Ross Macdonald

 “You didn’t happen to shoot him yourself by any chance?” 

“You're very acute. Naturally I shot him. This is my getaway.”” 

I was merely asking. I couldn’t help noticing the blood on you.” 

He smiled with soft malice. His changeable mouth, both sensitive and brutal, tempted my fist the way a magnet tempts iron. He was big enough, and not too old, but he was a little ripe. I put my fist in my pocket and walked around to the other side of the car. 

I switched on the dome light. Tony Aquista was still blowing his sad small bubbles. His eyes were completely closed now. He was blind and deaf with the effort to hold onto life. The ambulance sighed in the road. 

I followed it on its return trip through the highway suburbs, past motels and cabins and trailer parks where soldiers and salesmen and tourists and migrant workers passed temporary nights with temporary bedmates. At a six-lane wye where two main roads converged, the ambulance turned off the highway to the left. 

I missed the green arrow and had to wait. The hospital was visible in the distance, a long white box of a building pierced with lights. Nearer the highway, the lighted screen of an outdoor theater, on which two men were beating each other to the rhythm of passionate music, rose against the night like a giant dream of violence. 

I found the ambulance entrance at the rear of the hospital. Its red electric sign spelled out EMERGENCY and cast a hellish glow on the oil-stained concrete driveway. Before I went in, I took a clean shirt out of my bag and put it on. 

Catch 22

To Yossarian, the idea of pennants as prizes was absurd. No money went with them, no class privileges. Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else. 

&

There were usually not nearly as many sick people inside the hospital as Yossarian saw outside the hospital, and there were generally fewer people inside the hospital who were seriously sick. There was a much lower death rate inside the hospital than outside the hospital, and a much healthier death rate. Few people died unnecessarily. People knew a lot more about dying inside the hospital and made a much neater, more orderly job of it. They couldn’t dominate Death inside the hospital, but they certainly made her behave. They had taught her manners. They couldn’t keep Death out, but while she was in she had to act like a lady. People gave up the ghost with delicacy and taste inside the hospital. There was none of that crude, ugly ostentation about dying that was so common outside the hospital. They did not blow up in mid-air like Kraft or the dead man in Yossarian’s tent, or freeze to death in the blazing summertime the way Snowden had frozen to death after spilling his secret to Yossarian in the back of the plane. 

“I’m cold,” Snowden had whimpered. “I’m cold.” 

“There. there,” Yossarian had tried to comfort him. ““There, there’ 

They didn’t take it on the lam weirdly inside a cloud the way Clevinger had done. They didn’t explode into blood and clotted matter. They didn’t drown or get struck by lightning, mangled by machinery or crushed in landslides. They didn’t get shot to death in hold-ups, strangled to death in rapes, stabbed to death in saloons, bludgeoned to death with axes by parents or children, or die summarily by some other act of God. Nobody choked to death. People bled to death like gentlemen in an operating room or expired without comment in an oxygen tent. There was none of that tricky now-you-see-me-now-you-dor’t business so much in vogue outside the hospital, none of that now-I-am-andnow-I-ain’t. There were no famines or floods. Children didn’t suffocate in cradies or iceboxes or fall under trucks. No one was beaten to death. People didn’t stick their heads into ovens with the gas on, jump in front of subway trains or come plummeting like dead weights out of hotel windows with a whooshl, accelerating at the rate of thirty-two feet per second to land with a hideous plop! on the sidewalk and die disgustingly there in public like an alpaca sack full of hairy strawberry ice cream, bleeding, pink toes awry. 

All things considered, Yossarian often preferred the hospital, even though it had its faults. The help tended to be officious, the rules, if heeded, restrictive, and the management meddlesome. Since sick people were apt to be present, he could not always depend on a lively young crowd in the same ward with him, and the entertainment was not always good. He was forced to admit that the hospitals had altered steadily for the worse as the war continued and one moved closer to the battlefront, the deterioration in the quality of the guests becoming most marked within the combat zone itself where the effects of booming wartime conditions were apt to make themselves conspicuous immediately. The people got sicker and sicker the deeper he moved into combat, until finally in the hospital that last time there had been the soldier in white, who could not have been any sicker without being dead, and he soon was. 

&

Outside the tent, Corporal Whitcomb snickered. The other man chuckled. For a few precarious seconds, the chaplain tingled with a weird, occult sensation of having experienced the identical situation before in some prior time or existence. He endeavored to trap and nourish the impression in order to predict, and perhaps even control, what incident would occur next, but the afflatus melted away unproductively, as he had known beforehand it would. Déja vu. The subtle, recurring confusion between illusion and reality that was characteristic of paramnesia fascinated the chaplain, and he knew a number of things about it. He knew, for example, that it was called paramnesia, and he was interested as well in such corollary optical phenomena as jamais vu, never seen, and presque vu, almost seen. There were terrifying, sudden moments when objects, concepts and even people that the chaplain had lived with almost all his life inexplicably took on an unfamiliar and irregular aspect that he had never seen before and which made them seem totally strange: jamais vu. And there were other moments when he almost saw absolute truth in brilliant flashes of clarity that almost came to him: presque vu. The episode of the naked man in the tree at Snowden’s funeral mystified him thoroughly. It was not déja vu, for at the time he had experienced no sensation of ever having seen a naked man in a tree at Snowden’s funeral before. It was not jamais vu, since the apparition was not of someone, or something, familiar appearing to him in an unfamiliar guise. And it was certainly not presque vu, for the chaplain did see him. 

&

Did it indeed seem probable, as he had once overheard Dunbar ask, that the answers to the riddles of creation would be supplied by people too ignorant to understand the mechanics of rainfall?

Sutherland

 Various things

1455 Recently we have all been through a step change in the sharing of information like that experienced by Europeans of the 15th and 16th centuries. Ours is the internet; theirs was the invention of printing with movable alphabetical type. 

First came writing, though at first that didn't advance literature so much as state bureaucracy. Early papyri and clay tablets were inventories, receipts, lists of payment in beer to manual workers, at a time when imaginative literature like epics and lyric poems were sung or spoken from memory. 

Another great leap forward was the codex — the book as we know it, with lots of pages bound together along one edge. This had two advantages over the scroll: you could write on both sides of the page, and (much more important) the reader could flick to different parts of the text much more quickly — like moving from videotapes to DVDs. 

But books had to be either written by hand or printed from elaborately carved woodblocks, which limited their distribution to the elites of church and state. Printing using type that could be set up, used for multiple copies, then distributed and ultimately used again for another text introduced mass production to the mix. 

What Gutenberg did was to take a wine press, add.a padded flat surface to the bortom of the screw, and below that a ‘chase’ or frame in which to clamp the type and its spacers. The type was inked with a roller, paper or vellum placed over it, and the upper surface screwed down. Trained as a goldsmith, Gutenberg knew what alloy would make the type able to withstand repeated use. He also worked out that ink based on oil rather than water would stick better to the type. 

Gutenberg’s idea to print the whole of St Jerome's Latin translation of the Old and New Testaments was itself a radical step, since most worshippers in a Catholic service would know the Bible only through the missal — a sort of anthology of scripture with certain selected texts 

to be read out on a particular day. Though his massive Bible remained expensive, within a little over half a century printing had spread to over 2,000 cities in Europe, and had got much cheaper. When Bibles became affordable, people could gain direct access to God's word without the mediation of the parish priest — the fundamental principle of the Reformation. 

To speed the process reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin could now publish their sermons and religious tracts more cheaply. Before long came political pamphlets, newspapers, street ballads — even (eventually) imaginative literature. As print capitalism spread, so more and more people wanted to learn how to read. The process of enlightenment was reciprocal. “We change our tools’, as Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, has said of the internet, ‘and then our tools change us. 

Our Mutual Friend

 " It was a school for all ages, and for both sexes. The latter were kept apart, and the former were partitioned off into square assortments. But, all the place was pervaded by a grimly ludicrous pretence that every pupil was childish and innocent. This pretence, much favored by the lady-visitors, led to the ghastliest absurdities. Young women old in the vices of the commonest and worst life, were expected tc profess themselves enthralled by the good child’s book, the adventures of Little Margery, who resided in tke village cottage by the mill; severely reproved and morally squashed the miller, when she was five and he was fifty ; divided her porridge with singing birds; denied herself a new nankeen bonnet, on the ground that the turnips did not wear nankeen bonnets, neither did the sheep who ate them; who plaited straw and delivered the dreariest orations to all comers, at all sorts of unseasonable times. So, unwieldy young dredgers and hulking mudlarks were referred to the experiences of Thomas Twopence, who, having resolved not to rob (under circumstances of uncommon atrocity) his particular friend and benefactor, of eighteenpence, presently came into supernatural possession of three and sixpence, and lived a shining light ever afterward. (Note, that the benefactor came to no good.) Several swaggering sinners had written their own biographies in the same strain; it always appearing from the lessons of those very boastful persons, that you were to do good, not because it was good, but because you were to make a good thing of it. Contrariwise, the adult pupils were tanght to read (if they could learn) out of the New Testament; and by dint of stumbling over the syllables and keeping their bewildered eyes on the particular syllables eoming round to their turn, were as absolutely ignorant of the sublime history, as if they had never seen nor heard of it. An exceedingly and confoundingly perplexing jumble of a school, in fact, where black spirits and grey, red spirits and white, jumbled jumbled jumbled jumbled, jumbled every night. And particularly every Sunday night. For then, an inclined plane of unfortunate infants would be handed over to the prosiest and worst of all the teachers with good intentions, whom nobody older would endure. Who, taking his stand on the floor before them as chief executioner, would be attended by a conventional volunteer boy as executioner’s assistant. When and where it first became the conventional Bystem that a weary or inattentive infant in a class must have its face smoothed down with a hot hand, or when and where the conventional volunteer boy first beheld such system in Operation, and became inflamed with a sacred zeal to administer it, matters not. 

The last batch

 Nyt:

The idea of the private room presented itself to the Italian imagination during the Renaissance; privacy and solitude were the prerogative of the nobleman, of the aristocrat and, later, of the gentleman. Solitude — chosen, blessed solitude — is never not a matter of hierarchy and class standing.) “In the early modern era,” the historian  Orest Ranum tells us in an essay in “A History of Private Lite,” “architects created new private spaces in the homes of the well-to-do, or,  rather, they increased the amount of private space by transforming into rooms what had previously been mere objects of furniture. ... Words such as study, cabinet, bibliothéque (shelf or library) . and écritoire (writing desk or writing room) may still refer to items of furniture, but they also designate rooms serving a particular, often private, function. ... A man who once kept a locked writing desk could now closet himself in his writing room and lock the door.” 

At one time personal identification was a novel, even revolutionary accessory of selfhood. For much of the millennium, ordinary people did without the trappings of personal identification: passports, identity cards, signatures, even surnames. 

As Europe emerged from the Dark Ages the population became more mobile, creating opportunities tor imposture. Most famous 1s the case of Martin Guerre, who returned home from battle to find that someone had usurped his identity, along with his wite, child and inhentance. Ever since, fraud and authenticity have been at war. 

The rise of modern cities multiplied the opportunities for fraud, as confidence men and swindlers, exploiting the anonymity of the urban milieu, adopted aliases or impersonated strangers. In response, criminologists have developed ever more sophisticated ways to tag the self, building archives of names, mug shots and fingerprints, 

Gopnik on Dick

There's nothing more exciting to an adolescent reader than an unknown genre writer who speaks to your condition and has something great about him. The Ace paperback cover promises mere thrills, and the writing provides real meaning. The combination of evident value and apparent secrecy makes E]more Leonard fans feel more for their hero than Borges lovers are allowed to feel for theirs. When they tell you it’s going to be good, what more can you hope for it to be? Eventually, enough of these secret fans grow up and get together, and the writer is designated a Genius, acquiring all the encumbrances of genius: fans, notes, annotated editions, and gently disparaging comprehenSive reviews. Since genre writing can support only one genius at a time—and no genre writer ever becomes just a good writer; it’s { all prophet or all hack—the guy is usually resented by his peers and their partisans even as the establishment hails him. No one hates the rise of Elmore Leon; ard so much as a lover of Ross Macdonald. Of all American writers, none have got the genre-hackto-hidden-genius treatment quite so fully as Philip K. Dick, the California-raised and based science-fiction writer who, beginning in the nineteen-fifties, Dicks m wrote thirty-six speed-fuelled novels, went crazy in the early seventies, and died in 1982, only fifty-three. His reputation has risen through the two parallel operations that genre writers get when they get big. First, he has become a prime inspiration for the movies, becoming for contemporary science-fiction and fantasy movies what Raymond Chandler was for film noir: at least eight feature films, including “Total Recall,” “Minority Report,” “A Scanner Darkly,” and, most memorably, Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner,” have been adapted from Dick's books, and even more—from Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” to the “Matrix” series owe a defining debt to his mixture of mordant comedy and wild metaphysics. 

But Dick has also become for our time what Edgar Allan Poe was for Gilded Age America: the doomed genius who supplies a style of horrors and frissons. (In both cases, it took the French to see it; the first good critical writing on Dick, as on Poe, came from Europe, and particularly from Paris.) Like Poe's, Dick's last big book was a work of cosmic explanation in which lightning bolts of brilliance flash over salty oceans of insanity. Poe’s explanation of everything was called “Eureka.” Dick's was “VALIS.” 

Dick's fans are not modest in their claims. Nor are they especially precise: Borges, Calvino, Kafka, Robertson Davies are cited, in the blurbs and introductions, as his peers. A note of inconsistency inflects these claims—Calvino and Robertson Davies?—but they are sincerely made and, despite all those movies and all that praise, have a slight, useful tang of hyperbolic defensiveness. One of the first things that everyone is inclined to say about Dick is that his subject and his mostly straight-to-paperback publication kept him from literary respectability, leaving him a neglected cult writer who is only now beginning to get his due. 

On the evidence of the biographers, though, this doesn’t seem quite true. While he served a fairly long apprenticeship a series of almost unreadable realist working-class novels that he wrote in the fifties are now back in print—and struggled to make money, from the time “The Man in the High Castle” won a Hugo Award, in 1963, he was famous, admired, and read. He wasn't reviewed on the front page of the Times Book Review, but so what? Reading his life either in the reflective French version, by Emmanuel Carrére, or in the thorough and intelligent American one, by Lawrence Sutin—one has a sense not of a man of thwarted ambition but, rather, of a man burning up with ideas and observations who found in a pop form the perfect vehicle for expressing them. 

Dick's allegiance was not to literature but to writing. 

Kimmelman:

 Even more than writers or painters, composers illustrate best the Romantic equating of nonconformity with glory. By the late 18th century, pure instrumental music — music not written for the king or the church but simply for the pleasure of an emerging bourgeoisie — was coming into its own. With the rise of a middle class, composers were beginning to think in terms of public concerts and paying crowds. Musicians like Liszt and Berlioz, both of them basing works on Byron’s poems, wrote with this new audience in mind. 

But religious music had expressed piety; court music, elegance. They reflected the goals of their subjects. What were the new symphonies supposed to celebrate? Making money? Individuality theretore became a prime criterion of artistic value, an excuse for artists entering a marketplace that many of them claimed to disdain. As Charles Rosen, the pianist and writer, has put it, during the Romantic era “the work has its own law, its own reason for existing: it is produced by the artist not for a purpose but because he must — ‘out of an inner necessity.’ ” 

So the artist now sought to make a living by, as it were, selling his soul — his individual sensibility. The more individual the sensibility, the better the artist — an idea that naturally flowed into the larger sphere of politics and public life. “Force of mind is developed only by attacking power,” was Mme. de Staél’s phrase for the concept of the underdog individual versus the dominating mass, which Byron translated as “All Talent has a propensity to attack the Strong.” 

If Byron has come to seem to us like a virtual parody of Romantic excess, it is partly because he refused to stick to any one esthetic or moral philosophy. He was a freethinker dogged by Calvinist guilt; he had stoud up for the poor but took childish pride in his aristocracy. 

The concept of self-indulgence that Byron embodied involved an elevation of private esthetics over reason. Enlightenment reason had lost much of its luster after Robespierre. As a bedrock ideology for the modern artist, the Romantic credo of individuality was to become particularly irresistible because it didn’t depend on any one view of the world to which everyone had to conform. 

Conformity became the only enemy, which helps to explain why Romanticism as a historical movement is still so poorly remembered: it Consciously resisted any one definition. The Romantic revolution was like William Morris’s description of a battle that men fight and lose: “the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat,” Morris wrote, “and when it comes, turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.” 

This also seems like a metaphor for the Romantic concept of the misunderstood genius — the individual artist of the most exceptional talent — although we ought to be careful about attributing too much, ultimately, to the Romantic age. Victor Hugo, like Byron a larger-than-life character, fooled around with scraps of lace dipped in colored ink. He signed stones that he found on the beach. But we really haven’t the slightest idea whether this meant to Hugo what it implies to us. We know only that he wasn’t a forward thinker about the art of his time. The critic Sainte-Beuve said that Hugo “spent his entire life going from one man to another, helping himself to whatever they had to offer,” which was funny coming from Sainte-Beuve, who had an affair with Hugo’s wife. Still, it was an astute statement: Hugo pointed the way ahead by looking backward, to what had already been done. 

Nyt:

INDIVIDUALISM MAY FEEL like a natural condition, but many of its aspects did not develop until the last thousand years. Surnames, for example, did not emerge until the mid-1300’s. Before then men typically were identified only by the names of their fathers — John, son of Henry; Martin, Peter’s son — and women took the names of their fathers or husbands. In eastern Europe, Jews typically did not have last names until the early 1800's, and in America, far into the 19th century, slaves were not permitted to have surnames unless given one by theit owners. As for the idea of personal space, it was not until the 1700’s in England that corridors were first included in the homes of the well-to-do. Until then, to get from room A to room E, one had to walk through all the rooms in between. 

The newest aspect of individualism is that more people can aspire to it. A rising standard of living has freed most Americans from having to spend every waking hour satisfying basic needs. Middleclass affluence has also reduced the need to rely on parents or children and has enabled many more people to go it alone. A hundred years ago, few people lived by themselves; today 1 out of 4 households contains only one person. 

Meanwhile, the character of individualism has changed. The older style, echoing Franklin and Emerson, turned on self-reliance, achievement — what sociologists call utilitarian individualism. That is still much evident. But a newer style has blossomed in recent decades, what is called expressive individualism, That is about emotional gratification, self-help, getting in touch with feelings, expressing personal needs. Utilitarian individualism is going West, on Horace Greeley’s advice, to find your fortune. Expressive individualism is going to the forest, on Robert Bly’s advice, to find your inner essence. 

On Pullman, Wallace and others

 In Lyra’s world, the Bible isn’t quite the same as ours: when Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, the first thing they see is the adult form of their daemons. “But it en’t true, is it?” Lyra asks of the story. “Not true like chemistry or engineering, not that kind of true? There wasn’t really an Adam and Eve?” Lord Asriel tells her to think of the story as an “imaginary number, like the square root of minus one.” Its truth might not be tangible, but you can use it to calculate “all manner of things that couldn't be imagined without it.” The metaphor is not just cunning; it helps explain why Pullman, a champion of science, writes in the fantastic mode, 

- Pullman loves Oxford, but he’s far from donnish. His books have been likened to those of J. R. R. Tolkien, another alumnus, but he scoffs at the notion of any resemblance. “ “The Lord of the Rings’ is fundamentally an infantile work,” he said. “Tolkien is not interested in the way grownup, adult human beings interact with each other. He’s interested in maps and plans and languages and codes.” When it comes to “The Chronicles of Narnia,” by C. 8. Lewis, Pullman’s antipathy is even more pronounced. Although he likes Lewis’s criticism and quotes it surprisingly often, he considers the fantasy series “morally loathsome.’ In a 1998 essay for the Guarajan, entitled “The Dark Side of Narnia,” he condemned “the misogyny, the racism, the sado-masochistic relish for violence that permeates the whole cycle.” 

He reviled Lewis for depicting the character Susan Pevensie’s sexual coming of age—suggested by her interest in “nylons and lipstick and invitations’as grounds for exclusion from paradise. In Pullman’s view, the “Chronicles,” which end with the rest of the family’s ascension to a neo-Platonic version of Narnia after they die in a railway accident, teach that “death is better than life; boys are better than girls... and so on. There is no shortage of such nauseating drivel in Narnia, if you can face it.” 

Pullman also makes the argument that Lewis really isn’t all that Christian. The fate of Susan Pevensie, he told me, indicates “some sort of crazed, deranged Manichaeism. Here’s a simple test: What is the greatest Christian virtue? Well, it’s charity, isn’t it? It's love. If somebody who knew nothing about Christian doctrine, and who had been told that Lewis was a great Christian teacher, read all the way through those books, would he get that message? No.” 

Rosen on Alfred Russel Wallace

Wallace discovered geology and botany, purchasing, in 1841, a pamphlet on the structure of plants published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Soon, his interest spread to beetles. There are three hundred and fifty thousand described species of coleoptera in the world, more than any other order in the animal kingdom; when a later British biologist, J.B.S. Haldane, was pressed by a clergyman on the nature of God, he reportedly said, “He has an inordinate fondness for beetles.” British naturalists were certainly fond of them, since they could be found all over England. In a public library, Wallace met a young man named Henry Walter Bates, later to become one of the great Victorian entomologists, who was as passionate about natural history as he was. Before long, the young men were planning a tropical adventure.

Wallace gave himself a crash course in flora and fauna, making local collecting trips and haunting the British Museum. He also read everything on natural history that he could find, including Robert Chambers’s hugely influential book “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.” This notorious work, published anonymously in 1844, blended science and creationism and argued passionately for “transmutation’—the notion that present life had evolved from previous forms. ‘This was not a new argument. Darwin's grandfather Erasmus had suggested as much two generations earlier; the missing key, which both Darwin and Wallace would supply, was the way that evolution worked. But “Vestiges” helped lay the foundation both for popular acceptance of the concept of evolution and for its ultimate scientific articulation. Though rife with unsubstantiated speculation that put off many established men of science (including Darwin, who also took note of how much calumny could be heaped on a man who ventured unpopular, and unproven, scientific opinions), the book excited Wallace and gave his first trip to the Tropics a purpose beyond the chance to flee a dead-end job and follow in the glamorous footsteps of other scientist-adventurers.

But the final lesson came on the way — home. Wallace’s ship caught fire and sank, and he found himself, after four years in the Amazon, floating in an open boat in the Sargasso Sea, seven hundred miles from shore. He was without friends, having quarrelled with Bates.

Wallace's sister Fanny had become a spiritualist while he was in the Tropics, and, partly through her interest, Wallace began attending séances in 1865. Though he was skeptical, looking behind doors and under tables in advance of the proceedings, he quickly fell under the spell of these events, enthusiastically recording what he saw. Fresh flowers materialized ona table. (Wallace duly noted each species.) A spirit hand reached down to touch the keys of an accordion. The name of a deceased brother turned up on a piece of — paper that Wallace had hidden. 

In 1866, Wallace, never one to keep his opinions to himself, produced a pamphlet, “The Scientific Aspect of the Supernatural,” which he sent to his eminent colleagues. In 1869, he published a review of a new edition of Lyell’s “Principles.” In it, Wallace explained the mechanism of evolution and defended the laws of natural selection that accounted for it, but he also expressed the opinion that “there yet seems to be evidence of a Power which has guided the action of those laws in definite directions and for special ends.” This was one of the first public expressions of a mystical turn that Wallace called his “little heresy.” Darwin, warned in advance, had written anxiously to Wallace, “I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child.” Wallace never did abandon natural selection, but later generations came to find him an unfit parent. He did not conform to the pattern of the modern scientist, who, on seeing the evolutionary light, was supposed to shed any illusion about the supernatural. Wallace attempted to reconcile the two, and his reputation suffered accordingly. 

&

 Sellers’s paradigm seemed to offer an answer; he had dumped all the pieces out of” the box, and put them together, joining decades of meticulous empirical research about Western farmers, Eastern bankers, Southern slaves, artisans, immigrants, politicians, everyone. 

Before the market revolution: Americans grew food and made things for themselves or to barter with neighbors; they were humble but happy, rallying around “enduring human values of family, trust, cooperation, love, and equality.” After: they grew food and made things to sell, for cash to cold, unfeeling, and distant markets, they, were frantic, alienated, untrusting, competitive, repressed, and lonely. “Inherent and ongoing contradictions between capitalist market relations and human needs” plagued the nation, as Sellers had it, and plague us still. For leading the anti-market struggle against the “business class” and attacking paper money and credit, Andrew Jackson served as Sellers’s hero, especially for having vetoed, in 1832, the charter for the Second Bank of the United States. But Old Hickory, and democracy, proved no match for the tyrannical business minority of bankers, merchants, and strivers, whose capitalist machinations made the poor pvorer; the middle-class smug, pious, and bourgeois; and the rich richer. As Thoreau put it, “A few are riding, but the rest are run over.” The literary scholar Perry Miller once said that “Walden” is “a manifesto of Yankee cussedness.” 

Consider two major nineteenth-century events: the religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening and the temperance movement. In 1776, about one in six Americans belonged to a church; by 1850, that number had risen to one in three. In roughly the same period, the amount of alcohol that Americans drank dropped from more than seven gallons per adult per year to less than two gallons (about what it is today). If you were to look at a map, and chart these changes, youd see that they follow the course of the nation’s growing neiwork of canals and railroads. The canal or railroad arrives, and the people join cnurches; the people join churches, and they drink less. How do historians account for these correlations? The answer, at first, seems obvious: preachers spread the Gospel; the same boats and trains that carried cash crops from farms to towns brought revivalist ministers from towns to farms. But, once they got there, why did anyone listen to them? Sellers argues that the heightened religiosity and tectotalling of nineteenth-century Americans can be attributed to “class needs for work disciti pline, social order, and cultural hegemony.” (In factory towns, some bosses required their workers to go to church.)  The market needs industrious, reliable, orderly workers; the market produces them. Howe disagrees. “Evangelical religion was not foisted upon the industrial working classes,’ he writes. Factoryworkers and farmers joined churches, and stopped drinking, for the same reason that their middle-class counterparts did: they were persuaded by evangelism’s embrace of egalitarianism, and “its trust in the capacities of ordinary people.” Or consider sex. In agrarian America, as Sellers conjures it, “unsegregated nudity, casually exposed genitalia, and the sounds and smells of coition were commonplace in crowded cabins.” The market revolution replaced this earthy carnality with unrelenting prudishness: restrictive clothing, private bedrooms (with mattresses!), revivalist ministers’ militant campaigns against masturbation, and“an unprecedented denigration of eroticism.”  The market needs workers who don't think about sex all day long, the market produces them.

Not so fast, Howe counters: “What we think of as Victorian prudery can also be seen as a clumsy effort to make men regard women as something other than sexual objects.” The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed a wholesale transformation of manners, a politeness revolution. Sellers, no champion of courtesy, sniffs at this kind of thing as “middle-class mythology,” but Howe thinks manners matter. (One of the chief merits of “What Hath God Wrought” is Howe's earnest effort, and great success, at chronicling changes of all sorts, from rates of childhood mortality to the gross national product, from the frequency of bathing to the firepower of cannons.) In short, “ladies first” wasn't all bad. “Although polite culture put women on a pedestal to avoid challenging the prerogatives of men,” Howe writes, “it represented in important respects an advance over the subjugation of women common in premodern society.” 

It’s tempting to agree with Sellers that what really lies between these two interpretations is “values.” Sellers thinks that poor, drunk, lusty, impious eighteenthcentury Americans were freer, and happier, than their wealthier, sober, prim, devout nineteenth-century grandchildren; Howe thinks it’s the grandchildren who were better off. They both concede, at length, that not everyone was better off; the people who were really “run over” in Jacksonian America were enslaved African-Americans, who toiled in the cotton fields that spread across the continent, Native Americans, who were forced from their land and marched from the South to the West, under Jackson’s brutal policy of “Indian removal”; and Mexicans, who suffered grievously during Polk’s war.

The women’s-rights movement, which grew out of the antislavery move ment, which grew out of revivalism, which was made possible by advances in transportation and communication, is the strongest evidence for the interpretive weight that | lowe places on social, cultural, and religious forces as agents of change, and makes “What Hath God Wrought” a bold challenge both to Sellers, who is more interested in economics, and to Wilentz, who is more interested in politics. Howe’s synthesis does what a synthesis is supposed to do: it brings all these things together. Economic changes separated men’s work from women’s, and made “work” a place that men went to and “home” a place where women stayed. Revivalist ministers celebrated women’s moral purity, and drew women into reform movements, including abolitionism, which sowed the seeds for Seneca Falls. “The major disputes, excitement, and violence of American history between 1815 and 1848 did not involve either a struggle to attain white male democracy or the imposition of a new ‘market revojution’ on subsistence family farmers,” Howe argues. “Not the affirmation of democracy itself, that ‘all men are created equal,’ but attempts to broaden the legal  And political definition of men arouse serious controversy in the United States during these years.

-J. Lepore on DW Howe

What motivated Marie-Laure, this sacred monster whose irreverent, far-ranging vision helped to launch the Surrealist movement and left its mark on many aspects of twentieth-century culture? Marie-Laure Bischoftsheim—her maiden name—was the descendant, on her father’s side, of a wealthy German banking family and, on her mother’s side, of a French aristocratic clan who traced their ancestry to the Marquis de Sade. Marie-Laure’s maternal grandmother, the acid-witted Comtesse de Chevigné, born Laure de Sade, was the Marquis’s great-granddaughter. She shocked her peers by associating with artists and bohemians. (She was also reputed to be the first French society woman to have uttered the word merde in public.) 

-FdPGrey on Marie-Laure de N.

Kundera

FAME 

In “The Hugoliad,” a 1935 pamphlet against Victor Hugo, the playwright Eugéne Ionesco, who was twenty-six | and still living in Romania, wrote, “The characteristic of the biography of famous men is that they wanted to be famous. The characteristic of the biography of all men is that they did not want to be, or they never thought of being, famous men. ... A famous man is disgusting.” 

Let us try to sharpen the terminology: a man becomes famous when the number of people who know him is markedly greater than the number he knows. The recognition enjoyed by a great surgeon is not fame: he is admired not by a public but by his patients, by his colleagues. He lives in equilibrium. Fame is a disequilibrium. There are professions that drag it along behind them necessarily, unavoidably: politicians, supermodels, athletes, artists. 

Artists’ fame is the most monstrous of all, for it implies the idea of immortality. And that is a diabolical snare, because the grotesquely megalomaniac ambition to survive one’s death is inseparably bound to the artist's probity. Every novel created with real p::ssion aspires quite naturally to a lasting aesthetic value, meaning to a value capable of surviving its author. To write without having that ambition is cynicism: a mediocre plumber may be useful to people, but a mediocre novelist who consciously produces books that are ephemeral, commonplace, conventional—thus not useful, thus burdensome, thus noxiousis contemptible. This is the novelist’s curse: his honesty is bound to the vile stake of his megalomania. 

The Abbess of Crewe

 “I dare say,” says the Abbess. ‘““This is a sad hour for a England in these, the days of her decline. All this public uproar over a silver thimble, mounting as it has over the months. Such a scandal could never arise in the United States of America. They have a sense of proportion and they understand Human Nature over there; it’s the secret of their success. A realistic race, even if they do eat asparagus the wrong way.

That Religion is founded on principles of Paradox. That Paradox is to be accepted and presents no Problem. That electronic surveillance (even if a convent were one day to practise it) does not differ from any other type of watchfulness, the which is a necessity of a Religious Community; we are told in the Scriptures “to watch and to pray,” which is itself a paradox since the two activities cannot effectively be practised together except in the paradoxical sense. 

But, Gertrude, we’re having a lot of trouble with Felicity. The life of the Abbey of Crewe is at stake, Gertrude.” 

“The salvation of souls comes first,” says Gertrude’s husky voice. ““The cannibals are to be converted to the faith with dietary concessions and the excessive zeal of the vegetarian heretics suppressed.” 

“What puzzles me so much, Gertrude my love, is how the cannibals will fare on the Day of Judgment,” Alexandra says cosily. “Remember, Gertrude, that friendly little verse of our childhood: It’s a very odd thing...As odd as can be...That whatever Miss T. eats... Turns into Miss T... . 

 Repeat that to the reporter, if you please, and if there are any more telephone calls from outside please say we've retired for the night.” 

“What will they make of that?’”’ Mildred says. “It sounds awfully charming.” 

“They'll make some sort of a garble,” says the Abbess. “Garble is what we need, now, Sisters. We are leaving the sphere of history and are about to enter that of mythology. Mythology is nothing more than history garbled; likewise history is mythology garbled and it is nothing more in all the history of man. Who are we to alter the nature of things? So far as we are concerned, my dear Sisters, to look for the truth of the matter will be like looking for the lost limbs, toes and fingernails of a body blown to pieces in an air crash.” 

The English Catholic bishops will be furious at your citing Milton,” says Walburga. 

“It’s the Roman cardinals who matter,” says the Abbess, “‘and I doubt they have ever heard of him.”