The Swerve

Excerpts:
At its height the Museum contained at least a half-million papyrus rolls systematically organized, labeled, and shelved according to a clever new system that its first director, a Homer scholar named Zenodotus, seems to have invented: the system was alphabetical order.

and

What was ridiculous about Christianity was not only its language- the crude style of the Gospels Greek resting in the barbarous otherness of Hebrew and Aramaic- but also its exaltation of divine humiliation and pain conjoined with a arrogant triumphalism. The Epicureans mockery of Christianity set the stage for the subsequent disappearance of the whole Epicurean school of thought: Plato and Aristotle, pagans who believed in the immortality of the soul, could ultimately be accommodated by a triumphant Christianity; Epicureanism could not.

Epicurus did not deny the existence of gods. Rather, he thought that if the concept of divinity made any sense at all, the gods could not possibly be concerned with anything but their own pleasures. Neither creators of the universe nor its destroyers, utterly indifferent to the doings of any beings other than themselves, they were deaf to our prayers or our rituals. The Incarnation, Epicureans scoffed, was a particularly absurd idea. Why should the humans think of themselves as so superior to bees, elephants, ants, or any of the available species, now or in eons to come, that god should take their form and not another? And why then, among all the varieties of humans, should he have taken the form of a jew? Why should anyone with any sense credit the idea of Providence, a childish idea contradicted by any rational adult’s experience and observation? Christians are like a council of frogs in a pond, croaking at the top of their lungs, “For our sakes was the world created.”

Christians could try, of course, to reverse the mockery. If such doctrines as the Incarnation and the resurrection of the body seemed absurd-“figments of diseased imagination," as one pagan put it, "and the futile fairy-tales invented by poets' fancy. What about the tales that pagans profess to believe?
But there is, of course, something uncomfortable about the “back-to-you” strategy, since the alleged ridiculousness of one set of beliefs hardly shores up the validity of another.

Christians knew, moreover, that many pagans did not believe in the literal truth of their own myths and that there were some-Epicureans prominent among them-who called into question virtually all religious systems and promises. Such enemies of faith found the doctrine of bodily resurrection particularly risible, since it was contradicted both by their scientific theory of atoms and by the evidence of their own senses: the rotting corpses that testified with nauseating eloquence to the dissolution of the flesh.

The early Church Father Tertullian vehemently insisted that, despite all appearances, everything would come back in the afterlife, down to the last details of the mortal body. He knew all too well the responses he would get from the doubters:

What will be the use of the hands themselves and the feet and all the working parts of the body, when even trouble about food will cease? What will be the use of the kidneys . . . and of the other genital organs of both sexes and the dwelling places of the foetus and the streams from the nurse’s breasts, when sexual intercourse and conception and upbringing alike will cease to be? Finally, what use will the whole body be, which will of course have absolutely nothing to do?

"The crowd mocks,” Tertullian wrote, “ judging that nothing is left over after death,” but they will not have the last laugh: "I will rather laugh at the crowd at the time when they are cruelly burning up themselves.” On the Day of Judgment, each man will be brought forth before the heavenly tribunal, not a piece of him, not a shadow, not a symbolic token, but rather the whole of him, as he lived on the earth. And that means teeth and intestines and genitals, whether or not their mortal functions have ceased forever. “Yes!” Tertullian addressed his pagan listeners. “We too in our day laughed at this. We are from among yourselves. Christians are made, not born!”

Some critics pointed out with a derisory smile that many features of the Christian vision were stolen from much more ancient pagan stories: a tribunal in which souls are judged, fire used for punishment in an underground prison house, a divinely beautiful paradise reserved for the spirits of the holy. But Christians replied that these ancient beliefs were all distorted reflections of the true Christian mysteries. The eventual success of this argumentative strategy is suggested by the very word we have been using for those who clung to the old polytheistic faith. Believers in Jupiter, Minerva, and Mars did not think of themselves as “pagans”: the word, which appeared in the late fourth century, is etymologically related to the word “peasant.” It is an insult, then, a sign that the laughter at rustic ignorance had decisively reversed direction.

The charge of doctrinal plagiarism was easier for Christians to deal with than the charge of absurdity. Pythagoreans who believed in bodily resurrection had the right general idea; it was simply an idea that needed correction. But Epicureans who said that the whole idea of resurrection was a grotesque violation of everything that we know about the physical universe could not be so easily corrected. It made some sense to argue with the former, but the latter were best simply silenced.

Though early Christians, Tertullian among them, found certain features in Epicureanism admirable-the celebration of friendship, the emphasis on charity and forgiveness, a suspicion of worldly ambition-by the early fourth century, the task had become clear: the atomists had to disappear. The followers of Epicurus had already aroused considerable enmity outside the Christian community. When the emperor known as Julian the Apostate (c. 331-363), who attempted to revive paganism against the mounting Christian onslaught, drew up a list of works that it was important for pagan priests to read, he also noted some titles that he explicitly Wished to exclude: “Let us not,” he wrote, “admit discourses by Epicureans.” jews, likewise, termed anyone who departed from the rabbinic tradition apikoros, an Epicurean. But Christians particularly found Epicureanism a noxious threat. If you grant Epicurus his claim that the soul is mortal, wrote Tertullian, the whole fabric of Christian morality unravels. For Epicurus, human suffering is always finite: “ if it is slight, he [Epicurus] says, you may despise it, if it is great it will not be long.” But to be Christian, Tertullian countered, is to believe that torture and pain last forever: “Epicurus utterly destroys religion,” wrote another Church Father; take Providence away, and “confusion and disorder will overtake life.”

Christian polemicists had to find a way to turn the current of mockery against Epicurus and his followers. Ridiculing the pagan pantheon did not work in this case, since Epicureanism eloquently dismantled the whole sacrificial worship of the gods and dismissed the ancient stories. What had to be done was to refashion the account of the founder Epicurus so that he became a figure of riotous excess.

Even more than the theory that the world consisted only of atoms and void, the main problem was the core ethical idea: that the highest good is the pursuit of pleasure and the diminution of pain. What had to be undertaken was the difficult project of making what appeared simply sane and natural-the ordinary impulses of all sentient creatures-seem like the enemy of the truth.

Centuries were required to accomplish this grand design, and it was never fully completed. But the grand outlines may be seen in the late third and early fourth century in the works of a North African convert from paganism to Christianity: Lactantius. Appointed tutor to the son of the emperor Constantine, who had established Christianity as the religion of the empire, Lactantius wrote a series of polemics against Epicureanism. That philosophy had, he acknowledges, a substantial following, "not because it brings forward any truth, but because the attractive name of pleasure invites many.” Christians must refuse the invitation and understand that pleasure is a code name for vice.

The task, for Lactantius, was not only to draw believers away from their pursuit of human pleasures; it was also to persuade them that God was not, as Epicureans believed, entirely absorbed within the orbit of divine pleasures and hence indifferent to the fate of humans. Instead, as Lactantius wrote in a
celebrated work written in 313 CE, God cared about humans, just as a father cared about his wayward child. And the sign of that care, he wrote, was anger. God was enraged at man that was the characteristic manifestation of His love and wanted to smite him over and over again, with spectacular, unrelenting violence.

A hatred of pleasure-seeking and a vision of God’s providential rage: these were death knells of Epicureanism, henceforward branded by the faithful as “insane.” Lucretius had urged the person who felt the prompting of sexual desire to satisfy it: “a dash of gentle pleasure sooths the sting.” (4.177) Christianity, as a story rehearsed by Gregory demonstrates, pointed in a different direction. The pious Benedict found himself thinking of a woman he had once seen, and, before he knew what was happening, his desires were aroused:

He then noticed a thick patch of nettles and briers next to him. Throwing his garment aside he flung himself into the sharp thorns and stinging nettles. There he rolled and tossed until his whole body was in pain and covered with blood. Yet, once he had conquered pleasure through suffering, his torn and bleeding skin served to drain the poison of temptation from his body. Before long, the pain that was burning his whole body had put out the fires of evil in his heart. It was by exchanging these two fires that he gained the victory over sin.

What worked for the saint in the early sixth century would, as monastic rules made clear, work for others. In one of the great Cultural transformations in the history of the West, the pursuit of pain triumphed over the pursuit of pleasure.

The infliction of pain was hardly unknown in the world Of Lucretius. The Romans were specialists in it, dedicating sums and huge arenas to public spectacles or violence. And it was not only in the Colosseum that Romans could glut themselves on injury. pain, and death. Plays and poems, based on the ancient myths, were often blood-drenched, as were paintings and sculptures. Violence was part of the fabric of everyday life. Schoolmasters and slaveholders were expected to flog their victims, and whipping was a frequent prelude to Roman executions. This is why in the gospel account, prior to his crucifixion, Jesus was tied to a column and scourged.

But for the pagans, in the great majority of these instances, pain was understood not as a positive value, a stepping stone to salvation, as it was by pious Christians intent on whipping themselves, but as an evil, something visited upon rule~ breakers, criminals, captives, unfortunate wretches, and-the only category with dignity-soldiers. Romans honored a brave soldier’s voluntary acceptance of pain, but that acceptance was far different from the ecstatic embrace celebrated in hundreds of convents and monasteries. The heroes of Roman stories willingly met what they could not, in good conscience, avoid or what they felt they had to endure in order to prove to their enemies their dauntless courage. Outside the orbit of that heroic obligation, there lay the special philosophical discipline that enabled the classical sage to regard inescapable pain-of kidney stones, for example-with equanimity. And for everyone, from the most exalted philosopher to the humblest artisan, there was the natural pursuit of pleasure.

In pagan Rome, the most extravagant version of this pursuit of pleasure came together in the gladiatorial arena with the most extravagant infliction and endurance of pain. If Lucretius offered a moralized and purified version of the Roman pleasure principle, Christianity offered a moralized and purified version of the Roman pain principle. Early Christians, brooding on the sufferings of the Saviour, the sinfulness of mankind, and the anger of a just Father, found the attempt to cultivate pleasure manifestly absurd and dangerous. At best a trivial distraction, pleasure was at worst a demonic trap, figured in medieval art by those alluring women beneath whose gowns one can glimpse reptilian claws. The only life truly worth imitating-the life of Jesus-bore ample witness to the inescapable presence in mortal existence of sadness and pain, but not of pleasure. The earliest pictorial depictions of jesus were uniform in their melancholy sobriety. As every pious reader of Luke’s Gospel knew, Jesus wept, but there were no verses that described him laughing or smiling, let alone pursuing pleasure.

It was not difficult for Christians of the fifth and sixth centuries to find reasons to weep: the cities were falling apart, the fields were soaked in the blood of dying soldiers, robbery and rape were rampant. There had to be some explanation for the catastrophic behavior of human beings over so many generations, as if they were incapable of learning anything from their historical experience. Theology provided an answer deeper and more fundamental than this or that flawed individual or institution: humans were by nature corrupt. Inheritors of the sin of Adam and Eve, they richly deserved every miserable catastrophe that befell them; they needed to be punished; they had coming to them an endless diet of pain. Indeed, it was only through this pain that a small number could find the narrow gate to salvation.

The most ardent early believers in this doctrine, those fired by an explosive mix of fear, hope, and fierce enthusiasm, were determined to make the pain to which all humankind was condemned their active choice. In doing so, they hoped to pay to an angry God the dues of suffering that He justly and implacably demanded. They possessed something of the martial hardness admired by traditional Roman culture, but, with a few exceptions, the goal was not the achievement of Stoical indifference to pain. On the contrary. Their whole project depended on experiencing an intense sensitivity to hunger, thirst, and loneliness. And when they whipped themselves with thorny branches or struck themselves with jagged stones, they made no effort to suppress their cries of anguish. Those cries were part of the payment, the atonement that would, if they were successful, enable them to recover in the afterlife the happiness that Adam and Eve had lost.

By the year 600 there were over three hundred monasteries and convents in Italy and Gaul. Many of these were still small- little more than fortified villas, with their outbuildings-but they possessed a spiritual rationale and an institutional coherence that conferred upon them stability in an unstable world. Their inhabitants were drawn from those who felt compelled to transform their lives, to atone for their own sins and for the sins of others, to secure eternal bliss by turning their backs on ordinary pleasures. Over time, their numbers were supplemented by many less fervent souls who had in effect been given to the Church by their parents or guardians.

In monasteries and convents driven by the belief that redemption would only come through abasement, it is not surprising that forms of corporal punishment-virgarum verbera (hitting with rods), corporale supplicium (bodily punishment), ictus (blows), vapulatio (cudgeling), disciplina (whipping), and flagellatio-were routinely inflicted on community members who broke the rules. Disciplinary practices that would, in pagan society, have been disgraces inflicted only on social inferiors were meted out with something like democratic indifference to rank. Typically, the guilty party had to carry the rod that was used for the beating, and then sitting on the ground
and constantly repeating the words Mea culpa, submit to blows until the abbot or abbess was satisfied.

The insistence that punishment be actively embraced by the victims-literalized in the kissing of the rod--marked a deliberate Christian trampling on the Epicurean credo of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. After all, the experience of pain was not only punishment; it was a form of pious emulation. Christian hermits, brooding on the sufferings of the Saviour, mortified their flesh, in order to experience in their own bodies the torments that jesus had had to undergo. Though these acts of self-scourging began to be reported in late antiquity-they were novel and strange enough in the beginning to attract widespread attention-it was not until the eleventh century that a monastic reformer, the Italian Benedictine Peter Damian, established voluntary self-flagellation as a central ascetic practice acceptable to the Church.

It had taken a thousand years to win the struggle and secure the triumph of pain seeking. “Did our Redeemer not endure scourging?” Damian asked those critics who called into question the celebration of the whip. Weren’t the apostles and many of the saints and martyrs flogged? What better way to follow in their footsteps, what surer method of imitating Christ, than to suffer the blows that they suffered? To be sure, Damian concedes, in the case of these glorious predecessors, someone else Was doing the whipping. But in a world in which Christianity has triumphed, we have to do the whipping for ourselves. Otherwise the whole dream and doctrine of the imitation of Christ would have to be abandoned. “The body has to be shaped like a piece of wood,” explained one of the many texts that followed in Damian’s wake, “with beatings and whippings, with canes, scourges, and discipline. The body has to be tortured and starved, so that it submits to the spirit and takes perfect shape." In the pursuit of this spiritual goal, all boundaries, restraints, and inhibitions drop away.

Existentialists in America from Bakewell

The existentialist culture of the late 1940s seemed very Parisian to anyone looking in from the outside, but it was also driven by a love, or at least a fascination, for all things American. Paris itself was still full of Americans, including servicemen left behind from the Liberation forces as well as new arrivals. Few young Parisians could resist American clothes, American films or American music. The fact that all of this had been banned by the Occupation authorities added to its appeal-and the ‘zazous’ had been secretly dancing to American jazz for months. The importance of American music for a whole generation is summed up in a story told by Juliette Gréco. She had been arrested by the Gestapo in 1943, held in a cell, and then, to her surprise, freed again. She walked eight miles home through wintry streets in a thin cotton dress, and as she walked, she defiantly sang an American Song at the top of her voice: ‘Over the Rainbow’.

To go with the jazz, blues and ragtime after the war, people sought out American clothes, readily available in flea markets; there was a particular craze for plaid shirts and jackets. If your twenty-first-century time machine could take you back to a Parisian jazz club immediately after the war, you would not find yourself in a sea of existentialist black; you would be more likely to think you’d walked into a lumberjacks’ hoedown. An impression of the effect can be had from Jacques Becker’s film Rendezvous de juillet, released in 1949, which features an exuberant dance scene in the Lorientais club: as Claude Luter’s band plays on the cramped stage, the check-shirted crowd leaps around on the dance floor. The sleek black turtleneck arrived afterwards-and when Americans in turn adopted that fashion, few realised they were returning a sartorial compliment.

In the cinemas, meanwhile, people devoured American crime movies and, from the bouquinistes along the Seine, they bought American fiction. The most popular writers were the hardest-boiled ones: James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett and Horace McCoy, whose despairing Depression-era novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? came out in French from Gallimard in 1946. Camus had emulated the style of American noir novels in The Stranger, and Sartre and Beauvoir were also fans. They loved non-genre American authors too: Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck and John Dos Passes-who was, according to Sartre, the greatest writer of the era. Many American books were translated by French publishers: ‘traduit de l’americain’ became a favourite phrase on covers. Not all books that looked like translations were the real thing, however. A book called I Spit on Your Graves, ostensibly by ‘Vernon Sullivan’ and translated by Boris Vian, was by Vian himself. Written on a kind of dare, it was a violent, sensationalist story about a black man who kills two white women to avenge the lynching of his brother, but is hunted down and eventually shot dead by the police. Vian made money from it, but got into trouble the following year when a man in Montparnasse strangled his girlfriend and shot himself, leaving a copy of the novel by his bed with the description of a strangling circled in ink in case anyone failed to notice the similarity.

Americans, able to visit Paris as tourists for the first time in five years, fell in love with the city all over again as they had in the 1920s. They sat in the Flore and Deux Magots, and ventured down the cellar stairs into nightclubs. They listened to the talk of l’existentialisme and les existentialistes, and passed it on to their friends back home. Cultured New Yorkers began to court the real existentialists: one by one, Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus were all invited to cross the Atlantic for visits and lecture tours. They all accepted.

The first to go was Sartre, in mid-January 1945: at Camus’ suggestion, he joined a delegation of invited French journalists, representing Combat and Le Figaro. (This was why he was away for the Brasillach trial.) He travelled around for two months, meeting countless people, of whom one, Dolores Vanetti, became a long-term lover. His poor English prevented him from talking as freely as he usually liked to, but he watched carefully and took notes, then wrote articles on his return. He focused on socialist questions, such as the matter of how American workers coped with the high-speed automation of American factories. At the time, few thought of technological appliances, consumerism or automated production techniques as widespread features of modern life: rather, they were considered distinctively American, and this added to the country’s glamorous but alarming image in many European minds. Can one actually live with all that technology? What does it do to a person? Sartre observed with surprise that US workers seemed cheerful, despite being cogs in a Chaplinesque industrial machine driven to go constantly faster and faster by their bosses. The whole of America seemed to be such a machine, and Sartre wondered whether it could possibly go on like that.

He returned for further visits in the late 19405, and became more comfortable communicating with people, although his English remained limited. By Sartre’s third visit, in 1948, Lionel Abel~-who met him at a Partisan Review evening-was amazed at his loquacity in a language he barely knew: there was little Sartre could say, yet he never shut up.

Albert Camus was the next to go, touring the US from March to May 1946. He travelled more nervously than Sartre, aware of being a stranger and troubled by the constant small difficulties of figuring out how things worked and what one was supposed to do. His unease made him a good observer of differences.

He noted: the morning fruit juices, the national Scotch and Soda...the anti-Semitism and the love of animals-this last extending from the gorillas in the Bronx Zoo to the protozoa of the Museum of Natural History-the funeral parlors where death and the dead are made up at top speed (Die, and leave the rest to us’) the barber shops where you can get a shave at three in the morning. ..

He was especially impressed by the billboard in Times Square where a giant GI puffed real smoke from a Camel cigarette. The only place that seemed comforting in its familiarity was New York’s Bowery district, then a derelict zone of cheap bars and run-down hotels, with the elevated railway line running through it at second-storey level, casting everything below into deep shadow. ‘A European wants to say: “Finally, reality.“ Like Sartre watching the workers, Camus was attracted and repelled. Above all, he could not understand the apparent lack of anguish in America. Nothing was properly tragic.

In 1947, Simone de Beauvoir made her journey. Unlike Sartre, she already spoke and read English; like Camus, she was astounded at the bizarre devices and inventions. She kept a diary in which she boggled at such phenomena as the way letters were posted in her hotel: next to the elevator on each floor was a tiny chute into which you dropped your envelope so that it fluttered down to a box at the bottom. The first time she saw the white things flashing by, she took them for hallucinations. Next she went to a newsagent and tried to work out how to buy stamps from the machines, but the coins confused her. She made many friends, however, and after coming to grips with New York she set out on a country-wide lecture tour with diversions to visit jazz clubs, and cinemas where she saw 'thrillings’ and ‘laffmovies’. While in Chicago, she met Nelson Algren, a tough-guy novelist who wrote about addicts and prostitutes and the seamy side of American life. They began an affair and she fell in love; they would remain lovers for three years, although they were able to meet only at long intervals in the US or France.

Her response to America was the now usual mixture of wariness and bliss. She was seduced. America 'was abundance, and infinite horizons; it was a crazy magic lantern of legendary images'. It was the future-or at least one possible version of the future. A rival ver' sion was offered by the Soviet Union, which also attracted her. But the United States was undoubtedly the stronger, at the moment. It was more confident; it was wealthy, and it had the Bomb.

One element of American life unequivocally horrified Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus: its racial inequalities, and not only in the South. After his first trip, Sartre wrote in Le Figaro of how black ‘untouchables' and ‘unseeables’ haunted the streets, never meeting your gaze; it was as if they saw no one, and you were not supposed to see them either.

Maugham

From Don Fernando:
Many years ago I wrote a book about Andalusia, but I am bitterly conscious of its defects. It is called The Land of the Blessed Virgin. In those days, at the end of the nineteenth century, the young were more immature than at present; they had not the knowing, clever way of concealing their ignorance that now fills with admiration those who have occasion to read their works. I was but twenty-three when I went to Seville. I had spent five years in a London hospital and for the first time in my life was my own master. I have been back to Spain a dozen times since then; it has never ceased to possess for me the glamour of those first few months of heavenly freedom. I had no ties and no responsibilities. I had no care in the world but to write well; I did not know then what severe labour and what harassing bondage this entailed. I wandered about the country, enthusiastic with all the new sights I saw, but my enthusiasm (though I did not know it) was perfectly conventional. It is curious how seldom youth looks at the world with the fresh and direct gaze that you would have expected to come naturally to it; whether from diffidence or timidity it looks upon what it has never seen before with alien eyes.
Perhaps a certain sophistication is needed before one can see things for oneself. Such certainly was the case with me. My feelings were genuine enough, but they were the feelings of the travellers who had gone before me. I saw what Borrow and Richard Ford, Théophile Gautier and Mérimée had seen.
Presently I went for a trip on horseback. At that time the only means of communication between one region and another was the railway, for the roads were impassable to wheeled traffic, and if you wanted to see places that were not on the line you had to ride. When I came back I thought it would be a good exercise to write an account of the excursion. In fiction the manner of your writing is conditioned by your matter. You cannot write in the same way if you are describing an incident as if you are analysing a state of mind; dialogue, which you aim at making as natural as possible, breaks the pattern; it is only in the essay or in the book of travel that you can attempt a sustained effect. It is very good for the novelist now and again to try his hand at something of the sort.

Hemingway the Horror

Steve King:
In 1950, The New Yorker published Lillian Ross’s controversial profile of Ernest Hemingway, “How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?” Based on a weekend spent following the author around New York, Ross’s article is regarded as an essential moment in the creation of the Hemingway legend. Some found Ross’s Hemingway attractive; some agreed with the New Yorker wit who quipped to James Thurber, “She loved him so much she shot him.”
Ross begins her article with praise for “the greatest American novelist and short-story writer of our day,” but for the most part she writes in a documentary style, letting Hemingway’s words and actions speak for themselves. Hemingway gave his approval to the result before publication, despite many passages which seem boasting, aggressive, or just odd — for example, the title of the article, a cryptic question which Hemingway kept asking aloud throughout the two days. Having just finished the final draft of Across the River and into the Trees, he was in a celebratory mood for much of the time — champagne all morning, wine at lunch, a pocket flask for his walkabouts. His sports metaphors and advice are as copious. He tells Marlene Dietrich that she is “hitting them with the bases loaded,” and “the best that ever came into the ring.” His advice to Ross, and for all occasions: “Never lead against a hitter unless you can outhit him. Crowd a boxer, and take everything he has, to get inside. Duck a swing. Block a hook. And counter a jab with everything you own. Papa’s delivery of hard-learned facts of life.” By taking his own advice, “I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant.” At one point, Hemingway forces a belt salesman at Abercrombie and Fitch to poke him in the stomach. He raises an airgun to take a pretend shot at a flock of Fifth Avenue pigeons. He says he got his writer’s fastball from Flaubert, his knuckleball from Baudelaire and Rimbaud; that he learned how to counterpoint in words from Bach, and “how to make a landscape from Mr. Paul Cezanne by walking through the Luxembourg Museum a thousand times with an empty gut.”

From the profile:
I had written to him asking if I might see him when he came to town, and he had sent me a typewritten letter saying that would be fine and suggesting that I meet his plane at the airport. “I don’t want to see anybody I don’t like, nor have publicity, nor be tied up all the time,” he went on. “Want to go to the Bronx Zoo, Metropolitan Museum, Museum of Modern Art, ditto of Natural History, and see a fight. Want to see the good Breughel at the Met, the one, no two, fine Goyas and Mr. El Greco’s Toledo. Don’t want to go to Toots Shor’s. Am going to try to get into town and out without having to shoot my mouth off. I want to give the joints a miss. Not seeing news people is not a pose. It is only to have time to see your friends.” In pencil, he added, “Time is the least thing we have of.”

Time did not seem to be pressing Hemingway the day he flew in from Havana. He was to arrive at Idlewild late in the afternoon, and I went out to meet him. His plane had landed by the time I got there, and I found him standing at a gate waiting for his luggage and for his wife, who had gone to attend to it. He had one arm around a scuffed, dilapidated briefcase pasted up with travel stickers. He had the other around a wiry little man whose forehead was covered with enormous beads of perspiration. Hemingway was wearing a red plaid wool shirt, a figured wool necktie, a tan wool sweater-vest, a brown tweed jacket tight across the back and with sleeves too short for his arms, gray flannel slacks, Argyle socks, and loafers, and he looked bearish, cordial, and constricted. His hair, which was very long in back, was gray, except at the temples, where it was white; his mustache was white, and he had a ragged, half-inch full white beard. There was a bump about the size of a walnut over his left eye. He was wearing steel-rimmed spectacles, with a piece of paper under the nosepiece. He was in no hurry to get into Manhattan. He crooked the arm around the briefcase into a tight hug and said that it contained the unfinished manuscript of his new book, “Across the River and into the Trees.” He crooked the arm around the wiry little man into a tight hug and said he had been his seat companion on the flight. The man’s name, as I got it in a mumbled introduction, was Myers, and he was returning from a business trip to Cuba. Myers made a slight attempt to dislodge himself from the embrace, but Hemingway held on to him affectionately.

“He read book all way up on plane,” Hemingway said. He spoke with a perceptible Midwestern accent, despite the Indian talk. “He like book, I think,” he added, giving Myers a little shake and beaming down at him.

“Whew!” said Myers.

“Book too much for him,” Hemingway said. “Book start slow, then increase in pace till it becomes impossible to stand. I bring emotion up to where you can’t stand it, then we level off, so we won’t have to provide oxygen tents for the readers. Book is like engine. We have to slack her off gradually.”

“Whew!” said Myers.

Hemingway released him. “Not trying for no-hit game in book,” he said. “Going to win maybe twelve to nothing or maybe twelve to eleven.”

Myers looked puzzled.

“She’s better book than ‘Farewell,’ “ Hemingway said. “I think this is best one, but you are always prejudiced, I guess. Especially if you want to be champion.” He shook Myers’ hand. “Much thanks for reading book,” he said.

“Pleasure,” Myers said, and walked off unsteadily.

Hemingway watched him go, and then turned to me. “After you finish a book, you know, you’re dead,” he said moodily. “But no one knows you’re dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.” He said he felt tired but was in good shape physically; he had brought his weight down to two hundred and eight, and his blood pressure was down too. He had considerable rewriting to do on his book, and he was determined to keep at it until he was absolutely satisfied. “They can’t yank novelist like they can pitcher,” he said. “Novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.”

The Age of Scandal

T.H. White:

The atmosphere of the second epoch was different from the Age of Reason’s: so different that the period seems to require a label of its own. One might suggest, the Age of Scandal.

Between the Classical and the Romantic movements, as they are recognized at present, there existed this other age, which was one of peculiar flavour. It filled the hiatus between Pope and Wordsworth with a distinct and unique culture, none the less real because it is seldom recognized now. It could be roughly dated between the death of Pope and the publication of the Lyrical Ballads, except that such dates are confusing. Periods do not exist between fixed years. They have forerunners in the previous age and laggards in the subsequent one. Although the Age of Scandal was at its height in the seventeen-eighties, under its greatest product, Horace Walpole, yet, between forerunner and laggard, it may be said to have stretched from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to Croker or to Creevey.

The people of the late eighteenth century and of the Regency were different from the Augustans. They were not cold and formal like a heroic couplet but, on the contrary, eccentric, individual, sentimental, dramatic, tearful, even doggy. For that matter, they were a good deal more ‘romantic’, in the exact sense of that term, than the unsmiling crocodile of Rydal. Their heiresses frequently ran away with the footmen.

Few people seem to realize how charming and peculiar the Age of Scandal was. We have to dismiss
so much from our minds before we can crawl inside theirs: before we can picture the powdered gentlemen in silks and laces, with their jewellery and the swords which they were ready to draw, with their sedan chairs and lap dogs and immense bets and deep potations. One of the commonest words about male clothes, in the letters of the reprobate Duke of Queensberry, was ‘pretty’. One of his presents to the Prince Regent was a muff. Among the commonest reactions from readers and playgoers was that of tears. They adored their dogs and sent them tender messages in their letters. They were emotional about their friends, catty about their enemies, unusual in their hobbies and singular in themselves. They were perhaps the first people in English literature to be real enough for gossip.

Gossip must be about character. It is useless to gossip about an unknown character, impossible to tell a good story about a person without foibles; for it is the foible which gives the story point. These people had characters, were among the first people in England who were sufficiently peculiar, in a modern way, to be apprehended by us as personalities. They did extraordinary things: puffed and blew like Dr. Johnson, or went to executions like the sinister Selwyn, or constructed the astonishing tower of Fonthill like Beckford, or said that they were about to give birth to the Messiah like Joanna Southcott or to a litter of rabbits like Mary Tofts. They fought duels in balloons like M. 1e Pique in 1808 the first human being ever to be shot down in aerial combat -or directed their farm labourers with a megaphone and a telescope like Sydney Smith in his ‘rheumatic armour’. Sometimes they could never be sure whether they were men or women, like the Chevalier d’Eon, and sometimes they dislocated London’s milk supply, as was the case with the fourth Duke of Queensberry -who was supposed to take his early bath in this liquid before it was retailed -with the consequence that for many years nobody in London felt secure about the morning tea.

The Age of Scandal was the reverse of being a pompous one. Gossip is not pompous. It was inevitably an age of intimacy and of nicknames. Creevey was a product of it, and, as Lytton Strachey has pointed out:

There are no great names in his vocabulary only nicknames: George III is ‘old Nobs’, the Regent ‘Prinney’, Wellington ‘the Beau’, Lord John Russell ‘Pie and Thimble’, Brougham, with whom he was on very friendly terms, is sometimes ‘Bruffam’, sometimes ‘Beelzebub’, and sometimes ‘Old Wickedshifts’; and Lord Durham, who once remarked that one could ‘jog along on £40,000 a year’, is ‘King Jog’.

It was because these people were aristocrats. The gossips lived in a small society which scarcely touched the middle classes of Wesley, nor the peasantry, nor the Mob. Literature had for the first time since Elizabeth become the medium instead of the plaything of the gentry. They moved in the tight world of the Drawing-rooms and of the Birthdays, knew each other as well as the boys at a public school in England might know each other today, chatted about the latest scandal, and, because they had learned to be literate, they wrote it down. So they remain in literature.

I'm Lady Montagu's time gentlemen had not been expected to shave daily. Washing had been performed in a hand-basin. Chamber-pots had been kept in the dining-room sideboard, for the use of those who sat after the ladies had retired. Instead of the water-closet, which was re-introduced at the end of the century, there was the chaise percee: sometimes in a separate room, as was the case when George II died upon the stool; sometimes only behind a curtain, as it was when Lord Hervey had a contretemps in 1742.

The fixed bath, except at spas, was almost unknown ---Dr. Johnson observed of baths, ‘I hate immersion’ -and Byron was still quite proud of building a bathroom at Newstead in the nineteenth century. Until the days of Jenner, most people were disfigured by smallpox, and the lack of reliable artificial teeth, though this convenience did exist, produced the Punch-and-Judy profile in old age. . In difficult circumstances, however, the aristocracy did its best. Tooth powder was used, and the choice of scents included Spirit of Ambergris, Otto of Roses, Aqua Mellis and Cordova Water. If a footman touched the sugar for the lemonade with his fingers, even the slovenly Dr. Johnson would throw the glass out of the window. They shifted their clothes frequently, and these were well washed at home. Johnson decided that when he kept a seraglio ‘the ladies should all wear linen gowns -or cotton . . . I would have m; silk; you cannot tell when it is clean . . . Linen detects its mm dirtiness’. In later days Brummell insisted or} 'country washing’. Their soaps were Joppa, Genoa, Irish, Bristol, Windsor, Black and Liquid. They kept up a diligent campaign against fleas, pared their linger-nails with penknives, used scent with powder and paid attention to their hair. The heads were shaved for the wig or the natural hair worn in a queue, the powder being sometimes tinted when en grande toilette.

The Prince de Kaunitz, who wore satin stays, passed a portion of every morning in walking up and down a room in which four valets puffed a cloud of scented powder, but each of a different colour, in order that it might fall and amalgamate into the exact nuance that best suited their master’s taste.
The British Army, in the third George’s reign, used 6500 tons of flour for powdering every year.


One of the earliest recordings is of a speech by Gladstone, who stands half-way between ourselves and the eighteenth century. It sounds already like a music hall imitation of a comic clergyman. In the Age of Scandal itself, it seems reasonably certain that people spoke even more slowly, even more oratorically, with even more pauses for mental punctuation between the concessive clauses. They certainly read more slowly.

Another surprise for the producer would have lain in the matter of attitude. For a gentleman in Walpole’s period was judged not only by his accent but also by his department, as if he were a ballet. It was literally true that a gentleman had to move in a stylized way. George III complained that Lord Liverpool’s ‘motions were never very graceful’. The fat Bubb-Doddington, when created Lord Melcombe, was found ‘before a looking glass in his new robes, practising attitudes and debating with himself upon the most graceful mode of carrying his coronet’. (Unfortunately, on being presented to Queen Charlotte, his breeches ‘in the act of kneeling down, forgot their duty, and broke lose from their moorings in a very indecorous manner’.)

Books like The Dancing Master mentioned by M. Delahaute provided ‘the Rules required for walking, saluting and making bows in all kinds of company’, with a chapter entitled ‘How to take off your Hat and replace it’. Frenilly ‘took a month’s course of instruction from the celebrated Petit, at twelve francs a lesson’, in order to learn how to introduce himself to a ‘circle’. ‘It was by no means an inferior science to know how to enter a drawing-room in which some thirty ladies and gentlemen were sitting in a circle round the fire, with both assurance and grace; to penetrate this circle arm to make a slight inclination as you walked round it; to make your way to your hostess, and to retire with dignity and without riffling your fine clothes, for you were dressed in lace, and your hair was dressed in thirty-six curls, all powdered; you were carrying your hat under your arm, your sword reached to your heels, and you were armed with a huge muff, the smallest being two and a half feet wide!’ They moved, said Gronow, ‘with a studied dignity of posture’. The Marquis of Abercorn, though this was more a matter of etiquette than of posture, was ‘stated to have always gone out shooting in his Blue Ribbon, and to have required his housemaids to wear white kid gloves when they made his bed’.

Food and drink, from the enormous quantity in which they were consumed, would have been another of the surprises for a modern mind, and there would have been a hundred lesser reasons to raise the eyebrows. For instance, the people themselves were smaller than we are. ‘The increase in the height of our countrymen’, wrote Miss Hawkins in 1822, ‘attests the superior good sense with which children are now reared.’ ‘From a study of the dresses that do remain’, writes an authority on clothes, ‘we may form the opinion that men and women were on the whole smaller than they are today, the women slighter in build and the men more stocky.’ A Duchess of Rutland must surely have been very slight, when she could compress her waist into the size of an orange and a half.

For the rest, the eye would be taken by scattered curiosities. Peas were correctly eaten with a knife.

The forks had only three prongs. There were no dessert spoons. The games of ombre, piquet, basset, whisk, brag and lanterloo were played with cards whose Kings, Queens and knaves had feet.

Throughout England [wrote the son of the duc de Liancourt in 1784] it is the custom to breakfast together, the meal resembling a dinner or supper in France. The commonest breakfast hour is 9 o’clock and by that time the ladies are fully dressed with their hair properly done for the day. Breakfast consists of tea and bread and butter in various forms. In the houses of the rich you have coffee, chocolate and so on. The morning newspapers are on the table and those who want to do so, read them during breakfast, so that the conversation is not of a lively nature. At 10 o’clock or 10.30 each member of the party goes off on his own pursuit -hunting, fishing or walking. So the day passes till 4 o’clock but at 4 o’clock precisely you must present yourself in the drawing-room with a great deal more ceremony than we are accustomed to in France. This sudden change of social manners is quite astonishing and I was deeply struck by it. In the morning you come down in riding-boots and a shabby coat, you sit where you like, you behave exactly as if you were by yourself, no one takes any notice of you, and itis all extremely comfortable. But in the evening, unless you have just arrived, you must be well-washed and well-groomed. The standard of politeness is uncomfortably high strangers go first into the dining-room and sit near the hostess and are served in seniority in accordance with a rigid etiquette. In fact for the first few days I was tempted to think that it was done for a joke.

Dinner is one of the most wearisome of English experiences, lasting, as it does, for four or five hours. The first two are spent in eating and you are compelled

to exercise your stomach to the full in order to please your host. He asks you the whole time whether you like the food and presses you to eat more, with the result that, out of pure politeness, I do nothing but eat from the time that I sit down until the time when I get up from the table.

The courses are much the same as in France except that the use of sauce is unknown in the English kitchen and that one seldom sees a ragout. All the dishes consist of various meats either boiled or roasted and of joints weighing about twenty or thirty pounds.

After the sweets, you are given water in small bowls of very clean glass in order to rinse out your mouth -a custom which strikes me as extremely unfortunate. The more fashionable folk do not rinse out their mouths, but that seems to me even worse; for if you use the water to wash your hands, it becomes dirty and quite disgusting. This ceremony over, the cloth is removed and you behold the most beautiful table that it is possible to see. It is indeed remarkable that the English are so much given to the use of mahogany; not only are their tables generally made of it, but also their doors and seats and the handrails of their staircases. Yet it is just as dear in England as in France. It is a matter which I do not pretend to understand, but I am inclined to think that the English must be richer than we are; certainly I have myself observed not only that everything costs twice as much here as in France but that the English seize every opportunity to use things which are expensive in themselves. At all events, their tables are made of the most beautiful wood and always have a brilliant polish like that of the finest glass. After the removal of the cloth, the table is covered with all kinds of wine, for even gentlemen of modest means always keep a large stock of good wine. On the middle of the table there is a small quantity of fruit, a few biscuits (to stimulate thirst) and some butter. for many English people take it at dessert.

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont

‘Over there is Mrs Arbuthnot,’ Mrs Palfrey said, in a low voice to Ludo. ‘With the sticks.’
‘I thought so. I shouldn’t be afraid of her, you know.
Although you seem very much the new girl round here.’
‘Of' course. Mrs Arbuthnot has been at the Claremont for years.’
‘It has entered her soul.’
‘But we aren’t allowed to die here.’
He threw back his head and laughed.
‘But isn’t that sad ?’ she asked doubtfully.

and

She had noticed earlier while they were drinking sherry that he did not seem to have many friends: the few people whom he introduced to Mrs Palfrey had not the sort of bonhomie to match his own; in fact, their eyes almost at once began to range the room for some escape. Rather like a small boy, he had shown off, overdone the familiarity, button-holed men he hardly knew. He was not snubbed; but he was not encouraged. Mrs Palfrey was sorry for him about this and tried to make up for it by giving him her whole attention.

Rolled-up fillets of sole masked with a pinkish sauce followed the soup. The wine, Mr Osmond assured Mrs Palfrey, would not upset her. ‘It is quite a far cry from some we have been obliged to drink. This is one of the things I know about,’ he said, in a tone that implied that there were many others.

Mrs Palfrey’s neighbour turned and boomed a few observations at her between courses, while buttering pieces of bread.

Roast duck was served with frozen peas and whirls of duchesse potatoes.

Occasionally, the toast-master would bawl at them that their Worshipful Master and his Lady wished to take wine with the visitors, or old friends from Potters Bar, or a contingent all the way from Ramsgate.

‘I think you must allow there’s not much wrong with this,’ Mr Osmond said, meaning the claret.

‘I’m afraid the Claremont doesn’t prepare us for such enormous feasts,’ Mrs Palfrey said, striving not to flag..

‘What do you make of that?’ the man on her right asked her, pointing to the menu. ‘Péches Denise, avec crépes dentelle. All Greek to me, I fear.’

‘Denise is the name of our hostess,’ Mr Osmond said across Mrs Palfrey, who drew back her bust a little as he did so.

They looked at the two figures in the centre of the top table -who appeared remote like Royalty, her pink bouquet placed before her. To have a pudding named after one! Mrs Palfrey marvelled. It was their big evening, those two. They had been rhythmically clapped in (it was rather like a savage rite, Mrs Palfrey had thought), and now presided. She had folded back long white kid gloves off her hands and, from Mrs Palfrey’s distance, looked as if her arms were clumsily bandaged.

The pudding in her honour was no more than half a tinned peach sitting on sherry-soaked sponge-cake, and covered with a scoop of ice-cream. From all sides, waitresses came hastening with it.

The Queen; the coffee; Mrs Palfrey declined a crime de meat/2e, which Mr Osmond’s late wife had been partial to, he said. She had also liked petits fours, and always said that was the best part of the meal. ‘Fish bored her,’ Mr Osmond said.

This was really unanswerable, and Mrs Palfrey was glad that the toast-master suddenly banged on the table for the beginning of the speeches.

The Teeth of Time

From the Swerve:

At the end of the fifth cen~ tury CE an ambitious literary editor known as Stobaeus com“ piled an anthology of prose and poetry by the ancient world’s best authors: out of 1,430 quotations, 1,115 are from works that re now lost.

All this general vanishing, all the works of the brilliant found as of atomism, Leucippus and Democritus, and most of the Works of their intellectual heir Epicurus, disappeared. Epicurus had been extraordinarily prolific. He and his principal philosophical opponent, the Stoic Chrysippus, wrote between them, it was said, more than a thousand books. Even if this figure is exaggerated or if it counts as books what we would regard as essays and letters, the written record was clearly massive. That record no longer exists. Apart from three letters quoted by an ancient historian of philosophy, Diogenes Laertius, along with a list of forty maxims, almost nothing by Epicurus has survived. Modern scholarship, since the nineteenth century, has only been able to add some fragments. Some of these were culled from the blackened papyrus rolls found at Herculaneum; others were painstakingly recovered from the broken pieces of an ancient wall. On that wall, discovered in the town of Oenoanda, in the rugged mountains in southwest Turkey, an old man, in the early years of the second century CE, had had his distinctly Epicurean philosophy of life-“a fine anthem to celebrate the fullness of pleasure”--chiseled in stone. But where did all the books go?

The actual material disappearance of the books was largely the effect of climate and pests. Though papyrus and parchment were impressively long-lived (far more so than either our cheap paper or computerized data), books inevitably deteriorated over the centuries, even if they managed to escape the ravages of {ire and flood. The ink was a mixture of soot (from burnt lamp wicks), water, and tree gum: that made it cheap and agreeably easy to read, but also water-soluble. (A scribe who made a mistake could erase it with a sponge.) A spilled glass of wine or a heavy downpour, and the text disappeared. And that was only the most common threat. Rolling and unrolling the scrolls or poring over the codices, touching them, dropping them, coughing on them, allowing them to be scorched by fire from the candles, or simply reading them over and over eventually destroyed them.

Carefully sequestering books from excessive use was of little help, for they then became the objects not of intellectual hunger but of a more literal appetite. Tiny animals, Aristotle noted, may be detected in such things as clothes, woolen blankets, and cream cheese. “Others are found,” he observed, “in books, some of them similar to those found in clothes, others like tailless scorpions, very small indeed.” Almost two thousand years later in Micrographia (1655), the scientist Robert Hooke reported with fascination what he saw when he examined one of these creatures under that remarkable new invention, the microscope:
a small white silver-shining Worm or Moth, which I found much conversant among books and papers, and is supposed to be that which corrodes and eats holes through the leaves and covers. Its head appears big and blunt, and its body tapers from it towards the tail, smaller and smaller, being shaped almost like a carrot. . . . It has two long horns before, which are straight, and tapering towards the top, curiously ringed or knobbed. . . . The hinder part is terminated with three tails, in every particular resembling the two longer horns that grow out of the head. The legs are scaled and haired. This animal probably feeds upon the paper and covers of books, and perforates in them several small round holes.

The bookworm-"one of the teeth of time,” as Hooke put it-is no longer familiar to ordinary readers, but the ancients knew it very well. In exile, the Roman poet Ovid likened the "constant gnawing of sorrow” at his heart to the gnawing of the bookworm-“as the book when laid away is nibbled by the worm’s teeth.” His contemporary Horace feared that his book will eventually become “food for vandal moths.” And for the Greek poet Evenus, the bookworm was the symbolic enemy of human culture: “Page-eater, the Muses’ bitterest foe, lurking destroyer, ever feeding on thy thefts from learning, why, black bookworm, dost thou lie concealed among the sacred utterances, producing the image of envy?” Some protective measures, such as sprinkling cedar oil on the pages, were discovered to be effective in warding off damage, but it was widely recognized that the best way to preserve books from being eaten into oblivion was simply to use them and, when they finally wore out, to make more copies.

Though the book trade in the ancient world was entirely about copying, little information has survived about how the enterprise was organized. There were scribes in Athens, as in other cities of the Greek and Hellenistic world, but it is not clear whether they received training in special schools or were apprenticed to master scribes or simply set up on their own. Some were evidently paid for the beauty of their calligraphy; others were paid by the total number of lines written (there are line numbers recorded at the end of some surviving manuscripts). In neither case is the payment likely to have gone directly to the scribe: many, perhaps most, Greek scribes must have been slaves working for a publisher who owned or rented them. (An inventory of the property of a wealthy Roman citizen with an estate in Egypt lists, among his fifty-nine slaves. five notaries, two amanuenses, one scribe, and a book repairer, along with a cook and a barber.) But we do not know whether
these scribes generally sat in large groups, writing from dictation, or worked individually from a master copy. And if the author of the work was alive, we do not know if he was involved in checking or correcting the finished copy.

Somewhat more is known about the Roman book trade, where a distinction evolved between copyists (librari) and scribes (scribae). The librari generally were slaves or paid laborers who worked for booksellers. The booksellers set up advertisements on pillars and sold their wares in shops located in the Roman Forum. The scribae were free citizens; they worked as archivists, government bureaucrats, and personal secretaries. (Julius Caesar had seven scribes who followed him around taking dictation.) Wealthy Romans employed (or owned as slaves) personal librarians and clerks who copied books borrowed from the libraries of their friends. "I have received the book,” Cicero wrote to his friend Atticus, who had lent him a copy of a geographical work in verse by Alexander of Ephesus. “He’s incompetent as a poet and he knows nothing; however, he’s of some use. I’m having it copied and I’ll return it.”

Authors made nothing from the sale of their books; their profits derived from the wealthy patron to whom the work was dedicated. (The arrangement which helps to account for the fulsome flattery of dedicatory epistles-seems odd to us, but it had an impressive stability, remaining in place until the invention of copyright in the eighteenth century.) Publishers had to contend, as we have seen, with the widespread copying of books among friends, but the business of producing and marketing books must have been a profitable one: there were bookshops not only in Rome but also in Brindisi, Carthage, Lyons, Reims, and other cities in the empire.

Large numbers of men and women-for there are records of female as well as male copyists-spent their lives bent over paper, with an inkwell, ruler, and hard split-reed pen, satisfying the demand for books. The invention of movable type in the fifteenth century changed the scale of production exponentially, but the book in the ancient world was not a rare commodity; a well-trained slave reading a manuscript aloud to a roomful of well-trained scribes could produce masses of text. Over the course of centuries, tens of thousands of books, hundreds of thousands of copies, were made and sold.

There was a time in the ancient world-a very long time in which the central cultural problem must have seemed an inexhaustible outpouring of books. Where to put them all? How to organize them on the groaning shelves? How to hold the profusion of knowledge in one’s head? The loss of this plenitude would have been virtually inconceivable to anyone living in its midst.

Then, not all at once but with the cumulative force of a mass extinction, the whole enterprise came to an end. What looked stable turned out to be fragile, and what had seemed for all time was only for the time being.

The scribes must have been among the first to notice: they had less and less to do. Most of the copying stopped. The slow rains, dripping through the holes in the decaying roofs, washed away the letters in books that the flames had spared, and the worms, those “teeth of time,” set to work on what was left. But worms were only the lowliest agents of the Great Vanishing Other forces were at work to hasten the disappearance of the books, and the crumbling of the shelves themselves into dub and ashes. Poggio and his fellow book hunters were lucky to find anything at all.

Japan and China

From The Dark Valley:
Prince Konoe fostered a fierce chauvinism in Japan as the conflict with China continued. His government regimented the nation in an increasingly dictatorial manner; in fact, Japanese took to using the word “totalitarianism” during the later 1930s, though the system was said to be incompatible with the Imperial Way. Individuals were urged to make sacrifices for the greater good: “Away with frivolous entertainment”; “One soup and one side dish (per meal).” Posters, films, broad casts, lectures and meetings repeated the message, creating a mood of harsh austerity throughout Nippon. By the winter of 1937-8, when school children doffed their warm coats in sympathy for the fighting troops, life at home seemed to be “an extension of the battle line.” “Never before,” declared a Tokyo journal, “have the sentiment and mode of life of the Japanese people witnessed such a great change during so brief a period.” To support the soldiers of the sun abroad no domestic self-denial seemed too extravagant. The Prime Minister himself was subject to right-wing criticism for eating unnecessary lunches. But when death threats followed, Konoe remained languidly indifferent.

The pressure to pinch and scrape left its mark on the entire population. They were pressed to renounce costly ornaments, seasonal gifts and new clothes. Women wearing bright kimonos, cosmetics and permanent waves were publicly rebuked. Later kimonos were compulsorily abbreviated to save material; and some were dyed khaki, while others bore patriotic motifs-arrows, fans, bells. Frills and pleats were removed from Western dresses, though women who really wanted to identify with the military adopted mompez', drab peasant pantaloons. Men wore single-breasted jackets, shirts with attached collars and shortened tails, and trousers without turn-ups. Brass buttons and hair-pins were banished. Iron was as scarce as gold and children were no longer given metal toys. To save timber, matches were shaved by 0.029 of an inch. To save leather, handbags were made of bamboo, willow or cellophane. Shoes were fashioned from shark or whale skin, and there was a campaign in favour of cloth slippers (mi) and wooden clogs (gem). Chemists from the Ministry of Agriculture experimented with tanning rat skins. Designs were even advanced for a national uniform costing 30 yen (less than £2), to be worn by officials and, if times got harder, by everyone.

Economies, enforced by the police, took many forms. Dance halls and mah-jongg clubs were shut down. Shops, restaurants, theatres, cinemas, brothels and other places of entertainment had to close early. Rubber balls, including golf balls, were banned. As well as the “control of pleasure,” the authorities insisted on the “utilisation of waste”--old newspapers, broken pens, beer bottle tops. The government sponsored a huge programme of substitution: raffia for rubber bands; soya bean stalks for wood pulp; plastic, porcelain and glass for metal; rayon for cotton and wool. Many goods were rationed-including petrol, which resulted in the spread of asphyxiating charcoal-fuelled cars, lorries and buses. Japanese fishing-boats reverted to sails. Imports were restricted and over 300 foreign commodities disappeared from the shelves of department stores, including soaps, perfumes, cosmetics, tooth powder, cameras, stationery and clothing. The Ginza was darkened, the “prohibition against neon signs” being officially described as “an enlightened act. ” The Tokyo Olympic Games, scheduled for 1940, were abandoned because the metal for the stands could be used to build a destroyer. For similar reasons Mitsubishi stopped work on its huge new building in the Marunouchi business district. Even the Emperor was subject to the spartan imperatives of the day. He had to give up foreign wine and cigarettes (for others-he himself did not smoke). When the government’s drive to wring gold from its citizens began, he was obliged to swap his gold spectacles for cheap metal ones and change his gilded crests to silver. Until Saionji intervened, Hirohito was actually prevented from convalescing after an illness in his modest, grey-boarded, seaside house at Hayama. He also had to seek military approval before doing anything as effete as collecting marine specimens, a task which involved courtiers in full morning dress wading into the water, bowing and beaching the imperial boat.

Like Stalin’s Russia, Konoe’s Japan seemed bent on starving itself great. Movements were launched to eliminate company banquets and to cut down the amount of food served in private houses. This was small enough in all conscience: the breakfast and dinner-of a typical university professor might consist of nothing more than rice and pickled radish, while lunch would be something like fish soup and boiled cabbage. People were encouraged to ear half-hulled rice, partly because it was more nutritious but mainly because the polished article was over-dressed and gave the “impression of a degenerate western dish.” Patriots, incidentally, served their children rice with a pickled plum in the centre to replicate the national flag. Through its National Mobilisation Act (passed in March 1938) the government not only took control of capital and industry, wages and labour, training and research; it also mobilised goods and materials. It aimed to reduce daily necessities “to the minimum required for sustenance.” So, at a time when eggs, butter, milk and cheese were almost unobtainable at home, they were exported to obtain foreign exchange. In due course other Japanese foods were sold in Peking when they could hardly be found in Tokyo-milled flour, canned crab, fish, fruit, jam.
The tightening of the national belt concentrated the nationalist mind. Japan had always been strictly disciplined but now intellectual uniformity was deemed a matter of survival. Teachers were told to instruct their pupils in “Japanese science” based on “the Imperial Way.” This apparently excluded evolution, since the Japanese claimed divine descent. School sports became more martial. General Araki, now Minister of Education, tried to weed out “spiritual borrowings” from outsiders and to harmonise Japanese sport to the “way of the warrior”. This meant more emphasis on marching, judo and kendo, though baseball, duly purged of alien terminology, remained acceptable.

To assist with their spiritual mobilisation Araki banished books by writers such as Mill, Hardy, Gissing, Shaw, Russell and Aldous Huxley. Subsequently a production of Hamlet was forbidden in case it should provoke dangerous thoughts about royalty. “Thoughts are contraband,” wrote a foreign journalist, and the police were especially keen to stop them from being smuggled into universities. They arrested, intimidated and vetted lecturers.
++++
However, when Chamberlain proved unwilling to offend the Axis whole, Halifax characteristically capitulated. He advised against the loan because of “the risk of an adverse reaction in Japan.”

THE Japanese were not mollified since by this stage Britain was the prime scapegoat for their failure to subjugate China. This failure was harder to bear because, under the hammer of Thor, China was evidently being forged into a united nation. To be sure, the country was so vast, amorphous and diverse that it was less a state than a geographical expression. Bounded by steppe, mountain, desert, forest and ocean, it stretched from the harsh brown plains of the arid north to the lush green uplands of the subtropical south, from the Himalayan peaks of Tsinghai to the Yangtse basin in Kiangsu. The threads holding this immense territory together were sparse. By 1938 China had only 70,000 miles of high road and 10,000 miles of railway track. Language was an equally inadequate means of communication: the province of Fukien alone was said to have 108 dialects. Foreigners were often assumed to be speaking a regional patois and vain attempts were made to talk to them by spelling out words in Chinese characters. Differences of race, religion and even diet (rice versus noodles) fur’ ther divided the inhabitants. In any case, they were for the most part virtually embedded in their native earth. Ninety per cent of the 500 mil, lion souls were peasants: at the mercy of flood, famine, drought and dis ease; subject to warlords, landlords, money-lenders and tax-collectors. The Chinese peasant was so poor, a British ambassador noted, that whereas his equal in the Dutch East Indies could always get a banana, he would "often be heartily thankful if he could get a share in an old banana skin.” Yet the Communist Chairman, Mao Tse-tung, discerned in the ground-down peasant an incipient revolutionary and the Kuominrang Generalissimo, Chiang Kai-shek, perceived him as an insrinctive nationalist. Neither was wrong. Under the agonising imperative of the Japanese invasion, the Chinese masses were mobilised as a political force as never before.

No leader had done more to unite the nation than Chiang Kai-shek. The son of a village merchant, he was born in 1887 near the port of Ningpo and he always spoke (in his high-pitched voice) with the sibilant accents of Chekiang province. His mother brought him up strictly, according to Confucian precepts, and the discipline seemed to be imprinted on his face. It was a mask so expressionless that it often caused comment among Westerners schooled on tales of Oriental inscrutability. The visiting British writers Auden and Isherwood, for example, thought Chiang “almost a sinister presence; he has the fragile impassivity of a spectre.” Yet behind that frozen countenance wild passions raged. Sometimes they erupted into violence. When provoked he would shout, curse, weep, bang the table, throw things, complain of torments like those “Buddha suffered in hell.” He might threaten to commit suicide and his face would change colour, first to “pale green,” then to “terrible white.” Often his tantrums culminated in the order of a thrashing or a beheading. But they were soon over, like his periodic “gusts of passion,” one of which caused him to try to rape the 13-year-old girl who later became his second wife. Chiang’s strongest driving force was a brave, stubborn, cunning and utterly ruthless ambition. To achieve power he made every sacrifice, employed every expedient and tapped every well-spring.

After cutting off his pigtail in defiance of Manchu custom, Chiang scraped and struggled to get the best possible military education-in Japan. In 1911 he returned to fight in the revolution which would, Sun Yatsen hoped, plant in China the three principles of nationalism, socialism and democracy. Chiang also acquired a less wholesome patron in Tu Yuehsheng, boss of the notorious Green Gang and head of Shanghai’s criminal underworld. There the young officer engaged in activities which apparently ranged from “intense dissipation” (one reward for which was gonorrhoea) to extortion, robbery and murder. In 1923 Chiang visited Russia and with Soviet help he was appointed commandant of Whampoa Military Academy in Canton, China’s Sandhurst or West Point. On Sun Yatsen’s death in 1925 Chiang was expected to emerge as the pre-eminent military leader, a Chinese Trotsky. But two years later, having identified Bolshevism as “Red impetialism,” he purged the Kuomintang’s Communist allies. He also tried to establish his legitimacy as head of the Nationalist party by marrying Mei-ling Soong, the beautiful, American educated sister of Sun Yat-sen’s widow. Although he wrote her love letters and called her “Darling“ (one of his few English words) it is clear that this marriage, his third. was a dynastic one. It was, like his subsequent conversion to Christianity a “calculated political move. Not only did it make him Sun‘s heir and gain him Croesus-rich brothers-in-law (T V. Soong and H. H. Kung). it helped to win him friends in the West at the very time he needed them. Within a year Chiang had marched north captured Peking‘ and become. in the eyes of the world. the leader of a unified China.

This was a gigantic illusion. As the American journalist Edgar Snow wrote Chiang was nothing more than “the apex of a loose pyramid of sand".  He was a national warlord who had failed to conquer his regional compeers and had to rely on a quasi-feudal fealty, which was often witheld. From his capital, Nanking, he exercised direct control over only five of the lower Yangtse provinces. Elsewhere his rule was constantly challenged in local revolts amounting at times to civil war. In the long run, of course, Chaing's most dangerous enemies within were the Communists. Outlawing these ‘bandits' and putting a huge price on the heads of their leaders, he attempted to crush them in a series of bitter campaigns. He failed, though Mao Tse-tung's forces were eventually driven into the remote fastness of north Shensi. Nor was Chiang successful in dealing with the annual threats to his regime: the alien wedge of Western powers in their privileged concessions, the louring Russian menace and the aggression of Japan. In his house were many mansions and to remain even nominal landlord he had to engage in a perpetual struggle.

Chiang drew Strength from various sources, foreign and domestic. He learned from Hitler, whom he admired, when trying to weld the faction-ridden Kuomintang into a party which would command allegiance througtout the country. His aim, he told the Blue Shirts, an elite band formed in 1932 on the model of Nazi Stormtroopers, was “to spread our revolutionary spirit to the masses of the entire nation.” German military advisers also helped to modernise Chiang’s army, which was taught the goose-step. His security chief, Tai-Li, turned the euphemistically named Central Investigation and Statistics Bureau into such a Gestapo that he was known as “China’s Himmler.”‘ Yet Chiang often spoke the language of Western democracy, especially when Mei-ling was acting as his interpreter. And he did more than simply pay lip-service to capitalist ideals: he achieved much in the way of promoting education, improving communications, developing industry and stabilising the currency. After initial doubts, the publications of Henry Luce in the United States hailed Chiang as a “sagacious” leader and they “clearly preferred Mei-ling to her American counterpart, Eleanor Roosevelt.

Chiang’s “New Life Movement,” launched in 1934 in an attempt to revitalise China spiritually, was a more eclectic affair. With its prohibitions against spitting, smoking, drinking, over-eating, foot-shuffling, using lip stick, burning joss-sticks and letting off firecrackers; with its processions bearing multicoloured dragons and shining pagodas from which fluttered slogans urging people to kill flies and rats, to avoid gambling and women; with its Boy Scout spies to discover miscreants and its squads of bully boys to beat them up, the Movement seemed a cross between Fascism and Evangelicalism. Yet with its emphasis on the ancient virtues of courtesy, righteousness, integrity and a sense of shame, the New Life Movement drew on the tradition of Confucius. Many Westerners disliked its combination of intolerance and hypocrisy, Madame Chiang Kai-shek coming in for harsh criticism on both scores. She was so fond of sermonising that, not content with subjecting Chinese pilots to a course of moral uplift, she “laid down some golden rules for air tactics.” Yet in defiance of the precepts of the new purity campaign, she smoked mentholated English cigarettes, painted her face, imported Paris lingerie, slept between silken sheets and used the most delicious perfume that Auden and Isherwood had ever smelled. According to her socialist sister Ching-ling (Sun Yat-sen’s widow), she spent 4 million Chinese dollars a year on toilet articles, including medicinally-impregnated lavatory paper at 20 dollars a sheet. Still, Chiang made up for his wife’s extravagance by his monastic austerity. Frugal, taciturn, teetotal and non-smoking, he wore an unadorned tunic and seemed a fine advertisement for the New Life Movement. It impressed many Chinese.

It also helped to cloak the fact that Chiang’s regime was fundamentally reactionary and corrupt. Behind Chiang stood the gangster, Tu Yuehsheng, his Green Eminence. With a long egg-shaped head, close-cropped hair, bat ears, dead eyes, cruel lips, large yellow decayed teeth, and the sickly complexion of an addict, the blue-gowned Tu seemed like a caricature of the fictional Fu Manchu. In fact, he was nastier than he looked. It was with his help that the Generalissimo attempted to monopolise the nation’s drug traffic, now more profitable than ever since Chinese opium Was increasingly being used to produce morphine and heroin. This was “an act of stupendous government criminalisation.” It was, as Sun Yat-sen had said, “tantamount to selling out the country.“ But it was also an important revenue-yielding enterprise (a standard one, secretly employed by Mao at Yenan, for example) which did much to sustain Chiang’s regime. And it was disguised with consummate cynicism. Drug shops tamed out their business, supervised by the police, under the name of de-toxification clinics. The Opium Suppression Bureau, far from eradicating the trade in narcotics, actually managed it. One of the Bureau’s members was Tu himself, described in the British-edited Chinese Who's Who of 1933 as a “well-known public welfare worker.”

Whatever his associations, Chiang was widely regarded as the strong man of weak China. The British considered him powerful and dynamic. The japanese recognised that he was chiefly responsible for the national revival; as a Foreign Ministry spokesman in Tokyo later said, “His figure shines brighter than anyone else in the Kuomintang and the government." Stalin thought he had much more to gain from Chiang Kai-shek than from Mao Tse-tung. This was a reasonable assumption since until 1937 Chiang seemed to be succeeding in his campaign to appease the Japanese in order to destroy the Reds. With a ferocity all his own, he had followed the traditional Chinese policy of tackling domestic rebels before foreign aggressors. “Rather slay a thousand innocent men,” he insisted, ‘than let one Communist escape.” By 1934 the Nationalists had almost exterminated the Communists, who set off on the epic retreat to north China which is known as the Long March. It became, in the theology of Chinese Marxists, an exodus like that of the Children of Israel. The chosen cadres also had their own Moses, in the person of Mao Tse-tung.

These are not original analogies, for the odyssey has attained the status if a national myth, with Mao himself as its hero. The Long March has been represented as the migration of the Red Nation, carrying with it, like he Ark of the Covenant, the pure faith that would revolutionise China.

Mao himself was not just the leader but the saviour. He emerged from the ordeal as a superhuman figure charged with “elemental vitality. Foreigners were particularly apt to hail him as a “monumental genius.” To one Western devotee, who met him soon after the Long March, the character of this tall peasant-philosopher, with his long hair and his effeminate hands, was plainly written on his face. She discerned wisdom in his “high, square forehead”; “patience and untold suffering in [his] sparse, painfully knitted brows”; shrewdness and irony in his “large black eyes”; “determination, in his high cheekbones”; “sensuality in his full lips”; sensitiveness to beauty in his “nervous, finely shaped ears”; kindness in the “soft curve of his chin”; “sense of humour in the corners of his eyes and of his mouth.”"
Such romance hid a reality that was hardly less fantastic. The Long March was not an inspired national migration but an improvised military evacuation. Threatened with encirclement by the forces of Chiang Kai-shek, some 86,000 men, mostly young soldiers so countrified that they had never seen a locomotive or an electric light, abandoned their Kiangsi soviet south of the Yangtse River in search of a safe haven. The Red Army Stole away at night, in accordance with principles of deception recommended by ancient Chinese war manuals, shedding its skin like a golden cicada and moving “intangibly as a ghost in the starlight." But it also deceived those left behind-old, young, sick, female-who received no mercy from the Kuomintang. The Red Army was equally ruthless with the men in its own ranks. Moreover, although imbued with revolutionary idealism, some of them even with virginal innocence, they were not above rape, robbery, kidnapping, extortion and murder, their usual victims being landlords, not peasants. Nevertheless the army's positive achievements were worthy of celebration in song and story.

Particular events stand out: the running fights, swift manoeuvres and guerrilla stratagems by which Chiang Kai-shek was eluded and deluded; the clashes with remote hill tribes such as the Miao and Yi (the latter liked to strip stragglers of all their possessions, including clothes, and leave them to starve or freeze); the climbing of the Great Snowy Mountains, where troops were “told to talk in whispers because there was so little oxygen”, the still more hazardous voyage through the marshy, unmapped grasslands on the empty plateau between the watersheds of the Yellow and Yangtse rivers. But no episode was more famous than the storming of the iron-chain suspension bridge over the Tatu River, a swirling torrent that flowed through jagged narrows with the speed of a galloping horse, at Luting. To capture it ahead of Kuomintang reinforcements, Mao sent shock troops racing up the gorge. They wound in “dragon lines” along Steep cliffs, and at night their split-bamboo torches sent “arrows of light glinting down the dark face of the imprisoning river.” They arrived before the Nationalists. Assault teams, armed with sub-machine-guns, Mauser pistols and hand grenades, swung themselves across the hundred-yard-long bridge link by link, since the wooden flooring had been removed on their side. On the far side it remained intact and the Kuomintang guard, which had been shooting wildly, poured kerosene on the planks and set them alight. The attackers charged through the flames and secured the bridgehead. But even this crucial victory is overshadowed by the oft-repeated statistics of the Long March: in a year Mao’s force travelled 6,000 miles, crossed 18 mountain ranges and 24 rivers, captured 62 towns and broke through the armies of 10 warlords. Only a few thousand survivors (including a handful of women) reached Shensi province, walled and moated by nature, where Mao set up his headquarters in the tiny, ancient city of Yenan, “South of the Clouds.”

Living in a candle-lit cave in a bleak, loamy valley so narrow that the sun penetrated only for a few hours each day, eating cabbage and millet, reading and writing copiously, cultivating tobacco in his little garden, Mao rapidly became acknowledged as the warrior-sage of the Chinese revolution. Yet he had begun the Long March in a litter and had not taken command for three months. Despite his growing reputation as a military genius his tactics had sometimes led to bloody reverses in the field and his strategy so reduced the strength of his own contingent that he barely survived the struggle for power inside the Red Army. That he prevailed was a tribute to the peasant stubbornness which ran through his character like “a steel rod.” Beaten as a boy by his father, who had raised himself from poverty by hoarding grain to keep up the price, Mao had revolted against the bucolic life. In 1911, aged 18, he had left his Hunan village to study at Changsha, where, he later joked, he invaded the provincial library “like an ox let loose in a vegetable garden.“ Although he acquired a veneer of education, wrote poetry and became a Marxist, Mao never strayed far from his earthy roots.

He valued manual labour over intellectual endeavour. He admired primitive rebels, distressed farmers who became the outlaw heroes of Chinese novels, the “bandits of despair.” He reviled foreign devils and denounced Chinese subservience to them: “If one of our foreign masters farts, it’s a lovely perfume.” Chewing red peppers and chain-smoking Pirate cigarettes, he remained dirty, dishevelled and uncouth-happy to search his trousers for lice in front of visiting journalists such as Edgar Snow. Privately he sinned against the canons of sexual puritanism which (after earlier espousing free love) be publicly prescribed. Employing brutal means and enduring cruel setbacks, he had struggled for years to exploit the revolutionary potential of the armed rural working class. This he came to appreciate better than anyone, visualising hundreds of millions of peasants rising “like a tornado or tempest-a force so extraordinarily swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to suppress it.” But at Yenan he grew fat, literally and metaphorically. Bloated on adulation, he was a peasant emperor in the making. Puffed up by vanity, he was a proleptic dictator of the proletariat.

Paradoxically, Mao’s most down-to-earth qualities-his simplicity, self' deprecating humour, rustic common sense-assisted in his deification. His very weaknesses were a source of strength. Mao’s chronic constipation became a cause for concern throughout the Red Army: at Yenan a cheer would go up as news spread that “the Chairman’s bowels have moved.” Mao was a poor orator who “spoke as if his mouth were full of hot congee”; but this endeared him to the huge audiences at his open-air meetings outside Yenan, where listeners at the front relayed his words to those at the back amid murmurs of approval. His awesome popularity, though, rested on his transcendent abilities and achievements. Despite the setbacks Mao had proved his mastery of guerrilla warfare during the Long March, escaping entrapment with bewildering feints and dazzling forced marches, living off the land yet making friends with most of its inhabitants, transforming the whole campaign into a prelude to revolution. At Yenan Mao deployed his formidable organisational skills to build the élite which would mobilise the masses. To turn China Red required certain key measures: creating a model soviet (many peasants thought this was a person), free from exploitation, beggary, unemployment, prostitution, infanticide, child slavery, opium-smoking, foot-binding; seeking Moscow’s blessing, not least by setting up a secret police (given the innocuous title, “Social Affairs Department”) modelled on the OGPU; simultaneously endorsing democracy and human rights in order to conciliate the West; above all, forming a popular front with Chiang Kai-shek to “drive out the invading dwarfs” of Nippon.“ Currency notes printed in Shensi bore such slogans as “Stop Civil War!” and “Unite to Resist Japan!” Before he would seek allies against the Japanese, though, Chiang himself was bent on wiping out every Communist soldier in China.

However, the case that Chinese should not fight Chinese but combine against Japan won increasing support. None championed it more ardently than the warlord Chang Hsueh-liang, known as the Young Marshal, whose father (the Old Marshal) had been assassinated by the Kwantung Army in 1928. Failing to persuade Chiang Kai-shek, he sought to coerce him. When the Generalissimo visited Sian in December 1936, the Young Marshal staged a mutiny. Chiang was staying just outside the ancient city, in the temple-hotel at the hot springs resort of Lintung. He rose early to meditate cross-legged in his night-shirt before an open window. Shots rang out as the Young Marshal’s troops overwhelmed his bodyguard. Leaving behind his slippers and false teeth (which he only wore at night, his wife would complain, when visiting a concubine), Chiang climbed out of the window, scaled a wall and dropped 30 feet, injuring his back in the fall. He limped up a bare, snowy hillside in the grey dawn, seeking refuge and praying for help. It came, he later told a journalist, in the shape of “two white hares. I knew, instinctively, that God had sent them as a sign and that they would lead me to safety.”63 Chiang followed them and found a small cleft in the rocks where he hid. But the soldiers soon found him. Chiang expected the worst and pleaded for a quick death. Instead he was carried down the hill on an officer’s back and imprisoned in the Palace of Glorious Purity, built for Tang emperors within the walls of Sian. There he was visited by the Young Marshal who apologized for the inconvenience.

News of the kidnapping astonished the world. Confusion reigned, com. pounded by strict censorship and unbridled propaganda. London (agog with the abdication crisis) was predictably baffled by the “Chinese Puzzle." Tokyo blamed a Comintern plot. Moscow asserted that Chiang was the victim of a Japanese coup, a claim so absurd that Chinese papers Would not print it for fear of ridicule. Apparently Mao’s first instinct was to urge the trial and punishment of the Generalissimo, who “owes us a blood debt high as a mountain.”" But, pressed by the Kremlin, the Chinese Communist Party soon determined to use him to promote the struggle for national salvation, which would become, Mao hoped, the crucible of social revolution. Having caged Chiang, the Young Marshal’s supporters were fearful of “setting the tiger free back to the mountains.“ But Mao’s urbane lieutenant Chou En-lai argued convincingly that Chiang was indispensable. As the Generalissimo himself told the Young Marshal, "I am the government. ”‘Tortuous negotiations took place to secure his release, which was bought at the price of ending the civil war and concentrating on the foreign aggressors. Chiang showed his gratitude by locking up the Young Marshal for life. But he did not renege on his main pledge. Paradoxically, the “Sian Incident,” as it was called, made Chiang "the popular symbol of what he had opposed for years: a genuine united front against Japan.” As leader of the Chinese, he had to follow them.


Red Menace in order to present the Japanese invasion as “a defence action against Communists.” At the War Exhibition in Ueno Park, for example, a large mural showed red war-planes rising from Moscow, changing colour in mid-flight, and landing at Wuhan in the blue-and-white livery of the Kuomintang. Contrary to the myth that was soon established, Mao husbanded his army as “the germ plasm of the Chinese revolution.”Chiang, on the other hand, flung his best troops into the fray, hoping to show japan that the cost of lighting to the finish would be too high.

Once or twice they scored a victory, notably at Taierhchuang in March 1938, which was hailed as another Guadalajara. Sixteen thousand Japanese soldiers were surrounded and killed, many in vicious hand-to-hand hghting. But for the most part Chiang’s armies were hopelessly outclassed in leadership, training, tactics and equipment. A Russian adviser was appalled to see Chinese units being ferried across the Yellow River on ox-hide rafts as old as the Great Wall. An American military observer described Chiang’s grey-clad troops, who sometimes satisfied their craving for salt with the gunpowder in bullets removed from their cases, as a “goddam medieval mob.”7J They resisted in order to stop the Chinese becoming “the coolies of Japan”;74 but when routed they merged into the countryside to become peasants again. From north and east the “blood-spot Hag” steadily advanced towards the nation’s industrial heartland, the triple city of Wuhan, known as China’s “three furnaces.” Chiang was trading too much space for too little time. Yet retreat was the only way to stave off defeat. Not only did Japan’s murderous firepower prove irresistible on land but Nippon controlled the waters and the skies. Chinese courage and patriotism were not enough. Nor was Chinese propaganda. At an oliicial briefing in Ilankow on 9 Match 1938 journalists learned that “Of aeVen planes brought down by Chinese forces, fifteen Wele destroyed by infantry.”7i