Saintly Max Perkins and the truly awful Zelda Fitzgerald

As he approached middle age, Perkins’ s tendency toward eccentricity began to flourish. He maintained an embarrassed belief in phrenology, the study of character as revealed by the protuberances of the skull. A prominent nasal bone was, he felt, the sign of individuality. He did not think any man who had a small nose or a flat back to his head could be especially worthwhile. To Perkins, it was a sign of mental weakness to confess a lapse of memory. "Never admit you can’t remember,” he would say. "Send a bucket into your subconscious.”

In his own engaging way he was becoming a fussbudget. Babies sucking on bottles disgusted him. Once, after a dinner honoring a famous beauty, he criticized her because "she had marks of her day clothes on her bare back.” He believed no "real lady” would ever drink beer or use Worcestershire sauce. -"In our family,” he admonished his own daughters, "we say underclothes, not underwear.”

When he brought books home to put on his shelves, he immediately ripped off their dust jackets and threw them away. He instinctively closed volumes he found lying open, pages down, and he winced when he observed someone licking fingers to turn pages.

He was a doodler and would ceaselessly sketch portraits of Napoleon, always 1n profile He also found pleasure 1n dreaming up "practical” solutions to everyday problems. Among his notions were that honey ought to be packaged in transparent containers and squeezed out like toothpaste. He went so far as to suggest to a friend in advertising that they should market the product as "Tubes of Liquid Sunshine.” He also thought typewriter paper ought to come in a long, perforated roll, like bathroom tissue.

Yet Perkins had no aptitude whatever for anything mechanical. "He couldn’t even drive in a screw,” said one daughter. One day several people on the fifth floor of the Scribner Building went running into Max’s office because they smelled smoke. They found Max totally ignoring a blaze in his wastebasket and carrying on with his work. One of old Charles Scribner’s grandsons, George Schieffelin, said, "I’m sure Max had no idea how it got started and even less how to put it out.”

Perkins’s daughters agreed their father was all but a menace behind the wheel of a car. Peggy said: ”He would drive along at a breakneck speed until he began to think about something that interested him. Then he would slow up and creep along. It infuriated him to have people pass him. He always refused to dim his lights. He said it was silly. Once we came up behind a man and woman walking together by the side of the road. He slowed up and drove very slowly behind them, trying to make us see from an artist’s point of view the difference between the way a man and a woman walk. We begged him to go past, because of course the poor people were bewildered, but he wouldn't. He was too interested in the problem of how to draw the difference.” '

****

Save Me The Waltz was the story of Alabama Beggs, a Montgomery judge’s daughter who married a handsome, promising artist she met during the war; through his early triumphs, she found herself unhappy and unfulhlled and started up a ballet career. Zelda had named the artist Amory Blaine, the protagonist of This Side of Paradise. Within the week Zelda wired Perkins: ACTING ON SCOTTS ADVICE WILL YOU RETURN MANUSCRIPT’ PHIPPS‘ CLINIC JOHNS HOPKINS WITH MANY THANKS REGRETS AND REGARDS. Fitzgerald had at last heard about the manuscript and wanted to read it himself before Max did. Perkins complied, writing: HAD READ ABOUT 60 PAGES WITH GREAT INTEREST VERY LIVE AND MOVING HOPE YOU WILL RETURN IT.

Perkins wrote Hemingway about the novel. "It looked as if there were a great deal that was good in it,” he said, ”but it seemed rather as though it somewhat dated back to the days of The Beauliful and Damned And of course it would not do at all the way it was, with Amory Blaine It would have been mighty rough on Scott. . . . I think the novel will be quite a good one when she finishes it.”

Scott interrupted his own novel to confer with Zelda, then wrote Max that the entire middle section of her book would have to be "radically rewritten.” The name of the artist, he said, would of course be changed. But Scott’s objections, in truth, went beyond the qualities of the manuscript itself. He was furious with Zelda. It was not just that she had sent the manuscript to Perkins before showing it to him, as if going behind his back. It was also that he soon realized how much use she had made of incidents from their life together-the rich material he had been too busy to use in the last few years because he had had to write cheaper stories to pay Zelda’s doctor bills.

In trying to placate Scott, Zelda all but threw herself at his feet. In a breast-beating letter she wrote, "Scott, I love you more than anything on earth and if you were offended I am miserable.” She knew what She had done: "I was . . . afraid we might have touched the same material.” But she explained: "Purposely I didn’t [send my book to you before I mailed it to Max]--knowing that you were working on your own and honestly feeling that I had no right to interrupt you to ask for a serious opinion. Also, I know Max will not want it and I prefer to do the corrections after having his opinion. . . . So, Dear, My Own, please realize that it was not from any sense of not turning first to you-but time and other ill-regulated elements that made me so bombastic about Max."

Fitzgerald had left Alabama on March 30 to be near his wife in Baltimore. In May he reported to Max, "Zelda's novel is now good. Improved in every way. It is new. She has largely eliminated the speakeasy-nights-and’ our-trip-to-Paris atmosphere. You’ll like it. . . . I am too close to it to judge it but it may be even better than I think.” In the middle of the month, when he mailed the manuscript to Perkins for a second reading he noted that it had the faults and virtues of any first novel.
She agreed to change any ”questionable parts,” but Perkins found Save Me the Waltz, strangely enough, virtually beyond editing. The entire manu. script was honeycombed with some of the most flowery language he had ever seen. Her similes flowed naturally if not always sensibly, some. times dozens of them on a single page. In describing the boatloads of Americans who wandered around France in the late twenties, for example, Zelda wrote:

"They ordered Veronese pastry on lawns like lace curtains at Versailles and chicken and hazlenuts at Fountainebleau where the woods wore powdered wigs. Discs of umbrellas poured over surburban terraces with the smooth round ebullience of a Chopin waltz. They sat in the distance under the lugubrious dripping elms, elms like maps of Europe, elms frayed at the end like bits of Chartreuse wool, elms heavy and bunchy as sour grapes. They ordered the weather with a continental appetite, and listened to the centaur complain about the price of hoofs."

Hardly a character, emotion, or scene was not adorned with her grandiloquence. But that was the very quality that distinguished her writing, just as it enlivened her speech. For the most part, Perkins benignly neglected the problem and chose to let it appear in public as it was, to live or die on its own.

Under her husband’s eye, Zelda revised the galley proofs considerably. The book was shortened, mostly by filing down the accounts of their marital jags. During the next few months proofs were shuttled around so hectically from Perkins to the author to the typesetter, to Perkins, back

.to the author, and back to the typesetter-that it seemed at last that every one, exhausted, had just quit, as if to avoid another mailing. Max thought of warning the Fitzgeralds they would have to pay for the excessive corrections, but he knew they wanted the book the way they thought it should be, regardless of cost. Ultimately, countless misspellings, unclear passages, and most of the rococo language found their way into print. Impressed with the bulk of her book once it was bound, Zelda wrote Max, “1 only hope it will be as satisfactory to you as it is to me.”

The Fitzgeralds’ marriage worked like a seesaw. In the spring of 1932, while Zelda was high with expectations for her book, Scott W215 feeling low. He was torn from his past but unattached to any future.

Up Close and Personal

Reading 'Monster' by John Gregory Dunne on the writing of the screenplay of what eventually became 'Up Close and Personal' which starred Robert Redford, hence

Max Perkins

On one of James’s visits to New York, Max took a fancy to his ten. gallon hat. James sent one to Perkins, and it fit perfectly. ”I happened to be walking in it with a portrait painter,” Max wrote in thanking him, "and he begged me to let him paint me in it, and that never happened before I got this hat.” From that day forward, there was hardly a moment when Perkins did not wear a hat, indoors and out. Eventually he traded off permanently to a soft gray-felt fedora, size seven, which he wore so low that it folded his ears forward.

His habit of hat-wearing became Perkins’s most famous eccentricity and the subject of much speculation. ”Why the hat?” people kept wondering. The answer seems to be that he found it useful as well as ornamental. It gave the impression to unexpected office visitors that he was on his way out, and this kept them from buttonholing him into idle conversation. The hat also thrust his ears forward, which helped his hearing. Miss Wyckoff suggested that Perkins wore his hat to keep customers in the Scribners bookstore from mistaking him for a clerk as he made his afternoon promenade. Perkins himself revealed something of his attitude on the matter in a column he wrote for the Plainfield newspaper. The slouch hat, he apotheosized, was “the hat of independence and individuality, the American hat.”

Perkins’s attachment to his hat was hardly greater than his attachment to his clothing in general. At first glance he seemed to be an elegantly dressed New Yorker, but under close scrutiny he looked rather ragged. His daughters often pointed out his white shirt peeking through the thinning fabric of his suit-jacket elbows. Louise once tried to shame him into buying a new suit by telling him all his clothes looked secondhand, but that did not bother Max. Only at her sternest insistence would he give in to her demand that he buy a new suit. He would allow her to pick one suit from his closet, take it to the tailor, and have another made exactly like it.

This Yankee penchant for the sparse made Perkins the ideal editor for President Calvin Coolidge. Max published a collection of his speeches; it took months to talk "Silent Cal” down from 160,000 to 98,000 words. 

As publication neared, Fitzgerald lacked Perkins’s confidence. He was shakiest about the title. In early March he wired Max, asking if it was too late to change it to Gold-Hatted Gatsby. Max cabled that such a change would cause not only a harmful delay but also considerable confusion. The author tried to live with The Great Gatsby, but he still believed in his heart that the title would forever stand as his book’s one flaw.

Perkins went right on making the final preparations for The Great Gatsby’s April 10 publication; but on March 19 Fitzgerald could not re frain from sending him an exigent telegram from Capri: CRAZY ABOUT TITLE UNDER THE RED WHITE AND BLUE. WHAT WOULD DELAY BE? Perkins responded that there would be a delay of several weeks. Besides, he wired THINK IRONY IS FAR MORE EFFECTIVE UNDER LESS LEADING TITLE EVERYONE LIKES PRESENT TITLE URGE WE KEEP IT. Three days later Fitzgerald acceded. He wired: YOU’RE RIGHT. But his nervousness mounted. ‘ 

....

Perkins said, "If a young man worked beside [Brownell] for some years and failed to become a passable editor he simply had no capacity for the work.” One of Brownell's hard and fast principles was that almost as much could be learned about an author's abilities through an interview as by reading his manuscript, since "water cannot rise above its source." Another Brownell adage that Perkins subscribed to was that the worst reason for publishing anything was that it resembled something else, that however unconscious, ”an imitation is always inferior." Sometimes a second-rate manuscript was marked by some rare characteristics that made it hard for the staff to surrender it. Brownell would close the debate by saying, "We can’t publish everything. Let someone else make a failure of it."

Brownell was always considerate of the authors he turned down. Whenever a book of promise had to be rejected, it was Brownell who wrote the most sympathetic letters. Perkins admired these compassionate rejections as works of art. One was so warmhearted that the author mailed his manuscript back, having written in the margin of the letter: "Then why the devil don’t you publish it?” 

Sein and Being

So what is the being that Heidegger wants us to marvel at and what are the beings that have it? Heidegger's word Sein (being) cannot be easily defined, because what it refers to is not like other categories or qualities. It certainly is not an object of any kind. Nor is it an ordinary shared feature of
objects. You can teach someone what a 'building’ is by pointing to a lot of different structures from grass huts to skyscrapers; it may take a While but eventually they will get it. But you could go on forever pointing out huts, meals, animals, forest paths, church portals, festive atmospheres, and looming thunderclouds, saying each time, ‘Look: being!’, and your interlocutor is likely to become more and more puzzled.

Heidegger sums this up by saying that Being is not itself a being. That is, it is not a deiined or delineated entity of any kind. He distinguishes between the German word Seiende, which can refer to any individual entity, such as a mouse or a church door, and Sein, which means the Being that such particular beings have. (In English, one way of signalling the distinction is by using the capital ‘B’ for the latter.) He calls it the ‘ontological difference-from ‘ontology’, the study of what is. It is not an easy distinction to keep clear in one’s mind, but the ontological difference between Being and beings is extremely important to Heidegger. If we get confused between the two, we fall into errors-for example, settling down to study some science of particular entities, such as psychology or even cosmology, while thinking that we are studying Being itself.

Unlike beings, Being is hard to concentrate on and it is easy to forget to think about it. But one particular entity has a more noticeable Being than others, and that is myself, because, unlike clouds and portals, I am the entity who wonders about its Being. It even turns out that I have a vague, preliminary, non-philosophical understanding of Being already otherwise I would not have thought of asking about it. This makes me the best starting point for ontological inquiry I am both the being whose Being is up for question and the being who sort of already knows the answer.

I myself, then, will be the path. But Heidegger re-emphasises that this does not mean I should sign up for courses in human sciences such as biology, anthropology, psychology or sociology. These merely ‘ontical’ inquiries have nothing to contribute to an ontological investigation. Like the speculative debris cleared away by Husserl’s epoché, they are likely only to get in the way by clogging up our inquiry with irrelevant ideas. If I want to know what a human being is, it’s no good wiring one up to a EEG machine to measure brain waves, or analysing examples of behaviour. Just as Karl Jaspers had turned from psychology to phenomenology in order to practise ‘a different thinking', Heidegger felt that the question of Being must be truly philosophical or it is nothing. Moreover, it should not be philosophical in the old. fashioned way, focused narrowly on questions of what we can know. A new new beginning is needed.

For Heidegger, this means not only starting with Being but ensuring constant vigilance and care in thinking. He generously helps us to achieve this by using a frustrating kind of language.

As his readers soon notice, Heidegger tends to reject familiar philosophical terms in favour of new ones which he coins himself. He leaves the German Sein or Being more or less as it is, but when it comes to talking about the questioner for whom its Being is in question (i.e. me, a human), he strenuously avoids talk of humanity, man, mind, soul or consciousness, because of the scientific, religious or metaphysical assumptions such words conceal. Instead, he speaks of ‘Dasein’, a word normally meaning ‘existence’ in a general way, and compounded of da (there) and sein (to be). Thus, it means ‘there-being’, or 'being-there’.

The effect is at once disconcerting and intriguing. Reading Heidegger, and feeling (as one often does) that you recognise an experience he is describing, you want to say, ‘Yes, that’s me!’ But the word itself deflects you from this interpretation; it forces you to keep questioning. Just getting into the habit of saying Dasein takes you halfway into Heidegger’s world. It is so important a term that English translators tend to leave it in the original German; an early partial French translation by Henry Corbin rendered it as ‘réalité humaine’, which created another layer of confusion.

Why, one often wails, can’t Heidegger speak plainly? His tangled and unnatural terms invite parody; as in Gunter Grass’ 1963 novel Dog Years, where a character falls under the influence of an unnamed philosopher and goes around calling underdone potatoes ‘spuds forgetful of Being’, and clearing rodents out of the kitchen’s water pipes while wondering, ‘Why rats and not other essents? Why anything at all rather than nothing?’ One might think that, if Heidegger had anything worth saying, he could have communicated it in ordinary language.

The fact is that he does not want to be ordinary, and he may not even want to communicate in the usual sense. He wants to make the familiar obscure, and to vex us. George Steiner thought that Heidegger’s purpose was less to be understood than to be experienced through a ‘felt strangeness’. It is something like the 'alienation’ or estrangement effect used by Bertholt Brecht in his theatre, which is designed to block you from becoming too caught up in the story and falling for the delusion of familiarity. Heidegger’s language keeps you on edge. It is dynamic, obtrusive, sometimes ridiculous and often forceful; on a page of Heidegger, things are typically presented as surging or thrusting, as being thrown forward, lit up or broken open. Heidegger admitted that his way of writing produced some ‘awkwardness’, but he thought that a small price to pay for overturning the history of philosophy and bringing us back to Being.

For non-German readers, it should be added, some of the awkwardness is an artefact of translation. German welcomes monumental word constructions, but in English they tend to come out as long hyphenated lines, trundling along like mismatched railway carriages. The Question of Being, for example, is an elegant Seinsfrage in German. But even German cannot comfortably accommodate Sich-vorveg-schon-sein-in-(der-Welt) als Sein-bei, or ‘ahead-of-itself-already-being-in-(the-world) as beingtogether-with (beings encountered within the world)’.

One way of thinking about Heidegger is as a literary innovator, and perhaps even as a kind of modernist novelist. I was well into working on this book when, via Janet Malcolm’s study Two Lives, I came across excerpts from Gertrude Stein’s experimental novel The Making of Americans. Stein sets out as if to relate a standard family saga, but abandons conventional ways of writing in order to say things like this about her characters:

I am always feeling each kind or them as a substance darker, lighter, thinner, thicker, muddier, clearer, smoother, lumpier, granularer, mixeder, simpler. . . and always I am feeling in each one of them their kind of stuff as much in them, as little in them, as all of a piece in them, as lumps in them held together sometimes by parts of the same sometimes by other kinds of stuff in them. . . [S]ome. . . are made of little lumps of one kind of being held together or separated from each other, as one comes to feel it in them, the lumps in them from each other by other kind of being in them, sometimes by other kind of being in them that is almost the complete opposite of the lumps in them, some because, the lumps are melting always in to the surrounding being that keeps the lumps from touching, in some because the kind of being in them is spread out so thin in them, that everything that they have learned, that they like to be in living, all reaction to everything interesting, in them, has really nothing to do in them with the thin spread being in them...Some are always Whole ones though the being in them is all a mushy mass with a skin to hold them in and so make one.

The ‘being’ in them, she explains, ‘can be slimy, gelatinous, gluey, white opaquy kind of thing and it can be white and vibrant and clear and heated and this is all not very clear to me’.

Heidegger would have disliked Stein’s imprecision, but he might have appreciated the sight of a writer stretching language to its utmost to avoid the dulling effect of ordinary perceptions. He might also have recognised that her distinction between characters and the ‘being’ in them foreshadows his own notion of the ontological difference.

Thus, it can help to think of Heidegger as an experimental novelist, or a poet. Yet, even while rejecting the traditional philosophical virtue of clarity, he was adamant that he was a philosopher, and that there was nothing merely literary or playful about his language. His purpose was to overturn human thinking, destroy the history of metaphysics, and start philosophy all over again. A little violence done to language is to be expected, given an overall aim that is so extreme and so violent

The biggest overturning that Being and Time inflicts on old-school philosophy is to approach the question of Dasein and its Being in a way that Husserl had been supposed to do but did not make very evident: through everyday life.

Heidegger gives us Dasein in its weekday clothes, as it were: not in its Sunday best, but in its ‘everydayness’. Other philosophers have tended to start with a human being in an unusual state, such as sitting alone in a room staring into the embers of a fire and thinking-which was how Descartes began. They then go on to use simple, everyday terms to describe the result. Heidegger does the opposite. He takes Dasein in its most ordinary moments, then talks about it in the most innovative way he can. For Heidegger, Dasein’s everyday Being is right here: it is Being-in-the-world, or In-der-Welt-sein.

The main feature of Dasein’s everyday Being-in-the-world right here is that it is usually busy doing something. I don’t tend to contemplate things; I pick them up and act on them. If I hold a hammer, it is not normally to ‘stare at the hammer-Thing’, as Heidegger puts it. (He uses the lovely word das Hammerding.) It is to go to work hammering nails.

Moreover, I do my hammering in service of some purpose, such as building a bookcase for my philosophy tomes. The hammer in my hand summons up a whole network of purposes and contexts. It reveals Dasein’s involvement with things: its ‘concern’. He cites examples: producing something, using something, looking after something, and letting something go, as well as negative involvements such as neglecting something, or leaving it undone. These are what he calls "deficient’ forms, but they are still forms of concern. They show that Dasein’s Being in general is one of ‘care’. The distinction between 'care’ and 'concern’ (Besorgen and Sorge) is confusing, but both mean Dasein is in the world up to the elbows, and it is busy. We are not far from Kierkegaard and his point that I don’t just exist, but have an interest or an investment in my existence.
My involvements, Heidegger continues, lead me to deploy 'useful things’ or 'equipment’ -items such as the hammer. These have a par. ticular Being which Heidegger calls Zuhandenheit: ‘readiness-to~hand’ or 'handiness’. While I am hammering, the hammer has that kind of Being for me. If, for some reason, I lay down the hammer and gawp at it as a Hammerding, then it has a different kind: Vorhandenheit or 'presence-at-hand’.

For Heidegger, the philosophers’ second-biggest mistake (after forgetfulness of Being) has been to talk about everything as though it was present-at-hand. But that is to separate things from the everyday ‘concernful’ way in which we encounter them most of the time. It turns them into objects for contemplation by an unconcerned subject who has nothing to do all day but gaze at stuff. And then we ask why philosophers seem cut off rom everyday life!

By making this error, philosophers allow the whole structure of worldly Being to fall apart, and then have immense difficulty in getting it back together to resemble anything like the daily existence we recognise. Instead, in Heidegger’s Being-in-the-world, everything comes already linked together. If the structure falls to pieces, that is a ‘deficient’ or secondary state. This is why a smoothly integrated world can be revealed by the simplest actions. A pen conjures up a network of ink, paper, desk and lamp, and ultimately also a network of other people for whom or to whom I am writing, each one with his or her own purposes in the world. As Heidegger wrote elsewhere, 2 table is not just a table: it is a family table, where ‘the boys like to busy themselves’, or perhaps the table where ‘that decision was made with a friend that time, where that work was written that time, where that holiday was celebrated that time’. We are socially as well as equipmentally involved. Thus, for Heidegger, all Being-in-the-world is also a ‘Being-with’ or Mitsein. We cohabit with others in a ‘with-world’, or Mitwelt.

The old philosophical problem of how we prove the existence of other minds has now vanished. Dasein swims in the with-world long before it wonders about other minds. Others are those 'from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself -those among whom one is too’. Mitsei'n remains characteristic even of a Dasein that is shipwrecked on a desert island or trying to get away from everyone by living on the top of a pillar, since those situations are defined mainly by reference to the missing fellow Daseins. The Dasein of a stylite is still a Being-with, but it is (Heidegger loves this word) a ‘delicient’ mode of Being-with.

Heidegger gives an example that brings everything together. I am out for a walk, and I iind a boat by the shore. What Being does the boat have for me? It is unlikely to be ‘just’ an object, a boat-thing which I contemplate from some abstract vantage point. Instead, I encounter the boat as (1) a potentially useful thing, in (2) a world which is a network of such things, and (3) in a situation where the boat is clearly useful for someone else, if not for me. The boat lights up equipment, world and Mitsein all at once. If I want to consider it a mere ‘object’, I can, but this does violence to everyday Being.

The surprising thing is that philosophy had to wait so long for someone to say these things. American pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey and William James had explored human life as a practical, active affair, but they did not share Heidegger’s grand philosophical vision, and were more inclined to use pragmatism to bring philosophy down to earth rather than to remind it of its greatest tasks and questions. Husserl did share Heidegger’s scale of ambition, but he had relocated everything in his idealist cavern. For Heidegger, that was a fatal mistake: Husserl had bracketed out the wrong thing. He had bracketed out Being, the one thing that is indispensable.

Heidegger is philosophy’s great reverser. In Being and Time, it is everyday Being rather than the far reaches of cosmology or mathematics that is most ‘ontological’. Practical care and concern are more primordial than reflection. Usefulness comes before contemplation, the ready-to-hand before the present-at-hand, Being-in-the-world and Being~with-others before Being-alone. We do not hover above the great rich tangle of the world, gazing down from on high. We are already in the world and involved in it-we are ‘thrown’ here. And 'thrownness’ must be our starting point.

from S Bakewell

Ethel Merman by Wolcott Gibbs

  It is even possible to get along with none of the accepted gifts at all, substituting for them some quality so hard to define that it is usually just called personal-ity. Helen Morgan's talent, for instance, fitted no pattern. She was not beautiful nor very bright and her sad little voice belonged in a speakeasy, providing synthetic tears for the synthetic gin. All she had was the faculty of communicating a vague, enormous melancholy, but it was enough, at least for the peculiar temper of her time. Un-orthodox triumphs like hers, however, are rare; the quadruple threat is the ideal. The fact that Miss Merman can triumphantly carry a show all by herself is an imposing mystery, since, at first glance, she would seem to be even more limited than most of her sisters. Ethel Merman is s feet 51/2 inches tall. When she first appeared on Broadway she weighed 118 pounds, but now 130 seems more probable. She has an abundance of black hair; long-lashed, dark-brown eyes; a nose that has a rather Jewish cast, although she is not, and a generous mouth that is usually ajar, displaying handsome teeth, a little out of line along the bottom row. These conventional details, however, haven't much to do with what really makes her a figure of rare and irresistible humor on the stage before she even opens her mouth. It is partly a matter of structure and arrangement. Artists, in an attempt to impose some kind of order on the human body, have stated that, ideally, the female head is one-seventh the length of the whole figure, though in fashion drawing this is reduced to one-tenth for the purpose of achieving that unearthly grace. Working from photographs, since it is hardly practicable to apply a ruler to a lady piece by piece, statisticians have estimated that Miss Merman's head accounts for a little more than one-sixth of the total, making it measure about a foot, or nearly four inches beyond the length attained by less ambitious girls. Since the width is proportionate, it can safely be said that she has an almost record face. To borrow a useful phrase from Ring Lardner, it
is a sleeper jump from her hairline to her chin and another none from ear to ear. The features on this plane are whimsically designed.  The arching brows she offers to the public are a little higher than the ghostly traces of her own and give her a perpetually astounded air, heightened by her bright, round eyes, and her mouth, squared off by art likewise expresses a constant pleased surprise. Nature obviously intended her to have a rather inexpressive face and  the look of intense vivacity that usually adorns it is as comic and unnatural as the look of glassy distinction worn by the odd celebrities in those whisky advertisements.
 Her figure diminishes rapidly from her wide, square shoulders to her pretty feet so that, as one critic noted, the effect is curiously foreshortened, as if you were looking down at her from a stepladder. She walks with a rather jaunty swing, an appearance of elbowing her way through a crowd that may have been borrowed originally from Jimmy Durante, but now has a bustle unmistakeably her own. Sometimes it amuses her to waddle like a duck, usually when the scene would normally call for classic grace, ands and then she kicks one foot up in the air in queer, perfunctory gaiety. Miss Merman's voice somehow defies studious analysis. One critic, generally more at home at the Metropolitan Opera House than the Imperial Theatre, recently spoke of it with respect. "It is a big, well-focused contralto," he began carefully. "You might say it goes on a straight line." At this point, however, his educated man-ner deserted him. "Hell, it's quite an organ," he said. "Got ping, you know what I mean. I guess she's got leather or something down there." Others have mentioned her exactp itch (when she sharps or flats it is invariably for her own humorous purposes), her extraordi-nary sense of rhythm and the enunciation that, without the hideous grimaces that usually disfigure the precise vocalist still makes every intricate syllable clear all over the house. Whatever her qualities, she acquired them without training, never having taken a formal lesson in her life. She has never learned to breathe according to the rules, simply doing so whenever she happens to feel like it, and she has had no experience with those elocution-class favorites like "The rain in Spain falls gently on the plain" that are guaranteed to make any young woman talk like Lynn Fontanne.
of everything she has sung, up to Annie, Miss Merman has named I Got Rhythm as her favorite fast song, Mississinewah as the funniest song generally, I Get a Kick Out of You as the ballad that affected her most, and Eadie Was a Lady as the best character piece. A good many people might dissent mildly from this selection, especially from the omission of You're the Top, which certainly involved the greatest amount of stylish reference ever crowded into one lyric, but they were all fine songs and the words from them still bring back very cheerful memories to those who first heard that stirring and jubilant trumpet in the days when we were all certainly in far better shape. While Miss Merman has certainly been fortunate in her authors, she has a firm mind Of her own and hasn't hesitated to veto ideas that don't appeal to her. Once, for instance, Cole Porter thought it might be a good idea to incorporate some topical references in a song. The show was in a late stage of rehearsal and anyway she wasn't much impressed with the news item he had in mind. "Listen," she told him firmly, "I'm not going to go louse up my lyrics just because some big dope did something." When she refused to appear in Sadie Thompson the only show she ever declined, her objections were largely based on a difference of opinion with Howard Dietz about lyrics. He had a verse that amused him involving the word Malmaison, but Miss Merman was not convinced. "What's it mean?" she asked. He told her that Malmaison was a famous kind of lipstick and she went away, but obviously still doubtful. The next day she came back and delivered her ultimatum. "Hey, Howard," she said. "That Malmaison. I asked twenty-five other dames and none of them ever heard of it either. It goes out." It didn't, but Miss Merman did. About the only time she has ever lost in such a contest, in fact, was when she was in Hollywood, and the forces of purity proved too much for her. "One look at you and I get hot pants" was nervously altered to "One look at you and I get that way" and "feet" was substituted in a line that once ran genially: "Oh, she started a heat wave, by making her seat wave." Neither of these alterations struck her as an improvement, but, after all, she wasn't God.

Phenomenology and Husserl from A.T.E.C.

So what exactly is phenomenology? It is essentially a method rather than a set of theories, and— at the risk of wildly oversimplifying—its basic approach can be conveyed through a two-word command: DESCRIBE PHENOMENA. The first part of this is straightforward: a phenomenologist's job is to describe. This is the activity that Husserl kept reminding his students to do. It meant stripping away distractions, habits, clichés of thought, presumptions and received ideas, in order to return our attention to what he called the 'things themselves'. We must fix our beady gaze on them and capture them exactly as they appear, rather than as we think they are supposed to be. The things that we describe so carefully are called phenomena — the second element in the definition. The word phenomenon has a special meaning to phenomenologists: it denotes any ordinary thing or object or event as it presents itself to my experience, rather than as it may or may not be in reality. As an example, take a cup of coffee. (Husserl liked coffee: long before Aron talked about the phenomenology of apricot cocktails, Husserl told students in his seminars, 'Give me my coffee so that I can make phenomenology out of it.') What, then, is a cup of coffee? I might define it in terms of its chemistry and the botany of the coffee plant, and add a summary of how its beans are grown and exported, how they are ground, how hot water is pressed through the powder and then poured into a shaped receptacle to be presented to a member of the human species who orally ingests it. I could analyse the effect of caffeine on the body, or discuss the international coffee trade. I could fill an encyclopaedia with these facts, and I would still get no closer to saying what this particular cup of coffee in front of me is. On the other hand, if I went the other way and conjured up a set of purely personal, sentimental associations — as Marcel Proust does when he dunks his madeleine in his tea and goes on to write seven volumes about it— that would not allow me to understand this cup of coffee as an immediately given phenomenon either. Instead, this cup of coffee is a rich aroma, at once earthy and per-fumed; it is the lazy movement of a curlicue of steam rising from its surface. As I lift it to my lips, it is a placidly shifting liquid and a weight in my hand inside its thick-rimmed cup. It is an approaching warmth, then an intense dark flavour on my tongue, starting with a slightly austere jolt and then relaxing into a comforting warmth, which spreads from the cup into my body, bringing the promise of lasting alertness and refreshment. The promise, the anticipated sensations, the smell, the colour and the flavour are all part of the coffee as phenomenon. They all emerge by being experienced. If I treated all these as purely 'subjective' elements to be stripped away in order to be 'objective' about my coffee, I would find there was nothing left of my cup of coffee as a phenomenon— that is, as it appears in the experience of me, the coffee-drinker. This experiential cup of coffee is the one I can speak about with certainty, while everything else to do with the bean-growing and the chemis-try is hearsay. It may all be interesting hearsay, but it's irrelevant to a phenomenologist. Husserl therefore says that, to phenomenologically describe a cup of coffee, I should set aside both the abstract suppositions and any intrusive emotional associations. Then I can concentrate on the dark, fragrant, rich phenomenon in front of me now This 'set-ting aside' or 'bracketing out' of speculative add-ons Husserl called epoche— a term borrowed from the ancient Sceptics, who used it to mean a general suspension of judgement about the world. Husserl sometimes referred to it as a phenomenological 'reduction' instead: the process of boiling away extra theorising about what coffee `really' is, so that we are left only with the intense and immediate flavour— the phenomenon. The result is a great liberation. Phenomenology frees me to talk about my experienced coffee as a serious topic of investigation. It likewise frees me to talk about many areas that come into their own only when discussed phenomenologically. An obvious example, close to the coffee case, is expert wine tasting— a phenomenological prac-tice if ever there was one, and one in which the ability both to discern and to describe experiential qualities are equally important. There are many such topics. If I want to tell you about a heart-rending piece of music, phenomenology enables me to describe it as a moving piece of music, rather than as a set of string vibrations and mathematical note relationships on which I have pinned a personal emotion. Melancholy music is melancholy; a sweet air is a sweet air; these descriptions are fundamental to what music is. Indeed, we do talk about music phenomenologically all the time. Even if I describe a sequence of notes as going 'up' or 'down', this has less to do with what the sound waves are doing (which is becoming more or less fre-quent, and longer or shorter) than with how the music plays out in my mind. I hear the notes climbing up an invisible ladder. I almost physi-cally rise in my chair as I listen to Ralph Vaughan Williams' 'The Lark Ascending'; my very soul takes flight. That's not just me: it is what the music is. Phenomenology is useful for talking about religious or mysti-cal experiences: we can describe them as they feel from the inside without having to prove that they represent the world accurately. For similar reasons, phenomenology helps physicians. It makes it possible to consider medical symptoms as they are experienced by the patient rather than exclusively as physical processes. A patient can describe a diffuse or stabbing pain, or a sensation of heavi-ness or sluggishness, or the vague unease in a disturbed stomach. Amputees often suffer from 'phantom' sensations in the area of the lost limb; phenomenology allows these sensations to be analysed. The neurologist Oliver Sacks discussed such experiences in his 1984 book A Leg to Stand On, about his recovery from a severe leg injury. Long after the physical damage had healed, his leg felt separate from him, like a wax model: he could move it, but it did not feel like his from within. After much physiotherapy it returned to normal, but, had he not been able to convince his doctors that the feeling was phenomenologically important and that it belonged to the con-dition rather than being some personal oddity, he might not have
received that therapy and might never have regained full control of his leg. In all these cases, the Husserlian 'bracketing out' or epoche allows the phenomenologist to temporarily ignore the question Tut is it real?', in order to ask how a person experiences his or her world. Phenomenology gives a formal mode of access to human experience. It lets philosophers talk about life more or less as non-philosophers do, while still being able to tell themselves they are being methodical and rigorous. The point about rigour is crucial; it brings us back to the first half of the command to describe phenomena. A phenomenologist cannot get away with listening to a piece of music and saying, 'How lovely!' He or she must ask: is it plaintive? is it dignified? is it colossal and sub-lime? The point is to keep coming back to the 'things themselves' —phenomena stripped of their conceptual baggage — so as to bail out weak or extraneous material and get to the heart of the experience. One might never finish adequately describing a cup of coffee. Yet it is a liberating task: it gives us back the world we live in. It works most effectively on the things we may not usually think of as material for philosophy: a drink, a melancholy song, a drive, a sunset, an ill-at-ease mood, a box of photographs, a moment of boredom. It restores this personal world in its richness, arranged around our own perspective yet usually no more noticed than the air. There is another side effect: it ought in theory to free us from ideologies, political and otherwise. In forcing us to be loyal to experience, and to sidestep authorities who try to influence how we interpret that experience, phenomenology has the capacity to neutralise all the 'isms' around it, from scientism to religious fundamentalism to Marxism to fascism. All are to be set aside in the epoche— they have no business intruding on the things themselves. This gives phenomenology a surprisingly revolutionary edge, if done correctly. No wonder phenomenology could be exciting. It could also be perplexing, and often it was a bit of both. A mixture of excitement and puzzlement was evident in the response of one young German who discovered phenomenology in its early days: Karl Jaspers. In 1913, he was working as a researcher at the Heidelberg Clinic of Psychiatry, having chosen psychology over philosophy because he liked its con-crete, applied approach. Philosophy seemed to him to have lost its way, whereas psychology produced definite results with its experimental methods. But then he found that psychology was too workmanlike: it lacked philosophy's grand ambition. Jaspers was not satisfied by either. Then he heard about phenomenology, which offered the best from both: an applied method, combined with the soaring philosoph-ical aim of understanding the whole of life and experience. He wrote a fan letter to Husserl, but in it admitted that he was not yet quite sure what phenomenology was. Husserl wrote back to him, 'You are using the method perfectly. Just keep it up. You don't need to know what it is; that's indeed a difficult matter.' In a letter to his parents, Jaspers speculated that Husserl did not know what phenomenology was either. Yet none of this uncertainty could dim the excitement. Like all phi-losophy, phenomenology made great demands on its practitioners. It required 'a different thinking', Jaspers wrote; 'a thinking that, in knowing, reminds me, awakens me, brings me to myself, transforms me'. It could do all that, and also give results.
Besides claiming to transform the way we think about reality, phenomenologists promised to change how we think about ourselves. They believed that we should not try to find out what the human mind is, as if it were some kind of substance. Instead, we should consider what it does, and how it grasps its experiences. Husserl had picked up this idea from his old teacher Franz Brentano, in Vienna days. In a fleeting paragraph of his book Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, Brentano proposed that we approach the mind in terms of its 'intentions' — a misleading word, which sounds like it means deliberate purposes. Instead it meant a general reaching or stretching, from the Latin root in-tend, meaning to stretch towards or into something. For Brentano, this reaching towards objects is what our minds do all the time. Our thoughts are invariably of or about something, he wrote: in love, something is loved, in hatred, something is hated, in judgement, something is affirmed or denied. Even when I imagine an object that isn't there, my mental structure is still one of `about-ness or 'of-ness'. If I dream that a white rabbit runs past me checking its pocket watch, I am dreaming of my fantastical dream-rabbit. If I gaze up at the ceiling trying to make sense of the structure of consciousness, I am thinking about the structure of consciousness. Except in deepest sleep, my mind is always engaged in this aboutness: it has 'intentionality'. Having taken the germ of this from Brentano, Husserl made it central to his whole philosophy. Just try it: if you attempt to sit for two minutes and think about nothing, you will probably get an inkling of why intentionality is so fundamental to human existence. The mind races around like a for-aging squirrel in a park, grabbing in turn at a flashing phone screen, a distant mark on the wall, a clink of cups, a cloud that resembles a whale, a memory of something a friend said yesterday, a twinge in a knee, a pressing deadline, a vague expectation of nice weather later, a tick of the clock. Some Eastern meditation techniques aim to still this scurrying creature, but the extreme difficulty of this shows how unnatural it is to be mentally inert. Left to itself, the mind reaches out in all directions as long as it is awake — and even carries on doing the dreaming phase of its sleep. Understood in this way, the mind hardly is anything at all: it is its aboutness. This makes the human mind (and possibly some animal minds) different from any other naturally occurring entity. Nothing else can be as thoroughly about or of things as the mind is: even a book only reveals what it's 'about' to someone who picks it up and peruses it, and is otherwise merely a storage device. But a mind that is experiencing nothing, imagining nothing, or speculating about noth-ing can hardly be said to be a mind at all. Husserl saw in the idea of intentionality a way to sidestep two great unsolved puzzles of philosophical history: the question of what objects 'really' are, and the question of what the mind 'really' is. By doing the epoche and bracketing out all consideration of reality from both topics, one is freed to concentrate on the relationship in the middle. One can apply one's descriptive energies to the endless dance of intentionality that takes place in our lives: the whirl of our minds as they seize their intended phenomena one after the other and whisk them around the floor, never stopping as long as the music of life plays. Three simple ideas — description, phenomenon, intentionality —provided enough inspiration to keep roomfuls of Husserlian assistants busy in Freiburg for decades. With all of human existence awaiting their attention, how could they ever run out of things to do? Husserlian phenomenology never had the mass influence of Sartrean existentialism, at least not directly but it was his groundwork that freed Sartre and other existentialists to write so adventurously about everything from café waiters to trees to breasts. Reading his Husserl books in Berlin in 1933, Sartre developed his own bold interpretation of it, putting special emphasis on intentionality and the way it throws the mind out into the world and its things. For Sartre, this gives the mind an immense freedom. If we are nothing but what we think about, then no predefined 'inner nature' can hold us back. We are protean. He gave this idea a Sartrean makeover in a short essay which he began writing in Berlin, but published only in 1939: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl's Phenomenology: Intentionality'. The philosophers of the past, he wrote, had been stuck in a 'digestive' model of consciousness: they thought that to perceive something was to draw it into our own substance, as a spider coats an insect in its own spittle to semi-dissolve it. Instead, with Husserl's intentionality, to be conscious of something is to burst out—to wrest oneself from moist, gastric intimacy and fly out over there, beyond oneself, to what is not oneself To fly over there, to the tree, and yet outside the tree, because it eludes and repels me and I can no more lose myself in it than it can dissolve itself into me: outside it, outside myself ... And, in this same process, consciousness is purified and becomes clear as a great gust of wind. There is nothing in it any more, except an impulse to flee itself, a sliding outside itself If, impossibly, you were to 'enter' a consciousness, you would be picked up by a whirlwind and thrown back outside to where the tree is and all the dust, for consciousness has no 'inside'. It is merely the exterior of itself and it is this absolute flight, this refusal to be substance, that constitute it as a consciousness. Imagine now a linked series of bursts that wrest us from ourselves, that do not even leave an `ourself' the time to form behind them, but rather hurl us out beyond them into the dry dust of the world, on to the rough earth, among things. Imagine we are thrown out in this way, abandoned by our very natures in an indifferent, hostile, resistant world. If you do so, you will have grasped the profound meaning of the discovery Husserl expresses in this famous phrase: All consciousness is consciousness of something.'

For Sartre, if we try to shut ourselves up inside our own minds, 'in a nice warm room with the shutters closed', we cease to exist. We have no cosy home: being out on the dusty road is the very definition of what we are. Sartre's gift for shocking metaphor makes his 'Intentionality' essay the most readable introduction to phenomenology ever written, and one of the shortest. It is certainly a better read than anything Husserl wrote. Yet Sartre was by then already aware that Husserl had later moved away from this outward-bound interpretation of intentionality. He had come to look at it a different way, as an operation that pulled everything back into the mind after all. Husserl had long ago considered the possibility that the whole intentional dance could just as easily be understood as occurring inside a per-son's inner realm. Since the epoche suspended questions about whether things were real, nothing stood in the way of this interpretation. Real, not real; inside, outside; what difference did it make? Reflecting on this, Husserl began turning his phenomenology into a branch of 'ide-alism' — the philosophical tradition which denied external reality and defined everything as a kind of private hallucination. What led Husserl to do this in the 1910's and 1920's was his longing for certainty.