Manhood

AMERICAN MANHOOD by E. Anthony Rotundo
Romantic Love
To understand the historical emergence of modern love, we need to understand the appearance of what some have called the "romantic self." This is the belief that every person has a unique essence, a fundamental core that remains when all social roles and conventions are stripped away. A man or a woman in love shares that essence with his or her beloved as with no other person. This sharing of one's innermost self is vital to modern romantic love.2 Before such sharing (and such love) could happen readily, two histori-cal changes had to take place in the Northern states. The first change was religious. The romantic self is the same personal essence as the Christian soul, the chief difference being that a true Christian—at least in the Puritan sense—shares that innermost core with God and not with a beloved human. Before romantic love was possible historically, God's exclusive claim on a person's true core had to recede as a cultural belief. The second historical change that had to take place was social and cul-tural. As long as the dominant conception of the individual was that of an inhabitant of many roles and statuses, the romantic self was probably unimaginable. At least, it was inaccessible to other people. As the religious and social beliefs of the Puritans lost their ability to shape individual lives during the eighteenth century, the romantic self became more accessible. By the end of that century, New Englanders were speaking the language of romance. Romantic love was emerging as the main criterion for marriage. By the nineteenth century, romance had become a cultural ideal, the unquestioned essence of love. And love was the sine qua non of the marriage choice. A Pennsylvania man expressed the faith of his time when he wrote in 1850: "Marriage without love can-not fail to be a source of perpetual unhappiness." Individual men and women who lived out this new concept of roman-tic love did not experience it in the same terms we have used to describe it here. Instead, nineteenth-century lovers spoke of profound mutual sympathy.  Because men and women in love felt driven toward a complete and shared understanding, they set an extremely high value on candor. Candor connected two people who inhabited separate spheres. It moved lovers past the stereotypes of the opposite sex and confronted them with the real people obscured by the larger images. For a man, this meant seeing a woman not as devil or angel, temptress or paragon, but as one particular human being. Ideally, he opened up his true self and found the true self of his beloved open in return. With its promises of intimacy and oneness, romantic love offered a grand, irresistible dream to young people of the nineteenth century.
For all of its potential rewards, love presented young men—and young women—with a set of problems as well, beginning with the basic structure of courtship. As with many other social situations since childhood, the males were allowed broad initiative, while a woman had very narrow latitude. He could choose a person to pursue more freely than she could. Still, courtship, as a social situation, had unfamiliar and threatening dimensions for a young male. In particular, the quest for love and marriage presented a man with standards of success that were foreign to him. At work or elsewhere among his own sex, a male was judged largely for what he could do. In courtship, on the other hand, a woman judged him largely for who he was. To be sure, his attainments of occupation and income might affect his eligibility to court a woman, but in the end she accepted or rejected him because of his qualities of person. His whole being was subject to judgment in courtship, and the stakes—mar-riage and companionship for life—were the highest he had ever played for. Young men were used to risks, but not risks of this kind. The structure of courtship was such that women could thwart men's dreams, frustrate their plans, and leave them feeling unworthy and em-barrassed. Thus, romance and the pursuit of marriage drew out some of men's deepest suspicions about women even as the experience elicited some of their most exalted feelings. Male suspicion focused on the possi-bility that women could use their attractiveness and their power to say no as a way to make fools of men and gratify their own vanity. A woman who behaved in this way was called a coquette, and men often described their feelings about coquetry in writing. Lucien Boynton, an aspiring lawyer, doubted that "such a person has . . . strict and well-established moral principles." In writing about the woman he was courting, Lucien said bluntly: "She will sacrifice anything, no matter what to the object she may have in view which may be merely the gratification of her vanity."
We cannot know how many women in courtship acted purely out of vanity. What we do know is that young men wrote about coquettes fre-quently and with fear. The central issue, it seems, was power. Young men were not used to women having control over them, and the females they courted did have personal power over their feelings and fate. The experience roused emotions remembered from infancy and boyhood, when mothers played the unenviable role of archfrustrater to their sons. For some men, this had been the only important experience of submis-sion to a woman, and it left them suspicious of females who had the power to thwart them. The truth of the matter was that women labored under greater handi-caps than men did. Although women did have some power in courtship, it was largely the power to say no and thus to hurt or frustrate a suitor. Women could not do as their brothers did and actively seek out a part-ner. Instead, they had to wait for an interested male to come along. Early in the century, a young woman named Eliza Southgate pointed out that "the inequality of privilege between the sexes is . . . in no instance . . . greater than in the liberty of choosing a partner in marriage; true, we have the liberty of refusing those we don't like, but not of selecting those we 'do." Woman's relatively passive role in courtship was made worse by the
fact that the choice of a partner had deeper implications for her than for a man. Her husband would determine where she lived, what level of wealth and status she attained, and how she might structure her life. As a leading historian of courtship has said, "it was men who . . . held the lives of women in their hands." Young men sometimes showed an awareness of this basic inequity.

Act One

 "May Robson played to under a thousand in Flint, Michigan, Saturday night; and Fiske O'Hara played to four hundred in Saginaw," he was saying. "I don't know what the hell is happening. This is the height of the season, they never played to those kinds of grosses before." He went on to list the grosses of the other shows and the possible adverse conditions in each town, all of which he knew intimately, that might account for the alarming drop in receipts. But as he talked on, his bewilderment only grew greater, for there appeared to be no logical answer to the over-all slump. What was happening, of course, though neither of us knew it then and the final grim answer was not to be a certainty until a few years later, was that "the road"—that staple and necessary ad-junct of the theatre's lifeline in America—"the road" as the theatre knew it and counted on it at that time was disappearing with fright-ening swiftness. Talking pictures had not yet arrived, of course, but the silent movies and the magic of early radio were making enormous inroads on the cultural habits of theatregoing America. Also, the tremendous impact of the mass-produced automobile and the fact that communication between peoples in small towns was suddenly obtainable and with ease, all played a part, I suppose, in the hidden revolution that was to destroy both the road and that deeply en-trenched kingpin of family entertainment, vaudeville. With their disappearance went a way of theatrical life and an irreplaceable training ground for young actors, for shoddy as some of the fare may have been, it provided a testing ground for actors that no school of acting, however high-minded its purpose, ever came close to. There is no such thing as a substitute for acting before an audience, no matter how grubby the conditions may be, and with the passing of the road and vaudeville, a large and invaluable audience disappeared forever, too. It occurred neither to Mr. Pitou nor apparently to anyone else in the theatre of that time that what they were witnessing was not a passing flurry of bad business but the end of an era, and the fearsome figures of A. L. Erlanger and E. F. Albee continued to rule over a domain that had already vanished. What occurred to me quite sharply, listening to Mr. Pitou talk on and on, was the fact that he was not mentioning either The Beloved Bandit or myself. It took a few minutes for the full im-port of this to sink in, and then a great weight seemed to lift from my chest. It could mean, of course, only one thing—I was safe! My precarious footing in the theatre was still intact. I made a solemn vow to myself never again to type the words "Act One" on a piece of white paper as long as I lived.

The End of the Affair

Easily slipped my mind and fell into the stacks of books that, in perdition, wait. I noticed the edges flamed with yellow post-it flags, so here are the five or six things I wanted to remember from a book I'd rather forget.

When I began to realize how often we quar-relled, how often I picked on her with nervous irritation, I became aware that our love was doomed; love had turned into a love affair with a beginning and an end. I could name the very moment when it had begun, and one day I knew I should be able to name the final hour. When she left the house I couldn't settle to work. I would recon-struct what we had said to each other; I would fan myself into anger or remorse. And all the time I knew I was forc-ing the pace. I was pushing, pushing the only thing I loved out of my life. As long as I could make believe that love lasted I was happy; I think I was even good to live with, and so love did last. But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death; I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.
and
My landlady knocked on the door and said "A Mr. Parkis to see you," thus indicating by a grammatical article the social status of the caller.
....
Have a cigarette"
"Oh no sir, not on duty- except of course for purposes of concealment."
....
How old is he?"
"Gone twelve" as though his boy were a clock. "A youngster can be useful and nobody notices him. Boys are born lingerers"
and
"Im sorry Henry". How often we believe we can slide out of our guilt by an act of contrition.

and finally a highly-wrought tussle with reason and retraction and dawning understanding- so skillful and droll and so much a part of why one loves Greene:

When I came in and sat down and looked round I realized it was a Roman church, full of plaster statues and bad art, realistic art.
I hated the statues, the crucifix, all the emphasis on the human body. I was trying to escape from the human body and all it needed. I thought I could believe in some kind of a God that bore no relation to ourselves, something vague, amorphous, cosmic, to which I had promised something and which had given me something in return —a Thing which had stretched out of the vague into the concrete human life, like a powerful vapour moving among the chairs and walls. One day I too would become part of that vapour; I would escape myself forever. And then I came into that dark church in Park Road and saw the bodies standing around me on all the altars—the hideous plaster statues with their complacent faces—and I re-membered that they believed in the resurrection of the body, the body I wanted destroyed forever. I had done so much injury with this body. How could I want to pre-serve any of it for eternity ? And suddenly I remembered a phrase of Richard's, about human beings inventing doctrines to satisfy their desires, and I thought, how wrong he is. If I were to invent a doctrine it would be that the body was never born again, that it rotted with last year's vermin. It's strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum's swing, at a point where it never rests—not in the dull perpendicular mean, where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another ? If only a miracle could stop the pendulum at an angle of sixty degrees, one would believe the truth was there. Well, the pendulum swung today, and I thought, instead of my own body, of Maurice's. I thought of certain lines life had put on his face, as personal as lines of his writing. I thought of a new scar on his shoulder that wouldn't have been there if once he hadn't tried to protect another man's body from a falling wall. He didn't tell me why he was in hospital those three days; Henry told me. That scar was part of his ch'aracter as much as his jealousy. And so I thought, do I want that body to be vapour—mine, yes, but his ? And I knew I wanted that scar to exist through all eternity. But could my vapour love that scar ? Then I began to want my body that I hated, but only be-cause it could love that scar. We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds ? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can even love with our sense-less nails; we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve. Richard's right, I thought; we have invented the resur-rection of the body because we do need our own bodies, and immediately I admitted that he was right and that this was a fairy tale we tell each other for comfort, I no longer felt any hate of those statues. They were like bad coloured pictures in Hans Andersen; they were like bad poetry, but somebody had needed to write them, some-body who wasn't so proud that he hid them rather than expose his foolishness. I walked up the church, looking at them one after the other. In front of the worst of all—I don't know who she was—a middle-aged man was praying. He had put his bowler hat beside him, and in the bowler hat, wrapped in newspaper, were some sticks of celery. And of course on the altar there was a body too—such a familiar body, more familiar than Maurice's, that it had
never struck me before as a body with all the parts of a body, even the parts the loincloth concealed. I remembered one in a Spanish church I had visited with Henry, where the blood ran down in scarlet paint from the eyes and the hands. It had sickened me. Henry wanted me to admire the twelfth-century pillars, but I was sick, and I wanted to get out into the open air. I thought, these people love cruelty. A vapour couldn't shock you with blood and cries. When I came out into the plaza I said to Henry, "I can't bear all these painted wounds." Henry was very reason-able—he's always reasonable. He said, "Of course it's a very materialistic faith. A lot of magic—" "Is magic materialistic ?" I asked. "Yes. 'Eye of newt and toe of frog, finger of birth-strangled babe.' You can't have anything more materialistic than that. In the Mass they still believe in transsubstantiation. I knew all about that, but I had an idea that it had more or less died out at the Reformation—except for the poor, of course. Henry put me right—how often has Henry rearranged my muddled thoughts! "Materialism isn't only an attitude for the poor," he said. "Some of the finest brains have been materialist—Pascal, Newman. So subtle in some directions; so crudely superstitious in others. One day we may know why. It may be a glandular deficiency." So today I looked at that material body on that material cross, and I wondered, how could the world have nailed a vapour there ? A vapour, of course, felt no pain and no pleasure. It was only my superstition that imagined
AFFAIR it could answer my prayers. Dear God, I had said; I should have said, Dear Vapour. I had said, I hate you; but can one hate a vapour ? I could hate that figure on the cross with its claim to my gratitude—"I've suffered this for you"—but a vapour— And yet Richard believed in less even than a vapour. He hated a fable, he fought against a fable, he took a fable seriously. I couldn't hate Hansel and Gretel, I couldn't hate their sugar house as he hated the legend of Heaven. When I was a child I could hate the wicked queen in Snow White, but Richard didn't hate his fairy-tale devil. The devil didn't exist, and God didn't exist, but all his hatred was for the good fairy tale, not for the wicked one. Why ? I looked up at that over-familiar body, stretched in imaginary pain, the head drooping like a man asleep. I thought, sometimes I've hated Maurice, but would I have hated him if I hadn't loved him too ? 0 God, if I could really hate you, what would that mean ? Am I a materialist after all? I wondered. Have I some glandular deficiency, that I am so uninterested in the really important unsuperstitious things and causes, like the Charity Commission and the cost-of-living index and better calories for the working class ? Am I a materialist be-cause I believe in the independent existence of that man with the bowler, the metal of that cross, these hands I can't pray with ? Suppose God did exist, suppose he was a body like that. What's wrong in believing that his body existed as much as mine ? Could anybody love him or hate him if he hadn't got a body ? I can't love a vapour that was Maurice. That's coarse, that's beastly, that's materialist, I know—but why shouldn't I be beastly and coarse and materialist ? I walked out of the church in a flaming rage and, in defiance of Henry and all the reason-able and the detached, I did what I had seen people do in Spanish churches: I dipped my finger in the so-called holy water and made a kind of cross on my forehead.

and

St. Augustine asked where time came from. He said it came out of the future which didn't exist yet into the present that had no duration, and went into the past which had ceased to exist.

Manhood

The young males held an image of girls that was distinctly two-sided. Boys knew that they preferred the company of other boys, contrasting their own rough play with the gentler pastimes of girls. The opposite sex, they felt, was timid and dull. A girl spent her day in that world of good be-havior where dirt and noise were not allowed and where—given middle-class tastes of the time—the sun rarely shone." The most serious damage to a boy's image of girls probably stemmed from the fact that he had re-cently escaped from that domestic world himself. Boys, after all, spent the first few years of their lives entirely in women's world, closely supervised and dressed in the same clothes as girls. If boys' feelings about girls con-tained a great measure of scorn, it was a scorn they felt for an old and frus-trating identity that they had finally and gleefully shed. Girls were the ob-jects of ill feeling that they had done little to create. It did not matter to the boys that girls had roused their scorn unwit-tingly. The boys delighted in the opportunity to attack them. Young Francis Parkman made an electric machine that could give a shock to a whole row of girls at school. More often, boys launched sudden attacks of slapping and scratching. Even more frequently, they pelted girls with mud balls, snowballs, chestnuts, and whatever other small-but-annoying objects came to hand.'
The girls, especially when treated as an undefined herd of gentle, frilly things, made a handy screen on which a boy could project many hostile feelings. In one quick attack, a boy could take vengeance on an earlier identity, express his disdain for the clean politeness of domestic-ity, and vent his scorn for the restraint of impulse that home and women represented. The cruelty of boys to girls was in certain ways similar to their cruelty toward small animals. Both categories of victim appeared to boys as frail, defenseless creatures, and both were targets unlikely to fight back. In either case, boys were conducting an exercise in power by taking advantage of a situation which they could easily dominate. There is yet another dimension of meaning to the petty violence that boys inflicted on girls. Since boys used rough physical contact to com-municate fondness as well as dislike, their attacks on girls signified not only hostility but also its opposite, affection. If pelting another boy with stones could be an expression of regard, a similar assault could transmit the same sort of message from boy to girl. Or at least in the mind of the boy it could. The idea that girls might experience petty attacks in a dif-ferent way either did not occur to boys or else did not deter them from launching their assaults. The records of nineteenth-century life indicate that boys' emotions about girls often combined fascinated attraction with the disdain that we have already explored.'4 When a boy was "stuck on" a girl, he might do little more than exchange glances and giggles. A more adventurous fel-low might carry a girl's books home from school or exchange tokens of affection. Older boys liked to find clever ways to send notes to their cho-sen ones during class time at school, and a few even wrote valentine messages to their sweethearts. While these desultory affairs rarely pre-occupied the boys, they do indicate a capacity for tender affection to-ward girls that was totally at odds with the rough, boisterous surface of the youthful male personality. The same boyish interest in the opposite sex showed through in other, more generalized ways. In the classroom, boys liked to pull pranks that would attract the girls' attention and make them laugh. They were also capable of minor acts of gallantry such as breaking a pencil in half to share with a needy girl or refusing to squirt girls who happened into the midst of a water fight (an odd point of chivalry on the part of boys who liked to splatter young females with mud balls).'5 In sum, boys made it clear that they found girls admirable and attractive, even though they displayed an equally genuine sense of scorn and suspicion toward fe-males. The positive feelings that girls aroused—feelings that the boys seemed to find mysterious and unsettling—may have added a special
passion to the boys' feelings of disdain, and thus lent particular vigor to their playful attacks. In all of this, there is little to indicate that boys were paying attention to specific qualities of individual girls. Young females served as nearly blank screens where boys focused positive as well as negative feelings about the opposite sex. The screen was not perfectly blank, of course; boys looked at girls and saw gentler, quieter people than themselves, people enmeshed in a domestic world and dressed in gowns and curls. These few broad cues were enough to elicit a confusing combination of disdain and reverence that was rooted in boys' early life experience. One common theme that did link these ambivalent feelings was a wish to dominate, either through physical aggression or through the protective gestures of gallantry. The desire to dominate, together with the boyish ambivalence toward girls, formed an important emotional legacy that boys brought with them to the more focused relationships with girls that would come in their late teens.
The "Effects of 'Cupid's Darts'
In the world of nineteenth-century childhood, boys and girls assumed that a young male "liked best to be with boys" and "would a great deal rather play with a boy than [a girl] at recess."Th Then, at about the mid-teens, boys took a new and serious interest in girls. Not coincidentally, this was the age at which puberty arrived in the nineteenth century. Boys were conscious of the changing forces that drove their interest. One Massachusetts youth of seventeen or eighteen asked a friend, "At our age when our affections are strongest is it to be supposed that we should not have someone on whom our affections are fixed?"
( kisses distributed with more or less partiality according to the rules of the play; but thank Heaven, there was no fiddler." This may seem like an odd way to improve on the "sins" of con-tredanse, but the folks in Massachusetts did not see it that way: "Kissing was a sign of peace, and was not at all like taking hold of hands and skip-ping about to the scraping of a wicked fiddle)
 he began to be conscious that now he was passing to a new sphere, where the girls are supreme and superior and he began to feel for the first time that he was an awkward boy.23
As a boy crossed the threshold into this new arena of feeling and ex-perience, he dimly realized that he was passing back into women's world. His sense of mastery slipped away from him when impulses he could not deny drove him into a social realm he could not understand. The experi-ence of boy culture left a youth unprepared to grapple with this loss of his sense of mastery and control. At this dramatic juncture in life, all but the most isolated youths turned to their male friends for help and support. The attempt to under-stand women became a shared obsession, and the pursuit of them be-came a shared crisis. In boardinghouse bedrooms, on long walks home from parties, and in letters, young men traded intensely in the feelings and details of their relationships with women.

The Dark Valley

The historian, as Friedrich Schlegel said, is "the prophet looking back-wards." Glimpses of what could be in store for the world, dangers to avoid or opportunities to grasp, may be discerned in The Dark Valley. The story of how the leading industrial nations passed from the Slump to a war in which they were all belligerents is told chronologically. Unlike painters, who can present a vast composition on a single canvas, writers must proceed in linear fashion. But in so doing writers of large histories, especially, risk losing the narrative thread in the warp of simultaneous incident and the weft of related interpretation. But they also enable me to develop the main theme of the book, which concerns the manipulation of perception and the distortion of reality. Propaganda became part of the air people breathed during the 1930s. All the major occurrences of the day were the subject of organised deception which ranged from the big, amplified lie to a delicate economy with the truth. Moreover, many public spectacles were specifically mounted and choreographed with propagandist intent. King George V's Silver Jubilee celebrations and his son's coronation were a democratic riposte to Hitler's barbaric pageants at Nuremberg. Stalin's purge trials dramatised a new kind of tyranny. Mussolini's aerial circuses advertised the virility of Fascism. The unveiling of countless war memori-als in France not only marked the nation's immense sacrifice but stressed its incapacity to face another blood-letting. Hollywood created celluloid myths to banish the Depression and affirm the New Deal. The machina-tions behind the scenes were at least as important as the performances acted out on the stage. Of course, to lie is human and deceit has always been the element in which politicians, more than most people, live—their salamander's fire. "Lord, lord," said Falstaff, "how this world is given to lying!" Similarly the manufacture of illusion has invariably been part of the business of govern-ment. Rulers as remote as Rameses II, Augustus Caesar and Louis XIV have exemplified Montesquieu's dictum that the splendour surrounding monarchs forms part of their might. Yet the Depression years witnessed
the dissemination of falsehood on a hitherto unprecedented scale. Never had science and art so combined to promote earthly powers. Goebbels and others developed novel techniques of thought control. New media such as radio and talking pictures were mobilised to sway the masses. Leaders used aircraft to grab the limelight and they emblazoned their mes-sages on the sky. Dictators imposed their version of the truth by means of dogma and terror. They created new cults and persecuted unbelievers. Russia and Germany, and to a lesser extent Italy and Japan, had their own reality. Facts were moulded like plasticine into the approved shape, whether Communist, Aryan, Fascist or imperial. Totalitarianism won adherents across frontiers, for the failures of capi-talism were palpable during the Depression and the democracies suffered a sharp crisis of confidence. Hearing that Stalin had achieved planned progress and social equality, that Hitler had abolished unemployment and built autobahns, that Mussolini had revived Italy and made the trains run on time, people in Britain, France and the United States were inclined to believe that Utopia was another country. Many converts suppressed their critical faculties in all sincerity and naivete: on the basis of a visit to Moscow in 1939, for example, Sir Charles Trevelyan told the Daily Tele-graph that Russian public opinion was the best informed in the world. Many others thought it a small matter, at such a fraught time, to sacrifice veracity on the altar of ideology. In fact the Great Depression may best be understood as the moral equivalent of war, whose first casualty is truth. Naturally people did not lose the ability to make up their own minds during the 193os. All sorts of disparate creeds flourished in the West, where many were quite untouched by the political fundamentalism of the day. Even Germans under Hitler and Russians under Stalin remained free in their heads. But how free? Mass brainwashing did not work in the dic-tator states, but it had some effect in clouding apprehension. Confusion also reigned in the democracies, where citizens were sceptical about offi-cial information, especially after revelations that atrocity stories accepted as gospel during the Great War had been lies. Moreover, the general cli-mate of opinion militated against certainty. The old Victorian orthodoxies were crumbling under the assaults of subversives from Samuel Butler and Edward Carpenter to H. G. Wells and Lytton Strachey—to say nothing of world-shakers such as Darwin, Freud and Einstein, let alone Heisenberg. Thus many became a prey to half-belief and double-think-1984 began in 1931. This is not to deny that dialectical vacillation and dual consciousness are perennial conditions. As Montaigne argued in his essay on incon-stancy, paradox is integral to personality. "The daemon of Socrates affords a memorable instance," declared Gibbon, "how conscience may slumber in a mixed and middle state between self-illusion and voluntary fraud." Yet never was conviction more fractured or doubt more pervasive than during the 193os. Then, to a greater degree than ever before or since, humanity saw through a glass darkly. It is always hard to unearth what Victor Hugo called "that huge blind mole, the Past," but never more so than from the Kafkaesque burrow dug in the Depression. This work therefore includes a pronounced epistemological dimension. It investigates how, and how far, contemporaries knew what they knew and the extent to which our own view of the time is fogged by their uncer-tainty. It surveys the strategies of delusion and self-delusion, the tech-niques of obfuscation, euphemism and selective amnesia, the mechanisms of willingly suspending disbelief and accepting the evidence of things not seen. Above all it elucidates the way in which political power obscured knowledge and economic catastrophe darkened understanding. This theme is reflected in the metaphor which recurs again and again in one form or another and which gives the book its title. Many people during the 193os remarked that they were passing through a dark valley, the valley of the shadow of death, a vale of tears in which the forces of darkness threatened to overwhelm the angels of light. The imagery was biblical (rather than Freudian) but darkness was no mere image: it literally covered the earth during the Depression. If the lamps went out in 1914, if the blinds came down in 1939, the lights were progres-sively dimmed after 1929. As H. G. Wells observed (in The Shape of Things to Come [1933]), the "polychromatic visual clamour" of Broadway, Pic-cadilly Circus, the Champs-Elysées, the Kurfurstendamm and the Ginza died away. Opacity "recaptured the nocturnal town. 'Night-life' became stealthy and obscure, with an increasing taint of criminality." The neon brightened later and by 1934 the photographer Man Ray, poet of the dark-room, could speak of an "age of light." The glare was increased by dicta-tors keen to appear in a good light. As that phrase suggests, the central metaphor of this book is a mixed metaphor. Darkness invariably presented itself as light and was occasionally mistaken for it. Light, which Sir Thomas Browne called "the shadow of God," was equally ambiguous. It was often refracted through a prism of incomprehension and at times par-tially or wholly eclipsed. So my purpose is clear, if ambitious. It is to shed new light on a dark, dishonest decade. It is to cast a broad beam of illumi-nation into a gloomy period, a period when the world was struggling with one crisis and hurtling towards another, the greatest in its history.

Shakespeare

Among the lesser-noted disposals was a dark oval portrait, twenty-two inches high by eighteen wide, purchased by the Earl of Ellesmere for 355 guineas and known ever since as the Chandos portrait. The painting had been much retouched and was so blackened with time that a great deal of detail was (and still is) lost. It shows a balding but not unhandsome man of about forty who sports a trim beard. In his left ear he wears a gold earring. His expression is confident, serenely rakish. This is not a man, you sense, to whom you would lightly entrust a wife or grown daughter. Although nothing is known about the origin of the paint-ing or where it was for much of the time before it came into the Chandos family in 1747, it has been said for a long time to be of William Shakespeare. Certainly it looks like William Shake-speare—but then really it ought to, since it is one of the three likenesses of Shakespeare from which all other such likenesses are taken. In 1856, shortly before his death, Lord Ellesmere gave the painting to the new National Portrait Gallery in London as its founding work. As the gallery's first acquisition, it has a certain sentimental prestige, but almost at once its authenticity was doubted. Many critics at the time thought the subject was too dark-skinned and foreign looking—too Italian or Jewish—to be an English poet, much less a very great one. Some, to quote
the late Samuel Schoenbaum, were disturbed by his "wanton" air and "lubricious" lips. (One suggested, perhaps a touch hope-fully, that he was portrayed in stage makeup, probably in the role of Shylock.) "Well, the painting is from the right period—we can cer-tainly say that much," Dr. Tarnya Cooper, curator of sixteenth-century portraits at the gallery, told me one day when I set off to find out what we could know and reasonably assume about the most venerated figure of the English language. "The collar is of a type that was popular between about 1590 and 1610, just when Shakespeare was having his greatest success and thus most likely to sit for a portrait. We can also tell that the sub-ject was a bit bohemian, which would seem consistent with a theatrical career, and that he was at least fairly well to do, as Shakespeare would have been in this period." I asked how she could tell these things. "Well, the earring tells us he was bohemian," she explained. "An earring on a man meant the same then as it does now—that the wearer was a little more fashionably racy than the average person. Drake and Raleigh were both painted with earrings. It was their way of announcing that they were of an adventur-ous disposition. Men who could afford to wore a lot of jewelry back then, mostly sewn into their clothes. So the subject here is either fairly discreet, or not hugely wealthy. I would guess prob-ably the latter. On the other hand, we can tell that he was pros-perous—or wished us to think he was prosperous—because he is dressed all in black." She smiled at my look of puzzlement. "It takes a lot of dye to make a fabric really black. Much cheaper to produce cothes that were fawn or beige or some lighter color. So black clothes in the 16th century were nearly always a sign of prosperity.

Besotted Antony

For the most part the reports of Antony's disorienting, degrading passion for Cleopatra date from the Athenian summer. If in Alexandria he had distracted her from state business, the tables now turned. He attended principally to her. "Many times, while he was seated on his tribunal and dispensing justice to tetrarchs and kings, he would receive love-billets from her in tablets of onyx or crystal, and read them," Plutarch tells us. (Antony was not the first to receive love let-ters on state occasions. Caesar too had received "wanton bits" during Senate sessions. That mistress did not write on onyx tablets, however.) At one juncture Cleopatra happened to ride conspicuously past the courts on the shoulders of her servants as Antony presided over a legal case. A distinguished Roman orator held the floor, or did until Antony caught sight of Cleopatra. He then "sprang up from his tribunal and forsook the trial, and hanging on to Cleopatra's litter escorted her on her way." It was ignoble behavior; a Roman could indulge in as diversified, as lurid, a sexual life as he pleased, but he was meant to be discreet and unsentimental in his affections. Pompey had made himself a laughingstock  for his indecent habit of falling in love with his own wife. In the second century a senator was expelled from that assembly for kissing his wife in public, in full view of their daughter. Antony had been reprimanded years earlier for having openly nuzzled his wife. He was said these days to rise during banquets, before his guests to massage Cleopatra's feet according to some compact they had made." (The relationship proceeded by pacts, wagers, and competitions, something Cleopatra brought to the table. Antony was little inclined to formalities.) The gesture was in itself offensive; one had servants for such indulgences. the stories— of what another age might term gallantry or devotion, of what the East deemed proper obeisance, of what were in Rome indecencies and indignities—piled up. Antony fawned over Cleopa tra, which was what eunuchs did. He trailed her litter through th( streets, among her attendants. And this, sniffed the Romans, he apin upon the Egyptian queen the usual abuse of the other woman, when she was not even beautiful! From Octavian's point of view, the Athenian reports were too good to be true, as they may well have been. For all of the mania preparations, for all of the governmental irregularities in Rome despite the gathering sense of inevitability, there was no real cause fo a rupture; Antony and Octavian remained two men in search of a conflict. They found one in 32. Antony evidently felt some degree of attachment to Cleopatra or felt with her invincible: In May, he divorced Octavia. From Athens, he instructed her to leave their corn fortable home. We cannot know how much that gesture was directed at Octavia and how much at her brother. Coming as it did after years of disingenuous reconciliations and flimsy agreements, after a season of slanders, it may only have preempted a salvo from the other dire( tion. Octavia could have elected to end the marriage herself. The divorce itself was simple, an informal procedure for which there was no paperwork. Its ramifications were more complex. As Plutarch remarks on the death of Pompey's wife and Caesar's daughter, the family alliance "which had hitherto veiled rather than restrained the ambition of the two men was now at an end."

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THE GUIDING THEME of our book can be stated in a series of   questions. First, what understanding of being human has shaped the various epochs in the history of the West? In particu-lar, how did the various accounts of human existence show us who we are in relation to a source of meaning outside of us; in relation, in short, to what we have held sacred in our various ways. Second, how did these accounts of human being, and of the sacred, keep the problem of nihilism at bay? And finally, is there anything in these self-understandings from our history that we can use to combat the nihilism of our secular age? These are the questions that direct a phenomenological, rather than humanist or Hegelian, reading of the history of the West. A phenomenological account of this sort focuses on the way people ex-perienced themselves and the sacred rather than on the rational con-ceptions they had of themselves and their world. It sees in our history not unidirectional change—neither forward nor backward—but a series of different paradigms of cultural practice each of which high-
lights some aspects of human experience and covers up others. In our reading of the great texts that focused the epochs of Western history we ought, then, to look for whatever it was about those epochs that allowed them to avoid the problems we have, though it led to our
problems eventually. We begin this chapter with Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, the pinnacle of and paradigm for the High Middle Ages. The central feature of Dante's world is his sense that the universe is created by God, and therefore that its moral and spiritual meaning is written on its face. Medieval Christendom, in other words, was a world in which absolutely everything had its place. This is about as anti-nihilistic a universe as one can imagine. Far from there being no intrinsic mean-ings, the Medieval World is absolutely replete with them. We need to ask: Are there experiences at the margins of our own world that reflect the anti-nihilistic aspect of this medieval understanding? The medieval understanding of Creation is no longer accessible to the West in its original form. Even most believing Christians don't understand our world today as a created world in which every aspect of the universe has a God-given meaning that it wears on its face. Still, Dante's general idea, that we are free to retrain our desires so that they are directed toward what ultimately sustains and fulfills them—so that they become attuned, in other words, to the meanings that are already out there in the world—will turn out to hold an important clue for our nihilistic age. As we follow the stages by which our culture lost touch with the gods, and with them all mattering and meaning, Dante offers several other important insights. Within his work is a warning about the attraction of hell that we have yet to heed; a promising way to find meaning in our earthly lives, though he himself finally failed to ap-preciate it; and a stunning demonstration of how in the end the Greek understanding of reality undermines the Judeo-Christian revelation it was introduced to articulate.
CHRISTIANITY WAS VERY RADICAL, and it needed a lot of articulat-ing. For almost a thousand years the Western world tried unsuccess-fully to articulate Christianity in Platonic Greek terms. Augustine and other church fathers tried, in particular, to give a central place to an incarnate god while accepting Plato's adoration of an abstract eternity and his resulting denigration of the body. Then, a surprising breakthrough occurred. A bunch of lecture notes that had been de-caying in a cellar for years were rediscovered, translated into Arabic, eventually translated into Latin, and brought to the West. The author, Aristotle, turned out to be a brilliant critic of Plato's philosophy. He held that enduring, material things like trees and tables—not eternal, abstract ideas as in Plato—were the most real. He also contended that being embodied was not enfeebling or humiliat-ing, as Plato and Augustine had held. Rather, bodies were empower-ing, according to Aristotle; indeed, embodied individuals were more perfect than disembodied souls. Christian philosophers and theologians soon recognized that Ar-istotle, rather than Plato, was their man. They devoted themselves to making Christianity intelligible in Aristotelian terms. Greatest among these articulators was St. Thomas Aquinas, who lived from 1225 until 1274 and who took on the huge task of writing a Summa Theologica, which reconciled in detail the Greek and Christian understandings of reality. And the great popularizer of St. Thomas's theology was Dante Alighieri, who lived a generation after St. Thomas. Dante laid out Thomas's achievement in a poem he called The Comedy. It was written in the vernacular, Italian, instead of scholarly Latin, and it focused and held up to the people of the day their medi-eval understanding of everything that is. In this way it was a work of art that functioned like a god. The "Historical Introduction" to The Inferno by Archibald MacAllister tells us that
before [Dante's] death in 1321 the first two parts [of The Com-edy] had already . . . achieved a reputation tinged with super-natural awe.'
No wonder that by the sixteenth century Dante's poem was recog-nized as sacred and thereafter called The Divine Comedy. Aristotle held that the world is hierarchically organized. That means not only that it is unified, but also that things are ranked within it with respect to how perfect they are. At the top of all this order is a being Aristotle called The Prime Mover. The Prime Mover, in its absolute perfection, draws all beings to itself. According to Aristotle, the hierarchical order is primarily manifest in the natural world. But the idea of a hierarchical universe in which everything has its place fit well with the Judeo-Christian belief in a creator God. In the Medieval World everything from lead to gold, from mice to elephants, and from sinners to saints was ranked. Even each type of sin was ranked. As Dante descends into Hell in the first part of The Divine Comedy, each type of sinful life he sees is worse than the one above it. Indeed, even the saints themselves are ranked! In the final part of the poem, as Dante is drawn upward toward Para-dise, the saints he meets are more and more saintly. One could call all this monolithic monotheism. There is no place for the poly-worlds of Homer or for the tragically conflicting situations of Aeschylus. Dante popularized St. Thomas's metaphysics and theology in his famous poem, but his initial motivation was much simpler than that. At the age of nine he had met an eight-year-old girl in Florence named Beatrice Portinari. He fell in love with her "at first sight." From that moment Dante took Beatrice to be his Lady, and he vowed to write a poem about her like nobody had ever written for his Lady before. And he did. The Divine Comedy is set in 1300, when Dante is thirty-five years old. He has gone "astray / from the straight road," he writes in the famous opening lines of the poem, and "woke to find myself alone in a dark wood." We know nothing of how Dante has gone astray, only that he has, and that he must undertake a journey, therefore, to save his soul. The journey itself, however, is clearer. It will take him through the entire Christian spiritual universe. First Dante must walk down through Hell itself, where he will see every type of sin that Christian-ity names, along with the punishments that are fit to each. Next he will ascend the mountain of Purgatory, where he will see the souls of those who sinned but repented, and the process of rehabilitation they must undergo. And finally, in Paradise, he will see the various types of saintly souls, and the increasingly blissful states they can achieve. In this way Dante will gain an understanding of precisely what a worthy life consists of and all the ways one can fail to achieve it. Along this journey Dante will have two guides. Through Hell and most of Purgatory the great Roman poet Virgil will lead the way. Vir-gil, however, is a peculiar choice to guide Dante through the Chris-tian universe. After all, he died before Jesus was born. Indeed, there are interesting ways in which Virgil's Roman Stoic philosophy leads him to misunderstand what matters in the Christian world. Finally, Virgil's understanding gives out altogether, since reason alone is not capable of comprehending Christian love. This is when Dante's sec-ond guide takes over. As he ascends through the various levels of Para-dise, his Lady Beatrice leads the way.
THE GATES OF HELL through which Dante and Virgil pass are in-scribed with a dedicatory poem that ends in the famous line: 'Aban-don all hope ye who enter here."' Hell is not only for those who have sinned but also for those who had the misfortune to live before or otherwise outside the influence of Christ. Of the nine circles in Hell, the least severe by far is the first circle, called Limbo, which is re-served for the virtuous pagans and unbaptized children. In Limbo Virgil finds his eternal home, along with the other great figures of the
Classical and Old Testament worlds: the poets like Homer and Ovid, the philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, and until they were later rescued by Jesus, the Hebrews like Abraham, Noah, and David. The virtuous pagans never had a chance to be Christians, so the lives they lived were the best they could manage under the circumstances. In Limbo they continue their virtuous lives, acting with moderation and dignity. But they can sense that they are missing something. As Virgil says, they are spared the suffering of Hell except for one affliction: "that without hope we live on in desire."3 Sighing fills the air of Limbo, as the virtuous pagans sense the absence of something they cannot quite understand or articulate. In Dante's Christian world, to be a human being of any epoch is to have been created by God to need the total fulfillment He makes possible. But God's universe offers that fulfillment only if one gets in the right relation to it by catching the Christian mood of agape love. The prob-lem is that nobody knew this until Jesus came along and showed it, so the noble souls in Limbo have missed their chance. In the next four circles of Hell a variety of sinful souls are de-scribed: lustful, gluttonous, avaricious, and wrathful souls, among many others. Unlike the souls in Limbo, these are Christians who have gone astray. Without going into the details, it is worth point-ing out that their sins all have a certain structural similarity: they loved something that was not sufficient to fulfill their desires. The lustful, for example, loved the carnal delight of sex—they "sinned in the flesh."' Among these Dante counts not only Paolo and Francesca, whom we met in Chapter 1, but also Cleopatra, Tristan, and of course Helen and Paris. (Notice that Dante's interpretation of Helen is very different from Homer's.) The sin they share is to have wasted all their love on something that couldn't in the end offer spiritual fulfillment. Without considering Dante's positive alternative, one can see what he thinks is wrong with lives like these. The way Dante understands these sinners, they are various kinds of sex and love addicts. (Or they are addicted to food, or money, or even their own anger.) The struc-ture of addictions like these is uniquely unfulfilling. Consider an anal-ogy with an addiction to cigarettes. The addict keeps coming back for more of the thing he thinks will fulfill him, make him happy, or give his life meaning. It looks desirable, and therefore it seems as if it should satisfy his desires to have it. But in fact when a smoker has finished one cigarette, he's left only with a icraving for another. Ultimately such a sinner gets nothing but the desire for more of the unfulfilling thing. Dante is certainly right that a life devoted to this kind of addiction is to be avoided. But his Aristotelian picture gives him a particular analysis of the case. In his view God's perfection, like the perfection of the Prime Mover in Aristotle, draws everything to Him. Human beings, in particular, are born to be fulfilled by the direct experience of God. To let your love be averted from Him and aimed at anything else—even the Lady Beatrice—is to have lived an unfulfilled life. Whether it is possible to gain fulfillment through total commit-ment to another person or not, the souls deeper down in Hell have got a different problem. Within the fifth circle there is an enormous wall that separates upper from lower Hell. Within the wall is Hell proper, which Dante calls the City of Dis. (Dis is the Roman name for the Greek god of the underworld, Hades.) In order to get to the bottom of Hell, and from there up to Purgatory and then Paradise, Dante and Virgil will have to pass through the City of Dis. Here is where Virgil's non-Christian background becomes a li-ability. In his capacity as tour guide, Virgil marches off to demand entrance through the imposing city gate. "Take heart," he tells his fearful charge.
Nothing can take our passage from us when such a power has given warrant for it.5
When he reaches the gate, however, and presumably demands access in the name of God, the group of guards at the gate run behind the wall: "I couldn't hear my Lord's words," Dante reports
but the pack that gathered round him suddenly broke away howling and . . . slammed the towering gate hard in his face.6
Virgil is stunned. "Who has forbidden me the halls of sorrow?" he wonders.' But Virgil misunderstands the spiritual layout of Hell. He thinks that the lowest circles of Hell must be like a sturdy prison built to keep the worst offenders in. After all, that is certainly what Hell would be like in the Roman world. And true to this pagan conception Virgil says at one point in describing the souls of Dis, "I will explain how each is prisoned, and why."' But the City of Dis is not a prison to keep the most sinful souls in; it is a fortress built to keep God out. Dante, the Christian, understands this immediately. He talks about how he was
. . . eager to learn what new estate of Hell those burning fortress walls enclosed.'
The City of Dis is a fortress instead of a prison because the souls who live within it have not just turned their love toward something less fulfilling than God; they have actively rejected Him. Saint Thomas distinguishes between carnal sin and spiritual sin, and that distinc-tion is mirrored in the geography of Dante's Hell. Carnal sin is loving good things such as food, sex, and material goods, but loving them too much. Such overvaluation is punished outside the wall of Dis. Spiritual sin, by contrast, is rejecting God's creation. The spiritual sin-ners have barricaded themselves inside the walls of Dis, and use their energy to keep God out. But why would anybody rebel against God? We can learn from Milton's Paradise Lost. There, Satan says he "would rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven." He resents being created by God so that he, Satan, can find peace and fulfillment only in contemplating Him. He wants to make up his own mind about what to worship. Likewise, Dante's Satan, and the rebellious angels who follow him and defend the wall of the City of Dis, are dedicated to freely choosing what satis-fies them. They reject God's creation in order to give things value as they see fit. Thus the sinners inside the City of Dis substitute for natu-ral attractions willfully and actively chosen ones. For example, inside Dis Dante finds the homosexuals who cruise in packs. In Dante's world this is a rebellious rejection of a natural desire for monogamous heterosexual love.'° An even more serious sin is the rejection of life itself, so suicides are punished even deeper inside the City of Dis. As we shall soon see, the further Dante goes down in Hell, the less open the shades become to the appeal of things stemming from God's love and the more they close in on themselves. Moreover, the further away from God the shades are, the less moved they are by love of him. God is after all the Prime Mover. As a result, the deeper they go, the less they can move. At the bottom of Hell the most serious sinners are literally frozen in a pool of ice. Because they were unmoved by any-thing in God's creation, they can't move at all. Milton's Protestant Hell is hot all the way down. We are used to an active, interventionist Satan at the head of armies of fallen angels. But Dante's Satan is so self-sufficient that he is not drawn to do anything. He is almost completely immobilized in the ice. All he can do is flap his wings, and indeed it is thanks to his flapping that Hell is frozen over." The Enlightenment admired all ways of life that strove for inde-pendence, so they praised the self-sufficiency that gave itself its own laws as autonomy. For the Medievals, however, to exclude oneself from bliss in order to save one's autonomy was the very essence of sin. Dante can thus be read as warning his contemporaries about the evils of autonomy. That warning could include those of our contem-poraries tempted by Nietzschean willfulness—such as David Foster Wallace, whom we have already discussed. In a creation that draws us toward what is fulfilling, the attempt to set up one's own values and assign one's own meaning to things rather than cultivate their latent meaning can lead to a sad sort of nihilism in which there is no mean-ing and nothing moves us at all.
DANTE NEEDS A PLACE for free will in his system. If your will ulti-mately has nothing to do with the kind of life you lived—if that life was preordained and there was nothing you could have done about it—then what sense does it make to reward or punish you for that life? But if Dante is against the kind of willful autonomy found in the City of Dis, how can he have any notion of freedom of the will? Dante does, indeed, have a place for free will in his system, but it's not the kind of free will we're used to. For one thing, freedom for Dante lies not in your ability to choose which life you're going to live or what actions you're going to perform, as we might imagine. In particu-lar, it doesn't involve freedom from some kind of external constraint upon your action. That's the kind of freedom that most naturally goes against a notion of determinism, and it's the kind of freedom we worry about most. But it's not at all what Dante has in mind. Rather, freedom according to Dante consists in being free to re-train your desires to focus on what will be fulfilling. In Dante's view the job of training one's desires lies principally with the State and the Church, and the problem with the modern world is that the State and the Church have failed to do their job.'2 Indeed, if we were raised properly and so had the right desires then each of us would go straight to God like an arrow shot from a bow.13 But even in Dante's world, when the Church and State are failing to train us properly, we have the freedom to retrain ourselves on our own if we so desire. That is the phenomenon described in detail in Dante's account of Purgatory. Dante's overall view is that the senses, and our desires, are bound by what grabs them, but we have the freedom to form those senses by means of our will and intellect so that the right things grab them. The reforming glutton, for example, can retrain himself in such a way as to no longer see food as the only object worthy of his desire. Former gluttons in Purgatory are actively engaged in this type of retraining. They agree to undergo the torture of Tantalus, a kind of forced diet-ing. The main difference between Hell and Purgatory, then, is that those in Hell embraced their bad desires, while those in Purgatory repented them. The act of repenting is the free act of the will on the basis of which one can be judged. Repentance puts one on the path to salvation, and the "punishment" consists in freely going through the regime of reforming one's senses and desires so that they are directed in the right way. All souls are naturally attracted to things in the world, according to Dante. How do we turn these attractions toward living a worthy life? Two options present themselves. The first says to try to withhold your desire, or even rid yourself of it. This is a typically Stoic type of approach, and it is the one that Virgil adopts. "Reason must guard the threshold of consent," he says.14 The appetites, in other words, are to be kept in check; reason must keep us from giving in to our desires. Dante has a different, Christian, view. All love is good in Dante's view as long as it is directed toward an appropriate object in an appro-priate way. He counters Virgil's Stoic view that free will should curb love with the Christian view that free will should direct love. Dante thinks that you should intensify your love and be committed to what-ever attracts you with total devotion, and then if it fails to satisfy you, which it surely will, you can learn from your mistakes until you finally find someone or something worthy of total passion and commitment. The last thing you should do is trim your desire. Free will allows you to train your desires in the right direction.
IT SEEMS AS THOUGH Dante admits a variety of desirable goals. At least that's what it looks like. The question is whether Dante can be consistent. In particular, the question is whether Dante thinks it is possible to find someone or something here on earth that is worthy of total passion and commitment. To the extent that he cannot, he runs the risk of recapitulating Augustine's error of giving an interpreta-tion of Christianity that can't make sense of an embodied, incarnated Christ.
prom Dante to Kant: The Attractions and Dangers ofAutonomy l 129
In his poem Dante does not neglect Jesus and seek access to an eternal disembodied God by way of his deepest inner self, as did Au-gustine. Dante was a totally outgoing person deeply involved in the politics of his city of Florence and also totally devoted to the woman who inspired his poem. Happily for him the early Christian mood of total devotion to Jesus had indirectly inspired a group of French poets called troubadours to develop a new understanding of love. It wasn't Greek erotic desire, but it wasn't Christian agape either. It was a new mood that came to be called courtly love. This new kind of love in-volved total devotion to a person who became the center of your life. Indeed, in the troubadour tradition your beloved actually gives you your identity. Without her you would cease to exist as the person you have become in loving her. You understand who you are entirely in relation to her, and therefore you are ready to die for her. In short, the troubadours invented romantic love and Dante was a romantic lover. The depth of Dante's devotion to Beatrice is signaled in his poem. In the middle of The Divine Comedy, at the top of the mountain of Purgatory, Dante witnesses a pageant of the books of the Bible; the pageant portrays the history of the church. In the middle of the pag-eant a cart arrives pulled by a griffin. The griffin is a traditional sym-bol for Jesus: as a beast with two natures it mirrors Him who was both man and God. The procession comes to a halt, and the cart stops just in front of Dante. In the cart he notices a hooded figure. Something is happening which is the culmination of the history of the church. Angels fly overhead singing, "Blessed is he who comes." We are fully prepared for the hood to pull back and reveal Jesus Christ. But here is where Dante makes his most audacious move. For the figure in the cart isn't Jesus; it's Beatrice! Dante has put his girlfriend in Jesus' place! Dante has put Beatrice in the place of Christ. He has, indeed, written a poem about his beloved that glorifies her more than any poet before him has ever exalted his Lady. There is something phenomenologically plausible about this as well. The phenomenon here is that love can draw one to another person so that she becomes the center of one's world. If one is blessed enough to be drawn into such a love, then everything in one's life makes sense in relation to her, and the sense it all makes is shining and glorious and completely satisfying. One understands oneself completely and hap-pily in terms of the definition this love gives to one's life. If this is the experience Dante had, then it is not crazy for him to see Beatrice in the role of Christ the Savior when he sees her in the pageant at the top of Purgatory. The mood of romantic love for an-other is not so far, after all, from the various forms of the sacred that we have seen up till now For one thing, it is not a feeling that one can choose. Like being guided by Athena or catching the contagious mood of agape in the presence of Jesus, romantic love too is some-thing that strikes one, takes one over. It demands a sense of gratitude. Finally, one understands exactly how to act on the basis of it. Roman-tic love gives one an attunement to a situation that makes everything matter in its appropriate degree. If Dante had stopped with Beatrice at the top of Purgatory, therefore, he'd have described a completely livable world that could bring joy and meaning into his life. Moreover, the kind of devotion that he has to Beatrice is devotion to her as a physical, embodied being. He talks about her beautiful green eyes, her lovely mouth, and especially her legs, in characterizing his total devotion. In this way Dante captures an essential part of the Christian intuition that the saving mood is one that happens in the physical, embodied world. If he finds his fulfillment in his commit-ment to Beatrice, then he has found a way to resist the Augustinian mistake of trying to interpret Christianity in a completely abstract and disembodied way. This is the moment when Dante has the chance to give an interpretation of Christianity that frees it from the Greek abstractions with which it is incompatible. Unfortunately, that is not the path Dante takes. The West will have to wait another five hundred years before Soren Kierkegaard de-velops the phenomenology of romantic love Dante began to describe. In Dante's case, although Beatrice does guide him through Paradise,
he does not find his life's meaning through his commitment to her. Rather, having guided Dante through the circles of Heaven, Beatrice returns to her seat in the rose in which the saved souls sit when con-templating God. Having placed her in the position of Savior, putting her in the place of the one St. John says is the truth and the way, Dante treats her as a ladder he can leave behind when he reaches God. For Beatrice herself is not the ultimate object of love in Dante's final picture.'5 She is the way but not the truth. When Beatrice returns to her seat, Dante can see her high up in the rose, right below St. Peter. She gives Dante one last smile, and then turns back to contemplate the radiance of God. Dante reports that: "Experiencing that radiance, it is impossible to think of ever turning from Beatrice has led Dante to achieve the beatific vision—a direct contemplation of God. But the bliss of God's love is so over-whelming that far from organizing his life and providing the point of all his actions, it takes him out of his life altogether. Instead of return-ing to politics with renewed vigor, or trying to live as Beatrice would have him do, Dante seems to lose all sense of himself as an individual. According to St. Thomas the beatitude caused by the contemplation of God's radiance is the ultimate goal of human life. The bliss of con-templating God is so overwhelming, however, that it makes all other earthly joys irrelevant. So Dante is never going to look back at Beatrice. -What had been the most important commitment in his life on earth turns out to be irrelevant to his fulfillment. In effect, the single most important distinction—the distinction between his love for Beatrice and every-thing else in his life—gets leveled by the bliss of contemplating God. Similarly, Dante's commitment to politics ends up looking irrel-evant. From his place in Paradise Dante looks back toward the earth and reports: "I saw this globe so lost in space that I had to smile at such a sorry show.'7 He sees that everything earthly, even politics, is trivial and says: "I saw the dusty little threshing ground that makes us ravenous for our mad sins."' Like his love of Beatrice, everything
political that was meaningful in his life has been trumped by God's radiance. Once Dante sees God, he is never going to turn away from God's radiance to take sides in politics or to gaze on Beatrice again.

ATS

This conception of the writer as genius only encourages a cer-tain personality to focus even harder on how to succeed. It is like the young Luther rushing back to confess the pride he felt in his original confession. Purity of heart, like the purity of the writer's devotion, is not to be found—according to Gilbert—by trying hard to eradicate all impure thoughts. Gilbert has an essentially Lutheran view of genius. Not the young Luther, who thought he could purify his soul by confessing properly and well and often, but Luther after his revelation, Luther after he has come to believe that good works on their own are irrelevant, for only by the grace of God can one achieve salvation. That's sort of what Gilbert thinks about writing. It doesn't involve the Christian God in particular for her, of course, and this is an obvious distinction from Luther. But Gilbert does think that one writes well only when the god of writing shines upon her, only by the grace of the attendant spirit—the genius—who comes to tell her what to write. One can see the appeal of such a view; it does a lot to ease the pres-sure of creative performance by taking the responsibility for success out of the hands of the writer, just as it did a lot to ease the pressure of the demand to achieve purity for the early Luther. If one could con-vince oneself of the truth of this properly Lutheran vision, and really manage to live it, then perhaps one could avoid Wallace's fate. Luther's actual revelation—the vision that switched his focus from works to faith, from the idea that salvation comes through the good work of confession and other hard-won indications of purity to the idea that God's grace alone can do the trick—this revelation is often described as turning on the interpretation of a biblical phrase about
the "righteousness of God." God is not righteous in the sense that he gazes into your soul and passes a just judgment upon you, seeing clearly how much purity you have achieved, as the medieval Catholic view held. God is righteous instead, in Luther's mature view, in the sense that he justifies your existence through His love, a love he may offer no matter how sinful you have been. In this mature Lutheran view, God's grace is literally nothing over which the individual has control. We are pure, passive recipients of it, in just the way that Gil-bert imagines the writer is a pure, passive recipient of her genius's inspiration. Gilbert exemplifies this receptive view of creative genius in a story from the American poet Ruth Stone. Stone is in her nineties now but in reminiscences about her childhood, Gilbert reports, she vividly re-calls her early encounters with the force of poetry.
When she was growing up in rural Virginia, [Stone] would be out working in the fields, and . . . she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. . . . It was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her . . . And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page.
This idea of the poem as an external force, something wander-ing the world looking for a receptacle, a place to reside, is Gilbert's Lutheran ideal; it is what she thinks can save great artists from the de-structive force and the dark times, from drinking gin at nine o'clock in the morning. As in the case of Luther, to get this understanding of the human being as writer requires a Gestalt shift, a shift that turns what was an onerous, pressure-filled, probably inachievable task into something that is entirely outside the artist's realm of responsibility.
It is not clear that this is a reason for the truth of the view, but it is at least Gilbert's instrumental reason for wanting to believe it. About Wallace's Nietzschean-type approach she says:
I got to tell you, I think that was a huge error. You know, I think that allowing somebody . . . to believe that he or she is . . . the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery is just a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile, human psyche. It's like asking somebody to swallow the sun. It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance. And I think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years.
The idea that we must "become gods ourselves" as Nietzsche says,48 that we must become the source of all "divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery," this dramatically self-aggrandizing view was indeed prefigured by the Renaissance notion of genius—and of rational hu-manism more generally. And we think Gilbert is right to resist it. It's not just too much responsibility for the human psyche, as she points out, but it's probably inconsistent with what are deeply human kinds of comfort and happiness too, as we will see in Melville. So on this issue we side with Gilbert over Wallace. But there are disadvantages to Gilbert's pure receptivity view as well. For if the poem is a purely external force that rumbles through us—if the sacred and the divine and the meaningful can't be earned but depend on God's inscrutable grace—then this receptive view is just as incapacitating as Wallace's kind of Nietzschean nihilism. Whereas Wallace gives us an unachievable task, Gilbert gives us no task at all. We can pray for inspiration from the genius, of course, just as the mature Luther can pray for the grace of God. But what really matters in the end has nothing to do with how we live our lives.49 What matters is only whether we happen to be near a pencil at the
David Foster Wallace's Nihilism l 57
moment the poem rumbles through. Perhaps this is good news for pencil companies, but the rest of us can feel little joy in such a vision. The question that remains is whether Gilbert and Wallace between them have completely covered the terrain. In Wallace's Nietzschean view, we are the sole active agents in the universe, responsible for gen-erating out of nothing whatever notion of the sacred and divine there can ever be. Gilbert, by contrast, takes a kind of mature Lutheran view. On her account we are purely passive recipients of God's divine will, nothing but receptacles for the grace he may choose to offer. Is there anything in between? We think there is, and we will try to de-velop it in the final chapter of the book.

-"■111111

ATS

Only Dante's extreme kind of bliss- a bliss so powerful that it supercedes any kind of human commitment or attachment or project whatsoever, a bliss so overwhelming that it reveals earth and all earthly goods as completely insignificant, so ecstatic that it takes you out of the world and into an infinitely better one-
only this kind of experience of the sacred will do. If this is the goal that Wallace seeks, then nothing available on earth can achieve it. The joy of a crowd rising as one in the spontaneous celebration of a feat of human greatness, the cozy warmth of the fireside, the comfort and gratitude of a family meal—none of these human kinds of happi-ness will do. Only in the ecstatic bliss of a levitating Mitchell Drinion does salvation lie. But Wallace's vision is demanding in a second sense as well. For it demands that this bliss be experienced constantly, without cease, through even the most banal and frustrating and painful and awful aspects of existence. Indeed it demands that Hell itself be experienced as fully paradisiacal bliss. There is some question whether this radically demanding picture of salvation is actually attractive. For it seems to level all possible ex-periences, leaving no room for the idea that any experience is bet-ter than any other. One wonders whether bliss of this eternal sort is even desirable at all. Is bliss—when there is nothing to contrast it with—actually enjoyable for human beings? Or is it rather that the full range of human emotions is required for any one of them to take on significance? We will see that this is Melville's view. The Catskill eagle that he admires can soar to the highest heights and descend into the blackest gorges, and by way of this variety sees the true meaning in all our states. Finally, however, Wallace's vision of the sacred is also deeply im-poverished. As we have seen, there is no sense whatsoever in Wal-lace that the "sacred" moments of existence are gifts, so there is no place for gratitude. The bliss that Wallace seeks is not only ecstatic and unworldly—extreme in a sense known only to Dante's medieval Christian monotheism it is in addition generated solely by the indi-vidual will.38 This divorces Wallace's notion of the sacred completely from its traditional support in some external notion of the divine. In Dante's world, by contrast, ecstatic bliss is possible only when one gives up one's individual will completely and releases it into the will of
David Foster Wallace's Nihilism I 49
God. "But mine were not the wings for such a flight," Dante writes, in the very lines from which Wallace was quoting:
Here my powers rest from their high fantasy But already I could feel my being turned . • . By the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars."
No wonder Wallace worried he was not strong enough to write the story he wanted. Only inhuman, divine strength would have been sufficient for the task. Nietzsche thought we were strong enough for a project like this, that the true free spirits could live this way with joy. Indeed, Nietzsche believed that the only possibility for existence was for each of us to become gods ourselves. Nietzsche is thinking of this kind of infi-nite freedom when he describes the free spirits as living forever upon the open sea, the stable but constraining land to be discarded like a crutch. "We have left the land and have embarked," Nietzsche writes.
We have burned our bridges behind us—indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us. . . . Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom—and there is no longer any "land.""
The person who feels homesick for land, in other words, who wishes for some stable ground to stand upon, some externally imposed con-straint to guide him in his choice, this person is simply not strong enough, in Nietzsche's view, to experience the joy of infinite freedom. To see what extraordinary strength this requires, we need to keep in mind the radical freedom that Wallace is aiming for. It is a freedom of will so complete that by its force one can experience searing pain as overwhelming joy; crushing, crushing boredom as instant bliss; hell itself as the sacred, mystical oneness of all things deep down. There are literally no constraints whatsoever to the meaning we can con-struct for our experiences. In the context of this infinite freedom any restriction whatsoever—even of the land beneath our feet—is woeful, romdeplorable; it chafes and burns. But what if this is impossible for human beings? What if our very umanness sets limitations to the way we can experience ourselves and our world? What if it isn't possible to create meaning or find a sense of the sacred ex nihilo without some kind of constraints? In such a world, as Melville understood, grim perseverance is possible for a while; but in the end suicide is the only choice. Melville too considers a character—Bulkington is his name—who is at home only in the infinite openness of the sea, for whom land "seemed scorching to his feet." And he thinks there is something seri-ous and terrifying and wonderful about such a character.
I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in midwinter just landed from a four years' danger-ous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term.4'
But there is no happiness in Melville's Bulkington: "in the deep shadows of his eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem to give him much joy."42 Indeed, by contrast with Nietzsche's joy-ful free spirit, Melville sees in Bulkington a grim, dangerous exis-tence—one that is wonderful and awe-full, to be sure; indeed one that is devoted to the highest truth—but an existence, for all that, that is not livable for a mortal man. Bulkington himself is a "mor-tally intolerable truth."" Bulkington reveals a deep tension, perhaps even a paradox, of human existence, in Melville's view. As a human being Bulkington has to work hard to keep his freedom; the seduction of the shore's safety is a constant danger. For upon the land is where all normal human comfort and vulnerability lies. And though these comforts and vulnerabilities are not true realities but only seeming ones, al-thpugh they are not as stable as they seem to be and grounded in God,
and although Bulkington himself recognizes this, nevertheless their comfort appeals to every human being.
The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that's kind to our mortalities.“
For Bulkington these human comforts and vulnerabilities must be resisted. Sure, the happiness of friendship seems a joy to normal folks, but Bulkington knows this joy is sanctioned by no God, and therefore in it lies no eternal truth; he knows that boredom, and anger, and frustration, and melancholy—yes, even the "damp, drizzly November in the soul" that we shall see is so important to Melville's central char-acter Ishmael—all these are a mirage, a nothing, and so can properly have no effect. He is not driven to the sea by melancholy, like Ishmael is. Rather, the "slavishness" of the land can only be counteracted by the complete lack of constraint one finds at sea. In Wallace this is the freedom to treat melancholy as happiness, boredom as bliss, to make a comfort of even the stormiest waters. But this kind of infinite freedom, according to Melville, is not a human freedom at all. The freedom to gaze at the eternal chaos of the universe and impose an arbitrary meaning upon it, to live eter-nally upon this open sea, that is the freedom of a god, a freedom no mortal life can sustain. Perhaps we should think of Wallace himself, therefore, as we read the description of Bulkington's last hour. When he is absent one morning, presumably having jumped from the ship, Melville describes Bulkington as a demigod.
"But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling in-finite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart. O Bulkington, bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing. Straight up leaps thy apotheosis!"
Bear thee grimly demigod, indeed!

1876

"It is a fascinating game." Sanford puffed on his cigar. "I think about it sometimes for myself." "Politics?" "Yes. If you have the money and the feel of the thing, why, it's as simple as can be. It would take me maybe two hundred thou-sand dollars to buy a seat in the Senate. Conkling paid a bit more for his seat but then New York's more prosperous than Rhode Island."
"But why would you want it? After all, don't men go to the Senate in order to acquire the sort of money that you already have?" Sanford laughed. "Good point! I suppose it's to see if you can get the top prize. Become the president. After all, that's worth having for itself, isn't it?" "I can't think why. As far as I can tell, our presidents have almost no function, except perhaps in wartime." "But they are there! Don't you see? Now, when you worry about corruption—" "Mr. Sanford, I promise you that I have not lost a moment's sleep at the thought of a bribe given or received." "Sir, I know your writing. I know who your friends are. You're shocked by all this. But how else can you run a country where half the people don't even speak English and everybody's in a scramble to get his share of the pie? I'll tell you something," he told me. "Personally, I'm like you. I don't like anything about this so-called democracy. I'd like a well-run country with honest peo-ple in the government, the way they have in Prussia . . ." "A tyranny?" "If that's the only way to clean things up, make things run right, well, I'd accept that." "With yourself as the tyrant, naturally." "Oh, I'd accept that in a flash!" He laughed to show that he was not joking. "Mrs. Sprague has true `tong.'"My other ear was duly filled with the sound of McAllister's voice; he had heard a magical name and responded in character. "Whenever I hear New York-ers say there is no society at Washington, I say, why, you have never been to Mrs. Sprague's for New Year's Day nor seen her enter a room, any room, with her hair done in braids like a coronet, and those marvellous jewels. Gone now, I should think. They are flat broke, don't you know? the Spragues." This last item was added as if it were a charming detail of the poor woman's regalia. McAllister then gave me a recipe for terrapin, "taught me by a Maryland darkey," involving a good deal of cream and butter. He also asked me if I had noticed how Americans of the same class say "sir" to one another whereas in England only servants say "sir." "But we do say `sir' in England. To royalty." I was benign.
and
 "Have you been to the White House yet?" John was curious to see how Emma would respond to American grandeur. But she was demure. "Only to pay a call on Mrs. Grant. We are, she said, to be invited to her next 'large' dinner. She emphasized the 'large.' Unless, of course, Papa offends the President with his pieces." "Then you've not seen the President, Mr. Schuyler?" "Oh, I've seen him, yes, but I've not met him." I should have noted earlier in these pages that two days ago, at about ten o'clock in the evening the President appeared in the rotunda of Willard's Hotel. I had been warned that he often likes to stroll over from the White House to sit in the lobby and smoke a cigar, to speak to no one, and then go home. The hotel people respect his incog-nito, if that's the word. But sometimes he is recognized by the guests, as he was by Nordhoff and me. Nordhoff saw him first. We were seated at the far end of the rotunda, going over my second piece. "Here he comes. Don't stare." I glanced casually toward the main door and there stood Gen-eral Grant. None of the other guests recognized him, but then he is not, to say the least, a vivid-looking man. For one thing he is a good deal smaller than I had expected, and though, ostensibly, robust of build, he seems curiously fragile because of the way he moves: the upper part of the body inclines forward as he walks, while the head is held slightly to one side. I would suspect that he is pigeon-toed, with one leg shorter than the other like my mother, whose gait resembled his. The hair is short, turning grey, and parted on the left side (it is said that he has a violent prejudice against men who part their hair in the middle). The famous beard is neatly tended and covers, or rather masks, the entire lower part of the face. Clenched between his teeth was a long black cigar that remained unlit for the whole time he sat in the lobby: he chewed rather than smoked. Just back of his chair stood the sole detective who guards the President on his strolls. Ears, nose, eyes are unexceptional, but the face in repose is very curious. There is something hurt, damaged, puzzled in the ex-pression. "Does he always look so wretched?" I asked. "Pretty much. He laughs little, smiles less. And for an army man he is most prudish. He'll walk out of the room if someone tells a dirty story—" "But he drinks, doesn't he?" "He used to. Certainly before and even during the war he was often drunk. But now I think he's rather abstinent. Most of his time is spent with horses. In fact, he will only talk to you about horses or the war. He gets upset at any mention of politics." "Quite understandable." "He has no interest in the arts. He actively dislikes music. Yet he is partial, curiously enough, to flowers." "Men are not easy to fathom, are they?" "Heroes least of all." So we stared for half an hour at General Grant as he took his ease, chewed his cigar, looked at the people coming and going like any other war veteran come home to grow old, to sit on the courthouse steps of an evening and watch others live. Finally, the President was recognized. Two political types (of the lobby, not the Congress: I've got so I can tell them apart with a glance) emerged from the barroom and, rather drunkenly, pre-sented themselves for Grant's attention. The hero's face did not once lose its puzzled expression while the blue eyes did not, to say the least, invite any intimacy with the strangers. As Grant got to his feet one of the men seized his hand. The President allowed the hand to be held for an instant. Then he pulled it—and himself—away. The two men suddenly were faced not with the President but with the tall detective who had placed his large presence between them and the retreating small figure. In an instant the scene was done. "Is he stupid?" I asked, genuinely curious. "No. But limited. Without much curiosity. Yet he has come to know a good deal more about government than most people suspect. But he has—obviously—no gift for presiding over this country."
and
 "Make history? But there is no history," I said, trying out in my own voice Baron Jacobi's theory, "only fictions of varying degrees of plausibility." "What?" "I meant to tell you that I had an amusing conversation with Garfield about history. He assured me that one can learn the truth about the past through old newspapers, letters, diaries. Then he proposed to help me write, as it were, the history of Mr. Blaine, by setting down in the Herald all the lies he would like to see in print." "But now you know the truth. And the truth always comes out." "Dear Nordhoff, in this case I know only what you tell me is the truth. And you could be mistaken. As for the truth always coming out, why, I think it never does. But even if it did, who would know?"
and
 "But what is there new to write about? I mean politically. No one seems very interested in either candidate." This is true, and I find it astonishing, considering the issues involved. Yet all sum-mer long the country ha's been entirely preoccupied with the Centennial Exhibition, with sewing machines, Japanese vases, popped corn, typewriters and telephones, not to mention inces-sant praise for those paladins who created this perfect nation, this envied Eden, exactly one century ago. "Things will heat up, Charlie, and you're the man to do the heating." "No, Jamie. Nordhoff heats the pot, which I simply stir from time to time." "That's all right, too." He gave me a passing grade for this conceit. "Zach. Chandler has ordered the Interior Department to investigate Tilden's taxes. Back in '62, during the worst of the war, Tilden said that his income for the year was only seven thousand dollars. Actually, it was more than a hundred thou-sand." "I should think that by not paying the infamous tax on income, Tilden would be something of a hero." "Boys in blue," said Jamie, combing his moustache with his fingers. "Union in peril. Slaves to be freed. Every dollar needed. Patriotic duty. Down with Copperhead Democrats. Oh, The New York Times is getting ready to pour it on. There is no crime their editors would not commit to help the Republican party." "I don't think that I can be lyric on the subject of taxes not paid." "There's good stuff assembled. And something very sweet about Hayes." Jamie looked suddenly happy. "Some years ago he shot his mother with a pistol, in a sudden fit of insanity." "This need not make him unpopular." I thought Jamie was joking. But apparently he was repeating the latest rumour to make the rounds. All in all, I do not think that democracy, as practised in these states, is a success. While Tilden grimly, laboriously presents to the people his plans to reform what is, probably, the most corrupt society in the Western world, the press is busy with idiotic irrelevaneies about Tilden's alleged drunkenness, syphilis, close-ness to Tweed—all set to music in a pretty song called "Sly Sam, the Railroad Thief." Hayes's taxes are also under review, since he, too, is a rich lawyer who did not pay, it is rumoured, any tax at all in '68 and '69. Lately he has been accused of stealing the money entrusted him by one of his soldiers killed in the war. "Charlie, go South. Please. I beg you. Get that pony out of the sun, you stupid Irish bastard!" shouted Jamie to his groom. "Even the heat at Newport is too much for me. I would perish at the South. Besides, Nordhoff's already done you proud." Nord-hoff's pieces for the Herald on the so-called cotton states have been most sympathetic and vivid; he appears to want some sort of re-alignment to the present political balance. "Always a breeze at New Orleans, and Florida is a paradise this time of year. That's where the trouble's going to be." "How do you know?" Although I have no high opinion of Jamie's general intelligence (certainly he has managed to keep well outside Western civilization and all its works), I am con-stantly impressed by his sense of this country. He is a sort of human barometer, able to anticipate before anyone else a political scandal, an Indian massacre. "South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana are all under Federal control. Grant's got the troops down there." "Less than three thousand in the whole South." I am, after all, An Authority. Jamie ignored my Authoritativeness. "So what's going to hap-pen if they vote Democratic?" "But they will vote Democratic, and Tilden will be the presi-dent." "That's only a part of it." Jamie looked about him vaguely. "I'll give you half again as much as I've been overpaying you if you just go to New Orleans, talk to the leaders there . . ." I was firm. I refused to go South. But I did agree to resume my weekly pieces in September, since the last eight weeks of a pre dential election are the crucial ones. At least from the point view of learning who stole what from whom. "Did Hayes really shoot his mother?" I was curious about that detail. Jamie was donning his helmet, pony at hand. "Certainly." "Shot her dead?"

Jesus and Cecil B. DeMille

Production was complicated by a major blowup between DeMille and Paul Iribe, after which the director ordered Mitch Leisen to take over. It was Leisen who devised a way for H. B. Warner to hang on the Cross for the two weeks neces-sary to shoot the Crucifixion sequence. He made casts of Warner's hands, and the casts were bolted to the cross, with blood modeled down the wrists. The casts had leather pads built into the back; Warner would insert his hands into the casts and grasp the leather so that he could hang convincingly for several minutes at a time. Besides that, a bicycle seat was mounted on the Cross so that Warner's weight would be supported yet another way. Although DeMille was clearly concerned about money, he didn't cut corners and the proprieties were observed. A curtain was dropped in front of the Gol-gotha set whenever Warner had to get on or off the Cross. There was no smoking, and bad language was discouraged. "Whenever DeMille started to get apoplectic about something," remembered Mitch Leisen, "I would say very quietly, `There's a bishop right behind you.' That was my one revenge for all the hell I got from him most of the time." Poor H. B. Warner hung on the Cross for fourteen days, followed by three days of shooting on the Resurrection, followed by two days of shooting on the Ascension. Warner's drinking problem was reactivated by the pressure. Monte West-more was in charge of Warner's makeup, and when the actor would show up in the morning still weaving, Westmore would make him drink cod liver oil. After
vomiting, Warner would be shaken but sober. Westmore continued this rough treatment for several weeks until Warner decided sobriety was preferable to cod liver oil. Sally Rand, who would become famous for her Fan Dance in the 1933 Chi-cago World's Fair, played one of Mary Magdalene's slaves. Rand and Warner began an affair, which infuriated DeMille. Rand would tell friends about the day when DeMille spotted her and Warner coming to the set together. DeMille grabbed his ever-present microphone and boomed out, "Miss Rand! Leave my Jesus Christ alone! If you must screw someone, screw Pontius Pilate!" Visiting the production was a young Jesuit from St. Louis named Daniel Lord, who would become a friend of DeMille's and an advisor on the film. Lord collapsed under the onslaught of DeMille's charm, but always managed to main-,. tain an overall sense of objectivity about the man. In his memoirs, Lord described DeMille as "a strange and fascinating blend of absolute monarch and charming gentleman, of excellent host and exacting taskmaster, of ruthless drive on the set and complete letdown the moment that the day's shooting had come to an end; a Renaissance prince who had the in-stincts of a Barnum and a magnified Belasco; frankly in love with hokum (which he liked to discuss and reduce to terms of understandable basic emotion)." The plot invention of Judas's love affair with Mary Magdalene induced some-thing approaching physical pain in Lord, but DeMille was adamant; he told Lord that the audience had to be won over; that they had to have a sense of luxury and beauty. "If they fall in love with Magdalene, then when she leaps into her chariot and says, 'I go to find a Carpenter,' they will go along," said DeMille. Actually, the title uttered by the Magdalene, one of the juiciest in all of silent films, is "Go fetch my richest perfumes! Harness my zebras—gift of the Nubian king! This carpenter shall learn that He cannot hold a man from Mary Magda-lene!" It is only after another character tells the Magdalene that he has observed this man healing the blind that she says, "I have blinded more men than He hath ever healed. . . . We go to call upon a carpenter!" Soon, Jesus casts out her demons: the Seven Deadly Sins.
and
DeMille had a habit of bestowing nicknames on employees, which was not function of affection but derived from the fact that he had a terrible memory fo, names. As Richard deMille would remember, "He could easily list the twelve apo& ties, but not the fifty technicians." The music editor would always be addressed "Mr. Music," while a minor actress was always referred to as "Dottie Coughdrop.' "Get Dottie Coughdrop;" he would tell Joe Egli, the casting director, and Egli would have to match a face to the vague name. His demeanor around the younger women on his staff was rigorously profes. sional and fatherly. When a gorgeous Iowa girl named Mary Bennett came to work in his office, he offered her a screen test and acting training if she wanted it. She didn't and later regretted her decision, but all her life idolized DeMille as an ideal father figure. Professionally, he agonized over major decisions, especially subject and cast. ing. "DeMille always had a hell of a time [making] decisions, about anything," remembered Henry Noerdlinger, his highly regarded head of research. "[But] once he had made a decision then there was no deviation from it." "He was a very exacting person," said A. C. Lyles. "If you went to him for something, he would want to know exactly what the subject was and wanted to know exactly the answers when he asked you what they were. And you couldn't con him. He knew the business. He made the business. I always found him to be very friendly, cordial, very open to suggestions, very willing to help people who wanted to be helped." Mitchell Leisen would assert that "He had very positive ideas of what he wanted and he wasn't satisfied until he got it. . . . I owe him everything I ever learned about making pictures. The most important thing of all is the power of concentrating, never deviating from your objective. Once he started on a project, he concentrated on that and thought of nothing else." On the set of a picture, he was everywhere, even directing the taking of the stills. Robert Parrish, who worked for him as an extra, said that "he often seemed to spend as much time and energy on the still as he did on the actual scenes." For stills, he would get in front of the company and do what he never did during the picture itself: act out the scene. As the actors mimicked him, he would wait for the expression he wanted, then yell "STILL!" and everyone would freeze. If anyone moved and spoiled the shot, he would become irate. One day, Parrish witnessed an episode that would grow into a legend, as two men in the back of the crowd began talking while DeMille was launching into an oration about a full day's work for a full day's pay. DeMille stopped and asked what the men were talking about. One of them refused to say. He was promptly sent home. The other fellow was called up to the camera platform. "There are four hundred people waiting for lunch because of you. Will you kindly tell them what you had to say that was so important?" The extra, Eddie Boyle, took the proffered microphone and said, "I said, ,I wonder when he's going to call lunch.' " The crowd erupted into applause. DeMille's response was a trace of a smile. The assistant promptly called "Lunch. One hour." Parrish asserted that the response that became the stuff of a hundred Hollywood anthologies—"I wonder when that bald headed old son of a bitch is going to call lunch" was strictly a myth. "Eddie Boyle was tough and seasoned," Parrish wrote, "but he was not as tough and seasoned as all that, though some of us at the time wished he had been." Parrish also witnessed a moment when DeMille's chair boy accidentally nudged his script binder so that dozens of script pages fell out. There was a wind machine cranking away right behind the director, and the pink, blue, and white pages went sailing out over the set. DeMille lashed out and smacked the chair boy on the buttocks. For men like DeMille, telling actors where to stand and camera-men where to put the camera was only directing a movie; to order people around, to intimidate them, was to direct life itself. Several times during production, he would seize his microphone and launch into a condemnation of chatter on the set. "WHAT I WANT IS QUIET! QUIET BEHIND THE CAMERA AND INTELLIGENCE IN FRONT OF IT. I KNOW I CAN'T HAVE BOTH AT THE SAME TIME BUT LET'S SEE IF I CAN GET ONE OR THE OTHER." DeMille would almost never criticize a star on the set. It just wasn't good sense to unnerve someone the public was paying to see. But he often worked on the star through other luckless people. If an actress was late to the set, he would grab the microphone and lay into the hairdresser, and the point would be made. With few exceptions, his rages were calculated for effect; DeMille was the Sun Tzu of filmmaking, employing the Art of War to achieve the Art of DeMille. DeMille despised limp, halfhearted acting. For that matter, he despised limp, halfhearted anything. He wanted projection, he wanted dynamism, and he wanted it from stars and extras alike. He would also excoriate extras that failed to give him the level of excitement he needed.