For his star, DeMille used the legendary stage actress Fannie Ward in only her second movie. Ward wasn't famous for her acting, but for her youthful appear-ance in spite of the fact that she was at least forty-three years old and working in a medium whose harsh lighting could make thirty-year-olds look fifty. Geraldine Farrar characterized her as "a baffling ingenue [who] carried the inevitable parasol to shade her baby-like complexion, which she candidly confessed 'took hours to fix up.' " Besides a complicated makeup regimen, Ward also endured several face-lifts as did her husband, Jack Dean. DeMille's casting instincts led him to the young Japanese actor Sessue Hay-akawa, who responded with an astonishing portrayal keying on sexual malice. In outline, Hayakawa's character is the heavy, but the actor's sexual magnetism is so intense, his acting so contained, that the audience's sympathy invariably gravitates toward him rather than Ward's silly society bitch.
_____
Hopper asked about DeMille's closed office door. "Shhh", he was told, "Mr. DeMille is thinking!"
"Is that possible?" Hopper asked.
__________
She walked across the white bearskin rug to DeMille's desk. Behind him there were two stained glass windows. The precisely calibrated effect was of a lord in his Gothic castle. "He liked that idea of being, shall I say, remote from you," wrote Julia. "He told me later that he got his desire for such an office from David Belasco, for whom he had worked as a young man." He glanced at her story idea. Faye wondered if there was a part for her in his next picture. "Yes, I think so," he told her, "but you will never be a star in pictures. "Because you haven't the right kind of personality. You are the 'cute' type.
In the theater we call them soubrette. Also, your face is too round, your nose too long and I want you to write. He told her that he thought she might be able to alternate with Miss Macpherson as a scriptwriter.
________
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
At Freddie's by the brilliant Penelope Fitzgerald
The manager said that this was a matter for his staff. It seemed, however, that the Temple School, with its forty years of Shakespearean training, was carrying on the old traditions in a state not far from destitution, with crippled furniture, undraped windows, and floors bare to the point of indecency, and it was not to be believed that a prosperous theatre like the Alexandra would stand by and watch such things happen without giving a helping hand. The manager knew what was happening to him, even though it was for the first time, for he had heard it described by others. He was being Freddied, or, alternatively, Shakespeare would have been pleased, dear-ed, although the phrase had not passed between them. Thirty-seven minutes later he had agreed to send the old covers and carpeting round to the Temple, on indefinite loan. He felt unwell. Weakmindedness makes one feel as poorly as any other over-indulgence.
Everyone who knew the Temple School will remember the distinctive smell of Freddie's office. Not precisely disagree-able, it suggested a church vestry where old clothes hang and flowers moulder in the sink, but respect is called for just the same. It was not a place for seeing clearly. Light, in the morning, entered at an angle, through a quantity of dust. When the desk lamp was switched on at length the circle of light, although it repelled outsiders, was weak. Freddie herself, to anyone who was summoned into the room, appeared in the shadow of her armchair as a more solid piece of darkness. Only a chance glint struck from her spectacles and the rim of great semi-precious brooches, pinned on at random. Even her extent was uncertain, since the material of her skirts and the chair seemed much the same. The covers from the Alexandra, of drab crimson with bald patches, were put on to the furniture as soon as they arrived, but made, after all, little difference. Opposite was another, much smaller, armchair, which, though Freddie kept no pets, gave the impression that a dog had just been sitting in it. Placed there, the caller had to meet Freddie's eyes, which, though not at all bright — they were of a pale boiled blue — expressed an interest so keen as to approach disbelief. The face, like the ample skirt, was creased with lines, as though both had been crumpled together at the same time. What might a good ironing not reveal? Although Freddie usually began by saying something gracious, the caller's first instinct was that of self-preser-vation, or even to make sure that the door, now to the rear, could be reached in a hurry. Ye; in fact no one left before they had to. The margin between alarm and fascination was soon crossed. Partly it was her voice, a croak suggestive of long suffering, which adjusted itself little by little, as though any difficulties were worthwhile, to caressing flattery. This flattery usually saved Freddie money. — I hope you don't mind the room being rather cold, I don't notice it myself while I'm talking to you — knowing that this kind of thing could be seen through, but that in itself constituted a further flattery. Certainly she could create her own warmth, a glow like the very first effects of alcohol. As to what she wanted, no mystery was made. She wanted to get the advantage, but on the other hand human beings interested her so much that it must always be an advantage to meet another one. When she smiled there was a certain lopsidedness, the shade of a deformity, or, it could be, the aftermath of a slight stroke. Freddie never tried to conceal this — Take a good look — she advised her pupils — I'm not nearly so amusing as you're going to be when you imitate me. — But the smile itself was priceless in its benevolence, and in its amusement that benevolence could still exist. One had to smile with her, perhaps regretting it later. Her shabbiness was a grossly unfair reproach. Her devotion to the things of the spirit was a menace. The trouble, of course, was that she never asked anything exactly for herself. Why, after all, had the Alexandra parted with so many lengths of rep and velvet? Why did the Royal Opera House, at every end-of-season auction, allow so much indulgence to bids from the Temple School?
and
At this point it came to her that she was not good enough for Pierce, and nobody can bear this feeling for any length of time. Lyons teashops might almost have been particularly designed for the resolution of such awkward situations, and perhaps when, fifteen years later, the "teashops were dis-continued as uneconomic the situations disappeared with them. In a Lyons, as Hannah had reflected, the limits of communication had to be reached by seven o'clock, while at the same time it was necessary to share a table or at all events to sit very close to other customers, so that although everyone restricted their elbows, their 'bodies and their newspapers and by a long established convention showed no signs of understanding what they overheard, they provided all the same a certain check on human intimacy. The rosy-tinted looking-glasses on every wall also acted as a restraint on the undemanding clientele who would rather keep their eyes on their plates than be caught looking at their own reflexions. At Lyons, the females, if escorted, sat at a table and 'kept the place' while the males queued for what was needed and carried it back, as their remote forbears had done, with difficulty. During this process the tea overflowed into the saucers. Later the sugar, which was only put out on every fourth table, had to be borrowed and exchanged. There was always a good deal of apologising at Lyons.
and
Perhaps the whole thing would turn out in the end to have been a help to hom and next tme he wouldn't make a mess of it. But unfortunately, as she knew, real life is not susceptible to rehearsals.
Everyone who knew the Temple School will remember the distinctive smell of Freddie's office. Not precisely disagree-able, it suggested a church vestry where old clothes hang and flowers moulder in the sink, but respect is called for just the same. It was not a place for seeing clearly. Light, in the morning, entered at an angle, through a quantity of dust. When the desk lamp was switched on at length the circle of light, although it repelled outsiders, was weak. Freddie herself, to anyone who was summoned into the room, appeared in the shadow of her armchair as a more solid piece of darkness. Only a chance glint struck from her spectacles and the rim of great semi-precious brooches, pinned on at random. Even her extent was uncertain, since the material of her skirts and the chair seemed much the same. The covers from the Alexandra, of drab crimson with bald patches, were put on to the furniture as soon as they arrived, but made, after all, little difference. Opposite was another, much smaller, armchair, which, though Freddie kept no pets, gave the impression that a dog had just been sitting in it. Placed there, the caller had to meet Freddie's eyes, which, though not at all bright — they were of a pale boiled blue — expressed an interest so keen as to approach disbelief. The face, like the ample skirt, was creased with lines, as though both had been crumpled together at the same time. What might a good ironing not reveal? Although Freddie usually began by saying something gracious, the caller's first instinct was that of self-preser-vation, or even to make sure that the door, now to the rear, could be reached in a hurry. Ye; in fact no one left before they had to. The margin between alarm and fascination was soon crossed. Partly it was her voice, a croak suggestive of long suffering, which adjusted itself little by little, as though any difficulties were worthwhile, to caressing flattery. This flattery usually saved Freddie money. — I hope you don't mind the room being rather cold, I don't notice it myself while I'm talking to you — knowing that this kind of thing could be seen through, but that in itself constituted a further flattery. Certainly she could create her own warmth, a glow like the very first effects of alcohol. As to what she wanted, no mystery was made. She wanted to get the advantage, but on the other hand human beings interested her so much that it must always be an advantage to meet another one. When she smiled there was a certain lopsidedness, the shade of a deformity, or, it could be, the aftermath of a slight stroke. Freddie never tried to conceal this — Take a good look — she advised her pupils — I'm not nearly so amusing as you're going to be when you imitate me. — But the smile itself was priceless in its benevolence, and in its amusement that benevolence could still exist. One had to smile with her, perhaps regretting it later. Her shabbiness was a grossly unfair reproach. Her devotion to the things of the spirit was a menace. The trouble, of course, was that she never asked anything exactly for herself. Why, after all, had the Alexandra parted with so many lengths of rep and velvet? Why did the Royal Opera House, at every end-of-season auction, allow so much indulgence to bids from the Temple School?
and
At this point it came to her that she was not good enough for Pierce, and nobody can bear this feeling for any length of time. Lyons teashops might almost have been particularly designed for the resolution of such awkward situations, and perhaps when, fifteen years later, the "teashops were dis-continued as uneconomic the situations disappeared with them. In a Lyons, as Hannah had reflected, the limits of communication had to be reached by seven o'clock, while at the same time it was necessary to share a table or at all events to sit very close to other customers, so that although everyone restricted their elbows, their 'bodies and their newspapers and by a long established convention showed no signs of understanding what they overheard, they provided all the same a certain check on human intimacy. The rosy-tinted looking-glasses on every wall also acted as a restraint on the undemanding clientele who would rather keep their eyes on their plates than be caught looking at their own reflexions. At Lyons, the females, if escorted, sat at a table and 'kept the place' while the males queued for what was needed and carried it back, as their remote forbears had done, with difficulty. During this process the tea overflowed into the saucers. Later the sugar, which was only put out on every fourth table, had to be borrowed and exchanged. There was always a good deal of apologising at Lyons.
and
Perhaps the whole thing would turn out in the end to have been a help to hom and next tme he wouldn't make a mess of it. But unfortunately, as she knew, real life is not susceptible to rehearsals.
Wednesday, March 04, 2015
Hero
Emir Nuri Shaalan, who led the desert tribes in Syria and the Lebanon mountains was one of the four great men ruling the Ara-bian desert. The others were Feisal's father, Emir Hussein of Mec ca, whose control over the Hejaz, the holy city of Mecca, and the Red Sea ade him formidable; his greatest rival, ibn Saud, emir of the ports m Rashids, a ferocious and implacable warrior who controlled the vast d fol-es-ert space to the east of Hejaz, with his capital at Riyadh, and whose lowers were Wahhabis, fierce Muslim puritans and fundamentalists; and the idrisi, Sayid Mohammed ibn Ali, who controlled the region south of the Hejaz. The competition between the four desert rulers was intense, and in many ways more important to them than any quarrel they might have with Turkey. As to their loyalties to outsiders, Hussein was of course now the ally of Britain and France, supported by the Foreign Office in though he remained London and the Arab Bureau in Cairo, ned always aware of the growing power of ibn Saud. Ibn Saud received support and backing from the government of India and the Colonial Office in London. The idrisi took money from both sides and was notoriously unreliable; and Nuri Shaalan was in the pay of the Turks, though higher bids hough open to from the Allied Powers. British policy, as can be seen, was confused—indeed, when open warfare finally broke out between Hussein and ibn Saud after the end of World War I, the Foreign Office and Cairo backed and supported Hussein, while the Colonial Office and New Delhi backed and supported ibn Saud, so the British taxpayer ended up paying for both sides in that war. None of the four was a Jeffersonian idealist of course Hussein's enemies in Mecca were kept in chains in the dungeons beneath his palace, ibn Saud punished infringements of sharia with public behead-ings, and both the idrisi and Nuri Shaalan were feared despots. Lawrence had already taken the precaution of sending one of Nuri's men on ahead with a message making it clear that they came in peace and sought his hospitality, but, in typical desert fashion, the messenger failed to arrive, and was later found lying in the desert, a desiccated corpse—a victim of thirst or murder—with the remains of his camel beside him. The Howeitat were on the move, as they sought grazing for
the camels, heading northwest along Wadi Sirhan in the direction of Azrak, which was less than 120 miles from Jerusalem to the west, and from Damascus to the north, and fell within Nuri's sphere of influence. Lawrence was now deep behind the Turkish lines, where a large part of the population favored the Ottoman Empire, or was in its pay. When Auda returned, bringing with him more tribesmen as well as the somewhat ambiguous blessing of Nuri Shaalan, Lawrence's relief was quickly ruffled by a burst of overoptimism from Sharif Nasir and Auda, who now proposed to change the objective of the attack from Aqaba to Damascus itself, and raise the tribes of Syria and Lebanon to make an army. Lawrence was alarmed by this. The Turks had more than enough troops in Syria to put down such a rising; besides, Aqaba would become, from the British point of view, a more important conquest than Damas-cus, since it would ensure that as the Arab forces moved north they would provide the desert right wing of any British advance through the Holy Land to Jerusalem. However attached Lawrence was to the Arab cause and to Feisal, he could never altogether forget the demands of British strategy. Like any man who has two masters with opposing interests, he was torn between them. Lawrence's position was equivocal. In theory, at any rate, Sharif Nasir was in command of the expedition, with Auda as his coequal military leader. Lawrence had already found out that neither of them was willing to accept an order from the other, and that his best policy was to win over one at a time to what he wanted to do, playing each man off skillfully against the other, and both of them against Nesib el Bekri, whose only interest was in reaching Damascus. It was obvious to Lawrence that even if all of Syria could be raised against the Turks, which was doubtful, try-ing to take Damascus before the British broke through the Turkish lines at Gaza and while Aqaba remained in Turkish hands would lead to a disaster. By suggesting to Auda that an advance on Damascus would make Sharif Nasir the man of the hour, and to Nasir that raising the local tribes to advance on Damascus would put Auda in effective control of the expedition, Lawrence managed to stave off the change in plans.
the camels, heading northwest along Wadi Sirhan in the direction of Azrak, which was less than 120 miles from Jerusalem to the west, and from Damascus to the north, and fell within Nuri's sphere of influence. Lawrence was now deep behind the Turkish lines, where a large part of the population favored the Ottoman Empire, or was in its pay. When Auda returned, bringing with him more tribesmen as well as the somewhat ambiguous blessing of Nuri Shaalan, Lawrence's relief was quickly ruffled by a burst of overoptimism from Sharif Nasir and Auda, who now proposed to change the objective of the attack from Aqaba to Damascus itself, and raise the tribes of Syria and Lebanon to make an army. Lawrence was alarmed by this. The Turks had more than enough troops in Syria to put down such a rising; besides, Aqaba would become, from the British point of view, a more important conquest than Damas-cus, since it would ensure that as the Arab forces moved north they would provide the desert right wing of any British advance through the Holy Land to Jerusalem. However attached Lawrence was to the Arab cause and to Feisal, he could never altogether forget the demands of British strategy. Like any man who has two masters with opposing interests, he was torn between them. Lawrence's position was equivocal. In theory, at any rate, Sharif Nasir was in command of the expedition, with Auda as his coequal military leader. Lawrence had already found out that neither of them was willing to accept an order from the other, and that his best policy was to win over one at a time to what he wanted to do, playing each man off skillfully against the other, and both of them against Nesib el Bekri, whose only interest was in reaching Damascus. It was obvious to Lawrence that even if all of Syria could be raised against the Turks, which was doubtful, try-ing to take Damascus before the British broke through the Turkish lines at Gaza and while Aqaba remained in Turkish hands would lead to a disaster. By suggesting to Auda that an advance on Damascus would make Sharif Nasir the man of the hour, and to Nasir that raising the local tribes to advance on Damascus would put Auda in effective control of the expedition, Lawrence managed to stave off the change in plans.
Tuesday, March 03, 2015
Cleo
That diplomatic formula mattered—it had been worth its weight in Auletes' gold—but had not previously entailed costly statues of foreign monarchs at sacred addresses in the heart of Rome. It struck an odd chord in a city where humans did not tradition-ally mingle among cult images. Cleopatra may or may not have fully grasped the irregularity of Caesar's tribute; gold statues were not new to her. She would in his villa have acutely felt the oddities of the situation. The very palette of Rome was different. She was accustomed to ocean views, invigorat-ing sea breezes, to sparkling white walls and a cloudless Alexandrian sky. There was no glinting turquoise Mediterranean out her window, no purple light at the end of the day. Nor was there any rapturous architecture. Rome was monochromatic next to the blaze of color to which Cleopatra was accustomed. All was wood and plaster. Music pervaded every aspect of Alexandrian life, where the flutes and lyres, rattles and drums, were everywhere. Only reluctantly did the Romans admit such frivolities to their culture. One apologized for one's ability to dance or play the flute well. "No one dances while he is sober," offered Cicero, the greatest of Roman killjoys, "unless he happens to be a lunatic."* If she spent any time in the thick of the city, Cleopatra found her-self amid a gloomy welter of crooked, congested streets, with no main avenue and no central plan, among muddy pigs and soup vendors and artisans' shops that tumbled out onto footways. By every measure a less salubrious city than Alexandria, Rome was squalid and shapeless, an oriental tangle of narrow, poorly ventilated streets and ceaseless, shutter-creaking commotion, perpetually in shadow, stiflingly hot in
*(Some took Cicero's distaste further. If a man was an excellent piper, it followed that he was a worthless man. "Otherwise he wouldn't be so good a piper," notes Plutarch, quoting approvingly. The axiom did not work to the advantage of Cleopatra's father. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, he would be written off as "not a real man, but a pipe-player and a charlatan.")
summer. Isolated though Cleopatra was on her wooded hill, there were advantages too in Caesar's address. She was at a remove from the incessant hawking and haggling, the pounding of blacksmiths and the hammering of stonemasons, the rattling of chains and squeaking of hoists below. Rome was a city of nonstop construction, as homes collapsed or were torn down regularly. To ease the racket Caesar had curtailed daytime traffic in the streets, with the predictable result: "You have to be a very rich man to get sleep in Rome," asserted Juve-nal, who cursed the evening stampede, and felt he risked his life each time he set foot outside. To be trampled by litters or splattered with mud constituted peripheral dangers. Pedestrians routinely crumpled into hidden hollows. Every window represented a potential assault. Given the frequency with which pots propelled themselves from ledges, the smart man, warned Juvenal, went to dinner only after having made his will. Cleopatra had any number of reasons to yearn for what a Latin poet would later term her "superficially civilized country." At the time of her visit Rome had only just discovered urban design, another Eastern import. You would search in vain for the famous landmarks; the Coliseum, "the last word in amphitheatres," had not yet been built. Nor were the Pantheon or the Baths of Cara-calla. Pompey's theater had been Rome's only structure of distinction; it had inspired Caesar's Forum, which now eclipsed it. Rome remained provincial, but increasingly aware of itself as such. Greece continued to spell culture, elegance, art. If you wanted a secretary, a doctor, an difficult to get a decent copy of anything in Rome, which nursed a animal trainer, a craftsman, you wanted a Greek. And if you wanted healthy inferiority you dearly hoped to find yourself in Alexandria. It was iy inferiority complex as a result. It manifested itself the time-honored way: The Roman waxed superior. His was hardly the first civilization merrily to impugn the one it aspired to be. So the pyra-mids--marvels of engineering and of ancient exactitude, constructed with primitive tools and equally primitive arithmetic—could be reduced to "idle and foolish ostentations of royal wealth." Gulping down his envy with a bracing chaser of contempt, a Roman in Egypt found himself less awed than offended. He wrote off extravagance as detrimental to body and mind, sounding like no one so much as Mark Twain resisting the siren call of Europe. Staring an advanced civiliza-tion straight in the face, the Roman reduced it either to barbarism or decadence. He took refuge in the hard edges and right angles of his own language, even while—sniffing and scorning—he acknowl-edged it to be inferior to the sinuous, supple, all-accommodating Greek tongue. Latin kept its speaker on the straight and narrow. Regrettably, there was no word in that language for "not possessing!' But neither, blessedly, was there a Latin term for "gold-inlay utensils" or "engraved glasses from the warm Nile." With Caesar's overseas campaigns, with Rome's rising might and fortune, the splendors of the Greek world began to penetrate the Ital-ian peninsula. It would be difficult to overstate the ramifications of those imports for Cleopatra. Pompey had only just introduced ebony to Rome. Myrrh and cinnamon, ginger and pepper, were newly arrived. For the first time, decorative pillars graced the entries of pri-vate homes. Only one house in Rome sported marble-paneled walls, although in a few years that home would be rivaled by a hundred oth-ers. The culinary arts flourished, as turbot, stork, and peacock found their place on tables. During Cleopatra's stay the relative virtues of mantis prawns versus African snails were vigorously debated. Hers was a Rome in transition; there were both luxurious entertainments and those who stole the fine linen napkins. Latin literature was in its infancy and Greek literature soon to be discounted, written off—the metaphor was apt—as a beautiful vase full of poisonous snakes. The beauty, of a toga—that plain, natural wool garment, as uncomfortable as it was impractical—was, like the Latin language itself, in the constraints. At his entertainments Caesar arranged for silk awnings, to shade the spectators along the Via Sacra and up the Capitoline Hill. As Alexandrian imports, those awnings automatically qualified as "a barbarian luxury."
With the nouveau riche embrace of the East came those who parsed each import and read in it the end of civilization, the road to degeneracy. To that end Caesar reenacted the city's long-neglected sumptuary laws, designed to curb private expenditures. He was strict on this count as only a lover of magnificence—as the first host in his-tory to offer his guests a selection of four fine wines— can be. He dis-patched agents to confiscate delicacies in the market, to confiscate ornate tableware, midmeal, in private homes. With few exceptions, he prohibited litters, scarlet garments, pearls. To anyone accustomed to Alexandria, the fashion capital of the world, the idea that Caesar's Rome needed sumptuary laws was laughable. A woman who knew when it was time to downgrade her dinnerware could be trusted to dress appropriately, however; Cleopatra may have toned down the wardrobe. A Roman matron wore white, where the Alexandrian woman relished color. And a woman who could calibrate her humor for different audiences knew better than to scorn a dinner that in no way rivaled her fare at home. As has been observed over the millen-nia, luxury is more easily denounced than denied; Caesar's edict was that who weaned himself with difficulty that winter from peacock, giant oysters, and saltwater eel. (Peacock meat was notoriously tough, but popular with some than others. It won few points from Cicero, offend rev: Paat c not the point.) Oysters and eels, Cicero moaned, had never his digestive system as did turnips. Cleopatra thought of the puritans real and purported—among whom she found herself we do not know. We know well what they thought of her. Marriage, and women, were done differently in rome, where female authority was a meaningless concept. (Similarly, for a man to be called effeminate was the worst insult.) The Roman deft. nition of a good woman was an inconspicuous woman, something that defied Cleopatra's training. In Alexandria she needed to make a spectacle of herself Here the mandate was reversed. Not only was a Roman woman without political or legal rights, but she was without a personal name; she carried only the one derived from her father. Caesar had two sisters, both named Julia. Roman women cast their eyes down in public, where they were silent and recessive. They did not issue the dinner invi-tations. They were invisible in intellectual life, represented less often in art than they were in Egypt, where female workers and female pharaohs appear in painting and sculpture, in tomb scenes and on chapel walls, trapping birds, selling goods, or making offerings to the gods. For a foreign sovereign the rules —like the sumptuary laws —did not entirely apply, but Cleopatra could not have felt at her ease.* As always, what kept women pure was the drudge's life. ( Juvenal sup-plied the traditional, formula: "Hard work, short sleep, hands chafed and hardened" from housework.) As a marriage crasher who had somehow hustled herself into Venus's exalted company, Cleopatra unsettled Rome on any number of counts: she was female and for-eign, an Eastern monarch in what still believed itself to be a king-crushing republic, a stand-in for Isis, whose cult was suspect and subversive and whose temples were notorious spots for assignations. Cleopatra confused the categories and flouted convention. Even by modern standards, she posed problems of protocol. If she was the mis-tress of a Roman dictator, was she mistress of the Roman world as well?
(*The prevailing ethos is preserved in the literature. In the Iliad, women are the most perfect things in creation. They are also, as has been observed, as a general rule teas' ing, scolding, thwarting, contradicting, and hoodwinking." In the Greek plays, women have the key parts. There are few outsize female heroines in Roman ture, in which wives come in two varieties: the tyrannical rich and the spencithrlie poor. Roman literature is notably short as well on deceived husbands, a comic stag from Aristophanes to Moliere.)
No matter how she comported herself—at all times she seems to have been as deft with her image as her person—she broke every rule in the book. A queen at home, she was a courtesan out of her country. And she was something more dangerous still: a courtesan with means. Cleopatra was not merely economically independent, but richer than any man in Rome. Her very wealth—the same wealth that had fed Rome during the triumphs—impugned her morals. To wax eloquent on someone's embossed silver, his sumptuous carpets, his marble statuary, was to indict him. The implications were greater for the lesser sex. "There's nothing a woman doesn't allow herself, nothing she considers disgust-ing, once she has put an emerald choker around her neck and has fas-tened giant pearls to her elongated ears," went the logic. In that respect the length of her ears would do more to seal Cleopatra's fate than that of her nose.* Even assuming she had left her best jewelry in Alexandria, she was synonymous in Rome with the "reckless extravagance" of that world. It was no less than her birthright. (A proper Roman woman con-sidered her children her jewels.) By Roman standards, even Cleopatra's eunuchs were rich. This meant that every unpardonable evil in the prof-ligacy family attached itself to her. Well before she became the sorceress oflegend— a reckless, careless destroyer of men—she was suspect as an extrav-agance extravagant weak Easterner, a reckless, careless destroyer of wealth. If moral rbeis it turpitude began with shellfish and metastasized into purple and scarlet o 'less for lbund its ostentatious apogee in pearls, which topped the :ale in Rome. Suetonius invoked them to prove Caesar's luxury.
*(Some took Cicero's distaste further. If a man was an excellent piper, it followed that he was a worthless man. "Otherwise he wouldn't be so good a piper," notes Plutarch, quoting approvingly. The axiom did not work to the advantage of Cleopatra's father. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, he would be written off as "not a real man, but a pipe-player and a charlatan.")
summer. Isolated though Cleopatra was on her wooded hill, there were advantages too in Caesar's address. She was at a remove from the incessant hawking and haggling, the pounding of blacksmiths and the hammering of stonemasons, the rattling of chains and squeaking of hoists below. Rome was a city of nonstop construction, as homes collapsed or were torn down regularly. To ease the racket Caesar had curtailed daytime traffic in the streets, with the predictable result: "You have to be a very rich man to get sleep in Rome," asserted Juve-nal, who cursed the evening stampede, and felt he risked his life each time he set foot outside. To be trampled by litters or splattered with mud constituted peripheral dangers. Pedestrians routinely crumpled into hidden hollows. Every window represented a potential assault. Given the frequency with which pots propelled themselves from ledges, the smart man, warned Juvenal, went to dinner only after having made his will. Cleopatra had any number of reasons to yearn for what a Latin poet would later term her "superficially civilized country." At the time of her visit Rome had only just discovered urban design, another Eastern import. You would search in vain for the famous landmarks; the Coliseum, "the last word in amphitheatres," had not yet been built. Nor were the Pantheon or the Baths of Cara-calla. Pompey's theater had been Rome's only structure of distinction; it had inspired Caesar's Forum, which now eclipsed it. Rome remained provincial, but increasingly aware of itself as such. Greece continued to spell culture, elegance, art. If you wanted a secretary, a doctor, an difficult to get a decent copy of anything in Rome, which nursed a animal trainer, a craftsman, you wanted a Greek. And if you wanted healthy inferiority you dearly hoped to find yourself in Alexandria. It was iy inferiority complex as a result. It manifested itself the time-honored way: The Roman waxed superior. His was hardly the first civilization merrily to impugn the one it aspired to be. So the pyra-mids--marvels of engineering and of ancient exactitude, constructed with primitive tools and equally primitive arithmetic—could be reduced to "idle and foolish ostentations of royal wealth." Gulping down his envy with a bracing chaser of contempt, a Roman in Egypt found himself less awed than offended. He wrote off extravagance as detrimental to body and mind, sounding like no one so much as Mark Twain resisting the siren call of Europe. Staring an advanced civiliza-tion straight in the face, the Roman reduced it either to barbarism or decadence. He took refuge in the hard edges and right angles of his own language, even while—sniffing and scorning—he acknowl-edged it to be inferior to the sinuous, supple, all-accommodating Greek tongue. Latin kept its speaker on the straight and narrow. Regrettably, there was no word in that language for "not possessing!' But neither, blessedly, was there a Latin term for "gold-inlay utensils" or "engraved glasses from the warm Nile." With Caesar's overseas campaigns, with Rome's rising might and fortune, the splendors of the Greek world began to penetrate the Ital-ian peninsula. It would be difficult to overstate the ramifications of those imports for Cleopatra. Pompey had only just introduced ebony to Rome. Myrrh and cinnamon, ginger and pepper, were newly arrived. For the first time, decorative pillars graced the entries of pri-vate homes. Only one house in Rome sported marble-paneled walls, although in a few years that home would be rivaled by a hundred oth-ers. The culinary arts flourished, as turbot, stork, and peacock found their place on tables. During Cleopatra's stay the relative virtues of mantis prawns versus African snails were vigorously debated. Hers was a Rome in transition; there were both luxurious entertainments and those who stole the fine linen napkins. Latin literature was in its infancy and Greek literature soon to be discounted, written off—the metaphor was apt—as a beautiful vase full of poisonous snakes. The beauty, of a toga—that plain, natural wool garment, as uncomfortable as it was impractical—was, like the Latin language itself, in the constraints. At his entertainments Caesar arranged for silk awnings, to shade the spectators along the Via Sacra and up the Capitoline Hill. As Alexandrian imports, those awnings automatically qualified as "a barbarian luxury."
With the nouveau riche embrace of the East came those who parsed each import and read in it the end of civilization, the road to degeneracy. To that end Caesar reenacted the city's long-neglected sumptuary laws, designed to curb private expenditures. He was strict on this count as only a lover of magnificence—as the first host in his-tory to offer his guests a selection of four fine wines— can be. He dis-patched agents to confiscate delicacies in the market, to confiscate ornate tableware, midmeal, in private homes. With few exceptions, he prohibited litters, scarlet garments, pearls. To anyone accustomed to Alexandria, the fashion capital of the world, the idea that Caesar's Rome needed sumptuary laws was laughable. A woman who knew when it was time to downgrade her dinnerware could be trusted to dress appropriately, however; Cleopatra may have toned down the wardrobe. A Roman matron wore white, where the Alexandrian woman relished color. And a woman who could calibrate her humor for different audiences knew better than to scorn a dinner that in no way rivaled her fare at home. As has been observed over the millen-nia, luxury is more easily denounced than denied; Caesar's edict was that who weaned himself with difficulty that winter from peacock, giant oysters, and saltwater eel. (Peacock meat was notoriously tough, but popular with some than others. It won few points from Cicero, offend rev: Paat c not the point.) Oysters and eels, Cicero moaned, had never his digestive system as did turnips. Cleopatra thought of the puritans real and purported—among whom she found herself we do not know. We know well what they thought of her. Marriage, and women, were done differently in rome, where female authority was a meaningless concept. (Similarly, for a man to be called effeminate was the worst insult.) The Roman deft. nition of a good woman was an inconspicuous woman, something that defied Cleopatra's training. In Alexandria she needed to make a spectacle of herself Here the mandate was reversed. Not only was a Roman woman without political or legal rights, but she was without a personal name; she carried only the one derived from her father. Caesar had two sisters, both named Julia. Roman women cast their eyes down in public, where they were silent and recessive. They did not issue the dinner invi-tations. They were invisible in intellectual life, represented less often in art than they were in Egypt, where female workers and female pharaohs appear in painting and sculpture, in tomb scenes and on chapel walls, trapping birds, selling goods, or making offerings to the gods. For a foreign sovereign the rules —like the sumptuary laws —did not entirely apply, but Cleopatra could not have felt at her ease.* As always, what kept women pure was the drudge's life. ( Juvenal sup-plied the traditional, formula: "Hard work, short sleep, hands chafed and hardened" from housework.) As a marriage crasher who had somehow hustled herself into Venus's exalted company, Cleopatra unsettled Rome on any number of counts: she was female and for-eign, an Eastern monarch in what still believed itself to be a king-crushing republic, a stand-in for Isis, whose cult was suspect and subversive and whose temples were notorious spots for assignations. Cleopatra confused the categories and flouted convention. Even by modern standards, she posed problems of protocol. If she was the mis-tress of a Roman dictator, was she mistress of the Roman world as well?
(*The prevailing ethos is preserved in the literature. In the Iliad, women are the most perfect things in creation. They are also, as has been observed, as a general rule teas' ing, scolding, thwarting, contradicting, and hoodwinking." In the Greek plays, women have the key parts. There are few outsize female heroines in Roman ture, in which wives come in two varieties: the tyrannical rich and the spencithrlie poor. Roman literature is notably short as well on deceived husbands, a comic stag from Aristophanes to Moliere.)
No matter how she comported herself—at all times she seems to have been as deft with her image as her person—she broke every rule in the book. A queen at home, she was a courtesan out of her country. And she was something more dangerous still: a courtesan with means. Cleopatra was not merely economically independent, but richer than any man in Rome. Her very wealth—the same wealth that had fed Rome during the triumphs—impugned her morals. To wax eloquent on someone's embossed silver, his sumptuous carpets, his marble statuary, was to indict him. The implications were greater for the lesser sex. "There's nothing a woman doesn't allow herself, nothing she considers disgust-ing, once she has put an emerald choker around her neck and has fas-tened giant pearls to her elongated ears," went the logic. In that respect the length of her ears would do more to seal Cleopatra's fate than that of her nose.* Even assuming she had left her best jewelry in Alexandria, she was synonymous in Rome with the "reckless extravagance" of that world. It was no less than her birthright. (A proper Roman woman con-sidered her children her jewels.) By Roman standards, even Cleopatra's eunuchs were rich. This meant that every unpardonable evil in the prof-ligacy family attached itself to her. Well before she became the sorceress oflegend— a reckless, careless destroyer of men—she was suspect as an extrav-agance extravagant weak Easterner, a reckless, careless destroyer of wealth. If moral rbeis it turpitude began with shellfish and metastasized into purple and scarlet o 'less for lbund its ostentatious apogee in pearls, which topped the :ale in Rome. Suetonius invoked them to prove Caesar's luxury.
Monday, March 02, 2015
Cleopatra
By Stacy Schiff
At the outskirts of Rome a fragrant dusting of cassis, myrrh, and cinnamon hung in the air. Modest tombs and colossal mausoleums lined both sides of the road, as did shrines to Mercury, the patron saint of travelers. If they had not done so already, Caesar's representatives met Cleopatra outside the city walls and directed her, across a wooden bridge, to his large country estate, on the west bank of the Tiber. With assistance, Cleopatra settled on the southeastern part of the Janicu-lum Hill, a fine address if by no means as prestigious as those across town, on the opposite hill. In Caesar's villa she found herself sur-rounded by an extensive collection of painting and sculpture, a colon-naded court, and a mile-long, lushly planted garden, lavish by Roman standards, which to an Egyptian queen was fairly meaningless. By contrast she enjoyed a clear view of the city below. Through the pines and cypresses Cleopatra looked out over the yellowish Tiber to the outlying hills and the red-tile rooftops of Rome, a metropolis that consisted for the most part of a jumble of twisting lanes and densely packed tenements. Rome had recently overtaken Alexandria in popu-lation; in 46 it was home to nearly z million people. On all other levels it qualified as a provincial backwater. It was still the kind of place where a stray dog might deposit a human hand under the breakfast table, where an ox could burst into the dining room. As displacements went, this one was akin to sailing from the court of Versailles to eighteenth-century Philadelphia. In Alexandria, the glorious past Wa,: very much in evidence. Rome's glorious future was from Cleopatra quarters nowhere visible. It was just still possible to mistake which was the Old World and which the New. There is every indication that Cleopatra kept a low profile, low as she could keep under her unusual circumstances: "For she had come to the city with her husband and settled in Caesar's own house, so that he too derived an ill reputation on account of both of them," chides Dio. As everyone knew, Caesar lived in the center of town, near the Forum, with his wife, Calpurnia. Cleopatra's influence and that of her country were all the same much felt, directly and indi-rectly. On his return Caesar had begun to institute a number of reforms drawn from his Egyptian stay, during which he had evidently studied innovation as attentively as tradition. Most conspicuously, he went to work on the Roman calendar, which by 46 had crept three months ahead of the season. For some time a Roman year had con-sisted of 355 days, to which the authorities added an extra month irreg-ularly, when doing so suited their purposes. As Plutarch has it, "Only the priests could say the time, and they, at their pleasure, without giv-ing any notice, slipped in the intercalary month." The result was a thorough mess; at one juncture, Cicero did not know what year he was living in. Caesar adopted the Egyptian calendar of twelve thirty-day months, with an additional five-day period at the end of the year, subsequently deemed "the only intelligent calendar which ever existed in human history." He adopted as well the twelve-hour divi-sion between night and day that he had known in Alexandria. Gener-ally speaking, time was a vaguer, more elastic notion in Rome, where it was subject to perpetual debate.* Cleopatra's astronomers and math-ematicians assisted in Caesar's planning. The result was a bold correc-tion in .6, 4 the last year of muddled reckoning' and one of 445 days, the extra weeks inserted between November and December. The Egyptian episode had exerted a profound influence on Caesar; the only question in the eighteen months to come would be to what degree it had done so.
*As Seneca observed: "Easier for two philosophers to agree than two clocks."
At the outskirts of Rome a fragrant dusting of cassis, myrrh, and cinnamon hung in the air. Modest tombs and colossal mausoleums lined both sides of the road, as did shrines to Mercury, the patron saint of travelers. If they had not done so already, Caesar's representatives met Cleopatra outside the city walls and directed her, across a wooden bridge, to his large country estate, on the west bank of the Tiber. With assistance, Cleopatra settled on the southeastern part of the Janicu-lum Hill, a fine address if by no means as prestigious as those across town, on the opposite hill. In Caesar's villa she found herself sur-rounded by an extensive collection of painting and sculpture, a colon-naded court, and a mile-long, lushly planted garden, lavish by Roman standards, which to an Egyptian queen was fairly meaningless. By contrast she enjoyed a clear view of the city below. Through the pines and cypresses Cleopatra looked out over the yellowish Tiber to the outlying hills and the red-tile rooftops of Rome, a metropolis that consisted for the most part of a jumble of twisting lanes and densely packed tenements. Rome had recently overtaken Alexandria in popu-lation; in 46 it was home to nearly z million people. On all other levels it qualified as a provincial backwater. It was still the kind of place where a stray dog might deposit a human hand under the breakfast table, where an ox could burst into the dining room. As displacements went, this one was akin to sailing from the court of Versailles to eighteenth-century Philadelphia. In Alexandria, the glorious past Wa,: very much in evidence. Rome's glorious future was from Cleopatra quarters nowhere visible. It was just still possible to mistake which was the Old World and which the New. There is every indication that Cleopatra kept a low profile, low as she could keep under her unusual circumstances: "For she had come to the city with her husband and settled in Caesar's own house, so that he too derived an ill reputation on account of both of them," chides Dio. As everyone knew, Caesar lived in the center of town, near the Forum, with his wife, Calpurnia. Cleopatra's influence and that of her country were all the same much felt, directly and indi-rectly. On his return Caesar had begun to institute a number of reforms drawn from his Egyptian stay, during which he had evidently studied innovation as attentively as tradition. Most conspicuously, he went to work on the Roman calendar, which by 46 had crept three months ahead of the season. For some time a Roman year had con-sisted of 355 days, to which the authorities added an extra month irreg-ularly, when doing so suited their purposes. As Plutarch has it, "Only the priests could say the time, and they, at their pleasure, without giv-ing any notice, slipped in the intercalary month." The result was a thorough mess; at one juncture, Cicero did not know what year he was living in. Caesar adopted the Egyptian calendar of twelve thirty-day months, with an additional five-day period at the end of the year, subsequently deemed "the only intelligent calendar which ever existed in human history." He adopted as well the twelve-hour divi-sion between night and day that he had known in Alexandria. Gener-ally speaking, time was a vaguer, more elastic notion in Rome, where it was subject to perpetual debate.* Cleopatra's astronomers and math-ematicians assisted in Caesar's planning. The result was a bold correc-tion in .6, 4 the last year of muddled reckoning' and one of 445 days, the extra weeks inserted between November and December. The Egyptian episode had exerted a profound influence on Caesar; the only question in the eighteen months to come would be to what degree it had done so.
*As Seneca observed: "Easier for two philosophers to agree than two clocks."
Cecil B. DeMille
FRom Empire of Dreams:
As he was readying the production, Cecil wrote the playwright Stewart Edward White, "I am about to produce The Warrens of Virginia, and expect to kill a lot of perfectly good actors and some good horses. Why don't you come down and see the fun?" White responded: "Nothing would please me better ... especially if you will guarantee to kill a lot of actors." Cecil began The Warrens on December 5, finished it on January 9, 1915, and it was released on February 15. Cecil remembered that it was on that picture that
1914-1928 93
he devised what he referred to, with some exaggeration, as "the birth of artificial [screen] lighting." "When we first went to California, everything was sunlight. No artificial light was employed. Having come from the stage, I wanted an effect, so I borrowed a spotlight from an old theater in Los Angeles [DeMille later remembered it was the Mason Opera House] when I was taking a photograph of a spy. The spy was coming through a curtain and I lighted half of his face [with] only just a smash of light from one side, the other side being dark. I saw the effect on the screen and carried out that idea of lighting all through the rest of the picture, that is, a smash of light from one side or the other." When DeMille sent the finished picture east, Sam Goldfish sent a violent telegram: "Have you gone mad? Do you expect us to be able to sell a picture for full price when you show only half of the man?" "This isn't an exaggeration," DeMille would insist when telling the story in later years. "This is exactly as it occurred. . . I was really desperate. As I told you, the director has to go through; he has to do something. So Allah was very kind to me and suggested the phrase 'Rembrandt lighting.' I sent a telegram to New York saying 'If you fellows are so dumb that you don't know Rembrandt lighting when you see it, don't blame me.' The sales department said, 'Rembrandt light-ing! What a sales argument!' They took the picture out and charged the exhibitor twice as much for it because it had Rembrandt lighting." The story sounds a little too well rounded, the stuff of anecdotal history, but both DeMille and Lasky remembered the same set of circumstances and the same responses. Actually, "Rembrandt" lighting soon became "Lasky" lighting, because early filmmakers understood the importance of what a later generation called branding. "I was trying to get composition and light and shadow," DeMille would recall, "and I would say to [Alvin Wyckoff] 'You mustn't make this part so light, under the table mustn't be light—it should be dark and the back corner of the room shouldn't be light—it should be dark.' So they all said, 'He likes it contrasty'— contrasty!—that was the phrase. There were some terrible battles because of that, because that meant expose it for contrast. It didn't mean shadow it, it just meant make the whites whiter and the blacks blacker." DeMille films began to use spotlighting for dramatic effect, in the same way that it was used on the stage: to guide the viewer's eye and to heighten a dramatic moment with harsh pools of light in the midst of darkness. The result, as histo-rian Lea Jacobs noted, is "confined and shallow areas of illumination, sharp-edged shadows and a palpable sense of the directionality of light." DeMille's lighting was innovative for the movies, although it seems likely that he was adapting the techniques of David Belasco to the screen. but his concern with composition and lighting makes him a true innovator in a period where the principal concern was recording a clean unambiguous image.
and
This is the way it was: Visitors stayed at the Hollywood Hotel, a wooden building at Hollywood and Highland that ran half a block fronting on Highland. It looked like a slightly shopworn summer hotel, with rocking chairs lined up on the front veranda. The lobby was small, and in the dining room food was served in white porcelain bowls that looked like bird baths. The rooms had matting instead of carpeting, the beds were iron, the windows had white net curtains, and there was a small closet with three hooks. "The odor," remembered Bessie Lasky, "was like left-over food that had been fried in stale bacon fat." The atmosphere was sleepy and depressing, the boarders "looking blank and useless, rocking alone on the porch, filling the air with futility and gloom, transparent in their shabby clothes." To get to the studio, people would either be picked up by the studio car, or rent horses and ride down Vine Street and tie the horses off in front of the barn with a large wooden sign: "Lasky Studio." Directly across the street was an orange grove with an old stucco house in the middle. People who had never been far west—or far south—would marvel at the orange blossoms and the way their scent could perfume the air for hundreds of yards, or the way the pepper trees on Vine swayed in the breeze. The hotel would send over box lunches: cold chicken, a hard-boiled egg, a piece of tomato, a bread and butter sandwich, and salt and pepper. Chairs would placed around the perimeter of the set. There, remembered Bessie Lasky, "the handsome, picturesque young director in puttees, boots and cap . . . acted out the scenes for the people and put on the best show himself."
As he was readying the production, Cecil wrote the playwright Stewart Edward White, "I am about to produce The Warrens of Virginia, and expect to kill a lot of perfectly good actors and some good horses. Why don't you come down and see the fun?" White responded: "Nothing would please me better ... especially if you will guarantee to kill a lot of actors." Cecil began The Warrens on December 5, finished it on January 9, 1915, and it was released on February 15. Cecil remembered that it was on that picture that
1914-1928 93
he devised what he referred to, with some exaggeration, as "the birth of artificial [screen] lighting." "When we first went to California, everything was sunlight. No artificial light was employed. Having come from the stage, I wanted an effect, so I borrowed a spotlight from an old theater in Los Angeles [DeMille later remembered it was the Mason Opera House] when I was taking a photograph of a spy. The spy was coming through a curtain and I lighted half of his face [with] only just a smash of light from one side, the other side being dark. I saw the effect on the screen and carried out that idea of lighting all through the rest of the picture, that is, a smash of light from one side or the other." When DeMille sent the finished picture east, Sam Goldfish sent a violent telegram: "Have you gone mad? Do you expect us to be able to sell a picture for full price when you show only half of the man?" "This isn't an exaggeration," DeMille would insist when telling the story in later years. "This is exactly as it occurred. . . I was really desperate. As I told you, the director has to go through; he has to do something. So Allah was very kind to me and suggested the phrase 'Rembrandt lighting.' I sent a telegram to New York saying 'If you fellows are so dumb that you don't know Rembrandt lighting when you see it, don't blame me.' The sales department said, 'Rembrandt light-ing! What a sales argument!' They took the picture out and charged the exhibitor twice as much for it because it had Rembrandt lighting." The story sounds a little too well rounded, the stuff of anecdotal history, but both DeMille and Lasky remembered the same set of circumstances and the same responses. Actually, "Rembrandt" lighting soon became "Lasky" lighting, because early filmmakers understood the importance of what a later generation called branding. "I was trying to get composition and light and shadow," DeMille would recall, "and I would say to [Alvin Wyckoff] 'You mustn't make this part so light, under the table mustn't be light—it should be dark and the back corner of the room shouldn't be light—it should be dark.' So they all said, 'He likes it contrasty'— contrasty!—that was the phrase. There were some terrible battles because of that, because that meant expose it for contrast. It didn't mean shadow it, it just meant make the whites whiter and the blacks blacker." DeMille films began to use spotlighting for dramatic effect, in the same way that it was used on the stage: to guide the viewer's eye and to heighten a dramatic moment with harsh pools of light in the midst of darkness. The result, as histo-rian Lea Jacobs noted, is "confined and shallow areas of illumination, sharp-edged shadows and a palpable sense of the directionality of light." DeMille's lighting was innovative for the movies, although it seems likely that he was adapting the techniques of David Belasco to the screen. but his concern with composition and lighting makes him a true innovator in a period where the principal concern was recording a clean unambiguous image.
and
This is the way it was: Visitors stayed at the Hollywood Hotel, a wooden building at Hollywood and Highland that ran half a block fronting on Highland. It looked like a slightly shopworn summer hotel, with rocking chairs lined up on the front veranda. The lobby was small, and in the dining room food was served in white porcelain bowls that looked like bird baths. The rooms had matting instead of carpeting, the beds were iron, the windows had white net curtains, and there was a small closet with three hooks. "The odor," remembered Bessie Lasky, "was like left-over food that had been fried in stale bacon fat." The atmosphere was sleepy and depressing, the boarders "looking blank and useless, rocking alone on the porch, filling the air with futility and gloom, transparent in their shabby clothes." To get to the studio, people would either be picked up by the studio car, or rent horses and ride down Vine Street and tie the horses off in front of the barn with a large wooden sign: "Lasky Studio." Directly across the street was an orange grove with an old stucco house in the middle. People who had never been far west—or far south—would marvel at the orange blossoms and the way their scent could perfume the air for hundreds of yards, or the way the pepper trees on Vine swayed in the breeze. The hotel would send over box lunches: cold chicken, a hard-boiled egg, a piece of tomato, a bread and butter sandwich, and salt and pepper. Chairs would placed around the perimeter of the set. There, remembered Bessie Lasky, "the handsome, picturesque young director in puttees, boots and cap . . . acted out the scenes for the people and put on the best show himself."
Sunday, March 01, 2015
Agent Zigzag
ALL WARS - BUT this war in particular—tend to be seen in mono-chrome: good and evil, winner and loser, champion and coward, loyalist and traitor. For most people, the reality of war is not like that, but rather a monotonous gray of discomforts and compro-mises, with occasional flashes of violent color. War is too messy to . produce easy heroes and villains; there are always brave people on the wrong side, and evil men among the victors, and a mass of per-fectly ordinary people struggling to survive and understand in be-tween. Away from the battlefields, war forces individuals to make impossible choices in circumstances they did not create, and could never have expected. Most accommodate, some collaborate, and a very few find an internal compass they never knew they had, point-ing to the right path.
and
"There is a well-defined class of people prone to spy mania," wrote Churchill, who was not immune to the mania himself. "War is the heyday of these worthy folk." German spies were spotted everywhere, and nowhere. Police were deluged with reports of strange figures in disguise, lights flash-ing at night, burning haystacks, and paranoid neighbors hearing tapping through the walls. One avid amateur spy catcher reported seeing a man with a "typically Prussian neck." Robert Baden-Powell, the original scoutmaster, insisted you could spot a German spy from the way he walked. Anyone and everyone might be a spy. Evelyn Waugh lampooned the frenzy: "Suspect everyone—the vicar, the vil-lage grocer, the farmer whose family have lived here for a hundred years, all the most unlikely people." The spies were said to be spreading newspaper on the ground to give secret signals to air-borne Germans, poisoning chocolate, infiltrating the police, re-cruiting lunatics from asylums to act in a suicide squad, and sending out murderous agents into the British countryside disguised as fe-male hitchhikers. Vast energy and resources was devoted to following up the re-ports, with a complete lack of success. The most grievous outcome of the panic was the internment of twenty-seven thousand Germans, Italians, and other "enemy aliens," most of whom were not only in-nocent, but also strongly opposed to Nazism. The failure to uncover the plotters merely redoubled the conviction that they must be agents of the highest quality. The secret service, wrote an insider, "was left with the very uncomfortable feeling that there must be agents in this country whom it was unable to discover." The simple truth was that apart from Arthur Owens and his band of imaginary Welsh extremists, the Abwehr had utterly failed to recruit an effective team of spies in Britain before the war. But as Operation Sea Lion, the plan for the German invasion of Britain, took shape, the German secret service set about rectifying this fail-ure with a vengeance. From late 1940, as the air duel between the RAF and the Luftwaffe intensified, the Abwehr began pouring agents into Britain: They came by rubber dinghy, U-boat, seaplane, and parachute; they came disguised as refugees and seamen. Some
came armed with the latest wireless transmitters and carefully forged identity documents; others arrived with nothing more than the clothes they stood up in. Between September and November 1940, it is estimated that at least twenty-one Abwehr agents were dis-patched to Britain, with instructions to report on troop movements, identify and sabotage targets vital to British defense, prepare for the imminent invasion, and then mingle with the retreating British army. A list of prominent Britons to be arrested by the Gestapo was drawn up, and at the Abwehr headquarters in Berlin there was little doubt that Hitler's storm troopers would soon be marching down Whitehall. The Abwehr spies were a mixed bag. Some were Nazi ideo-logues, but most were the human jetsam that tends to float toward the spy world: opportunists, criminals, and a handful of fantasists. The vast majority of the "invasion spies" had one thing in common, though: They were amateurs. Many spoke English badly, or not at all. Few had received more than rudimentary training. They were poorly briefed and often ignorant of English life. One was arrested after he tried to pay £10 and 6 shillings for a train ticket costing "ten and six." The Abwehr would never find out that its entire espionage pro-gram in Britain had been discovered, dismantled, and turned against it. Many of its agents, it is true, seemed to vanish without a trace, but this was only to be expected. Several had begun sending messages by wireless and secret ink, and a few seemed to be flourish-ing undercover. That, at least, is what Hitler was told. Yet the more professional and experienced German intelligence officers knew that the caliber of spies being sent to Britain was pitifully low. The little information coming out of Britain was low-grade stuff. No sab-otage operation of any note had been carried out. The Abwehr leadership decided that in order to penetrate Britain's intelligence defenses, they would need to look beyond the eager amateurs deployed so far. An altogether superior sort of spy was needed: someone handpicked and properly trained by profes-sionals for a specific, highly dangerous mission. This individual should be dedicated, ruthless, and, if possible, British.
and
"There is a well-defined class of people prone to spy mania," wrote Churchill, who was not immune to the mania himself. "War is the heyday of these worthy folk." German spies were spotted everywhere, and nowhere. Police were deluged with reports of strange figures in disguise, lights flash-ing at night, burning haystacks, and paranoid neighbors hearing tapping through the walls. One avid amateur spy catcher reported seeing a man with a "typically Prussian neck." Robert Baden-Powell, the original scoutmaster, insisted you could spot a German spy from the way he walked. Anyone and everyone might be a spy. Evelyn Waugh lampooned the frenzy: "Suspect everyone—the vicar, the vil-lage grocer, the farmer whose family have lived here for a hundred years, all the most unlikely people." The spies were said to be spreading newspaper on the ground to give secret signals to air-borne Germans, poisoning chocolate, infiltrating the police, re-cruiting lunatics from asylums to act in a suicide squad, and sending out murderous agents into the British countryside disguised as fe-male hitchhikers. Vast energy and resources was devoted to following up the re-ports, with a complete lack of success. The most grievous outcome of the panic was the internment of twenty-seven thousand Germans, Italians, and other "enemy aliens," most of whom were not only in-nocent, but also strongly opposed to Nazism. The failure to uncover the plotters merely redoubled the conviction that they must be agents of the highest quality. The secret service, wrote an insider, "was left with the very uncomfortable feeling that there must be agents in this country whom it was unable to discover." The simple truth was that apart from Arthur Owens and his band of imaginary Welsh extremists, the Abwehr had utterly failed to recruit an effective team of spies in Britain before the war. But as Operation Sea Lion, the plan for the German invasion of Britain, took shape, the German secret service set about rectifying this fail-ure with a vengeance. From late 1940, as the air duel between the RAF and the Luftwaffe intensified, the Abwehr began pouring agents into Britain: They came by rubber dinghy, U-boat, seaplane, and parachute; they came disguised as refugees and seamen. Some
came armed with the latest wireless transmitters and carefully forged identity documents; others arrived with nothing more than the clothes they stood up in. Between September and November 1940, it is estimated that at least twenty-one Abwehr agents were dis-patched to Britain, with instructions to report on troop movements, identify and sabotage targets vital to British defense, prepare for the imminent invasion, and then mingle with the retreating British army. A list of prominent Britons to be arrested by the Gestapo was drawn up, and at the Abwehr headquarters in Berlin there was little doubt that Hitler's storm troopers would soon be marching down Whitehall. The Abwehr spies were a mixed bag. Some were Nazi ideo-logues, but most were the human jetsam that tends to float toward the spy world: opportunists, criminals, and a handful of fantasists. The vast majority of the "invasion spies" had one thing in common, though: They were amateurs. Many spoke English badly, or not at all. Few had received more than rudimentary training. They were poorly briefed and often ignorant of English life. One was arrested after he tried to pay £10 and 6 shillings for a train ticket costing "ten and six." The Abwehr would never find out that its entire espionage pro-gram in Britain had been discovered, dismantled, and turned against it. Many of its agents, it is true, seemed to vanish without a trace, but this was only to be expected. Several had begun sending messages by wireless and secret ink, and a few seemed to be flourish-ing undercover. That, at least, is what Hitler was told. Yet the more professional and experienced German intelligence officers knew that the caliber of spies being sent to Britain was pitifully low. The little information coming out of Britain was low-grade stuff. No sab-otage operation of any note had been carried out. The Abwehr leadership decided that in order to penetrate Britain's intelligence defenses, they would need to look beyond the eager amateurs deployed so far. An altogether superior sort of spy was needed: someone handpicked and properly trained by profes-sionals for a specific, highly dangerous mission. This individual should be dedicated, ruthless, and, if possible, British.
1876
Yet I have, as much as possible, avoided them. Somehow they never seem to fit our way of life at Paris: this includes Bryant, though he and I have met in Europe off and on over the years, usually in Italy. I once debated (and the negative won) taking him to Princess Mathilde's, where he might meet her circle, particularly my especial friend Taine, as well as such amusing novelists as Gautier, the Goncourt brothers and the Russian Turgenev. But somehow I could not imagine William Cullen Bryant in that circle (where even I, after forty years, am still known as the "blond wild Indian"). I fear that that brilliant circle would sooner roast a waterfowl than apostrophize it. Lately the young journalist-writers have been descending on Europe like termites on an ancient frame house, and London has taken them very much to heart. The English can never get enough of the grotesque; they particularly delight in those Americans who seem to them truly American, preferably the ones with long hair and Western twangs, who chew tobacco and tell tall tales—ah, those tall tales of wild Indians and of drunken bears and of jumping frogs. N.P. Willis, Joaquin Miller, Mark Twain and, most interesting of all, I am told, a Californian called (I think) Pierce whose work I have not read, but whose brilliant mordant conversation has been reported to me by the Princess Mathilde who hears of him from the Empress at Chislehurst. Our Empress may be bored by literary men and explorers, but appar-ently a son of the American West has discovered how to make her exile amusing. Needless to say, nothing west of Seine-et-Oise interests Paris, including, alas, their former Empress. Stedman mentioned any number of literary men I must meet and I pretended interest, although I have never found congenial the company of professional writers. Also I do not read novels anymore while today's poetry makes me quite angry, since, at best it is no more than carefully ruined prose.
and
From her voice I could not guess her mood. I suspect that this is because we now speak only English to each other and in English she is someone else as am I. Languages do bend one morally to their grammatical requirements.
and
Gilder has sent me a number of books he thinks I should read. The new work by Mark Twain is all about a boy in a small town on the Mississippi. I cannot say that the doings of any boy quite seizes my attention. I suspect that this book is more in the line of William de La Touche Clancey. Thumbing through it, I did find some nice jokes, no doubt taken from the lecture hall. Yet, when it comes to raw Western vernacular, I much prefer the novels of Edward Eggleston, particularly The Hoosier Schoolmaster. Although a clergyman, Eggleston appears not to like Christian-ity, at least in its more wild evangelical frontier manifestations, and I can read him as easily as I do Balzac. I have also been fascinated by a writer named De Forest—a failure according to everyone in publishing. Gilder concedes the man's talent, "but novels are for the ladies and his are much too brutal, too close to sordid life, too full of politics." In other words too interesting and too real. The curious thing about this ongoing "aesthetic" debate be-tween the romantic writers on the one hand and the realists on the other is that neither school achieves anything but romantic false effects. American realists feel that to describe the workings of a factory is somehow to be vivid and truthful, and to a point they are right. But when it comes to writing about the men and women in the factories and what they really do to one another, particularly at work or within marriage, these realists are every bit as romantic and unrealistic as the popular, busy women writ-ers or even, to turn to the highest peak, that dark veiled lady of New England letters Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, faced with any truth about the way we are, swiftly evokes ghosts and haunted houses on those nights when silvery clouds cross a beauteous skull-like but, oh, so fictive moon. If I were more interested I would do something on the French realists, who are not much known here. Howells at the Atlantic seems well-disposed; he has even written on Turgenev. Yet when one reads his own easy lady-flattering fictions, one wonders if for all his intelligence he can ever cease to be the opposite of what he affects to admire. I have several times mentioned Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale as a novel that perfectly shows human life as it is—the undifferentiated drift down the years which most lives are—and yet the author is able to make every eddy in that slow progress glitter with some truthful light, so unlike the fool-ish jokes of a Mark Twain or the melodramatic romances of Hawthorne.
and
From her voice I could not guess her mood. I suspect that this is because we now speak only English to each other and in English she is someone else as am I. Languages do bend one morally to their grammatical requirements.
and
Gilder has sent me a number of books he thinks I should read. The new work by Mark Twain is all about a boy in a small town on the Mississippi. I cannot say that the doings of any boy quite seizes my attention. I suspect that this book is more in the line of William de La Touche Clancey. Thumbing through it, I did find some nice jokes, no doubt taken from the lecture hall. Yet, when it comes to raw Western vernacular, I much prefer the novels of Edward Eggleston, particularly The Hoosier Schoolmaster. Although a clergyman, Eggleston appears not to like Christian-ity, at least in its more wild evangelical frontier manifestations, and I can read him as easily as I do Balzac. I have also been fascinated by a writer named De Forest—a failure according to everyone in publishing. Gilder concedes the man's talent, "but novels are for the ladies and his are much too brutal, too close to sordid life, too full of politics." In other words too interesting and too real. The curious thing about this ongoing "aesthetic" debate be-tween the romantic writers on the one hand and the realists on the other is that neither school achieves anything but romantic false effects. American realists feel that to describe the workings of a factory is somehow to be vivid and truthful, and to a point they are right. But when it comes to writing about the men and women in the factories and what they really do to one another, particularly at work or within marriage, these realists are every bit as romantic and unrealistic as the popular, busy women writ-ers or even, to turn to the highest peak, that dark veiled lady of New England letters Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, faced with any truth about the way we are, swiftly evokes ghosts and haunted houses on those nights when silvery clouds cross a beauteous skull-like but, oh, so fictive moon. If I were more interested I would do something on the French realists, who are not much known here. Howells at the Atlantic seems well-disposed; he has even written on Turgenev. Yet when one reads his own easy lady-flattering fictions, one wonders if for all his intelligence he can ever cease to be the opposite of what he affects to admire. I have several times mentioned Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale as a novel that perfectly shows human life as it is—the undifferentiated drift down the years which most lives are—and yet the author is able to make every eddy in that slow progress glitter with some truthful light, so unlike the fool-ish jokes of a Mark Twain or the melodramatic romances of Hawthorne.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)