In such quotations Time can be turned into something else; for this reason they are no use to us, Time and not something else being our subject here. But there can hardly be a more elusive subject. Either it recedes or transforms itself on our approach. Perhaps Carlyle, whom few read nowadays, is our man here, simply thundering away with "That great mystery of TIME, were there no other; the illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide"—and so on. Add to him a few select and more amusing passages from his contemporary Lewis Carroll (the Mad Hatter's tea party, for example) and we might begin creeping a little closer to our subject. To Carlyle Time is a mystery, to Lewis Carroll it is a joke; and both of them do better than their fellow authors, with their snappy judgments and platitudes about Time, pretending to know everything when in fact they know nothing. The idea of Time as a combined joke-mystery is not to be despised. Our favorite images of Time are of course all these tides, floods, rivers, streams—anything, it appears, that suggests moving water. The forward-flowing tide of time. Or, and I think better: Time's waters will not ebb nor stay. And perhaps the most familiar of all, from Isaac Watts's famous hymn: Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away. This seems a fine image until we begin to think about it (though, to be fair to Watts, he
probably never intended us to think about it). These sons that are being borne away—where are they going? Ob-viously, they are being floated into the past. Some of them were around last year, now they have gone. This seems all right until we realize that, if this stream is bearing all its sons away, it must be flowing from the future into the past. And if so, tomorrow's rough water might drown somebody yesterday. And if we feel this will not do, and we reverse the movement of the stream, making it roll from the past into the future, then nobody would have been borne away. We would all be floating happily together, catching an oc-casional glimpse of Alfred the Great, Chaucer, and Nell Gwyn. This is a fine fantasic idea, everybody in the past floating into the future, but it is certainly not what the hymn-writer meant. Moving water has been our favorite image of Time probably because it does suggest the stealthy but irresistible passing of the days, months, years. Intellectually it is not a satisfying image because oceans and tides have shores, floods and rivers and streams have banks, so that we can-not help wondering what these shores and banks are, what it is that stands still while time keeps flowing.
and
Extremes of optimism and pessimism, progress and regress, the claims of novelty and tradition, what was too new and what was too old; science challenging religion, Socialism and Communism denouncing Capitalism, real-ism opposing romanticism; Out of these opposites and the battles between them came that extraordinary energy of the 19th century and all those great seminal ideas that we in our century inherited and, instead of driving them out with ideas of our own, proceeded to put into practice on a large and often catastrophic scale. And in this huge but creative turbulence, the idea of Time, linear, inescapable, queerly accelerated (just as Evo-lution had been accelerated), played a considerable part. The clock struck oftener and ticked louder. There were many attempts, on different levels of intelli-gence and feeling, to escape. Schopenhauer almost returned to the vast life-denying outlook of ancient India; Nietzsche offered a new version of the old Greek idea of Eternal Recurrence; Bergson, reversing the usual process, dived into Time to discover a semi-magical duration. The Transcendentalists could hardly write five lines without men-tioning Eternity. With the continuing help of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, Rome embraced new converts, from Oxford and many another place, and as a bonus produced Papal Infallibility. Romanticism; strong in the first half of the century but weakening later, was among other things an attempt to escape this idea of Time, to return to those magical places of the Middle Ages. Spiritualism, beginning as a fashion-able fad about the middle of the century, soon included among its devotees several distinguished scientists. True, it seemed to accept without question a linear one-dimen-sional Time; common to those on this side or the other side of the grave; but it was one form of protest against Time as a conveyor belt carrying us to extinction. Then Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant gave the later 19th century the Theosophical movement, which introduced into innumerable teashops and parlors Reincarnation, Karma, Astral Planes, and various lost continents. These were the years when Myers and Gurney were the pioneers of psychical research and published the first and perhaps the best book of its kind, Phantasms of the Living. Then in the later 1880s and early 1890s, Hinton and sev-eral other speculative mathematicians were responsible for a curious little flurry of books about the fourth dimension. Hinton was a genuine original who has not had the attention he deserves; in one of his awkward attempts at storytelling, An Unfinished Communication, he surprisingly anticipates Ouspensky's theory of recurrence. This is surprising because Hinton and his fellow fourth-dimension theorists had not associated this unknown dimension with Time. This was left to a young man of genius, Herbert George Wells, a former science instructor still in his twenties, who in 1895 published The Time Machine. It will at least serve as a bridge between the last century and this one if I add a note here about H. G. Wells. I was fairly well acquainted with him during the last 20 years of his life, and my admiration and affection for him are on record in more than one place. Thinking about him now, with the ideas of Time still in mind, I find myself regretting deeply, for his sake as well as ours, his later attitude toward the Time problem. He must have deliberately turned away from it, no doubt believing that other things were more important, but I always felt that this decision had left him feeling uneasy. He was irritable when the subject came up. He pooh-poohed Dunne, whom he had known long before An Experiment With Time; he dismissed with a snort Ouspensky and his followers, without knowing much about them; and although he was never rude about it, he deplored the way in which I was bothering my head about Time in the '30s. He was like a man who, having wrongly given up playing an instrument for which he had a flair, then refused to listen to anybody else playing it. And I feel strongly that if Wells, after writing his Out-line of History, had dedicated himself to solving the riddle of Time, he would have saved himself much disappoint-ment later, he would have rediscovered his astonishing gift of intuition, he would have left us, at this date, far deeper in his debt. His last thin cry of despair, Mind at the End of its Tether, must be taken for what it is, the work of a dying man, unconsciously projecting his own dissolution upon the universe. But I think he might never have written it if, instead of ceaselessly pleading for "open Conspiracies" and scientific world governments, he had brought all his great gifts to the Sphinx of Time. After all, it was a certain idea of Time, which he might have challenged and then destroyed, that encouraged the age to reject his open conspiracies and calls for world government.
Sunday, July 26, 2015
Pops by Terry Teachout
sippi, promising infinite splendor in their newspaper ads: "One block long, 75 feet wide, 5000 passengers, three roomy decks open on all sides, 500 rockers, 250o comfortable seats, 5000 electric lights, moo electric fans. Best dance music in the United States. 1500 couples can dance on the dance floor at one time!" It was Marable who kept them dancing on the S.S. Sidney, having first lured them onto the boat with his calliope solos. His fans included Theodore Roosevelt, who was once seen dancing to his jaunty version of "Turkey in the Straw." Marable was light enough to pass for white, and a 1916 photograph shows him leading a quintet of white instrumentalists, wearing a rak-ishly cocked cap and a knowing half smile. After 1917, though, he worked only with black players, and in that same year he started billing his ensembles as "jazz" bands. The expression was more than just a nod to the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, which popularized the use of the still-unfamiliar word. A ragtime pianist, Marable had been haunting the honky-tonks of New Orleans and paying attention to what he heard. "We were playing in and out of New Orleans all the time," he remembered, "and I began to notice the type of music they were playing there. It just got under my skin." In the winter of 1917, Marable and Joseph Streckfus, a white pi-anist turned steamboat pilot who supervised the music played on the Streckfus Line, started hiring New Orleans musicians for their local cruises. Pleased with the results, they decided in 1919 to send a New Orleans—based group on the Sidney's summer cruise. The eight-piece Metropolitan Jaz-E-Saz Orchestra included Armstrong, the drum-mer Warren "Baby" Dodds (pronounced "dots"), and the bassist George "Pops" Foster, all of whom would later leave New Orleans to have major careers in Chicago and New York. At the time, though, they were unknown beyond the city limits, and Streckfus, fearing that a full-strength dose of their hot music might overstimulate his patrons ordered them to avoid the bluesy slow drags. Instead the Jaz-E-Sazzers played popular songs, every fourth one a waltz, in the bouncy manner of Art Hickman's successful San Francisco dance band, seasoning them with a pinch of jazz.
IN THE EARLY THIRTIES jazz had no history save for what was en-graved in the memories of the men who made it and the grooves of the records they cut. Buddy Bolden and Bix Beiderbecke were dead, and Joe Oliver, Bunk Johnson, Jelly Roll Morton, and Sidney Becher had dropped out of sight. The only music that mattered was the music of the moment. Then Benny Goodman, who had listened to the Creole Jazz Band at Lincoln Gardens when he was in knee pants, recorded a Fletcher Henderson—arranged version of Morton's "King Porter Stomp" in July of 1935 that became a surprise hit and an an-them of the era of big-band swing that was around the corner. It was "King Porter Stomp" that drove the crowd wild at the Palomar Ball-room in Los Angeles a few weeks later. "That number started off with Bunny Berigan playing a trumpet solo, the saxophones and rhythm behind him," Goodman recalled. "Before he'd played four bars, there was such a yelling and stomping and carrying on in that hall that I thought a riot had broken out. When I went into my solo, the noise was even louder. Finally the truth got through to me: We were causing the riot." In that same year Bob Crosby, Bing's brother, started fronting a band whose members, many of whom were from
New Orleans, cut a series of swinging instrumentals for Decca based 011 78s by Oliver, Beiderbecke, and Louis Armstrong, most of which were then out of print. The surviving members of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band reor-ganized the following year and began playing in public for the first time since 1925, an event that caught the ear of Time: "Hot jazz cultists who have learned to treasure the Dixieland's out of print phonograph records as classics and museum pieces never believed they might actually hear them together again." A few months earlier Time had published an article on the swing craze that made promi-nent mention of Oliver, Beiderbecke, and Armstrong ("His trumpet solos . . . are as important to many lovers of American syncopation as Beethoven's 9th Symphony is to subscribers of the New York Phil-harmonic"). Hugues Panassie's Le jazz hot, mentioned in a footnote, was translated into English and rushed into print as Hot Jazz: A Guide to Swing Music around the same time that Otis Ferguson, one of America's first important jazz critics, began contributing essays about Beiderbecke, Goodman, and other musicians to the New Republic. By 1938 interest in the early days of jazz was picking up speed. On January 16 the Goodman band gave a concert at Carnegie Hall that included musical impressions of Armstrong and Beiderbecke played by Harry James and Bobby Hackett. The next day Eddie Condon took Jess Stacy, Goodman's pianist, and a group of like-minded players into a New York studio and cut the first 78 sides to be released by Commodore, an independent record label founded by Milt Gabler that was devoted to small-group jazz. The launch of Commodore Records inspired a piece in Life called "Swing: The Hottest and Best Kind of Jazz Reaches Its Golden Age." In May Jelly Roll Morton emerged from the shadows to make the first in a series of autobiographical recordings for the Library of Congress in which jbhaezowzt:onl,d,BFoethare story of New Orleans jazz from his solipsistic point of view. Three months later he went public, sending an irate letter to in which he proclaimed himself to be the "creator" of many years I was Number One man with the Victor Recording Company. Tiger Rag was transformed into jazz by me . . .
and
The bottom fell out of big-band jazz in the winter of 1946. Time ran an obituary for the era: "The big brassy jazz bands had become a luxury that people were unwilling to pay for. . . In the past eight weeks, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Harry James, Les Brown and Jack Teagarden decided to disband. Gene Krupa and Jimmy Dorsey cut salaries. This week Woody Herman gave up too." Joe Glaser needed no journalist to read him the writing on the wall. "Promoters all over are going broke — bookings are being cancelled at the last minute — I can name at least half a dozen Colored bands that will disband in the next 3o days and at least 3o white bands that will disband," he had written to Joe Garland that summer.
The Attractions and Dangers of Autonomy from ATS
ARISTOTLE'S DESCRIPTION OF the Prime Mover is that it moves all other beings by way of the attraction of its perfection. The last lines of The Paradiso describe the Christian version of the Greek Supreme Being taking control of Dante's desire and will:
... I could feel my being turned . . . by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.
The Dante who, thanks to the troubadours, found that the most important experience in his life was his love for an individual woman, has been drawn into the orbit of The Prime Mover. His individual will along with his love of Beatrice and his political commitments have been overwhelmed by the bliss of contemplating God. One might say Dante has been Missed out. While bliss wipes you out, joy makes you more intensely you. And in Dante's world every joy is meaning-less compared to the bliss of the beatific vision. "Bliss beyond bliss, all other joys transcending," he says. Dante is ultimately absorbed into the love of all creatures for their Creator. But is this really the way to a fulfilled existence? It seems more like the way to avoid a meaningful life rather than the way to attain one. Indeed, it might be a medieval form of nihilism; for it says that there is nothing in this life that has any meaning whatsoever—even Beatrice's saving love or Dante's deep political motivations are trivial compared with the love of God. It is here that Dante inadvertently shows us that the Greek metaphysics Aquinas is working with undermines the agape love we saw in the early Christianity of John and Paul. On the early Christian model one lives in the world with Jesus in you, and that means you live in the mood of joy not bliss, a mood that guides you to definite and directed action in the world of the word made flesh. The concept of the love of God is therefore ambiguous. In Dante's world it turns out to mean the love of each of us for Aristotle's Supreme Being, whereas in the Gospel it means Jesus' love for each of us. In Dante's final mystical merging there is no place for Jesus as an embodied object and paradigm of agape love. Dante's final experience is merely that God's radiance is "painted with man's image." Jesus is just a face, in Dante's view, with no body beneath it to hold it up. In sum, the medieval attempt to articulate Christianity in Aristotelian terms must fail. The negative message of the Inferno is phenomenologically apt: autonomy really does lead to active nihilism, since when all meaning originates with us nothing has authority over us or the power to move us. But, if we try to put the Christian love of an incarnate Jesus into Aristotelian terms we end up with a Supreme Being and a love so overwhelming and passive that it wipes out individuality and all meaningful differences. Dante's unconditional commitment that has drawn him to Beatrice, and that might have offered him and his medieval Christian culture a new source of personal meaning, is wiped out by an impersonal, Greek, mystical experience. Indeed, it turns out that what has been called the Medieval Synthesis Aquinas's and Dante's achievement of conceptualizing the Christian revelation in Aristotelian terms—is not the answer to nihilism but another step in its direction.
ST. THOMAS, FOLLOWING ARISTOTLE, claimed that the highest goal in life was the beatific vision of the Prime Mover—renamed The Supreme Being. St. Thomas understood this as the bliss of directly contemplating God. But as we have just seen, in Dante's poem this leaves no place for Jesus and agape love, nor for a community of joyful Christians, nor, indeed, for individual selves. Martin Luther, writing a century after Thomas and Dante, was determined to rescue Christianity from Aristotle and get back to the early Christianity expressed in the letters of Paul. Luther minces no words in stating his disgust at the disastrous influence of Aristotle:
It grieves me to the quick that this damned, conceited, rascally heathen has deluded and made fools of so many of the best Christians with his misleading writings. God has plagued us thus for our sins.
And he adds:
The universities need a good, stiff reform. . . . It is my advice that the books of Aristotle, . . . which have hitherto been es-teemed the best, be entirely removed from the curriculum.
Luther thus decisively breaks with the attempt to bring together Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christian experience. He could be criti-cizing St. Augustine, St. Thomas, and Dante when he says: "It does [the sinner] no good to recognize God in his glory and majesty, unless he recognizes him in the humility and shame of the cross." Or more succinctly: "The 'theologian of glory' calls the bad good and the good bad. The 'Theologian of the cross,' says what a thing is."25 That is, Christians are not called to experience the Greek-type pure presence of the divine, but are called to relate to Jesus, the "Word made Flesh" as described by John and experienced by Paul. In general, Luther had no use for mystics and monks. Both types were cut off from the world in which, according to Luther, communal joy—rather than blissed-out contemplation of God—is the conta-gious Christian mood. Luther is adamant that
we . . . ought freely to help our neighbor through our body and its works, and each one should become as it were a Christ to the other that we may be Christians to one another.
Rather than leave the world by contemplating God's truth in the depth of the self as Augustine did, or by merging with the love mov-ing creation as Dante did, the Christian is reborn "a new man in a new world." A new world was, indeed, on the horizon. Thanks to Luther the Aristotelian/Thomistic/Dantian theology ceased to hold center stage in our cultural understanding of ourselves. The reborn Christian, whose mood is directly shared with Jesus and with all other Chris-tians, does not need the mediation of popes and priests. According to Luther, every Christian is a Pope and "all they which faithfully believe in Christ are saints."" This is not a way of being a self-sufficient or autonomous being, - but it does open the possibility of thinking of oneself as at least self-sufficient vis a vis the church—up to then the most powerful institu-tion in the West. In the new world of the Enlightenment that Luther ushers in, this can come to sound very self-sufficient, especially when he says:
[A] Christian man, if ye define him rightly, is free from all laws, and is not subject unto any creature, either within or with-out. . . . For he hath such a gift, such a treasure in his heart, that although it seemeth to be but little, yet notwithstanding the smallness thereof, is greater than heaven and earth, because Christ, which is this gift, is greater."
Luther's reformation, and the Protestant Reformation more gen-erally, thus provided a corrective to the medieval passive nihilism of Dante. But its emphasis on individual freedom also prepared the way rforrthe active nihilism associated with the death of God. Luther's cor-rective to medieval nihilism centers on his insistence that God's love embraces us despite our sins. The mood of Christianity in Luther, therefore, is joy and gratitude.3° In Luther's own life this mood gave him a certainty about how to act. This certainty was manifest in his famous statement at the Diet of Worms in 1521: "Here I stand; I can do no other." Certainty about how to act in this world therefore a certainty for which one would "die a thousand deaths," as Luther says in his commentary on Paul's Letter to the Romans—stands in stark contrast with the hope that a mood of bliss might lift one out of this world and its commitments, as in the medieval nihilism of Dante. But the corrective came at the price of meaning. In order to em-phasize the peculiarities of this mood of joy and gratitude, Luther stressed that it was experienced in terms of a personal and individ-ual relation to Jesus. This personal and individual relation to Jesus is not the same as the Enlightenment celebration of the independent individual, but it was a step in that direction. Reform Christianity had the effect of emphasizing the individual as defined by his inner thoughts and desires at the expense of a God-given hierarchy of or-dered, worldly meanings outside the individual. Indeed, in Luther's account of Christianity the world in its politi-cal, religious, and environmental forms is entirely disenchanted. We have now traveled far from Dante's medieval hierarchy of meanings—in which the value of everything is written on its face. Rather, each in-dividual is as a king, according to Luther, since one no longer follows the laws in service to the king and his state. One is indebted instead to the mood that Jesus' love and suffering instills in you, and it is this mood that determines what is lawful. That is to say, as Jesus said, love fulfills the Law. One is no longer dependent on the priests and their mediation or intercession in one's relations with God. Rather, Jesus justifies you as an individual by giving his grace and love to you directly. This brings us a long way toward the Enlightenment understand-ing of the self as the self-sufficient source of meaning in the universe. But unlike the Enlightenment thinkers, especially Descartes and Kant, Luther still had a strong sense of the individual's dependence on a Savior. According to him, works of devotion offered by the church
and by individuals are worthless, willful acts of pride, unless they are experienced in faith and humility. We can't give faith to ourselves any more than we can give ourselves our other moods:
Faith is a living and unshakeable confidence . . . [it] makes us joy-ful, high-spirited, and eager in our relations with God and with all mankind. . . . Righteousness of this kind cannot be brought about in the ordinary course of nature, by our own free will, or by our own powers. No one can give faith to himself . . . "
Descartes took the next big step toward nihilism by denigrating receptivity entirely and focusing exclusively on what one can obtain by one's own willpower.
IT IS NOT UNTIL the early seventeenth century that we arrive at the French philosopher Rene Descartes, the only reconfigurer in the West besides the Jesus figure we have described. Just as Jesus established our Christian World with its saints and sinners, Descartes established Our Modern World in which we understand ourselves as self-sufficient subjects standing over against self-sufficient objects. He does this by drawing on Augustine's discovery of the inner depths of the soul and on Luther's emphasis on each Christian's independence. But Luther, with his understanding of moods—especially agape and gratitude—preserves a sense of the necessary receptivity of the Christian while Descartes claims that human subjects at their best are completely de-tached, self-contained, and, far from being passive, have a willpower SO great that it rivals God's. He says:
It is free-will alone ... which I find to be so great in me that I can conceive no other idea to be more great; it is indeed the case that it is for the most part this will that causes me to know that in some manner I bear the image and likeness of God."
... I could feel my being turned . . . by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.
The Dante who, thanks to the troubadours, found that the most important experience in his life was his love for an individual woman, has been drawn into the orbit of The Prime Mover. His individual will along with his love of Beatrice and his political commitments have been overwhelmed by the bliss of contemplating God. One might say Dante has been Missed out. While bliss wipes you out, joy makes you more intensely you. And in Dante's world every joy is meaning-less compared to the bliss of the beatific vision. "Bliss beyond bliss, all other joys transcending," he says. Dante is ultimately absorbed into the love of all creatures for their Creator. But is this really the way to a fulfilled existence? It seems more like the way to avoid a meaningful life rather than the way to attain one. Indeed, it might be a medieval form of nihilism; for it says that there is nothing in this life that has any meaning whatsoever—even Beatrice's saving love or Dante's deep political motivations are trivial compared with the love of God. It is here that Dante inadvertently shows us that the Greek metaphysics Aquinas is working with undermines the agape love we saw in the early Christianity of John and Paul. On the early Christian model one lives in the world with Jesus in you, and that means you live in the mood of joy not bliss, a mood that guides you to definite and directed action in the world of the word made flesh. The concept of the love of God is therefore ambiguous. In Dante's world it turns out to mean the love of each of us for Aristotle's Supreme Being, whereas in the Gospel it means Jesus' love for each of us. In Dante's final mystical merging there is no place for Jesus as an embodied object and paradigm of agape love. Dante's final experience is merely that God's radiance is "painted with man's image." Jesus is just a face, in Dante's view, with no body beneath it to hold it up. In sum, the medieval attempt to articulate Christianity in Aristotelian terms must fail. The negative message of the Inferno is phenomenologically apt: autonomy really does lead to active nihilism, since when all meaning originates with us nothing has authority over us or the power to move us. But, if we try to put the Christian love of an incarnate Jesus into Aristotelian terms we end up with a Supreme Being and a love so overwhelming and passive that it wipes out individuality and all meaningful differences. Dante's unconditional commitment that has drawn him to Beatrice, and that might have offered him and his medieval Christian culture a new source of personal meaning, is wiped out by an impersonal, Greek, mystical experience. Indeed, it turns out that what has been called the Medieval Synthesis Aquinas's and Dante's achievement of conceptualizing the Christian revelation in Aristotelian terms—is not the answer to nihilism but another step in its direction.
ST. THOMAS, FOLLOWING ARISTOTLE, claimed that the highest goal in life was the beatific vision of the Prime Mover—renamed The Supreme Being. St. Thomas understood this as the bliss of directly contemplating God. But as we have just seen, in Dante's poem this leaves no place for Jesus and agape love, nor for a community of joyful Christians, nor, indeed, for individual selves. Martin Luther, writing a century after Thomas and Dante, was determined to rescue Christianity from Aristotle and get back to the early Christianity expressed in the letters of Paul. Luther minces no words in stating his disgust at the disastrous influence of Aristotle:
It grieves me to the quick that this damned, conceited, rascally heathen has deluded and made fools of so many of the best Christians with his misleading writings. God has plagued us thus for our sins.
And he adds:
The universities need a good, stiff reform. . . . It is my advice that the books of Aristotle, . . . which have hitherto been es-teemed the best, be entirely removed from the curriculum.
Luther thus decisively breaks with the attempt to bring together Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christian experience. He could be criti-cizing St. Augustine, St. Thomas, and Dante when he says: "It does [the sinner] no good to recognize God in his glory and majesty, unless he recognizes him in the humility and shame of the cross." Or more succinctly: "The 'theologian of glory' calls the bad good and the good bad. The 'Theologian of the cross,' says what a thing is."25 That is, Christians are not called to experience the Greek-type pure presence of the divine, but are called to relate to Jesus, the "Word made Flesh" as described by John and experienced by Paul. In general, Luther had no use for mystics and monks. Both types were cut off from the world in which, according to Luther, communal joy—rather than blissed-out contemplation of God—is the conta-gious Christian mood. Luther is adamant that
we . . . ought freely to help our neighbor through our body and its works, and each one should become as it were a Christ to the other that we may be Christians to one another.
Rather than leave the world by contemplating God's truth in the depth of the self as Augustine did, or by merging with the love mov-ing creation as Dante did, the Christian is reborn "a new man in a new world." A new world was, indeed, on the horizon. Thanks to Luther the Aristotelian/Thomistic/Dantian theology ceased to hold center stage in our cultural understanding of ourselves. The reborn Christian, whose mood is directly shared with Jesus and with all other Chris-tians, does not need the mediation of popes and priests. According to Luther, every Christian is a Pope and "all they which faithfully believe in Christ are saints."" This is not a way of being a self-sufficient or autonomous being, - but it does open the possibility of thinking of oneself as at least self-sufficient vis a vis the church—up to then the most powerful institu-tion in the West. In the new world of the Enlightenment that Luther ushers in, this can come to sound very self-sufficient, especially when he says:
[A] Christian man, if ye define him rightly, is free from all laws, and is not subject unto any creature, either within or with-out. . . . For he hath such a gift, such a treasure in his heart, that although it seemeth to be but little, yet notwithstanding the smallness thereof, is greater than heaven and earth, because Christ, which is this gift, is greater."
Luther's reformation, and the Protestant Reformation more gen-erally, thus provided a corrective to the medieval passive nihilism of Dante. But its emphasis on individual freedom also prepared the way rforrthe active nihilism associated with the death of God. Luther's cor-rective to medieval nihilism centers on his insistence that God's love embraces us despite our sins. The mood of Christianity in Luther, therefore, is joy and gratitude.3° In Luther's own life this mood gave him a certainty about how to act. This certainty was manifest in his famous statement at the Diet of Worms in 1521: "Here I stand; I can do no other." Certainty about how to act in this world therefore a certainty for which one would "die a thousand deaths," as Luther says in his commentary on Paul's Letter to the Romans—stands in stark contrast with the hope that a mood of bliss might lift one out of this world and its commitments, as in the medieval nihilism of Dante. But the corrective came at the price of meaning. In order to em-phasize the peculiarities of this mood of joy and gratitude, Luther stressed that it was experienced in terms of a personal and individ-ual relation to Jesus. This personal and individual relation to Jesus is not the same as the Enlightenment celebration of the independent individual, but it was a step in that direction. Reform Christianity had the effect of emphasizing the individual as defined by his inner thoughts and desires at the expense of a God-given hierarchy of or-dered, worldly meanings outside the individual. Indeed, in Luther's account of Christianity the world in its politi-cal, religious, and environmental forms is entirely disenchanted. We have now traveled far from Dante's medieval hierarchy of meanings—in which the value of everything is written on its face. Rather, each in-dividual is as a king, according to Luther, since one no longer follows the laws in service to the king and his state. One is indebted instead to the mood that Jesus' love and suffering instills in you, and it is this mood that determines what is lawful. That is to say, as Jesus said, love fulfills the Law. One is no longer dependent on the priests and their mediation or intercession in one's relations with God. Rather, Jesus justifies you as an individual by giving his grace and love to you directly. This brings us a long way toward the Enlightenment understand-ing of the self as the self-sufficient source of meaning in the universe. But unlike the Enlightenment thinkers, especially Descartes and Kant, Luther still had a strong sense of the individual's dependence on a Savior. According to him, works of devotion offered by the church
and by individuals are worthless, willful acts of pride, unless they are experienced in faith and humility. We can't give faith to ourselves any more than we can give ourselves our other moods:
Faith is a living and unshakeable confidence . . . [it] makes us joy-ful, high-spirited, and eager in our relations with God and with all mankind. . . . Righteousness of this kind cannot be brought about in the ordinary course of nature, by our own free will, or by our own powers. No one can give faith to himself . . . "
Descartes took the next big step toward nihilism by denigrating receptivity entirely and focusing exclusively on what one can obtain by one's own willpower.
IT IS NOT UNTIL the early seventeenth century that we arrive at the French philosopher Rene Descartes, the only reconfigurer in the West besides the Jesus figure we have described. Just as Jesus established our Christian World with its saints and sinners, Descartes established Our Modern World in which we understand ourselves as self-sufficient subjects standing over against self-sufficient objects. He does this by drawing on Augustine's discovery of the inner depths of the soul and on Luther's emphasis on each Christian's independence. But Luther, with his understanding of moods—especially agape and gratitude—preserves a sense of the necessary receptivity of the Christian while Descartes claims that human subjects at their best are completely de-tached, self-contained, and, far from being passive, have a willpower SO great that it rivals God's. He says:
It is free-will alone ... which I find to be so great in me that I can conceive no other idea to be more great; it is indeed the case that it is for the most part this will that causes me to know that in some manner I bear the image and likeness of God."
Saturday, July 25, 2015
Dark Valley on the Japanese Earthquake
As THE inflationary crisis was reaching its climax in Germany, a cataclysm of an entirely different kind occurred on the other side of the globe. Moments before noon on Saturday 1 September 1923, Japan was struck by a massive earthquake. The inhabitants were accustomed to seismic upheavals, superstition attributing them to the movements of the giant catfish Narnazu which lived under their volcanic isles. Indeed, when the architect Frank Lloyd Wright visited Japan he was amazed to discover that
the needle on the seismometer was never still. But this was different. It measured 8.3 on the Richter Scale, which made it significantly stronger than the force that had razed San Francisco in 1906, and its epicentre was only 3o miles south of Yokohama. According to witnesses, the first shock felt like "a grinding blow beneath our feet." It rose to a sickening "crescendo of turmoil." This lasted only about fifteen seconds but its effect was stupendous. As the captain of a ves-sel in the port of Yokohama observed, the whole city undulated "like the surface of the ocean under a great storm." With a deafening roar nearly all the buildings in Yokohama and most of those in Tokyo toppled to the ground. Acres were flattened and many thousands were killed at once. Rows of new houses vanished under landslides while medieval ruins, buried for hundreds of years, suddenly came to light. Roads were gashed with crevasses large enough to swallow an automobile; trains crashed as railway lines buckled and bridges collapsed; tram and telegraph wires fes-tooned the streets like monstrous spiders' webs. What one witness called the "insanely malicious forces of nature" appeared to have battered nearby villages into the ground with "a gigantic flail."While the earth continued to tremble and choking yellow dust filled the air, the survivors, many crazed with fear, fled into parks and open spaces. Almost at once fires began, as charcoal cooking braziers (hibachi) kin-dled the remains of wood and paper dwellings. Gas flaring from broken pipes added to the conflagration. It was fanned by a wind known as tatsumaki—the dragon's twist. This spread sparks to the futons, or padded quilts, carried by many refugees, turning them into involuntary pyro-maniacs. It also drove flames over the wide Sumida River, where thou-sands of people sheltering at a clothing depot in the working-class suburb of Honjo were incinerated. In Yokohama huge oil storage tanks on the hillside burst, releasing an avalanche of fuel which quickly ignited. Many sought refuge in canals or at sea, only to be burned alive as streams of blaz-ing oil covered the water. Boats in the harbour were set alight or sunk by tidal waves. On land incandescent tempests erupted. They were nothing like the familiar city blazes known as the "flowers of Edo," but rather a ter-rifying adumbration of the fire-storms caused by saturation bombing dur-ing the Second World War. Many suffocated, like those in the crush at Hongo Station. Others were whirled into the air, human brands plucked from the burning. Thousands died in "ghastly, grotesque attitudes,"62 their arms upraised in a hopeless attempt to ward off the furnace heat. After dark, people ten miles away could read by its light. Immersed in billows of flame which roared like heavy guns, Yokohama presented "an amazing, grand and terrifying spectacle."63 Amid the glare and stench of death, the impression of war was compounded: soldiers started to dynamite build-ings in order to make fire-breaks and to shoot the wild animals which were roaming the streets after escaping from their shattered cages in the zoo. Despite all efforts the holocaust lasted for several days. The Japanese responded variously. In the frenzied exodus from the cities some fugitives were trampled underfoot. Martial law was declared, but there were cases of hysteria, cowardice, looting and "foul work by ghouls.”64 Large stocks of rice had been destroyed and food riots occurred. More horrible was the wave of paranoia which soon engulfed the nation. Searching for scape-goats, people blamed the inferno on immigrant Korean workers—for whom they felt an atavistic racial antagonism. The authorities claimed to have uncovered a gigantic Korean plot involving arson, looting, bombing and murder. Fifteen thousand Koreans were interned and many others were tortured and massacred. Some were literally crucified. Japanese youths armed with spears and swords acted as vigilantes and "appeared to have lost their reason. "65 The police behaved no better, rounding up a number of left-wing radicals, some of whom were beaten and killed. An army officer took the opportunity to assassinate the imprisoned anarchist leader Osugi, breaking his back with a ju-jitsu hold and then strangling his common-law wife and child. He was never brought to justice. Fears of subversion were not entirely groundless. Among the crowd seeking sanctuary inside the walled and moated gardens of the Imperial Palace, one man cried ominously: "Remember Russia!"66 Later these 247-acre grounds, with their exquisite pavilions and pools, terraces and court-yards, streams, bridges and flowers, were thrown open to refugees. The Prince Regent Hirohito, who had become head of state in 1921 as a result of his father's madness, was absent from Tokyo but several members of his family were killed. Although he soon returned, there was some resentment at his failure adequately to reassure and commiserate with his subjects. Doubtless Hirohito was inhibited by protocol, which ruled out sponta-neous demonstrations of emotion. But three months after the earthquake a young socialist attempted to assassinate him because he had not raised an ideal state on the ruins. It was one of the many paradoxes of Japan that violent social indisci-pline could coexist with adamantine social order. Zen Buddhism, with its doctrine that salvation lies in following the dictates of one's heart whatever the earthly consequences, encouraged a sublime nonconformity. At the same time the Japanese were so devoted to the ideal of national polity (kokutai) that they sometimes burst the bounds of orthodoxy and became more imperial than the Emperor. Yet their commitment to fulfilling obli-
gations at any cost, not excepting hara-kiri, resulted in a community spirit almost inconceivable to individualistic foreigners, who were inclined to disparage it as an archaic hangover from feudalism or a sinister portent of the "hive mentality." However, many Westerners caught up in the earth-quake benefited from the self-denying code of their Oriental servants, who often sacrificed their own interests in order to save their employers' lives or to rescue their possessions. Most Japanese, indeed, behaved with exemplary courage and restraint, and some were heroic. So bad had the destruction been in Tokyo that it was initially feared that the capital would have to be moved to another site. But citizens took heart from Premier Yamamoto's exhortation to "unite and rebuild." Salvage work began almost immediately and some construction started before the ashes were cool. People waited stoically in food queues two miles long. There were many patriotic demonstrations. None was more moving than that prompted by a schoolmaster who, after fire had swept through a host of his companions, cried: 'All present shout three banzais with me." Two hundred voices were raised in the most pitiful cheer ever heard." Because communications were cut, the outside world was slow to grasp the scale of the Japanese tragedy: perhaps 140,000 dead, tens of thousands injured and devastation which was likened to that of Armageddon. As one witness wrote, "Imagine the Somme battle-fields and the ruins of Ypres on a gigantic but concentrated scale and you have a picture, though not even realistic enough, of Tokyo and the country around.” At two billion dol-lars, the cost of renovation amounted to 4o per cent of the country's gross national product. It not only wiped out the 400-million-dollar profit which Japan had made out of the First World War, it crippled the entire economy. In the words of an American authority, this was "the greatest financial catastrophe of the age." Foreign countries, particularly the United States, responded generously to the disaster, donating millions of dollars and enabling relief agencies like the Red Cross to deliver food, clothing, tents, medical supplies and other aid to the stricken cities. But this largesse did little more than point up the contrast between America's wealth and Japan's poverty. It was poverty so acute that the masses could seldom afford to eat much more than rice and salt—Prince Saionji hailed it as a notable improvement when they were later able to augment this diet with bean paste (mire) and soy sauce. During the various economic crises of the 192os, farmers—and agriculture employed half of Japan's 6o million people—had no recourse but to sell their daughters into prostitution. Sometimes it seemed as though this were Japan's most prosperous business
the needle on the seismometer was never still. But this was different. It measured 8.3 on the Richter Scale, which made it significantly stronger than the force that had razed San Francisco in 1906, and its epicentre was only 3o miles south of Yokohama. According to witnesses, the first shock felt like "a grinding blow beneath our feet." It rose to a sickening "crescendo of turmoil." This lasted only about fifteen seconds but its effect was stupendous. As the captain of a ves-sel in the port of Yokohama observed, the whole city undulated "like the surface of the ocean under a great storm." With a deafening roar nearly all the buildings in Yokohama and most of those in Tokyo toppled to the ground. Acres were flattened and many thousands were killed at once. Rows of new houses vanished under landslides while medieval ruins, buried for hundreds of years, suddenly came to light. Roads were gashed with crevasses large enough to swallow an automobile; trains crashed as railway lines buckled and bridges collapsed; tram and telegraph wires fes-tooned the streets like monstrous spiders' webs. What one witness called the "insanely malicious forces of nature" appeared to have battered nearby villages into the ground with "a gigantic flail."While the earth continued to tremble and choking yellow dust filled the air, the survivors, many crazed with fear, fled into parks and open spaces. Almost at once fires began, as charcoal cooking braziers (hibachi) kin-dled the remains of wood and paper dwellings. Gas flaring from broken pipes added to the conflagration. It was fanned by a wind known as tatsumaki—the dragon's twist. This spread sparks to the futons, or padded quilts, carried by many refugees, turning them into involuntary pyro-maniacs. It also drove flames over the wide Sumida River, where thou-sands of people sheltering at a clothing depot in the working-class suburb of Honjo were incinerated. In Yokohama huge oil storage tanks on the hillside burst, releasing an avalanche of fuel which quickly ignited. Many sought refuge in canals or at sea, only to be burned alive as streams of blaz-ing oil covered the water. Boats in the harbour were set alight or sunk by tidal waves. On land incandescent tempests erupted. They were nothing like the familiar city blazes known as the "flowers of Edo," but rather a ter-rifying adumbration of the fire-storms caused by saturation bombing dur-ing the Second World War. Many suffocated, like those in the crush at Hongo Station. Others were whirled into the air, human brands plucked from the burning. Thousands died in "ghastly, grotesque attitudes,"62 their arms upraised in a hopeless attempt to ward off the furnace heat. After dark, people ten miles away could read by its light. Immersed in billows of flame which roared like heavy guns, Yokohama presented "an amazing, grand and terrifying spectacle."63 Amid the glare and stench of death, the impression of war was compounded: soldiers started to dynamite build-ings in order to make fire-breaks and to shoot the wild animals which were roaming the streets after escaping from their shattered cages in the zoo. Despite all efforts the holocaust lasted for several days. The Japanese responded variously. In the frenzied exodus from the cities some fugitives were trampled underfoot. Martial law was declared, but there were cases of hysteria, cowardice, looting and "foul work by ghouls.”64 Large stocks of rice had been destroyed and food riots occurred. More horrible was the wave of paranoia which soon engulfed the nation. Searching for scape-goats, people blamed the inferno on immigrant Korean workers—for whom they felt an atavistic racial antagonism. The authorities claimed to have uncovered a gigantic Korean plot involving arson, looting, bombing and murder. Fifteen thousand Koreans were interned and many others were tortured and massacred. Some were literally crucified. Japanese youths armed with spears and swords acted as vigilantes and "appeared to have lost their reason. "65 The police behaved no better, rounding up a number of left-wing radicals, some of whom were beaten and killed. An army officer took the opportunity to assassinate the imprisoned anarchist leader Osugi, breaking his back with a ju-jitsu hold and then strangling his common-law wife and child. He was never brought to justice. Fears of subversion were not entirely groundless. Among the crowd seeking sanctuary inside the walled and moated gardens of the Imperial Palace, one man cried ominously: "Remember Russia!"66 Later these 247-acre grounds, with their exquisite pavilions and pools, terraces and court-yards, streams, bridges and flowers, were thrown open to refugees. The Prince Regent Hirohito, who had become head of state in 1921 as a result of his father's madness, was absent from Tokyo but several members of his family were killed. Although he soon returned, there was some resentment at his failure adequately to reassure and commiserate with his subjects. Doubtless Hirohito was inhibited by protocol, which ruled out sponta-neous demonstrations of emotion. But three months after the earthquake a young socialist attempted to assassinate him because he had not raised an ideal state on the ruins. It was one of the many paradoxes of Japan that violent social indisci-pline could coexist with adamantine social order. Zen Buddhism, with its doctrine that salvation lies in following the dictates of one's heart whatever the earthly consequences, encouraged a sublime nonconformity. At the same time the Japanese were so devoted to the ideal of national polity (kokutai) that they sometimes burst the bounds of orthodoxy and became more imperial than the Emperor. Yet their commitment to fulfilling obli-
gations at any cost, not excepting hara-kiri, resulted in a community spirit almost inconceivable to individualistic foreigners, who were inclined to disparage it as an archaic hangover from feudalism or a sinister portent of the "hive mentality." However, many Westerners caught up in the earth-quake benefited from the self-denying code of their Oriental servants, who often sacrificed their own interests in order to save their employers' lives or to rescue their possessions. Most Japanese, indeed, behaved with exemplary courage and restraint, and some were heroic. So bad had the destruction been in Tokyo that it was initially feared that the capital would have to be moved to another site. But citizens took heart from Premier Yamamoto's exhortation to "unite and rebuild." Salvage work began almost immediately and some construction started before the ashes were cool. People waited stoically in food queues two miles long. There were many patriotic demonstrations. None was more moving than that prompted by a schoolmaster who, after fire had swept through a host of his companions, cried: 'All present shout three banzais with me." Two hundred voices were raised in the most pitiful cheer ever heard." Because communications were cut, the outside world was slow to grasp the scale of the Japanese tragedy: perhaps 140,000 dead, tens of thousands injured and devastation which was likened to that of Armageddon. As one witness wrote, "Imagine the Somme battle-fields and the ruins of Ypres on a gigantic but concentrated scale and you have a picture, though not even realistic enough, of Tokyo and the country around.” At two billion dol-lars, the cost of renovation amounted to 4o per cent of the country's gross national product. It not only wiped out the 400-million-dollar profit which Japan had made out of the First World War, it crippled the entire economy. In the words of an American authority, this was "the greatest financial catastrophe of the age." Foreign countries, particularly the United States, responded generously to the disaster, donating millions of dollars and enabling relief agencies like the Red Cross to deliver food, clothing, tents, medical supplies and other aid to the stricken cities. But this largesse did little more than point up the contrast between America's wealth and Japan's poverty. It was poverty so acute that the masses could seldom afford to eat much more than rice and salt—Prince Saionji hailed it as a notable improvement when they were later able to augment this diet with bean paste (mire) and soy sauce. During the various economic crises of the 192os, farmers—and agriculture employed half of Japan's 6o million people—had no recourse but to sell their daughters into prostitution. Sometimes it seemed as though this were Japan's most prosperous business
Tuesday, July 21, 2015
Dark Valley on inflation in Germany
January 1919 there were 9 marks to the dollar; three years later there were 192. Stimulated by the assassination of the Jewish foreign minister Walter Rathenau in 1922, the "currency debauch" worsened. The British ambassador quipped that "German finance is dying beyond its means."3' In January 1923 it seemed that France was determined to finish the work of war and peace, for Poincare insisted that Germany pay while making it impossible for it to do so. As Britain dithered and the United States with-drew, France began to exploit the Ruhr, Germany's industrial powerhouse, for its own ends. Berlin retaliated with a doomed strategy of passive re-sistance which cost 4o million marks a day. Forgetting their own puni-tive treatment of defeated Russia, the Germans found a new unity in com-mon mortification. The Reichsbank made valiant efforts to hold the mark at a rate of about 2,000 to the dollar. But when these efforts failed it rose to astronomical heights. In July 1923 there were 353,412 marks to the dollar; in August, 4,620,455; in September, 98,860,000; in October, 25,260,208,000; in November, 4,200,000,000,000. It was the most colos-sal inflation in history, making the assignats of the French Revolution look almost as good as gold. To produce this currency 300 paper mills and 2,000 printing plants worked round the clock; eventually it cost more to print the notes than they were worth. Banks had to take on more clerks to count the noughts. They used the blank side of the notes as scrap paper because it was cheaper than buying pads. Eventually stacks of cash were not counted at all but weighed or measured with a ruler. Life was transformed into a bizarre paperchase. Patrons of restaurants found their meals becoming more expensive as they ate. Factory workers saw their wages shrinking in value as they queued to collect them. How-ever fast they ran to the shops, prices outstripped them. Shopkeepers, indeed, looked on their customers almost as thieves for taking goods which could only be replaced at prohibitive expense. Peasants refused to sell their produce for paper money, saying: "We don't want any Jew-confetti from Berlin."32 Beggars rejected anything less than a million marks. New notes appeared, issued by municipalities and acceptable locally. Forgeries added to the confusion. Some people paid in kind:
The Roots of Fascism 3 3 theatre seats were sold for a couple of eggs; prostitutes offered their ser-vices for cigarettes. Interest rates rose to 20 per cent a day and loans were made in terms of rye or coal or even electric kilowatts. Bureaucrats in the Finance Ministry took part of their salaries in potatoes. Those who possessed foreign currency were impossibly rich, for no one had enough marks to change anything but the smallest denominations. Ten dollars would purchase a large modern house. Foreign profiteers took advantage of the situation to make a killing, while American tourists lit their cigarettes with million-mark notes and pasted larger denominations on their suitcases, further exacerbating German chauvinism. In the words of one contemporary, "Germany was a rapidly decomposing corpse, on which the birds of prey were swooping down from all directions."33 At the height of the inflation, according to a familiar story, a woman who left a basket of marks on the pavement came back to find the basket stolen and the marks in the gutter. Currency notes were used as lavatory paper. Ger-mans talked of the death of money. Stephan Zweig minted a compelling metaphor for that awesome demise in his story of a blind man whose family had secretly sold his cherished collection of drawings in order to keep alive, replacing them in his portfolio with blank sheets of paper.34 In the same vein, Hitler dismissed the Treaty of Versailles as a scrap of paper. Not everyone suffered. Landowners actually benefited, often paying off their mortgages in depreciated marks. So did industrialists, especially if they sold abroad. Trade-unionists had a measure of protection. But at a time when a pound of ersatz butter could cost a labourer's daily wage and it might take five months' earnings to buy a suit of clothes, the working class was sucked into a maelstrom of misery. Even worse off were pension-ers and those living on fixed incomes. Their savings vanished and they faced not only indigence but starvation. Here was a revolution as sweeping as that of the Bolsheviks. At a stroke property was destroyed and "the bourgeoisie was proletarianised."35 Middle-class values were turned upside down: debtors were virtuous while thrift was a vice; wealth was no longer the index of worth. As one contemporary said, "Inflation finished the process of moral decay which the war had started." Crime spread: so many potato fields were raided that police had to guard them in order to preserve the seed crop. There was an increase in suicide, malnutrition, illness and emigration. Infant mortality rates rose. Economic paralysis set in, unemployment grew, strikes and disturbances spread, shops were ransacked and towns looted. Corruption and anti-Semitism flourished—the Jews were accused of exploiting the tragedy. Germany's physical and psychic health decayed together. Life became "madness, nightmare, desperation, chaos."36 Observing that the inflation had revived Germany's "old, bristling, savage spirit," D. H. Lawrence said: "Money becomes insane, and people with it. "37 Sexual decadence seemed to be a by-product of the bankruptcy of traditional values. A foreigner exclaimed, "Nothing brought you so much face to face with the patho-logical distortion of Germany's postwar mentality as the weird night life of Berlin."38 Describing the way in which inflation infected everything, one historian has written that it was a "revolutionary influence much more powerful than the war itself."39 Inevitably this crisis threatened Germany's fragile democracy. Since the State was unable to protect its citizens they were bound to look elsewhere, especially when, in September 1923, the impotent government surren-dered to French coercion in the Ruhr. Many workers turned to the Com-munists; Saxony and Thuringia were menaced by Red revolution. Many of the dispossessed middle class were seduced by right-wing movements. None was more rabid than the National Socialist party, which promised to restore a strong, unified Reich that was both anti-capitalist and anti-Bolshevist. And no one articulated petty-bourgeois bitterness more vehe-mently than its leader, Adolf Hitler, who larded his speeches with hideous invective against money-grubbing Jews.
and
Noting that Germans needed to humiliate others in order to compensate for their own sense of mass worthlessness during the "witches' sabbath of devaluation,"43 Elias Canetti thought that without it the Rihrer could not have induced them to par-ticipate in the destruction of the Jews. Hitler was a small, nondescript figure. His complexion was pallid, his limbs were ill-coordinated, his lank hair flopped over a receding fore-head, his toothbrush moustache was the image of Charlie Chaplin's. Only expressive, sensitive hands and luminous blue eyes saved him from being totally unprepossessing. In his heavy boots, blue serge suit, broad-brimmed black hat and dirty mackintosh, he resembled, in the words of his affluent acolyte "Putzi" Hanfstaengl, "a suburban hairdresser on his day off" or "a waiter in a railway station restaurant." Hitler's style of life was shabbier still. He rented a small, dingy room in a poor district of Munich. It contained a single bed, a few sticks of furniture and a couple of threadbare rugs to cover the worn linoleum. Hitler's habits were Bohemian: he was erratic and unpunctual. So were his tastes: he had an insatiable appetite for sweet things, cream cakes, coffee flavoured with squares of chocolate, white wine enriched with spoonfuls of castor sugar. In the presence of upper-class people his manners were gauche. Yet even at this stage Hitler had developed "unmistakably Napoleonic and Messianic airs."Accompanied by a savage Alsatian dog, he swaggered about pack-ing a pistol and cracking a rhinoceros-hide whip. His pretensions knew no bounds. He once exclaimed, "I must enter Berlin like Christ in the Tem-ple of Jerusalem and scourge out the money-lenders."Absurd as his rhetoric sounds, when Hitler spoke he convinced audiences that he really was the saviour of Germany. He was transfigured by oratory. No prophet ever had a more vivid appreciation of the "magic power of the spoken word." As he wrote in Mein Kampf: The broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of speech. And all great movements are popular movements, volcanic erup-tions of human passions and emotional sentiments, stirred either by the cruel Goddess of Distress or by the firebrand of the word hurled among the masses.
Hitler despised the kind of middle-class political meetings where professo-rial figures in frock coats and monocles read their speeches in hushed tones to a somnolent audience. "Only a storm of hot passion can turn the des-tinies of peoples," he believed, "and he alone can arouse passion who bears it within himself." Hitler himself was so passionate that Hanfstaengl described his perorations as "an orgasm of words."They induced ecstasy in his audiences and it later became his practice, at the climax, to crush his spectacles in his clenched fist. To quote another witness, who had never experienced such "hypnotic mass-excitement," he displayed the "fanati-cally hysteric romanticism of a brutal will."But if Hitler played the demiurge he also learned the tricks of the demagogue. Apparently he stud-ied the techniques of Ferdl Weiss, a popular Munich comedian. He rehearsed in front of a looking-glass, timed his entry to perfection, used every aid—bands, banners, spotlights, salutes. Emblazoned all around was the swastika, described by Barbusse as "two interlaced gibbets."5° Hitler varied his rhythm and orchestrated the crowd's responses like an inspired musician.
Hitler ost about five pounds in weight during every speech- he sweated so profusely that the dye running from his suit stained his shirt and underwear blue.
The Roots of Fascism 3 3 theatre seats were sold for a couple of eggs; prostitutes offered their ser-vices for cigarettes. Interest rates rose to 20 per cent a day and loans were made in terms of rye or coal or even electric kilowatts. Bureaucrats in the Finance Ministry took part of their salaries in potatoes. Those who possessed foreign currency were impossibly rich, for no one had enough marks to change anything but the smallest denominations. Ten dollars would purchase a large modern house. Foreign profiteers took advantage of the situation to make a killing, while American tourists lit their cigarettes with million-mark notes and pasted larger denominations on their suitcases, further exacerbating German chauvinism. In the words of one contemporary, "Germany was a rapidly decomposing corpse, on which the birds of prey were swooping down from all directions."33 At the height of the inflation, according to a familiar story, a woman who left a basket of marks on the pavement came back to find the basket stolen and the marks in the gutter. Currency notes were used as lavatory paper. Ger-mans talked of the death of money. Stephan Zweig minted a compelling metaphor for that awesome demise in his story of a blind man whose family had secretly sold his cherished collection of drawings in order to keep alive, replacing them in his portfolio with blank sheets of paper.34 In the same vein, Hitler dismissed the Treaty of Versailles as a scrap of paper. Not everyone suffered. Landowners actually benefited, often paying off their mortgages in depreciated marks. So did industrialists, especially if they sold abroad. Trade-unionists had a measure of protection. But at a time when a pound of ersatz butter could cost a labourer's daily wage and it might take five months' earnings to buy a suit of clothes, the working class was sucked into a maelstrom of misery. Even worse off were pension-ers and those living on fixed incomes. Their savings vanished and they faced not only indigence but starvation. Here was a revolution as sweeping as that of the Bolsheviks. At a stroke property was destroyed and "the bourgeoisie was proletarianised."35 Middle-class values were turned upside down: debtors were virtuous while thrift was a vice; wealth was no longer the index of worth. As one contemporary said, "Inflation finished the process of moral decay which the war had started." Crime spread: so many potato fields were raided that police had to guard them in order to preserve the seed crop. There was an increase in suicide, malnutrition, illness and emigration. Infant mortality rates rose. Economic paralysis set in, unemployment grew, strikes and disturbances spread, shops were ransacked and towns looted. Corruption and anti-Semitism flourished—the Jews were accused of exploiting the tragedy. Germany's physical and psychic health decayed together. Life became "madness, nightmare, desperation, chaos."36 Observing that the inflation had revived Germany's "old, bristling, savage spirit," D. H. Lawrence said: "Money becomes insane, and people with it. "37 Sexual decadence seemed to be a by-product of the bankruptcy of traditional values. A foreigner exclaimed, "Nothing brought you so much face to face with the patho-logical distortion of Germany's postwar mentality as the weird night life of Berlin."38 Describing the way in which inflation infected everything, one historian has written that it was a "revolutionary influence much more powerful than the war itself."39 Inevitably this crisis threatened Germany's fragile democracy. Since the State was unable to protect its citizens they were bound to look elsewhere, especially when, in September 1923, the impotent government surren-dered to French coercion in the Ruhr. Many workers turned to the Com-munists; Saxony and Thuringia were menaced by Red revolution. Many of the dispossessed middle class were seduced by right-wing movements. None was more rabid than the National Socialist party, which promised to restore a strong, unified Reich that was both anti-capitalist and anti-Bolshevist. And no one articulated petty-bourgeois bitterness more vehe-mently than its leader, Adolf Hitler, who larded his speeches with hideous invective against money-grubbing Jews.
and
Noting that Germans needed to humiliate others in order to compensate for their own sense of mass worthlessness during the "witches' sabbath of devaluation,"43 Elias Canetti thought that without it the Rihrer could not have induced them to par-ticipate in the destruction of the Jews. Hitler was a small, nondescript figure. His complexion was pallid, his limbs were ill-coordinated, his lank hair flopped over a receding fore-head, his toothbrush moustache was the image of Charlie Chaplin's. Only expressive, sensitive hands and luminous blue eyes saved him from being totally unprepossessing. In his heavy boots, blue serge suit, broad-brimmed black hat and dirty mackintosh, he resembled, in the words of his affluent acolyte "Putzi" Hanfstaengl, "a suburban hairdresser on his day off" or "a waiter in a railway station restaurant." Hitler's style of life was shabbier still. He rented a small, dingy room in a poor district of Munich. It contained a single bed, a few sticks of furniture and a couple of threadbare rugs to cover the worn linoleum. Hitler's habits were Bohemian: he was erratic and unpunctual. So were his tastes: he had an insatiable appetite for sweet things, cream cakes, coffee flavoured with squares of chocolate, white wine enriched with spoonfuls of castor sugar. In the presence of upper-class people his manners were gauche. Yet even at this stage Hitler had developed "unmistakably Napoleonic and Messianic airs."Accompanied by a savage Alsatian dog, he swaggered about pack-ing a pistol and cracking a rhinoceros-hide whip. His pretensions knew no bounds. He once exclaimed, "I must enter Berlin like Christ in the Tem-ple of Jerusalem and scourge out the money-lenders."Absurd as his rhetoric sounds, when Hitler spoke he convinced audiences that he really was the saviour of Germany. He was transfigured by oratory. No prophet ever had a more vivid appreciation of the "magic power of the spoken word." As he wrote in Mein Kampf: The broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of speech. And all great movements are popular movements, volcanic erup-tions of human passions and emotional sentiments, stirred either by the cruel Goddess of Distress or by the firebrand of the word hurled among the masses.
Hitler despised the kind of middle-class political meetings where professo-rial figures in frock coats and monocles read their speeches in hushed tones to a somnolent audience. "Only a storm of hot passion can turn the des-tinies of peoples," he believed, "and he alone can arouse passion who bears it within himself." Hitler himself was so passionate that Hanfstaengl described his perorations as "an orgasm of words."They induced ecstasy in his audiences and it later became his practice, at the climax, to crush his spectacles in his clenched fist. To quote another witness, who had never experienced such "hypnotic mass-excitement," he displayed the "fanati-cally hysteric romanticism of a brutal will."But if Hitler played the demiurge he also learned the tricks of the demagogue. Apparently he stud-ied the techniques of Ferdl Weiss, a popular Munich comedian. He rehearsed in front of a looking-glass, timed his entry to perfection, used every aid—bands, banners, spotlights, salutes. Emblazoned all around was the swastika, described by Barbusse as "two interlaced gibbets."5° Hitler varied his rhythm and orchestrated the crowd's responses like an inspired musician.
Hitler ost about five pounds in weight during every speech- he sweated so profusely that the dye running from his suit stained his shirt and underwear blue.
Dark Valley on Mussolini
the door and later decreed that his ministers should run the last 20 yards into his presence. Enthroned on high, Mussolini exuded animal magne-tism. But he could be modest, courteous, charming and sardonic. Many visitors were impressed, not least Winston Churchill, who was suspected of wishing to become an English Mussolini. Churchill did not altogether discourage this notion before 1935, saying that in Italy he would be a Fas-cist and stressing the need for leaders who "feel themselves to be uplifted above the general mass." There were no giant peaks on the "democratic plateau," there was no "venerated 'El Capitan' or 11 Duce,' casting its majestic shadow in the evening light."'7 Witnesses less susceptible to the allurements of power were inclined to dismiss Mussolini as a comic-opera Caesar, "a Napoleon turned pugilist."" One woman journalist (whom he tried to seduce) was put off by Mus-solini's "absurd attitudinising"—the scowling forehead, the rolling eyes, the pouting mouth, the snapping jaw, the shaven head thrown back, the huge chin thrust out.'9 Mussolini's compulsive exhibitionism was part of his cult of machismo. Whenever possible he bared his chest for the benefit of the cameras and he made much of his furious bouts of exercise—riding, fencing, swimming, bicycling, boxing, playing tennis, doing gymnastics. More private manifestations of virility were visited on the many females who succumbed to his crude advances. Indifferent to the looks of his con-quests (though he liked them to smell strongly of scent or sweat—he him-self seldom washed, preferring to dab his body with eau-de-Cologne), Mussolini thrust himself forward with sadistic vigour, dragging them to the floor while removing neither his trousers nor his shoes. Apparently "his brutality and savage curses in moments of climax were followed by words of tenderness, however brief and however commonplace, when he was satisfied." And at least one woman was favoured, after he had lifted himself from her person, with an air on his violin.2° Equally theatrical were Mussolini's public performances, his harangues to crowds from his balcony, which he called his "stage." He spoke in short, strident sentences, making chopping gestures with his right hand. Often he paused and posed for dramatic effect—head up, torso erect, arms akimbo—looking like nothing so much as a music hall villain. Yet Mussolini was no more the comic figure he seems in flickering news-reels than he was the old-fashioned accommodationist visualised by other politicians at home and abroad. He was a peculiarly twentieth-century species of political gangster. Fascism was not just the negation of democ-racy, it was government by terror. Mussolini certainly snuffed out parlia-mentary power. But he also encouraged acts of violence against his opponents, of which the murder of the Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti in 1924 is the best-known example. Mussolini relished thuggery as a form of manliness and declared that his regime "could not be prosecuted except at the bar of history."2' This conveniently remote tribunal enabled him to rule by means of crime. He employed ruffians such as Roberto Farinacci, the viciously anti-Semitic boss of Cremona who was sometimes known as "Mussolini's left hand." He suppressed civil liberties, expro-priated property, imposed censorship, tapped telephones, destroyed inde-pendent trade unions, imprisoned people without trial. He appointed himself "head" of government and built up a mystique of the Duce, the infallible, omnipotent Leader, who was capable of performing miracles. (It was said that he stopped Mount Etna's lava from destroying a village.) Nothing less than playing the role of quasi-divine dictator could satisfy Mussolini's extravagant longings. As he said soon after coming to power, "I am possessed by a frenzied ambition which torments and devours me from within like a physical illness. It is, through my own will-power, to carve a mark on the age—like a lion with his claws, like this." Then with outspread fingers he made a savage, slashing motion. It was a symbolic gesture hardly impaired by the fact that he bit his fin-ger nails "not merely to the quick but almost to the moons." Whether they regarded him as saviour, buffoon or barbarian, contemporaries were bound to acknowledge that Mussolini had made his mark. Out of the blazing passions of war and the blighted hopes of peace he had distilled a new political force. It drew strength both from national exaltation and from national humiliation; for despite victory won at such terrible cost Italy remained, as Mussolini insisted, in comparison to more exalted pow-ers a "proletarian nation."24 It also drew strength from fears of Bolshevism, which was widely seen not as an alternative form of tyranny but as the stark antithesis of Fascism. Communists themselves identified Fascism as the final crisis of capitalism, in which the workers were terrorised into submission. Capitalists, or some of them, believed that the political dynamism and discipline of Fascism complemented their own economic efforts, especially after the Crash. "In 1929 the pillars of the temple that seemed to defy the centuries crumbled in a vast uproar," Mussolini declared. "The crisis through which we are passing is not a crisis in the sys-tem; it is a crisis of the system. "25 During this crisis the global battle-lines between Left and Right hardened, leaving little room for compromise. Many non-Fascists admired Mussolini for having created a state which seemed strong enough to withstand the economic holocaust. Many others feared that Mussolini's Roman Empire would plunge Europe into a new dark age. After the Great War T S. Eliot had described the Waste Land as "a heap of broken images." With equal pessimism the Auden generation witnessed the consecration of the new icons of Fascism—black shirts, loud-speakers, rubber truncheons, barbed wire, jackboots.
A DRESS rehearsal for the world crisis of 1929 seemed to be taking place in the Germany of 1923. The lost war and the cruel peace had reduced the new Weimar Republic to a condition bordering on anarchy. Short-lived governments were challenged by separatist organisations and putsches from the Left and Right. There was a rash of political assassinations. Riots and strikes proliferated. Poverty and hunger stalked the land. France's intransigent President Poincare demanded prompt payment of repara-tions, fixed at the enormous sum of 132 billion gold marks; and when the Germans defaulted in January 1923 French troops marched into the Rhineland, proposing to dig out the Ruhr's coal, as Lloyd George said, with bayonets. More insidious still, inflation was destroying the value of money like some financial cancer. In this poisoned atmosphere extremist political groups flourished, among them the small but well-disciplined National Socialist party in Bavaria. Its spell-binding leader Adolf Hitler intuitively grasped the fact that the social chaos caused by the mark's precipitous fall was the humus of Nazism.
Sunday, July 19, 2015
Hero final
Arabs and the Jews. Lawrence believed, as he wrote to Charlotte Shaw, that Britain was "quit of the war-time Eastern adventure with clean hands," though what he really meant was that he was quit of it with clean hands, and this much is certainly true. He had done his best to undo the Sykes-Picot agreement, and had placed two of Hussein's sons on semi-independent Arab thrones—he could hardly have done more. He was not quite "quit of it" yet, however. After a brief spell in London in May, Churchill sent him back to the Middle East, to Jidda, to under-take the impossible, which was to persuade King Hussein to agree in writing to all the various and conflicting arrangements that had been made by the Allies in the Middle East since the end of the war.
and
In every way the opposite of Lawrence, Liddell Hart was tall, elegant, storklike, fond of the good things of life, and so fascinated by women that he oversaw the smallest details of the lingerie for both his wives, was exacting and deeply involved in the design of their corsets, and regularly measured the waists of his two daughters. He was in fact a walking ency-clopedia on the subject of lingerie—or as one of his biographers, Alex Danchev, refers to it wittily, "l'artillerie de la nuit"—as knowledgeable about bras and merry widows and garter belts as he was about war. A perfectionist in all things, he was obsessed by the ideal of the feminine wasp waist, which was the Schwerpunkt* (to borrow a phrase from German strategic thinking) of his sexual desire. Despite these differences, he and Lawrence got along very well; and Lawrence, in his many letters to Lid-dell Hart and in his lengthy written commentaries on the text, is perhaps franker about himself than he is with anyone else except Charlotte Shaw. He respected Liddell Hart as a scholar, and was pleased to be taken seri-ously as a strategic thinker. Their admiration and friendship were genuine. Liddell Hart made contact with Lawrence as early as 1927, in one of his many guises as military editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica—it was part of his strategy to command as many positions in the field of military commentary and journalism as he could—proposing that Lawrence should write the article on "Guerrilla Warfare." Lawrence, then in Karachi, declined to write the entry but suggested how it could be pulled out of Seven Pillars of Wisdom; and Liddell Hart proceeded to do this for the fourteenth edition of the encyclopedia, above the initials T.E.L. This began a learned correspondence between the two men, which continued over the next seven years. Anybody who doubts that Lawrence was an exception-ally well-read strategic thinker need only consult the correspondence between him and Liddell Hart
*The Schwerpunkt was the central aim of German strategy, the focal point against which must be directed the maximum concentration of force to effect a breakthrough. The concept was characterized in World War II by General Guderian's comment, Nicht kleckern, klotzen! ("Don't fiddle around, smash!").
which itself provides something of a textbook in battle analysis and strategy. It was not until 1929 that Liddell Hart was finally persuaded by his agent David Higham to write a book about Lawrence. The book took him four years to complete—very unusually, since he typically dashed off books as quickly as he could, to keep his elaborate lifestyle afloat. The two men met frequently, and nothing ever dimmed Liddell Hart's admiration for his much smaller friend (in photographs taken of the two of them, Lawrence seems dwarfed by Hart's height, and in one of these photos he stands on a bollard to bring their heads to the same level). Liddell Hart called Law-rence "the Spirit of Freedom come incarnate to a world in fetters." This was insightful, for even though Lawrence had placed himself in a military world of tight restraints, he remained what Liddell Hart called an "anarch,"
Empire of Dreams
On Cecil B. DeMille:
DeMille was stunned when the Catholic League of Decency gave "The Greatest Show on Earth" a B rating, "morally objectionable in part for allpersons" because of the character of the clown who has killed his fatally ill wife rather than watch her suffer. "With these Catholics, a little euthanasia goes a long way" Demille said.
and
The shot completed, Brynner took off for Acapulco, leaving behind his friend, the film's doctor: Max Jacobson. Jacobson would become known as the quintessential Dr. Feelgood dispensing his specially concocted brand of pick-me-ups to dozens of celebrity patients, among them DeMille, John F. Kennedy, Alan Jay Lerner, and Tennessee Williams. DeMille had been seeing Jacobson occasion-ally since January 1952. No one seemed to know or care what Jacobson was prescribing, only that it banished fatigue and made sleep optional. Jacobson's manner and thriving medi-cal practice gave him an aura of omnipotence that wasn't to be found in the usual dispensers of pep pills that were pandemic in Hollywood in the 1940s. In fact, Jacobson was injecting customized doses of methedrine, which raises blood pres-sure, relieves fatigue, and induces a touch of euphoria. Jacobson was described by Christopher Plummer as "a cross between Con-rad Veidt and Martin Bormann," and Tennessee Williams would write that the doctor had "a magical atmosphere of understanding and compassion. . . . I don't think he even took my pulse or blood pressure or had me fill out a questionnaire about my medical history. He just looked at me . . . then started concocting the shot, drawing a bit of fluid from one bottle and another and another as my sus-pense and my alarm increased." But the aftermath of the injection was almost miraculous: "I felt as if a concrete sarcophagus about me had sprung open and I was released as a bird on the wing." Williams's response was not unusual; one female patient described the effects of the injections as resembling an orgasm. Jacobson's method was to give two injections, one in the arm, one in the buttocks. "He had a basic formula, and he would vary it according to your size, remembered Eddie Fisher. "He was like Rasputin; he could make you believe anything. He was from Berlin and had a German accent. He could be warm or he could be a tyrant, but he had a tremendous sense of humor with a great grasp of the English language. You were under his spell; he believed he had found the answer to Eternal Youth. He may have meant well in the beginning, but as he saw what power he had he became more destructive and took a lot of chances. A lot of people OD'd because he'd give them too much. I became as addicted to hip' as. I did to the drugs." Richard deMille smelled a rat. "Max Jacobson was what we would now call
guru. He was slightly mysterious, and always had the latest medical information and spoke in a technical language that had a grand sound to it. He was a total charlatan." Henry Noerdlinger, who was more sophisticated than most of the people on DeMille's staff, was on to Jacobson fairly quickly. Noerdlinger remembered going into a tent in Egypt with Jacobson one day, and without a word, the doctor said, "Don't tell me, I know what's wrong with you," whereupon he produced a syringe, had Noerdlinger drop his pants, and gave him a shot. "He was a most peculiar doctor," Noerdlinger would say with commendable European understatement. When Joan Brooskin came down with dengue fever, Jacobson gave her a couple of shots and told her that not only would she get over the fever, she would never have migraines or menstrual cramps again! "When DeMille's energy lagged, he would pick himself up with a shot of Dr. Feelgood's juice," remembered Anthony Quinn. "He was hooked and so was Katherine. She even started taking the children to see Dr. Feelgood." Quinn too began seeing Jacobson for pick-me-ups. DeMille's increasing dependency on the quack, attested to by the unquestioned respect in his correspondence to Jacobson, would be the most obvious manifestation of a naiveté that Donald Hayne had observed: "The latest glib ex-pert to come along can make an impression on DeMille, at least if he claims expertness in a field with which DeMille is not fully familiar." Hayne believed that this curious Achilles' heel in an otherwise strong-minded man derived from DeMille's ego and need for success: "If he has invested time and initial confidence in a man, the man must make good, and DeMille will continue to swear by him as long as there is any chance that he might [make good]; and sometimes, unfortunately, longer." It is unclear whether DeMille's California doctors knew about Jacobson's "treatments," but Cecil's medical problems didn't begin and end with one quack. His cholesterol around this time was a sky-high 400. In a note to himself, Cecil noted that "normal [was] 150-200." Jacobson would attend DeMille off and on until DeMille's death, and the doctor's "treatments" undoubtedly shortened his life. As Anthony Quinn remembered, there were times when "DeMille never knew if he was up or down. He was prone to tremendous mood swings. His en-ergy came and went. It was sometimes difficult for him to talk." Jacobson's medi-cal license would be revoked in 1975.
and
Production(on The Ten Commandments) dragged on endlessly with the Golden Calf sequence being a particular trial. One of the extra girls walked up to an assistant director and inquired, "Who do I have to fuck to get off this picture?"
and
The Voice of God on Mt. Sinai was dubbed by a small-part actor named Delos Jewkes (from the Music Man and Andy Griffith Show). Getting the voice and effects right was a painstaking process and time began to run out. When New York made inquiries about wrapping it up, DeMille replied, "Tell them we can stop right now and call it the Five Commandments".
and
He nudged the Paramount publicity department to pay for granite monoliths of the Ten Commandments to be installed on courthouse lawns, city halls, and public squares wherever the film played. More than four thousand were installed, and one of them became the basis of a Supreme Court decision allowing them on public property, but banning them from courtrooms.
DeMille was stunned when the Catholic League of Decency gave "The Greatest Show on Earth" a B rating, "morally objectionable in part for allpersons" because of the character of the clown who has killed his fatally ill wife rather than watch her suffer. "With these Catholics, a little euthanasia goes a long way" Demille said.
and
The shot completed, Brynner took off for Acapulco, leaving behind his friend, the film's doctor: Max Jacobson. Jacobson would become known as the quintessential Dr. Feelgood dispensing his specially concocted brand of pick-me-ups to dozens of celebrity patients, among them DeMille, John F. Kennedy, Alan Jay Lerner, and Tennessee Williams. DeMille had been seeing Jacobson occasion-ally since January 1952. No one seemed to know or care what Jacobson was prescribing, only that it banished fatigue and made sleep optional. Jacobson's manner and thriving medi-cal practice gave him an aura of omnipotence that wasn't to be found in the usual dispensers of pep pills that were pandemic in Hollywood in the 1940s. In fact, Jacobson was injecting customized doses of methedrine, which raises blood pres-sure, relieves fatigue, and induces a touch of euphoria. Jacobson was described by Christopher Plummer as "a cross between Con-rad Veidt and Martin Bormann," and Tennessee Williams would write that the doctor had "a magical atmosphere of understanding and compassion. . . . I don't think he even took my pulse or blood pressure or had me fill out a questionnaire about my medical history. He just looked at me . . . then started concocting the shot, drawing a bit of fluid from one bottle and another and another as my sus-pense and my alarm increased." But the aftermath of the injection was almost miraculous: "I felt as if a concrete sarcophagus about me had sprung open and I was released as a bird on the wing." Williams's response was not unusual; one female patient described the effects of the injections as resembling an orgasm. Jacobson's method was to give two injections, one in the arm, one in the buttocks. "He had a basic formula, and he would vary it according to your size, remembered Eddie Fisher. "He was like Rasputin; he could make you believe anything. He was from Berlin and had a German accent. He could be warm or he could be a tyrant, but he had a tremendous sense of humor with a great grasp of the English language. You were under his spell; he believed he had found the answer to Eternal Youth. He may have meant well in the beginning, but as he saw what power he had he became more destructive and took a lot of chances. A lot of people OD'd because he'd give them too much. I became as addicted to hip' as. I did to the drugs." Richard deMille smelled a rat. "Max Jacobson was what we would now call
guru. He was slightly mysterious, and always had the latest medical information and spoke in a technical language that had a grand sound to it. He was a total charlatan." Henry Noerdlinger, who was more sophisticated than most of the people on DeMille's staff, was on to Jacobson fairly quickly. Noerdlinger remembered going into a tent in Egypt with Jacobson one day, and without a word, the doctor said, "Don't tell me, I know what's wrong with you," whereupon he produced a syringe, had Noerdlinger drop his pants, and gave him a shot. "He was a most peculiar doctor," Noerdlinger would say with commendable European understatement. When Joan Brooskin came down with dengue fever, Jacobson gave her a couple of shots and told her that not only would she get over the fever, she would never have migraines or menstrual cramps again! "When DeMille's energy lagged, he would pick himself up with a shot of Dr. Feelgood's juice," remembered Anthony Quinn. "He was hooked and so was Katherine. She even started taking the children to see Dr. Feelgood." Quinn too began seeing Jacobson for pick-me-ups. DeMille's increasing dependency on the quack, attested to by the unquestioned respect in his correspondence to Jacobson, would be the most obvious manifestation of a naiveté that Donald Hayne had observed: "The latest glib ex-pert to come along can make an impression on DeMille, at least if he claims expertness in a field with which DeMille is not fully familiar." Hayne believed that this curious Achilles' heel in an otherwise strong-minded man derived from DeMille's ego and need for success: "If he has invested time and initial confidence in a man, the man must make good, and DeMille will continue to swear by him as long as there is any chance that he might [make good]; and sometimes, unfortunately, longer." It is unclear whether DeMille's California doctors knew about Jacobson's "treatments," but Cecil's medical problems didn't begin and end with one quack. His cholesterol around this time was a sky-high 400. In a note to himself, Cecil noted that "normal [was] 150-200." Jacobson would attend DeMille off and on until DeMille's death, and the doctor's "treatments" undoubtedly shortened his life. As Anthony Quinn remembered, there were times when "DeMille never knew if he was up or down. He was prone to tremendous mood swings. His en-ergy came and went. It was sometimes difficult for him to talk." Jacobson's medi-cal license would be revoked in 1975.
and
Production(on The Ten Commandments) dragged on endlessly with the Golden Calf sequence being a particular trial. One of the extra girls walked up to an assistant director and inquired, "Who do I have to fuck to get off this picture?"
and
The Voice of God on Mt. Sinai was dubbed by a small-part actor named Delos Jewkes (from the Music Man and Andy Griffith Show). Getting the voice and effects right was a painstaking process and time began to run out. When New York made inquiries about wrapping it up, DeMille replied, "Tell them we can stop right now and call it the Five Commandments".
and
He nudged the Paramount publicity department to pay for granite monoliths of the Ten Commandments to be installed on courthouse lawns, city halls, and public squares wherever the film played. More than four thousand were installed, and one of them became the basis of a Supreme Court decision allowing them on public property, but banning them from courtrooms.
Compton Mackenzie's Vestal Fire
The carabinieri entrusted with
the business of communicating to him the decision of the authorities arrived at the Grand Hotel Colosseo when he was taking a bath to get rid of the effects of the journey. It has already been pointed out that nobody dreams of arguing with carabinieri. As for attempting to stop them you might as well fancy trying to stop a glacier. Partly it is their awe-inspiring gemination which conveys such an impression of ineluctable fate in their advance. The Hydra, the Chimaera, the Sphinx, the Siren herself, these are familiar instances upon the human mind of a combination of two or several forms in a single organism. The two in oneness or one in twoness of a pair of carabinieri is not less dreadful in its suggestion of a preternatural power. The gendarme has become the butt of comic opera, because he was merely one man in a ridiculous uniform. The carabinieri in much the same kind of uniform have never been laughed at. And they never will be laughed at, for we may say without_ exaggeration that every pair of carabinieri are Romulus and Remus eternally founding the eternal city. So while Marsac lay in his bath and listened in pleasant egotistical dreams to the noise of the multitudinous swifts gathering in the wine-gold morning air of Rome, the carabinieri reached the lobby of the hotel and demanded of the head porter his whereabouts. On being informed that he was in his bath they demanded to be taken to the bath-room. Now, a certain majesty clings to the head porters of great hotels, and if ever anybody might have been supposed capable of bandying arguments with a pair of carabinieri it was the head porter of the Grand Hotel Colosseo ; yet without a moment's hesitation he dismissed half a dozen rich and noble clients waiting to consult him and led the way himself to the bathroom. " Ouvrez la Porte, s'il vous plait, monsieur le comte," he begged.
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Not that the old ladies had been reconciled to any of their enemies ; but the gaps that their absence had caused for a time had been filled by newcomers to the island, who had arrived to spend a day, or at most a week, and who like so many predecessors had remained there ever since. Of these newcomers undoubtedly the most conspicuous was Mrs. Hector Macdonnell. She was a rich Scots widow with all the faults and none of the fine qualities of her Lowland race. Her tongue was sharp, her accent broad.. She was purse-proud, snobbish, odiously mean, and ineffably vain. She mistook pruriency for puritanism, and affected a ludicrous sensibility to the beauties of nature. She was the worst kind of scandalmonger, because her tongue, dressed with the vinegar of malice and the oil of self-righteousness, lacked the honest mustard of ribaldry or the salt of wit. She was so well pleased with herself that she was never lonely, and she would sit for hours with no other company except her own portrait, which occupied a large easel in the middle of her salone at the Villa Candida. That portrait, executed by one of the Sirene painters, who in the hope of gaining an extra hundred liras on his com-mission had striven hard to flatter his sitter, was as ugly and garish as the original. It represented a bouncing woman with a hard carmine face, who, dressed in an elaborate cerise gown, sat gazing out across the Bay of Naples. The effect was of an advertisement for some distemper or dye ; and yet the colours were, if anything, toned down from the original. Mrs. Macdonnell rarely wore anything but some crude shade of pink for her trailing gowns of silk and satin, and her immense picture hats built up with gardens of sham flowers were always hung with coloured streamers that could have made a bridesmaid of 1896 feel ashamed of herself. She laid great stress on a long pedigree, and had adopted her late husband's family with such a romantic Highland devotion that she had by now entirely forgotten that her own maiden name was—but let no offence be given to the countless owners of that name by revealing it. Any-way, lest anybody should forget that she was Mrs. Hector Macdonnell, she had caused to be engraved on her cards her late husband's crest and motto. That motto happened to be Always ready, and the delight this gave to a ribald society may be imagined. Her nickname was Bonny Sarah ' owing to a 'Sirenian legend that when she first came to the island and was wished buona sera or good evening by passers-by she had supposed them to be commenting on her good looks. Mrs. Macdonnell (whom in spite of the crested card Mrs. Ambrogio would call Mrs. Macdonald) was at the Villa Amabile this afternoon, creating in the big salone as brilliant but not so beautiful an effect as the judas-tree on the Strada Nuova in-full bloom of hot carmine against the azure velvet of the May sky. Miss Virginia and Miss Maimie loved this aggressive female, but why they did was a riddle that nobody on the island ever suc-ceeded in solving. Perhaps it was that Mrs. Macdonnell's venomous propriety reassured them over the Count. Mrs. Macdonnell was determined to be one of his most fervid supporters, and she, who was even shocked by the light behaviour of a niece that was staying with her and who was always confiding in Miss Virginia and Miss Maimie how much the unbridled manners and morals of contem-porary girlhood distressed her, did seem to lend a real weight of respectability to the Marsac cause. Phyllis Allerton, the unsatisfactory niece, was one of the
numerous prototypes of the post-war girl, and the faithful-ness with which she and her fellows resembled their suc-cessors proves that the post-war girl is not in the least the product of the war, but the natural development of young womanhood. Queen Victoria lived too long. King Edward died too soon. Hence the apparent rapidity of development for which the war has been given undeserved credit or blame. Mrs. Macdonnell did not realize that Queen Victoria was dead. Hence her objection to this niece whom she had invited to spend the Spring and Summer with her in Sirene, and who had repaid her kindness by being consistently late for every meal, by accepting invita-tions to go bathing with young men without asking her aunt's permission, by smoking in the public street, and worst of all by being obviously a much more welcome addition to any party than she was herself
and
When one of the doyens of the English colony sent a telegram in code putting a sovereign accumulator on three horses running at Newmarket, the Secret Service in Naples spent a fortnight unravelling the mystery so deeply did they suspect an attempt to revictual a submarine at the Piccola Marina; and in the room of two Russian exiles a samovar was arrested by the carabinieri on the charge of being a wireless equipment.
and
America was being taken very seriously by the Italians at this date, and when the Italians take anything seriously they always change the-names of their streets, so that for a time in even the tiniest village you would find a Via Woodrow Wilson, not one of which survived the conference at Versailles. The way Nigel was standing champagne this evening seemed to be an earnest of the way America would be standing champagne to Italy in the thirsty days of peace-making. When the magnum of Fiume was emptied into the glasses of the Serbian delegates at Versailles, President Wilson became a No Thoroughfare in Italy, much to the relief of Latin lips, which champ at the letter W as a horse champs at an uncomfortable bit. But although this evening Nigel might shine with the reflected milky radiance of Wilson's benevolent teeth, every one of which seemed to stand up like a lighthouse in the murk of war, his long hibernation had been too much for him. He never recovered from it ; and after flitting round for awhile like a faded butterfly of last year in the cold and cruel light of Spring, he left Sirene without letting anybody know his destination. Rumour was busy for a day or two after his departure. Some said that repenting of his life he had become a Trappist monk. Others suggested economy as the explanation of his disappearance, and one or two would be content with- nothing less than suicide. Three months later the mystery was solved. He had been o growing a beard ; and he who had once been used to being told that he reminded people of the Naples Narcissus was Shortly more than grateful nowadays to be told that he was not unlike a Velasquez. There were many to suggest that Nigel had grown a beard to assume a masculinity he did not
possess. But they wronged him there. A double chin, not a double life, was the inspiration of the change. Autres temps, autres cceurs," Marsac sniffed. And that 4t was more witty than true. Nigel may still be seen on the Piazza. He is close on fifty now, and he is known to ribald English visitors as The Bearded Lady.
Hero redux
Certainly Hussein already realized that his claim to be "king of all the Arabs" and likewise his claim to the vast amount of territory promised to him by Sir Henry McMahon in 1915 were going to be a hard sell in Paris, let alone in Riyadh, where his
rival ibn Saud, with the backing of the British government in India, was already moving to take control of the entire Arabian Peninsula. It should be noted that Lawrence, with the skill of a natural "insider," was already well informed about the negotiations between Britain and France. On November 9, the Foreign Office released an Anglo-French declaration that embodied some of his suggestions, though couched in such vague and optimistic prose that it seemed to envisage both "native governments" and colonial rule. The British were in a difficult position. McMahon and Hussein's correspondence of 1915 directly contradicted the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 (as well as the Balfour Declaration of 1917), and while these conflicting promises to the Arabs, the French, and the Jews could be swept under the rug so long as the war continued, vic-tory would instantly bring the British face-to-face with the unwelcome reality of having promised more in the Middle East than they or anyone else could deliver. On November 8, only a day after Lawrence's message to King Hussein, the subject of the Middle East was suddenly overshadowed by the surren-der of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. On November 9 the kaiser abdicated. And on November 11, "the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month," Germany itself asked for an armistice. Those in charge of Britain's foreign and colonial affairs were suddenly faced with a range of issues more serious and pressing than the Middle East. What was to be the future of Germany? What was to replace the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was already beginning to crumble into a number of small, mutually hostile would-be states? Who was to receive the German colonies in Africa, and on what terms? Could a viable European peace be constructed without the participation of the Russians, now controlled by a Bolshevik regime that repudiated all trea-ties and preached universal revolution? Clamorous advocates for new states like Poland and Czechoslovakia were already appearing, maps and draft constitutions in hand; in the Balkans the Romanians were already Allies; almost a third of Hungary as their reward for joining the "ies; the Serbs, on whose behalf the war had begun, weregreedy to seize as much territory as possible and create a multinational Yugoslavia; and Zionists were pressing for the rapid implementation of the Balfour Declaration. More important than all these problems was the fact that the presi-dent of the United States was planning to join in the peace talks himself, bringing with him a host of unwelcome ideas, including a "general asso-ciation of nations." The New World was embarking on an effort to remake and reform the Old. "Even the Good Lord contented himself with only ten," Clemenceau grumbled, when he read Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points with the skeptical eye of an old-fashioned French nationalist who already knew what he wanted: Alsace; Lorraine; the Rhineland; formi-dable, crippling reparations; client states in the east to hold Germany in check; and, of course, last but not least, Syria, Lebanon, Mosul with its oil, and a share in the Holy Land. At the same time, the prospect of President Wilson's participation in the peace talks, together with a formidable American delegation,* made his majesty's government more inclined to collaborate with the French. Only by standing together, arm in arm, bras dessus, bras dessous, could the two principal European powers hope to resist what they both saw as Woodrow Wilson's starry-eyed idealism and naïveté. In the meantime, reports and advice on the Middle East continued to pour in to the Eastern Committee. Both Clayton and Hogarth sent long, detailed recommendations, basically echoing Lawrence's views. They were quickly countered by an equally long memorandum from Sir Arthur Hirtzel of the India Office, outlining the views of the government of India. These amounted to a sharp reminder that what really mattered was the oil deposits of Mesopotamia, rather than the Syrian Desert, and a warning that it was not worth jeopardizing British interests in Mesopo-tamia for the sake of nebulous promises that may have been made to Hussein and his sons. Hirtzel expressed polite scorn for Lawrence, whose
contempt for the Indian government and the Indian army on his brief visit to Baghdad in 1916 during the siege of Kut had not been forgotten or forgiven: "Without in the least wishing to deprecate [Lawrence's] achieve-ments and his undoubted genius, it must be said about him that he does not at all represent—and would not, I think, claim to represent—the local views of Northern Mesopotamia and Iraq; of the latter, indeed, he has practically no first-hand knowledge at all." Hirtzel also warned strongly against Lawrence's proposal to place one of Hussein's sons on a throne in Baghdad as king of Iraq, and another on a throne in Mosul to rule over the Kurds,* and suggested that if Britain raised objections to France's ruling over Lebanon and Syria, the French would hardly be likely to accept British rule over Iraq. Even the joy of victory did not prevent Stephen-Jean-Marie Pichon, the French foreign minister, from administering a sharp rap on the knuckles to the British Foreign Office, reminding them that so far as France was concerned, the Sykes-Picot agreement was still in force and that France expected to receive everything it had been promised. Pichon reminded the British Foreign Office of France's "historic duty towards the peoples of Syria," just in case the members of the Eastern Committee had forgotten, or might have plans to denounce the Sykes-Picot agree-ment to President Wilson as exactly the kind of secret diplomacy that the Fourteen Points were intended to prevent. Much as the British might deprecate the exaggerated territorial claims of King Hussein, or the ambitions of Syrian nationalists, when it came to the Middle East there was more sympathy for the Arabs in London—partly because of Lawrence—than for the French. Lawrence's capacity for communicating enthusiasm was now concentrated on the task of getting Feisal to the Peace Conference, despite strong French opposition.
*Although Lawrence's plan may have been overgenerous to Hussein and his sons, it nevertheless recognized the difference between northern and southern Mesopotamia, and would have resulted in an independent Kurdish state and solved at least one of the fundamental divisive issues that plague modern Iraq.
The first difficulty Lawrence faced was not so much Feisal's initial reluctance to exchange his claim to the throne of Syria for that of Iraq—the latter had originally been promised to his brother Abdulla—although this was a factor, but Churchill's need to have it appear that the people of Iraq had called Feisal to the throne. Churchill's requirement was much harder to stage-manage, particularly given the doubts of Colonel Arnold Wilson, the stiff-necked acting chief political officer in Iraq, under whose orders the Iraqi rebellion of 1920 had been brutally repressed. Wilson remained skeptical about Feisal's appeal to the Iraqis, and about the Hashemite family in general, and his skepticism was initially shared by Gertrude Bell. Lawrence quickly managed to convert Bell to his point of view—his cheery self-confidence usually brought that about. The prob-lem of Wilson, a firm believer in the use of force and in the inability of the Arabs to govern an area like Iraq, was solved by knighting him, then replacing him with the more malleable Sir Percy Cox. Gertrude Bell was assigned—among many other more important tasks, including persuading the initially reluctant Shiites and the Jews of Baghdad to accept a Sunni king—the job of devising a national flag, draw-ing up a code of court etiquette, and selecting a recognizable national anthem. (The last proved impossible, so the initial choice was the music of "God Save the King," without the lyrics.) Deciding on Iraq's borders was a more difficult question. The western border with Syria was fixed by a pre-vious agreement with the French, the southern border was an invisible line in the sand between Iraq and the vast empty desert ibn Saud claimed, and the eastern border was that of the old Ottoman Empire with Persia; but to the north was the territory inhabited by Kurds, Arabic-speaking non-Arabs, supposedly of Indo-European descent, who passionately desired an independent Kurdistan. Unfortunately for them, the grand prize of Iraq from the British point of view was Mosul, right in the middle of the Kurdish homeland, with its rich oil deposits. Accordingly, commer-cial interests and realpolitik combined to create a country with a Shiite majority, a Sunni king, a disappointed Kurdish minority, and a small but wealthy and cosmopolitan class of Jewish merchants in Baghdad.
and
Already in 1921 there were considerable misgivings about Lawrence's solution to the problem of how to reward Abdulla for giving up any claim he had to the Iraqui throne in favor of his brother Feisal. The Balfor Declaration had prudently not attempted to define the exact frontiers of Palestine, but both historically and biblically it had always included the area to the east of the Jordan as well as the west bank. Approximately three-quarters of the territory to which the Zionists aspired was now a separate country, under the rule of an emir and the Sharif of Mecca, with Jewish settlement forbidden
there—an area moreover which potentially could have sufficient water and could be ideal for settlement and modern farming, but which would remain a sandy wasteland. The reaction of Lawrence's fellow political adviser Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen was apoplectic and immediate, and echoed the feelings of the Zionist leadership: "The atmosphere in the Colonial Office is definitely hebraphobe, the worst offender being Shuck-burgh who is head of the Middle East Department. Hubert Young and little Lawrence do their best to cOnceal their dislike and mistrust of Jews but both support the official pro-Arab policy of Whitehall and frown on the equally official policy based on the Balfour Declaration; the latter is the only policy I recognize. I exploded on hearing Churchill had severed the Transjordan from Palestine. . . . Lawrence was of course with Churchill and influenced him.... This reduces the Jewish National Home to one-third of Biblical Palestine." Meinertzhagen described himself as "foam-ing at the mouth with anger and indignation," not necessarily a figure of speech where Meinertzhagen was concerned, but his protests were mild compared with those of the Zionists themselves, in Palestine and in the United States. The Israelis' belief that Jordan is, or ought to be, the Pales-tinian state, and that the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were always intended to be part of the Jewish state, thus goes back to 1921, and the creation of Trans-Jordan. If Lawrence had been unaware of that before the eight days he spent with Abdulla, calming the tribes and persuading Abdulla to accept the "governorship" of Trans-Jordan, he certainly became aware of it the moment he reached Jerusalem. Churchill's daring initiatives were not all that disturbed the inhabi-tants of Palestine, who now suddenly found themselves living in a much smaller country than either the Jews or the Arabs had expected. Although Palestine was still occupied by the British army, and Lawrence's old friend Ronald Storrs had been rushed into khaki to serve as Jerusalem's military governor, a civilian high commissioner had been appointed in 1920, and the choice had fallen on Sir Herbert Samuel, the former home secretary, who was a Jew and an ardent Zionist. Even before his appoint-ment was final, Arabs responded with "consternation, despondency, and
exasperation," feelings shared for once with the Christian population of Palestine—Catholic, Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Armenian, and Protestant—as well as with the Orthodox Jews, who believed that any attempt to encourage Jewish immigration was impious until and unless God arranged it. Samuel arrived at Jaffa, in a white diplomatic uniform, and was greeted by a seventeen-gun salute. Then he was taken to a reception in Jerusalem, where the chief military administrator he was replacing handed him "a typewritten receipt for 'one Palestine taken over in good condition,' which Sir Herbert duly signed." Below his signa-ture, however, he cautiously wrote, "E.&O.E.," letters which, on commer-cial documents, stand for "Errors and Omissions Excepted." Samuel was happily unaware that even the unflappable and unmilitary Storrs was holding "a loaded and cocked Browning pistol in his left hand" as they sat together in the back of the open car on the way to the reception. Storrs was well informed of the Arabs' hostility toward Samuel, though in the event, Samuel was notably evenhanded and fair. Although he too was strongly opposed to the creation of Trans-Jordan, he got along well with Lawrence, who took him on a sightseeing trip to Petra. At one point, as Churchill, Samuel, and Lawrence stood surrounded by a crowd of chant-ing, shouting Arabs, Churchill took off his hat to thank them for their prolonged cheers. "What are they saying?" he asked Lawrence. "Death to the Jews," Lawrence explained quietly. Samuel did his best to control the fear and anger that were already beginning to mar the relationship between the Jews and the Arabs in the Holy Land.
* Storrs (the source of this quotation) got it slightly wrong. In fact, it read, "Received from Major-General Sir Louis J. Bois, K.C.B.—One Palestine, complete." Samuel (by then in his nineties) was incensed when this chit, intended as a good-natured joke, was offered for sale at auction in New York, and went for $5,000.
rival ibn Saud, with the backing of the British government in India, was already moving to take control of the entire Arabian Peninsula. It should be noted that Lawrence, with the skill of a natural "insider," was already well informed about the negotiations between Britain and France. On November 9, the Foreign Office released an Anglo-French declaration that embodied some of his suggestions, though couched in such vague and optimistic prose that it seemed to envisage both "native governments" and colonial rule. The British were in a difficult position. McMahon and Hussein's correspondence of 1915 directly contradicted the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 (as well as the Balfour Declaration of 1917), and while these conflicting promises to the Arabs, the French, and the Jews could be swept under the rug so long as the war continued, vic-tory would instantly bring the British face-to-face with the unwelcome reality of having promised more in the Middle East than they or anyone else could deliver. On November 8, only a day after Lawrence's message to King Hussein, the subject of the Middle East was suddenly overshadowed by the surren-der of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. On November 9 the kaiser abdicated. And on November 11, "the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month," Germany itself asked for an armistice. Those in charge of Britain's foreign and colonial affairs were suddenly faced with a range of issues more serious and pressing than the Middle East. What was to be the future of Germany? What was to replace the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was already beginning to crumble into a number of small, mutually hostile would-be states? Who was to receive the German colonies in Africa, and on what terms? Could a viable European peace be constructed without the participation of the Russians, now controlled by a Bolshevik regime that repudiated all trea-ties and preached universal revolution? Clamorous advocates for new states like Poland and Czechoslovakia were already appearing, maps and draft constitutions in hand; in the Balkans the Romanians were already Allies; almost a third of Hungary as their reward for joining the "ies; the Serbs, on whose behalf the war had begun, weregreedy to seize as much territory as possible and create a multinational Yugoslavia; and Zionists were pressing for the rapid implementation of the Balfour Declaration. More important than all these problems was the fact that the presi-dent of the United States was planning to join in the peace talks himself, bringing with him a host of unwelcome ideas, including a "general asso-ciation of nations." The New World was embarking on an effort to remake and reform the Old. "Even the Good Lord contented himself with only ten," Clemenceau grumbled, when he read Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points with the skeptical eye of an old-fashioned French nationalist who already knew what he wanted: Alsace; Lorraine; the Rhineland; formi-dable, crippling reparations; client states in the east to hold Germany in check; and, of course, last but not least, Syria, Lebanon, Mosul with its oil, and a share in the Holy Land. At the same time, the prospect of President Wilson's participation in the peace talks, together with a formidable American delegation,* made his majesty's government more inclined to collaborate with the French. Only by standing together, arm in arm, bras dessus, bras dessous, could the two principal European powers hope to resist what they both saw as Woodrow Wilson's starry-eyed idealism and naïveté. In the meantime, reports and advice on the Middle East continued to pour in to the Eastern Committee. Both Clayton and Hogarth sent long, detailed recommendations, basically echoing Lawrence's views. They were quickly countered by an equally long memorandum from Sir Arthur Hirtzel of the India Office, outlining the views of the government of India. These amounted to a sharp reminder that what really mattered was the oil deposits of Mesopotamia, rather than the Syrian Desert, and a warning that it was not worth jeopardizing British interests in Mesopo-tamia for the sake of nebulous promises that may have been made to Hussein and his sons. Hirtzel expressed polite scorn for Lawrence, whose
contempt for the Indian government and the Indian army on his brief visit to Baghdad in 1916 during the siege of Kut had not been forgotten or forgiven: "Without in the least wishing to deprecate [Lawrence's] achieve-ments and his undoubted genius, it must be said about him that he does not at all represent—and would not, I think, claim to represent—the local views of Northern Mesopotamia and Iraq; of the latter, indeed, he has practically no first-hand knowledge at all." Hirtzel also warned strongly against Lawrence's proposal to place one of Hussein's sons on a throne in Baghdad as king of Iraq, and another on a throne in Mosul to rule over the Kurds,* and suggested that if Britain raised objections to France's ruling over Lebanon and Syria, the French would hardly be likely to accept British rule over Iraq. Even the joy of victory did not prevent Stephen-Jean-Marie Pichon, the French foreign minister, from administering a sharp rap on the knuckles to the British Foreign Office, reminding them that so far as France was concerned, the Sykes-Picot agreement was still in force and that France expected to receive everything it had been promised. Pichon reminded the British Foreign Office of France's "historic duty towards the peoples of Syria," just in case the members of the Eastern Committee had forgotten, or might have plans to denounce the Sykes-Picot agree-ment to President Wilson as exactly the kind of secret diplomacy that the Fourteen Points were intended to prevent. Much as the British might deprecate the exaggerated territorial claims of King Hussein, or the ambitions of Syrian nationalists, when it came to the Middle East there was more sympathy for the Arabs in London—partly because of Lawrence—than for the French. Lawrence's capacity for communicating enthusiasm was now concentrated on the task of getting Feisal to the Peace Conference, despite strong French opposition.
*Although Lawrence's plan may have been overgenerous to Hussein and his sons, it nevertheless recognized the difference between northern and southern Mesopotamia, and would have resulted in an independent Kurdish state and solved at least one of the fundamental divisive issues that plague modern Iraq.
The first difficulty Lawrence faced was not so much Feisal's initial reluctance to exchange his claim to the throne of Syria for that of Iraq—the latter had originally been promised to his brother Abdulla—although this was a factor, but Churchill's need to have it appear that the people of Iraq had called Feisal to the throne. Churchill's requirement was much harder to stage-manage, particularly given the doubts of Colonel Arnold Wilson, the stiff-necked acting chief political officer in Iraq, under whose orders the Iraqi rebellion of 1920 had been brutally repressed. Wilson remained skeptical about Feisal's appeal to the Iraqis, and about the Hashemite family in general, and his skepticism was initially shared by Gertrude Bell. Lawrence quickly managed to convert Bell to his point of view—his cheery self-confidence usually brought that about. The prob-lem of Wilson, a firm believer in the use of force and in the inability of the Arabs to govern an area like Iraq, was solved by knighting him, then replacing him with the more malleable Sir Percy Cox. Gertrude Bell was assigned—among many other more important tasks, including persuading the initially reluctant Shiites and the Jews of Baghdad to accept a Sunni king—the job of devising a national flag, draw-ing up a code of court etiquette, and selecting a recognizable national anthem. (The last proved impossible, so the initial choice was the music of "God Save the King," without the lyrics.) Deciding on Iraq's borders was a more difficult question. The western border with Syria was fixed by a pre-vious agreement with the French, the southern border was an invisible line in the sand between Iraq and the vast empty desert ibn Saud claimed, and the eastern border was that of the old Ottoman Empire with Persia; but to the north was the territory inhabited by Kurds, Arabic-speaking non-Arabs, supposedly of Indo-European descent, who passionately desired an independent Kurdistan. Unfortunately for them, the grand prize of Iraq from the British point of view was Mosul, right in the middle of the Kurdish homeland, with its rich oil deposits. Accordingly, commer-cial interests and realpolitik combined to create a country with a Shiite majority, a Sunni king, a disappointed Kurdish minority, and a small but wealthy and cosmopolitan class of Jewish merchants in Baghdad.
and
Already in 1921 there were considerable misgivings about Lawrence's solution to the problem of how to reward Abdulla for giving up any claim he had to the Iraqui throne in favor of his brother Feisal. The Balfor Declaration had prudently not attempted to define the exact frontiers of Palestine, but both historically and biblically it had always included the area to the east of the Jordan as well as the west bank. Approximately three-quarters of the territory to which the Zionists aspired was now a separate country, under the rule of an emir and the Sharif of Mecca, with Jewish settlement forbidden
there—an area moreover which potentially could have sufficient water and could be ideal for settlement and modern farming, but which would remain a sandy wasteland. The reaction of Lawrence's fellow political adviser Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen was apoplectic and immediate, and echoed the feelings of the Zionist leadership: "The atmosphere in the Colonial Office is definitely hebraphobe, the worst offender being Shuck-burgh who is head of the Middle East Department. Hubert Young and little Lawrence do their best to cOnceal their dislike and mistrust of Jews but both support the official pro-Arab policy of Whitehall and frown on the equally official policy based on the Balfour Declaration; the latter is the only policy I recognize. I exploded on hearing Churchill had severed the Transjordan from Palestine. . . . Lawrence was of course with Churchill and influenced him.... This reduces the Jewish National Home to one-third of Biblical Palestine." Meinertzhagen described himself as "foam-ing at the mouth with anger and indignation," not necessarily a figure of speech where Meinertzhagen was concerned, but his protests were mild compared with those of the Zionists themselves, in Palestine and in the United States. The Israelis' belief that Jordan is, or ought to be, the Pales-tinian state, and that the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were always intended to be part of the Jewish state, thus goes back to 1921, and the creation of Trans-Jordan. If Lawrence had been unaware of that before the eight days he spent with Abdulla, calming the tribes and persuading Abdulla to accept the "governorship" of Trans-Jordan, he certainly became aware of it the moment he reached Jerusalem. Churchill's daring initiatives were not all that disturbed the inhabi-tants of Palestine, who now suddenly found themselves living in a much smaller country than either the Jews or the Arabs had expected. Although Palestine was still occupied by the British army, and Lawrence's old friend Ronald Storrs had been rushed into khaki to serve as Jerusalem's military governor, a civilian high commissioner had been appointed in 1920, and the choice had fallen on Sir Herbert Samuel, the former home secretary, who was a Jew and an ardent Zionist. Even before his appoint-ment was final, Arabs responded with "consternation, despondency, and
exasperation," feelings shared for once with the Christian population of Palestine—Catholic, Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Armenian, and Protestant—as well as with the Orthodox Jews, who believed that any attempt to encourage Jewish immigration was impious until and unless God arranged it. Samuel arrived at Jaffa, in a white diplomatic uniform, and was greeted by a seventeen-gun salute. Then he was taken to a reception in Jerusalem, where the chief military administrator he was replacing handed him "a typewritten receipt for 'one Palestine taken over in good condition,' which Sir Herbert duly signed." Below his signa-ture, however, he cautiously wrote, "E.&O.E.," letters which, on commer-cial documents, stand for "Errors and Omissions Excepted." Samuel was happily unaware that even the unflappable and unmilitary Storrs was holding "a loaded and cocked Browning pistol in his left hand" as they sat together in the back of the open car on the way to the reception. Storrs was well informed of the Arabs' hostility toward Samuel, though in the event, Samuel was notably evenhanded and fair. Although he too was strongly opposed to the creation of Trans-Jordan, he got along well with Lawrence, who took him on a sightseeing trip to Petra. At one point, as Churchill, Samuel, and Lawrence stood surrounded by a crowd of chant-ing, shouting Arabs, Churchill took off his hat to thank them for their prolonged cheers. "What are they saying?" he asked Lawrence. "Death to the Jews," Lawrence explained quietly. Samuel did his best to control the fear and anger that were already beginning to mar the relationship between the Jews and the Arabs in the Holy Land.
* Storrs (the source of this quotation) got it slightly wrong. In fact, it read, "Received from Major-General Sir Louis J. Bois, K.C.B.—One Palestine, complete." Samuel (by then in his nineties) was incensed when this chit, intended as a good-natured joke, was offered for sale at auction in New York, and went for $5,000.
Saturday, July 18, 2015
Act 1
Unfortunately, it was also the moment that saw the end of Mr. Kaufman's forbearance and patience. The frenzy, in other words, was starting exactly on schedule. Its cause was simple enough. Though the stagehands had worked through the night, it now turned out we could not get the stage, although more than enough time had been allowed and a free stage had been promised for eleven o'clock this morning. The lighting as usual had held everything up, and Mr. Kaufman, who hated to rehearse in a hall or in the lounge, was furious. This was just the sort of small crisis that threw him into a temper—and Mr. Kaufman in temper was a formidable figure.
genuine crisis he met head-on and with enviable calm, but small ir-ritations he had no capacity whatever to meet. In addition, his chief weakness, even beyond inept waiters and people who insisted on tell-ing him jokes, was what may be best described as "inanimate object trouble," and a rehearsal hall or a theatre lounge inevitably brought out the worst in him. His difficulty with inanimate objects seemed to be that all kinds of furniture contrived to take on a malevolent and almost human design the moment he entered the room. Chairs, lamps, ashtrays and tables seemed to move imperceptibly out of line and craftily place themselves in his path. His progress through a room would begin peaceably enough, but by the time he had stum-bled against a chair, knocked against a lamp and banged his elbow against the ashtray as he sank down onto the sofa, his threshold of irritation had been breached. He would sit muttering oaths under his breath and stare malignantly at the furniture, and the same pat-tern more or less would be repeated when he left the room. It put him in foul humor for a good while afterward, and I had learned to steer clear of him until he had rubbed the bruised knee or elbow suf-ficiently and was out in an open space where no furniture could move toward him. I held my breath now as we all filed into the rehearsal hall, for a rehearsal hall is just that—a large empty hall with nothing but chairs in it, and usually old and rickety chairs at that. Every one of them seemed to perk up and form an invisible phalanx of enmity as Mr. Kaufman entered the room, and then move quickly into position. I cannot swear that I saw them move, but they seemed to tremble with anticipatory glee. Mr. Kaufman usually surveyed the furniture in a strange room with equal enmity and distrust, trying to gauge, I always thought, from which side the attack would come or which chair he would bang himself against first. But he was deeply engaged in conversation at the moment with the two stage managers and he passed through the doorway without looking up. He did not go very Ear. Though the stage manager on either side of him did not so much as even brush against a chair, Mr. Kaufman ran smack into one be-fore he was ten steps into the room. He gave a howl of surprise and rage and kicked the offending chair clear across the room, stubbing [ 408]
his toe, of course, in the process. He snarled viciously at one of the stage managers who tried to help him and limped toward the table, where he promptly banged his elbow as he sat down; and, as he sat, there was a sound of ripping cloth and one and all knew that a pro-truding nail in the seat of the chair had torn a hole in his trousers. Not a soul laughed. Indeed, everyone looked stricken. His whole as-pect in these moments was so terrifying that I firmly believe that if he had ever slipped on a banana peel in Times Square the entire area would have been clear of people before he rose to his feet again, for he somehow managed to convey a sense of individual blame to any-one who happened to witness this unending warfare with inanimate objects. There was complete silence in the hall now, for there was every indication of heavy weather ahead, and to make matters worse, Mr. Kaufman began to sneeze and could not stop. He was susceptible to drafts and convinced that the merest puff of air could lay him low, and a great scurrying took place to close the offending windows. Some of them would not close, others were too high to reach, a window pole could not be found, and the two stage managers were wet with perspiration by the time the windows were wrestled with and all the chairs shifted to the far end of the hall away from the draft. It was not the best of circumstances in which to start the final days of rehearsal, and Mr. Kaufman's mood was not improved by the news which arrived in midafternoon that the stage would not be available until tomorrow. It was the company's turn now to lose their tempers, and they proceeded to do so each in turn and according to the size of their billing in the program. It was hard to blame them. Actors like to adjust their voices and pitch their performance to the an size of the theatre they are going to play in, and the sooner they are to do so, the more secure they feel. They are correct, of course, for a performance suited to the Lyric in Philadelphia might well be out of scale in the Music Box. The news that they would have only one day on the stage of the Music Box, instead of the two days they had every right to expect, cut through, for good and all, the heavy cream of false politeness that had so far acted as a cover for panic and nerves.
genuine crisis he met head-on and with enviable calm, but small ir-ritations he had no capacity whatever to meet. In addition, his chief weakness, even beyond inept waiters and people who insisted on tell-ing him jokes, was what may be best described as "inanimate object trouble," and a rehearsal hall or a theatre lounge inevitably brought out the worst in him. His difficulty with inanimate objects seemed to be that all kinds of furniture contrived to take on a malevolent and almost human design the moment he entered the room. Chairs, lamps, ashtrays and tables seemed to move imperceptibly out of line and craftily place themselves in his path. His progress through a room would begin peaceably enough, but by the time he had stum-bled against a chair, knocked against a lamp and banged his elbow against the ashtray as he sank down onto the sofa, his threshold of irritation had been breached. He would sit muttering oaths under his breath and stare malignantly at the furniture, and the same pat-tern more or less would be repeated when he left the room. It put him in foul humor for a good while afterward, and I had learned to steer clear of him until he had rubbed the bruised knee or elbow suf-ficiently and was out in an open space where no furniture could move toward him. I held my breath now as we all filed into the rehearsal hall, for a rehearsal hall is just that—a large empty hall with nothing but chairs in it, and usually old and rickety chairs at that. Every one of them seemed to perk up and form an invisible phalanx of enmity as Mr. Kaufman entered the room, and then move quickly into position. I cannot swear that I saw them move, but they seemed to tremble with anticipatory glee. Mr. Kaufman usually surveyed the furniture in a strange room with equal enmity and distrust, trying to gauge, I always thought, from which side the attack would come or which chair he would bang himself against first. But he was deeply engaged in conversation at the moment with the two stage managers and he passed through the doorway without looking up. He did not go very Ear. Though the stage manager on either side of him did not so much as even brush against a chair, Mr. Kaufman ran smack into one be-fore he was ten steps into the room. He gave a howl of surprise and rage and kicked the offending chair clear across the room, stubbing [ 408]
his toe, of course, in the process. He snarled viciously at one of the stage managers who tried to help him and limped toward the table, where he promptly banged his elbow as he sat down; and, as he sat, there was a sound of ripping cloth and one and all knew that a pro-truding nail in the seat of the chair had torn a hole in his trousers. Not a soul laughed. Indeed, everyone looked stricken. His whole as-pect in these moments was so terrifying that I firmly believe that if he had ever slipped on a banana peel in Times Square the entire area would have been clear of people before he rose to his feet again, for he somehow managed to convey a sense of individual blame to any-one who happened to witness this unending warfare with inanimate objects. There was complete silence in the hall now, for there was every indication of heavy weather ahead, and to make matters worse, Mr. Kaufman began to sneeze and could not stop. He was susceptible to drafts and convinced that the merest puff of air could lay him low, and a great scurrying took place to close the offending windows. Some of them would not close, others were too high to reach, a window pole could not be found, and the two stage managers were wet with perspiration by the time the windows were wrestled with and all the chairs shifted to the far end of the hall away from the draft. It was not the best of circumstances in which to start the final days of rehearsal, and Mr. Kaufman's mood was not improved by the news which arrived in midafternoon that the stage would not be available until tomorrow. It was the company's turn now to lose their tempers, and they proceeded to do so each in turn and according to the size of their billing in the program. It was hard to blame them. Actors like to adjust their voices and pitch their performance to the an size of the theatre they are going to play in, and the sooner they are to do so, the more secure they feel. They are correct, of course, for a performance suited to the Lyric in Philadelphia might well be out of scale in the Music Box. The news that they would have only one day on the stage of the Music Box, instead of the two days they had every right to expect, cut through, for good and all, the heavy cream of false politeness that had so far acted as a cover for panic and nerves.
Cleopatterer final
In a world entranced by rhetoric— addicted to "honeyballs of phrases, every word and act besprinkled with poppy-seed and sesame" —the plausible reliably trumped the actual. Octavian had at his disposal plenty of generous veins to mine. The depredations of the East alone — that intoxicating, intemperate, irrational realm supplied a mother lode of material. Like its queen, Egypt was beguiling and voluptuous; the modern association between the Orient and sex was hoary already in the first century. Already Africa was the address of moral decay. From there it was no great leap to transform the Antony of the Donations into a power-crazed, dissolute, Eastern despot: "In his hand was a golden scepter, at his side a scimitar; he wore a purple robe studded with huge gems; a crown only was lacking to make him a king dallying with a queen." It was the diadem and golden statues business all over again; the accessories of kingship unnerved Romans even more than did autocracy itself, which they had tolerated in a more subtle version for at least a decade. In Octavi-an's account, Antony was irredeemably contaminated by the Oriental languor and the un-Roman luxuries of the East as, arguably, Caesar and Alexander the Great had been before him. In turn Octavian would soon enough discover that Egypt conferred on its conqueror a mixed blessing, a literal embarrassment of riches. Like a prodigious trust f und, it convinced men they were gods. Octavian wrung the most mileage from Antony's affair with Cleo-Patra. She allowed him to recycle the oldest trope: the allergy to the Powerful woman was sturdier even than that to monarchy, or to the depraved East. Whether or not Cleopatra controlled Antony, she unequivocally permitted Octavian to control the narrative.
and
If Antony was to send his body to her, what would he conceivably deny her? And for what would she hesitate to ask? Octavian seems to have been the one who decided that Cleopatra plotted to make Rome a province of Egypt, an idea very unlikely to have crossed her quick mind. He had on his side the familiar type, the scheming, spendthrift wife, for whom no diamond is large enough, no house spacious enough. As Eutropius put it centuries later, Antony began a war at the urging of the queen of Egypt, who "longed with womanly desire to reign in the city as well."* Already it was acknowl-edged "that the greatest wars have taken place on account of women." Whole families had been ruined on their account. And already—the fault as ever of the sultry, sinuous, overtly subversive East—Egyptian women had caused their share of trouble. They were endowed with insatiable ardor and phenomenal sexual energy. One husband was not Hnee cor-ralled the evidence. enough for them. They attracted and ruined men. Octavian only cor-lad found a cunning disguise for a civil war, which four years earlier he had declared officially over, and into which he had prom-ised again to lead his men. How much more palatable, how much more credible, that Antony should be destroyed by an illicit love than by his countrymen! It was by no means difficult to rally legions or tax the populace, or set fathers against sons with the claim that Cleopatra was poised to conquer them as she had conquered Antony. As Lucan formulated the battle cry a century later, "Would a woman—not even Roman—rule the world?" The logic was simple. The Egyptian queen had subdued Antony. Rome, Octavian warned, was next. At the end of October he declared war—on Cleopatra.
THE DECLARATION COULD not have been unexpected. It may even have come as a relief. Cleopatra must all the same have been surprised by its terms. She had engaged in no hostilities toward Rome. She had comported herself like the ideal vassal—if a vassal with privileges. She had maintained order in her kingdom, supplied Rome when called upon to do so, materialized when summoned, aggressed upon no neighbors. She had done everything in her power to uphold and noth-ing to diminish the surpassing greatness of Rome. Traditionally, a three-step process preceded a Roman declaration of war: The Senate submitted a demand for restitution, followed after a month by a sol-emn reminder that satisfaction was still wanting. Three days later, a messenger traveled to enemy territory, formally to open hostilities. Octavian summoned Cleopatra neither for an accounting nor an air-ing of charges. He made no overtures through diplomatic channels. Instead, deft as ever with the mise-en-scene, he dusted off the ceremo-nial portion of the process. In a military cloak he personally launched a spear drenched in pig blood toward the East, from a ritual patch of "hostile soil" in Rome. (There is speculation that he invented this ancient rite for the occasion, that Octavian was making up the history as he went along. He was very good at restoring traditions, including those that had never existed.) There were no official charges for the simple reason that none could be leveled. Insofar as Cleopatra was accused of any hostile intent, she was condemned "for her acts," con-veniently left unspecified. Octavian gambled that Antony would remain true to Cleopatra, a loyalty that—under the circumstances — allowed Octavian to charge that his compatriot "had voluntarily taken up war on the side of the Egyptian woman against his native country."
and
Octavian enlisted an asp. Arriving on the scene after his messengers, h , he attempted to resuscitate Cleopatra. He called in the psylli, Libyans believed to enjoy a magical immunity to snake venom. By taste they were said to be able to determine what kind of snake had bitten; by murmuring spells and sucking at the wound they were said to be able to extract death from an icy corpse, The psylli who knelt over Cleopa-tra worked no miracles. The Egyptian queen could not be revived. That was not altogether surprising. Neither Dio nor Plutarch was at all sure of the asp, who surely crept into the story later rather than arriving in Cleopatra's lifetime, amid a basket of figs. Even Strabo, who landed in Egypt shortly after her death, was unconvinced. For any number of reasons Cleopatra was unlikely to have recruited an asp, or an Egyptian cobra, for the job. A woman known for her crisp decisions and meticulous planning would surely have hesitated to entrust her fate to a wild animal. She had plenty of quicker, less painful options. It was as well a little too convenient to be killed by the royal emblem of Egypt; the snake made more sym-bolic than practical sense. Even the most reliable of cobras cannot kill three women in quick succession, and the asp is a famously sluggish snake. An Egyptian cobra, bristling and hissing and puffing itself up to its six-foot splendor, could hardly have hidden in a fig basket or remained hidden in one for long. The job was too great and the basket too small. Poison was a more likely alternative, as Plutarch seems to imply with his survey of Cleopatra's experiments. Most likely she swallowed a lethal drink—the hemlock and opium of Socrates would have done the trick—or applied a toxic ointment. Hannibal had resorted to poison when backed into a corner 150 years earlier; Mithradates had attempted the same. Cleopatra's uncle, the king of Cyprus' had known precisely what to have on hand when Rome had come calling in 58. Assuming she died of the same cause as Charmian assuming she died in the state in which she was discovered, Cleopatra
suffered little. There were no shuddering paroxysms, which cobra venom would ultimately have induced. This toxin's effect was more narcotic than convulsive, the death peaceful, swift, and essentially painless. "The truth of the matter," Plutarch announces, to centuries of deaf ears, "no one knows."
Dismissed for nearly two hundred years, the snake clings tenaciously to the story. Cleopatra's asp is the cherry tree of ancient his-tory, a convenience, a shorthand, most of all a gift to painters and sculptors through the centuries. It made poetic sense and good art. (So did the naked breast, also not part of the original tale.) And the snake multiplied immediately: Horace wrote "sharp-toothed ser-pents" into an ode. Virgil, Propertius, and Martial would follow suit. The beast or beasts figure in every early account. Octavian would further clinch the deal by displaying a model of Cleopatra with an asp in his triumph. Not only was the snake a potent symbol of Egypt, where coiled cobras had adorned pharaonic brows for millennia, but snakes crawled all over Isis statues as well. They had insinuated themselves in the Dionysian cult. Iconography aside, it is easy to see what some-one is trying to communicate when he pairs a lady with a snake. Alexander the Great's mother— as murderous and maniacal a Macedonian princess who ever lived—kept serpents as pets. She used them to ter-rify men. Before her came Eve, Medusa, Electra, and the Erinyes; when a woman teams up with a snake, a moral storm threatens some-he sent Octavian may have confused the issue for all time with his call to the psylli. He controlled the historical record every bit as firmly as he was said to have controlled his adolescent sexual urges. Very likely us off, for thousands of years, in the wrong direction. He may have done so intentionally. There is an alternate version of the death; it has long been clear that we may be missing something here, that one farce of August io could well conceal another, that the greatest deathbed scene in history is perhaps not what it seems.
and
The Egyptian victory was celebrated with particular élan, not only because it could afford to be. There was a civil war to camouflage. Cleopatra's statue remained in the Forum. It was the least Octa-vian could do for the woman whose golden couches and jeweled pitch-ers financed his career. Cleopatra allowed him to discharge every one of his obligations. She guaranteed Roman prosperity. So vast were the funds Octavian injected into the economy that prices soared. Interest rates tripled. As Dio summed up the transfer of wealth, Cleopatra saw to it that "the Roman empire was enriched and its temples adorned.' Her art and obelisks decorated its streets. Soundly defeated, she was
nonetheless celebrated, in the beauty of a foreign city. With the riches
carne a rush of Egyptomania. Sphinxes, rearing cobras, sun disks, acanthus leaves, hieroglyphs, proliferated throughout Rome. Lotus blossoms and griffins decorated even Octavian's personal study. Cleo-patra earned a second backhanded tribute: In her wake, a golden age of women dawned in Rome. High-born wives and sisters suddenly enjoyed a role in public life. They interceded with ambassadors, coun-seled husbands, traveled abroad, commissioned temples and sculp-tures. They become more visible in art and in society. They joined Cleopatra in the Forum. No Roman woman would ever attain the exalted status or enjoy the unprecedented privileges granted Livia and Octavia, which they owed to a foreigner, to whom they served as counterweight. Livia compiled a fat portfolio of properties, one that would include lands in Egypt and palm groves in Judaea. Octavia would go down in history as the un-Cleopatra, supremely modest, prudent, and pious. Cleopatra got a promotion as well, from pretext to punctuation point. If you were looking for a date for the beginning of the modern world, her death would be the best to fix upon. With her she took both the four-hundred-year-old Roman Republic and the Hellenistic Age. Octavian would go on to effect one of the greatest bait and switches in history; he restored the Republic in all its glory and— as would be apparent within a decade or so —as a monarchy. Having learned from Casesars example, he did so subtly. Octavian was never a "king," always a"princeps," or "first citizen." For a title that was at once sufficiently grand and free of all monarchical odor, he turned to 'Augustus," to signify that the man formerly known as Gaius Julius Caesar was more than human, that he was precious and revered. There was some irony in fact that the West quickly began to resemble Cleopatra's East, the more so as Octavian had advertised Cleopatra as a threat to the Republic, something she had never intended.
and
If Antony was to send his body to her, what would he conceivably deny her? And for what would she hesitate to ask? Octavian seems to have been the one who decided that Cleopatra plotted to make Rome a province of Egypt, an idea very unlikely to have crossed her quick mind. He had on his side the familiar type, the scheming, spendthrift wife, for whom no diamond is large enough, no house spacious enough. As Eutropius put it centuries later, Antony began a war at the urging of the queen of Egypt, who "longed with womanly desire to reign in the city as well."* Already it was acknowl-edged "that the greatest wars have taken place on account of women." Whole families had been ruined on their account. And already—the fault as ever of the sultry, sinuous, overtly subversive East—Egyptian women had caused their share of trouble. They were endowed with insatiable ardor and phenomenal sexual energy. One husband was not Hnee cor-ralled the evidence. enough for them. They attracted and ruined men. Octavian only cor-lad found a cunning disguise for a civil war, which four years earlier he had declared officially over, and into which he had prom-ised again to lead his men. How much more palatable, how much more credible, that Antony should be destroyed by an illicit love than by his countrymen! It was by no means difficult to rally legions or tax the populace, or set fathers against sons with the claim that Cleopatra was poised to conquer them as she had conquered Antony. As Lucan formulated the battle cry a century later, "Would a woman—not even Roman—rule the world?" The logic was simple. The Egyptian queen had subdued Antony. Rome, Octavian warned, was next. At the end of October he declared war—on Cleopatra.
THE DECLARATION COULD not have been unexpected. It may even have come as a relief. Cleopatra must all the same have been surprised by its terms. She had engaged in no hostilities toward Rome. She had comported herself like the ideal vassal—if a vassal with privileges. She had maintained order in her kingdom, supplied Rome when called upon to do so, materialized when summoned, aggressed upon no neighbors. She had done everything in her power to uphold and noth-ing to diminish the surpassing greatness of Rome. Traditionally, a three-step process preceded a Roman declaration of war: The Senate submitted a demand for restitution, followed after a month by a sol-emn reminder that satisfaction was still wanting. Three days later, a messenger traveled to enemy territory, formally to open hostilities. Octavian summoned Cleopatra neither for an accounting nor an air-ing of charges. He made no overtures through diplomatic channels. Instead, deft as ever with the mise-en-scene, he dusted off the ceremo-nial portion of the process. In a military cloak he personally launched a spear drenched in pig blood toward the East, from a ritual patch of "hostile soil" in Rome. (There is speculation that he invented this ancient rite for the occasion, that Octavian was making up the history as he went along. He was very good at restoring traditions, including those that had never existed.) There were no official charges for the simple reason that none could be leveled. Insofar as Cleopatra was accused of any hostile intent, she was condemned "for her acts," con-veniently left unspecified. Octavian gambled that Antony would remain true to Cleopatra, a loyalty that—under the circumstances — allowed Octavian to charge that his compatriot "had voluntarily taken up war on the side of the Egyptian woman against his native country."
and
Octavian enlisted an asp. Arriving on the scene after his messengers, h , he attempted to resuscitate Cleopatra. He called in the psylli, Libyans believed to enjoy a magical immunity to snake venom. By taste they were said to be able to determine what kind of snake had bitten; by murmuring spells and sucking at the wound they were said to be able to extract death from an icy corpse, The psylli who knelt over Cleopa-tra worked no miracles. The Egyptian queen could not be revived. That was not altogether surprising. Neither Dio nor Plutarch was at all sure of the asp, who surely crept into the story later rather than arriving in Cleopatra's lifetime, amid a basket of figs. Even Strabo, who landed in Egypt shortly after her death, was unconvinced. For any number of reasons Cleopatra was unlikely to have recruited an asp, or an Egyptian cobra, for the job. A woman known for her crisp decisions and meticulous planning would surely have hesitated to entrust her fate to a wild animal. She had plenty of quicker, less painful options. It was as well a little too convenient to be killed by the royal emblem of Egypt; the snake made more sym-bolic than practical sense. Even the most reliable of cobras cannot kill three women in quick succession, and the asp is a famously sluggish snake. An Egyptian cobra, bristling and hissing and puffing itself up to its six-foot splendor, could hardly have hidden in a fig basket or remained hidden in one for long. The job was too great and the basket too small. Poison was a more likely alternative, as Plutarch seems to imply with his survey of Cleopatra's experiments. Most likely she swallowed a lethal drink—the hemlock and opium of Socrates would have done the trick—or applied a toxic ointment. Hannibal had resorted to poison when backed into a corner 150 years earlier; Mithradates had attempted the same. Cleopatra's uncle, the king of Cyprus' had known precisely what to have on hand when Rome had come calling in 58. Assuming she died of the same cause as Charmian assuming she died in the state in which she was discovered, Cleopatra
suffered little. There were no shuddering paroxysms, which cobra venom would ultimately have induced. This toxin's effect was more narcotic than convulsive, the death peaceful, swift, and essentially painless. "The truth of the matter," Plutarch announces, to centuries of deaf ears, "no one knows."
Dismissed for nearly two hundred years, the snake clings tenaciously to the story. Cleopatra's asp is the cherry tree of ancient his-tory, a convenience, a shorthand, most of all a gift to painters and sculptors through the centuries. It made poetic sense and good art. (So did the naked breast, also not part of the original tale.) And the snake multiplied immediately: Horace wrote "sharp-toothed ser-pents" into an ode. Virgil, Propertius, and Martial would follow suit. The beast or beasts figure in every early account. Octavian would further clinch the deal by displaying a model of Cleopatra with an asp in his triumph. Not only was the snake a potent symbol of Egypt, where coiled cobras had adorned pharaonic brows for millennia, but snakes crawled all over Isis statues as well. They had insinuated themselves in the Dionysian cult. Iconography aside, it is easy to see what some-one is trying to communicate when he pairs a lady with a snake. Alexander the Great's mother— as murderous and maniacal a Macedonian princess who ever lived—kept serpents as pets. She used them to ter-rify men. Before her came Eve, Medusa, Electra, and the Erinyes; when a woman teams up with a snake, a moral storm threatens some-he sent Octavian may have confused the issue for all time with his call to the psylli. He controlled the historical record every bit as firmly as he was said to have controlled his adolescent sexual urges. Very likely us off, for thousands of years, in the wrong direction. He may have done so intentionally. There is an alternate version of the death; it has long been clear that we may be missing something here, that one farce of August io could well conceal another, that the greatest deathbed scene in history is perhaps not what it seems.
and
The Egyptian victory was celebrated with particular élan, not only because it could afford to be. There was a civil war to camouflage. Cleopatra's statue remained in the Forum. It was the least Octa-vian could do for the woman whose golden couches and jeweled pitch-ers financed his career. Cleopatra allowed him to discharge every one of his obligations. She guaranteed Roman prosperity. So vast were the funds Octavian injected into the economy that prices soared. Interest rates tripled. As Dio summed up the transfer of wealth, Cleopatra saw to it that "the Roman empire was enriched and its temples adorned.' Her art and obelisks decorated its streets. Soundly defeated, she was
nonetheless celebrated, in the beauty of a foreign city. With the riches
carne a rush of Egyptomania. Sphinxes, rearing cobras, sun disks, acanthus leaves, hieroglyphs, proliferated throughout Rome. Lotus blossoms and griffins decorated even Octavian's personal study. Cleo-patra earned a second backhanded tribute: In her wake, a golden age of women dawned in Rome. High-born wives and sisters suddenly enjoyed a role in public life. They interceded with ambassadors, coun-seled husbands, traveled abroad, commissioned temples and sculp-tures. They become more visible in art and in society. They joined Cleopatra in the Forum. No Roman woman would ever attain the exalted status or enjoy the unprecedented privileges granted Livia and Octavia, which they owed to a foreigner, to whom they served as counterweight. Livia compiled a fat portfolio of properties, one that would include lands in Egypt and palm groves in Judaea. Octavia would go down in history as the un-Cleopatra, supremely modest, prudent, and pious. Cleopatra got a promotion as well, from pretext to punctuation point. If you were looking for a date for the beginning of the modern world, her death would be the best to fix upon. With her she took both the four-hundred-year-old Roman Republic and the Hellenistic Age. Octavian would go on to effect one of the greatest bait and switches in history; he restored the Republic in all its glory and— as would be apparent within a decade or so —as a monarchy. Having learned from Casesars example, he did so subtly. Octavian was never a "king," always a"princeps," or "first citizen." For a title that was at once sufficiently grand and free of all monarchical odor, he turned to 'Augustus," to signify that the man formerly known as Gaius Julius Caesar was more than human, that he was precious and revered. There was some irony in fact that the West quickly began to resemble Cleopatra's East, the more so as Octavian had advertised Cleopatra as a threat to the Republic, something she had never intended.
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