrine, excerpted in Reader’s Digest, that “exhibitions of indecision, dis-
unity, and intemal disintegration within this country have an exhilarating effect
on the whole Communist movement.” Through the 1960s, AFL-CIO president
George Meany loved to flatter rank-and-file members that they were the first
line of resistance against the Communists: in Czechoslovakiafhe said, “they
controlled the trade union movement, and within seven days they controlled
the country.” Attomey General Robert Kennedy told a I961 press conference,
“Communist espionage here in this country is more active than it has ever
been.” (There had been none to speak of since World War II.) Army recruits
saw films like Red Nightmare, narrated by Jack Webb, which depicted an
ersatz American town deep within the Soviet interior where spies were suppos-
edly training in indigenous American arts like sipping sodas at drugstore foun-
tains in order to infiltrate the United States. You could no less avoid breathing
in a bit of paranoia in Cold War America, in fact, than you could soot in
Charles Dickens’s Manchester. Did Birchers and their ideological cognates
claim that dangerous “fallout” from nuclear testing was a hoax? So did the
Atomic Energy Commission, all through the 1950s. And it was the “discover-
ies". of the CIA chief of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, not Robert
Welch, that a KGB “Master Plan” allowed no Soviet to defect to the United
States except as a KGB double agent (thus bona fide Soviet defectors were
often kept naked in isolation in a brightly lit room and had to submit to cruel
fhrge-year interrogations to force them to give up their KGB secrets); and that
mere was a second, secret Kremlin inside the official Kremlin whose existence
could only be inferred because no one who had ever been inside it was ever
‘allowed beyond its walls.
It shouldn’t have been surprising that the John Birch Society was able to
win a membership in the tens of thousands in an officially encouraged atmo-
sphere of fear and suspicion. The John Birch Society was also a voice for con-
servatism—its motto was “Less govemment and more responsibility”—at a
time when the Republican Party was turning more liberal. At a time when a
housewife from suburban New York, Betty Friedan, was writing a book argu-
ing that the alienation and boredom of housewives was Amen'ca’s “problem
that has no name,” the Society gave housewives world-historic purpose to their
lives. (“I just don’t have time for anything,” one told a Time magazine inter-
viewer. “I’m fighting Communism three nights a week.”) And last but not
least, being a Bircher was fun. The fellowship was vouchsafed by the rule that
when a chapter grew bigger than two dozen, it was split in half—~the rationale
being that unwieldy chapters were easier for the Communists to infiltrate. The
groups’ main activity was monthly meetings in members’ living rooms (at
which the main activity might be watching a film of a lecture given by Welch,
who looked a bit like TV’s Mr. McGoo and, eerily, recited his interminable
talks from memory); and group members would carry out whatever sugges-
tions they cared to that were handed down in Welch’s monthly Bulletin. They
might write the director of the Boy Scouts to ask why the president of the
Communist-infiltrated National Council of Churches addressed the National
Jamboree; or they might send postcards to congressmen showing the map the
“Negro Soviet Republic” Communists proposed be carved out of the American
South in 1928. They might be asked to attend meetings of “Communist fronts”
like the ACLU to shout down “disloyal” speakers, or to urge their dentist and
the airlines to display National Review and Human Events on their magazine
racks, or to form a local chapter of a Birch front organization like Support Your
Local Police. And, most of all, members were instructed to keep informed by
reading books like Tito: Moscow ’s Trojan Horse and I Saw Poland Betrayed.
Welch could have remained obscure forever if not for his success. Disillu-
sionment with the GOP after Nixon’s 1960 defeat swelled the membership
rolls; by February of 1961 the John Birch Society was large enough that when
Welch wanted them to write their congressmen demanding the impeachment of Earl Warren for favoring civil libertarians over read-hunters, letters flooded into Capitol Hill. Enterprising reporters took note.
the room in diamond fonnation, an old Communist trick to give the appear-
ance of greater number to manufacture acclaim for their speakers. The next
day, the surprising degree of conservatism among college students was widely
noted in newspapers around the country. Murray Kempton would write in The
Progressive, “We must assume that the conservative revival is the youth move-
ment of the ’6os.” And another wave of disaffected young collegians read the
reports and signed on with the battalions‘Ban'y Goldwater was not sure he
wanted to lead.
The day Young Americans for Freedom rallied in New York, an issue of Time
reporting on a group that made YAF look tame found its way to mailboxes.
The John Birch Society, apparently, believed General Dwight David
Eisenhower to be a secret agent of the Intemational Communist Conspiracy.
The group’s absolute leader was a man named Robert Welch; there was a gov-
erning council (including Manion and several of his Americans for Goldwater
stalwarts, and three past presidents of the National Association of Manufactur-
ers), but it was said that its main purpose was to choose a successor should
Welch be assassinated by Communists. Every year the Society published a
“scoreboard” of how far down the road to complete Communist subversion
country was; the United States was 50 to 60 percent, Iceland 80 to I00
According to Time, the John Birch Society was “a goose step away
formation of goon squads.”
To congressmen, the eerily uniform flood of letters they had been receiv-
ing calling for the impeachment of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren
finally made sense: that was one of the Society’s four goals—along with saving
HUAC, abolishing the income tax, and banning the sale of goods manufactured
in Communist countries. The media coverage opened the eyes of community
groups whose meetings were being disrupted by unfamiliar faces shouting
“republic!” every time someone called America a “democracy” (it was Society
doctrine that “democracy” meant rule by mob, and Society tactics to press the
case through heckling) and the eyes of PTA leaders who had learned to rue
sudden spikes in membership: Welch urged members to join the local PTA and
“go to work to take it over.”
By April of I961 you had to have been living in a cave not to know about
Robert Welch and his John Birch Society. The daily barrage of reports left
Americans baffled and scared at this freakish power suddenly revealed in their
midst. It also left some eager to leam where they could sign up.
Robert Harold Winbome Welch was born in I899 on a farm in Chowan
County, North Carolina. His people were simple farmers and Southern Baptist
' ‘sters. Young Robert was a genius. He left home to enroll at the state uni-
at twelve then eamed a commission to the Naval Academy when he
verslgalventeen. He decided he wanted to be a writer. The Navy being over-
Zgfzked with officers at the close of the Great War, he was let go. But his nerve
failed him. He enrolled at the Harvard Law School instead—then quit to
quickly raise the means to win the hand of the daughter of a wealthy Akron,
Q1110, businessman. His brother had a candy business outside Boston. So candy
it would be. _
Welch specialized in sales. The frustrated writer’s first book, in I941, The
Road to Salesmanship, proclaimed selling a profession more important than
law or medicine. “Instead of the bread and circuses handed out to idle mobs by
politicians,” salesmen drove progress itself by inducing Americans to want
more things and then to strive to better themselves in order to earn enough to
buy them. Wartime experience as an Office of Price Administration consultant
for the candy industry hardened Welch’s conservatism; lobbying as chair of the
Washington Committee of the National Confectioners Association (he was
named Candy Industry Man of the Year in 1947) petrified it. He masteredthe
signal vocation of America’s domestic Cold Warriors: compiling, organizing,
and cross-referencing files—who had belonged to what? who had been where?
who knew whom‘? He devoured history, newspapers, socialist organs; and
became convinced (incredulous that anyone would want to deliver more power
into the hands of an all-powerful central government) that Westem Europe’s
welfare states were products of a Communist conspiracy—and that the con-
spiracy was gaining ground here, too. He began taking longer and longer trips
abroad, winning audiences with men like Chiang Kai-shek and Konrad Ade-
nauer. In 1950 Welch ran for the Republican nomination for lieutenant gover-
nor of Massachusetts. He declared his platform the United States Constitution.
He came in fourth. Elective office would not be his métier.
‘ The next April, President Truman relieved General MacArthur of his com-
inand in Korea. There followed an unprecedented outpouring of popular emo-
tion for the general—he was, said one Republican congressman, “a great hunk
Of God in the flesh”—-and a triumphant national tour. Alongside McCarthy’s
Ongoing inquisition, it marked a new tendency on the American right: it was
that much easier to believe you were doing patriotic work even-—perhaps espe-
bially-—if you defied the govemment. In I951 Welch traveled New England
decrying the aid and comfort Dean Acheson’s State Department was providing
the Communists. In one town a listener wrote a critical open letter to a local
Wasn’t McCarthyism fast becoming a political liability for ‘the
Party? Welch, compelled to answer, spent the next two weeks in a
stupor.
and
By the time of the John Birch Society’s sudden national coming-out in the
spring of 1961, they had 20,000 members (or 60,000, or 100,000; eStiInates
van'ed—-but even 20,000 was greater than the membership of the Communist
Party of the United States in its i93os heyday). An office down the road from
Welch’s fieldstone~and-frame home in the Boston suburb of Belmont employed
some twenty-eight full-time staffers and an equal number of volunteers, who
dumped $4,000 worth of mail each week at the Belmont post office next door.
An Iowa pen company gave an expensive fountain model as a premium to each
new member. Centralia, Missouri, was a virtual Birch fiefdom; the owner of
the factory that employed half the town’s workforce made membership practi-
cally a condition for advancement. By I962 Welch was raising over a million
dollars a year. '
Since McCarthy’s day, liberals had been wondering why apparently intel-
ligent people could believe that the wrong kind of politics in the United States
would inexorably hasten its takeover by the USSR. It was concluded that these
were people who feared for their status in a rapidly changing, complex urban
society, who pined for a simpler past (they were for the “repeal of industrial-
ism,” said Commentary, which was odd, since most Birch leaders were
industrialists). The cognoscenti neglected the simplest answer: people were
afraid of internal Communist takeover because the govemment had been
telling them to be afraid—at least since I947, when George F. Kennan argued
in “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” the founding document of U.S. Cold War
doctrine, excerpted in Reader’s Digest, that “exhibitions of indecision, dis-
unity, and intemal disintegration within this country have an exhilarating effect
on the whole Communist movement.” Through the 1960s, AFL-CIO president
George Meany loved to flatter rank-and-file members that they were the first
line of resistance against the Communists: in Czechoslovakiafhe said, “they
controlled the trade union movement, and within seven days they controlled
the country.” Attomey General Robert Kennedy told a I961 press conference,
“Communist espionage here in this country is more active than it has ever
been.” (There had been none to speak of since World War II.) Army recruits
saw films like Red Nightmare, narrated by Jack Webb, which depicted an
ersatz American town deep within the Soviet interior where spies were suppos-
edly training in indigenous American arts like sipping sodas at drugstore foun-
tains in order to infiltrate the United States. You could no less avoid breathing
in a bit of paranoia in Cold War America, in fact, than you could soot in
Charles Dickens’s Manchester. Did Birchers and their ideological cognates
claim that dangerous “fallout” from nuclear testing was a hoax? So did the
Atomic Energy Commission, all through the 1950s. And it was the “discover-
ies". of the CIA chief of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, not Robert
Welch, that a KGB “Master Plan” allowed no Soviet to defect to the United
States except as a KGB double agent (thus bona fide Soviet defectors were
often kept naked in isolation in a brightly lit room and had to submit to cruel
fhrge-year interrogations to force them to give up their KGB secrets); and that
mere was a second, secret Kremlin inside the official Kremlin whose existence
could only be inferred because no one who had ever been inside it was ever
‘allowed beyond its walls.
It shouldn’t have been surprising that the John Birch Society was able to
win a membership in the tens of thousands in an officially encouraged atmo-
sphere of fear and suspicion. The John Birch Society was also a voice for con-
servatism—its motto was “Less govemment and more responsibility”—at a
time when the Republican Party was turning more liberal. At a time when a
housewife from suburban New York, Betty Friedan, was writing a book argu-
ing that the alienation and boredom of housewives was Amen'ca’s “problem
that has no name,” the Society gave housewives world-historic purpose to their
lives. (“I just don’t have time for anything,” one told a Time magazine inter-
viewer. “I’m fighting Communism three nights a week.”) And last but not
least, being a Bircher was fun. The fellowship was vouchsafed by the rule that
when a chapter grew bigger than two dozen, it was split in half—~the rationale
being that unwieldy chapters were easier for the Communists to infiltrate. The
groups’ main activity was monthly meetings in members’ living rooms (at
which the main activity might be watching a film of a lecture given by Welch,
who looked a bit like TV’s Mr. McGoo and, eerily, recited his interminable
talks from memory); and group members would carry out whatever sugges-
tions they cared to that were handed down in Welch’s monthly Bulletin. They
might write the director of the Boy Scouts to ask why the president of the
Communist-infiltrated National Council of Churches addressed the National
Jamboree; or they might send postcards to congressmen showing the map the
“Negro Soviet Republic” Communists proposed be carved out of the American
South in 1928. They might be asked to attend meetings of “Communist fronts”
like the ACLU to shout down “disloyal” speakers, or to urge their dentist and
the airlines to display National Review and Human Events on their magazine
racks, or to form a local chapter of a Birch front organization like Support Your
Local Police. And, most of all, members were instructed to keep informed by
reading books like Tito: Moscow ’s Trojan Horse and I Saw Poland Betrayed.
Welch could have remained obscure forever if not for his success. Disillu-
sionment with the GOP after Nixon’s 1960 defeat swelled the membership
rolls; by February of 1961 the John Birch Society was large enough that when
Welch wanted them to write their congressmen demanding the impeachment of Earl Warren for favoring civil libertarians over read-hunters, letters flooded into Capitol Hill. Enterprising reporters took note.
Vestal Fire
by Compton McKenzie
She was still beautiful, but she had allowed time and the
weather to beat her complexion into numberless fine
wrinkles, and the loose gowns that might have become her
slim youth looked dowdy now on the angularity to which
that slimness had turned. Yet she still diffused on "the
sensitive observer a fragrance of the romantic ’eighties and
made him think of early volumes of Browning he had come
across marked here and there in a fine hand beside the
poems with dates and the names of fair old towns like
Ravenna or Assisi. ' Indeed, she resembled nothing so much
as a roseleaf pressed between the pages of a book, and those
who were privileged to enjoy her friendship and sit talking
to her in the little study whose windows looked out across
olive-orchards to the Salernian gulf never left her company
without feeling the richer for it. The walls were crowded
with the faded photographs of cinquecento pictures and
reproductions of Della Robbia plaques, and the tops of
her book-cupboards were thronged with the plaster casts
of famous statues. You felt that she had drawn near to
beauty along byways of her own and never travelled down
the high-road of fashion. Like most people on Sirene she
had her eccentricity. It was her habit to take the gloomiest
view of everything. She loved to think that people were
ill or unhappy or miserable, not because she yearned to
sympathize with them or help them, and certainly not
from any malice, ‘but purely to indulge a mental luxury
of her own. Joseph Neave could not bear her pessimism,
which was extreme in the Villino Paradiso where she could
revelin the gloomiest forebodings about his own health and
at the same time sigh over the anxiety he must be causing
to his poor wife, for whom she had a great affection, con-
sidering her to be on the whole the most worthy object of
compassion in all Sirene. .
and
but once upon a time there was none of that kind of stufii-
ness in Sirene. Only about fifteen years before this date
an English nobleman made a regular practice of walking‘
down from Anasirene to pay visits in Sirene with nothing
on but a top-hat. In fact the tenant of the Villa Parnasso,
now owned by Scudamore the American scholar, had grilles
put in the seven doors that gave ingress to its hallowed
shades so that when she was having a tea-party she could
inspect Lord G—-—-’s attire before admitting him. And
if any young unmarried girls were present nothing would
induce her to let him in, which everybody used to think
so sweet and hold-fashioned of dear Mrs. W-———. Then
there was a Slovakian painter called Czcszckz who used to
take ofil all his clothes and sit on the wall of Mrs. Pape’s
Villa Eolia, reading The Little F lowers of St. Francis. Even
her benevolence could not stand this, and she sent for
Beccafico the guafdia to dress Czcszckz and take him away.
As even in the coldest weather he only wore one of his wife’s
nightgowns, this should have been easy, but Beccafico had
to chase -him all over Sirene as a butterfly-hunter pursues
his game before he managed to envelop him. Beccafico
was so much exhausted by the chase that he drank even
more ‘wine than usual to restore himself, with the result that
he lay supine for three days and three nights afterwards,
during which time no less than six outrages against pudor
of a much graver nature were committed in public, and
the island was in worse repute than at any time since the
days of Tiberius. In these days of course nothing like that
could happen. Except for a few Bolsheviks who haunt with
terra-cotta nudity the almost inaccessible coves at the foot
of Monte Ventoso nobody offends against pudor, and all
bathing-dresses must conform to the design approved by
the rindaco and are not licensed until they have been
measured with the municipal tape. I
Carlyle once said that Herbert Spencer was the most
unending ass in Christendom. He had not met the Count.
and
Myself I intend to make excava-
tions in searching for the lost books of Elephantis. What
villainy that these books into which the most poetic cour-
tezan who has ever lived inserted all which she knew of her
profession will be no longer at our service ! I adore to think
of the venerable Tiberius studying them in the seclusion of
this ile encbantée . . .” and so on till surmienly Michele
swung round from the box as they were pass' g a rose-hung
gateway and shouted: e
“ Anglish chimetery.” '
“ Fine,” acknowledged the Harvard philosopher, who was
beginning to think Marsac a bore. ,
“ Many Anglish and American deads inside,” Michele
commented, cracking his whip with a macabre relish.
She was still beautiful, but she had allowed time and the
weather to beat her complexion into numberless fine
wrinkles, and the loose gowns that might have become her
slim youth looked dowdy now on the angularity to which
that slimness had turned. Yet she still diffused on "the
sensitive observer a fragrance of the romantic ’eighties and
made him think of early volumes of Browning he had come
across marked here and there in a fine hand beside the
poems with dates and the names of fair old towns like
Ravenna or Assisi. ' Indeed, she resembled nothing so much
as a roseleaf pressed between the pages of a book, and those
who were privileged to enjoy her friendship and sit talking
to her in the little study whose windows looked out across
olive-orchards to the Salernian gulf never left her company
without feeling the richer for it. The walls were crowded
with the faded photographs of cinquecento pictures and
reproductions of Della Robbia plaques, and the tops of
her book-cupboards were thronged with the plaster casts
of famous statues. You felt that she had drawn near to
beauty along byways of her own and never travelled down
the high-road of fashion. Like most people on Sirene she
had her eccentricity. It was her habit to take the gloomiest
view of everything. She loved to think that people were
ill or unhappy or miserable, not because she yearned to
sympathize with them or help them, and certainly not
from any malice, ‘but purely to indulge a mental luxury
of her own. Joseph Neave could not bear her pessimism,
which was extreme in the Villino Paradiso where she could
revelin the gloomiest forebodings about his own health and
at the same time sigh over the anxiety he must be causing
to his poor wife, for whom she had a great affection, con-
sidering her to be on the whole the most worthy object of
compassion in all Sirene. .
and
but once upon a time there was none of that kind of stufii-
ness in Sirene. Only about fifteen years before this date
an English nobleman made a regular practice of walking‘
down from Anasirene to pay visits in Sirene with nothing
on but a top-hat. In fact the tenant of the Villa Parnasso,
now owned by Scudamore the American scholar, had grilles
put in the seven doors that gave ingress to its hallowed
shades so that when she was having a tea-party she could
inspect Lord G—-—-’s attire before admitting him. And
if any young unmarried girls were present nothing would
induce her to let him in, which everybody used to think
so sweet and hold-fashioned of dear Mrs. W-———. Then
there was a Slovakian painter called Czcszckz who used to
take ofil all his clothes and sit on the wall of Mrs. Pape’s
Villa Eolia, reading The Little F lowers of St. Francis. Even
her benevolence could not stand this, and she sent for
Beccafico the guafdia to dress Czcszckz and take him away.
As even in the coldest weather he only wore one of his wife’s
nightgowns, this should have been easy, but Beccafico had
to chase -him all over Sirene as a butterfly-hunter pursues
his game before he managed to envelop him. Beccafico
was so much exhausted by the chase that he drank even
more ‘wine than usual to restore himself, with the result that
he lay supine for three days and three nights afterwards,
during which time no less than six outrages against pudor
of a much graver nature were committed in public, and
the island was in worse repute than at any time since the
days of Tiberius. In these days of course nothing like that
could happen. Except for a few Bolsheviks who haunt with
terra-cotta nudity the almost inaccessible coves at the foot
of Monte Ventoso nobody offends against pudor, and all
bathing-dresses must conform to the design approved by
the rindaco and are not licensed until they have been
measured with the municipal tape. I
Carlyle once said that Herbert Spencer was the most
unending ass in Christendom. He had not met the Count.
and
Myself I intend to make excava-
tions in searching for the lost books of Elephantis. What
villainy that these books into which the most poetic cour-
tezan who has ever lived inserted all which she knew of her
profession will be no longer at our service ! I adore to think
of the venerable Tiberius studying them in the seclusion of
this ile encbantée . . .” and so on till surmienly Michele
swung round from the box as they were pass' g a rose-hung
gateway and shouted: e
“ Anglish chimetery.” '
“ Fine,” acknowledged the Harvard philosopher, who was
beginning to think Marsac a bore. ,
“ Many Anglish and American deads inside,” Michele
commented, cracking his whip with a macabre relish.
Friday, January 02, 2015
Audrey Hepburn and Breakfast at Tiffany's
from the book by Sam Wasson:
During the Second World War, strict rationing rendered opu-
lence outré, and simplicity politically correct. That all changed
on February 12, 1947, when Christian Dior launched his
first postwar line, christened the “New Look” by AIT16fiC311
Harper’s Bazaar. With his yards and yards of soft sumptuous
fabrics, tight fitted jackets nipped in the waist, and full bloom-
ing skirts, Dior did away with the brawny shoulder pads and
durable wartime fabrics of the early forties. In their place, he
reintroduced the hourglass figure and the long-lost bust: all
at once, women were allowed to be womanly again. (In fact,
the New Look was so lavish, it was briefly condemned by the
British Board of Trade.)
Now, to be truly faconnable, a woman needed girdles and
waist cinchers. For those who couldn’t afford Victorian corsetry,
there was the practical (but shapely) shirtwaist dress, which, in
the words of its master, Edith Head, was "tight enough to show
you’re a woman and loose enough to show you’re a lady.” In
other words, the New Look was Edith’s Look, but by this time it
was an old look. What Sabrina Fairchild needed was to look new.
Through the late fifties and early sixties, Peter Gurm was
the epitome of cool. Where most hard-boiled PIs were as
burned out as the hoods they trailed, Gunn was an Ivy-league
playboy closer to James Bond th‘an Philip Marlowe and intro-
duced network audiences to the next thing in soigné. With
the aid of his cinematographers, Edwards developed a highly
cinematic look for his show, complete with severe chiaroscuro
(not the regular dull grays), eccentric angles, and disorienting
camera moves. Adding to the hipness was Henry Mancini’s
chart-topping theme, which used modern jazz at a time when
most TV was scored with a more formal orchestral sound.
jurow and Shepherd wanted that hip feeling for Breakfast at
T ifianys.
Blake was working on a picture called High Time when they
called in May of 1960. No matter what they told him, he knew
they were taking a chance.
BENG CflO$EY EN A E#RE$S
Blake Edwards, a pipe lodged in his mouth, settled down in his
director’s chair stationed squarely behind the camera and took
a long, slow look around the set.
What a mess. High Time, a moronic “teenage” comedy with
Bing Crosby, was undoubtedly the most useless picture he’d
ever made. What the hell was the studio thinking? The scene
they were setting up called for Bing to dance around in a
pink taffeta hoopskirt, but that wasn’t the problem (actually,
I
LIKING IT "K39
it was the funniest thing in the picture); the problem was the
story, the dialogue, the acting, dealing with Bing himself, and
the inexorable reality that no matter what he did or how smart
he was about it, there was no way Blake could clean up the
mess. What do you do with a movie about a fifty-year-old
widower who decides to go back to college, hang with jive
talkers, pledge a frat, rally for the big game, and romance a
French professor on the school hayride? All the world’s whip
pans, flashy dissolves, and state-of-the-art postproduction
effects-—if Blake used them (and he did)—would only make
him look like a plastic surgeon cutting up a corpse.
Okay, so he Wasn’t yet Billy Wilder, but why did he say yes
to this shit? Right: he was making money. But that was about
all he was making.
High Time was proof positive that the industry was panicked
about the new generation. Who were these kids? They had
sex, they did drugs, and like everyone else, they went to the
movies. But what did they want to see? In 1960, no one in
Hollywood had a clue: the year’s top films were Swiss Family
Robinson and Psycho. Meanwhile, the success of foreign films
by Bergman, Fellini, and—~if you wore a beret-—Antonioni were
challenging the home court advantage. Should the studios get
artier too? Ordinarily, getting young people to the movies was
a cinch for Hollywood because kids Wanted to see what their
parents saw. Way back when, families used to go to the movies
together. That’s what Mickey Rooney was for. Shirley Temple,
Depression-era antitoxin, was a box-office queen from 1934 to
1939. But this strange generation of youngsters—-“teenagers”
they were called——was impossible to pin down.
During the Second World War, strict rationing rendered opu-
lence outré, and simplicity politically correct. That all changed
on February 12, 1947, when Christian Dior launched his
first postwar line, christened the “New Look” by AIT16fiC311
Harper’s Bazaar. With his yards and yards of soft sumptuous
fabrics, tight fitted jackets nipped in the waist, and full bloom-
ing skirts, Dior did away with the brawny shoulder pads and
durable wartime fabrics of the early forties. In their place, he
reintroduced the hourglass figure and the long-lost bust: all
at once, women were allowed to be womanly again. (In fact,
the New Look was so lavish, it was briefly condemned by the
British Board of Trade.)
Now, to be truly faconnable, a woman needed girdles and
waist cinchers. For those who couldn’t afford Victorian corsetry,
there was the practical (but shapely) shirtwaist dress, which, in
the words of its master, Edith Head, was "tight enough to show
you’re a woman and loose enough to show you’re a lady.” In
other words, the New Look was Edith’s Look, but by this time it
was an old look. What Sabrina Fairchild needed was to look new.
Through the late fifties and early sixties, Peter Gurm was
the epitome of cool. Where most hard-boiled PIs were as
burned out as the hoods they trailed, Gunn was an Ivy-league
playboy closer to James Bond th‘an Philip Marlowe and intro-
duced network audiences to the next thing in soigné. With
the aid of his cinematographers, Edwards developed a highly
cinematic look for his show, complete with severe chiaroscuro
(not the regular dull grays), eccentric angles, and disorienting
camera moves. Adding to the hipness was Henry Mancini’s
chart-topping theme, which used modern jazz at a time when
most TV was scored with a more formal orchestral sound.
jurow and Shepherd wanted that hip feeling for Breakfast at
T ifianys.
Blake was working on a picture called High Time when they
called in May of 1960. No matter what they told him, he knew
they were taking a chance.
BENG CflO$EY EN A E#RE$S
Blake Edwards, a pipe lodged in his mouth, settled down in his
director’s chair stationed squarely behind the camera and took
a long, slow look around the set.
What a mess. High Time, a moronic “teenage” comedy with
Bing Crosby, was undoubtedly the most useless picture he’d
ever made. What the hell was the studio thinking? The scene
they were setting up called for Bing to dance around in a
pink taffeta hoopskirt, but that wasn’t the problem (actually,
I
LIKING IT "K39
it was the funniest thing in the picture); the problem was the
story, the dialogue, the acting, dealing with Bing himself, and
the inexorable reality that no matter what he did or how smart
he was about it, there was no way Blake could clean up the
mess. What do you do with a movie about a fifty-year-old
widower who decides to go back to college, hang with jive
talkers, pledge a frat, rally for the big game, and romance a
French professor on the school hayride? All the world’s whip
pans, flashy dissolves, and state-of-the-art postproduction
effects-—if Blake used them (and he did)—would only make
him look like a plastic surgeon cutting up a corpse.
Okay, so he Wasn’t yet Billy Wilder, but why did he say yes
to this shit? Right: he was making money. But that was about
all he was making.
High Time was proof positive that the industry was panicked
about the new generation. Who were these kids? They had
sex, they did drugs, and like everyone else, they went to the
movies. But what did they want to see? In 1960, no one in
Hollywood had a clue: the year’s top films were Swiss Family
Robinson and Psycho. Meanwhile, the success of foreign films
by Bergman, Fellini, and—~if you wore a beret-—Antonioni were
challenging the home court advantage. Should the studios get
artier too? Ordinarily, getting young people to the movies was
a cinch for Hollywood because kids Wanted to see what their
parents saw. Way back when, families used to go to the movies
together. That’s what Mickey Rooney was for. Shirley Temple,
Depression-era antitoxin, was a box-office queen from 1934 to
1939. But this strange generation of youngsters—-“teenagers”
they were called——was impossible to pin down.
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