This conception of the writer as genius only encourages a cer-tain personality to focus even harder on how to succeed. It is like the young Luther rushing back to confess the pride he felt in his original confession. Purity of heart, like the purity of the writer's devotion, is not to be found—according to Gilbert—by trying hard to eradicate all impure thoughts. Gilbert has an essentially Lutheran view of genius. Not the young Luther, who thought he could purify his soul by confessing properly and well and often, but Luther after his revelation, Luther after he has come to believe that good works on their own are irrelevant, for only by the grace of God can one achieve salvation. That's sort of what Gilbert thinks about writing. It doesn't involve the Christian God in particular for her, of course, and this is an obvious distinction from Luther. But Gilbert does think that one writes well only when the god of writing shines upon her, only by the grace of the attendant spirit—the genius—who comes to tell her what to write. One can see the appeal of such a view; it does a lot to ease the pres-sure of creative performance by taking the responsibility for success out of the hands of the writer, just as it did a lot to ease the pressure of the demand to achieve purity for the early Luther. If one could con-vince oneself of the truth of this properly Lutheran vision, and really manage to live it, then perhaps one could avoid Wallace's fate. Luther's actual revelation—the vision that switched his focus from works to faith, from the idea that salvation comes through the good work of confession and other hard-won indications of purity to the idea that God's grace alone can do the trick—this revelation is often described as turning on the interpretation of a biblical phrase about
the "righteousness of God." God is not righteous in the sense that he gazes into your soul and passes a just judgment upon you, seeing clearly how much purity you have achieved, as the medieval Catholic view held. God is righteous instead, in Luther's mature view, in the sense that he justifies your existence through His love, a love he may offer no matter how sinful you have been. In this mature Lutheran view, God's grace is literally nothing over which the individual has control. We are pure, passive recipients of it, in just the way that Gil-bert imagines the writer is a pure, passive recipient of her genius's inspiration. Gilbert exemplifies this receptive view of creative genius in a story from the American poet Ruth Stone. Stone is in her nineties now but in reminiscences about her childhood, Gilbert reports, she vividly re-calls her early encounters with the force of poetry.
When she was growing up in rural Virginia, [Stone] would be out working in the fields, and . . . she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. . . . It was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her . . . And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page.
This idea of the poem as an external force, something wander-ing the world looking for a receptacle, a place to reside, is Gilbert's Lutheran ideal; it is what she thinks can save great artists from the de-structive force and the dark times, from drinking gin at nine o'clock in the morning. As in the case of Luther, to get this understanding of the human being as writer requires a Gestalt shift, a shift that turns what was an onerous, pressure-filled, probably inachievable task into something that is entirely outside the artist's realm of responsibility.
It is not clear that this is a reason for the truth of the view, but it is at least Gilbert's instrumental reason for wanting to believe it. About Wallace's Nietzschean-type approach she says:
I got to tell you, I think that was a huge error. You know, I think that allowing somebody . . . to believe that he or she is . . . the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery is just a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile, human psyche. It's like asking somebody to swallow the sun. It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance. And I think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years.
The idea that we must "become gods ourselves" as Nietzsche says,48 that we must become the source of all "divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery," this dramatically self-aggrandizing view was indeed prefigured by the Renaissance notion of genius—and of rational hu-manism more generally. And we think Gilbert is right to resist it. It's not just too much responsibility for the human psyche, as she points out, but it's probably inconsistent with what are deeply human kinds of comfort and happiness too, as we will see in Melville. So on this issue we side with Gilbert over Wallace. But there are disadvantages to Gilbert's pure receptivity view as well. For if the poem is a purely external force that rumbles through us—if the sacred and the divine and the meaningful can't be earned but depend on God's inscrutable grace—then this receptive view is just as incapacitating as Wallace's kind of Nietzschean nihilism. Whereas Wallace gives us an unachievable task, Gilbert gives us no task at all. We can pray for inspiration from the genius, of course, just as the mature Luther can pray for the grace of God. But what really matters in the end has nothing to do with how we live our lives.49 What matters is only whether we happen to be near a pencil at the
David Foster Wallace's Nihilism l 57
moment the poem rumbles through. Perhaps this is good news for pencil companies, but the rest of us can feel little joy in such a vision. The question that remains is whether Gilbert and Wallace between them have completely covered the terrain. In Wallace's Nietzschean view, we are the sole active agents in the universe, responsible for gen-erating out of nothing whatever notion of the sacred and divine there can ever be. Gilbert, by contrast, takes a kind of mature Lutheran view. On her account we are purely passive recipients of God's divine will, nothing but receptacles for the grace he may choose to offer. Is there anything in between? We think there is, and we will try to de-velop it in the final chapter of the book.
-"■111111
Sunday, May 31, 2015
Thursday, May 28, 2015
ATS
Only Dante's extreme kind of bliss- a bliss so powerful that it supercedes any kind of human commitment or attachment or project whatsoever, a bliss so overwhelming that it reveals earth and all earthly goods as completely insignificant, so ecstatic that it takes you out of the world and into an infinitely better one-
only this kind of experience of the sacred will do. If this is the goal that Wallace seeks, then nothing available on earth can achieve it. The joy of a crowd rising as one in the spontaneous celebration of a feat of human greatness, the cozy warmth of the fireside, the comfort and gratitude of a family meal—none of these human kinds of happi-ness will do. Only in the ecstatic bliss of a levitating Mitchell Drinion does salvation lie. But Wallace's vision is demanding in a second sense as well. For it demands that this bliss be experienced constantly, without cease, through even the most banal and frustrating and painful and awful aspects of existence. Indeed it demands that Hell itself be experienced as fully paradisiacal bliss. There is some question whether this radically demanding picture of salvation is actually attractive. For it seems to level all possible ex-periences, leaving no room for the idea that any experience is bet-ter than any other. One wonders whether bliss of this eternal sort is even desirable at all. Is bliss—when there is nothing to contrast it with—actually enjoyable for human beings? Or is it rather that the full range of human emotions is required for any one of them to take on significance? We will see that this is Melville's view. The Catskill eagle that he admires can soar to the highest heights and descend into the blackest gorges, and by way of this variety sees the true meaning in all our states. Finally, however, Wallace's vision of the sacred is also deeply im-poverished. As we have seen, there is no sense whatsoever in Wal-lace that the "sacred" moments of existence are gifts, so there is no place for gratitude. The bliss that Wallace seeks is not only ecstatic and unworldly—extreme in a sense known only to Dante's medieval Christian monotheism it is in addition generated solely by the indi-vidual will.38 This divorces Wallace's notion of the sacred completely from its traditional support in some external notion of the divine. In Dante's world, by contrast, ecstatic bliss is possible only when one gives up one's individual will completely and releases it into the will of
David Foster Wallace's Nihilism I 49
God. "But mine were not the wings for such a flight," Dante writes, in the very lines from which Wallace was quoting:
Here my powers rest from their high fantasy But already I could feel my being turned . • . By the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars."
No wonder Wallace worried he was not strong enough to write the story he wanted. Only inhuman, divine strength would have been sufficient for the task. Nietzsche thought we were strong enough for a project like this, that the true free spirits could live this way with joy. Indeed, Nietzsche believed that the only possibility for existence was for each of us to become gods ourselves. Nietzsche is thinking of this kind of infi-nite freedom when he describes the free spirits as living forever upon the open sea, the stable but constraining land to be discarded like a crutch. "We have left the land and have embarked," Nietzsche writes.
We have burned our bridges behind us—indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us. . . . Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom—and there is no longer any "land.""
The person who feels homesick for land, in other words, who wishes for some stable ground to stand upon, some externally imposed con-straint to guide him in his choice, this person is simply not strong enough, in Nietzsche's view, to experience the joy of infinite freedom. To see what extraordinary strength this requires, we need to keep in mind the radical freedom that Wallace is aiming for. It is a freedom of will so complete that by its force one can experience searing pain as overwhelming joy; crushing, crushing boredom as instant bliss; hell itself as the sacred, mystical oneness of all things deep down. There are literally no constraints whatsoever to the meaning we can con-struct for our experiences. In the context of this infinite freedom any restriction whatsoever—even of the land beneath our feet—is woeful, romdeplorable; it chafes and burns. But what if this is impossible for human beings? What if our very umanness sets limitations to the way we can experience ourselves and our world? What if it isn't possible to create meaning or find a sense of the sacred ex nihilo without some kind of constraints? In such a world, as Melville understood, grim perseverance is possible for a while; but in the end suicide is the only choice. Melville too considers a character—Bulkington is his name—who is at home only in the infinite openness of the sea, for whom land "seemed scorching to his feet." And he thinks there is something seri-ous and terrifying and wonderful about such a character.
I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in midwinter just landed from a four years' danger-ous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term.4'
But there is no happiness in Melville's Bulkington: "in the deep shadows of his eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem to give him much joy."42 Indeed, by contrast with Nietzsche's joy-ful free spirit, Melville sees in Bulkington a grim, dangerous exis-tence—one that is wonderful and awe-full, to be sure; indeed one that is devoted to the highest truth—but an existence, for all that, that is not livable for a mortal man. Bulkington himself is a "mor-tally intolerable truth."" Bulkington reveals a deep tension, perhaps even a paradox, of human existence, in Melville's view. As a human being Bulkington has to work hard to keep his freedom; the seduction of the shore's safety is a constant danger. For upon the land is where all normal human comfort and vulnerability lies. And though these comforts and vulnerabilities are not true realities but only seeming ones, al-thpugh they are not as stable as they seem to be and grounded in God,
and although Bulkington himself recognizes this, nevertheless their comfort appeals to every human being.
The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that's kind to our mortalities.“
For Bulkington these human comforts and vulnerabilities must be resisted. Sure, the happiness of friendship seems a joy to normal folks, but Bulkington knows this joy is sanctioned by no God, and therefore in it lies no eternal truth; he knows that boredom, and anger, and frustration, and melancholy—yes, even the "damp, drizzly November in the soul" that we shall see is so important to Melville's central char-acter Ishmael—all these are a mirage, a nothing, and so can properly have no effect. He is not driven to the sea by melancholy, like Ishmael is. Rather, the "slavishness" of the land can only be counteracted by the complete lack of constraint one finds at sea. In Wallace this is the freedom to treat melancholy as happiness, boredom as bliss, to make a comfort of even the stormiest waters. But this kind of infinite freedom, according to Melville, is not a human freedom at all. The freedom to gaze at the eternal chaos of the universe and impose an arbitrary meaning upon it, to live eter-nally upon this open sea, that is the freedom of a god, a freedom no mortal life can sustain. Perhaps we should think of Wallace himself, therefore, as we read the description of Bulkington's last hour. When he is absent one morning, presumably having jumped from the ship, Melville describes Bulkington as a demigod.
"But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling in-finite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart. O Bulkington, bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing. Straight up leaps thy apotheosis!"
Bear thee grimly demigod, indeed!
only this kind of experience of the sacred will do. If this is the goal that Wallace seeks, then nothing available on earth can achieve it. The joy of a crowd rising as one in the spontaneous celebration of a feat of human greatness, the cozy warmth of the fireside, the comfort and gratitude of a family meal—none of these human kinds of happi-ness will do. Only in the ecstatic bliss of a levitating Mitchell Drinion does salvation lie. But Wallace's vision is demanding in a second sense as well. For it demands that this bliss be experienced constantly, without cease, through even the most banal and frustrating and painful and awful aspects of existence. Indeed it demands that Hell itself be experienced as fully paradisiacal bliss. There is some question whether this radically demanding picture of salvation is actually attractive. For it seems to level all possible ex-periences, leaving no room for the idea that any experience is bet-ter than any other. One wonders whether bliss of this eternal sort is even desirable at all. Is bliss—when there is nothing to contrast it with—actually enjoyable for human beings? Or is it rather that the full range of human emotions is required for any one of them to take on significance? We will see that this is Melville's view. The Catskill eagle that he admires can soar to the highest heights and descend into the blackest gorges, and by way of this variety sees the true meaning in all our states. Finally, however, Wallace's vision of the sacred is also deeply im-poverished. As we have seen, there is no sense whatsoever in Wal-lace that the "sacred" moments of existence are gifts, so there is no place for gratitude. The bliss that Wallace seeks is not only ecstatic and unworldly—extreme in a sense known only to Dante's medieval Christian monotheism it is in addition generated solely by the indi-vidual will.38 This divorces Wallace's notion of the sacred completely from its traditional support in some external notion of the divine. In Dante's world, by contrast, ecstatic bliss is possible only when one gives up one's individual will completely and releases it into the will of
David Foster Wallace's Nihilism I 49
God. "But mine were not the wings for such a flight," Dante writes, in the very lines from which Wallace was quoting:
Here my powers rest from their high fantasy But already I could feel my being turned . • . By the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars."
No wonder Wallace worried he was not strong enough to write the story he wanted. Only inhuman, divine strength would have been sufficient for the task. Nietzsche thought we were strong enough for a project like this, that the true free spirits could live this way with joy. Indeed, Nietzsche believed that the only possibility for existence was for each of us to become gods ourselves. Nietzsche is thinking of this kind of infi-nite freedom when he describes the free spirits as living forever upon the open sea, the stable but constraining land to be discarded like a crutch. "We have left the land and have embarked," Nietzsche writes.
We have burned our bridges behind us—indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us. . . . Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom—and there is no longer any "land.""
The person who feels homesick for land, in other words, who wishes for some stable ground to stand upon, some externally imposed con-straint to guide him in his choice, this person is simply not strong enough, in Nietzsche's view, to experience the joy of infinite freedom. To see what extraordinary strength this requires, we need to keep in mind the radical freedom that Wallace is aiming for. It is a freedom of will so complete that by its force one can experience searing pain as overwhelming joy; crushing, crushing boredom as instant bliss; hell itself as the sacred, mystical oneness of all things deep down. There are literally no constraints whatsoever to the meaning we can con-struct for our experiences. In the context of this infinite freedom any restriction whatsoever—even of the land beneath our feet—is woeful, romdeplorable; it chafes and burns. But what if this is impossible for human beings? What if our very umanness sets limitations to the way we can experience ourselves and our world? What if it isn't possible to create meaning or find a sense of the sacred ex nihilo without some kind of constraints? In such a world, as Melville understood, grim perseverance is possible for a while; but in the end suicide is the only choice. Melville too considers a character—Bulkington is his name—who is at home only in the infinite openness of the sea, for whom land "seemed scorching to his feet." And he thinks there is something seri-ous and terrifying and wonderful about such a character.
I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in midwinter just landed from a four years' danger-ous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term.4'
But there is no happiness in Melville's Bulkington: "in the deep shadows of his eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem to give him much joy."42 Indeed, by contrast with Nietzsche's joy-ful free spirit, Melville sees in Bulkington a grim, dangerous exis-tence—one that is wonderful and awe-full, to be sure; indeed one that is devoted to the highest truth—but an existence, for all that, that is not livable for a mortal man. Bulkington himself is a "mor-tally intolerable truth."" Bulkington reveals a deep tension, perhaps even a paradox, of human existence, in Melville's view. As a human being Bulkington has to work hard to keep his freedom; the seduction of the shore's safety is a constant danger. For upon the land is where all normal human comfort and vulnerability lies. And though these comforts and vulnerabilities are not true realities but only seeming ones, al-thpugh they are not as stable as they seem to be and grounded in God,
and although Bulkington himself recognizes this, nevertheless their comfort appeals to every human being.
The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that's kind to our mortalities.“
For Bulkington these human comforts and vulnerabilities must be resisted. Sure, the happiness of friendship seems a joy to normal folks, but Bulkington knows this joy is sanctioned by no God, and therefore in it lies no eternal truth; he knows that boredom, and anger, and frustration, and melancholy—yes, even the "damp, drizzly November in the soul" that we shall see is so important to Melville's central char-acter Ishmael—all these are a mirage, a nothing, and so can properly have no effect. He is not driven to the sea by melancholy, like Ishmael is. Rather, the "slavishness" of the land can only be counteracted by the complete lack of constraint one finds at sea. In Wallace this is the freedom to treat melancholy as happiness, boredom as bliss, to make a comfort of even the stormiest waters. But this kind of infinite freedom, according to Melville, is not a human freedom at all. The freedom to gaze at the eternal chaos of the universe and impose an arbitrary meaning upon it, to live eter-nally upon this open sea, that is the freedom of a god, a freedom no mortal life can sustain. Perhaps we should think of Wallace himself, therefore, as we read the description of Bulkington's last hour. When he is absent one morning, presumably having jumped from the ship, Melville describes Bulkington as a demigod.
"But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling in-finite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart. O Bulkington, bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing. Straight up leaps thy apotheosis!"
Bear thee grimly demigod, indeed!
Sunday, May 17, 2015
1876
"It is a fascinating game." Sanford puffed on his cigar. "I think about it sometimes for myself." "Politics?" "Yes. If you have the money and the feel of the thing, why, it's as simple as can be. It would take me maybe two hundred thou-sand dollars to buy a seat in the Senate. Conkling paid a bit more for his seat but then New York's more prosperous than Rhode Island."
"But why would you want it? After all, don't men go to the Senate in order to acquire the sort of money that you already have?" Sanford laughed. "Good point! I suppose it's to see if you can get the top prize. Become the president. After all, that's worth having for itself, isn't it?" "I can't think why. As far as I can tell, our presidents have almost no function, except perhaps in wartime." "But they are there! Don't you see? Now, when you worry about corruption—" "Mr. Sanford, I promise you that I have not lost a moment's sleep at the thought of a bribe given or received." "Sir, I know your writing. I know who your friends are. You're shocked by all this. But how else can you run a country where half the people don't even speak English and everybody's in a scramble to get his share of the pie? I'll tell you something," he told me. "Personally, I'm like you. I don't like anything about this so-called democracy. I'd like a well-run country with honest peo-ple in the government, the way they have in Prussia . . ." "A tyranny?" "If that's the only way to clean things up, make things run right, well, I'd accept that." "With yourself as the tyrant, naturally." "Oh, I'd accept that in a flash!" He laughed to show that he was not joking. "Mrs. Sprague has true `tong.'"My other ear was duly filled with the sound of McAllister's voice; he had heard a magical name and responded in character. "Whenever I hear New York-ers say there is no society at Washington, I say, why, you have never been to Mrs. Sprague's for New Year's Day nor seen her enter a room, any room, with her hair done in braids like a coronet, and those marvellous jewels. Gone now, I should think. They are flat broke, don't you know? the Spragues." This last item was added as if it were a charming detail of the poor woman's regalia. McAllister then gave me a recipe for terrapin, "taught me by a Maryland darkey," involving a good deal of cream and butter. He also asked me if I had noticed how Americans of the same class say "sir" to one another whereas in England only servants say "sir." "But we do say `sir' in England. To royalty." I was benign.
and
"Have you been to the White House yet?" John was curious to see how Emma would respond to American grandeur. But she was demure. "Only to pay a call on Mrs. Grant. We are, she said, to be invited to her next 'large' dinner. She emphasized the 'large.' Unless, of course, Papa offends the President with his pieces." "Then you've not seen the President, Mr. Schuyler?" "Oh, I've seen him, yes, but I've not met him." I should have noted earlier in these pages that two days ago, at about ten o'clock in the evening the President appeared in the rotunda of Willard's Hotel. I had been warned that he often likes to stroll over from the White House to sit in the lobby and smoke a cigar, to speak to no one, and then go home. The hotel people respect his incog-nito, if that's the word. But sometimes he is recognized by the guests, as he was by Nordhoff and me. Nordhoff saw him first. We were seated at the far end of the rotunda, going over my second piece. "Here he comes. Don't stare." I glanced casually toward the main door and there stood Gen-eral Grant. None of the other guests recognized him, but then he is not, to say the least, a vivid-looking man. For one thing he is a good deal smaller than I had expected, and though, ostensibly, robust of build, he seems curiously fragile because of the way he moves: the upper part of the body inclines forward as he walks, while the head is held slightly to one side. I would suspect that he is pigeon-toed, with one leg shorter than the other like my mother, whose gait resembled his. The hair is short, turning grey, and parted on the left side (it is said that he has a violent prejudice against men who part their hair in the middle). The famous beard is neatly tended and covers, or rather masks, the entire lower part of the face. Clenched between his teeth was a long black cigar that remained unlit for the whole time he sat in the lobby: he chewed rather than smoked. Just back of his chair stood the sole detective who guards the President on his strolls. Ears, nose, eyes are unexceptional, but the face in repose is very curious. There is something hurt, damaged, puzzled in the ex-pression. "Does he always look so wretched?" I asked. "Pretty much. He laughs little, smiles less. And for an army man he is most prudish. He'll walk out of the room if someone tells a dirty story—" "But he drinks, doesn't he?" "He used to. Certainly before and even during the war he was often drunk. But now I think he's rather abstinent. Most of his time is spent with horses. In fact, he will only talk to you about horses or the war. He gets upset at any mention of politics." "Quite understandable." "He has no interest in the arts. He actively dislikes music. Yet he is partial, curiously enough, to flowers." "Men are not easy to fathom, are they?" "Heroes least of all." So we stared for half an hour at General Grant as he took his ease, chewed his cigar, looked at the people coming and going like any other war veteran come home to grow old, to sit on the courthouse steps of an evening and watch others live. Finally, the President was recognized. Two political types (of the lobby, not the Congress: I've got so I can tell them apart with a glance) emerged from the barroom and, rather drunkenly, pre-sented themselves for Grant's attention. The hero's face did not once lose its puzzled expression while the blue eyes did not, to say the least, invite any intimacy with the strangers. As Grant got to his feet one of the men seized his hand. The President allowed the hand to be held for an instant. Then he pulled it—and himself—away. The two men suddenly were faced not with the President but with the tall detective who had placed his large presence between them and the retreating small figure. In an instant the scene was done. "Is he stupid?" I asked, genuinely curious. "No. But limited. Without much curiosity. Yet he has come to know a good deal more about government than most people suspect. But he has—obviously—no gift for presiding over this country."
and
"Make history? But there is no history," I said, trying out in my own voice Baron Jacobi's theory, "only fictions of varying degrees of plausibility." "What?" "I meant to tell you that I had an amusing conversation with Garfield about history. He assured me that one can learn the truth about the past through old newspapers, letters, diaries. Then he proposed to help me write, as it were, the history of Mr. Blaine, by setting down in the Herald all the lies he would like to see in print." "But now you know the truth. And the truth always comes out." "Dear Nordhoff, in this case I know only what you tell me is the truth. And you could be mistaken. As for the truth always coming out, why, I think it never does. But even if it did, who would know?"
and
"But what is there new to write about? I mean politically. No one seems very interested in either candidate." This is true, and I find it astonishing, considering the issues involved. Yet all sum-mer long the country ha's been entirely preoccupied with the Centennial Exhibition, with sewing machines, Japanese vases, popped corn, typewriters and telephones, not to mention inces-sant praise for those paladins who created this perfect nation, this envied Eden, exactly one century ago. "Things will heat up, Charlie, and you're the man to do the heating." "No, Jamie. Nordhoff heats the pot, which I simply stir from time to time." "That's all right, too." He gave me a passing grade for this conceit. "Zach. Chandler has ordered the Interior Department to investigate Tilden's taxes. Back in '62, during the worst of the war, Tilden said that his income for the year was only seven thousand dollars. Actually, it was more than a hundred thou-sand." "I should think that by not paying the infamous tax on income, Tilden would be something of a hero." "Boys in blue," said Jamie, combing his moustache with his fingers. "Union in peril. Slaves to be freed. Every dollar needed. Patriotic duty. Down with Copperhead Democrats. Oh, The New York Times is getting ready to pour it on. There is no crime their editors would not commit to help the Republican party." "I don't think that I can be lyric on the subject of taxes not paid." "There's good stuff assembled. And something very sweet about Hayes." Jamie looked suddenly happy. "Some years ago he shot his mother with a pistol, in a sudden fit of insanity." "This need not make him unpopular." I thought Jamie was joking. But apparently he was repeating the latest rumour to make the rounds. All in all, I do not think that democracy, as practised in these states, is a success. While Tilden grimly, laboriously presents to the people his plans to reform what is, probably, the most corrupt society in the Western world, the press is busy with idiotic irrelevaneies about Tilden's alleged drunkenness, syphilis, close-ness to Tweed—all set to music in a pretty song called "Sly Sam, the Railroad Thief." Hayes's taxes are also under review, since he, too, is a rich lawyer who did not pay, it is rumoured, any tax at all in '68 and '69. Lately he has been accused of stealing the money entrusted him by one of his soldiers killed in the war. "Charlie, go South. Please. I beg you. Get that pony out of the sun, you stupid Irish bastard!" shouted Jamie to his groom. "Even the heat at Newport is too much for me. I would perish at the South. Besides, Nordhoff's already done you proud." Nord-hoff's pieces for the Herald on the so-called cotton states have been most sympathetic and vivid; he appears to want some sort of re-alignment to the present political balance. "Always a breeze at New Orleans, and Florida is a paradise this time of year. That's where the trouble's going to be." "How do you know?" Although I have no high opinion of Jamie's general intelligence (certainly he has managed to keep well outside Western civilization and all its works), I am con-stantly impressed by his sense of this country. He is a sort of human barometer, able to anticipate before anyone else a political scandal, an Indian massacre. "South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana are all under Federal control. Grant's got the troops down there." "Less than three thousand in the whole South." I am, after all, An Authority. Jamie ignored my Authoritativeness. "So what's going to hap-pen if they vote Democratic?" "But they will vote Democratic, and Tilden will be the presi-dent." "That's only a part of it." Jamie looked about him vaguely. "I'll give you half again as much as I've been overpaying you if you just go to New Orleans, talk to the leaders there . . ." I was firm. I refused to go South. But I did agree to resume my weekly pieces in September, since the last eight weeks of a pre dential election are the crucial ones. At least from the point view of learning who stole what from whom. "Did Hayes really shoot his mother?" I was curious about that detail. Jamie was donning his helmet, pony at hand. "Certainly." "Shot her dead?"
"But why would you want it? After all, don't men go to the Senate in order to acquire the sort of money that you already have?" Sanford laughed. "Good point! I suppose it's to see if you can get the top prize. Become the president. After all, that's worth having for itself, isn't it?" "I can't think why. As far as I can tell, our presidents have almost no function, except perhaps in wartime." "But they are there! Don't you see? Now, when you worry about corruption—" "Mr. Sanford, I promise you that I have not lost a moment's sleep at the thought of a bribe given or received." "Sir, I know your writing. I know who your friends are. You're shocked by all this. But how else can you run a country where half the people don't even speak English and everybody's in a scramble to get his share of the pie? I'll tell you something," he told me. "Personally, I'm like you. I don't like anything about this so-called democracy. I'd like a well-run country with honest peo-ple in the government, the way they have in Prussia . . ." "A tyranny?" "If that's the only way to clean things up, make things run right, well, I'd accept that." "With yourself as the tyrant, naturally." "Oh, I'd accept that in a flash!" He laughed to show that he was not joking. "Mrs. Sprague has true `tong.'"My other ear was duly filled with the sound of McAllister's voice; he had heard a magical name and responded in character. "Whenever I hear New York-ers say there is no society at Washington, I say, why, you have never been to Mrs. Sprague's for New Year's Day nor seen her enter a room, any room, with her hair done in braids like a coronet, and those marvellous jewels. Gone now, I should think. They are flat broke, don't you know? the Spragues." This last item was added as if it were a charming detail of the poor woman's regalia. McAllister then gave me a recipe for terrapin, "taught me by a Maryland darkey," involving a good deal of cream and butter. He also asked me if I had noticed how Americans of the same class say "sir" to one another whereas in England only servants say "sir." "But we do say `sir' in England. To royalty." I was benign.
and
"Have you been to the White House yet?" John was curious to see how Emma would respond to American grandeur. But she was demure. "Only to pay a call on Mrs. Grant. We are, she said, to be invited to her next 'large' dinner. She emphasized the 'large.' Unless, of course, Papa offends the President with his pieces." "Then you've not seen the President, Mr. Schuyler?" "Oh, I've seen him, yes, but I've not met him." I should have noted earlier in these pages that two days ago, at about ten o'clock in the evening the President appeared in the rotunda of Willard's Hotel. I had been warned that he often likes to stroll over from the White House to sit in the lobby and smoke a cigar, to speak to no one, and then go home. The hotel people respect his incog-nito, if that's the word. But sometimes he is recognized by the guests, as he was by Nordhoff and me. Nordhoff saw him first. We were seated at the far end of the rotunda, going over my second piece. "Here he comes. Don't stare." I glanced casually toward the main door and there stood Gen-eral Grant. None of the other guests recognized him, but then he is not, to say the least, a vivid-looking man. For one thing he is a good deal smaller than I had expected, and though, ostensibly, robust of build, he seems curiously fragile because of the way he moves: the upper part of the body inclines forward as he walks, while the head is held slightly to one side. I would suspect that he is pigeon-toed, with one leg shorter than the other like my mother, whose gait resembled his. The hair is short, turning grey, and parted on the left side (it is said that he has a violent prejudice against men who part their hair in the middle). The famous beard is neatly tended and covers, or rather masks, the entire lower part of the face. Clenched between his teeth was a long black cigar that remained unlit for the whole time he sat in the lobby: he chewed rather than smoked. Just back of his chair stood the sole detective who guards the President on his strolls. Ears, nose, eyes are unexceptional, but the face in repose is very curious. There is something hurt, damaged, puzzled in the ex-pression. "Does he always look so wretched?" I asked. "Pretty much. He laughs little, smiles less. And for an army man he is most prudish. He'll walk out of the room if someone tells a dirty story—" "But he drinks, doesn't he?" "He used to. Certainly before and even during the war he was often drunk. But now I think he's rather abstinent. Most of his time is spent with horses. In fact, he will only talk to you about horses or the war. He gets upset at any mention of politics." "Quite understandable." "He has no interest in the arts. He actively dislikes music. Yet he is partial, curiously enough, to flowers." "Men are not easy to fathom, are they?" "Heroes least of all." So we stared for half an hour at General Grant as he took his ease, chewed his cigar, looked at the people coming and going like any other war veteran come home to grow old, to sit on the courthouse steps of an evening and watch others live. Finally, the President was recognized. Two political types (of the lobby, not the Congress: I've got so I can tell them apart with a glance) emerged from the barroom and, rather drunkenly, pre-sented themselves for Grant's attention. The hero's face did not once lose its puzzled expression while the blue eyes did not, to say the least, invite any intimacy with the strangers. As Grant got to his feet one of the men seized his hand. The President allowed the hand to be held for an instant. Then he pulled it—and himself—away. The two men suddenly were faced not with the President but with the tall detective who had placed his large presence between them and the retreating small figure. In an instant the scene was done. "Is he stupid?" I asked, genuinely curious. "No. But limited. Without much curiosity. Yet he has come to know a good deal more about government than most people suspect. But he has—obviously—no gift for presiding over this country."
and
"Make history? But there is no history," I said, trying out in my own voice Baron Jacobi's theory, "only fictions of varying degrees of plausibility." "What?" "I meant to tell you that I had an amusing conversation with Garfield about history. He assured me that one can learn the truth about the past through old newspapers, letters, diaries. Then he proposed to help me write, as it were, the history of Mr. Blaine, by setting down in the Herald all the lies he would like to see in print." "But now you know the truth. And the truth always comes out." "Dear Nordhoff, in this case I know only what you tell me is the truth. And you could be mistaken. As for the truth always coming out, why, I think it never does. But even if it did, who would know?"
and
"But what is there new to write about? I mean politically. No one seems very interested in either candidate." This is true, and I find it astonishing, considering the issues involved. Yet all sum-mer long the country ha's been entirely preoccupied with the Centennial Exhibition, with sewing machines, Japanese vases, popped corn, typewriters and telephones, not to mention inces-sant praise for those paladins who created this perfect nation, this envied Eden, exactly one century ago. "Things will heat up, Charlie, and you're the man to do the heating." "No, Jamie. Nordhoff heats the pot, which I simply stir from time to time." "That's all right, too." He gave me a passing grade for this conceit. "Zach. Chandler has ordered the Interior Department to investigate Tilden's taxes. Back in '62, during the worst of the war, Tilden said that his income for the year was only seven thousand dollars. Actually, it was more than a hundred thou-sand." "I should think that by not paying the infamous tax on income, Tilden would be something of a hero." "Boys in blue," said Jamie, combing his moustache with his fingers. "Union in peril. Slaves to be freed. Every dollar needed. Patriotic duty. Down with Copperhead Democrats. Oh, The New York Times is getting ready to pour it on. There is no crime their editors would not commit to help the Republican party." "I don't think that I can be lyric on the subject of taxes not paid." "There's good stuff assembled. And something very sweet about Hayes." Jamie looked suddenly happy. "Some years ago he shot his mother with a pistol, in a sudden fit of insanity." "This need not make him unpopular." I thought Jamie was joking. But apparently he was repeating the latest rumour to make the rounds. All in all, I do not think that democracy, as practised in these states, is a success. While Tilden grimly, laboriously presents to the people his plans to reform what is, probably, the most corrupt society in the Western world, the press is busy with idiotic irrelevaneies about Tilden's alleged drunkenness, syphilis, close-ness to Tweed—all set to music in a pretty song called "Sly Sam, the Railroad Thief." Hayes's taxes are also under review, since he, too, is a rich lawyer who did not pay, it is rumoured, any tax at all in '68 and '69. Lately he has been accused of stealing the money entrusted him by one of his soldiers killed in the war. "Charlie, go South. Please. I beg you. Get that pony out of the sun, you stupid Irish bastard!" shouted Jamie to his groom. "Even the heat at Newport is too much for me. I would perish at the South. Besides, Nordhoff's already done you proud." Nord-hoff's pieces for the Herald on the so-called cotton states have been most sympathetic and vivid; he appears to want some sort of re-alignment to the present political balance. "Always a breeze at New Orleans, and Florida is a paradise this time of year. That's where the trouble's going to be." "How do you know?" Although I have no high opinion of Jamie's general intelligence (certainly he has managed to keep well outside Western civilization and all its works), I am con-stantly impressed by his sense of this country. He is a sort of human barometer, able to anticipate before anyone else a political scandal, an Indian massacre. "South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana are all under Federal control. Grant's got the troops down there." "Less than three thousand in the whole South." I am, after all, An Authority. Jamie ignored my Authoritativeness. "So what's going to hap-pen if they vote Democratic?" "But they will vote Democratic, and Tilden will be the presi-dent." "That's only a part of it." Jamie looked about him vaguely. "I'll give you half again as much as I've been overpaying you if you just go to New Orleans, talk to the leaders there . . ." I was firm. I refused to go South. But I did agree to resume my weekly pieces in September, since the last eight weeks of a pre dential election are the crucial ones. At least from the point view of learning who stole what from whom. "Did Hayes really shoot his mother?" I was curious about that detail. Jamie was donning his helmet, pony at hand. "Certainly." "Shot her dead?"
Monday, May 11, 2015
Jesus and Cecil B. DeMille
Production was complicated by a major blowup between DeMille and Paul Iribe, after which the director ordered Mitch Leisen to take over. It was Leisen who devised a way for H. B. Warner to hang on the Cross for the two weeks neces-sary to shoot the Crucifixion sequence. He made casts of Warner's hands, and the casts were bolted to the cross, with blood modeled down the wrists. The casts had leather pads built into the back; Warner would insert his hands into the casts and grasp the leather so that he could hang convincingly for several minutes at a time. Besides that, a bicycle seat was mounted on the Cross so that Warner's weight would be supported yet another way. Although DeMille was clearly concerned about money, he didn't cut corners and the proprieties were observed. A curtain was dropped in front of the Gol-gotha set whenever Warner had to get on or off the Cross. There was no smoking, and bad language was discouraged. "Whenever DeMille started to get apoplectic about something," remembered Mitch Leisen, "I would say very quietly, `There's a bishop right behind you.' That was my one revenge for all the hell I got from him most of the time." Poor H. B. Warner hung on the Cross for fourteen days, followed by three days of shooting on the Resurrection, followed by two days of shooting on the Ascension. Warner's drinking problem was reactivated by the pressure. Monte West-more was in charge of Warner's makeup, and when the actor would show up in the morning still weaving, Westmore would make him drink cod liver oil. After
vomiting, Warner would be shaken but sober. Westmore continued this rough treatment for several weeks until Warner decided sobriety was preferable to cod liver oil. Sally Rand, who would become famous for her Fan Dance in the 1933 Chi-cago World's Fair, played one of Mary Magdalene's slaves. Rand and Warner began an affair, which infuriated DeMille. Rand would tell friends about the day when DeMille spotted her and Warner coming to the set together. DeMille grabbed his ever-present microphone and boomed out, "Miss Rand! Leave my Jesus Christ alone! If you must screw someone, screw Pontius Pilate!" Visiting the production was a young Jesuit from St. Louis named Daniel Lord, who would become a friend of DeMille's and an advisor on the film. Lord collapsed under the onslaught of DeMille's charm, but always managed to main-,. tain an overall sense of objectivity about the man. In his memoirs, Lord described DeMille as "a strange and fascinating blend of absolute monarch and charming gentleman, of excellent host and exacting taskmaster, of ruthless drive on the set and complete letdown the moment that the day's shooting had come to an end; a Renaissance prince who had the in-stincts of a Barnum and a magnified Belasco; frankly in love with hokum (which he liked to discuss and reduce to terms of understandable basic emotion)." The plot invention of Judas's love affair with Mary Magdalene induced some-thing approaching physical pain in Lord, but DeMille was adamant; he told Lord that the audience had to be won over; that they had to have a sense of luxury and beauty. "If they fall in love with Magdalene, then when she leaps into her chariot and says, 'I go to find a Carpenter,' they will go along," said DeMille. Actually, the title uttered by the Magdalene, one of the juiciest in all of silent films, is "Go fetch my richest perfumes! Harness my zebras—gift of the Nubian king! This carpenter shall learn that He cannot hold a man from Mary Magda-lene!" It is only after another character tells the Magdalene that he has observed this man healing the blind that she says, "I have blinded more men than He hath ever healed. . . . We go to call upon a carpenter!" Soon, Jesus casts out her demons: the Seven Deadly Sins.
and
DeMille had a habit of bestowing nicknames on employees, which was not function of affection but derived from the fact that he had a terrible memory fo, names. As Richard deMille would remember, "He could easily list the twelve apo& ties, but not the fifty technicians." The music editor would always be addressed "Mr. Music," while a minor actress was always referred to as "Dottie Coughdrop.' "Get Dottie Coughdrop;" he would tell Joe Egli, the casting director, and Egli would have to match a face to the vague name. His demeanor around the younger women on his staff was rigorously profes. sional and fatherly. When a gorgeous Iowa girl named Mary Bennett came to work in his office, he offered her a screen test and acting training if she wanted it. She didn't and later regretted her decision, but all her life idolized DeMille as an ideal father figure. Professionally, he agonized over major decisions, especially subject and cast. ing. "DeMille always had a hell of a time [making] decisions, about anything," remembered Henry Noerdlinger, his highly regarded head of research. "[But] once he had made a decision then there was no deviation from it." "He was a very exacting person," said A. C. Lyles. "If you went to him for something, he would want to know exactly what the subject was and wanted to know exactly the answers when he asked you what they were. And you couldn't con him. He knew the business. He made the business. I always found him to be very friendly, cordial, very open to suggestions, very willing to help people who wanted to be helped." Mitchell Leisen would assert that "He had very positive ideas of what he wanted and he wasn't satisfied until he got it. . . . I owe him everything I ever learned about making pictures. The most important thing of all is the power of concentrating, never deviating from your objective. Once he started on a project, he concentrated on that and thought of nothing else." On the set of a picture, he was everywhere, even directing the taking of the stills. Robert Parrish, who worked for him as an extra, said that "he often seemed to spend as much time and energy on the still as he did on the actual scenes." For stills, he would get in front of the company and do what he never did during the picture itself: act out the scene. As the actors mimicked him, he would wait for the expression he wanted, then yell "STILL!" and everyone would freeze. If anyone moved and spoiled the shot, he would become irate. One day, Parrish witnessed an episode that would grow into a legend, as two men in the back of the crowd began talking while DeMille was launching into an oration about a full day's work for a full day's pay. DeMille stopped and asked what the men were talking about. One of them refused to say. He was promptly sent home. The other fellow was called up to the camera platform. "There are four hundred people waiting for lunch because of you. Will you kindly tell them what you had to say that was so important?" The extra, Eddie Boyle, took the proffered microphone and said, "I said, ,I wonder when he's going to call lunch.' " The crowd erupted into applause. DeMille's response was a trace of a smile. The assistant promptly called "Lunch. One hour." Parrish asserted that the response that became the stuff of a hundred Hollywood anthologies—"I wonder when that bald headed old son of a bitch is going to call lunch" was strictly a myth. "Eddie Boyle was tough and seasoned," Parrish wrote, "but he was not as tough and seasoned as all that, though some of us at the time wished he had been." Parrish also witnessed a moment when DeMille's chair boy accidentally nudged his script binder so that dozens of script pages fell out. There was a wind machine cranking away right behind the director, and the pink, blue, and white pages went sailing out over the set. DeMille lashed out and smacked the chair boy on the buttocks. For men like DeMille, telling actors where to stand and camera-men where to put the camera was only directing a movie; to order people around, to intimidate them, was to direct life itself. Several times during production, he would seize his microphone and launch into a condemnation of chatter on the set. "WHAT I WANT IS QUIET! QUIET BEHIND THE CAMERA AND INTELLIGENCE IN FRONT OF IT. I KNOW I CAN'T HAVE BOTH AT THE SAME TIME BUT LET'S SEE IF I CAN GET ONE OR THE OTHER." DeMille would almost never criticize a star on the set. It just wasn't good sense to unnerve someone the public was paying to see. But he often worked on the star through other luckless people. If an actress was late to the set, he would grab the microphone and lay into the hairdresser, and the point would be made. With few exceptions, his rages were calculated for effect; DeMille was the Sun Tzu of filmmaking, employing the Art of War to achieve the Art of DeMille. DeMille despised limp, halfhearted acting. For that matter, he despised limp, halfhearted anything. He wanted projection, he wanted dynamism, and he wanted it from stars and extras alike. He would also excoriate extras that failed to give him the level of excitement he needed.
vomiting, Warner would be shaken but sober. Westmore continued this rough treatment for several weeks until Warner decided sobriety was preferable to cod liver oil. Sally Rand, who would become famous for her Fan Dance in the 1933 Chi-cago World's Fair, played one of Mary Magdalene's slaves. Rand and Warner began an affair, which infuriated DeMille. Rand would tell friends about the day when DeMille spotted her and Warner coming to the set together. DeMille grabbed his ever-present microphone and boomed out, "Miss Rand! Leave my Jesus Christ alone! If you must screw someone, screw Pontius Pilate!" Visiting the production was a young Jesuit from St. Louis named Daniel Lord, who would become a friend of DeMille's and an advisor on the film. Lord collapsed under the onslaught of DeMille's charm, but always managed to main-,. tain an overall sense of objectivity about the man. In his memoirs, Lord described DeMille as "a strange and fascinating blend of absolute monarch and charming gentleman, of excellent host and exacting taskmaster, of ruthless drive on the set and complete letdown the moment that the day's shooting had come to an end; a Renaissance prince who had the in-stincts of a Barnum and a magnified Belasco; frankly in love with hokum (which he liked to discuss and reduce to terms of understandable basic emotion)." The plot invention of Judas's love affair with Mary Magdalene induced some-thing approaching physical pain in Lord, but DeMille was adamant; he told Lord that the audience had to be won over; that they had to have a sense of luxury and beauty. "If they fall in love with Magdalene, then when she leaps into her chariot and says, 'I go to find a Carpenter,' they will go along," said DeMille. Actually, the title uttered by the Magdalene, one of the juiciest in all of silent films, is "Go fetch my richest perfumes! Harness my zebras—gift of the Nubian king! This carpenter shall learn that He cannot hold a man from Mary Magda-lene!" It is only after another character tells the Magdalene that he has observed this man healing the blind that she says, "I have blinded more men than He hath ever healed. . . . We go to call upon a carpenter!" Soon, Jesus casts out her demons: the Seven Deadly Sins.
and
DeMille had a habit of bestowing nicknames on employees, which was not function of affection but derived from the fact that he had a terrible memory fo, names. As Richard deMille would remember, "He could easily list the twelve apo& ties, but not the fifty technicians." The music editor would always be addressed "Mr. Music," while a minor actress was always referred to as "Dottie Coughdrop.' "Get Dottie Coughdrop;" he would tell Joe Egli, the casting director, and Egli would have to match a face to the vague name. His demeanor around the younger women on his staff was rigorously profes. sional and fatherly. When a gorgeous Iowa girl named Mary Bennett came to work in his office, he offered her a screen test and acting training if she wanted it. She didn't and later regretted her decision, but all her life idolized DeMille as an ideal father figure. Professionally, he agonized over major decisions, especially subject and cast. ing. "DeMille always had a hell of a time [making] decisions, about anything," remembered Henry Noerdlinger, his highly regarded head of research. "[But] once he had made a decision then there was no deviation from it." "He was a very exacting person," said A. C. Lyles. "If you went to him for something, he would want to know exactly what the subject was and wanted to know exactly the answers when he asked you what they were. And you couldn't con him. He knew the business. He made the business. I always found him to be very friendly, cordial, very open to suggestions, very willing to help people who wanted to be helped." Mitchell Leisen would assert that "He had very positive ideas of what he wanted and he wasn't satisfied until he got it. . . . I owe him everything I ever learned about making pictures. The most important thing of all is the power of concentrating, never deviating from your objective. Once he started on a project, he concentrated on that and thought of nothing else." On the set of a picture, he was everywhere, even directing the taking of the stills. Robert Parrish, who worked for him as an extra, said that "he often seemed to spend as much time and energy on the still as he did on the actual scenes." For stills, he would get in front of the company and do what he never did during the picture itself: act out the scene. As the actors mimicked him, he would wait for the expression he wanted, then yell "STILL!" and everyone would freeze. If anyone moved and spoiled the shot, he would become irate. One day, Parrish witnessed an episode that would grow into a legend, as two men in the back of the crowd began talking while DeMille was launching into an oration about a full day's work for a full day's pay. DeMille stopped and asked what the men were talking about. One of them refused to say. He was promptly sent home. The other fellow was called up to the camera platform. "There are four hundred people waiting for lunch because of you. Will you kindly tell them what you had to say that was so important?" The extra, Eddie Boyle, took the proffered microphone and said, "I said, ,I wonder when he's going to call lunch.' " The crowd erupted into applause. DeMille's response was a trace of a smile. The assistant promptly called "Lunch. One hour." Parrish asserted that the response that became the stuff of a hundred Hollywood anthologies—"I wonder when that bald headed old son of a bitch is going to call lunch" was strictly a myth. "Eddie Boyle was tough and seasoned," Parrish wrote, "but he was not as tough and seasoned as all that, though some of us at the time wished he had been." Parrish also witnessed a moment when DeMille's chair boy accidentally nudged his script binder so that dozens of script pages fell out. There was a wind machine cranking away right behind the director, and the pink, blue, and white pages went sailing out over the set. DeMille lashed out and smacked the chair boy on the buttocks. For men like DeMille, telling actors where to stand and camera-men where to put the camera was only directing a movie; to order people around, to intimidate them, was to direct life itself. Several times during production, he would seize his microphone and launch into a condemnation of chatter on the set. "WHAT I WANT IS QUIET! QUIET BEHIND THE CAMERA AND INTELLIGENCE IN FRONT OF IT. I KNOW I CAN'T HAVE BOTH AT THE SAME TIME BUT LET'S SEE IF I CAN GET ONE OR THE OTHER." DeMille would almost never criticize a star on the set. It just wasn't good sense to unnerve someone the public was paying to see. But he often worked on the star through other luckless people. If an actress was late to the set, he would grab the microphone and lay into the hairdresser, and the point would be made. With few exceptions, his rages were calculated for effect; DeMille was the Sun Tzu of filmmaking, employing the Art of War to achieve the Art of DeMille. DeMille despised limp, halfhearted acting. For that matter, he despised limp, halfhearted anything. He wanted projection, he wanted dynamism, and he wanted it from stars and extras alike. He would also excoriate extras that failed to give him the level of excitement he needed.
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