Saturday, November 04, 2017
More from the Mad Boy
Salvador Dali must have been thrilled by the Folly when he came to stay with his wife Gala in the smmer of 1936. Gerald had met them in Paris with Winnie de Polignac and was intrigued enough by the rising surrealist star to invite him to Faringdon. Though Gerald might have sensed that, like him, Dali was sexually anxious and even timid, he probably did not know about the increasingly famous artists obsession with towers. Intense insecurity about the size of his penis and in particular a terror of the ‘lion’s jaws’ of female genitalia, had led Dali to take a compulsive refuge in masturbation a recurring theme in his paintings. According to Dali’s biographer, his onanistic fantasies were usually connected to towers, with a preference for church belfries that reminded him of his adolescent frenzies. It was often by fantasising the exact position of the three belfries of Sant Pere, his baptismal church, that he could achieve an orgasm. One can only imagine the effect on Dali as he climbed to the top of Lord Berners’s impressive brick erection and, gazing out over four or five verdant English counties, pictured the extraordinary ejaculation of hreworks that had taken place there only months earlier.
It was still years before Dali would start churning out the clichés of surrealism for American commercials, when his soft watches and lobsters would become old hat. In the mid-1930s he was at the height of his creative powers and on the cusp of great fame. Though plagued by strange phobias (locusts terrified him) and preeningly unpredictable. he was certainly entertaining, which never stopped being high on the list of requirements for guests at Faringdon. Gala, Dali’s Russian
wife, was a decade older than him, though her slim, supple body and flirtatiousness belied her forty-two years. She was as sexually uninhibited as he was awkward, and while she was probably his hrst female lover, he was certainly neither the first nor the last of her male conquests. Like her husband, she was obsessed with physical beauty and couldn’t bear ugliness. Always ready to Hing her clothes off and jump into bed with someone handsome enough, Gala must surely have taken a shine to the Mad Boy. Some years later, when Robert acquired a daughter, she was given the middle name Gala. Though many would agree ‘that to know her was to loathe her’, Gala was undeniably powerful, elegant and impressive.215 Penelope Betjeman recalled having dinner with the Dali’s at Faringdon, and noted how attractive Gala was. As to Dali himself, ‘I remember sitting next to him at dinner. He liked to shock you, and never stopped talking about fur-lined wombs!’
and
It was around this time that Gerald took to wearing little knitted skullcaps that some compared to tea cosies, while others noted ‘a somewhat rabbinical design’. The knitter was Marie Beazley, wife of the noted archaeologist and expert on Greek vases, J. D. ‘Jack’ Beazley. Mrs Beazley was a mysterious woman with ‘iridescent blue hair . . . very black oblique eyes, a long Oriental nose and the curved lips of an Archaic goddess’. She was Jewish, wore overwhelming eastern perfumes, cooked unfamiliar Levantine dishes with rose petals and pistachios, and played Chopin on the piano with great feeling. Though Harold Acton adored her, Mrs Beazley was to some rather a figure of fun; such exoticism was a step too far for tweedy Oxford. There was talk of her decolleté, her formidable nose and even a little moustache, not to mention the tame goose that followed her around (and later died after eating the Daily Mail).
and
Gerald was greatly amused to hear in the spring of 1943 that Dottie had behaved disgracefully at a grand poetry reading in Bond Street in the presence of the Queen. Given in aid of the Free French, it featured illustrious poets such as T. S. Eliot, Walter de la Mare, Vita Sackville-West and the Sitwells, all performing in alphabetical order. Dottie had allegedly got so drunk that she was not given her turn (which as ‘Wellesley’ was last). There were tears, insults, and Dottie hit Harold Nicolson with an umbrella while Vita (who had already done her reading) tried to soothe her and ultimately succeeded in taking her away in a taxi. Gerald later wrote to Edith Sitwell, joking that ‘Dorothy Wellesley is suing Harold [Nicolson] for saying she was drunk -whereas it was merely a Dionysiac Frenzy. I am mad at having missed it all
and
Another clever beautiful young blonde woman he was close to was now in prison Diana Mosley. In May 1940, Oswald Mosley had been imprisoned under Defence Regulation 18B as a threat to national security and Diana was interned in June. Gerald and Robert were among the few people who wrote her on her first day. "What can I send you? Would you like a little file concealed in a peach?" he wrote.
and
Given the warnings not to misinterpret the dowdy clothes and unsoaped bodies, it must have been a surprise for these US servicemen to find their hosts not only stylishly arrayed, scented individuals who entertained beautifully, but able to place a line spread on the table. Gerald described one such evening to Clarissa. ‘Two of the officers dined the other night. One (from Carolina) agreeable and prepossessing, the other a New Yorker lamentably dull and slow of speech. Others I have met ditto. I am told that it is regarded in America as politeness not to Spare one a single detail. But it makes one feel like a motor car going up hill with the brake on.’ Despite the cultural gap, Clarissa remembered that the Americans ‘were a source of resigned amusement to Gerald’. He wrote to her again when they were snowed up, with only enough food for a couple of days: ‘If it continues we shall have to kill and eat a soldier. It might be interesting to try the major, who is thoroughly impregnated with whisky and might make an excellent haggis.’
It was still years before Dali would start churning out the clichés of surrealism for American commercials, when his soft watches and lobsters would become old hat. In the mid-1930s he was at the height of his creative powers and on the cusp of great fame. Though plagued by strange phobias (locusts terrified him) and preeningly unpredictable. he was certainly entertaining, which never stopped being high on the list of requirements for guests at Faringdon. Gala, Dali’s Russian
wife, was a decade older than him, though her slim, supple body and flirtatiousness belied her forty-two years. She was as sexually uninhibited as he was awkward, and while she was probably his hrst female lover, he was certainly neither the first nor the last of her male conquests. Like her husband, she was obsessed with physical beauty and couldn’t bear ugliness. Always ready to Hing her clothes off and jump into bed with someone handsome enough, Gala must surely have taken a shine to the Mad Boy. Some years later, when Robert acquired a daughter, she was given the middle name Gala. Though many would agree ‘that to know her was to loathe her’, Gala was undeniably powerful, elegant and impressive.215 Penelope Betjeman recalled having dinner with the Dali’s at Faringdon, and noted how attractive Gala was. As to Dali himself, ‘I remember sitting next to him at dinner. He liked to shock you, and never stopped talking about fur-lined wombs!’
and
It was around this time that Gerald took to wearing little knitted skullcaps that some compared to tea cosies, while others noted ‘a somewhat rabbinical design’. The knitter was Marie Beazley, wife of the noted archaeologist and expert on Greek vases, J. D. ‘Jack’ Beazley. Mrs Beazley was a mysterious woman with ‘iridescent blue hair . . . very black oblique eyes, a long Oriental nose and the curved lips of an Archaic goddess’. She was Jewish, wore overwhelming eastern perfumes, cooked unfamiliar Levantine dishes with rose petals and pistachios, and played Chopin on the piano with great feeling. Though Harold Acton adored her, Mrs Beazley was to some rather a figure of fun; such exoticism was a step too far for tweedy Oxford. There was talk of her decolleté, her formidable nose and even a little moustache, not to mention the tame goose that followed her around (and later died after eating the Daily Mail).
and
Gerald was greatly amused to hear in the spring of 1943 that Dottie had behaved disgracefully at a grand poetry reading in Bond Street in the presence of the Queen. Given in aid of the Free French, it featured illustrious poets such as T. S. Eliot, Walter de la Mare, Vita Sackville-West and the Sitwells, all performing in alphabetical order. Dottie had allegedly got so drunk that she was not given her turn (which as ‘Wellesley’ was last). There were tears, insults, and Dottie hit Harold Nicolson with an umbrella while Vita (who had already done her reading) tried to soothe her and ultimately succeeded in taking her away in a taxi. Gerald later wrote to Edith Sitwell, joking that ‘Dorothy Wellesley is suing Harold [Nicolson] for saying she was drunk -whereas it was merely a Dionysiac Frenzy. I am mad at having missed it all
and
Another clever beautiful young blonde woman he was close to was now in prison Diana Mosley. In May 1940, Oswald Mosley had been imprisoned under Defence Regulation 18B as a threat to national security and Diana was interned in June. Gerald and Robert were among the few people who wrote her on her first day. "What can I send you? Would you like a little file concealed in a peach?" he wrote.
and
Given the warnings not to misinterpret the dowdy clothes and unsoaped bodies, it must have been a surprise for these US servicemen to find their hosts not only stylishly arrayed, scented individuals who entertained beautifully, but able to place a line spread on the table. Gerald described one such evening to Clarissa. ‘Two of the officers dined the other night. One (from Carolina) agreeable and prepossessing, the other a New Yorker lamentably dull and slow of speech. Others I have met ditto. I am told that it is regarded in America as politeness not to Spare one a single detail. But it makes one feel like a motor car going up hill with the brake on.’ Despite the cultural gap, Clarissa remembered that the Americans ‘were a source of resigned amusement to Gerald’. He wrote to her again when they were snowed up, with only enough food for a couple of days: ‘If it continues we shall have to kill and eat a soldier. It might be interesting to try the major, who is thoroughly impregnated with whisky and might make an excellent haggis.’
Sunday, October 29, 2017
The Mad Boy et al
From The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me
After the Russian Revolution in 1917, Stravinsky (who was a supporter) wanted to find a substitute for ‘God Save the Tsar!’ to play at his performances and to offer to the Bolsheviks. Though far from being politicised, let alone anybody’s idea of a revolutionary, it was Gerald who worked through the night with Stravinsky to help orchestrate the ‘Song of the Volga Boatrnen’.“ It was never used by the Soviets, but the exiled Russian composer went on playing it as a national anthem at his concerts.
Since the outbreak of the war, Stravinsky had been based with his family in Switzerland and in 1916 Gerald went to visit him there in the hope of musical advice. The thirty-four-year-old Russian was willing to act as a musical mentor to the thirty-three-year-old Englishman, and their correspondence illustrates their increasing familiarity, opening with, ‘Dear Friend’, ‘Dear Friend Tyrwhitt’, and Gerald signing off as ‘Your devoted Gerald Tyrwhitt’. Gerald’s penchant for pranks and jokes was already in evidence when he sent Stravinsky one of his characteristically doctored postcards a painting of Brahms that was adjusted so he was surrounded by naked women and clouds. The caption reads: ‘Why all of these nude women? I was always assured that Brahms was chaste.’
and
Jean Cocteau, like Gerald, was a man of varied talents who was in danger of being seen as a dandified dilettante. The apparent simplicity and succinctness of their work did not always endear them to cultural heavyweights. Gerald liked his compositions (and other people’s) to be entertaining, even escapist; nothing too long or too serious was permitted. As he wrote in his novel Far From the Madding War, ‘The English have a tendency to judge art by size and weight.’ In his work, he always aimed for brevity, and frequently levity not to mention parody. According to his future friend and collaborator, the composer Constant Lambert, Gerald ‘was the first to introduce into music the Max Beerbohm type of sophisticated satire, a mordant wit combined with classicism of style’.
Gerald's composition ‘L’Uomo dai bafli’ (“The Man with the Moustache’) was performed by Casella at a marionette show in the Teatro dei Piccoli in Rome perfect for Gerald's love of playfulness. A somewhat provocative part of the puppet ballet was the ‘Trois petites marches funébres’, consisting of three marches for a statesman, a canary, and an aunt leaving an inheritance. The humorous, even subversive approach to death was daring. This was an era when lengthy mourning periods and swathes of black crepe were still the rule, and though the canary’s march is genuinely sorrowful, the other two are obstinately cheerful. But Gerald had long seen the potential in gallows humour. As a child, he was said to have written a funeral dirge for his mother, who had been amused enough to ask him to perform it as a party piece. Mixing the pathos of the small bird’s demise with the pomp of the politician’s was typical of Gerald’s naughty wit, and while the statesman could be seen as representing his father’s formality and officialdom, the canary reflects both his and his mother’s love of birds.
and
Both Gerald and the Mad Boy bore the legacy of their Shropshire gentry backgrounds; they could both dress impeccably and liked a well-run house and good manners. It would be easy to assume that the Mad Boy was the one who brought an anarchic streak to their cohabitation, but actually it was sometimes Robert who introduced the county conventionality that bored Gerald. After all, it was Gerald who had a lifelong fascination with masks and fancy dress and who wrote modern music and cultivated artistic, avant-garde friends. While Robert loved fine clothes and would often mismatch his colours to produce a clownish, dandy effect, he was not intrigued by the grotesque and the peculiar like Gerald. Once, when Robert was entertaining some dull hunting friends in the drawing room, Gerald made himself scarce so he would not have to talk to them. Then, realising he needed a book from the shelves, he pulled a large hearth-rug over himself and, as if disguised as a strange animal, crawled into the room, proceeded to the bookcase, reached up a hand to take the required volume and crawled out again. One can only imagine the guests’ conversations after they had departed. When Robert later asked Gerald why he had done it, he responded, "I didn't want to draw attention to myself".
and
The drawing room was divided into two parts with the larger section papered white and filled with gilded French and ltalian furniture. The other, smaller end was olive green, ‘providing a perfect background for a riot of tropical birds, some alive and hopping about, some stuffed in cases, some pressed, like flowers in a screen, some modelled in china, one jumping with a song out off a gold box, and hundreds between the green morocco covers of Mr Gould’. There could never be enough birds for Gerald, and he introduced flamingos, storks and other gaudy feathered creatures that strutted around the gardens and into the house. Guests were amused to find that ‘odd, large-beaked birds wandered through the Georgian silver on the Chippendale dining-table, peeked in one’s plate or left squarking horribly on some guest’s head’. Plumed birds-of-paradise brought flashes of unfamiliar colours to the subdued palette of the English countryside as they patrolled the house or sat, preserved in fixed poses, beneath glass domes. One of Gerald’s favourite pets was a flashy green member of the Paradisaeidae family who he named John Knox, honouring the sixteenth-century Scottish Protestant in a way that would have appalled him. Gerald claimed that once, when he was laid up in bed with lumbago, he entertained himself by teaching the bird to turn somersaults. When the pet died, Gerald placed a notice in The Times personal column: ‘Died of jealousy, aged fifteen, John Knox, emerald bird-of-paradise belonging to Lord Berners. His guests are asked to wear half-mourning.’
It was an inspired day when Gerald decided to help nature along in the decoration department. According to Robert, Gerald read about dyeing doves in a Chinese book.
and
Earlier in 1934, Gerald had written ‘A Fascist March’ for the piano; apparently Diana thought he might come up with something nice for the Blackshirts to march to. The first eight bars were published in the Daily Express and nothing more is known of it. It is hard to imagine that Gerald could have done this with an entirely straight face, as his music nearly always contained jokes, parody and a lightness that is inimical to the tenets of Fascism. But what with Mussolini’s boys strutting about all over Rome (where Gerald wrote the piece) and Mosley being flavour of the year in England, perhaps he really did do his little bit. After all, plenty of political thinkers took Mosley seriously at the start. What does appear to have been a joke was Gerald’s claim to have had lunch with Hitler, though the evidence is highly contradictory. It is true is that Gerald and Robert were in Munich in the late summer of 1935, where they spent most days with Diana and Unity, whose growing obsession with the Fuhrer was most amusing to Gerald. William Crack said he drove Gerald to a restaurant where Hitler was dining, and Robert (whose version is probably less reliable) claimed that Gerald dined with Hitler and that he was invited for coffee. According to the Mad Boy, the English lord and the German dictator discussed composition. Hitler mentioned ‘his own composer’ (never identified) who was not in favour, and said: ‘I thought of sending him up in an aeroplane,’ presumably with the implication that he would not be coming back.
Nancy Mitford satirised their movement in her 1935 novel Wigs on the Green. Unity (who was over six foot tall) is portrayed as ‘England’s largest heiress’, Eugenia Malmains. Mosley is the Captain, who must be obeyed in all things. The innocent, passionate Eugenia stands on a washtub on a village green, calling ‘in thrilling tones . . . “Britons, awake! Arise! Oh, British lion! . . . [the] Union Jack Movement is a youth movement . . . We are tired of the old.” Eugenia has a dog called the Reichshund, after Bismarck’s dog, and a horse named Vivian Jackson. Diana was outraged, Mosley furious and Nancy was banned from their house for years.
and
Gerald himself joked that while the tea parties of Sibyl Colefax were ‘a party of lunatics presided over by an efficient, trained hospital nurse’, those of Emerald Cunard were ‘a party of lunatics presided over by a lunatic’.‘ Of course, there were those who claimed that Gerald himself offered more to this type of gathering than he took. Osbert Sitwell wrote, ‘In the years between the wars, Berners did more to civilise the wealthy than anyone in England. Through London’s darkest drawing rooms, as well as through the lightest, he moved, dedicated to their conversion, a sort of missionary of the arts, bringing a touch of unwanted fun into many a dreary life fun perhaps all the more funny for its being unwanted." Gerald was the perfect guest for these ladies ~ accomplished, titled and witty. His increasingly notorious eccentricity only added a dash of welcome spice to the mix.
Certain commentators claimed there was no comparing the two grandes dames. While Lady Cunard’s witty intelligence sparked off truly interesting conversations, her rival, Lady Colefax (the ‘Coal Box’), was merely fixated with collecting famous names and didn’t know what to do with them when she got them. Harold Nicolson wrote of her formidable energy: ‘While London still slept round her, she would have written and addressed some sixty postcards and the telephone
would start shrilling before the postman dared.
About ten years older than Gerald, Emerald Cunard had started off life in America as Maud Burke. After marrying into the Cunard shipping family, she changed her name to the more sparkling Emerald, and managed through intelligence, charm and ambition to create an immensely successful salon at her home in Grosvenor Square. Her great talent was to mix writers, musicians and painters with politicians, soldiers and members of the British and European aristocracy. Smalk built, with birdy eyes and a small mouth, she had many lovers, including the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham and the writer George Moore, both of whose work she promoted and inspired. Harold Nicolson caustically described her in later years as ‘looking like a third-dynasty mummy painted pink by amateurs’, and many said she neglected her skinny, kohl-eyed daughter Nancy, who made a name for herself as a provocative anti-racist and Civil rights activist, taking up with a Harlem- based jazz musician.
Though the Ladies Cunard and Colefax were always pleased to catch the biggest social fish, the Coal Box was an easier target for teasing. Sibyl Colefax was an interior decorator, founding Colefax and Fowler and adopting the traditional Georgian country house as her style. ‘Dark, sharp-featured, beady-eyed’, she was an inveterate snob: ‘Like a bunch of glossy red cherries on a hard straw hat,’ said Virginia Woolf. She had less money and panache than her American rival, and she was a notorious social climber, who would go to great lengths to ‘acquire’ the famous and the rich. But as Beverley Nichols admitted, ‘a woman who is neither nobly born, nor very rich, nor very beautiful, does not create a brilliant salon unless she has herself some brilliant qualities.’
Gerald quipped that when Sybil Colefax visited him in Rome and was given the room next to him, he got no sleep as ‘she never stopped climbing all night’.” In a thank-you letter following a 1945 weekend at Faringdon, the playwright Terence Rattigan continued the theme, imagining Sibyl’s social activities continuing beyond death, something, he joked, he himself could soon be responsible for if her hand turned gangrenous from a cut she had sustained when he helped her through a barbed-wire fence on a walk.* ‘By the way,’ he asked Gerald, ‘who do you think will be at her first dinner party in Paradise? Would she begin with Shakespeare, Disraeli, Mrs Siddens and a member of The Divine Family, or start lower down and work her way up?‘
Easy to caricature, the Coal Box provided inspiration for various pieces by Waugh etc.
After the Russian Revolution in 1917, Stravinsky (who was a supporter) wanted to find a substitute for ‘God Save the Tsar!’ to play at his performances and to offer to the Bolsheviks. Though far from being politicised, let alone anybody’s idea of a revolutionary, it was Gerald who worked through the night with Stravinsky to help orchestrate the ‘Song of the Volga Boatrnen’.“ It was never used by the Soviets, but the exiled Russian composer went on playing it as a national anthem at his concerts.
Since the outbreak of the war, Stravinsky had been based with his family in Switzerland and in 1916 Gerald went to visit him there in the hope of musical advice. The thirty-four-year-old Russian was willing to act as a musical mentor to the thirty-three-year-old Englishman, and their correspondence illustrates their increasing familiarity, opening with, ‘Dear Friend’, ‘Dear Friend Tyrwhitt’, and Gerald signing off as ‘Your devoted Gerald Tyrwhitt’. Gerald’s penchant for pranks and jokes was already in evidence when he sent Stravinsky one of his characteristically doctored postcards a painting of Brahms that was adjusted so he was surrounded by naked women and clouds. The caption reads: ‘Why all of these nude women? I was always assured that Brahms was chaste.’
and
Jean Cocteau, like Gerald, was a man of varied talents who was in danger of being seen as a dandified dilettante. The apparent simplicity and succinctness of their work did not always endear them to cultural heavyweights. Gerald liked his compositions (and other people’s) to be entertaining, even escapist; nothing too long or too serious was permitted. As he wrote in his novel Far From the Madding War, ‘The English have a tendency to judge art by size and weight.’ In his work, he always aimed for brevity, and frequently levity not to mention parody. According to his future friend and collaborator, the composer Constant Lambert, Gerald ‘was the first to introduce into music the Max Beerbohm type of sophisticated satire, a mordant wit combined with classicism of style’.
Gerald's composition ‘L’Uomo dai bafli’ (“The Man with the Moustache’) was performed by Casella at a marionette show in the Teatro dei Piccoli in Rome perfect for Gerald's love of playfulness. A somewhat provocative part of the puppet ballet was the ‘Trois petites marches funébres’, consisting of three marches for a statesman, a canary, and an aunt leaving an inheritance. The humorous, even subversive approach to death was daring. This was an era when lengthy mourning periods and swathes of black crepe were still the rule, and though the canary’s march is genuinely sorrowful, the other two are obstinately cheerful. But Gerald had long seen the potential in gallows humour. As a child, he was said to have written a funeral dirge for his mother, who had been amused enough to ask him to perform it as a party piece. Mixing the pathos of the small bird’s demise with the pomp of the politician’s was typical of Gerald’s naughty wit, and while the statesman could be seen as representing his father’s formality and officialdom, the canary reflects both his and his mother’s love of birds.
and
Both Gerald and the Mad Boy bore the legacy of their Shropshire gentry backgrounds; they could both dress impeccably and liked a well-run house and good manners. It would be easy to assume that the Mad Boy was the one who brought an anarchic streak to their cohabitation, but actually it was sometimes Robert who introduced the county conventionality that bored Gerald. After all, it was Gerald who had a lifelong fascination with masks and fancy dress and who wrote modern music and cultivated artistic, avant-garde friends. While Robert loved fine clothes and would often mismatch his colours to produce a clownish, dandy effect, he was not intrigued by the grotesque and the peculiar like Gerald. Once, when Robert was entertaining some dull hunting friends in the drawing room, Gerald made himself scarce so he would not have to talk to them. Then, realising he needed a book from the shelves, he pulled a large hearth-rug over himself and, as if disguised as a strange animal, crawled into the room, proceeded to the bookcase, reached up a hand to take the required volume and crawled out again. One can only imagine the guests’ conversations after they had departed. When Robert later asked Gerald why he had done it, he responded, "I didn't want to draw attention to myself".
and
The drawing room was divided into two parts with the larger section papered white and filled with gilded French and ltalian furniture. The other, smaller end was olive green, ‘providing a perfect background for a riot of tropical birds, some alive and hopping about, some stuffed in cases, some pressed, like flowers in a screen, some modelled in china, one jumping with a song out off a gold box, and hundreds between the green morocco covers of Mr Gould’. There could never be enough birds for Gerald, and he introduced flamingos, storks and other gaudy feathered creatures that strutted around the gardens and into the house. Guests were amused to find that ‘odd, large-beaked birds wandered through the Georgian silver on the Chippendale dining-table, peeked in one’s plate or left squarking horribly on some guest’s head’. Plumed birds-of-paradise brought flashes of unfamiliar colours to the subdued palette of the English countryside as they patrolled the house or sat, preserved in fixed poses, beneath glass domes. One of Gerald’s favourite pets was a flashy green member of the Paradisaeidae family who he named John Knox, honouring the sixteenth-century Scottish Protestant in a way that would have appalled him. Gerald claimed that once, when he was laid up in bed with lumbago, he entertained himself by teaching the bird to turn somersaults. When the pet died, Gerald placed a notice in The Times personal column: ‘Died of jealousy, aged fifteen, John Knox, emerald bird-of-paradise belonging to Lord Berners. His guests are asked to wear half-mourning.’
It was an inspired day when Gerald decided to help nature along in the decoration department. According to Robert, Gerald read about dyeing doves in a Chinese book.
and
Earlier in 1934, Gerald had written ‘A Fascist March’ for the piano; apparently Diana thought he might come up with something nice for the Blackshirts to march to. The first eight bars were published in the Daily Express and nothing more is known of it. It is hard to imagine that Gerald could have done this with an entirely straight face, as his music nearly always contained jokes, parody and a lightness that is inimical to the tenets of Fascism. But what with Mussolini’s boys strutting about all over Rome (where Gerald wrote the piece) and Mosley being flavour of the year in England, perhaps he really did do his little bit. After all, plenty of political thinkers took Mosley seriously at the start. What does appear to have been a joke was Gerald’s claim to have had lunch with Hitler, though the evidence is highly contradictory. It is true is that Gerald and Robert were in Munich in the late summer of 1935, where they spent most days with Diana and Unity, whose growing obsession with the Fuhrer was most amusing to Gerald. William Crack said he drove Gerald to a restaurant where Hitler was dining, and Robert (whose version is probably less reliable) claimed that Gerald dined with Hitler and that he was invited for coffee. According to the Mad Boy, the English lord and the German dictator discussed composition. Hitler mentioned ‘his own composer’ (never identified) who was not in favour, and said: ‘I thought of sending him up in an aeroplane,’ presumably with the implication that he would not be coming back.
Nancy Mitford satirised their movement in her 1935 novel Wigs on the Green. Unity (who was over six foot tall) is portrayed as ‘England’s largest heiress’, Eugenia Malmains. Mosley is the Captain, who must be obeyed in all things. The innocent, passionate Eugenia stands on a washtub on a village green, calling ‘in thrilling tones . . . “Britons, awake! Arise! Oh, British lion! . . . [the] Union Jack Movement is a youth movement . . . We are tired of the old.” Eugenia has a dog called the Reichshund, after Bismarck’s dog, and a horse named Vivian Jackson. Diana was outraged, Mosley furious and Nancy was banned from their house for years.
and
Gerald himself joked that while the tea parties of Sibyl Colefax were ‘a party of lunatics presided over by an efficient, trained hospital nurse’, those of Emerald Cunard were ‘a party of lunatics presided over by a lunatic’.‘ Of course, there were those who claimed that Gerald himself offered more to this type of gathering than he took. Osbert Sitwell wrote, ‘In the years between the wars, Berners did more to civilise the wealthy than anyone in England. Through London’s darkest drawing rooms, as well as through the lightest, he moved, dedicated to their conversion, a sort of missionary of the arts, bringing a touch of unwanted fun into many a dreary life fun perhaps all the more funny for its being unwanted." Gerald was the perfect guest for these ladies ~ accomplished, titled and witty. His increasingly notorious eccentricity only added a dash of welcome spice to the mix.
Certain commentators claimed there was no comparing the two grandes dames. While Lady Cunard’s witty intelligence sparked off truly interesting conversations, her rival, Lady Colefax (the ‘Coal Box’), was merely fixated with collecting famous names and didn’t know what to do with them when she got them. Harold Nicolson wrote of her formidable energy: ‘While London still slept round her, she would have written and addressed some sixty postcards and the telephone
would start shrilling before the postman dared.
About ten years older than Gerald, Emerald Cunard had started off life in America as Maud Burke. After marrying into the Cunard shipping family, she changed her name to the more sparkling Emerald, and managed through intelligence, charm and ambition to create an immensely successful salon at her home in Grosvenor Square. Her great talent was to mix writers, musicians and painters with politicians, soldiers and members of the British and European aristocracy. Smalk built, with birdy eyes and a small mouth, she had many lovers, including the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham and the writer George Moore, both of whose work she promoted and inspired. Harold Nicolson caustically described her in later years as ‘looking like a third-dynasty mummy painted pink by amateurs’, and many said she neglected her skinny, kohl-eyed daughter Nancy, who made a name for herself as a provocative anti-racist and Civil rights activist, taking up with a Harlem- based jazz musician.
Though the Ladies Cunard and Colefax were always pleased to catch the biggest social fish, the Coal Box was an easier target for teasing. Sibyl Colefax was an interior decorator, founding Colefax and Fowler and adopting the traditional Georgian country house as her style. ‘Dark, sharp-featured, beady-eyed’, she was an inveterate snob: ‘Like a bunch of glossy red cherries on a hard straw hat,’ said Virginia Woolf. She had less money and panache than her American rival, and she was a notorious social climber, who would go to great lengths to ‘acquire’ the famous and the rich. But as Beverley Nichols admitted, ‘a woman who is neither nobly born, nor very rich, nor very beautiful, does not create a brilliant salon unless she has herself some brilliant qualities.’
Gerald quipped that when Sybil Colefax visited him in Rome and was given the room next to him, he got no sleep as ‘she never stopped climbing all night’.” In a thank-you letter following a 1945 weekend at Faringdon, the playwright Terence Rattigan continued the theme, imagining Sibyl’s social activities continuing beyond death, something, he joked, he himself could soon be responsible for if her hand turned gangrenous from a cut she had sustained when he helped her through a barbed-wire fence on a walk.* ‘By the way,’ he asked Gerald, ‘who do you think will be at her first dinner party in Paradise? Would she begin with Shakespeare, Disraeli, Mrs Siddens and a member of The Divine Family, or start lower down and work her way up?‘
Easy to caricature, the Coal Box provided inspiration for various pieces by Waugh etc.
the evolution of god
by Robert Wright
From an objective standpoint, then, there is no reason to assume that the advent of Israelite monotheism took place anywhere other than Canaan, after centuries of immersion in Canaanite culture; no reason to doubt that Israelite religion is exactly the kind of organic outgrowth of the local culture that Kaufmann and Albright said it wasn‘t. It’s even possible that Yahweh, who spends so much of the Bible fighting against those nasty Canaanite gods for the allegiance of Israelites, actually started life as a Canaanite god, not an import.
The test of this evolutionary hypothesis -or at least the first test of it-is whether it is illuminating. Does it help clear up murky parts of Yahweh’s history? If we examine the Bible’s scattered, cryp~ tic clues about Yahweh's origins in light of it, do they then appear less jumbled, more coherent? The answer is yes.
Consider the “divine council” that seems at odds with the basic theology of the Bible, and yet turns up in the Bible more than once. As we‘ve seen, various ancient states, such as Egypt and China, seem to have modeled their pantheons at least partly on governmental structures. And Mesopotamia featured, more specifically, a deliberative assembly of gods-a council. Given that Mesopotamia is in the general vicinity of Canaan, it wouldn’t be shocking to find some such assembly in the early Canaanite tradition.
And, indeed, that’s what we find in Ugarit, the ancient city in northern Canaan whose translated texts have so illuminated the context of Israelite religion. There, at the end of the Bronze Age, on the eve of Israel’s birth, is a divine council. And the god most often depicted as its chief -a god named El (pronounced ale or el) bears a curious resemblance to Yahweh. Both gods were strong yet sensitive. El was seen as a “bull,” yet was also called “Kind El, the compassionate." Similarly, Yahweh, even in that early appearance as a warrior god, was driven by his compassion for the Israelites-~“thy steadfast love” for “the people whom thou hast redeemed.” Both gods appeared in dreams, became the patrons of the dreamers, and spoke often through prophets.“ And both were paternalistic creator gods: El was “creator of creatures” and “father of humanity.” As Smith has put it, El was “the divine father par excellence.”
The literal meaning of the Ugaritic term for the Canaanite “divine council” is, not surprisingly, “Council of El.” A bit more surprising is that if you peer beneath English versions of the Bible and examine the Hebrew rendering of the “divine council” on which God sits in Psalm 82, you find this phrase: adat El -which can be translated as “Council of El.” Hmmm.
And that’s just the beginning. It turns out that if you peer beneath the English word “god” in some parts of the Bible, you will find not the Hebrew word for Yahweh, but rather the Hebrew word El. Given that the Canaanite El appears on the historical record before the Israelite god Yahweh, it is tempting to conclude that Yahweh in some way emerged from El, and may even have started life as a renamed version of El.
There is cause for at least preliminary resistance to that temptation: the Hebrew word El is like the English word “god”-it can refer either to deities in general (“Hermes, a god of ancient Greece”) or to a particular deity (God with an uppercase G). The difference is that ancient Hebrew didn’t use the uppercase/lowercase convention to keep things clear. So you can’t infer, every time you see the Hebrew god called El, that his name is El.
Still, there are a few times in the Bible when the “El” applied to the Hebrew god indeed seems to be a proper noun. According to Genesis, Jacob “erected an altar and called it El-Elohe-Israel.” This could be translated as “god, the god of Israel,” but if you don’t capitalize the first “god” it doesn’t make much sense; it would be like dedicating an altar to “deity, the deity of Israel.” In other words, the first “god” has to be a specific god, and the specific god named El that we know of in that part of the world was head of the pantheon in northern Canaan. (Indeed, some English translations of Genesis render “El-Elohe-Israel” unabashedly as “El, God of Israel.”) If that’s not a close enough link between Israelite religion and El, look at the “uni "Israel“ itself." In ancient times names were often inspired by gods. and names ending in “el” typically referred to the god El.
An especially intriguing biblical appearance of the word El is in the phrase El Shaddai, famously rendered in English as “God Almighty.” As it turns out, “Almighty" is a mistranslation; though the exact meaning of Shaddai remains cloudy, it seems to refer to mountains not omnipotence-but that‘s another story.‘‘ For present purposes. what‘s interesting is the way this name is used in the sixth chapter of Exodus. during one of Moses’s conversations with God. God says. “I am Yahweh. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as El Shaddai. but by my name Yahweh I did not make myself known to them." Even Yahweh himself says that he started life with the name Ell”
Of course. Yahweh doesn't explicitly say he started life as the Canaanite god El. And at the time he is speaking, the Israelites (in the Bible‘s telling of the story) haven‘t yet gotten to Canaan. But this story may have entered Israel’s historical narrative much later than it is said to have happened. And if there is one lesson of modern biblical scholarship, it‘s that stories often say more about the era of their creation than about the era they claim to describe.
So what does Exodus 6 suggest about the era of its creation? If you were crafting a history of your god, why would you add such an odd twist. saying that he used to go by another name? Theories abound. One is this: you are trying to meld two religious traditions; you are trying to convince two groups of people-one that worships a god called Yahweh and another that warships a god called El-that they actually worship the same gods"
Supporters of this theory sometimes invoke a pattern in the Bible that was famously emphasized by the nineteenth-century scholar Julius Wellhausen. According to Wellhausen’s “documentary hypothesis.” the early phases of the biblical narrative from creation through the time of Moses-come largely from two authors (or two groups of like~minded authors), one known as the J source and one known as the E source. The E source refers to the Hebrew god as either El or Elohim (hence the E). The J source refers to the Hebrew god as Yahweh (and is known as J because of the way Yahweh is spelled in German, the language of much pioneering biblical scholarship, including Wellhausen’s).
The documentary hypothesis suggests that at some point in Israelite history there were indeed two geographically distinct traditions to reconcile, one worshipping a god named El and one worshipping a god named Yahweh. Adherents of this scenario say the J author(s) lived in the south, in the part of Israel known as Judah, and the E author(s) lived to the north-which, notably, is closer to the heartland of El worship.
Wellhausen’s scheme doesn’t enjoy the near universal esteem it had in the mid-twentieth century, but there’s no denying that the Bible features different vocabularies for Israel’s god. And if indeed the Hebrew god was the result of a merger-perhaps between a faction whose main deity was a creator god named El and another faction that worshipped a war god named Yahweh-this would be nothing new. As we’ve seen, the ancient world was full of politically expedient theological fusions. A common catalyst was that the two parties had a somewhat non-zero-sum relationship. Specifically: both felt they could get more from cooperation, even consolidation, than from conflict.
Certainly the Bible holds hints of once separate groups having united. It describes Israel at the end of the late second millennium BCE, before it evolved into a state-level society complete with a king, as a confederation of twelve tribes. In the Bible’s earliest list of tribes, however, some of the twelve are nowhere to be found. The missing tribes are southern; apparently the tribes that constituted Israel at this early date were in northern Canaan, where worship of El would be most likely. Hence, perhaps, the name Israel.
The merging of Israel’s tribes may be dimly reflected in the story of the patriarchs--Abraham who begat Isaac who beg-at Jacob. Few scholars think this lineage is accurate, but most think it is significant. Matty buy some variation on a theory put forth in 1930 by the German scholar Martin Noth: the different patriarchs had once been sacred ancestors of different tribes; one tribe claimed Abraham as founder, another Isaac, another Jacob.
the strange story behind another part of this verse: the phrase “children“ of Israel.”
The King James edition got this phrase from the “Masoretic Text,” a Hebrew edition of the Bible that took shape in the early Middle Ages, more than a millennium after Deuteronomy “as written. Where the Masoretic Text-the earliest extant Hebrew Bible got it is a mystery. The phrase isn’t found in either of the two much earlier versions of the verse now available: a Hebrew version in the Dead Sea Scrolls and a Greek version in the Septuagint. a pre-Christian translation of the Hebrew Bible.
Why would some editor have invented the phrase? Was some thing being covered up?
Some scholars who have used the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint to reconstruct the authentic version of the verse say that “children of Israel” was stuck in as a replacement for “sons of El.” With that lost phrase restored, a verse that was cryptic suddenly makes sense: El-the most high god, Elyon-divided the world‘s people into ethnic groups and gave one group to each of his sons. And Yahweh, one of those sons, was given the people of Jacob. Apparently at this point in Israelite history (and there’s no telling how long ago this story originated) Yahweh isn’t God, but just a god-and a son of God, one among many.
So how does Yahweh rise through the ranks? How does a god initially consigned to a lower level of the pantheon eventually merge with the chief god, El, and even, in a sense, supplant him? To judge by other examples of divine upward mobility in the ancient world, one likely explanation would be a shift in the relative power of northern and southern Israel, of El’s heartland and Yahweh’s heart~ land. Such an increase in southern Israel’s relative power may well have been under way during the eighth century BCE-and certainly it assumed dramatic form near the end of the century, when, as we’ll see in the next chapter, the north fell to Assyrian conquest. It was after this consolidation of power in the south that most of the Hebrew Bible was written, so southern scribes who were champions of Yahweh would have had a chance to augment his stature and to downplay a northern El-centric perspective.
From an objective standpoint, then, there is no reason to assume that the advent of Israelite monotheism took place anywhere other than Canaan, after centuries of immersion in Canaanite culture; no reason to doubt that Israelite religion is exactly the kind of organic outgrowth of the local culture that Kaufmann and Albright said it wasn‘t. It’s even possible that Yahweh, who spends so much of the Bible fighting against those nasty Canaanite gods for the allegiance of Israelites, actually started life as a Canaanite god, not an import.
The test of this evolutionary hypothesis -or at least the first test of it-is whether it is illuminating. Does it help clear up murky parts of Yahweh’s history? If we examine the Bible’s scattered, cryp~ tic clues about Yahweh's origins in light of it, do they then appear less jumbled, more coherent? The answer is yes.
Consider the “divine council” that seems at odds with the basic theology of the Bible, and yet turns up in the Bible more than once. As we‘ve seen, various ancient states, such as Egypt and China, seem to have modeled their pantheons at least partly on governmental structures. And Mesopotamia featured, more specifically, a deliberative assembly of gods-a council. Given that Mesopotamia is in the general vicinity of Canaan, it wouldn’t be shocking to find some such assembly in the early Canaanite tradition.
And, indeed, that’s what we find in Ugarit, the ancient city in northern Canaan whose translated texts have so illuminated the context of Israelite religion. There, at the end of the Bronze Age, on the eve of Israel’s birth, is a divine council. And the god most often depicted as its chief -a god named El (pronounced ale or el) bears a curious resemblance to Yahweh. Both gods were strong yet sensitive. El was seen as a “bull,” yet was also called “Kind El, the compassionate." Similarly, Yahweh, even in that early appearance as a warrior god, was driven by his compassion for the Israelites-~“thy steadfast love” for “the people whom thou hast redeemed.” Both gods appeared in dreams, became the patrons of the dreamers, and spoke often through prophets.“ And both were paternalistic creator gods: El was “creator of creatures” and “father of humanity.” As Smith has put it, El was “the divine father par excellence.”
The literal meaning of the Ugaritic term for the Canaanite “divine council” is, not surprisingly, “Council of El.” A bit more surprising is that if you peer beneath English versions of the Bible and examine the Hebrew rendering of the “divine council” on which God sits in Psalm 82, you find this phrase: adat El -which can be translated as “Council of El.” Hmmm.
And that’s just the beginning. It turns out that if you peer beneath the English word “god” in some parts of the Bible, you will find not the Hebrew word for Yahweh, but rather the Hebrew word El. Given that the Canaanite El appears on the historical record before the Israelite god Yahweh, it is tempting to conclude that Yahweh in some way emerged from El, and may even have started life as a renamed version of El.
There is cause for at least preliminary resistance to that temptation: the Hebrew word El is like the English word “god”-it can refer either to deities in general (“Hermes, a god of ancient Greece”) or to a particular deity (God with an uppercase G). The difference is that ancient Hebrew didn’t use the uppercase/lowercase convention to keep things clear. So you can’t infer, every time you see the Hebrew god called El, that his name is El.
Still, there are a few times in the Bible when the “El” applied to the Hebrew god indeed seems to be a proper noun. According to Genesis, Jacob “erected an altar and called it El-Elohe-Israel.” This could be translated as “god, the god of Israel,” but if you don’t capitalize the first “god” it doesn’t make much sense; it would be like dedicating an altar to “deity, the deity of Israel.” In other words, the first “god” has to be a specific god, and the specific god named El that we know of in that part of the world was head of the pantheon in northern Canaan. (Indeed, some English translations of Genesis render “El-Elohe-Israel” unabashedly as “El, God of Israel.”) If that’s not a close enough link between Israelite religion and El, look at the “uni "Israel“ itself." In ancient times names were often inspired by gods. and names ending in “el” typically referred to the god El.
An especially intriguing biblical appearance of the word El is in the phrase El Shaddai, famously rendered in English as “God Almighty.” As it turns out, “Almighty" is a mistranslation; though the exact meaning of Shaddai remains cloudy, it seems to refer to mountains not omnipotence-but that‘s another story.‘‘ For present purposes. what‘s interesting is the way this name is used in the sixth chapter of Exodus. during one of Moses’s conversations with God. God says. “I am Yahweh. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as El Shaddai. but by my name Yahweh I did not make myself known to them." Even Yahweh himself says that he started life with the name Ell”
Of course. Yahweh doesn't explicitly say he started life as the Canaanite god El. And at the time he is speaking, the Israelites (in the Bible‘s telling of the story) haven‘t yet gotten to Canaan. But this story may have entered Israel’s historical narrative much later than it is said to have happened. And if there is one lesson of modern biblical scholarship, it‘s that stories often say more about the era of their creation than about the era they claim to describe.
So what does Exodus 6 suggest about the era of its creation? If you were crafting a history of your god, why would you add such an odd twist. saying that he used to go by another name? Theories abound. One is this: you are trying to meld two religious traditions; you are trying to convince two groups of people-one that worships a god called Yahweh and another that warships a god called El-that they actually worship the same gods"
Supporters of this theory sometimes invoke a pattern in the Bible that was famously emphasized by the nineteenth-century scholar Julius Wellhausen. According to Wellhausen’s “documentary hypothesis.” the early phases of the biblical narrative from creation through the time of Moses-come largely from two authors (or two groups of like~minded authors), one known as the J source and one known as the E source. The E source refers to the Hebrew god as either El or Elohim (hence the E). The J source refers to the Hebrew god as Yahweh (and is known as J because of the way Yahweh is spelled in German, the language of much pioneering biblical scholarship, including Wellhausen’s).
The documentary hypothesis suggests that at some point in Israelite history there were indeed two geographically distinct traditions to reconcile, one worshipping a god named El and one worshipping a god named Yahweh. Adherents of this scenario say the J author(s) lived in the south, in the part of Israel known as Judah, and the E author(s) lived to the north-which, notably, is closer to the heartland of El worship.
Wellhausen’s scheme doesn’t enjoy the near universal esteem it had in the mid-twentieth century, but there’s no denying that the Bible features different vocabularies for Israel’s god. And if indeed the Hebrew god was the result of a merger-perhaps between a faction whose main deity was a creator god named El and another faction that worshipped a war god named Yahweh-this would be nothing new. As we’ve seen, the ancient world was full of politically expedient theological fusions. A common catalyst was that the two parties had a somewhat non-zero-sum relationship. Specifically: both felt they could get more from cooperation, even consolidation, than from conflict.
Certainly the Bible holds hints of once separate groups having united. It describes Israel at the end of the late second millennium BCE, before it evolved into a state-level society complete with a king, as a confederation of twelve tribes. In the Bible’s earliest list of tribes, however, some of the twelve are nowhere to be found. The missing tribes are southern; apparently the tribes that constituted Israel at this early date were in northern Canaan, where worship of El would be most likely. Hence, perhaps, the name Israel.
The merging of Israel’s tribes may be dimly reflected in the story of the patriarchs--Abraham who begat Isaac who beg-at Jacob. Few scholars think this lineage is accurate, but most think it is significant. Matty buy some variation on a theory put forth in 1930 by the German scholar Martin Noth: the different patriarchs had once been sacred ancestors of different tribes; one tribe claimed Abraham as founder, another Isaac, another Jacob.
and
the strange story behind another part of this verse: the phrase “children“ of Israel.”
The King James edition got this phrase from the “Masoretic Text,” a Hebrew edition of the Bible that took shape in the early Middle Ages, more than a millennium after Deuteronomy “as written. Where the Masoretic Text-the earliest extant Hebrew Bible got it is a mystery. The phrase isn’t found in either of the two much earlier versions of the verse now available: a Hebrew version in the Dead Sea Scrolls and a Greek version in the Septuagint. a pre-Christian translation of the Hebrew Bible.
Why would some editor have invented the phrase? Was some thing being covered up?
Some scholars who have used the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint to reconstruct the authentic version of the verse say that “children of Israel” was stuck in as a replacement for “sons of El.” With that lost phrase restored, a verse that was cryptic suddenly makes sense: El-the most high god, Elyon-divided the world‘s people into ethnic groups and gave one group to each of his sons. And Yahweh, one of those sons, was given the people of Jacob. Apparently at this point in Israelite history (and there’s no telling how long ago this story originated) Yahweh isn’t God, but just a god-and a son of God, one among many.
So how does Yahweh rise through the ranks? How does a god initially consigned to a lower level of the pantheon eventually merge with the chief god, El, and even, in a sense, supplant him? To judge by other examples of divine upward mobility in the ancient world, one likely explanation would be a shift in the relative power of northern and southern Israel, of El’s heartland and Yahweh’s heart~ land. Such an increase in southern Israel’s relative power may well have been under way during the eighth century BCE-and certainly it assumed dramatic form near the end of the century, when, as we’ll see in the next chapter, the north fell to Assyrian conquest. It was after this consolidation of power in the south that most of the Hebrew Bible was written, so southern scribes who were champions of Yahweh would have had a chance to augment his stature and to downplay a northern El-centric perspective.
and
Yahweh’s Sex Life (and Other Myths)
Still enough remains visible to complicate the task of those who claim to see large and sharp differences between the Abrahamic god and other gods in the vicinity. One oft-claimed difference for example. is that whereas the pagan gods had sex lives, Yahweh didn‘t “Israel‘s God." as Kaufmann put it, “has no sexual qualities or desires." It‘s true that there's no biblical ode to Yahweh that Compares with the Ugaritic boast that Baal copulated with a heifer 77 times,” even “88 times,” or that El’s penis “extends like the sea?” And it seems puzzling: If Yahweh eventually merged with El, and El had a sex life, why didn’t the postmerger Yahweh have one? Why, more specifically, didn’t Yahweh inherit El’s consort, the goddess Athirat?
Maybe he did. There are references in the Bible to a goddess named Asherah, and scholars have long believed that Asherah is just the Hebrew version of Athirat. Of course, the biblical writers don’t depict Asherah as God’s wife-this isn’t the sort of theological theme they generally championed-but rather heap disdain on her, and on the Israelites who worshipped her. However, in the late twentieth century, archaeologists discovered intriguing inscriptions, dating to around 800 BCE, at two different Middle Eastern sites. The inscriptions were blessings in the name not just of Yahweh but of “his Asherah.” The word “his” puts a suggestive spin on a passage in 2 Kings reporting that, near the end of the seventh century, Asherah was spending time in Yahweh’s temple. A priest who didn’t favor polytheism “brought out the image of Asherah from the house of the Lord, outside Jerusalem, to the Wadi Kidron, burned it at the Wadi Kidron, beat it to dust and threw the dust of it upon the graves of the common people.” In the next chapter we’ll see what a crucial moment in the evolution of monotheism this was.
The question of Yahweh’s sex life is part of a larger question that has high stakes: How mythological was Yahweh? Not “mythological” in the sense of not being true, but rather in the sense that Greek gods were mythological: Were there stories about Yahweh’s dramatic dealings with other extraordinary beings? Did he fight some gods or demigods and pal around with others? Was he part of a supernatural soap opera?
Many scholars have said no. Indeed, in Kaufmann’s View, the “non-mythological” nature of Yahweh “is the essence of Israelite religion" and sets Israelite religion “apart from all forms of paganism," cenainly including native Canaanite religion.
There is doubly bad news for those who, like Kaufmann, would hail Yahweh as a clean break from pagan myth. First, there are signs that the break wasn’t so clean-that, like so much else in the his tory of religion, it was more evolutionary than revolutionary. Second, when you try to trace this evolution, you see that Yahweh’s family tree may contain something even more scandalous than an early fusion with the Canaanite deity El. It may be that Yahweh, even while inheriting El’s genes, somehow acquired genes from the most reviled of all Canaanite deities: Baal.
Baal was of course immersed deeply in myth. He did battle with Yamm, the god of the sea, and Mot, the god of death. One Ugaritic text even says that he “smote Lotan,” a seven-headed “dragon.” Talk about mythological!
Then again, the Bible pays this tribute to Yahweh: “You broke the heads of the dragons in the waters. You crushed the heads of Leviathan.” And the ancient Hebrew word underlying Leviathan- Livyaton-is, so far as we can tell, just Hebrew for “Lotan”; apparently Yahweh not only slew multiheaded dragons, but slew the very multiheaded dragon that Baal slew. That same chapter of Psalms credits Yahweh with subduing the sea. Or, perhaps, Sea: some translators capitalize the word, because underlying it is yam, the ancient Hebrew word for the sea god that Baal smote. The Bible also promises, in the book of Isaiah, that Yahweh will “swallow up death forever”---and underlying “death” is the Hebrew word for Mot, the god of death with whom Baal struggled dramatically.
So why do English translations of the Bible say “sea” instead of “Yamm” and “death” instead of “Mot”? Ancient Hebrew didn’t have capital letters. When you see the Hebrew word mawet in isolation, you can’t say whether it is the proper noun meaning Mot or the generic noun meaning death. So the Bible’s translators can take their pick, and as a rule they’ve picked generic nouns. But you have to wonder about this choice. In deciding whether Yahweh was “swallowing up” Mot or merely death. for example: surely it is no coincidence that in Canaanite mythology Mot was famous for “swallowing” people at the end of their lives and delivering them to “Sheol,” the afterlife underworld or that Mot had once swallowed Yahweh’s rival, Baal.
Or consider the Bible’s puzzling reference to Yahweh’s “wrath against the rivers” and his “rage against the sea.” Why would Yahweh be upset with rivers and sea? How could he blame water for flowing? Wouldn’t these passages make more sense if the Hebrew words for “rivers” and “sea” (nahar and yam) were translated as Nahar and Yamm, the supernatural beings with whom Baal had fought in such mythological fashion? (Perhaps feeling a pang of conscience, the translators of the New Revised Standard Version obscurely acknowledge this possibility, with tine-print footnotes that say “or against River” and “or against Sea”) The case for a mythological translation only grows when you see how Yahweh himself appears in these passages. He conquers the forces of nature in a chariot (“You trampled the sea with your horses”). He brandishes a bow and intimidates the moon and the sun with “the light of your arrows” and the “gleam of your flashing spear.”
These last two images are generally taken to refer to lightning, and here lies yet another blurring of the line between the myths of those pagan Canaanites and the religion of ancient Israel: Yahweh, in addition to fighting the very forces of nature that Baal fights against and being himself depicted in anthropomorphic terms, as mythological gods often are, is depicted as the particular type of mythological god that Baal was: a storm god. In Psalm 29, Yahweh is the source of thunder and lightning: “The voice of the LORD is over the waters; the God of glory thunders. . . .The voice of the LORD flashes forth flames of fire.”
In 1936, H. L. Ginsberg, a lecturer at the Jewish Theological Seminary, suggested that this poem had originally been a hymn to Baal. Ginsberg’s initially eccentric theory has moved toward the mainstream as evidence for it has grown. One scholar, for instance, changed all the “Yahweh”s in the poem to “Baal”s and found that the amount of alliteration grew radically.
The eminent biblical scholar Frank Moore Cross has argued that one of the keystone events of the entire Bible-the crossing of the Red Sea-has roots in Baal mythology.” He notes that this episode features, in a sense, the sea submitting to God’s will, a faint echo of Baal‘s dominating Sea (Yamm) in battle. And certainly there is a mythic air about the account of the event in Exodus 15. Here the scene is nothing like the (probably later) account in Exodus 14 that is the one depicted in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments; the waters don’t just part majestically at Moses’s request and then reunite to drown the Egyptians. Rather, God is conspicuously, anthropomorphically, involved, and his mastery over the sea commensurately vivid: “At the blast of your nostrils the waters piled up, the floods stood up in a heap.”
But, whatever the parallels between the Red Sea episode and the myths of Baal, there is one big difference. Whereas the Baal myths take place in a supernatural ‘realm, the biblical story is fun- damentally about human history. Yes, the story is crucially shaped by intervention from on high, but the real action is on the ground. As Cross puts it, Yahweh’s battles, unlike the typical Baal battle, are “particularized in place and time.” A “mythic pattern” has been replaced by an “epic pattern.” Hence the title of his influential 1973 book, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic.
Even when Yahweh acts in plainly mythological fashion-slaying a multiheaded dragon, say-the biblical reference is fleeting; there is no lengthy plotline. “Mythic imagery is abundant in the Bible,” observes Mark S. Smith, yet “myth as narrative” is nearly absent. Smith’s explanation for the dearth of narrative myth involves, among other things, deletion. Toward the middle of the first millennium BCE, he says, mythological motifs fell out of fashion; Hebrew scriptures composed then depict God in less anthropomorphic form than before, and sometimes as formless. Smith argues that during this period, when myth was frowned on, earlier texts were being edited and re-edited; maybe priests found their View of Yahweh at odds with earlier accounts of his exploits and “chose not to preserve them, thereby functionally censoring them ”
But why go to the trouble? Even if myth had grown unfashionable, why bother to erase memory of its previous vogue? Probably because there were great theological stakes. After all, mythological gods deal with other formidable gods and sometimes find their will thwarted; but if you’re the one, all-powerful God, your will can’t be thwarted! Mythology, in other words, meant polytheism. So a project to strip early mythic narrative from scripture might have been part of a larger project: reworking the scriptures to imply that from the dawn of Israelite religion Yahweh was all-powerful and worthy of exclusive devotion. (The scholar Marjo Christina Annette Korpel compared Ugaritic and biblical descriptions of the divine and found “spectacularly” similar language “where strength, honour, dignity and compassion are concerned,” whereas “everything implying weakness, humiliation or desire is shunned in the Old Testament”)
This motivation would explain the kinds of mythological moments that did survive the editing. More than once, a plotline lasts just long enough to suggest that, if a basis for polytheism ever existed, it is now gone. In Psalm 82-the aforementioned divine council scene, in which God takes his seat among other gods-the scene ends with him predicting their death; or, in one common interpretation, sentencing them to death for their misdeeds.
Similarly, Yahweh’s encounter with the gods Sea and River lasts just long enough for him to casually subdue these pesky remnants of a bygone polytheism. Leaving that part of Baal’s legacy attached to Yahweh was theologically safe. But what about Baal’s setbacks, such as being “swallowed” by Mot, the god Death? Such humiliation wouldn’t befit a god worthy of exclusive devotion, and indeed the scriptures, as edited, don’t show Yahweh inheriting this part of Baal’s identity. Instead, we see that promise in the book of Isaiah that eventually Yahweh will “swallow up” Mot “forever,” a pointed assertion of Yahweh’s superiority not just to Mot but to Baal.‘
In a sense, then, the mid-first-millennium editors who in Smith’s account helped to demythologize the Bible weren’t bent on extirpating myth per se. Indeed. it was only later translators who changed Sea to sea and River to river and Death to death. The enemy, rather was myth in which gods other than the star of the show were formidable. And since narrative holds interest only when its ooutcome is sin doubt, that is when there is more than one formidable character-the death of these motifs meant the death of true mythic narrative.
This joint demise of polytheism and mythic narrative can be glimpsed, refracted, through shards of myth that remain in the Bible. A verse in the book of Habakkuk, as commonly translated, reads “God came from...Mount Paran" and “before him went pestilence. and plague followed close behind.”But the Hebrew words underlying “pestilence" and ‘plague” are the words for the gods of pestilence and plague, Deber and Resheph. In the Canaanite pantheon Deber and Resheph had been fiercely destructive,‘ but, as Smith has noted, that part of their identity doesn‘t make it into the Bible Rather, they appear as unassuming members of Yahweh’s retinue. And later translators, by turning the names of these gods into generic nouns, converted Pestilence and Plague from minor deities to men aspects of Yahweh’s power, and abstract aspects at that. Yahweh here seems to be repeating the strategy we saw Marduk exercise in the previous chapter. moving toward monotheism through subtle con quest, assimilating other gods into his being.
This passage from Habakkuk illustrates Smith‘s account of hot Canaanite polytheism got streamlined into Israelite monotheism. Gods that had ranked below El in the pantheon, such as Deber and Resheph, shrank in stature and eventually disappeared altogether. With the midlevel management now gone, all that was left of the downsized pantheon was a deity at the very top-now known at Yahweh-and supernatural beings at the very bottom: the divine messengers, or angels.
Maybe he did. There are references in the Bible to a goddess named Asherah, and scholars have long believed that Asherah is just the Hebrew version of Athirat. Of course, the biblical writers don’t depict Asherah as God’s wife-this isn’t the sort of theological theme they generally championed-but rather heap disdain on her, and on the Israelites who worshipped her. However, in the late twentieth century, archaeologists discovered intriguing inscriptions, dating to around 800 BCE, at two different Middle Eastern sites. The inscriptions were blessings in the name not just of Yahweh but of “his Asherah.” The word “his” puts a suggestive spin on a passage in 2 Kings reporting that, near the end of the seventh century, Asherah was spending time in Yahweh’s temple. A priest who didn’t favor polytheism “brought out the image of Asherah from the house of the Lord, outside Jerusalem, to the Wadi Kidron, burned it at the Wadi Kidron, beat it to dust and threw the dust of it upon the graves of the common people.” In the next chapter we’ll see what a crucial moment in the evolution of monotheism this was.
The question of Yahweh’s sex life is part of a larger question that has high stakes: How mythological was Yahweh? Not “mythological” in the sense of not being true, but rather in the sense that Greek gods were mythological: Were there stories about Yahweh’s dramatic dealings with other extraordinary beings? Did he fight some gods or demigods and pal around with others? Was he part of a supernatural soap opera?
Many scholars have said no. Indeed, in Kaufmann’s View, the “non-mythological” nature of Yahweh “is the essence of Israelite religion" and sets Israelite religion “apart from all forms of paganism," cenainly including native Canaanite religion.
There is doubly bad news for those who, like Kaufmann, would hail Yahweh as a clean break from pagan myth. First, there are signs that the break wasn’t so clean-that, like so much else in the his tory of religion, it was more evolutionary than revolutionary. Second, when you try to trace this evolution, you see that Yahweh’s family tree may contain something even more scandalous than an early fusion with the Canaanite deity El. It may be that Yahweh, even while inheriting El’s genes, somehow acquired genes from the most reviled of all Canaanite deities: Baal.
Baal was of course immersed deeply in myth. He did battle with Yamm, the god of the sea, and Mot, the god of death. One Ugaritic text even says that he “smote Lotan,” a seven-headed “dragon.” Talk about mythological!
Then again, the Bible pays this tribute to Yahweh: “You broke the heads of the dragons in the waters. You crushed the heads of Leviathan.” And the ancient Hebrew word underlying Leviathan- Livyaton-is, so far as we can tell, just Hebrew for “Lotan”; apparently Yahweh not only slew multiheaded dragons, but slew the very multiheaded dragon that Baal slew. That same chapter of Psalms credits Yahweh with subduing the sea. Or, perhaps, Sea: some translators capitalize the word, because underlying it is yam, the ancient Hebrew word for the sea god that Baal smote. The Bible also promises, in the book of Isaiah, that Yahweh will “swallow up death forever”---and underlying “death” is the Hebrew word for Mot, the god of death with whom Baal struggled dramatically.
So why do English translations of the Bible say “sea” instead of “Yamm” and “death” instead of “Mot”? Ancient Hebrew didn’t have capital letters. When you see the Hebrew word mawet in isolation, you can’t say whether it is the proper noun meaning Mot or the generic noun meaning death. So the Bible’s translators can take their pick, and as a rule they’ve picked generic nouns. But you have to wonder about this choice. In deciding whether Yahweh was “swallowing up” Mot or merely death. for example: surely it is no coincidence that in Canaanite mythology Mot was famous for “swallowing” people at the end of their lives and delivering them to “Sheol,” the afterlife underworld or that Mot had once swallowed Yahweh’s rival, Baal.
Or consider the Bible’s puzzling reference to Yahweh’s “wrath against the rivers” and his “rage against the sea.” Why would Yahweh be upset with rivers and sea? How could he blame water for flowing? Wouldn’t these passages make more sense if the Hebrew words for “rivers” and “sea” (nahar and yam) were translated as Nahar and Yamm, the supernatural beings with whom Baal had fought in such mythological fashion? (Perhaps feeling a pang of conscience, the translators of the New Revised Standard Version obscurely acknowledge this possibility, with tine-print footnotes that say “or against River” and “or against Sea”) The case for a mythological translation only grows when you see how Yahweh himself appears in these passages. He conquers the forces of nature in a chariot (“You trampled the sea with your horses”). He brandishes a bow and intimidates the moon and the sun with “the light of your arrows” and the “gleam of your flashing spear.”
These last two images are generally taken to refer to lightning, and here lies yet another blurring of the line between the myths of those pagan Canaanites and the religion of ancient Israel: Yahweh, in addition to fighting the very forces of nature that Baal fights against and being himself depicted in anthropomorphic terms, as mythological gods often are, is depicted as the particular type of mythological god that Baal was: a storm god. In Psalm 29, Yahweh is the source of thunder and lightning: “The voice of the LORD is over the waters; the God of glory thunders. . . .The voice of the LORD flashes forth flames of fire.”
In 1936, H. L. Ginsberg, a lecturer at the Jewish Theological Seminary, suggested that this poem had originally been a hymn to Baal. Ginsberg’s initially eccentric theory has moved toward the mainstream as evidence for it has grown. One scholar, for instance, changed all the “Yahweh”s in the poem to “Baal”s and found that the amount of alliteration grew radically.
The eminent biblical scholar Frank Moore Cross has argued that one of the keystone events of the entire Bible-the crossing of the Red Sea-has roots in Baal mythology.” He notes that this episode features, in a sense, the sea submitting to God’s will, a faint echo of Baal‘s dominating Sea (Yamm) in battle. And certainly there is a mythic air about the account of the event in Exodus 15. Here the scene is nothing like the (probably later) account in Exodus 14 that is the one depicted in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments; the waters don’t just part majestically at Moses’s request and then reunite to drown the Egyptians. Rather, God is conspicuously, anthropomorphically, involved, and his mastery over the sea commensurately vivid: “At the blast of your nostrils the waters piled up, the floods stood up in a heap.”
But, whatever the parallels between the Red Sea episode and the myths of Baal, there is one big difference. Whereas the Baal myths take place in a supernatural ‘realm, the biblical story is fun- damentally about human history. Yes, the story is crucially shaped by intervention from on high, but the real action is on the ground. As Cross puts it, Yahweh’s battles, unlike the typical Baal battle, are “particularized in place and time.” A “mythic pattern” has been replaced by an “epic pattern.” Hence the title of his influential 1973 book, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic.
Even when Yahweh acts in plainly mythological fashion-slaying a multiheaded dragon, say-the biblical reference is fleeting; there is no lengthy plotline. “Mythic imagery is abundant in the Bible,” observes Mark S. Smith, yet “myth as narrative” is nearly absent. Smith’s explanation for the dearth of narrative myth involves, among other things, deletion. Toward the middle of the first millennium BCE, he says, mythological motifs fell out of fashion; Hebrew scriptures composed then depict God in less anthropomorphic form than before, and sometimes as formless. Smith argues that during this period, when myth was frowned on, earlier texts were being edited and re-edited; maybe priests found their View of Yahweh at odds with earlier accounts of his exploits and “chose not to preserve them, thereby functionally censoring them ”
But why go to the trouble? Even if myth had grown unfashionable, why bother to erase memory of its previous vogue? Probably because there were great theological stakes. After all, mythological gods deal with other formidable gods and sometimes find their will thwarted; but if you’re the one, all-powerful God, your will can’t be thwarted! Mythology, in other words, meant polytheism. So a project to strip early mythic narrative from scripture might have been part of a larger project: reworking the scriptures to imply that from the dawn of Israelite religion Yahweh was all-powerful and worthy of exclusive devotion. (The scholar Marjo Christina Annette Korpel compared Ugaritic and biblical descriptions of the divine and found “spectacularly” similar language “where strength, honour, dignity and compassion are concerned,” whereas “everything implying weakness, humiliation or desire is shunned in the Old Testament”)
This motivation would explain the kinds of mythological moments that did survive the editing. More than once, a plotline lasts just long enough to suggest that, if a basis for polytheism ever existed, it is now gone. In Psalm 82-the aforementioned divine council scene, in which God takes his seat among other gods-the scene ends with him predicting their death; or, in one common interpretation, sentencing them to death for their misdeeds.
Similarly, Yahweh’s encounter with the gods Sea and River lasts just long enough for him to casually subdue these pesky remnants of a bygone polytheism. Leaving that part of Baal’s legacy attached to Yahweh was theologically safe. But what about Baal’s setbacks, such as being “swallowed” by Mot, the god Death? Such humiliation wouldn’t befit a god worthy of exclusive devotion, and indeed the scriptures, as edited, don’t show Yahweh inheriting this part of Baal’s identity. Instead, we see that promise in the book of Isaiah that eventually Yahweh will “swallow up” Mot “forever,” a pointed assertion of Yahweh’s superiority not just to Mot but to Baal.‘
In a sense, then, the mid-first-millennium editors who in Smith’s account helped to demythologize the Bible weren’t bent on extirpating myth per se. Indeed. it was only later translators who changed Sea to sea and River to river and Death to death. The enemy, rather was myth in which gods other than the star of the show were formidable. And since narrative holds interest only when its ooutcome is sin doubt, that is when there is more than one formidable character-the death of these motifs meant the death of true mythic narrative.
This joint demise of polytheism and mythic narrative can be glimpsed, refracted, through shards of myth that remain in the Bible. A verse in the book of Habakkuk, as commonly translated, reads “God came from...Mount Paran" and “before him went pestilence. and plague followed close behind.”But the Hebrew words underlying “pestilence" and ‘plague” are the words for the gods of pestilence and plague, Deber and Resheph. In the Canaanite pantheon Deber and Resheph had been fiercely destructive,‘ but, as Smith has noted, that part of their identity doesn‘t make it into the Bible Rather, they appear as unassuming members of Yahweh’s retinue. And later translators, by turning the names of these gods into generic nouns, converted Pestilence and Plague from minor deities to men aspects of Yahweh’s power, and abstract aspects at that. Yahweh here seems to be repeating the strategy we saw Marduk exercise in the previous chapter. moving toward monotheism through subtle con quest, assimilating other gods into his being.
This passage from Habakkuk illustrates Smith‘s account of hot Canaanite polytheism got streamlined into Israelite monotheism. Gods that had ranked below El in the pantheon, such as Deber and Resheph, shrank in stature and eventually disappeared altogether. With the midlevel management now gone, all that was left of the downsized pantheon was a deity at the very top-now known at Yahweh-and supernatural beings at the very bottom: the divine messengers, or angels.
Tuesday, September 05, 2017
The Cut-ups from Miles' Burroughs
Hassan-i-Sabbah himself was a member of the Nizari lsma’ili sect who held to the doctrine that Qiyanrat-the Resurrection, the day of judgment, the fifth fundamental belief of Islam-~-has already come, thus obviating all their religious obligations. They could drink wine, use cannabis,‘ have sex during Ramadan, and neglect their prayers. The historian Henri Corbin described the doctrine of Qiyamat as “nothing less than the coming of a pure spiritual Islam, freed from all spirit of legalism and of all enslave ment to the law, a personal religion of the Resurrection which is spiritual birth.”6 But this was secret knowledge, only imparted to Masters and Fel~ lows, the Dais or emissaries, who were initiated into all the grades of the secret doctrine. For the vast majority of his subjects, Hassan was rigid in his imposition of the strictest Islamic laws.7 The word “assassin” is a derogatory term, derived from hashishi, used by Hassan’s opponents to trivialize the assassins’ beliefs as being mere cannabis dreams.
That everything was seen to be illusion-“nothing is true”-meant that everything was permitted, a phrase seized upon by Burroughs and Gysin as a summation of the philosophy of Hassan~i-Sabbah. (It was used by Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 1880.) Burroughs used it as a trope, along with Hassan’s name, cutting it up and giving it many shades of meaning. Decades later, in The Western Lands, he was to confess that perhaps his approach to Hassan-iLSabbah had been faulty and that, “with a carry-over of Christian reflexes,” he had used Hassan’s name “like some Catholic feeling his saint medals.”
2. Cut-Ups
Around lunchtime on the first of October 1959, Brion Gysin was in room 25 of the Beat Hotel, cutting mounts for some drawings, slicing through the mat boards with his Stanley knife and simultaneously slicing through the pile of old copies of the New York Herald Tribune he was using to protect the table. When he finished, he saw that where the strips of newsprint were sliced, they peeled back and the words on the next page showed through and could be read across, combining stories from different pages. He found some of the combinations so amusing that the people in the next room knocked on the door, concerned that he was having a hysteria attack. Burroughs had been to lunch with two reporters from a magazine and on his return, Gysin excitedly showed him his discovery. Bill agreed that the results were amusing, but immediately recognized its importance as a technique and pronounced it to be “a project for disastrous success.” He could see that cut-ups literally enabled you to “read between the lines” and find out what the newspapers were really saying.
Together they began experimenting, initially with the magazines in Gysin’s room: the Saturday Evening Post and Time. They picked the best word and phrase combinations and used the results as poems, but quickly became frustrated by the mundane words at their disposal. They began Placing the strips of newsprint on texts by Rimbaud and Shakespeare and the results showed a marked improvement. As Burroughs said, “A page of Rimbaud cut up and rearranged will give you quite new images-real Rimbaud images--but new ones. [. . .] Cut-ups establish new connections between images, and one’s range of Vision consequently expands.” He recognized the importance of good source material. “I could see right away all the possibilities of cut-ups, where you have one image, you can have six out of that. What cuts up well are images, so you take Rimbaud and start cutting it up you get all sorts of quite good Rimbaud. We made a number of experiments, cut up my own texts, cut up other texts, cut up the Bible and Shakespeare and the classics, cut up experiments.”
Cut-ups held an obvious appeal for Burroughs, whose work was already fragmented. The Naked Lunch, with its lack of narrative or character development, its episodic presentation and random order of chapters, has sometimes been mistaken for a cut-up text even though it was written before their discovery. Burroughs was well aware of the idea’s antecedents: Eliot’s The Waste Land, the first great cut-up collage; Tristan Tzara’s poems made from words pulled from a hat; the “Camera Eye” sequence in USA by Dos Passos. Burroughs said, “I felt I had been working toward the same goal; thus it was a major revelation to me when I actually saw it being done.”
Slicing lines of text from articles was cumbersome and they quickly Progressed to an easier system. A page of text from a book, a magazine, a newspaper, or a letter was simply cut into four sections. The margins were trimmed off and the sections were moved against each other until a likely Phase or sentence was found. This was typed out on a new sheet of paper. ilk process was repeated for as long as it produced interesting new word combinations. They went through Rimbaud, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Life magazine features, whatever came to hand, and typed out anything that might their eye. They did not paste up the juxtaposed pages; there was no point. In cutting the pages with scissors, some words were cut in half and could be combined to make not just new phrases but new words: cut words.
There were many different methods of cutting text, but they all had one thing in common: they introduced a random juxtaposition of text; to give new word combinations. Only those lines of literary interest were typed up on a separate page. Sometimes Burroughs would only get one 0, two lines from the combinations offered and move on to another. These new pages might themselves be cut up, removing the material even further from its source.
Naturally they wanted to share their discovery with everyone, and soon Gregory Corso and Sinclair Beiles were engaged in cut-ups as well. Beiles had been persuaded to move to the hotel by Gysin, who thought that he really belonged there, with them, after his sterling work on getting The Naked Lunch into print. Corso was torn between his desire to be part of the experiment and join in the enthusiasm and excitement it was causing, and his core belief in the power of the muse. His contribution consisted mostly in cutting up the work of others: letters from friends, a poem by Allen Ginsberg, a stanza or two of Shelley. When the results of these initial experiments in cut-ups were published as Minutes to Co, Corso dissociated himself from the other three contributors, writing, “I join this venture unwillingly and willingly. Unwillingly because the poetry I have written was from the soul and not from the dictionary; willingly because if it can be destroyed or bettered by the ‘cut-up’ method, then it is poetry I care not for, and so should be cut-up. [. . .] to the muse I say: ‘Thank you for the poesy that cannot be destroyed that is in me’-for this I have learned after such a short venture in uninspired machine-poetry.”
Sinclair Beiles took the opposite path and cut up his source texts-articles from the Observer, Life, Encounter-again and again until they had such a density as to be bereft of meaning. The arguments between the four of them became so intense that Beiles, who was already in a mentally fragile state, had to sometimes leave the room to throw up. His mother later accused Burroughs of driving her son mad. Beiles has given two similar accounts of what appears to be a conscious imitation of Tristan Tzara’s pulling words out of a hat: “The four of us got together in Gysins room. We cut up bits of books and put them in wooden bowls. We then extracted piece after piece and put them together. The result was Minute to Go.” As this is his memory of his involvement, there must have been at least one experiment of this type.
The first extension of the cut-up method was when Brion Gysin applied it to tape recordings. They read aloud texts taken from poems and news\ paper articles and recorded them. Then the tape was rewound and new passages were cut in at random. Where these cut-ins occurred the old words were wiped off the tape and replaced by the new ones, often giving some interesting juxtapositions. Burroughs wrote, “I would say that my most interesting experience with the earlier techniques was the realization that when you make cut-ups you do not simply get random juxtapositions of words, that they do mean something, and often that these meanings refer to some future event. I’ve made many cut-ups and then later recognized that the cut-up referred to something that I read later in a news‘ paper or in a book, or something that happened. To give a very simple example, I made a cut-up of something Mr. Getty had written, I believe for Time and Tide. The following phrase emerged: ‘It’s a bad thing to sue your own father.’ About three years later his son sued him. Perhaps events are pre-written and pre-recorded and when you cut word lines the future leaks out.”
That everything was seen to be illusion-“nothing is true”-meant that everything was permitted, a phrase seized upon by Burroughs and Gysin as a summation of the philosophy of Hassan~i-Sabbah. (It was used by Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 1880.) Burroughs used it as a trope, along with Hassan’s name, cutting it up and giving it many shades of meaning. Decades later, in The Western Lands, he was to confess that perhaps his approach to Hassan-iLSabbah had been faulty and that, “with a carry-over of Christian reflexes,” he had used Hassan’s name “like some Catholic feeling his saint medals.”
2. Cut-Ups
Around lunchtime on the first of October 1959, Brion Gysin was in room 25 of the Beat Hotel, cutting mounts for some drawings, slicing through the mat boards with his Stanley knife and simultaneously slicing through the pile of old copies of the New York Herald Tribune he was using to protect the table. When he finished, he saw that where the strips of newsprint were sliced, they peeled back and the words on the next page showed through and could be read across, combining stories from different pages. He found some of the combinations so amusing that the people in the next room knocked on the door, concerned that he was having a hysteria attack. Burroughs had been to lunch with two reporters from a magazine and on his return, Gysin excitedly showed him his discovery. Bill agreed that the results were amusing, but immediately recognized its importance as a technique and pronounced it to be “a project for disastrous success.” He could see that cut-ups literally enabled you to “read between the lines” and find out what the newspapers were really saying.
Together they began experimenting, initially with the magazines in Gysin’s room: the Saturday Evening Post and Time. They picked the best word and phrase combinations and used the results as poems, but quickly became frustrated by the mundane words at their disposal. They began Placing the strips of newsprint on texts by Rimbaud and Shakespeare and the results showed a marked improvement. As Burroughs said, “A page of Rimbaud cut up and rearranged will give you quite new images-real Rimbaud images--but new ones. [. . .] Cut-ups establish new connections between images, and one’s range of Vision consequently expands.” He recognized the importance of good source material. “I could see right away all the possibilities of cut-ups, where you have one image, you can have six out of that. What cuts up well are images, so you take Rimbaud and start cutting it up you get all sorts of quite good Rimbaud. We made a number of experiments, cut up my own texts, cut up other texts, cut up the Bible and Shakespeare and the classics, cut up experiments.”
Cut-ups held an obvious appeal for Burroughs, whose work was already fragmented. The Naked Lunch, with its lack of narrative or character development, its episodic presentation and random order of chapters, has sometimes been mistaken for a cut-up text even though it was written before their discovery. Burroughs was well aware of the idea’s antecedents: Eliot’s The Waste Land, the first great cut-up collage; Tristan Tzara’s poems made from words pulled from a hat; the “Camera Eye” sequence in USA by Dos Passos. Burroughs said, “I felt I had been working toward the same goal; thus it was a major revelation to me when I actually saw it being done.”
Slicing lines of text from articles was cumbersome and they quickly Progressed to an easier system. A page of text from a book, a magazine, a newspaper, or a letter was simply cut into four sections. The margins were trimmed off and the sections were moved against each other until a likely Phase or sentence was found. This was typed out on a new sheet of paper. ilk process was repeated for as long as it produced interesting new word combinations. They went through Rimbaud, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Life magazine features, whatever came to hand, and typed out anything that might their eye. They did not paste up the juxtaposed pages; there was no point. In cutting the pages with scissors, some words were cut in half and could be combined to make not just new phrases but new words: cut words.
There were many different methods of cutting text, but they all had one thing in common: they introduced a random juxtaposition of text; to give new word combinations. Only those lines of literary interest were typed up on a separate page. Sometimes Burroughs would only get one 0, two lines from the combinations offered and move on to another. These new pages might themselves be cut up, removing the material even further from its source.
Naturally they wanted to share their discovery with everyone, and soon Gregory Corso and Sinclair Beiles were engaged in cut-ups as well. Beiles had been persuaded to move to the hotel by Gysin, who thought that he really belonged there, with them, after his sterling work on getting The Naked Lunch into print. Corso was torn between his desire to be part of the experiment and join in the enthusiasm and excitement it was causing, and his core belief in the power of the muse. His contribution consisted mostly in cutting up the work of others: letters from friends, a poem by Allen Ginsberg, a stanza or two of Shelley. When the results of these initial experiments in cut-ups were published as Minutes to Co, Corso dissociated himself from the other three contributors, writing, “I join this venture unwillingly and willingly. Unwillingly because the poetry I have written was from the soul and not from the dictionary; willingly because if it can be destroyed or bettered by the ‘cut-up’ method, then it is poetry I care not for, and so should be cut-up. [. . .] to the muse I say: ‘Thank you for the poesy that cannot be destroyed that is in me’-for this I have learned after such a short venture in uninspired machine-poetry.”
Sinclair Beiles took the opposite path and cut up his source texts-articles from the Observer, Life, Encounter-again and again until they had such a density as to be bereft of meaning. The arguments between the four of them became so intense that Beiles, who was already in a mentally fragile state, had to sometimes leave the room to throw up. His mother later accused Burroughs of driving her son mad. Beiles has given two similar accounts of what appears to be a conscious imitation of Tristan Tzara’s pulling words out of a hat: “The four of us got together in Gysins room. We cut up bits of books and put them in wooden bowls. We then extracted piece after piece and put them together. The result was Minute to Go.” As this is his memory of his involvement, there must have been at least one experiment of this type.
The first extension of the cut-up method was when Brion Gysin applied it to tape recordings. They read aloud texts taken from poems and news\ paper articles and recorded them. Then the tape was rewound and new passages were cut in at random. Where these cut-ins occurred the old words were wiped off the tape and replaced by the new ones, often giving some interesting juxtapositions. Burroughs wrote, “I would say that my most interesting experience with the earlier techniques was the realization that when you make cut-ups you do not simply get random juxtapositions of words, that they do mean something, and often that these meanings refer to some future event. I’ve made many cut-ups and then later recognized that the cut-up referred to something that I read later in a news‘ paper or in a book, or something that happened. To give a very simple example, I made a cut-up of something Mr. Getty had written, I believe for Time and Tide. The following phrase emerged: ‘It’s a bad thing to sue your own father.’ About three years later his son sued him. Perhaps events are pre-written and pre-recorded and when you cut word lines the future leaks out.”
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