The Liar's Tale by Jeremy Campbell

Descartes undertakes a kind of rescue, by saying that rock~bottom truths are installed in our minds at birth, in everyone’s mind, distributed equally; we do not need to receive a special kind of grace to know them. The organ of truth is thus something like the organ of conscience: it is there, and it is up to us to listen to it.

Descartes’s metaphor of the mendacious demon in the Meditation: is the converse of the single Truth: It is the embodiment of the single Lie The philosopher Roger Scruton thinks the demon is arguably a better, more economical explanation of our ordinary experience than the commonsense View that we live in an objective world which corresponds to our opinions. “Instead of supposing the existence of a complex world, with a multiplicity of objects, whose laws we barely understand,” says Scruton, “the demon hypothesis proposes just one object (the demon) operating according to a principle (the desire and pursuit of deception) that we are intimately acquainted with. The hypothesis is both simpler, and more intelligible, than the doctrine of common sense. Maybe it is the best explanation!”

At a time when Descartes was writing his Meditations, ancient skepticism in the form of Pyrrhonism was enjoying a revival, thanks to the rediscovery of the works of Sextus Empiricus, the “methodical” philosopher who flourished in the second and third centuries A.D. Sextus was a champion of his master Pyrrho, a Greek skeptic much taken with the atomic theory of Democritus. Pyrrho taught an extreme form of relativism in which the senses cheat. Eyes and ears are quite capable of lying to us and people are inclined to tell you the first thing that pops into their heads. Faced with that day-in, day-out mendacity, you might as well keep quiet and preserve aphasia, a non-committal silence, an imperturbable serenity. Pyrrho himself was an exemplary Pyrrhonist. According to Diogenes Laertius, he was apt to wander around in traffic. not looking Where he was going, so that his friends had to rescue him from “carts, precipices, dogs and whatnot.”

Sextus touched a seventeenth-century nerve with his insistence on the idea that each person’s constitution is so radically different from anyone else’s we cannot even pretend there is a single, truthful account of ordinary experience. The mental is so intimately linked to the physical, it is impossible to separate body from soul. And since bodies vary wildly from person to person, souls, or minds, must vary to the same extent. “We differ,” Sextus wrote, “in our constitutional peculiarities. For some people, beef is easier to digest than rock-fish, and some suffer diarrhoea from inferior Lesbian wine. There used to be an old woman of Attica, they say, who could drink thirty grams of hemlock with impunity, and Lysis used to take four grams of opium without harm.”

Michel de Montaigne, one of the most widely read Pyrrhonists of the period, took almost the opposite View from that of Descartes on the role of mind and reason. He believed consciousness can be deceived and can also deceive itself. Montaigne, who died four years before Descartes was born, and whose influence on his times has been likened to that of Freud on ours, held that the senses lie to the mind and the mind lies back in return. The two compete in defrauding each other. What is more, Reason is one of the imps of falsehood leading us astray. As an inner presence, it also enables us to deceive ourselves. '

A provocative theme in Montaigne’s writings is that ignorance, Untruth, just not caring whether or not the whole world is a lie, can be a source of happiness and contentment to the human species. We can be deceived, be a prey to falsehoods, and still enjoy our existence. A big mistake is to try to separate our “higher” faculties from our personhood, from the quotidian condition of being human. We are all members of the common herd. The acids of Reason, which for Descartes were an elixir of psychological health, would, if allowed free rein, eat away and destroy our natural instincts, Montaigne j Warned. The mind is always trying to improve on nature, aspiring to be something it was never intended to be; it is artificial and pretentious. It has ideas above its station. The imagination, in particular, is flighty and poor at making a distinction between truth and lies. Like one of today’s critics of the postmodernists, Montaigne pokes fun at the mania of his contemporaries for interpretation, for commentaries on commentaries, never agreeing on a final version. There is more bustle, more ink spilt on more paper, to interpret interpretations, than to interpret things. Critics occupy more space than original writers: “every place swarms With commentaries; of authors there is great scarcity.” The natural disease of the mind is that it “does nothing but ferret and inquire, and is eternally wheeling, juggling and perplexing itself like silkworms, and then suffocates in its Work.”

Whereas Descartes went to great lengths to lift human beings out of nature, out of the common opinions and habits of other people, the conventions of society, Montaigne let himself be “ignorantly and negligently led by the general law of the world.” It would be folly, he said, to worry and fret about whether such a law is correct and true, since it is not private and personal, but public and general. In a strongly worded passage at the end of the Essays, he advises against “disassociating” the mind from the body. People who do so “would put themselves out of themselves, and escape from being men. ’Tis folly; instead of transforming themselves into angels, they transform themselves into beasts. Instead of elevating, they lay themselves lower. These transcendental humors affright me, like high and inaccessible cliffs and precipices.” We escape out of ourselves because we do not know how to live within ourselves.

“’Tis to much purpose to go upon stilts,” Montaigne noted, “for, when upon stilts, we must yet Walk with our legs; and when seated upon the most elevated throne in the world, we are but seated upon our rump.”

There is evidence that Descartes read Montaigne before beginning to write the Discourse. Montaigne’s Essays were popular, went through several reprintings and were taken up by such figures as Father Pierre Charron, a skeptical theologian very close to Montaigne. Charron’s book De la Sagesse was a treatise on the correct method for avoiding error and discovering truth, quite similar to the drift of Descartes’s own approach. He denied that human beings have any sufficient mental apparatus enabling them to tell truth from falsehood. We are apt to believe any old thing under the pressure of social conformity and coercion.

It is clear that Descartes recoiled from Montaigne’s View that mind must not be regarded as distinct and separate from the body or from nature. Montaigne had taken an almost Darwinian approach to the continuity of humans and nonhuman species. To suppose there is a profound break between the two is sheer conceit: “Presumption is our natural and original disease,” he said, cuttingus all down to size. “The most wretched and frail of all creatures is man, and withal the proudest. He feels and sees himself lodged here in the dirt and filth of the world, nailed and riveted to the worst and deadest part of the universe, in the lowest story of the house, and most remote from the heavenly arch, with animals of the worst condition, and yet in his imagination will be placing himself above the circle of the moon, and bringing heaven under his feet.” And what is there in human intelligence that is not present in some degree in other animals? Why does the spider make her web tighter in one place and looser in another, if she does not deliberate and think about it? Look at the intelligence of the fox, who tests the thickness of ice on a river by putting his ear on it, harkening to the sound of the water’s current, how deep it is or how shallow.

Moreover, beasts are at least as cunning and duplicitous as we ourselves. We plot strategems to trap and snare them, but they are a match for us; they are capable of “subtleties and inventions” to thwart such tricks. Consider the case of the mule belonging to Thales, the early Greek natural philosopher. This animal, carrying heavy bags of salt, conceived the dodge of “by accident” stumbling into a river, wetting the sacks and thereby lightening its load some what. Thales, it is said, tumbled to the ruse and made the mule carry Wool instead of salt, whereupon it ceased its ploy forthwith.

Montaigne goes on for pages and pages about the wonderful cleverness of beasts, to deflate our complacently lofty opinion of human reason, which he considered to be nothing special. As for truth, even the vaunted science of Aristotle was being undermined. Had not a New World been discovered on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, an entirely different culture with strange customs and beliefs, different absolutes? The kingdom of the intellect was tottering, the sin. gleness of the Roman Catholic Church under threat from the breakaway movement of the Reformation. “By extending the implicit skeptical tendencies of the Reformation crisis, the humanistic crisis, and the scientific crisis into a total crise pyrrhonienne,” says the historian of skepticism Richard Popkin, Montaigne’s work “became the coup de grace to an entire intellectual world.”

Descartes met the crisis head-on. Earlier he had put on a famous “Sophistical demonstration” at the home of the papal nuncio in Paris. He took some arguments of “incontestable” truths, and by the use of plausible reasoning showed they were false. Then he took what Was obviously a glaring falsehood and dressed it up as a seeming truth.

It was more than a mere philosophical interest in stabilizing the centrifugal dispersion of once unimpeachable truths, however, that motivated Descartes. He had been “devastated” by the condemnation of Galileo by the Roman Catholic Church for heresy, so much so that he decided to suppress his own treatise, Le Monde, which confirmed the Copernican thesis of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, and was within days of going to press. In 1624, Galileo had been given permission to write on the Copernican system as long as he did not take sides. But his next book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, so upset the church that he was called to Rome to be “interviewed” by the Inquisition. The book was banned and burned in 1633, and Galileo was tried and sentenced to life imprisonment, though he was allowed to live under house arrest. Later he was ordered to recite the seven penitential psalms every week for three years. He signed a formal abjuration of his belief in the Copernican doctrine.

Descartes showed signs of panic at the news. It was clear that the church was not interested in truth, but in its own supremacy, its own authority, and Descartes’s priorities were the exact reverse of those. He “quasi” decided to burn all his papers. “I cannot imagine,” he more to a friend, “that an Italian, and especially one well thought of by the Pope from what I have heard, could have been labelled a criminal for nothing other than wanting to establish the movement of the earth.” He saw this turn of events as a threat to the whole basis of his system. If Copernicanism is false, he said, “so too are the entire foundations of my philosophy.” It was around this time that Descartes took up the challenge of skepticism in earnest. His method of metaphysical, “hyperbolical” doubt, the doubt designed to end all doubts, and the confrontation with the demon of falsehood, seem to have been a response to the Galileo affair. “Skepticism was simply a means to an end, and that end had nothing to do with certainty about the existence of the material world, but rather with establishing the metaphysical credentials of a mechanist natural philosophy, one of whose central tenets-the Earth’s motion around the Sun-had been condemned by the Inquisition,” in the view of his biographer Stephen Gaukroger.

One of Descartes’s chief aims was to justify his belief in a mechanistic world. He was opposed to naturalism, the doctrine that what we might suppose to be supernatural acts of God can be explained without reference to God. Nature on its own possessed occult powers, according to the naturalist View. It was active and infinitely more mysterious than we might think, but at the same time more mundane. There were heretical suggestions that such God~linked activities as prayer and the sacraments were really states of mind, psychological attitudes. One answer to this dangerous theory of an active nature which behaved like supemature was to insist that the world is a mechanism. Matter is inactive, the supernatural is the supernatural, and never the twain shall meet. Nature has no occult powers. Descartes was intent on showing that God transcends nature, and that the mind, being entirely different from the body, cannot be part of nature.

Truth is obtained at the cost of a sacrifice. That is the conclusion of Descartes. The search for Truth is a lonely enterprise, a solitary mission. It requires the exclusion of possibilities, because the more possibilities there are, the less truth there is. Falsehood, error, uncertainty, arise because the will is free. Reason is the curb that reins in the licentiousness of the will, when it roams beyond the confines of reason. Reason is unfreedom. It rules out more than it rules in. That is what prompted Ernest: Gellner to aim a withering blast at Descartes for being “profoundly bourgeois,” essentially middle class “unromantic, uncommunal, unhistorical,” the self-made metaphysician, starting with nothing, coming up from nothing, proceeding step by step, tidily, not acting on impulse, above all self-sufficient. “It is indeed in this spirit that the bourgeois entrepreneur deploys his resources and keeps his accounts and records in financial and legal order-slow, careful, judicious, deliberate, omit~ ting naught, accounting for all.” Gellner lets the master of rationalism have it full in the face. Possessed of “a yearning for freedom from any kind of indebtedness, he will not mortgage his convictions to some common bank of custom, whose management is outside his control, and which consequently is not really to be trusted.” The difference between Montaigne and Descartes comes down to this. For Montaigne, there was “something more important” than truth. For Descartes, there was nothing more important. Said Montaigne: “ ’Tis the misery of our condition, that often that which presents itselfto our imagination for the most true does not also appear the most useful to life.” Descartes, by contrast, gives the impression that misery is the absence of truth, and life comes in second place to truth. “Descartes lived an unhappy and indeed, for some considerable periods, a rather disturbed life,” writes one of his biographers. “This is something he made every effort to deny or disguise, and the means he chose were intellectual. His sources of pleasure were few, but intellectual achievements figure prominently amongst these, and these achievements were elevated into virtually the only form of worthwhile pursuit, in a way that goes well beyond a commitment to a ‘life of the mind,’ for example.” In the Discourse, Descartes announces his core ambition: “I always had an excessive desire to learn to distinguish the true from the false.” For sure, Descartes was a notable separator and sifter. He detached God from the world, mind from nature, reason from culture. And he- the bachelor who prized his privacy so highly-privileged singleness as the pot of gold at the end of the philosophical rainbow. His method was to strip down to bare bedrock by doubting everything he had ever been told, suspecting all doctrines and systems, all scholarly worldviews. Start from scratch, alone, with just the elementary, primitive, original apparatus of thought itself and the clear and dis- tinct ideas provided by the “truth conscience” organ with which we are born.

The life of the mind can be a rather removed and isolated existence. It is not necessarily a team sport. In the Discourse on Method, published in 1637, Descartes states in no uncertain terms that something which has evolved, which has a history, which has been been altered over long periods of time by a variety of circumstances, is inferior to a work created all at one time by a single author working on his own. Buildings designed by just one architect are usually more beautiful and better proportioned than those several generations of experts have tried to renovate and improve. A city that has grown up over centuries with ad hoc augmentations and extensions contains much higgledy-piggledy, needlessly complex design, with recent constructions perched on top of ancient masonry, streets crooked and irregular, giving the impression that the city emerged by accident rather than by the careful blueprints of an architect. Similarly, Descartes piously adds, “the constitution of true Religion Whose ordinances are of God alone, is incomparably better regulated than any other.”

A mind created at a stroke, by one and only one divinity, like a city laid out all at once by a single designer, would be immune to deception and falsehood. No crooked streets in the second, no twisted sophistries in the first. It is the long process of unhurried, organic development of knowledge over time and in history that lets in the fiends of error, the imps of delusion and fraud. As long as the mind does not contain its own mental geology, residues of old forms of knowledge buried like fossils in its depths; as long as it is underwritten by a God who finds it impossible to lie, the mind may be trusted not to swindle us. Descartes intended to cheat history by demolishing it with the wrecking ball of his Method, reducing everything to such simple, basic units they could not be false, creating a new science of thought as an architect would raze a whole town in order to build one that is his and his alone. In place of a Rome or Paris there would be a Washington, DC, a Brasilia.

That, of course, was exactly the sort of metaphor that led William Paley, in his Natural Theology of 1802, to the categorical assertion that the universe is like a watch, and a watch must have had a watch\ maker, a single designer who made it at a stroke as a finished instrument for a specific use. There are no useless parts, still present in the Watch just because they are remnants of the history of watchmaking, At the hinge of the intellectual revolution of the nineteenth century, that analogy was thrown back in Paley’s face. It was the heart and soul of Darwin’s theory that life has a history, mind has a history, and the evolution of species, like the partly haphazard structure of an ancient city, often updates obsolete parts of the body, leaving the residue of archaic, obsolete organs in place. In the concluding chapter of the Origin, Darwin introduces a profoundly personal manifesto: “When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as something wholly beyond his comprehension, when we regard every production of nature as one which has a long history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, in the same way as any great mechanical invention is the summing up of the labor, the experience, the reason and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting-I speak from experience-does the study of natural history become!”

In published “Objections” to the Meditations, Descartes, who disliked criticism, was brought down to earth and reprimanded for his refusal to recognize the role that “life,” the wisdom and learning of centuries, has to play in the formation of ideas he held to be the gift of a non-deceiving God to the single individual. How could he be sure that the idea of a perfect, supreme Being would have come to him if he “had not been nurtured among men of culture”? To dismiss as suspect, as a source of falsehood, all that civilization has to offer is cavalier, rash, and ungrateful. Did Descartes ever consider the possibility that these ideas came from books. from conversation with his friends, rather. than being messages hatched in his own mind in isolation, or arriving from a Supreme Being? Is truth a community venture, or an individual operation, with just one demon in attendance? That question Was to haunt Philosophy for centuries to come, culminating in the provocative notion, as diametrically opposed to the Cartesian view as could possibly be imagined, that “truth” is just a social construct,

Sartre and SEX

Sartre was quite squeamish. To judge by the vivid descriptions in his books, he found sex a nightmarish process of struggling not to drown in slime and gloop. (Before we mock him too much for this, let’s remember that we know it only because he revealed it so candidly. Well, okay, let’s mock him a little bit.)

The physical lusciousness of life was never a threat to Beauvoir; she could not get enough of it. As a child, she wanted to consume everything she saw. She would gaze greedily into the windows of sweet shops-‘the luminous sparkle of candied fruits, the cloudy lustre of jellies, the kaleidoscopic inflorescence of acidulated fruit-drops~ green, red, orange, violet-I coveted the colours themselves as much as the pleasures they promised me’. She wished the whole universe could be edible, so it could be eaten as Hansel and Gretel ate from the gingerbread house. Even as an adult, she wrote, ‘I wanted to crunch flowering almond trees, and take bites out of the rainbow nougat of the sunset.’ Travelling to New York in 1947, she felt an urge to eat the neon signs, brightly arrayed against the night sky.

Her appetite extended to collecting things, including many gifts and souvenirs from her travels. When she finally moved from hotel rooms to a proper apartment in 1955, it quickly filled up with ‘jackets and skirts from Guatemala, blouses from Mexico. . .ostrich eggs from the Sahara, lead tom-toms, some drums that Sartre had brought back from Haiti, glass swords and Venetian mirrors that he had bought in the rue Bonaparte, a plaster cast of his hands, Giacometti’s lamps’. Her diarykeeping and memoir-writing also reflected an urge to acquire and relish everything that came into her grasp. .

She explored the world with the same passion, travelling and walking fanatically. While living alone in Marseilles as a young schoolteacher, she would pack buns and bananas on her days off, put on a dress and a pair of espadrilles, and set out at dawn to explore the mountainous countryside. Once, carrying bread, a candle and a water bottle full of red wine, she ascended Mont Mézenc and spent the night in a flint but at the summit. She woke to find herself looking down on a sea of cloud, and ran down the path on rocks which, when the sun came out. heated up and burned her feet through the
soles of her inappropriate shoes. On another walk, she got stuck in a gorge and barely managed to scramble out. Later, in the Alps in 1936, she fell down a sheer rock face while out alone, but escaped with a few scratches.

Sartre was different. He would be persuaded to join her on walks, but didn’t enjoy the sensation of fatigue. Being and Nothingness contains a marvellous description of slogging up a hill behind an unnamed companion, whom one pictures as Beauvoir (although the scene has something in common with Petrarch’s famous ascent of Mont Ventoux). While this companion seems to be having fun, Sartre experiences the effort as a nuisance, something that intrudes on his freedom. He gives in quickly, throws down his knapsack and collapses at the roadside. The other person is tired too, but finds it blissful to forge on, feeling the glow of sunburn on the back of the neck and relishing the way the roughness of the path is revealed afresh by each trudging step. The Whole landscape presents itself differently to the two of them.

Sartre preferred skiing, and that experience also found its way into Being and Nothingness. Walking over a snowfield is hard work, he pointed out, but skiing over it is a delight. The snow itself changes underneath you, phenomenologically speaking; instead of presenting itself as viscous and clinging, it becomes hard and smooth. It bears you up, and you slide flowingly over it, as easily as the notes of Nausea’s jazz song. He added that he was curious about waterskiing, a new invention which he had heard of but not tried. Even on snow, you left a line of ski marks behind you; in water, you left nothing. That was the purest pleasure Sartre could imagine.

His dream was to pass through the world unencumbered. The possessions that delighted Beauvoir horrified Sartre. He too liked travelling, but he kept nothing from his trips. He gave away books after reading them. The only things he always kept by him were his pipe and his pen, and even these were not for getting attached to. He lost them constantly, he wrote: ‘they’re exiles in my hands’.

With people, he was generous to the point of obsession. He gave money away as fast as it came. in order to get it away from him, like a hand grenade.

Sadomasochism from Edmund White

But on any night of the week such sights can be observed in the Village at a private club. Four dollars at the door buys drink and admission to the huge painhouse. As your eyes adjust to the gloom, you see one guy whipping another. Over there someone Who checked all his clothes in the coatroom is hoisted aloft in a leather swing. Those men are pressed to the wall, facing it. A punishment? No, the wall, you discover, has been pierced with crotch-high ‘glory holes’, and on the other side of the partition someone even now is being covered in glory. In the basement two stoned men are kissing under black light. Absurdly, touchingly, anachronistically romantic, they are unaware of everyone around them, their fluorescent white shirts gleaming eerily like Baudelaire’s swan bathing its wings in the dust.

The oldest and dumbest joke about S and M has the masochist saying ‘Beat me’, and the sadist replying ‘No’. What’s all wrong about the joke is that it assumes sadism is the same thing as psychological cruelty. A playwright who’s known to be a sadist is presumed to be cruel to his audiences (‘No wonder that play went on so long’). Of an English poet whose verse follows strictly traditional forms, some Wiseacre remarks, ‘But of course the forms are strict. If you’d seen him in his saturnine leathers you’d understand his craving for discipline.’

So thoroughly corrupted are we by the Freudian parlor game that such interpretations have become the ordinary stuff of conversation; we are all rabbis, and life is the copious Talmud

awaiting our narrow exegesis. The hermeneutics convince us that a life my life, your life, anyone’s life is all of a piece. He’s cruel in bed and cruel at work. Proust tortured mice for fun ”[14 tortures us by going on and on in his Big Book.

But what if each of us is not unified, but piecemeal? What .' parts oppose rather than duplicate one another? Sam the sadist is a loyal and loving son, a beneficent employer; and the motorcycle club he heads sponsors an annual benefit for handicapped kids. The playwright is famous for his own work with the disabled, the poet for his long hours of patient advice to his students; and Proust was a proverb of kindness (when he found 200 mistakes in twenty-three galley pages, he begged the proofreader not to take the discovery of these errors ‘for a reproach’).

More to the point, sadism itself is not cruel. Those gay ‘top men’ I’ve quizzed have admitted, somewhat sheepishly, that they seldom inflict much pain beyond a few slaps and light licks with a belt. So theatrical (or filmic) is sado-masochism that even the blows are designed to look and sound more violent to the (usually imaginary) audience than they actually are; the belt is doubled, the punishing hand is cupped.

Marijuana, poppers, mescalin and beer stimulate the imagination to such a fever that by merely standing over the cowering slave a master is able to suggest an assault. At every point the experienced master can judge whether his slave wants more or less pain. And sometimes the sadist will ask sotto voce if things are getting too heavy. Naturally there are some sadists who, like Sade himself, can be aroused only by inflicting pain, but these are in the minority. Ankle restraints are plush-lined; the paddle is commedia dell’arte slapstick.

The violence resides almost entirely in the language. One man licking another’s Frye boots would be hilarious were the act not labeled ‘humiliation’. Someone once remarked that in adolescence pornography is a substitute for sex, whereas in adulthood sex is a substitute for pornography; the S and M rap (that muttered or shouted stream of abuse, obscenity, military commands) is the conflation of pornography and sex, the marriage of signifier and signified, an act of extraordinary semiotic condensation. 

There’s another theory: that gay S and M is a safe outlet for throttled rage. Sadism is, presumably, a way for uptight men to release their thunderbolts under the guise of passion. The masochist has indicated his readiness to be punished, and to abuse him seems to be simple compliance, almost charity. Still better, the anger can always be ‘disavowed and laughed off later as just part of a game.

Some of Gregersen’s findings support this interpretation. Leather men he’s interviewed report that they are or have been vegetarians or pacifists. If not always liberal, many are at least libertarian in their politics, averse to authoritarianism of every stripe and hell-bent on defending individual rights.

If one rather cynically assumes that pacifism, vegetarianism, humaneness towards animals and libertarianism are indicative of repressed urges towards violence, then a case could be made for the theory that links S and M to contained rage. To me, however, these beliefs and character traits are. more readily attributable to an active imagination, to empathy, to what Keats called ‘negative capability’ the power to project oneself into another creature’s skin. Such a capacity makes S and M itself possible; no one would be drawn towards the drama of domination (nor would he be good at it) unless he could project himself into the mind of the dominated.

France and Daladier from TDV

But France’s industrial capacity was now so restricted that money could hot be turned into munitions overnight. A B-I heavy tank, for example) took two years to build--in three separate factories. Indeed, some machine tools were so old that workers constructed tanks with little more than hammers and files. Efficient production depended on large orders, which Were not forthcoming. The removal of munitions plants from the vulnerable Paris region, notably Pierre Cot’s transfer of the entire aviation industry to Toulouse, Bordeaux and Marseilles, further disrupted rearmament. There were shortages of skilled workers, especially in engineering and metallurgy Still, France made such strides that by 1939 it was outproducing Germany in both tanks and fighter aircraft. Furthermore France’s military equipment was in certain respects superior to that of the Third Reich. Gamelin nOt only had more tanks, some with thicker armour and heavier guns, he also had more artillery than Germany. True, only 44 of his 200 artillery regiments were motorised. But the Wehrmacht itself was more of a “military anachronism” than a “mechanised juggernaut”: when Hitler invaded Russia in 1941 he helded 3,350 tanks and 650,000 horses, over four times as many as had Napoleon in 1812.

However, arms mattered less than men-and ideas. Gamelin and his generals had learned little and forgotten nothing since Verdun. They did not even appreciate the value of the inhltration tactics which had enabled the Germans to make such dramatic advances in 1918, well before the blitzkrieg was envisioned. It was not so much in war matériel that France was old-fashioned-though Vuillemin said that the obsolescence of the air force scared him out of his wits-it was in military doctrine.

Gamelin considered aviation an adjunct to the army and even a progressive such as Charles de Gaulle had little notion of employing aircraft in combined operations with tanks. The French army relied on firepower rather than mobility, understandable perhaps since its infantry, burdened with heavier equipment, was slower in 1939 than it had been in 1914. Gamelin allowed himself to be distracted by Italy and developed no plans to attack Germany. Any offensive, he said, would result in “a modernised form of the battle of the Somme.” As this suggests, Gamelin was as defence-minded as Daladier who, as War Minister, declared that “the first and last word in military art is to build a trench and hold it.” Yet the Maginot Line was palpably incomplete. Like its leaders, the French army was cautious, bureaucratic, fossilised by tradition. Few of its officers envisaged the tank as much more than a lumbering gun platform designed to support ground troops-not one of the copies of General Guderian’
and

Equally inadequate were the evacuation measures-~except in the case of government ministries. Politicians seemed especially prone to “blue funk.” The Aviation Minister, certain that “the destruction of Paris would pass all imagination,” sent his family to Brittany and advised others to do the same. These others had to fend for themselves. So from Lille to Strasbourg there was a “stampede of the well-to-do.”Cars packed with people and possessions jammed the roads leading south and west. Huge crowds besieged the railway stations and people fought for seats on trains. Six hundred thousand Parisians fled in a week. The capital felt empty, though queues still formed outside savings banks. The shops were deserted, apart from those selling trunks. The Louvre closed and its works of art were packed into crates. Factories were camouflaged, trenches were dug in parks, street lamps dimmed to a glimmer. Doctors profited by issuing medical certificates granting exemption from military service. A brisk trade arose in houses for sale or rent in areas remote from invasion routes. Country cousins became popular. By 29 September 1938, in fact, France was consumed by a war scare reminiscent of the Great Fear of 1789. In Paris, Strasbourg, Dijon and elsewhere mobs attacked Jews and looted their shops, shouting: “Down with the Jewish war. ” The spirit of Bonnet stalked the land. “Let us not be heroic,” he urged; “We are not up to it.”

At Munich Daladier was hungry for conciliation. As usual, he looked combative and made a continuing show of resistance. But he was a willing victim of the British “plot,” as Lord Halifax’s private secretary put it, “to frighten the French into ratting and then get out on their shoulders.”94 Daladier revealed his true colours by remarking that the bellicistes in his own cabinet wanted to push France into an “absurd and above all impossible war,” a war that might cost the lives of three million Frenchmen. Harrowed by his country’s weakness, especially in the air, he agreed to the carve-up of Czechoslovakia. But his scowling countenance and hunched posture betrayed his anger, Daladier recognised that Munich was a crushing humiliation for France, but he did not expect it to be hailed with “frenetic joy.”96 By treating the story of Daladier’s return to France as the Climax of his post-war novel The Reprieve, Sartre made it famous: expecting to be booed (if not mobbed.) by the crowd at Le Bourget airport but finding himself cheered, the dumbfounded Premier turned to Leger as they disembarked from the plane and said through gritted teeth, “The cunts!” Ironically, Sartre’s lover Simone de Beauvoir participated in the general euphoria. She was “delighted” with Munich and “felt not the faintest Pang of Conscience” about the betrayal of Czechoslovakia: “Anything, even the cruellest injustice, was better than war. ”

war in which the whole country, besieged behind the Maginot Line, would become a monstrous Verdun fllled, Laval forecast, with “millions of corpses.” Yet, as the decade advanced, more and more Frenchmen bitterly concluded that the alternative to war was slavery, that their choice lay “between Vérdun and Dachau. ” Hence the incessant panics, the visions of catastrophe and the “nightmare of fear”(Julien Green’s phrase) which afflicted France throughout the 1930s.

Disquiet aggravated disunity as Hitler set his sights on Poland. Bonnet sought to squirm out of French obligations. Daladier wavered and procrastinated, his outbursts of anger being invariably followed, as “Pertinax” remarked, by gestures of impotence. Even when he did declare war the Prime Minister tried to keep the door open to peace. Many of his compatriots shared his ambivalence. On the one hand, they knew that unless France fought Germany it was finished as a great power. They resembled the departing soldiers whose excellent morale was, a journalist noted, “curiously mental”:‘37 the poilus were not moved by patriotic fervour but by the grim conviction that a dirty job had to be done at once. On the other hand, a significant section of French society shared Daladier’s mental reservations and such people grew increasingly anxious that the war should remain as phoney as possible. They hoped that there would be little fighting and tried to believe that France was safe behind the Maginot Line, which would, some said, become the largest tourist attraction in Europe after the war. But as propagandists and censors went about their business and the newspapers appeared with large blank spaces, no one knew what was happening. Albert Camus wrote in his journal, “Never has the individual been more alone in the face of the lie-making machine.” An air of gloomy unreality permeated the capital. With its street lights painted dark blue, Paris resembled a ghost city. Car headlamps were also coloured blue and looked like large aquamarines bowling down asphalt canyons. Squares and alleys were full of shadows. The prostitutes carried gas masks, as did the tin’helmeted policemen, slung from their shoulders in dung-coloured satchels. “Everything, underlying everything,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir, “a feeling of unfathomable horror."

Jaspers and Arendt from the Cafe

Another friend was watching Heidegger’s new role in dismay: Karl Jaspers. He and Heidegger had become close after they met at Husserl’s birthday party-the one at which Malvine referred to Heidegger as the phenomenological child’. As Jaspers lived in Heidelberg, they only travelled to see each other occasionally, but their correspondence and long-distance friendship were warm. ‘ They had many points of philosophical contact. Following his early encounter with Husserl’s ideas, Jaspers had gone on to develop his own work, building on his psychology background as well as on Kierkegaardian existentialism. He was especially interested in Kierkegaard's studies of 'either/or' choices and of freedom: the ways in which we face up to dilemmas and decide what to do. Jaspers focused on what he called Grmzsituationen --border situations, or limit situations. These are the moments when one finds oneself constrained or boxed in by what is happening, but at the same time pushed by these events towards the limits or outer edge of normal experience, For example, you might have to make a life-or-death choice, or some thing might remind you suddenly of your mortality, or some event may make you realise that you have to accept the burden of responsibility for what you do. Experiencing such situations is, for Jaspers, almost synonymous with existing, in the Kierkegaardian sense. Although they are hard to bear, these are puzzles in our existence, and thus open the door to philosophising. We Cannot solve them by thinking in the abstract; they must be lived, and in the end we make our choices with our entire being. They are existential situations.

Jaspers’ interest in border situations probably had much to do with his own early confrontation with mortality. From childhood, he had ., sulfered from a heart condition so severe that he always expected to die at any moment. He also had emphysema, which forced him to speak slowly, taking long pauses to catch his breath. Both illnesses meant that he had to budget his energies with care in order to get his work done without endangering his life.

Karl and Gem“ Jaspers were also wrestling with their own decision. and continued to do so through the 19305: should they leave Germany? The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 severely restricted their lives: they stripped Jews of their citizenship and banned mixed marriages, although those already bring: like theirs, were officially tolerated for the moment. The following year, Jaspers lost his university position because Of his marriage. Yet they still could not bring themselves to leave. Instead, they kept their heads down and lived cautiously, very much as Jaspers had learned always to breathe and move cautiously, for fear of damaging his vital organs. Hannah Arendt, instead, left early on: she had the benefit of a powerful warning. Just after the Nazi takeover, in spring 1933, she had been arrested while researching materials on anti-Semitism for the German Zionist Organisation at Berlin’s Prussian State Library. Her apartment was searched; both she and her mother were locked up briefly, then released. They fled, Without stopping to arrange travel documents. They crossed to Czechoslovakia (then still safe) by a method that sounds almost too fabulous to be true: a sympathetic German family on the border had a house with its front door in Germany and its back door in Czechoslovakia. The family would invite people for dinner, then let them leave through the back door at night. From Prague, Arendt and her mother went on to Geneva, then to Paris, and finally to New York, where Arendt settled. She told a television interviewer later that everyone had known from the start how dangerous Nazi Germany was, but knowing it in theory was one thing, while acting on it and turning it into ‘personal destiny’ was very different.

The scientific method from The Anatomy of Revolution

So common is the misunderstanding of scientific method that we must attempt here to put the matter ; clearly as possible in a very few words.

First, not even the “exact” sciences like astronomy or physics are exact in the sense of “absolute" or “infallible.” Their firmest laws or uniformities are to be regarded as tentative. They may be upset at any time by further work. But at any given moment they are not to be tampered with unless they prove unreliable in relation to observed facts. In the contemporary revolution in physics, Newton’s laws have not been “disproved”; nor has the principle of indeterminacy been so firmly established as to make all men equal before the game of poker. What has happened in modern physics, as far as a layman can judge, is that the physicist has been sharply reminded that even his neatest uniformities are not absolutes, but are subject to correction, that he is safer in regarding these uniformities as based on observations rather than on the will of God, or the nature of things, or on reality. Or more radically, he should regard these uniformities as his invention rather than his discovery. .

This brings us easily to the second point. Science makes no attempt to study or describe reality-certainly not ultimate reality. Science is not even concerned with truth, in the sense that word has for theologians, for most philosophers, for a good many other people, and perhaps for common sense. The desire to find a final cause, an unmoved mover, a Ding an sich, seems to be so common in men that we have no grounds for believing that this search is not, in one form or another, a fairly constant and in fact essential element in human society. Only, scientists as scientists can have no part in such a search. Eddington, Jeans, even Whitehead, ceased to practice science while they were pursuing theology. Science is based, not on faith, but on skepticism, on a skepticism that will not even worry itself over its status in the universe. And so the scientist works on serenely, undisturbed by the philosopher’s final thrust: that to be constantly skeptical is to believe in doubt, which is after all a form of faith.

Third, the scientist by no means confines himself to “the facts and nothing but the facts.” Dangerous epistemological depths yawn at this point, but we shall have to try and go ahead in spite of them. The popularization of Baconian ideas on induction is probably the chief source of the erroneous notion that the scientist does nothing to the facts he laboriously and virtuously digs up, except to let them fall neatly into a place they make for themselves. Facts themselves are not just “out there" and we should be willing to accept L. J. Henderson’s definition of “fact” as an empirically verifiable statement (italics mine) about phenomena in terms of a conceptual scheme. Actually the scientist cannot work without a conceptual scheme; and though the relation between facts and conceptual schemes is not by any means clear, it is at least clear that a conceptual scheme involves something besides facts, involves, indeed, a working mind.
Let no one be frightened of the term "conceptual scheme." The meaning is really very simple: thunder and lightning impinge on our senses of hearing and sight probably the mere differentiating of this sound and this flash from other sounds and flashes means that we are employing a conceptual scheme. Certainly when we think of Jupiter with his bolts, Thor with his hammer, or the electrical discharge of modern physics, we have clearly arranged our sense-perceptions in accordance with definite conceptual schemes. We possess, indeed, the basic elements of three different theories of thunder and lightning, three differently stated uniformities in these phenomena. But the crucial reason why we should prefer our electrical discharge to Jupiter or Thor as a conceptual scheme is that it is more useful, and that we can by using it get on better also with other conceptual schemes we use for similar purposes. But in the sense which the word true has for the theologian, and most moralists and philosophers, our electrical discharge is not a bit truer than the old notions about Jupiter and Thor.

We may even use two contradictory conceptual schemes, choosing one or the other of convenience, or from habit. We are all of us educated out of the old Ptolemaic conceptual scheme, which saw the sun moving about a stationary earth, into the Copernican conceptual scheme, which sees the earth moving about a stationary sun. Einstein, of course, used a conceptual scheme somewhat different from both of these, but most of us are not yet up to Einstein; in daily life we all, however, contentedly say “the sun rises,” and should be very pedantic indeed if we insisted on saying in Copernican terms “the earth has revolved into sight of the sun.” .

The scientist, then, goes to work roughly in some such fashion as this. He starts with a conceptual scheme of some sort, and with questions, or even hypotheses, which he frames in terms of that scheme. He then hunts for a suitable supply of facts. These facts he seeks to arrange in uniformities or theories which will answer his questions, and 'perhaps suggest other questions. He then immerses himself in the hunt for facts, and emerges with new or ed uniformities. The scientist is not interested in where his conceptual scheme came from, or whether it preceded or followed on facts, or whether it is “subjective” and the facts “objective.” These questions he leaves to the philosophers, who have not settled them yet after two thousand years of debate. But the scientist does, by his recognition that a conceptual scheme is as essential to his activity as are observed facts, emancipate himself completely from self-styled “scientific” materialists, positivists, empiricists, who naively assert that our sense-perceptions filtered through a “mind” are somehow in themselves an orderly and sole reality, or a “reflection” of such a reality. For, note particularly, the facts with which the scientist deals are not phenomena, sense-perceptions, the “external world,” those dear absolutes of innocent positivists, but merely statements about phenomena. A properly verifiable statement about Cromwell or Lenin is then as much a fact as the reading of a thermometer in a laboratory. We cannot here go into the thorny problem of what satisfactory verification is; the practicing scientist, the practicing historian, the practicing judge (and, one hopes, jury) have their own well-tried craft-methods of verification.

Fourth, though the scientist is very careful indeed about matters of definition, and is as disdainful of sloppiness as any historian and of bad thinking as any logician, be distrusts rigidity and attempts at perfection. He is interested less in beauty and neatness of definition than in having his definitions fit not his sentiments and aspirations, but the facts. Above all, he does not dispute over words. He is less interested in the accurate theoretical distinction between a mountain and a hill than he is in making sure that he is ‘ dealing with concrete elevations on this earth. He does not expect class terms to be perfect, mutually exclusive; when he distinguishes between a plant and an animal, he is not at all offended if you call his attention to a living thing that seems to belong to both his classifications at once. He sets to work studying the living thing and will, if necessary, modify his class terms. But he is quite willing also, if it proves more convenient, to set up a new class term of borderline plant-animals. This simple willingness to be guided by convenience is of course one of the amazing things about the scientist and one of the most difficult for those who have not had a scientific training to adapt ourselves to. Most of us are early trained to prefer our opinions to our convenience.

Fifth, perfectly respectable scientific work can be and is constantly done in fields where the kind of controlled experimentation classically associated for instance with physics and chemistry is not possible. We may call this sort of scientific work, based indeed on experimental work auxiliary to it, but not in itself a series of controlled experiments, clinical. The clinician is best known in the medical sciences, where he appears very early in fifth-century Greece with Hippocrates. The clinician works through the case method. His data are amassed, not through experiments he can control, but through a series of cases which he observes and compares. The clinician, again, is not sloppy; but he can rarely be rigorously exact. He is helped greatly when he can draw on experimental sciences-organic chemistry, for example. But in his own right the good clinician is a good scientist. Obviously the social sciences can depend but to a limited extent on actual controlled experimentation; but they can be clinical sciences depending more on observation than on experimentation.

Finally, scientific thinking cannot be, except perhaps in suggesting problems, what nowadays most of us know well enough as wishful thinking. The scientist’s own hopes and fears, his own standards of what he would like to have prevail on this earth must be kept as far as possible out of his work, and especially out of his observations of, or dealing with, facts. How far such hopes and fears and standards enter into his choice of conceptual schemes, how far they influence the kind of questions he asks, are difficult problems we may perhaps be permitted to dodge. Sufficient that the techniques of most of the established sciences provide a very effective check on the cruder forms of wishful thinking. History, which because it has been so long an art and a craft is perhaps the most respectable of the social sciences, provides in the technical training undergone by most professional historians a surprisingly effective and not wholly dissimilar check on the more violent forms of partisan writing and thinking.

All in all, there is no reason why we should feel that the natural scientist uses methods, set standards, forever quite unattainable by the social scientist. Natural science as the more innocent materialists of the last century saw it-exact, infallible, a cosmos built on what in modern folk-usage is called induction-must seem remote to a struggling economist or sociologist. But natural science as it has always been understood by its ablest practitioners and is now widely understood-natural science as expounded methodologically by a Poincare-is no such thin substitute for Divine Providence, no such metaphysical abstraction.

Only God is exact, infallible, omniscient, unchanging, and modern science has been content to leave the search for God to disciplines fitted by long success for such a search.

Of the bare elements of scientific thinking-conceptual scheme, facts, especially “case histories,” logical operations, uniformities-the social sciences in general come out well on the score of facts. Even in the field of history, where neither laboratory nor questionnaire methods of research are available, our existing supply of facts is surprisingly good. .You cannot draw Cromwell back to life, but neither can you call the dinosaurs back to life. What we know about Cromwell from the written record is in many ways as reliable as what we know about dinosaurs from the fossil record. To say that history is a fable agreed upon, or a set of tricks played upon the dead, is to slander, or at least to misjudge, the great body of industrious and sober workers who have carried on the study of history. Notably the last century or so has seen the formation of a body of research workers in history who, with all their faults, maintain standards comparable in some ways to those maintained by similar groups in the natural sciences. These research workers do not indeed uncover the simple raw material of facts. The humblest antiquarian arranges the facts he digs out of his documents into some kind of pattern.

Jeremy Campbell

Plato's anti-sophistic view of truth and lies threw its imposing shadow across the span of time historians call the Middle Ages. He fiercely denied that the words we use to describe reality are mere counters that can be shuffled and tweaked to befuddle weak minds in a game of power. In its pure form, Plato’s theory says words refer to the eternally true, absolutely real, and context-free Ideas. Consciousness is not an artifact built up in a person by years of observing the world, accumulating and memorizing facts. It is something we are born possessing, and it is somehow in communication with the superworld of the Ideas.
This doctrine, that truth is not to be found in differences but in identity, was strong in medieval times, from the third century on. There was a bias against originality and a belief that every singular thing in the world, including every person, should be as like as possible to its ideal type.
Then, toward the end of the eleventh century, a reaction against this sovereignty of the abstract absolute set in. The particular began to stake its claim in opposition to the universal, and to a marked extent subvert the strenuous efforts Plato had made to keep language honest. As long as Truth was external to minds, external to. sentences and even to individual “true” things, it was safe. Language
could not trivialize or belittle it. Plato said we know what truth is because Truth is an independent entity in a separate domain, and the Sophists should keep their greedy hands off it.

Danger beckoned once the reality of universals was under question, since Christianity itself was based on such otherworldly absolutes as God and the Trinity. What if these eternal entities were not real at all, not outside time and space and even human thoughts, but simply words, names, that human beings had invented? That unsettling thesis came to be known as “nominalism,” originating in the teachings of the eleventh-century scholastic philosopher Roscellinus, whose Latin formula was universalis sunt nomina, “universals are (only) names.” Nominalism was destined to cast its influence over most of Europe. It was known as the via modema, or modern way, and eventually it was to spell the collapse of the Whole grand synthesis of medieval thought. By arguing that there is no reality apart from the single individual, that the world can be understood only one thing, one fact, at a time, nominalism made all human knowledge suspect. It also threw into question the entire relationship between language and thought. Loosely speaking, nominalism was a latter-day revival of the Sophistic distinction between pbysis and nomos, the natural and the artificial, between what is given and what is made. A Sophist, holding the View that there is a profusion of “truths”-perhaps as many as there are people to believe them-but no single, final Truth, and that language makes its own reality, would have been a nominalist in the fourteenth century AD.

In fact, Antisthenes, a leading Sophist who was among the handful of close associates present in the room with Socrates when he drank hemlock, has been called “the first nominalist.” Antisthenes denied the existence of the Platonic Forms as independent realities. There is a tale that he once said to Plato: “I see a horse, but I don’t see horseness.” Don’t feel proud of yourself, was the gist of Plato’s response. Regard it as a defect of intuition. “For you have the eye with which a horse is seen, but you have not yet acquired the eye to see horseness.” Or treeness. or blueness. or chariotness, presumably. To a nominalist, each tree, each shade of blue, every chariot, is uniq,1Q and different. Even if we could conceive horseness, the universal equine essence, it would exist only in our minds, and is just a fiction of reason. A thing has one and only one Logos; it cannot be spoken of except by its own proper description. Therefore there we go again-it is impossible to speak falsely or to contradict. Aristotle, the philosopher of common sense, called Antisthenes foolish and his followers “crude thinkers.”

At first, the rise of nominalism seemed to pose no deadly harm to church teaching and in fact tended to underscore the importance of revelation, since it also contested the Platonic idea that human rea. son can show that universals are real. You had to rely on faith. In the fourteenth century, however, nominalism, with its world-altering message that mankind can never know ultimate truth by the power of reason alone, burst onto the scene with renewed intensity and force. On the night of May 26, 1328, William of Ockham, a young Franciscan friar accused of propagating ideas deeply subversive of church authority, together with a handful of. like-minded colleagues, fled from his convent in Avignon, home of the popes in exile. Barely escaping arrest, they took ship secretly down the Rhone. At AiguesMortes, an imperial galley waited to take them to the emperor Louis of Bavaria. Ayear earlier, Louis had deposed the Avignon pope, John XXII, and set up an anti-pope in Rome. ,Ockham, a lecturer at Oxford, had been summoned to Avignon, where a committee of six theologians decided that fifty-one items in his commentaries were “heretical and pestilential.” He refused to disown them, inviting more grief for himself by taking sides against the pope on the bitterly controversial question of poverty. Ockham championed the cause of the Spirituals, a group of Franciscans who believed in practicing absolute poverty, as did the early Christians. Property, after all, did not exist in the Garden Of Eden. Two years later, he signed a protesi against a papal bull which condemned the doctrine. His escapt enabled him to carry on his polemical opposition from a secure dis/ game. He and his companions finally reached Pisa, where he pui pimself under the protection of the emperor, campaigning for political democracy in church and State, and stressing the importance of the individual over society as a whole.

The nocturnal flight of Ockham has been called a decisive moment in the history of European thought, comparable to the secret journey of Lenin in 1917 from Switzerland to Petrograd in a Sealed train, there to spread the virus of an untested ideology. In a phrase intended to emphasize that the force of ideas is not weaker diam the might of armies, Ockham’s first words to the emperor are reputed to have been: “Protect me with your sword, and I will defend You with my pen.” ’

Was Ockham the Lenin of his day? An exaggeration, certainly. In fact, he has been likened to a nineteenth-century liberal, someone like John Stuart Mill, for his utilitarian theory of property, his advocacy of civil and, to a limited extent, religious liberty and freedom of debate, and his strong belief that exceptions to rules are one of the inescapable facts of life. Like Darwin, Ockham also held fast to the view that metaphysics must be separated absolutely from the task of understanding nature. His ideas ultimately helped to bring about a fundamental change. in Western ways of thinking. Well into the twentieth century, one scholar notes, “Ockham’s name continued to carry the faint odor of disreputability and scandal in certain quarters.” His ideas have been compared to those of the twentieth-century theorist of “language games,” Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Ockham became a household word, thanks to his celebrated razor, the ever sharp blade of logic that shaves away superfluous terms and finicky distinctions that Scholasticism had manufactured in bulk over centuries of medieval thought. He probably never used such a word, but the metaphor of the razor as an instrument of economy and parsimony runs through all his work. “To employ a number of principles when it is possible to use a few is a waste of time,” is a typical Ockhamist statement of belief in the power of logital frugality.

Ockham was profoundly loyal to the church. He did not place under suspicion such theological untouchables as the Trinity. He merely shelved all aspirations to match up the inadequate instrument of the human mind with the enormous mystery of God’s operations. Like Protagoras, though in very different terms, Ockha,11 decided it was a waste of time even to attempt such an ambitious task. God must remain incomprehensible, a book closed to reason His Logos and ours are just completely different, and that is that, '

Putting the divine purpose off-limits to discussion in that way had a tremendously liberating effect on secular thought. One could do philosophy, study the natural world, uninhibited by the encumbrances of theological dogma, speculation, and authority. This implied a clean separation of the human mind from the superhuman, of history from theology, the political from the ecclesiastical) and to some extent the present from the past. Eventually, Ockham’s nominalism would lead to the vast upheavals of the Reformation, to Martin Luther. Already, in the fourteenth century, John Wycliffe in England had sided with nominalism in his campaign to make the scriptures available to all and sundry.

The sense that language had lost its moorings can be noticed in the work of William Langland, a younger contemporary of Ockham. His Piers Plowman, an allegorical poem about the search for truth, is full of tricky wordplay, verbal ambiguity, mistaken meaning, puns, and warped syntax. The scholar Mary Carruthers sees as a basic concern of the poem the task of redeeming a language that has lost its . metaphysical connection with truth. The biggest fool in Piers Plowman is a character named Will, who has a hugely inflated idea of his own ability to interpret what others say to him on important matters.

Chaucer, the greatest poet of the fourteenth century, was familiar with nominalist thinking and tinkered with the notion that no two people can communicate with each other in any meaningful way. john Gardner presents Chaucer to us moderns as a philosophical poet fascinated with nominalism, especially the idea that since my abstraction from the concrete individual thing is not “real,” but just a thought-up name, it may be entirely different from yours. I see a tomato and classify it as a fruit, but you may call it a vegetable, In the extreme version, the unreality of universals means that all ideas are private and uncommunicable: judgment subsides into mere opinion. Gardner inserts the fateful word “relativism” into his discussion pf late medieval nominalism. Our minds are just not up to the task.

Max Beerbohm

Be it remembered that long before this time there had been in the heart of Chelsea a kind of cult for Beauty. Certain artists had settled there, deliberately refusing to work in the ordinary official way, and “wrought," as they were wont to asseverate, “for the pleasure and sake of all that is fair.” Little commerce had they with the brazen world. Nothing but the light of the sun would they share with men. Quietly and unbeknown, callous of all but their craft, they wrought their poems or their pictures, gave them one to another, and wrought on. Meredith, Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, Holman Hunt were in this band of shy artificers. In fact, Beauty had existed long before 1880. It was Mr. Oscar Wilde who managed her debut. To study the period is to admit that to him was due no small part of the social vogue that Beauty began to enjoy. Fired by his fervid words, men and women hurled their mahogany into the streets and ransacked the curio-shops for the furniture of Annish days. Dados arose upon every wall, sunflowers and the feathers of peacocks curved in every corner, tea grew quite cold while the guests were praising the Willow Pattern of its cup. A few fashionable women even dressed them selves in sinuous draperies and unheard-of greens. Into whatsoever ballroom you went, you would surely find, among the women in tiaras and the fops and the distinguished foreigners, half a score of comely ragamufhns in velveteen, murmuring sonnets, posturing, Waving their hands. Beauty was sought in the most unlikely places. Young painters found her mobled in the fogs, and bank-clerks, versed in the writings of Mr. Hamerton, were heard to declare, as they sped home from the City, that the Underground Railway was beautiful from London Bridge to Westminster, but not from Sloane Square to Notting Hill Gate.

Estheticism (for so they named the movement) did indeed permeate, in a manner, all classes. But it was to the haut monde that its primary appeal was made. The sacred emblems of Chelsea were sold in the fashionable toy-shops, its reverently chanted creeds became the patter of the boudoirs. The old Grosvenor Gallery, that stronghold of the few, was verily invaded. Never was such a fusion of de’ lightful folk as at its Private Views.* There was Robert Browning the philosopher, dofiing his hat with a courtly sweep to more than one Duchess. There, too, was Theo Marzials, poet and eccentric, and Charles Colnaghi, the hero of a hundred tea-fights, and young Brookfield, the comedian, and many another good fellow. My Lord of Dudley, the virtuoso, came there, leaning for support upon the arm of his fair young wife. Disraeli, with his lustreless eyes and face like some seamed Hebraic parchment, came also, and whispered behind his hand to the faithful Corry. And Walter Sickert spread the latest mat of “the Master? who, with monocle, cane and tilted hat, flashed through the gay mob anon.

Autrement, there was Coombe Wood, in whose shade the Lady Archibald Campbell suffered more than one of Shakespeare’s plays to be enacted. Hither, from the garish, indelicate theatre that held her languishing, Thalia was hidden, if haply, under the open sky, she might resume her old charm. All Fashion came to marvel and so did all the aesthetes, in the heart of one of whose leaders, Godwin, that superb architect, the idea was first conceived. Real Pastoral Plays!

This passage, which I found in a contemporary chronicle, is so
quaint and so instinct with the spirit of its time that I am fain to quote it: “There were quaint, beautiful, extraordinary costumes walking about-ultra aesthetics, artistic-aesthetics, zsthetics that made up their minds to be daring, and suddenly gave way in some important point-put a frivolous bonnet on the top of a grave and flowing garment that Albert Diirer might have designed for a mantle. There were fashionable costumes that Mrs. Mason or Madame Elise might have turned out that morning. The motley crowd mingled, forming into groups, sometimes dazzling you by the array of colours that you never thought to see in full daylight. . . .Canary-coloured garments flitted cheerily by garments of the saddest green. A hat in an agony of pokes and angles was seen in
company with a bonnet that was a gay garland of flowers. A vast cape that might
have enshrouded the form of a Mater Dolorosa hung by the side of a jauntily striped Langtry-hood.”

and

My collection, like most collections, began imperceptibly. A man does not say to himself “I am going to collect’ this thing or that. True, the schoolboy says so; but his are not, in the true sense of the word. collections. He seeks no set autobiographic symbols, for boys never look back-~there is too little to look back on, too much in front. Nor have the objects of his collection any intrinsic charm for him. He starts a collection merely that he may have a plausible excuse for doing something he ought not to do. He goes in for birds' eggs merely that he may be allowed to risk his bones and tear his clothes in climbing; for butterflies, that he may be encouraged to poison and impale; for stamps . . . really, I do not know why he, why ant sane creature, goes in for Stamps. It follows that he has no real love
of his collection and soon abandons it for something else. The art oollector, how different! His hobby has a solid basis of pet~ preference. Some one gives him (say) a piece of jade. He admires it. He sees another piece in a shop, and buys it; later, he buys another. He does not regard these pieces of jade as distinct from [ha rest of his possessions; he has no idea of collecting jade. It is not till he has acquired several other pieces that he ceases to regard them a, mere items in the decoration of his room, and gives them a little table or a tray of a cabinet, all to themselves. How well they look there! How they intensify one another! He really must get some One to give him that little pedestalled Cupid which he saw yesterday in Wardour Street. Thus awakes in him, quite gradually, the spirit of the collector. Or take the case of one whose collection is not of beautiful things, but of autobiographic symbols: take the case of the glut ton. He will have pocketed many menus before it occurs to him to arrange them in an album. Even so, it was not until a fair number of labels had been pasted on my hat-box that I saw them as souvenirs, and determined that in future my hat-box should always travel with me and so commemorate my every darling escape.

In the path of every collector are strewn obstacles of one kind or another; and the overleaping of them is part of the fun. As a collector of labels I had my pleasant difficulties. On any much-belabelled piece of baggage the porter always pastes the new label over that which looks most recent; else the thing might miss its destination. Now, paste dries before the end of the briefest journey; and one of my canons was that, though two labels might overlap, none must efface the inscription of another. On the other hand, I did not wish to lose my hat-box, for this would have entailed inquiries, and dcscriptions, and telegraphing up the line, and all manner of agitation. What, then, was I to do? I might have taken my hat-box with me in the carriage? That, indeed, is what I always did. But unless a thing is to go in the van it receives no label at all. So I had to use a mild stratagem. “Yes,” I would say, “everything in the van!” The labels would be duly affixed. “Oh,” I would cry seizing the hat-box quickly. “I forgot. I want this with me in the carriage.” (I learned to seiieii quickly, because some porters are such martinets that they will whisk the label off and confiscate it.) Then, when the man was not looking, I would remove the label from the place he had chosen for it and press it on some unoccupied part of the surface.

Schiaparelli and Chanel from TDV

Elsa Schiaparelli, in particular, took full advantage of it. An Italian aristocrat and an anti-Fascist autocrat, who had contrived an evening ensemble based on an Ethiopian warrior’s tunic with trousers of imperial purple to honour Haile Selassie, she was by 1935 the “undisputed queen of Paris fashion.”I6 She had won the position, toppling Coco Chanel from her throne, largely by dint of audacity. Reacting against the subdued pastels, beiges and navies formerly thought sophisticated, Schiaparelli produced clothes in Fauvist hues: canary yellow, Mars orange and shocking pink (her trademark). Other schools of artists-Futurists, Dadaists and Surrealists-also contributed to her more avant-garde outfits. Thus she fabricated hats shaped like television sets, vegetable baskets, shoes. She created trompe-l’oez'l skeleton sweaters and fingernail gloves. She sold buttons that looked like lollipops, necklaces apparently threaded with aspirins, a handbag resembling a telephone, a white satin evening gown decorated with a huge Daliesque lobster. No garment-maker better appreciated the publicity value of being different: at the Exposition Schiaparelli caused a sensation by burying a naked plaster mannequin in flowers and stringing up a washing line on which she hung “all the clothes of a smart woman, even to panties, stockings and shoes.” Gendarmes had to hold back the crowds.

However, Schiaparelli owed her own vogue to practicality as well as to eccentricity. She used natural fabrics which moved with the body, as well as cheap synthetics such as rayon. Like Chanel, she appealed to the young with functional sports garb, well-cut suits and neat little black dresses. But Whereas Chanel had made proletarian styles elegant, producing apache sweaters for the beau monde and dungarees a la mode, Schiaparelli, as Jean Cocteau wrote, invented “for all women what was once the privilege of few---to be individual.” She also made them less androgynous, accentuating soft curves and fluid lines at a time when, thanks to diet and exercise, better-off women were more willowy than ever before. She narrowed waists and emphasised busts, moving away from the tubular shape of the 1920s and in 1935 pioneering padded brassieres. She also broadened shoulders, perhaps adumbrating the epaulettes of war, perhaps echoing the Balinese bapangs (projecting collars) seen at France’s Colonial Exhibition of 1931. Certainly Schiaparelli ransacked the globe for inspiration, finding it in Indian turbans, Cossack jackets, Mexican boleros, Tuareg pantaloons, Italian masks. Chic versions of such exotica were displayed at her boutique, the first of its kind, at 21 Place Vendome. There, in what was said to be the most famous window in the world, customers discovered an Aladdin’s cave of sartorial fantasy. It doubtless represented an “escape from reality”‘ at a time of Depression. Maybe, too, it was a protest against the uniform garb and the uniform mentality of totalitarianism. But it also reflected other influences, especially, in 1937, that of the International Exposition. Its glitter provoked an explosion of spangles and sequins. Its extravagance prompted the use of brighter colours, richer fabrics, more exuberant embroideries and more opulent styles-puffed and frilled tulle capes, for example. Schiaparelli called her mid-season collection “Paris, 1937”and won plaudits at home and abroad for her new, tall, svelte evening silhouette.

The Dark Valley on Austria

Schuschnigg refused to flee from Vienna and for the next seven years he remained a prisoner of the Nazis. So did his country; but most Austrians rejoiced in their captivity. The Wehrmacht, which marched in without firing a shot, was welcomed with unfeigned enthusiasm. It was greeted by
so many new brown uniforms and swastika flags that factories ran out of cloth and towns succumbed to “decorative monotony.” Church bells pealed and loyal addresses were read in front of cheering crowds. Men saluted and bellowed “Sieg Hail. ” Women wept for joy and uttered thanksgivings. Girls garlanded steel-helmeted troops as though they were an army of liberation. When the Fuhrer arrived, on the afternoon of 12 March 1938, people even knelt in the tracks of his big black Mercedes to collect the dust its wheels had touched. Hitler was so moved by the manifestations in his home town of Linz that, over a dinner of pea soup and rice at the Hotel Weinzinger, he abandoned the temporary expedient of making Austria a satellite state and decided to restore fully his “homeland to the German Reich.” In Vienna the former down-and-out was received with “an ecstasy of emotional fervour. “The whole city behaved like an aroused woman, vibrating, writhing, moaning and sighing lustfully for orgasm.“ wrote one witness, George Clare. who stated that this was no purple passage but an “exact description.” The climax came on 13 March in the Heldenplatz. where 100,000 people took part in an orgy of adoration as Hitler spoke from the balcony of the semicircular Hofburg. Austria‘s new mission, he said, was to be the youngest bastion of the German nation. It was a mission which the vast majority embraced, including Cardinal lnnitzer. He hailed Hitler, flew Nazi banners from St. Stephen’s Cathedral and urged Catholics to “do their duty to the German Father~ land.” lnnitzer subsequently recanted, but by then 99.73 per cent of the electorate had voted for the Anschluss: which he had sanctified. Austria had become Ostmark, a province of greater Germany, and postcards were on sale in Vienna showing “a swastika sun rising over the Stephanskirche.”

Why the Austrian mood swung so sharply towards Hitler has never been quite clear, even to Viennese analysts of the national psyche. It seemed inconceivable that such a hideous change could suddenly overtake a people famed for their golden-hearted Gemutlichkeit and blithe Schlamperei, for their addiction to light waltzes and sentimental operettas, for their indulgence in café conversation accompanied by patisseries, croissants, strudels, pancakes so thin that a newspaper could be read through them, and a hundred varieties of coffee, best served with whipped cream. Doubtless Austria’s surrender to the Fuhrer can partly be explained as a release from pent-up tension, an emotional catharsis. Partly it was due to Nazi propaganda, which played so effectively on the susceptibilities of the mutilated state. More important, in a country still reeling from the Depression, were hopes of economic improvement and full employment. These not only were realised but were reflected in a 300 per cent rise in Vienna’s birth rate, formerly one of the lowest in the world. But on a more sinister level the Anschluss was welcomed because it liberated monsters from the Austrian id.

Many Austrians, who (as the writer Alfred Polgar sardonically observed) made bad Nazis but good anti-Semites, burned to unleash their hostility on the country’s 400,000 Jews. There was a massive attack, the ferocity of which embarrassed even the Gestapo. As the German playwright Carl Zuckmayer wrote,

The city was transformed into a nightmare painting by Hieronymus Bosch . . . [the] air filled with an incessant, savage, hysterical screeching from male and female throats . . . [in an] uprising of envy, of malevolence, of bitterness, of blind vicious lust for revenge.

Mobs shouted “Destruction to the Jews.”‘°3 Thugs daubed anti-Semitic signs on walls and smashed Jewish windows. Looting was rampant: when Stormtroopers took 6,000 Austrian schillings from Sigmund Freud’s apartment he remarked wryly, “Never have I been paid so much for a single visit.” Repulsive scenes occurred in which Jews were forced to eat grass in the Prater park or to scrub pavements and public lavatories while crowds jeered that Hitler had at last found work for parasites. Aptly enough, Jews had nicknamed the moustached Fuhrer “Pemsel”-“brush” for cleaning lavatories.

However, the cataclysm of arrests, beatings and murders did have one great incidental benefit for Austria’s Jews. They were not lulled into a sense of false security like the Jews of Germany, where anti-Semitism was less acute and the persecution mounted more gradually. Instead, they sought to flee. One British diplomat recorded that his consulate was “stormed by hundreds of terrified hysterical Jews begging for a visa to go anywhere out of Austria.” He called the police. Other diplomats were equally unhelpful, reflecting the reluctance of their countries to admit Austrian Jews. Switzerland even insisted that their passports should be stamped with a large red “J.” When Hitler mentioned his plan to solve Europe’s “Jewish problem by way of emigration to the colonies” the Polish Ambassador promised the Fuhrer that, if it was successful, “we will erect him a beautiful monument in Warsaw." Neither scheme was realised and everywhere doors slammed against Jewish refugees. Austrian passport offices bore signs saying, “All frontiers are closed to the Jews.” Yet most of them managed to escape, though some only travelled as far as France, Czechoslovakia or Italy, where they were later caught by the Nazis. Driven to despair, thousands took a more direct way out, a route endorsed by Goring, who publicly said that he “could not put a policeman behind every Jew to prevent suicides.” This hardly squared with his promise to Sir Neville Henderson that Austrian Jews would be treated with “tolerance and leniency.” Nevertheless, Viennese newspapers and radio insisted that foreign reports of “de-Jewing” were an “orgy of lies.”

Absurd though official denials were, outsiders were bound to acknowledge that Austria had submitted voluntarily to Germany. Opponents of Hitler might harp on “the rape of Austria,” and in due course the myth that Austria was the first victim of Nazi aggression became enshrined in the heart of the nation. It even helped to ensure Austria’s post-war independence from the Soviet Union. However, as Ward Price remarked (with characteristic crudity) after accompanying German troops to Vienna, “If this was rape never have I seen a more willing victim." Price ignored the fact that many Austrians, and not only Jews, were horrified by the invasion.

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The Fuhrer worked himself into a rage over Polish brutalities...castrations, killings, rapes-inflicted on German minorities. As Ciano sardonically observed, he seemed to believe his own atrocity stories. In fact there was ample reason to disbelieve everything Hitler said, especially after his volte-face over Bolshevism. Mussolini endorsed the Nazi-Soviet agreement even though it cleared the decks for war. Ciano and other senior Fascists urged him to remain neutral, to break the Pact of Steel. The Duce swung to and fro like a weathercock in a storm. He yearned to march wit ‘ Hitler. He lusted for triumphs and spoils. He ached to turn his warlike rhetoric into reality. But, as Dino Grandi wrote, his Nietzschean warmongering had always been a game, “a bluff, a fraud.”

Mussolini wanted war as St. Augustine had wanted chastity-not yet. He knew that Italians were unwilling to light beside Germans and that the nation was unprepared for a major conflict. His troops were short of basic necessities, such as uniforms. His ships lacked fuel and nobody seemed to know how many aeroplanes he had-Ciano suggested that someone should be sent round the airhelds to count them. Italy was desperately short of raw materials and, running such a large trade deficit that it resorted to selling munitions to the democracies, its capacity for imports was only “about one-half of What it had been in I913.” So the Duce told the Fuhrer that he could not fight unless Germany supplied Italy with millions of tons of coal, oil, steel, arms and other matériel. The demand could not be met and Mussolini therefore espoused “non-belligerence”-a less shameful term, in his View, than neutrality. This was a Wise course for, when Hitler’s victories did finally tempt him to fight, Italian forces made little progress during the “hundred hours’ war” against France. But in September I939 Mussolini was mortified by his inglorious stance. Europe was going up in flames, he remarked to Ciano, and after 18 years of bellicose propaganda the Duce of Italy had become the champion of peace.

Max

and his authors from the marvelous A. Scott Berg:

Max cared little for the nonliterary arts-there was something almost effeminate about them, a delicacy that was at odds with his Evarts upbringing. He did appreciate classical sculpture, and he said every young boy should have a picture of the masculine Thinker by Michelangelo from the Medici tombs. (Even though he had only daughters, he saw to it that there was always one in the Perkins home.) No doubt because of his bad hearing and a ringing in his ears, he showed almost no interest in music. On the few occasions when he was coerced into attending a concert, he instructed his daughters not to applaud too much, for ”they might start in again.” The tunes he liked most were such old favorites as ”Sweet Afton” and "There Are Eyes of Blue.” He saw Victor Herbert’s Babe; in Toyland over and over. John Hall Wheelock remembered how embarrassed Max was when, having let himself be dragged to a nightclub, he saw a chorus line of male dancers starting to perform, he had to shield his eyes with his hand until the men two-stepped away.

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On the wagon longer than he had been in ages, Scott found his life “uninspiring,” whereas, he believed, these should be his most productive years. ”I’ve simply got to arrange something for the summer that will bring me to life again,” he wrote Perkins, "but what it should be is by no means apparent.”

For lack of a better suggestion, Max urged Scott to continue work on a novel he had begun which was set in medieval Europe-a long way from West Egg. Fitzgerald replied that the 90,000-word book would be called Philippe, Count of Darkness. His hero was a Frankish tough guy in armor-"It shall be the story of Ernest,” Fitzgerald put down in a notebook. Then he outlined parts of it that he could sell separately to magazines. He said Perkins could have it all by the late spring of 1936. ”I wish I had these great masses of mss. stored away like Wolfe and Hemingway,” Fitzgerald wrote Perkins, "but this goose is beginning to be pretty thoroughly plucked, I am afraid.”

In May, 1935, Fitzgerald Visited Perkins in New York. A bright period in Zelda’s health had proved to be just a flash, and Scott’s mood the evening they were together reflected it. He was scrappy, putting Max on the spot about books Scribners was publishing. He expressed his greatest dissatisfaction over Tom Wolfe. Scott had recently read Wolfe’s story "His Father’s House” in the latest issue of Modern Monthly, published by V. F. Calverton. It embodied all Wolfe’s faults and virtues and made Fitzgerald wish Tom were the sort of person with whom one could dis“ cuss his writing.

How he can put side by side such a mess as “With chitterling tricker fast fluttering skirrs of sound the palmy honied birderies came” and such fine phrases as "tongue-trilling chirrs, plumbellied smoothness, sweet lucidity” I don’t know. He who has such infinite power of suggestion and delicacy has absolutely no right to glut people on whole meals of caviar.

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Ernest .Hemingway thought the "Crack-Up” pieces were ”miserable.” People experienced emptiness many times in life, he said, and he thought they should come out of it fighting, not whining in public. He wrote Scott a few times to cheer him up but found him taking pride in his ”shamelessness of defeat.” Ever since he first met F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway said, he had thought that if the man had gone to that war he always felt so bad about missing, he would have been shot for cowardice. Hemingway was convinced that Scott’s troubles were selfinflicted. It was a terrible thing for Scott to love youth so much that he leapfrogged from childhood to senility without experiencing manhood.

Hemingway made one of his infrequent visits to New York that season. He was nervous about the reception of Green Hills of Africa, and with just cause. As fascism rose in Europe in the thirties, leftist ”essayists,” as many American literary critics preferred to call themselves, proclaimed that the purpose of literature was to remedy the world’s social ills. They were angry that Hemingway, one of the best-known voices of America, had not joined their cause. He remained unaffiliated with any group, committed only to his writing. His reputation was in great shape, he told Perkins-Andre Gide, Romain Rolland, and André Malraux, he pointed out, had just invited him to an international writers’ congress-but he was not deceived; the critics would have their knives out. He doubted, however, that they could kill him off for a while yet. ”Papa is pretty durable,” he assured Perkins.

When Perkins received the proofs of Green Hills of Africa from Ernest in late August, 1935, he thought everything about them was all right, except for a backhanded swipe at Gertrude Stein which Ernest had inserted. "I think it was better not to call the old girl a bitch,” Perkins wrote Hemingway of the indirect reference to her. Hemingway pointed out that he had not mentioned Miss Stein by name and there was nothing that proved it was definitely she. Besides, he asked Max, what Should be put in place of "bitch”? Certainly not ”Whore.” Hemingway offered to modify the noun with "lousy” or "lesbian,” but if anyone was ever a bitch, he said it was Gertrude Stein. He did not see what Perkins was fussing about, unless he thought the word would just give the critics something else to "burp about.”

In Green Hills of Africa, Hemingway pointed out that writers who read the critics practically destroyed themselves.

If they believe the critics when they say they are great then they must believe them when they say they are rotten and they lose confidence. At present we have two good writers who cannot write because they have lost confidence through reading critics. If they wrote, sometimes it would be good and sometimes it would be quite bad, but the good would get out. But they have read the critics and they must write masterpieces. The masterpieces the critics said they wrote. They weren’t masterpieces, of course. They were just quite good books. So now they cannot write at all.

Hemingway had discussed Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe with Perkins in almost identical phraseology. At last he made what, for him, was a conciliatory gesture, by altering his reference to Gertrude Stein, calling her a "female.” He thought that would anger her the most, and please Perkins.

Max expected a cold critical reaction to Green Hills, but not because of the vendetta Hemingway predicted. Max had observed enough careers to believe in their natural ebb and flow. He knew that if the critics did not have an issue at hand on which to take Hemingway to task, they would invent one. ”Every writer seems to have to go through a period when the tide runs against him strongly,” Perkins wrote Fitderald, ”and at the worst it is better that it should have done this when Ernest was writing books that are in a general sense minor ones.”

And indeed, the reviews of Green H ill; of Africa were tepid. Charlef Poore in the New York Times wrote that it was the "best-written story of big-game hunting anywhere” and that Ernest’s writing was “better than ever, fuller, richer, deeper and only looking for something that can use its full powers.” Edmund Wilson took what Max called a "Marxist crack” at it in the New Republic, calling it Hemingway’s “weakest book". Wilson had been one of Hemingway’s earliest admirers, but over the next few years he became one of his most outspoken critics. .

Ernest took the reviews hard.

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Six months into the writing, Marjorie Rawlings was still hunting for a title. She sent a list of alternatives to Perkins and asked for his opinion. He did not care much for The Flutter Mill. Of Juniper Island he said: ”I do not think place names are good for a book. There is not enough human suggestion in them.” Of her third title he wrote, “I would think one which carried the meaning of T/ae Yearling was probably right.” The more he spoke of it, the better it sounded to him. He wrote her in the spring of 1937, "It seems to have a quality even more than a meaning that fits the book.” It stuck.

After almost a year on the book, Mrs. Rawlings abruptly decided that what she had written was poor, and she threw out the manuscript. Perkins was shocked when she told him. There was nothing for him to do but to try to get her going again. He kept sending heartening letters, and eventually she resumed writing, more slowly but with more confidence.

In December, 1937, she sent the manuscript off to Perkins. He took days to read it, but, as he told her, that was a good sign. “The better a book is, the slower I go,” he explained. ”I think the last half is better than the first and that the book gets increasingly good. But the very beginning now is perfect, it seems to me, and of course the father and mother, and all about that life, and Cody’s on the island, are as good as can be.” He felt a few parts of the book were tainted with theatricality and romanticism and suggested that they be sacrificed in order to maintain the book’s naturalism, its honest depiction of a world that was sometimes cruel and terrifying. The Yearling was full of very tough people, he reminded Mrs. Rawlings, “and the toughness ought to be more evident.”

Marjorie Rawlings’s previous books had had hard luck, but every. thing went right for this one. The Book-of-the-Month Club made The Yearling its main selection in April, 1938. In general, book sales that year were only a third of what they had been before the Depression, but The Yearling became a runaway best seller overnight. It also won the Pulitzer Prize.

Two years before this bonanza, in June, 1956, Marjorie Rawlings had gone game-fishing in Bimini with a friend. There she learned that Ernest Hemingway had become the hero of the most popular legends down there. The latest story concerned Hemingway’s knocking a man down for calling him a big fat slob. ”You can call me a slob,” Hemingway had said, “but you can’t call me a big fat slob.” Then he struck him down. The natives of Bimini set the incident to music, and if they were sure Hemingway was not within earshot, they would sing in a calypso beat, “The big fat slob’s in the harbor.”

When Hemingway heard that one of Max Perkins’s authors was in the same waters, he called on her. ”I should have known from your affection for him that he was not a fire-spitting ogre,” Marjorie wrote back to Perkins, "but I’d heard so many tales in Bimini of his going around knocking people down, that I half-expected him to announce in a loud voice that he never accepted introductions to female novelists. In“ stead, a most lovable, nervous and sensitive person took my hand in a big gentle paw and remarked that he was a great admirer of my work."

The day before she left, Hemingway tussled six hours and fifty minutes with a 514-pound tuna. When his Pilar cruised into harbor at 9:30 that night, the whole population of the island flocked to see hi5 fish and hear his tale. "A fatuous old man-with a new yacht and a young bride had arrived not long previously, announcing that tunafishing, of whose difficulties he had heard, was easy,” Mrs. Rawlings wrote to Perkins. ”So as the Pilar was made fast, Hemingway came swimming up from
below-decks, gloriously drunk, roaring, 'Where’s the son of a bitch who said it was easy.’ The last anyone saw of him that night, he was standing alone on the pier using the tuna as a punching bag.

"Ernest seems to be ever on the defensive. He is so vast, so virile, that he does not need ever to hit anybody, Mrs. Rawlings wrote Perkins. ”Yet he is constantly defending something that he, at least, must consider vulnerable.” She thought the conflict might be due in part to the company he was keeping mainly sportsmen. 

Hemingway is among these people a great deal, and they like and admire him-his personality, his sporting prowess, and his literary prestige. It seems to me that unconsciously he must value their opinion. He must be afraid of laying bare before them the agony that tears the artist. He must be afraid of lifting before them the curtain that veils the beauty that should be exposed only to reverent eyes, as in Death in the Afternoon, he writes beautifully, and then immediately turns it off with a flippant comment, or a deliberate obscenity. His sporting friends would not understand the beauty. They would roar with delight at the flippancy.