Hero final

 In case mediation didn't work, it was hoped that bribery might do the trick, and ibn Saud was paid £100,000 in gold to leave King Hussein in possession of the Hejaz and the holy cities of Medina and Mecca. Lawrence displayed a degree of tact, persuasion, and sheer dogged persistence that would have qualified him for a knighthood had he not already turned one down. As usual, Lawrence communicated directly and at length with Win-ston Churchill, now back in London; with Lord Curzon at the Foreign Office; and with General Allenby in Cairo—in a stream of well-written messages, full of good suggestions and vivid descriptions of personalities and events. Lawrence was, in fact if not in title, a proconsul, making major decisions on his own, and explaining them later to the person who seemed most likely to approve. Lawrence later wrote to Robert Graves, unusually for him, "I take most of the credit of Mr. Churchill's pacifica-tion of the Middle East upon myself. I had the knowledge and the plan. He had the imagination and courage to adopt it." This was, as it hap-pened, a bold but accurate claim: Lawrence had a central role in shaping the borders of the modern Middle East and in placing Hashemite mon-archs on the hitherto nonexistent thrones of Iraq and Jordan. Nothing, after all, is fated: the British started with many obligations (a guilty one toward Feisal, and another, less guilt-ridden and more self-imposed, toward the Zionists), yet Lawrence, without ever appearing in the fore-ground, managed to impose his own ideas on everyone, and shape the area according to his own vision. Afterward, when Lawrence had left the scene, Zionists complained that a large part of what should have been Palestine had been given to Abdulla; many Iraqis complained that they had received a Sunni monarchy rather than a republic; Arabs everywhere complained that France and Britain had shared the Middle East between them and carved it up into client states; and the British complained that they had been burdened with the costs and responsibility of maintaining peace and order from Baghdad to Cairo, and from Amman to Suez, as well as with the impossible task of mediating between the Palestinian
Arabs and the Jews. Lawrence believed, as he wrote to Charlotte Shaw, that Britain was "quit of the war-time Eastern adventure with clean hands," though what he really meant was that he was quit of it with clean hands, and this much is certainly true. He had done his best to undo the Sykes-Picot agreement, and had placed two of Hussein's sons on semi-independent Arab thrones—he could hardly have done more. He was not quite "quit of it" yet, however. After a brief spell in London in May, Churchill sent him back to the Middle East, to Jidda, to under-take the impossible, which was to persuade King Hussein to agree in writing to all the various and conflicting arrangements that had been made by the Allies in the Middle East since the end of the war.
and
In every way the opposite of Lawrence, Liddell Hart was tall, elegant, storklike, fond of the good things of life, and so fascinated by women that he oversaw the smallest details of the lingerie for both his wives, was exacting and deeply involved in the design of their corsets, and regularly measured the waists of his two daughters. He was in fact a walking ency-clopedia on the subject of lingerie—or as one of his biographers, Alex Danchev, refers to it wittily, "l'artillerie de la nuit"—as knowledgeable about bras and merry widows and garter belts as he was about war. A perfectionist in all things, he was obsessed by the ideal of the feminine wasp waist, which was the Schwerpunkt* (to borrow a phrase from German strategic thinking) of his sexual desire. Despite these differences, he and Lawrence got along very well; and Lawrence, in his many letters to Lid-dell Hart and in his lengthy written commentaries on the text, is perhaps franker about himself than he is with anyone else except Charlotte Shaw. He respected Liddell Hart as a scholar, and was pleased to be taken seri-ously as a strategic thinker. Their admiration and friendship were genuine. Liddell Hart made contact with Lawrence as early as 1927, in one of his many guises as military editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica—it was part of his strategy to command as many positions in the field of military commentary and journalism as he could—proposing that Lawrence should write the article on "Guerrilla Warfare." Lawrence, then in Karachi, declined to write the entry but suggested how it could be pulled out of Seven Pillars of Wisdom; and Liddell Hart proceeded to do this for the fourteenth edition of the encyclopedia, above the initials T.E.L. This began a learned correspondence between the two men, which continued over the next seven years. Anybody who doubts that Lawrence was an exception-ally well-read strategic thinker need only consult the correspondence between him and Liddell Hart
*The Schwerpunkt was the central aim of German strategy, the focal point against which must be directed the maximum concentration of force to effect a breakthrough. The concept was characterized in World War II by General Guderian's comment, Nicht kleckern, klotzen! ("Don't fiddle around, smash!").
which itself provides something of a textbook in battle analysis and strategy. It was not until 1929 that Liddell Hart was finally persuaded by his agent David Higham to write a book about Lawrence. The book took him four years to complete—very unusually, since he typically dashed off books as quickly as he could, to keep his elaborate lifestyle afloat. The two men met frequently, and nothing ever dimmed Liddell Hart's admiration for his much smaller friend (in photographs taken of the two of them, Lawrence seems dwarfed by Hart's height, and in one of these photos he stands on a bollard to bring their heads to the same level). Liddell Hart called Law-rence "the Spirit of Freedom come incarnate to a world in fetters." This was insightful, for even though Lawrence had placed himself in a military world of tight restraints, he remained what Liddell Hart called an "anarch,"
 

Empire of Dreams

On Cecil B. DeMille:
DeMille was stunned when the Catholic League of Decency gave "The Greatest Show on Earth" a B rating, "morally objectionable in part for allpersons" because of the character of the clown who has killed his fatally ill wife rather than watch her suffer. "With these Catholics, a little euthanasia goes a long way" Demille said.

and
The shot completed, Brynner took off for Acapulco, leaving behind his friend, the film's doctor: Max Jacobson. Jacobson would become known as the quintessential Dr. Feelgood dispensing his specially concocted brand of pick-me-ups to dozens of celebrity patients, among them DeMille, John F. Kennedy, Alan Jay Lerner, and Tennessee Williams. DeMille had been seeing Jacobson occasion-ally since January 1952. No one seemed to know or care what Jacobson was prescribing, only that it banished fatigue and made sleep optional. Jacobson's manner and thriving medi-cal practice gave him an aura of omnipotence that wasn't to be found in the usual dispensers of pep pills that were pandemic in Hollywood in the 1940s. In fact, Jacobson was injecting customized doses of methedrine, which raises blood pres-sure, relieves fatigue, and induces a touch of euphoria. Jacobson was described by Christopher Plummer as "a cross between Con-rad Veidt and Martin Bormann," and Tennessee Williams would write that the doctor had "a magical atmosphere of understanding and compassion. . . . I don't think he even took my pulse or blood pressure or had me fill out a questionnaire about my medical history. He just looked at me . . . then started concocting the shot, drawing a bit of fluid from one bottle and another and another as my sus-pense and my alarm increased." But the aftermath of the injection was almost miraculous: "I felt as if a concrete sarcophagus about me had sprung open and I was released as a bird on the wing." Williams's response was not unusual; one female patient described the effects of the injections as resembling an orgasm. Jacobson's method was to give two injections, one in the arm, one in the buttocks. "He had a basic formula, and he would vary it according to your size, remembered Eddie Fisher. "He was like Rasputin; he could make you believe anything. He was from Berlin and had a German accent. He could be warm or he could be a tyrant, but he had a tremendous sense of humor with a great grasp of the English language. You were under his spell; he believed he had found the answer to Eternal Youth. He may have meant well in the beginning, but as he saw what power he had he became more destructive and took a lot of chances. A lot of people OD'd because he'd give them too much. I became as addicted to hip' as. I did to the drugs." Richard deMille smelled a rat. "Max Jacobson was what we would now call
guru. He was slightly mysterious, and always had the latest medical information and spoke in a technical language that had a grand sound to it. He was a total charlatan." Henry Noerdlinger, who was more sophisticated than most of the people on DeMille's staff, was on to Jacobson fairly quickly. Noerdlinger remembered going into a tent in Egypt with Jacobson one day, and without a word, the doctor said, "Don't tell me, I know what's wrong with you," whereupon he produced a syringe, had Noerdlinger drop his pants, and gave him a shot. "He was a most peculiar doctor," Noerdlinger would say with commendable European understatement. When Joan Brooskin came down with dengue fever, Jacobson gave her a couple of shots and told her that not only would she get over the fever, she would never have migraines or menstrual cramps again! "When DeMille's energy lagged, he would pick himself up with a shot of Dr. Feelgood's juice," remembered Anthony Quinn. "He was hooked and so was Katherine. She even started taking the children to see Dr. Feelgood." Quinn too began seeing Jacobson for pick-me-ups. DeMille's increasing dependency on the quack, attested to by the unquestioned respect in his correspondence to Jacobson, would be the most obvious manifestation of a naiveté that Donald Hayne had observed: "The latest glib ex-pert to come along can make an impression on DeMille, at least if he claims expertness in a field with which DeMille is not fully familiar." Hayne believed that this curious Achilles' heel in an otherwise strong-minded man derived from DeMille's ego and need for success: "If he has invested time and initial confidence in a man, the man must make good, and DeMille will continue to swear by him as long as there is any chance that he might [make good]; and sometimes, unfortunately, longer." It is unclear whether DeMille's California doctors knew about Jacobson's "treatments," but Cecil's medical problems didn't begin and end with one quack. His cholesterol around this time was a sky-high 400. In a note to himself, Cecil noted that "normal [was] 150-200." Jacobson would attend DeMille off and on until DeMille's death, and the doctor's "treatments" undoubtedly shortened his life. As Anthony Quinn remembered, there were times when "DeMille never knew if he was up or down. He was prone to tremendous mood swings. His en-ergy came and went. It was sometimes difficult for him to talk." Jacobson's medi-cal license would be revoked in 1975.
and
Production(on The Ten Commandments) dragged on endlessly with the Golden Calf sequence being a particular trial. One of the extra girls walked up to an assistant director and inquired, "Who do I have to fuck to get off this picture?"
and
The Voice of God on Mt. Sinai was dubbed by a small-part actor named Delos Jewkes (from the Music Man and Andy Griffith Show). Getting the voice and effects right was a painstaking process and time began to run out. When New York made inquiries about wrapping it up, DeMille replied, "Tell them we can stop right now and call it the Five Commandments".
and
He nudged the Paramount publicity department to pay for granite monoliths of the Ten Commandments to be installed on courthouse lawns, city halls, and public squares wherever the film played. More than four thousand were installed, and one of them became the basis of a Supreme Court decision allowing them on public property, but banning them from courtrooms.

Compton Mackenzie's Vestal Fire

The last excerpts:
The carabinieri entrusted with
the business of communicating to him the decision of the authorities arrived at the Grand Hotel Colosseo when he was taking a bath to get rid of the effects of the journey. It has already been pointed out that nobody dreams of arguing with carabinieri. As for attempting to stop them you might as well fancy trying to stop a glacier. Partly it is their awe-inspiring gemination which conveys such an impression of ineluctable fate in their advance. The Hydra, the Chimaera, the Sphinx, the Siren herself, these are familiar instances upon the human mind of a combination of two or several forms in a single organism. The two in oneness or one in twoness of a pair of carabinieri is not less dreadful in its suggestion of a preternatural power. The gendarme has become the butt of comic opera, because he was merely one man in a ridiculous uniform. The carabinieri in much the same kind of uniform have never been laughed at. And they never will be laughed at, for we may say without_ exaggeration that every pair of carabinieri are Romulus and Remus eternally founding the eternal city. So while Marsac lay in his bath and listened in pleasant egotistical dreams to the noise of the multitudinous swifts gathering in the wine-gold morning air of Rome, the carabinieri reached the lobby of the hotel and demanded of the head porter his whereabouts. On being informed that he was in his bath they demanded to be taken to the bath-room. Now, a certain majesty clings to the head porters of great hotels, and if ever anybody might have been supposed capable of bandying arguments with a pair of carabinieri it was the head porter of the Grand Hotel Colosseo ; yet without a moment's hesitation he dismissed half a dozen rich and noble clients waiting to consult him and led the way himself to the bathroom. " Ouvrez la Porte, s'il vous plait, monsieur le comte," he begged.

and

Not that the old ladies had been reconciled to any of their enemies ; but the gaps that their absence had caused for a time had been filled by newcomers to the island, who had arrived to spend a day, or at most a week, and who like so many predecessors had remained there ever since. Of these newcomers undoubtedly the most conspicuous was Mrs. Hector Macdonnell. She was a rich Scots widow with all the faults and none of the fine qualities of her Lowland race. Her tongue was sharp, her accent broad.. She was purse-proud, snobbish, odiously mean, and ineffably vain. She mistook pruriency for puritanism, and affected a ludicrous sensibility to the beauties of nature. She was the worst kind of scandalmonger, because her tongue, dressed with the vinegar of malice and the oil of self-righteousness, lacked the honest mustard of ribaldry or the salt of wit. She was so well pleased with herself that she was never lonely, and she would sit for hours with no other company except her own portrait, which occupied a large easel in the middle of her salone at the Villa Candida. That portrait, executed by one of the Sirene painters, who in the hope of gaining an extra hundred liras on his com-mission had striven hard to flatter his sitter, was as ugly and garish as the original. It represented a bouncing woman with a hard carmine face, who, dressed in an elaborate cerise gown, sat gazing out across the Bay of Naples. The effect was of an advertisement for some distemper or dye ; and yet the colours were, if anything, toned down from the original. Mrs. Macdonnell rarely wore anything but some crude shade of pink for her trailing gowns of silk and satin, and her immense picture hats built up with gardens of sham flowers were always hung with coloured streamers that could have made a bridesmaid of 1896 feel ashamed of herself. She laid great stress on a long pedigree, and had adopted her late husband's family with such a romantic Highland devotion that she had by now entirely forgotten that her own maiden name was—but let no offence be given to the countless owners of that name by revealing it. Any-way, lest anybody should forget that she was Mrs. Hector Macdonnell, she had caused to be engraved on her cards her late husband's crest and motto. That motto happened to be Always ready, and the delight this gave to a ribald society may be imagined. Her nickname was Bonny Sarah ' owing to a 'Sirenian legend that when she first came to the island and was wished buona sera or good evening by passers-by she had supposed them to be commenting on her good looks. Mrs. Macdonnell (whom in spite of the crested card Mrs. Ambrogio would call Mrs. Macdonald) was at the Villa Amabile this afternoon, creating in the big salone as brilliant but not so beautiful an effect as the judas-tree on the Strada Nuova in-full bloom of hot carmine against the azure velvet of the May sky. Miss Virginia and Miss Maimie loved this aggressive female, but why they did was a riddle that nobody on the island ever suc-ceeded in solving. Perhaps it was that Mrs. Macdonnell's venomous propriety reassured them over the Count. Mrs. Macdonnell was determined to be one of his most fervid supporters, and she, who was even shocked by the light behaviour of a niece that was staying with her and who was always confiding in Miss Virginia and Miss Maimie how much the unbridled manners and morals of contem-porary girlhood distressed her, did seem to lend a real weight of respectability to the Marsac cause. Phyllis Allerton, the unsatisfactory niece, was one of the
numerous prototypes of the post-war girl, and the faithful-ness with which she and her fellows resembled their suc-cessors proves that the post-war girl is not in the least the product of the war, but the natural development of young womanhood. Queen Victoria lived too long. King Edward died too soon. Hence the apparent rapidity of development for which the war has been given undeserved credit or blame. Mrs. Macdonnell did not realize that Queen Victoria was dead. Hence her objection to this niece whom she had invited to spend the Spring and Summer with her in Sirene, and who had repaid her kindness by being consistently late for every meal, by accepting invita-tions to go bathing with young men without asking her aunt's permission, by smoking in the public street, and worst of all by being obviously a much more welcome addition to any party than she was herself
and
When one of the doyens of the English colony sent a telegram in code putting a sovereign accumulator on three horses running at Newmarket, the Secret Service in Naples spent a fortnight unravelling the mystery so deeply did they suspect an attempt to revictual a submarine at the Piccola Marina; and in the room of two Russian exiles a samovar was arrested by the carabinieri on the charge of being a wireless equipment.
and
America was being taken very seriously by the Italians at this date, and when the Italians take anything seriously they always change the-names of their streets, so that for a time in even the tiniest village you would find a Via Woodrow Wilson, not one of which survived the conference at Versailles. The way Nigel was standing champagne this evening seemed to be an earnest of the way America would be standing champagne to Italy in the thirsty days of peace-making. When the magnum of Fiume was emptied into the glasses of the Serbian delegates at Versailles, President Wilson became a No Thoroughfare in Italy, much to the relief of Latin lips, which champ at the letter W as a horse champs at an uncomfortable bit. But although this evening Nigel might shine with the reflected milky radiance of Wilson's benevolent teeth, every one of which seemed to stand up like a lighthouse in the murk of war, his long hibernation had been too much for him. He never recovered from it ; and after flitting round for awhile like a faded butterfly of last year in the cold and cruel light of Spring, he left Sirene without letting anybody know his destination. Rumour was busy for a day or two after his departure. Some said that repenting of his life he had become a Trappist monk. Others suggested economy as the explanation of his disappearance, and one or two would be content with- nothing less than suicide. Three months later the mystery was solved. He had been o growing a beard ; and he who had once been used to being told that he reminded people of the Naples Narcissus was Shortly more than grateful nowadays to be told that he was not unlike a Velasquez. There were many to suggest that Nigel had grown a beard to assume a masculinity he did not
possess. But they wronged him there. A double chin, not a double life, was the inspiration of the change. Autres temps, autres cceurs," Marsac sniffed. And that 4t was more witty than true. Nigel may still be seen on the Piazza. He is close on fifty now, and he is known to ribald English visitors as The Bearded Lady.

Hero redux

 Certainly Hussein already realized that his claim to be "king of all the Arabs" and likewise his claim to the vast amount of territory promised to him by Sir Henry McMahon in 1915 were going to be a hard sell in Paris, let alone in Riyadh, where his
rival ibn Saud, with the backing of the British government in India, was already moving to take control of the entire Arabian Peninsula. It should be noted that Lawrence, with the skill of a natural "insider," was already well informed about the negotiations between Britain and France. On November 9, the Foreign Office released an Anglo-French declaration that embodied some of his suggestions, though couched in such vague and optimistic prose that it seemed to envisage both "native governments" and colonial rule. The British were in a difficult position. McMahon and Hussein's correspondence of 1915 directly contradicted the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 (as well as the Balfour Declaration of 1917), and while these conflicting promises to the Arabs, the French, and the Jews could be swept under the rug so long as the war continued, vic-tory would instantly bring the British face-to-face with the unwelcome reality of having promised more in the Middle East than they or anyone else could deliver. On November 8, only a day after Lawrence's message to King Hussein, the subject of the Middle East was suddenly overshadowed by the surren-der of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. On November 9 the kaiser abdicated. And on November 11, "the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month," Germany itself asked for an armistice. Those in charge of Britain's foreign and colonial affairs were suddenly faced with a range of issues more serious and pressing than the Middle East. What was to be the future of Germany? What was to replace the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was already beginning to crumble into a number of small, mutually hostile would-be states? Who was to receive the German colonies in Africa, and on what terms? Could a viable European peace be constructed without the participation of the Russians, now controlled by a Bolshevik regime that repudiated all trea-ties and preached universal revolution? Clamorous advocates for new states like Poland and Czechoslovakia were already appearing, maps and draft constitutions in hand; in the Balkans the Romanians were already Allies; almost a third of Hungary as their reward for joining the "ies; the Serbs, on whose behalf the war had begun, weregreedy to seize as much territory as possible and create a multinational Yugoslavia; and Zionists were pressing for the rapid implementation of the Balfour Declaration. More important than all these problems was the fact that the presi-dent of the United States was planning to join in the peace talks himself, bringing with him a host of unwelcome ideas, including a "general asso-ciation of nations." The New World was embarking on an effort to remake and reform the Old. "Even the Good Lord contented himself with only ten," Clemenceau grumbled, when he read Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points with the skeptical eye of an old-fashioned French nationalist who already knew what he wanted: Alsace; Lorraine; the Rhineland; formi-dable, crippling reparations; client states in the east to hold Germany in check; and, of course, last but not least, Syria, Lebanon, Mosul with its oil, and a share in the Holy Land. At the same time, the prospect of President Wilson's participation in the peace talks, together with a formidable American delegation,* made his majesty's government more inclined to collaborate with the French. Only by standing together, arm in arm, bras dessus, bras dessous, could the two principal European powers hope to resist what they both saw as Woodrow Wilson's starry-eyed idealism and naïveté. In the meantime, reports and advice on the Middle East continued to pour in to the Eastern Committee. Both Clayton and Hogarth sent long, detailed recommendations, basically echoing Lawrence's views. They were quickly countered by an equally long memorandum from Sir Arthur Hirtzel of the India Office, outlining the views of the government of India. These amounted to a sharp reminder that what really mattered was the oil deposits of Mesopotamia, rather than the Syrian Desert, and a warning that it was not worth jeopardizing British interests in Mesopo-tamia for the sake of nebulous promises that may have been made to Hussein and his sons. Hirtzel expressed polite scorn for Lawrence, whose
contempt for the Indian government and the Indian army on his brief visit to Baghdad in 1916 during the siege of Kut had not been forgotten or forgiven: "Without in the least wishing to deprecate [Lawrence's] achieve-ments and his undoubted genius, it must be said about him that he does not at all represent—and would not, I think, claim to represent—the local views of Northern Mesopotamia and Iraq; of the latter, indeed, he has practically no first-hand knowledge at all." Hirtzel also warned strongly against Lawrence's proposal to place one of Hussein's sons on a throne in Baghdad as king of Iraq, and another on a throne in Mosul to rule over the Kurds,* and suggested that if Britain raised objections to France's ruling over Lebanon and Syria, the French would hardly be likely to accept British rule over Iraq. Even the joy of victory did not prevent Stephen-Jean-Marie Pichon, the French foreign minister, from administering a sharp rap on the knuckles to the British Foreign Office, reminding them that so far as France was concerned, the Sykes-Picot agreement was still in force and that France expected to receive everything it had been promised. Pichon reminded the British Foreign Office of France's "historic duty towards the peoples of Syria," just in case the members of the Eastern Committee had forgotten, or might have plans to denounce the Sykes-Picot agree-ment to President Wilson as exactly the kind of secret diplomacy that the Fourteen Points were intended to prevent. Much as the British might deprecate the exaggerated territorial claims of King Hussein, or the ambitions of Syrian nationalists, when it came to the Middle East there was more sympathy for the Arabs in London—partly because of Lawrence—than for the French. Lawrence's capacity for communicating enthusiasm was now concentrated on the task of getting Feisal to the Peace Conference, despite strong French opposition.
*Although Lawrence's plan may have been overgenerous to Hussein and his sons, it nevertheless recognized the difference between northern and southern Mesopotamia, and would have resulted in an independent Kurdish state and solved at least one of the fundamental divisive issues that plague modern Iraq.
The first difficulty Lawrence faced was not so much Feisal's initial reluctance to exchange his claim to the throne of Syria for that of Iraq—the latter had originally been promised to his brother Abdulla—although this was a factor, but Churchill's need to have it appear that the people of Iraq had called Feisal to the throne. Churchill's requirement was much harder to stage-manage, particularly given the doubts of Colonel Arnold Wilson, the stiff-necked acting chief political officer in Iraq, under whose orders the Iraqi rebellion of 1920 had been brutally repressed. Wilson remained skeptical about Feisal's appeal to the Iraqis, and about the Hashemite family in general, and his skepticism was initially shared by Gertrude Bell. Lawrence quickly managed to convert Bell to his point of view—his cheery self-confidence usually brought that about. The prob-lem of Wilson, a firm believer in the use of force and in the inability of the Arabs to govern an area like Iraq, was solved by knighting him, then replacing him with the more malleable Sir Percy Cox. Gertrude Bell was assigned—among many other more important tasks, including persuading the initially reluctant Shiites and the Jews of Baghdad to accept a Sunni king—the job of devising a national flag, draw-ing up a code of court etiquette, and selecting a recognizable national anthem. (The last proved impossible, so the initial choice was the music of "God Save the King," without the lyrics.) Deciding on Iraq's borders was a more difficult question. The western border with Syria was fixed by a pre-vious agreement with the French, the southern border was an invisible line in the sand between Iraq and the vast empty desert ibn Saud claimed, and the eastern border was that of the old Ottoman Empire with Persia; but to the north was the territory inhabited by Kurds, Arabic-speaking non-Arabs, supposedly of Indo-European descent, who passionately desired an independent Kurdistan. Unfortunately for them, the grand prize of Iraq from the British point of view was Mosul, right in the middle of the Kurdish homeland, with its rich oil deposits. Accordingly, commer-cial interests and realpolitik combined to create a country with a Shiite majority, a Sunni king, a disappointed Kurdish minority, and a small but wealthy and cosmopolitan class of Jewish merchants in Baghdad.
and
Already in 1921 there were considerable misgivings about Lawrence's solution to the problem of how to reward Abdulla for giving up any claim he had to the Iraqui throne in favor of his brother Feisal. The Balfor Declaration had prudently not attempted to define the exact frontiers of Palestine, but both historically and biblically it had always included the area to the east of the Jordan as well as the west bank. Approximately three-quarters of the territory to which the Zionists aspired was now a separate country, under the rule of an emir and the Sharif of Mecca, with Jewish settlement forbidden
there—an area moreover which potentially could have sufficient water and could be ideal for settlement and modern farming, but which would remain a sandy wasteland. The reaction of Lawrence's fellow political adviser Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen was apoplectic and immediate, and echoed the feelings of the Zionist leadership: "The atmosphere in the Colonial Office is definitely hebraphobe, the worst offender being Shuck-burgh who is head of the Middle East Department. Hubert Young and little Lawrence do their best to cOnceal their dislike and mistrust of Jews but both support the official pro-Arab policy of Whitehall and frown on the equally official policy based on the Balfour Declaration; the latter is the only policy I recognize. I exploded on hearing Churchill had severed the Transjordan from Palestine. . . . Lawrence was of course with Churchill and influenced him.... This reduces the Jewish National Home to one-third of Biblical Palestine." Meinertzhagen described himself as "foam-ing at the mouth with anger and indignation," not necessarily a figure of speech where Meinertzhagen was concerned, but his protests were mild compared with those of the Zionists themselves, in Palestine and in the United States. The Israelis' belief that Jordan is, or ought to be, the Pales-tinian state, and that the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were always intended to be part of the Jewish state, thus goes back to 1921, and the creation of Trans-Jordan. If Lawrence had been unaware of that before the eight days he spent with Abdulla, calming the tribes and persuading Abdulla to accept the "governorship" of Trans-Jordan, he certainly became aware of it the moment he reached Jerusalem. Churchill's daring initiatives were not all that disturbed the inhabi-tants of Palestine, who now suddenly found themselves living in a much smaller country than either the Jews or the Arabs had expected. Although Palestine was still occupied by the British army, and Lawrence's old friend Ronald Storrs had been rushed into khaki to serve as Jerusalem's military governor, a civilian high commissioner had been appointed in 1920, and the choice had fallen on Sir Herbert Samuel, the former home secretary, who was a Jew and an ardent Zionist. Even before his appoint-ment was final, Arabs responded with "consternation, despondency, and
exasperation," feelings shared for once with the Christian population of Palestine—Catholic, Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Armenian, and Protestant—as well as with the Orthodox Jews, who believed that any attempt to encourage Jewish immigration was impious until and unless God arranged it. Samuel arrived at Jaffa, in a white diplomatic uniform, and was greeted by a seventeen-gun salute. Then he was taken to a reception in Jerusalem, where the chief military administrator he was replacing handed him "a typewritten receipt for 'one Palestine taken over in good condition,' which Sir Herbert duly signed." Below his signa-ture, however, he cautiously wrote, "E.&O.E.," letters which, on commer-cial documents, stand for "Errors and Omissions Excepted." Samuel was happily unaware that even the unflappable and unmilitary Storrs was holding "a loaded and cocked Browning pistol in his left hand" as they sat together in the back of the open car on the way to the reception. Storrs was well informed of the Arabs' hostility toward Samuel, though in the event, Samuel was notably evenhanded and fair. Although he too was strongly opposed to the creation of Trans-Jordan, he got along well with Lawrence, who took him on a sightseeing trip to Petra. At one point, as Churchill, Samuel, and Lawrence stood surrounded by a crowd of chant-ing, shouting Arabs, Churchill took off his hat to thank them for their prolonged cheers. "What are they saying?" he asked Lawrence. "Death to the Jews," Lawrence explained quietly. Samuel did his best to control the fear and anger that were already beginning to mar the relationship between the Jews and the Arabs in the Holy Land.
* Storrs (the source of this quotation) got it slightly wrong. In fact, it read, "Received from Major-General Sir Louis J. Bois, K.C.B.—One Palestine, complete." Samuel (by then in his nineties) was incensed when this chit, intended as a good-natured joke, was offered for sale at auction in New York, and went for $5,000.

Act 1

 Unfortunately, it was also the moment that saw the end of Mr. Kaufman's forbearance and patience. The frenzy, in other words, was starting exactly on schedule. Its cause was simple enough. Though the stagehands had worked through the night, it now turned out we could not get the stage, although more than enough time had been allowed and a free stage had been promised for eleven o'clock this morning. The lighting as usual had held everything up, and Mr. Kaufman, who hated to rehearse in a hall or in the lounge, was furious. This was just the sort of small crisis that threw him into a temper—and Mr. Kaufman in temper was a formidable figure.
genuine crisis he met head-on and with enviable calm, but small ir-ritations he had no capacity whatever to meet. In addition, his chief weakness, even beyond inept waiters and people who insisted on tell-ing him jokes, was what may be best described as "inanimate object trouble," and a rehearsal hall or a theatre lounge inevitably brought out the worst in him. His difficulty with inanimate objects seemed to be that all kinds of furniture contrived to take on a malevolent and almost human design the moment he entered the room. Chairs, lamps, ashtrays and tables seemed to move imperceptibly out of line and craftily place themselves in his path. His progress through a room would begin peaceably enough, but by the time he had stum-bled against a chair, knocked against a lamp and banged his elbow against the ashtray as he sank down onto the sofa, his threshold of irritation had been breached. He would sit muttering oaths under his breath and stare malignantly at the furniture, and the same pat-tern more or less would be repeated when he left the room. It put him in foul humor for a good while afterward, and I had learned to steer clear of him until he had rubbed the bruised knee or elbow suf-ficiently and was out in an open space where no furniture could move toward him. I held my breath now as we all filed into the rehearsal hall, for a rehearsal hall is just that—a large empty hall with nothing but chairs in it, and usually old and rickety chairs at that. Every one of them seemed to perk up and form an invisible phalanx of enmity as Mr. Kaufman entered the room, and then move quickly into position. I cannot swear that I saw them move, but they seemed to tremble with anticipatory glee. Mr. Kaufman usually surveyed the furniture in a strange room with equal enmity and distrust, trying to gauge, I always thought, from which side the attack would come or which chair he would bang himself against first. But he was deeply engaged in conversation at the moment with the two stage managers and he passed through the doorway without looking up. He did not go very Ear. Though the stage manager on either side of him did not so much as even brush against a chair, Mr. Kaufman ran smack into one be-fore he was ten steps into the room. He gave a howl of surprise and rage and kicked the offending chair clear across the room, stubbing [ 408]
his toe, of course, in the process. He snarled viciously at one of the stage managers who tried to help him and limped toward the table, where he promptly banged his elbow as he sat down; and, as he sat, there was a sound of ripping cloth and one and all knew that a pro-truding nail in the seat of the chair had torn a hole in his trousers. Not a soul laughed. Indeed, everyone looked stricken. His whole as-pect in these moments was so terrifying that I firmly believe that if he had ever slipped on a banana peel in Times Square the entire area would have been clear of people before he rose to his feet again, for he somehow managed to convey a sense of individual blame to any-one who happened to witness this unending warfare with inanimate objects. There was complete silence in the hall now, for there was every indication of heavy weather ahead, and to make matters worse, Mr. Kaufman began to sneeze and could not stop. He was susceptible to drafts and convinced that the merest puff of air could lay him low, and a great scurrying took place to close the offending windows. Some of them would not close, others were too high to reach, a window pole could not be found, and the two stage managers were wet with perspiration by the time the windows were wrestled with and all the chairs shifted to the far end of the hall away from the draft. It was not the best of circumstances in which to start the final days of rehearsal, and Mr. Kaufman's mood was not improved by the news which arrived in midafternoon that the stage would not be available until tomorrow. It was the company's turn now to lose their tempers, and they proceeded to do so each in turn and according to the size of their billing in the program. It was hard to blame them. Actors like to adjust their voices and pitch their performance to the an size of the theatre they are going to play in, and the sooner they are to do so, the more secure they feel. They are correct, of course, for a performance suited to the Lyric in Philadelphia might well be out of scale in the Music Box. The news that they would have only one day on the stage of the Music Box, instead of the two days they had every right to expect, cut through, for good and all, the heavy cream of false politeness that had so far acted as a cover for panic and nerves.

Cleopatterer final

In a world entranced by rhetoric— addicted to "honeyballs of phrases, every word and act besprinkled with poppy-seed and sesame" —the plausible reliably trumped the actual. Octavian had at his disposal plenty of generous veins to mine. The depredations of the East alone — that intoxicating, intemperate, irrational realm supplied a mother lode of material. Like its queen, Egypt was beguiling and voluptuous; the modern association between the Orient and sex was hoary already in the first century. Already Africa was the address of moral decay. From there it was no great leap to transform the Antony of the Donations into a power-crazed, dissolute, Eastern despot: "In his hand was a golden scepter, at his side a scimitar; he wore a purple robe studded with huge gems; a crown only was lacking to make him a king dallying with a queen." It was the diadem and golden statues business all over again; the accessories of kingship unnerved Romans even more than did autocracy itself, which they had tolerated in a more subtle version for at least a decade. In Octavi-an's account, Antony was irredeemably contaminated by the Oriental languor and the un-Roman luxuries of the East as, arguably, Caesar and Alexander the Great had been before him. In turn Octavian would soon enough discover that Egypt conferred on its conqueror a mixed blessing, a literal embarrassment of riches. Like a prodigious trust f und, it convinced men they were gods. Octavian wrung the most mileage from Antony's affair with Cleo-Patra. She allowed him to recycle the oldest trope: the allergy to the Powerful woman was sturdier even than that to monarchy, or to the depraved East. Whether or not Cleopatra controlled Antony, she unequivocally permitted Octavian to control the narrative.
and
 If Antony was to send his body to her, what would he conceivably deny her? And for what would she hesitate to ask? Octavian seems to have been the one who decided that Cleopatra plotted to make Rome a province of Egypt, an idea very unlikely to have crossed her quick mind. He had on his side the familiar type, the scheming, spendthrift wife, for whom no diamond is large enough, no house spacious enough. As Eutropius put it centuries later, Antony began a war at the urging of the queen of Egypt, who "longed with womanly desire to reign in the city as well."* Already it was acknowl-edged "that the greatest wars have taken place on account of women." Whole families had been ruined on their account. And already—the fault as ever of the sultry, sinuous, overtly subversive East—Egyptian women had caused their share of trouble. They were endowed with insatiable ardor and phenomenal sexual energy. One husband was not Hnee cor-ralled the evidence. enough for them. They attracted and ruined men. Octavian only cor-lad found a cunning disguise for a civil war, which four years earlier he had declared officially over, and into which he had prom-ised again to lead his men. How much more palatable, how much more credible, that Antony should be destroyed by an illicit love than by his countrymen! It was by no means difficult to rally legions or tax the populace, or set fathers against sons with the claim that Cleopatra was poised to conquer them as she had conquered Antony. As Lucan formulated the battle cry a century later, "Would a woman—not even Roman—rule the world?" The logic was simple. The Egyptian queen had subdued Antony. Rome, Octavian warned, was next. At the end of October he declared war—on Cleopatra.
THE DECLARATION COULD not have been unexpected. It may even have come as a relief. Cleopatra must all the same have been surprised by its terms. She had engaged in no hostilities toward Rome. She had comported herself like the ideal vassal—if a vassal with privileges. She had maintained order in her kingdom, supplied Rome when called upon to do so, materialized when summoned, aggressed upon no neighbors. She had done everything in her power to uphold and noth-ing to diminish the surpassing greatness of Rome. Traditionally, a three-step process preceded a Roman declaration of war: The Senate submitted a demand for restitution, followed after a month by a sol-emn reminder that satisfaction was still wanting. Three days later, a messenger traveled to enemy territory, formally to open hostilities. Octavian summoned Cleopatra neither for an accounting nor an air-ing of charges. He made no overtures through diplomatic channels. Instead, deft as ever with the mise-en-scene, he dusted off the ceremo-nial portion of the process. In a military cloak he personally launched a spear drenched in pig blood toward the East, from a ritual patch of "hostile soil" in Rome. (There is speculation that he invented this ancient rite for the occasion, that Octavian was making up the history as he went along. He was very good at restoring traditions, including those that had never existed.) There were no official charges for the simple reason that none could be leveled. Insofar as Cleopatra was accused of any hostile intent, she was condemned "for her acts," con-veniently left unspecified. Octavian gambled that Antony would remain true to Cleopatra, a loyalty that—under the circumstances — allowed Octavian to charge that his compatriot "had voluntarily taken up war on the side of the Egyptian woman against his native country."
and
Octavian enlisted an asp. Arriving on the scene after his messengers, h , he attempted to resuscitate Cleopatra. He called in the psylli, Libyans believed to enjoy a magical immunity to snake venom. By taste they were said to be able to determine what kind of snake had bitten; by murmuring spells and sucking at the wound they were said to be able to extract death from an icy corpse, The psylli who knelt over Cleopa-tra worked no miracles. The Egyptian queen could not be revived. That was not altogether surprising. Neither Dio nor Plutarch was at all sure of the asp, who surely crept into the story later rather than arriving in Cleopatra's lifetime, amid a basket of figs. Even Strabo, who landed in Egypt shortly after her death, was unconvinced. For any number of reasons Cleopatra was unlikely to have recruited an asp, or an Egyptian cobra, for the job. A woman known for her crisp decisions and meticulous planning would surely have hesitated to entrust her fate to a wild animal. She had plenty of quicker, less painful options. It was as well a little too convenient to be killed by the royal emblem of Egypt; the snake made more sym-bolic than practical sense. Even the most reliable of cobras cannot kill three women in quick succession, and the asp is a famously sluggish snake. An Egyptian cobra, bristling and hissing and puffing itself up to its six-foot splendor, could hardly have hidden in a fig basket or remained hidden in one for long. The job was too great and the basket too small. Poison was a more likely alternative, as Plutarch seems to imply with his survey of Cleopatra's experiments. Most likely she swallowed a lethal drink—the hemlock and opium of Socrates would have done the trick—or applied a toxic ointment. Hannibal had resorted to poison when backed into a corner 150 years earlier; Mithradates had attempted the same. Cleopatra's uncle, the king of Cyprus' had known precisely what to have on hand when Rome had come calling in 58. Assuming she died of the same cause as Charmian assuming she died in the state in which she was discovered, Cleopatra
suffered little. There were no shuddering paroxysms, which cobra venom would ultimately have induced. This toxin's effect was more narcotic than convulsive, the death peaceful, swift, and essentially painless. "The truth of the matter," Plutarch announces, to centuries of deaf ears, "no one knows."
Dismissed for nearly two hundred years, the snake clings tenaciously to the story. Cleopatra's asp is the cherry tree of ancient his-tory, a convenience, a shorthand, most of all a gift to painters and sculptors through the centuries. It made poetic sense and good art. (So did the naked breast, also not part of the original tale.) And the snake multiplied immediately: Horace wrote "sharp-toothed ser-pents" into an ode. Virgil, Propertius, and Martial would follow suit. The beast or beasts figure in every early account. Octavian would further clinch the deal by displaying a model of Cleopatra with an asp in his triumph. Not only was the snake a potent symbol of Egypt, where coiled cobras had adorned pharaonic brows for millennia, but snakes crawled all over Isis statues as well. They had insinuated themselves in the Dionysian cult. Iconography aside, it is easy to see what some-one is trying to communicate when he pairs a lady with a snake. Alexander the Great's mother— as murderous and maniacal a Macedonian princess who ever lived—kept serpents as pets. She used them to ter-rify men. Before her came Eve, Medusa, Electra, and the Erinyes; when a woman teams up with a snake, a moral storm threatens some-he sent Octavian may have confused the issue for all time with his call to the psylli. He controlled the historical record every bit as firmly as he was said to have controlled his adolescent sexual urges. Very likely us off, for thousands of years, in the wrong direction. He may have done so intentionally. There is an alternate version of the death; it has long been clear that we may be missing something here, that one farce of August io could well conceal another, that the greatest  deathbed scene in history is perhaps not what it seems.
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The Egyptian victory was celebrated with particular élan, not only because it could afford to be. There was a civil war to camouflage. Cleopatra's statue remained in the Forum. It was the least Octa-vian could do for the woman whose golden couches and jeweled pitch-ers financed his career. Cleopatra allowed him to discharge every one of his obligations. She guaranteed Roman prosperity. So vast were the funds Octavian injected into the economy that prices soared. Interest rates tripled. As Dio summed up the transfer of wealth, Cleopatra saw to it that "the Roman empire was enriched and its temples adorned.' Her art and obelisks decorated its streets. Soundly defeated, she was
nonetheless celebrated, in the beauty of a foreign city. With the riches
carne a rush of Egyptomania. Sphinxes, rearing cobras, sun disks, acanthus leaves, hieroglyphs, proliferated throughout Rome. Lotus blossoms and griffins decorated even Octavian's personal study. Cleo-patra earned a second backhanded tribute: In her wake, a golden age of women dawned in Rome. High-born wives and sisters suddenly enjoyed a role in public life. They interceded with ambassadors, coun-seled husbands, traveled abroad, commissioned temples and sculp-tures. They become more visible in art and in society. They joined Cleopatra in the Forum. No Roman woman would ever attain the exalted status or enjoy the unprecedented privileges granted Livia and Octavia, which they owed to a foreigner, to whom they served as counterweight. Livia compiled a fat portfolio of properties, one that would include lands in Egypt and palm groves in Judaea. Octavia would go down in history as the un-Cleopatra, supremely modest, prudent, and pious. Cleopatra got a promotion as well, from pretext to punctuation point. If you were looking for a date for the beginning of the modern world, her death would be the best to fix upon. With her she took both the four-hundred-year-old Roman Republic and the Hellenistic Age. Octavian would go on to effect one of the greatest bait and switches in history; he restored the Republic in all its glory and— as would be apparent within a decade or so —as a monarchy. Having learned from Casesars example, he did so subtly. Octavian was never a "king," always a"princeps," or "first citizen." For a title that was at once sufficiently grand and free of all monarchical odor, he turned to 'Augustus," to signify that the man formerly known as Gaius Julius Caesar was more than human, that he was precious and revered. There was some irony in fact that the West quickly began to resemble Cleopatra's East, the more so as Octavian had advertised Cleopatra as a threat to the Republic, something she had never intended.

After many

This time the anger had exploded in violent abuse. It was the anger of the well-meaning but stupid man who is compelled against his will to ask himself indiscreet questions about what he has been doing as a matter of course. He doesn't want to ask these questions because he knows that if he does he will be forced either to go on with what he is doing, but with the cynic's awareness that he is doing wrong, or else, if he doesn't want to be a cynic, to change the entire pattern of his life so as to bring his desire to do right into harmony with the real facts as revealed in the course of self-interrogation. To most people radical change is-even more odious than cynicism. The only way between the horns of the dilemma is to persist at all costs in the ignorance which permits one to go on doing wrong in the comforting belief that by doing so one is accomplishing one's duty—one's duty to the company, to the shareholders, to the family, the city, the state, the father-land, the Church. For, of course, poor Hansen's case wasn't in any way unique; on a smaller scale and therefore with less power to do evil, he was acting like all those civil servants and statesmen and prelates, who go through life, spreading misery and destruction, in the name of their ideals and under orders from their categorical imperatives. Well, he hadn't got very far with Hansen, Mr. Propter sadly concluded. He'd have to try again with Jo Stoyte. In the past, Jo had always refused to listen, on the ground that the estates were Hansen's business. The alibi was so convenient that it would be hard, he foresaw, to break it down. From Hansen and Jo Stoyte his thoughts wandered to that newly arrived family of transients from Kansas, to whom he had given one of his cabins. The three undernourished children, with the teeth already rotting in their mouths; the woman, emaciated by God knew what complication of diseases, deep-sunken • already in apathy and weakness; the husband alternately resentful and self-pitying, violent and morose. He had gone with the man to get some vegetables from the garden plots and a rabbit for the family supper. Sitting there, skinning the rabbit, he had had to listen to outbursts of incoherent complaint and indignation. Complaint and indignation against the wheat market, which had broken each time he had begun to do well. Against the banks he had borrowed money from and been unable to repay. Against the droughts and winds that had reduced his farm to a hundred and sixty acres of dust and wilderness. Against the luck that had always been against him. Against
the folks who had treated him so meanly, everywhere, all his life. Dismally familiar story! With inconsiderable variations, he had heard it a thousand times before. Sometimes they were sharecroppers from further south, dispossessed by the owners in a desperate effort to make the farming pay. Sometimes, like this man, they had owned their own place and been dis-possessed, not by financiers, but by the forces of nature—forces of nature which they themselves had made destructive by tearing up the grass and planting nothing but wheat. Sometimes they had been hired men, displaced by the trac-tors. All of them had come to California as to a promised land; and California had already reduced them to a condition of wandering peonage and was fast transforming them into Untouchables. Only a saint, Mr. Propter reflected, only a saint could be a peon and a pariah with impunity, because only a saint would accept the position gladly and as though he had chosen it of his own free will. Poverty and suffering ennoble only when they are voluntary. By involuntary pov-erty and suffering men are made worse. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for an involuntarily poor man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Here, for example, was this poor devil from Kansas. How had he reacted to involuntary poverty and suffering? So far as Mr. Propter could judge, he was compensating himself for his misfortunes by brutality to those weaker than himself. The way he yelled at the children . . . It was an all too familiar symptom. When the rabbit was skinned and gutted, Mr. Propter had interrupted his companion's monologue. "Do you know which is the stupidest text in the Bible?" he had suddenly asked. Startled and evidently a bit shocked, the man from Kansas had shaken his head. "It's this," Mr. Propter had said, as he got up and handed him the carcass of the rabbit "'They hated me without a cause:" Under the eucalyptus tree, Mr. Propter wearily sighed. Pointing out to unfortunate people that, in part at any rate, they were pretty certainly responsible for their own mis-fortunes; explaining to them that ignorance and stupidity are no less severely punished by the nature of things than de-
 liberate malice—these were never agreeable tasks. Never agreeable, but, so far as he could see, always necessary. For what hope, he asked himself, what faintest glimmer of hope is there for a/man who really believes that "they hated me without a cause" and that he had no part in his own dis-asters? Obviously, no hope whatever. We see, as a matter of brute fact, that disasters and hatreds are never without causes; we also see that some at least of those causes are generally under the control of the people who suffer the disasters or are the object of the hatred. In some measure they are directly or indirectly responsible. Directly, by the commission of stupid or malicious acts. Indirectly, by the omission to be as intelligent and compassionate as they might be. And if they make this omission, it is generally because they choose to conform unthinkingly to local standards, and the current way of living. Mr. Propter's thoughts re-turned to the poor fellow from Kansas. Self-righteous, no doubt disagreeable to the neighbours, an incompetent farmer; but that wasn't the whole story. His gravest offence had been to accept the world in which he found himself as normal, rational and right. Like all the others he had allowed the advertisers to multiply his wants; he had learnt to equate happiness with possessions, and prosperity, with money to spend in a shop. Like all the others, he had abandoned any idea of subsistence farming to think exclusively in terms of a cash crop; and he had gone on thinking in those terms, even when the crop no longer gave him any cash. Then, like all the others, he had got into debt with the banks. And fi-nally, like all the others, he had learnt that what the experts had been saying for a generation was perfectly true: in a semi-arid country, it is grass that holds down the soil; tear up the grass, the soil will go. In due course, it had gone. The man from Kansas was now a peon and a pariah; and the experience was making a worse man of him. St. Peter Claver was another of the historical personages to whom Mr. Propter had devoted a study. When the slave ships came into the harbour of Cartagena, Peter Claver was the only white man to venture down into the holds. There, in the unspeakable stench and heat, in the vapours of pus and excrement, he tended the sick, he dressed the ulcers of those whom their manacles had wounded, he held in his arms the men who had given way to despair and spoke to them words of comfort and affection—and in the intervals talked to them about their sins. Their sins! The modern humanitarian would laugh, if he were not shocked. And yet—such was the conclusion to which Mr. Propter had gradually and reluctantly come—and yet St. Peter Claver was probably right. Not completely right, of course; for acting on wrong knowledge, no man, however well intentioned, can be more than partially right. But as nearly right, at any rate, as a good man with a counter-reformation Catholic philosophy could expect to be. Right in insisting that, whatever the circumstances in which he finds himself, a human being al-ways has omissions to make good, commissions whose effects must if possible be neutralized. Right in believing that it is well even for the most brutally sinned against to be re-minded of their own shortcomings. Peter Claver's conception of the world had the defect of being erroneous, but the merit of being simple and dramatic. Given a personal God, dispenser of forgiveness; given heaven and hell and the absolute reality of human personalities; given the meritoriousness of mere good intentions and of unquestioning faith in a set of incorrect opinions; given the one true Church, the efficacy of priestly media-tion, the magic of sacraments—given all these, it was really quite easy to convince even a newly imported slave of his sinfulness and to explain exactly what he ought to do about it. But if there is no single inspired book, no uniquely holy Church, no mediating priesthood nor sacramental magic; if there is no personal God to be placated into forgiving of-fences; if there are, even in the moral world, only causes and effects and the enormous complexity of interrelationships —then, clearly, the task of telling people what to do about their shortcomings is much more difficult. For every individ-ual is called on to display not only unsleeping good will but also unsleeping intelligence. And this is not all. For, if individuality is not absolute, if personalities are illusory fig-ments of a self-will disastrously blind to the reality of a more-than-personal consciousness, of which it is the limita-tion and denial, then all of every human being's efforts must be directed, in the last resort, to the actualization of that more-than-personal consciousness. So that even intelligence is not sufficient as an adjunct to good will; there must also be the recollection which seeks to transform and transcend intelligence. Many are called, but few are chosen—because few even know in what salvation consists. Consider again this man from Kansas . . . Mr. Propter sadly shook his head. Everything was against the poor fellow—his fundamentalist orthodoxy, his wounded and inflamed egotism, his nervous irritability, his low intelligence. The first three disadvantages might perhaps be removed. But could anything be done about the fourth? The nature of things is implacable towards weakness. "From him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath." And what were those words of Spinoza's? "A man may be excusable and nevertheless be tormented in many ways. A horse is excusable for not being a man; but nevertheless he must needs be a horse, and not a man." All the same, there must surely be something to be done for people like the man from Kansas—something that didn't entail telling harmful untruths about the nature of things. The untruth, for example, that there is a person up, aloft or the other more modem untruth to the effect that human values are absolute and that God is the nation or the party or the human race as a whole. Surely, Mr. Propter insisted, surely, there was something to be done for such people. The man from Kansas had begun by resenting what he had said about the chain of cause and effect, the network of relationships—resenting it as a personal insult. But after-wards, when he saw that he was not being blamed, that no attempt was being made to come it over him, he had begun to take an interest, to see that after all there was some-thing in it. Little by little it might be possible to make him think a bit more realistically at least about the world of everyday life, the outside world of appearances. And when he had done that, then it mightn't be so overwhelmingly difficult for him to think a bit more realistically about him-self—to conceive of that all-important ego of his as a fiction, a kind of nightmare, a frantically agitated nothingness capa-ble, when once its frenzy had been quieted, of being filled with God, with a God conceived and experienced as a more than personal consciousness, as a free power, a pure working, a being withdrawn. . . . Suddenly, as he thus re-turned to his starting point, Mr. Propter became aware of the long, circuitous, unprofitable way he had travelled in order to reach it. He had come to this bench under the eucalyptus tree in order to recollect himself, in order to realize for a moment the existence of that other consciousness behind his private thoughts and feelings, that free, pure power greater than his own. He had come for this; but memories had slipped in while he was off his guard; speculations had started up, cloud upon cloud, like sea-birds rising from their nesting place to darken and eclipse the sun. Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cun-ning. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance; and he had failed to be vigilant. It wasn't a case, he reflected ruefully, of the spirit being willing and the flesh weak. That was al-together the wrong antithesis. The spirit is always willing; but the person, who is a mind as well as a body, is always unwilling—and the person, incidentally, is not weak but extremely strong. He looked again at the mountains, at the pale sky between the leaves, at the soft russet pinks and purples and greys of the eucalyptus trunks; then shut his eyes once more. "A nothingness surrounded by God, indigent of God, capa-ble of God and filled with God if man so desires." And what is God? A being withdrawn from creatures, a free power, a pure working. His vigilance gradually ceased to be an act of the will, a deliberate thrusting back of irrelevant personal thoughts and wishes and feelings. For little by little these thoughts and wishes and feelings had settled like a muddy sediment in a jar of water, and as they settled, his vigilance was free to transform itself into a kind of effortless unat-tached awareness, at once intense and still, alert and pas-sive—an awareness whose object was the words he had spoken and at the same time that which surrounded the words. But that which surrounded the words was the aware-ness itself; for this vigilance which was now an effortless awareness—what was it but an aspect, a partial expression, of that impersonal and untroubled consciousness into which the words had been dropped and through which they were slowly sinking? And as they sank they took a new signifi-cance for the awareness that was following them down into the depths of itself—a significance new not in respect to the entities connoted by the words, but rather in the mode of their comprehension, which, from being intellectual in character, had become intuitive and direct, so that the nature of man in his potentiality and of God in actuality was real ized by an analogue of sensuous experience, by a kind of un-mediated participation. The busy nothingness of his being experienced itself as transcended in the felt capacity for peace and purity, for the withdrawal from revulsions and desires, for the blissful freedom from personality. . . . The sound of approaching footsteps made him open his eyes. Peter Boone and that Englishman he had sat with in the car were advancing up the path towards his seat under the eucalyptus trees. Mr. Pmpter raised his hand in wel-come and smiled. He was fond of young Pete. There was native intelligence there and native kindliness; there was sensitiveness, generosity, a spontaneous decency of impulse and reaction. Charming and beautiful qualities! The pity was that by themselves and undirected as they were by a right knowledge of the nature of things, they should be so impotent for good, so inadequate to anything a reasonable man could call salvation. Fine gold, but still in the ore, un-smelted, unworked. Some day, perhaps, the boy would learn to use his gold. He would have to wish to learn first—and wish also to unlearn a lot of things he now regarded as self-evident and right. It would be hard for him, as hard, but for other reasons, as it would be for that poor fellow from Kansas. "Well, Pete," he called, "come and sit with me here. And you've brought Mr. Pordage; that's good." He moved to the middle of the bench so that they could sit, one on either side of him. "And did you meet the Ogre?" he said to Jeremy, pointing in the direction of the castle. Jeremy made a grimace and nodded. "I remembered the name you used to call him at school," he said. "That made it a little easier." "Poor Jo," said Mr. Propter. "Fat people are always sup-posed to be so happy. But who ever enjoyed being laughed at? That jolly manner they sometimes have, and the jokes they make at their own expense—it's just a case of alibis and prophylactics. They vaccinate themselves with their own ridicule so that they shan't react too violently to other peo-ple's." Jeremy smiled. He knew all about that. "It's a good way out of an unpleasant predicament," he said. Mr. Propter nodded. "But unfortunately," he said, "it didn't happen to be Jo's way. Jo was the kind of fat boy who
bluffs it out. The kind that fights. The kind that bullies or patronizes. The kind that boists and shows off. The kind that buys popularity by treating the girls to ice-creams, even if he has to steal a dime from his grandmother's purse to do it. The kind that goes on stealing, even if he's found out and gets beaten and believes it when they tell him he'll go to hell. Poor Jo, he's been that sort of fat boy all his life." He pointed once again in the direction of the castle, "That's his monument to a faulty pituitary.

After Many a Summer

JEREMY had dressed again and was sitting in the subterranean store-room that was to serve as his study. The dry acrid dust of old documents had gone to his head, like a kind of intoxicating snuff. His face was flushed as he prepared his files and sharpened his pencils; his bald head shone with perspiration; behind their bifocal lenses, his eyes were bright with excitement. There! Everything was ready. He turned round in his swivel chair and sat for a little while quite still, voluptuously savouring his anticipations. Tied up in innumerable brown paper parcels, the Hauberk Papers awaited their first reader. Twenty-seven crates of still unravished brides of quietness. He smiled to himself at the thought that he was to be their Bluebeard. Thousands of brides of quietness accumulated through centuries by succes-sive generations of indefatigable Hauberks. Hauberk after Hauberk; barony after knighthood; earldom after barony; and then Earl of Gonister after Earl of Gonister down to the last, the eighth: And, after the eighth, nothing but death duties and an old house and two old spinster ladies, sinking ever deeper into solitude and eccentricity, into poverty and family pride, but finally, poor pets! more deeply into poverty than pride. They had sworn they would never sell; but in the end they had accepted Mr. Stoyte's offer. The papers had been shipped to California. They would be able, now, to buy themselves a couple of really sumptuous funerals. And that would be the end of the Hauberks. Delicious frag-ments of English history! Cautionary perhaps, or per-haps, and more probably, merely senseless, merely a tale told by an idiot. A tale of cutthroats and conspirators, of patrons of learning and shady speculators, of bishops and kings' catamites and minor poets, of admirals and pimps, of saints and heroines and nymphomaniacs, of imbeciles and prime ministers, of art collectors and sad-ists. And here was all that remained of them, in twenty-seven crates, higgledy-piggledy, never catalogued, never even looked at, utterly virgin. Gloating over his treas-ure, Jeremy forgot the fatigues of the journey, forgot Los Angeles and the chauffeur, forgot the cemetery and the castle, forgot even Mr. Stoyte. He had the Hauberk Papers, had them all to himself. Like a child dipping blindly into a bran pie for a present which he knows will be exciting, Jeremy picked up one of the brown paper parcels with which the first crate was filled and cut the string. What rich confusion awaited him within! A book of household accounts for the year 1576 and 1577; a narrative by some Hauberk cadet of Sir Kenelm Digby's expedition to Scanderoon; eleven letters in Spanish from Miguel de Molinos to that Lady Hauberk who had scan-dalized her family by turning papist; a collection, in early eighteenth-century handwriting, of sickroom recipes; a copy of Drelincourt's "On Death"; and an odd volume of Andrea de Nerciat's "Felicia, ou Mes Fredaines." He had
just cut the string of the second bundle and was wondering whose was the lock of pale brown hair preserved between the pages of the Third Earl's holograph, "Reflections of the Late Popish Plot," when there was a knock at the door.

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.