Trilling on WDHowells

 Howells’s historical interest for us continucs through all his developing career. His famous pilgrimage to New England, his round of visits to the great literary figures of Massachusetts, is a locus classicus of our literary history. It culminated, as everyone remembers, in that famous little dinner which Lowell gave for him at the Parker House; it was the first dinner that Howells had ever seen that was served in courses, in what was then called the Russian style, and it reached its significant climax when Holmes turned to Lowell and said, “Well, James, this is the apostolic succession, this is the laying on of hands” Much has been made of this story, and indeed much must be made of it, for although Holmes probably intended no more than an irony-lightened kindliness to a very young man, his remark was previsionary, and the visit of Howells does mark a succession and an era, the beginning of an American literature where before, as Howells said, there had been only a New England literature. Then Howells’s uprooting himself from Boston to settle in New York in 1888 marks, as Alfred Kazin observes, the shifting of the concentrations of literary capital.

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It is of course in his novels that Howells is at his best as a social witness, and he can be very good indeed. The reader who wants to test for himself what were in actual fact Howells’s powers of social insight, which have for long been slighted in most accounts of them, might best read _A Modern Instance, and he would do well to read it alongside so perceptive a work of modern sociology as David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, for the two books address themselves to the same situation, a change in the American character, a debilitation of the American psychic tone, the diminution of moral tension. Nothing could be more telling than Howells’s description of the religious mood of the 1870s and 1880s, the movement from the last vestiges of faith to a genteel plausibility, the displacement of doctrine and moral strenuousness by a concern with “social adjustment” and the amelioration of boredom. And the chief figure of the novel, Bartley Hubbard, is worthy to stand with Dickens’s Bradley Headstone, or James’s Basil Ransom and Paul Muniment, or Flaubert’s Sénécal, or Dostoyevsky’s Smerdyakov and Shigalov, as one of a class of fictional characters who foretell a large social actuality of the future. Howells has caught in Hubbard the quintessence of the average sensual man as the most sanguine of us have come to fear our culture breeds him, a man somewhat gifted —and how right a touch that Hubbard should be a Writer of sorts, how deep in our democratic culture is the need to claim ~“ 

2 Henry James’s essay on Howells is well known, and in that essay there are three statements which by implication define the ground of our present indifference to Howells. They have the advantage for our inquiry of ap. pearing in the friendliest possible context, and they are intended not as judgments, certainly not as adverse judgments, but only as descriptions. 

This is the first statement: “He is animated by a love of the common, the immediate, the familiar, and the vulgar elements of life, and holds that iN proportion as we move into the rare and strange we become vague and arbitrary; that truth of representation, in a word, can be achieved only so long as it is in our power to test and measure it.” 

Here is the second statement: “He hates a ‘story; and (this private feat is not impossible) has probably made up his mind very definitely as to what the pestilent thing consists of. Mr. Howells hates an artificial fable, 2 denouement that is pressed into service; he likes things to occur as in lite, where the manner of a great many of them is not to occur at all.” 

And here is the third: “If American life is on the whole, as I make no doubt whatever, more innocent than that of any other country, nowhere s the fact more patent than in Mr. Howells’s novels, which exhibit so constant a study of the actual and so small a perception of evil” 

It will be immediately clear from these three statements how far from our modern taste Howells is likely to be. I have said they are objective starements, that they are descriptions and not judgments, yet we can hear in them some ambiguity of tone—some ambiguity of tone must inevitably be there, for James is defining not only his friend’s work but, by inversion, his own. And almost in the degree that we admire James and defend his artistic practice, we are committed to resist Howells. But I think we must have the grace to see that in resisting Howells, in rejecting him, we are resisting and rejecting something more than a literary talent or temperament or method. There is in Howells, as I have tried to suggest, an odd kind of muted, stubborn passion which we have to take account of, and respect, and recognize for what it is, the sign of a commitment, of an involvement in very great matters—we are required to see that in making our judgment of him we are involved in consideratons of way of life, of quality of being. 

His passion and its meaning become apparent whenever he speaks of the commonplace, which was the almost obsessive object of his literary faith. “The commonplace? Commonplace? The commonplace is just that light, impalpable, aerial essence which [the novelists] have never got into their confounded books yet. The novelist who could interpret the common feelings of commonplace people would have the answer to ‘the riddle of the painful earth’ on his tongue.” We might go so far as to grant that the passion of this utterance has a kind of intellectual illumination in it which commands our respect, but we in our time cannot truly respond to it. We are lovers of what James calls the rare and strange, and in our literature we are not responsive to the common, the immediate, the tamillar, and the vulgar elements in life. 

Or at least we have a most complicated relation to these elements. In Our poetic language we do want something that has affinity with the Common, the immediate, the familiar, and the vulgar. And we want a certain aspect or degree of these elements in all our literature—we want them in their extremity, especially the common and vulgar. We find an interest in being threatened by them; we like them represented in their extremity to serve as a sort of outer limit of the possibility of our daily lives,  As a kind of mundane hell.. They figure for us in this way and Ulysses in the wasteland in Kafka's novels and stories even in Yates and they account I believe for the interest of comfortable middle class readers in James Farrell. In short we consent to the commonplace as it verges upon and becomes the rare and strange the commonplace of extreme poverty or ultimate boredom may even come to imply the demonic And be valued for that let life be sufficiently depressing and sufficiently boring in its commonplaceness it's  and we shall have been licensed to give up quiet desperation And to become desperately fierce. We are attracted by the idea of human life in as it were putrefaction in stewing corruption we sense the force gathering in the fermentation.

Watt on love and the novel

Madame de Staél linked the fact that the Ancients had no novels with the fact that, largely as a result of the inferior social position of women, the classical world attached relatively little importance to the emotional relationships between men and women.! It is certainly true that classical Greece and Rome knew little of romantic love in our sense, and the erotic life in general was not given anything like the importance and approbation it has received in modern life and literature. Even in Euripides sexual passion is clearly considered as a violation of the human norm; while not exactly a vice, it is certainly not a virtue; and, for the man especially, to allow it much scope is an indication of weakness rather than strength. As for Latin literature, its similarly derogatory attitude is suggested by a passage in the commentary of Servius on the Aeneid: he explains that Dido’s love was not a serious enough subject for epic dignity, but that Virgil had redeemed himself by treating it in an almost comic style.

The idea that love between the sexes is to be regarded as the supreme value of life on earth is generally agreed to have had its origin in the rise of amour courtois in eleventh-century Provence, Courtly love is in essence the result of the transfer of an attitude of religious adoration from a divine to a secular object—from the Virgin Mary to the lady worshipped by the troubadour, Like modern individualism, therefore, the rise of romantic love has deep roots in the Christian tradition, and so it is very appropriate that it should be the basis of the ideal pattern of sexual behaviour in our society. The most universal religion of the West, according to Vilfredo Pareto,’ at least, is the sex religion; the novel supplies it with its doctrine and its rituals, just as the mediaeval romances had done for courtly love. 

Courtly love, however, could not itself provide the kind of connective or structural theme which the novel required. It was primarily a leisure fantasy invented to gratify the noble lady whose actual social and economic future had already been decided by her marriage to a feudal lord; it belonged to an a-moral world, a social vacuum where only the individual existed and where the external world, with its drastic legal and religious sanctions against adultery,2 was completely forgotten. Consequently the forms of mediaeval literature which dealt with everyday life paid no attention to courtly love, and presented womankind as a species characterised by an insatiate fleshly cupidity; while, on the other hand, the verse and prose romances which dealt with courtly love presented their heroines as angelic beings, and this idealisation was usually extended to the psychology, the background and the language of the story. Not only so: from the point of view of plot, heroic chastity is subject to exactly the same literary defects as inveterate promiscuity; both are poor in the qualities of development and surprise. In the romances, therefore, while courtly love provided the conventional beginning and end, the main interest of the narrative lay in the adventures which the knight achieved for his lady, and not in the development of the love relationship itself. 

Gradually, however, the code of romantic love began to accommodate itself to religious, social and psychological reality, notably to marriage and the family. This process seems to have occurred particularly early in England, and the new ideology which eventually came into being there does much to explain both the rise of the novel and the distinctive difference between the English and French traditions in fiction. Denis de Rougemont, in his study of the development of romantic love, writes of the French novel that ‘to judge by its literature, adultery would seem to be one of the most characteristic occupations of Western man’.!' Not so in England, where the break with the originally adulterous character of courtly love was so complete that George Moore was almost justified in claiming to have ‘invented adultery, which didn’t exist in the English novel till I began writing’ 

The values of courtly love could not be combined with those of marriage until marriage was primarily the result of a free choice by the individuals concerned. This freedom of choice has until recently been the cxception rather than the rule in the history of human socicty, especially as far as women have been concerned. The rise of the novel, then, would seem to be connected with the much greater freedom of women in modern society, a freedom which, especially as regards marriage, was achieved earlier and more completely in England than elsewhere, 

In eighteenth-century France, for example, daughters were customarily secluded from young men until their parents had arranged a marriage for them. The extent of women’s freedom in England was very striking in comparison, as Montesquieu! and many other contemporaries pointed out. In Germany the position of women was considered to be even more disadvantageous,? while Lady Mary Wortley Montagu criticised Szr Charles Grandison on the grounds that Richardson should have known enough about the restrictions on feminine rights in Italy to realise that his hero could never have begun his amour with Clementina in her father’s house.3 

The relatively great freedom of women in England had existed at least as far back as the Elizabethan period, but it was reinforced in the eighteenth century by some aspects of the rise of individualism. Economic individualism, we have seen, tended to weaken the ties between parents and children: and its spread was associated with the development of a new kind of family system which has since become the standard one in most modern societies, 

This system can be described as the ‘elementary’ family, to we A. R. Radcliffe-Brown's term,' or as the ‘conjugal’ family, to use Emile Durkheim’s.* In nearly all countries, of course, the family unit includes the ‘elementary’ or ‘conjugal’ group consisting of husband, wife and their children, but it also includes a whole complex of other less closely related kinsfolk: the use of the terms here, therefore, has a real defining force because it indicates that this elementary or conjugal group alone is what constitutes the family in our society; it is an entity formed by the voluntary union of two individuals. 

This kind of family, for which we will here use Durkheim’s term ‘conjugal’ as somewhat more descriptive and perhaps less imvidious than Radcliffe-Brown’s term ‘elementary’, is different from those of other societies and other periods in many respects, among which may be mentioned the following: on marriage the couple immediately sets up as a new family, wholly separate from their own parents and often far away from them; there is no established priority between the male and female lines of descent as regards property or authority, but instead both lineages are of equal relative unimportance; extended kinship ties in general, to grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, etc., have no compelling significance; and once set up, the conjugal family typically becomes an autonomous unit in economic as well as in social affairs. 

These arrangements seem obvious enough to us today, but they are in fact historically new, and they all increase the importance of the marriage choice, This choice is especially fateful for the woman, because, as a result of masculine dominance in the economic field, and of the social, residential and occupational mobility brought about by capitalism, it determines, not only her most important personal relationship, but also her social, economic and even geographical future. It is natural, therefore, that modern sociologists should see romantic love as a necessary correlative of the conjugal family system; 3 a strengthening of the intrinsic bonds between man and wife being absolutely necessary to replace the greater security and continuity of the woman's lot afforded by more cohesive and  Extended family systems and to provide the isolated conjugal unit and especially the wife with a strong supporting ideology.

Some of the most important causes of the very different modern emphasis have already been mentioned. Christianity in general, for example, was essentially an inward, individualist and self-conscious kind of religion, and its effects were strongest in Puritanism, with its stress on the inner light; while the indispensable Madame de Staél drew attention to the influence of the changed philosophical outlook of the seventeenth century on the novel’s subjective and analytic approach to character, the secularisation of thought which accompanied the new philosophy tended in the same direction: it produced an essentially mancentred world, and one in which the individual was responsible for his own scale of moral and social values. 

Finally, the rise of individualism is of great importance. By weakening communal and traditional relationships, it fostered not only the kind of private and egocentric mental life we find in Defoe’s heroes, but also the later stress on the importance of personal relationships which is so characteristic both of modern society and of the novel—such relationships may be seen as offering the individual a more conscious and selective pattern of social life to replace the more diffuse, and as it were involuntary, social cohesions which individualism had undermined. Individualism also contributed to Richardson’s emphasis on private experience in at least two other respects: 1t provided an audience deeply enough interested in all the processes that occur in the individual consciousness to find Pamela absorbing; and its economic and social development eventually led to the development of the urban way of life, a fundamental formative influence on modern society which seems to be connected in many ways with the private and subjective tendency both of Richardson personally and of the novel form in general. 

Eighteenth-century London had an importance in the national life of the time that was unequalled elsewhere. Throughout the period it was over ten times as large as any of modern urban man. The streets and places of resort in the various quarters of the town presented an infinite variety of ways of life, ways of life that anyone could observe, and yet for the most part utterly alien to any one individual’s personal experience. 

This combination of physical proximity and vast social distance is a typical feature of urbanisation, and one of its results is to give a particular emphasis to external and material values in the city-dweller’s attitude to life: the most conspicuous values —those which are common to the visual experience of everyone —are economic; in eighteenth-century London, for example, it was the coaches, fine houses and expensive clothes which pervade the outlook of Moll Flanders. There was no real metropolitan equivalent to the expression of the community values available to all represented by the parish church in the country. In many of the new centres of population there was no church at all, and, consequently, according to Swift, ‘five parts in six of the people of London [were] absolutely hindered from hearing divine service’ ;? and in any case the atmosphere of what was fast becoming ‘a mart of infidelity’3 tended to discourage church-going—Bishop Secker said that ‘people of fashion’ often attended ‘Divine worship in the country . . . to avoid scandal’, 

This decline of religious values in the town made way for the Supremacy of material values, a supremacy that was symbolised in the way that London was rebuilt after the Great Fire: under the new plan it was the Royal Exchange and not St. Paul’s which became the architectural focus of the City.? 

An environment so large and various that only a little of it can be experienced by any one individual, and a system of values that is mainly economic—these have combined to provide the novel in general with two of its most characteristic themes: the individual seeking his fortune in the big city and perhaps only achieving tragic failure, so often described by the French and American Realists; and, frequently in association with this, the milieu studies of such writers as Balzac, Zola and Dreiser, where we are taken behind the scenes, and shown what actually happens in the places we know only by passing them in the street or reading about them in the newspapers. Both these subjects also feature prominently in eighteenthcentury literature, where the novel supplemented the work of journalists and pamphleteers3 and revealed all the secrets of the town: both Defoe and Richardson appeal to this interest, and it is even more marked in such works as Fielding’s Amelia and Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker. At the same time London figured in much of the drama and fiction of the time as the symbol of wealth, luxury, excitement and perhaps a rich husband: for Steele’s novel-reading girl Biddy Tipkins, and for Eliza Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless it is the milieu where everything happens, where people really live: triumph in the big city has become the Holy Grail in the individual’s secular pilgrimage. 

Trilling on Austen

About this antagonism a word must be said. Few writers have been the object of an admiration so fervent as that which 1s given to Jane Austen. At the same time, she has been the object of great dislike. Lord David Cecil has said that the people who do not like Jane Austen are the kind of people “who do not like sunshine and unselfishness,” and Dr. Chapman, the distinguished editor of Jane Austen’s novels and letters, al. though dissenting from Lord David’s opinion, has speculated that perhaps “a certain lack of charity” plays a part in the dislike. But Mark Twain, to take but one example, manifestly did not lack charity or dislike sunshine and unselfishness, and Mark Twain said of Jane Austen that she inspired in him an “animal repugnance.” The personal intensity of both parties to the dispute will serve to suggest how momentous, how elemental, is the issue that Jane Austen presents. 

The animality of Mark Twain’s repugnance is probably to be taken as the male’s revulsion from a society in which women seem to be at the center of interest and power, as a man’s panic fear at a fictional world in which the masculine principle, although represented as admirable and Necessary, is prescribed and controlled by a female mind. Professor Garrod, whose essay “Jane Austen, A Depreciation” ts a summa of all the reasons for disliking Jane Austen, expresses a repugnance which is very nearly as feral as Mark Twain’s; he implies that a direct sexual insult is being offered to men by a woman author who “describes everything in the youth of women which does not matter” in such a way as to appeal to “that age in men when they have begun to ask themselves whether anything matters.” The sexual protest is not only masculine—Charlotte Bronté despised Jane Austen for representing men and women as nothing but ladies and gentlemen. 

Didion

Play:

THERE WAS AT FIRST that spring an occasional faggot who would take her to parties. Never a famous faggot, never one of those committed months in advance to escorting the estranged wives of important directors, but a third-string faggot. At first she was even considered a modest asset by several of them: they liked her not only because she would listen to late-night monologues about how suicidal they fel but because the years she spent modeling had versed her in precisely the marginal distinctions which preoccupied them. She understood, for example, about shoes, and could always distinguish among the right bracelet and the amusing impersonation of the right bracelet and the bracelet that was merely a witless copy. Still, chere remained some fatal lack of conviction in her performance, some instant of flushed inattention that would provoke them finally to a defensive condescension. Eventually they would raise their eyebrows helplessly at one another when they were with her, and be oversolicitous. “Darling,” they would say, “nave another drink.” And she would. She was drinking a good deal in the evenings now because when she drank she did not dream. “This way to the gas, ladies and gentlemen,” a loudspeaker kept repeating in her dreams now, and she would be checking off names as the children filed past her, the little children in the green antechamber, she would be collecting their lockets and baby rings in a fine mesh basket. Her instructions were to whisper a few comforting words to those children who cried or held back, because this was a humane operation, 

White:

Driving a Budget Rent-A-Car between Sacramento and San Francisco one rainy morning in November of 1968 I kept the radio on very loud. On this occasion I kept the radio on very loud not to find out what time it was but in an effort to erase six words from my mind, six words which had no significance for me but which seemed that year to signal the onset of anxety or fright. The words, a line from Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” were these: Petals on a wet black bough. The radio played “Wichita Lineman” and “I Heard It on the Grapevine.” Petals on a wet black bough. Somewhere between the Yolo Causeway and Vallejo it occurred to me that during the course of any given week I met too many people who spoke favorably about bombing power stations. 

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James B. Douglas and David D. Bohannon. In 1950 James B. Douglas had opened Northgate, in Seattle, the first regional center to combine a pedestrian mall with an underground truck tunnel. In 1954 David D. Bohannon had opened Hillsdale, a forty-acre regional center on the peninsula south of San Francisco. That is the only solid bio I have on James B. Douglas and David D. Bohannon to this day, but many of their opinions are engraved on my memory. David D. Bohannon believed in preserving the integrity of the shopping center by not cutting up the site with any dedicated roads. David D. Bohannon believed that architectural setbacks in a center looked “pretty on paper’ but caused ‘customer resistance.’”” James B. Douglas advised that a small-loan office could prosper in a center only if it were placed away from foot traffic, since people who want small loans do not want to be observed getting them. I do not now recall whether it was James B. Douglas or David D. Bohannon or someone else altogether who passed along this hint on how to paint the lines around the parking spaces (actually this is called “‘striping the lot,” and the spaces are “stalls’’): make each space a foot wider than it need be —ten feet, say, instead of nine—when the center first opens and business is slow. By this single stroke the developer achieves a couple of important objectives, the appearance of a popular center and the illusion of easy parking, and no one will really notice when business picks up and the spaces shrink. 

Nor do I recall who first solved what was once a crucial center dilemma: the placement of the major tenant vis-a-vis the parking lot. The dilemma was that the major tenant—the draw, the raison d’étre for the financing, the Sears, the Macy’s, the May Company wanted its customer to walk directly from car to store. The smaller tenants, on the other hand, wanted that same customer to pass their stores on the way from the car to, say, Macy’s. The solution to this conflict of interests was actually very simple: two major tenants, one at each end of a mall. This is called ‘’anchoring the mall,” and represents seminal work in shopping-center theory. One thing you will note about shopping-center theory is that you could have thought of it yourself, and a course in it will go a long way toward dispelling the notion that business proceeds from mysteries too recondite for you and me. 

A few aspects of shopping-center theory do in fact remain impenetrable to me. I have no idea why the Community Builders’ Council ranks ‘‘Restaurant’’ as deserving a Number One (or “‘Hot Spot’’) location but exiles ‘‘Chinese Restaurant’ to a Number Three, out there with ‘Power and Light Office’ and “Christian Science Reading Room.” Nor do I know why the Council approves of enlivening a mall with “‘small animals” but specifically, vehemently, and with no further explanation, excludes ‘‘monkeys.”’ If I had a center I would have monkeys, and Chinese restaurants, and Mylar kites and bands of small girls playing tambourine. 

A Dead Man

...In Deptford by Anthony Burgess

 Plato or some of his followers might posit the prior or prenatal collocation of souls. 

— Does he not also tell some legend of a unity capriciously split by the gods, so that half goes wandering in search of half? But that is a pretty doctrine of male soul and female soul conjoined if they are lucky, which is rare, after an eternity of seeking. 

— Male and female are grossly conjoined following nature’s wish that they breed. There is an airier or more spiritual mode of conjunction. 

They drank and drinking looked each other in the eye or eyes. Thomas Walsingham said: 

— More spiritual? Angels holding hands? 

— Holding hands, yes. Effecting more intimate joining. We have bodies, we are not all soul. There is a higher order than what crass nature dictates. Nature does not want poetry, nor music, nor the eyes of the seeker looking upward from the dungy earth. Nature does not want the love that she would call sterility but we could designate otherwise. 

— Well, we have known each other some ten minutes and you are already anatomising unnatural love. 

Kit blushed. He said hurriedly: 

— Unnatural love is a bad phrase. What is against nature is sin, so the religions say. But what makes man what he is is unnatural if we raise him as we must above eating, dunging, begetting, dying. 

— Well, these be high or deep matters for a morning cup and a first meeting. In youth is pleasure. (Kit started: someone, perhaps he himself, had said that that previous day or night that seemed now much in the past.) I mean that thought is the enemy of doing. My grave cousin is always saying that thought both makes and undoes life’s fabric. If, he says, he thinks too much on racks and thumbscrews and what he calls the apparatus of the finding of truth then he grows sick. And yet, he says, what is the big conflict but a grinding of thought against thought. Some think that bread can be God and some that bread is bread and God but a hovering thought over it.  And some that the Pope is the devil. It was different a hundreg years back. Thoughts change and become perilous. Whar, then, are the things that do not change? In youth is pleasure. 

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So to it again — femures, recta, ventra, ala. Cows ambled up munching roundly to watch, and one left an ample pat in tribute near to their thrown clothes. It steamed to the sun and its wholesome odour was borne in to them on the veering wind. There were enough birds above and about them, flying low since they had received messages of weather change, to make it seem that whirring wings of Adam’s paradise and a jangle of song withal were there to bless them. The scriptures had a lone Adam before that unhandy work with his nb, but what man could doubt that there had been a nameless companion for him expunged by God’s hunger for multiplicitous children to be tormented or saved according to his caprice, hence the machine Or miraculous contrivance of procreation, which pretended love, love being there but a trick? And so as the wind freshened they colled in the finality of their naked coupling among the insects, then dressed, then hand in hand walked to the town, though, reaching it, not hand in hand. 

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And Raleigh opened up a cabinet under his window. It held rows of long tubes, as he showed, curved gracefully and ending in a shallow bowl. Clay, he said, as in Virginia, but here I have one especially fashioned in silver. It glinted tn the firelight. And here is the nymph. From a drawer of the cabinet he took a fair pinch of a herb, strands of yellow, brown, black, and stuffed this in the silver bowl. Smell, he said, proffering. Kit sniffed. Heady, outlandish, altogether new. And now, Raleigh said, hef enlivening and curative spirit riseth in smoke. He took from a pot a spill and enflamed it at his fire. Then he inflamed the herb, the herb smouldered, he drew in smoke and, in a blue jet, emitted it. The aroma sidled towards Kit; Kit coughed gently. Aye, you will cough more when you kiss her. But the cough will be in the manner of a cleansing, a disgorgement of the grosser humours, you may even vomit them up. There is a bowl beneath that table. And then no more coughing, only the bliss of inhalation. Curse it, my talking has doused her. And he refired his spill and relighted. The blue jet bore his words: Will you try? 

Kit tried. He held the warming clay bowl in his fist; the fumes crept up the narrow tube. He drank to his lungs. And then his whole body burst in the manic fit. Aye aye, Raleigh said, kicking the spew-bowl] from under. Be not shamed by it. I too when I began. Cough cough, my boy, cough out the rottenness of the age. And then gently draw. Gently but gently. 

The one draw was for the moment enough. His stomach settled, his lungs shrugged an acquiescence, but his head danced. His eyes took in a reeling room then bade a stiller image ensue. There sat Sir Walter, calm, drinking in his smoke, saying: 

— There is a philosophy in this. As some say the love of boys is the higher refinement of coupling — I cannot agree, being by temperament given only to the enjoyment of women, nevertheless — they say this, I say, meaning that appetite is no longer chained to what nature wills, as with animals, so with tobacco eating and drinking are refined to an essence beyond the reach of gross nutriment. You follow me? I think you do. Hariot will give you a lecture on this at our next meeting.

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If Christ had known it, would he have transmitted his substance in smoke? The eucharist in a pipe-bowl. He saw Christ an instant, smiling, bending no angry brows. Christ had been called on in that agony now past and not well remembered; the demons had not prevailed. The guilt lay in the pleasure that was not nature’s trap and it was analogous, Raleigh was right, to that other pleasure. To rise above the cry of the maw that bread be turned to blood and bone, of the importunate gentleman of the loins that brats be begotten — was not that in a manner of the conquest of nature, vinegary mother that would pull us down? And to overcome nature was to exalt the soul? No matter, the drawing in of this divine smoke was an ecstasy and men would in time perceive it as a great benison to the world. Why did ignorant painted savages already know it? He drank out his pipe and filled another. Ecstasy to be renewed daily, a pleasure as necessary as feeding, there was the problem, with daily ravishing of the nymph no easy entrance to a Henslowe trugging house. The problem of supply and, brutal irony, the body begetting a need no baker or vintner could satisfy. Raleigh was for now the keeper of many keys. 

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I was at that time lodged with Tom Kyd, a man lonely and timid with boy and woman alike, moaning that his new play did not go well and yet seeking to instruct me in the right fashioning of what he called a decasyllabon. I had left Ned Alleyn because he was to marry and also because he had puffed himself up with fame and gave too many orders. Kit would sometimes come when Kyd was out to woo me to undressing with I love thee I love thee, but I was older and shaving once a week and conning the parts of young men, though this would be a sharp declension from the glory of Bel-Imperia and Zenocrate. I had come to hate the prying paws of the small gallants who came to the tiring room, by wine emboldened, saying What hast under here? — fardingale or stuffed bodice — and a moment only sweetheart, it is my need. So in something like gentleness I would thrust Kit away, and he would shrug and droop but bear small malice. One day I put it to him: 

— Why boys, why men, why never girls nor women? 

— There is a divine command, Lucretius calls on Alma Venus, delight of gods and men, and it may not be questioned. She commands me the way I must go and ever has, and nothing may be done. 

— And why does she, what is the reason in nature? 

— It is not in nature, Alma Venus rides all above her, one may say it is a rebuke to nature, we will go our own way nor follow the bestial law of breeding. And thus too we may escape from our mothers. To bed a woman, which I have never done, has a strong stench of incest. 

— You like not your mother? 

— I love her as a son should, but best from afar. 

— You may be what you wish, Nashe said, unnasally, since his handkerchief was at his hatchet nose. We are not here to exhort you to orthodoxy. We are merely at work on commissions. Your name would draw crowds and please their grades. 

&

— Listen to me, Kit said, and he knew, saying it, that the me to which he referred was one of a parcel of many within, and he felt a manner of despair or at least desperateness in not knowing well which was to speak. It is easier to believe in this Church of King Henry’s founding than not to. I believe, I believe, your worships, and the question of what is belief never arises. So, with this thin surcoat of belief, we may do our work and drink our drink and never be molested. To question faith is a grave matter, and here you are bringing your clowns in. An atheist at least has set working the engines of thought, and it is no easy matter to throw God out of his heaven. The truth is that there are no atheists, since who would be so witless as to assert what he cannot prove? Simply and in all candour we must shrug and say we know nothing. God’s book is man’s book, since God handles no quill. These bishops with their termagant wives throw the book at us and say believe because I demand belief and by God I will burn or hang and quarter you if you do not. By what authority is it affirmed that Martin and his Calvinists are wrong? How has the Church that Peter founded in Rome become so suddenly the Scarlet Woman? 

— As I said, Lyly nodded, your Faustus is a work of the old 

faith. And by atheist we may mean you reject the Church of the Reform. 

&

I was charmed. Laurigera stirpe prognata Delia, Sidnaei vatis Apollinet genuina soror I had written. This was the dedication to Tom Watson’s Amintae Gaudia, writ for her but yet to be printed, my Latin is better than Tom’s but not better than hers. She disliked my play for Pembroke’s Men. Too much sodomy, she said, and not enough history. I cut out the buggering of King Edward with a branding iron. Well, she shall have history without sodomy, if it can be found.