Broyard on Jazz

 I had never written anything but notes to myself. I was always scribbling on little pads I carried around, jotting down ideas, phrases, images. Half of the young men in the Village were writing such notes. They wrote them in cafes, in the park, even on the street. You'd see them stop and pull out their pads or notebooks to jot down something that had just struck them—the color of the sky, the bend of a street, an incongruity. These notes were postcards to literature that we never mailed. I took Milton's proposal very seriously. I would go upstairs in my parents' house and listen to jazz for hours, playing records over and over. It suited my mood, which was like the lyrics of a blues song. I had always liked old jazz—from Louis Armstrong to Lester Young—but I hadn't made up my mind about Charlie Parker, who was everybody's hero at that time. While he could be brilliant, I found in Parker's style a hint of the garrulousness that would soon come over black culture. Also, it seemed to me that jazz relied too much on improvisation to be a full-fledged art form. Nobody could be that good on the spur of the moment. And there was too much cuteness in jazz. It stammered and strained. It took its sentimentality for wisdom. I tried to imagine what Meyer Schapiro would say about jazz. Was it like Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, a frac-turing of music, like the splitting of the atom? But there was something momentous, something world-shaking, about the Demoiselles that jazz didn't have. It seemed to me that jazz was just folk art. It might be terrific folk art, but it was still only local and temporary.
I found a parallel for jazz not in Schapiro's class but in Gregory Bateson's. Bateson loved to tell stories, and he told them very well. He was in New Guinea, he said, living with the Iatmul tribe, sleeping in a thatched but on tall stilts, when one morning he was awakened at daybreak by a sound of drumming. He got up and looked out and saw a lone man walking beneath the clustered huts of the village, beating a drum. He walked in a curious way, this man, in a sawtooth pattern—not turning around to keep to his pattern but stepping backward, heels first. And in counterpoint to his drum-ming, he chanted a sad, staccato recitative. Bateson learned that this man had suffered a griev-ance that he could not get settled. The tribe had rejected his plea for redress and so he got up every morning and rehearsed his complaint to the village. He tried to wake them, to disturb their rest, invade their dreams. Think-ing about jazz, I remembered this man and I thought that jazz musicians were something like that.

Vitalism from the Age of Wonder

In fact Vitalist ideas had been stirring for over a generation. Ever since the 1790s the new developments in Romantic medical science and theory had begun to raise fundamental questions about the nature of life itself. What distinguishes organic from inorganic (`dead') matter, or vegetable life from animal life? Was there some form of animating power through-out nature, and if so, was it identical to — or analogous with — electricity? These led on, inevitably, to an enquiry about the nature of mind, spirit and the traditional concept of 'the soul': how could this be explained or defined in scientific terms, or should it simply be dismissed? Such questions, traditionally the province of theologians and philoso-phers, were now increasingly considered by physicians, science writers, and those who studied what Coleridge called 'the science of mind'.22 They had already been the subject of ingenious scientific experiments in Europe, which gave rise to increasingly fierce debates surrounding the work of Luigi Galvani in Italy and Franz Anton Mesmer in France. By 1792 Galvani's supposedly 'magnetic' frog experiments were proved to be erroneous by Alessandro Volta: the mysterious 'vital electrical fluid' came not from the animal itself, but from the chemical action of the metal plates to which it was attached during experiments. Similarly, the French Academie des Sciences had appointed a scientific commission in 1784, headed by Franklin and Lavoisier (both experts in electrical phenomena), to examine the claims of 'animal magnetism'. They set up a series of elegant 'blind' trials, in which mesmerists were asked to identify objects that had been previously filled with 'vital fluid, including trees and flasks of water. They signally failed to do so. The commissioners then went on to examine the supposed curing of 'mesmerised' patients. As with the Montgolfier trials, Franklin wrote in detail to Banks of their find-ings. With impressive precision, the commission concluded that some `mesmerised' patients did actually show marked signs of improved health. But this was not because of any'rnagnetic' influences or 'vitalising' electrical fluids. It was simply because the patients believed they would be cured.
But speculation continued to flourish in Germany, where a group of young writers, gathered at the University of Jena, began to explore the philosophical ideas of Friedrich Schelling and what he called Naturphilosophie. This doctrine, perhaps best translated as 'science mys-ticism, defined the entire natural world as a system of invisible powers and energies, operating like electricity as a series of 'polarities. According to Schelling's doctrine, the whole world was indeed replete with spiritual energy or soul, and all physical objects 'aspired' to become something higher. There was a 'world-soul' constantly 'evolving' higher life forms and 'levels of consciousness' in all matter, animate or inanimate. All nature had a tendency to move towards a higher state. So carbon for example 'aspired' to become diamond; plants aspired to become sentient animals; animals aspired to become men; men aspired to become part of the Zeitgeist or world spirit. Evolutionary, idealist, electrical and Vitalist ideas were all evidently tangled up in this system, which had an obvious appeal to imaginative writers in the Jena circle like Novalis, Schiller and Goethe, as well as experimental physiologists like Johann Ritter. It had its attractions, not least in its optimism and its sense of reverence for the natural world. But it also constantly teetered on the brink of idiocy. One of its wilder proselytisers, the Scandinavian geologist Henrick Steffens, was said to have stated that 'The diamond is a piece of carbon that has come to its senses'; to which a Scottish geologist, probably John Playfair, made the legendary reply: `Then a quartz, therefore, must be a diamond run mad: These ideas gradually crossed the Channel to Britain, though not of course escaping the sceptical, all-weather eye of Banks. In January 1793 the radical journalist John Thelwall gave a hugely controversial public lecture on 'Animal Vitality' organised by the Physical Society at Guy's Hospital, under the auspices of the surgeon Henry Cline. The topic was so popular among the medical students that discussions were renewed over five subsequent and increasingly rowdy meetings.25 'Citizen' Thelwall had become known for his wish to 'demystify' various forms of authority and received opinions, and the following year, in May 1794, he was to be prosecuted for Political sedition, a charge which carried the death penalty. It was partly the support of Cline, and the young Astley Cooper, which saved him from the gallows.' Attacking what he saw as the potential mystifications in Hunter's theories, Thelwall proposed an openly materialist thesis that no `spark of life' was divinely conferred, and that no soul was implanted by some external source. Yet he did not believe, like Hunter, that a 'life principle' could be simply explained by blood passing through the lungs. On the other hand he also maintained that 'Spirit, however refined must still be material: But what then was its source, if not blood — and not God? Here Thelwall raised the Vitalist question which haunted a whole generation of Romantic writers. 'What is this something — this vivifying principle? — Is it atmospheric air itself? Certainly not ... It has been proved by experiment, that in the arteries of the living body there is no air. Something, however, it must be, that is contained in the atmosphere, and something of a powerful and exquisitely subtle nature: 27 Attempts to define this exquisite but powerful 'something' deeply concerned the young poets Thelwall came to meet after his release from prison, when he fled with his wife to the West Country in 1797. But for them it still seemed more a psychological than a physiological question. Coleridge in his conversation poems was exploring the metaphysical notion of a 'one Life' that unified all living forms; while Wordsworth in `Tintern Abbey' wrote tentatively and beautifully of 'a sense sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused/Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns. Both writers, at this most radical point in their lives, were trying to avoid an explicit reference to God, while retaining their intuitions of a 'spiritual' power — whatever that might be — both within man and within the natural universe. It was a balancing act that, perhaps, could only be performed in poetry. All these Vitalist speculations were dramatically brought back to life, ten years after Thelwall's lecture, by an astonishing and brutal series of public experiments performed in London on 17 January 1803. The per-petrator, as Banks noted grimly, was another Italian, the Professor of Anatomy from Bologna, Giovanni Aldini. Banks had received earlier reports from Charles Blagden in Paris of Aldini 'experimenting on ani-mals' with voltaic batteries the previous year, but remained dubious about his authenticity. There were unconfirmed rumours of Aldini daz-zling the Galvanic Society with his 're-animation' exhibitions, but also of what Blagden called his 'excessive puffings and pretensions'.28 In London, surrounded by eager publicity, Aldini attempted to revive the body of a murderer, one Thomas Forster, by the application of electrical charges six hours after he had been hanged at Newgate. His demonstrations were graphically and melodramatically reported in the press: 'On the first application of the [electrical] arcs, the jaw began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and the left eye actually opened ... The conductors being applied to the ear, and to the rec-tum, excited muscular contractions much stronger ... The arms alter-nately rose and fell ... the fists clenched and beat violently the table on which the body lay, natural respiration was artificially established ... A lighted candle placed before the mouth was several times extinguished ... Vitality might have been fully restored, if many ulterior circumstances, had not rendered this — inappropriate.'29 That small, grotesque detail of the opening eye may well have caught a young novelist's imagination. Later experiments involved oxen's heads, dogs' bodies, and another human corpse which was said to have laughed and walked. The reports eventually caused such a public outcry that the experiments were banned, and Aldini forced to leave the country in 1805.
3
So when Abernethy and Lawrence began to clash in 1816, it was not entirely surprising that their angry exchanges quickly revived the old Vitalism debate in renewed form. For all its misgivings, the Royal College of Surgeons must have been glad to have raised a subject which brought such publicity. The exchanges were now closely followed by such serious literary journals as the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review. At its base there lay a theological question: whether the 'super-added' force, if it existed, was the same as a spirit or soul, or some 'intermediary' element between body and spirit, or some form of 'vital' electrical fluid? By 1819, and the publication of both Abernethy's original lectures and Lawrence's Natural History of Man, the issues had also become heavily politicised. Here was humane, pious English science fighting against cruel, reduc-tive, atheistical French science. The conservative Quarterly Review found a more personal line of attack: `We at the Quarterly Review, would ask what is it that Mr Lawrence, who is generally in the habit of smiling at the credulity of the world, modestly requires us all to believe? That there is no difference between a man and an oyster, other than that one possesses bodily organs more fully developed than the other! That all the eminent powers of reason, reflexion, imagina-tion, and memory — the powers which distinguish a Milton, a Newton, and a Locke, — are merely the function of a few ounces of organized matter called the brain! ... Mr Lawrence considers that man, in the most important characteristics of his nature, is nothing more than an orang-outang or an ape, with "more ample cerebral hemispheres"! ... Mr Lawrence strives with all his powers to prove that men have no souls! ... Mr Lawrence has the sub-lime confidence to tell us that it is only "the medullary matter of the brain" that thinks or has spiritual consciousnessr3° As such questions caught the public imagination, they also spread among writers and artists. The influential idea that the group of writers first known as the 'Lake Poets' (with the later addition of the 'Cockney School') were particularly opposed to all scientific advance seems to have begun at precisely this time. This gradually hardened into the dogma that the 'Romantic poets' (as they eventually became known) were funda-mentally anti-scientific. The myth can be observed forming on one signal occasion at a dinner party hosted in his north London studio in December 1817 by the painter and diarist Benjamin Haydon. This subsequently became known as the 'Immortal Dinner' (though it was in fact an extended, rather drunken luncheon). Indeed, it has been thought to exemplify the permanent, instinctive, deep-seated antagonism between Romantic poetry and science. But the truth seems rather different. The poets present included Wordsworth, Charles Lamb and John Keats (but not, significantly, Coleridge, Byron or Shelley). Its aim was to celebrate the first stage of Haydon's enormous oil painting Christ's Entry into Jerusalem, upon which he had been labouring for three years, and which would take him another three to complete. His subject was the dominion of religion over the arts and sciences. Haydon had laid his dinner table directly beneath the huge rectangular canvas. A triumphant,
youthful, bearded Christ rides at evening through the ancient city of Jerusalem, surrounded by a mob of enthusiastic disciples. The whole crowd sweeps downwards towards the viewer. But in one remote corner, set apart at the right of the picture, appear unmistakeable portraits of Wordsworth, Newton and Voltaire. Newton here represents analytic sci-ence, Voltaire godless French philosophical scepticism, and Wordsworth natural English piety. Haydon, perhaps provokingly, had dressed his old friend in a kind of monkish robe. There is one other striking figure just behind them. The young John Keats, his mouth wide open with a kind of shout of wonder, appears in animated profile from behind a pillar. During the increasingly rowdy dinner-table discussion that developed, the painting provoked a debate about the powers of Reason versus the Imagination. The destructive and reductive effects of the scientific outlook were mocked. Warming to the theme, Lamb mischievously described Newton as 'a fellow who believed nothing unless it was as clear as the three sides of a triangle'. Keats joined in, agreeing that Newton had `destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to a prism'. Haydon jovially records: 'It was impossible to resist them, and we drank "Newton's health, and confusion to Mathematics." 'Keats was wittily referring to the classic experiment in Newton's Optics, already much criticised in an essay by Goethe, in which a shaft of sunlight was passed through a prism, and separated out into the rainbow light of the spectrum. In fact the point of the experiment was that when the separated rain bow colours were individually passed through a second prism, they did not revert to white sunlight, but remained true colours (that is, in mod-ern terms, they remained at the same wavelength). The rainbow was not a mere scientific trick of the glass prism. It genuinely and beautifully existed in nature, through the natural prism of raindrops, although paradoxically it took a human eye to see it, and every human eye saw it differently. It seems unlikely that Keats did not know this; but perhaps he did not wish to admit that Newton had actually increased the potential poetry by showing it was not merely some supernatural sky writing as asserted in Genesis. "it shall be for a token of a covenant between Me and the earth. This playful and eventually drunken attack on the reductive effects of science was orchestrated and eagerly recorded by Haydon in his diary. Unlike the others, he was a passionate fundamentalist Christian, and believed that most science was inevitably godless, and probably blasphemous. Shelley had already baited Haydon for his religious superstitions remarking on that most "detestable religion, the Christian".

The Honorary Consul

Not one of Greene's entertainments- the distinction being readily clarified in pages of speculation on the nature of God and the sullenness of prostitutes, and vice versa.

." "Then where do you suppose he is?" Doctor Plarr asked. "He is probably dead in the river or else he is hidden nearer home. What were you doing in Buenos Aires?" It was a polite question, not a police question. He was no more interested than Escobar. "I wanted to see the Ambassador about Fortnum." "Yes. What did he have to say?" "I interrupted his siesta, poor man. He said the trouble is that no one's really interested." Colonel Perez said, "I assure you I am. Yesterday I wanted to organize a thorough search of the barrio popular, but the Governor thought it too dangerous. He does not want shooting if possible. Ours has been a very quiet province up till now except for a little trouble from those third world priests. He sent me off to Buenos Aires today to talk to the Minister of the In-terior. I think the Governor hopes to delay matters. If he can postpone action long enough and we are lucky Fortnum's body may be found outside the province. No one can complain then that we acted imprudently. The blackmail will have failed. Everyone will be happy. Except myself. Even your government will be happy. I hope they will pay a pension to the widow?" "I doubt it. He was only an Honorary Consul. What did the Minister say?"
"He is not afraid of shooting, that man. We could do with more like him. He advises the Governor to go ahead whatever happens and to use troops if necessary. The President wants everything settled before the Gen-eral finishes his fishing. What else did your Ambassador say?" "He said if the papers made enough fuss . . ." "Why should they? Have you heard the afternoon radio? A BOAC plane has crashed. A hijacker let off his grenade this time. There are a hundred and sixty-seven deaths—a hundred and sixty-seven Fortnums, and one of them a film star. No, Doctor Plan, we have to admit that ours is a very small affair." "Do you want to give up then?" "Oh no—I have dealt all my life in small affairs, and I have always preferred to see them settled. Un-finished dossiers take up a lot of room. A smuggler was shot yesterday on the river, so we have been able to close his file. Somebody has stolen a hundred thousand pesos from a bedroom in the Nacional—but we have our eyes on the man. And early this morning there was a small bomb found in the church of La Cruz. A very small bomb—for we are a very quiet province—and it was set to go off at midnight when the church was empty. If it had exploded, though, it might have de-stroyed the miraculous cross—and that would have been real news in El Litoral, even if not in the Naci6n. Perhaps it may become news in any case. There are rumors already that Our Lady herself got down off her altar and defused the bomb with her own hands and the Archbishop has visited the scene. You know the cross was first saved—years before Buenos Aires even existed—when lightning killed the Indians who were going to burn it." The door of the lavatory opened. "You know my colleague Captain Velardo, doctor? I was telling the doctor about our new miracle, Ruben."
"you may laugh, but the bomb did not go off"
"I think the fuse was badly set"
"And why was the fuse badly set? How can we be sure that it was not the hand of Our Lady guiding the hand?"
"All the same I prefer to believe we are kept in the air by the engines rather than divine intervention"

God's Secretaries again

Essentially, for all the extravagance of the king and parliament's voluble assertion of its ancient rights, peace reigned. In diocese after diocese in England, the records show that neither Catholics nor extreme Puritans were being hunted down. Pax and Concordia reigned rather sleepily over the country and, on the whole, in quiet corners, without much inter-vention or harassment, English men and women were getting on with their lives and their religion. Revolution, martyrdom, the heroism of exile — these hardly featured in the landscape. The country was relatively fat on a series of good harvests, pursuing its interests, in many ways sharing a common idea of what was good: a Christian, orderly commonwealth. As if on cue, in 1608, golf was introduced from Scotland for the first time, played around a 5-hole course on Blackheath, south of London. The leather balls, stuffed with feathers, lasted no more than one game each, particularly if it rained. At 5 shillings a time, it was a ruinously expensive but a strangely consoling pursuit, fitted to a country replete with contentment. That is not how it looks from America. For Americans, the spring and summer of z6o8 burns in the history of religious belief and the struggle for freedom of conscience as the months in which those Separatists who would later sail for New Ply-mouth on the Mayflower, known to us (but never to them) as the Pilgrim Fathers, finally gave up the struggle of living in England, unable to tolerate its oppressions any longer, and left, after great travails, for the freedoms of Amsterdam and then Leiden. How can this be explained? How can one of the most pacific moments in English history be the source of something which, in retrospect, looks like one of its greatest ruptures? It is, in part, a question of scale and of perspective. From the point of view of the English establishment, the events in the small agricultural communities around Scrooby and Gainsborough, on the borders
of Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire, were no more than minor irritations at the outer edge of their concerns. There was a tiny cell of radical thinking here — with strong Cambridge connec-tions, a stream of fire-breathing preachers coming north from the university city — wedded to all those extreme Puritan beliefs which the broadly tolerant English Church and state felt unable to accommodate. The Separatists' model was the ancient church of Antioch, in which there had been neither bishop nor clergy of any kind, and which was ruled 'by the Spirit', manifesting itself through the congregation. It was the congregation that appointed and ordained its own pastors, teachers, lay elders and deacons. In these gatherings, often in stables and outhouses, away from the sight of the church authorities, the priesthood of all believers was a living reality. Their services might last four hours, much of which was spent in prayer, often extempore, with no help from any prayer book, an unregulated, private spirit guiding the prophesyings of the faithful. Anyone, whether artisan or peasant, could expound the meaning of the scriptures. They held as their guiding sign the words of St Peter to all members of the church: But yee are a chosen generation, a royall Priest-hood, an holy nation, a peculiar people, that yee should shewe forth the praises of him, who hath called you out of darknes into his marueilous light.' The accompanying note in the Geneva Bible, which the Scrooby Separatists would have read, makes it quite clear. People like them, it reassured them, were God's elect. They were the true believers and the rest of the world, who clearly did not attend as closely as they did to the very word of God, would be damned to hell. 'And lest any man should doubt whether he is chosen or not, the apostle calls us back to the voice of the gospel sounding both in our ears and minds.' Listen to the words of the Bible and you will be saved. Nothing else is necessary. It is that singularity of conviction which drove the Puritan and pilgrim experience. Of course, those words of Peter's carry an explosively subversive charge.

and.... an association I never thought of:
 that preservation of his teeth at a time when the English, awash with sugar from their new slave-worked plantations in the Caribbean, were embarking on their long career of oral decay.

also...

The idea, in fact, was not to make a new translation, Smith maintained, but to make 'out of many good ones, one principal good one'. And that was their triumph: a polished collation, a refinement of a century's translating, a book that became both clear and rich. Of course, what they delivered to Robert Barker was not entirely good. The Hebrew and particularly the Greek texts the were working from were not the most accurate, even by tl-standards of their own time. Theodore Beza, Calvin's successor as the head of the church in Geneva, had prepared an edition of the New Testament some forty years earlier based on a more ancient and less corrupt manuscript. The English scholars were still a little adrift on tenses in Hebrew, while koine, the form of rubbed down and difficult Greek in which the New Testament is written, so unlike the Greek of Plato and Aristotle, still held mysteries for them, which only later translations would correct. And there are some parts of the King James Bible, particularly in the dense and difficult passages of Paul's Epistles, that are now, and to some extent were then, virtually unintelligible. A famous example is 2 Corinthians 6: I i —13 :
O yee Corinthians, our mouth is open vnto you, our heart is enlarged. Yee are not straitened in vs, but yee are straitened in your owne bowels. Nowe for a recompense in the same, (1 speake as vnto my children) be ye also inlarged. Even though Tyndale's effort was even more opaque, this is clearly a translation done by people who didn't really understand what they were translating, and in those circumstances rhythmic language and interesting vocabulary can do very little to save the situation. As modern translations make clear, Paul is asking the Corinthians, as a father might ask his children, to be more open with him, since he feels he has been open with them him-self, but no one would have divined that simple meaning from the muddle which (at least in this instance) the Jacobean Translators served up.
Some form of text was handed over to Robert Barker, 'Printer to the King's Most Excellent Maiestie', perhaps an annotated version of the Bishops' Bible, perhaps a manuscript. What was said to be the 'manuscript copy of the Bible' was sold twice in the seventeenth century, once to Cambridge University Press, once to a firm of London printers, but has now disappeared. According to one romantic theory, it was burnt in the Great Fire of London. Barker's printshop began to apply its own level of chaos to the production process. It seems to have been a sort of anarchy. Either two editions were produced one after another; or both at the same time and sheets from each edition were bound together in single volumes. As a result no copy of the 161 z Bible is like any other. And they were riddled with mistakes. The Translators had intended that any word inserted to improve the sense should be printed in a different face. In fact, that principle became confused early on and if a word is in italics in the printed Bible, there is often no telling if it is in the original Greek or Hebrew or not. Marginal references to other relevant parts of the Bible are highly inaccurate, particularly in the Psalms, where references are made to the numbering system used in the Vulgate, not the numbering system in this Bible itself. Calmly elegant Bibles in Roman typefaces had been in pro-duction in France and Switzerland for decades. This Bible, look-ing back to an imagined antiquity before the modern age, was given a heavy, antique feel with its dense blackletter typeface, a `Gothic', non-Roman typeface, and a certain airlessness on the page. It may be that because the Geneva Bibles were printed in open and accessible Roman type, and the Bishops' Bible, which this was intended to replace, had itself been in blackletter, that Barker made this retrograde decision. Although editions of the King James Bible were appearing in Roman type within a few years, blackletter editions continued to be printed and sold, well into the first years of the eighteenth century. Even at its birth, this was sold as the Bible of Old England. And it was littered with misprints, `hoopes' for `hookes', 'she' for 'he', three whole lines simply repeated in Exodus, and alarm-ingly 'Judas' for 'Jesus' in one of the Gospels. None of these was quite so catastrophic as a misprint that would appear in a 163 I edition, the so-called Wicked Bible, which failed to put the word `not' in Exodus 2o:14, giving the reading 'Thou shalt commit adultery', but the degree of muddle is scarcely what a modern scholarly text would tolerate. When, finally, in the nineteenth century, Dr F. Scrivener, a scholar working to modern standards, attempted to collate all the editions of the King James Bible then in circulation, he found more than 24,000 variations between them. The curious fact is that no one such thing as `The King James Bible' — agreed, consistent and whole — has ever existed.

The book crept out into the public arena. Being only a revision of earlier translations, and not a new work, there was no need for it to be entered in the Stationers' Register, which recorded only new publications and so, in addition to this most famous book having no agreed text, it also has no publication date. Nor is it known how many were printed of the first big folio edition for use in churches. When the first state Bible, the so-called Great Bible, was issued in 1540, 20,000 copies were run off, more than enough to provide one for every parish church in England, costing 1 o shillings each, 12 shillings bound. For the King James Bible, though, there is no record of either print-run or price. Everything that could have been done for it had been done. Something approaching three hundred and fifty scholar years had been devoted to its excellence; the Crown and state church had given it their imprimatur; a laudatory preface and dedication, by permission, to the king, had been included. Any publisher would have hoped for the most enormous success. They didn't get it. Some critics thought its dependence on a kind of English which seemed sixty or seventy years out of date (although its English was in fact a form no one had ever spoken) made it ridiculous and bogus. Hugh Broughton, a cantankerous and aggressive Puritan Hebrew scholar, who had wanted to be part of the great committee, sending papers and suggestions to Bancroft, but barred because of his incivility, lambasted the translation for its errors and its slavish following of the old Bishops' Bible. In the opening words of his Preface, Miles Smith had predicted such a reaction. `Zeale to promote the common good', he had begun — and there is no phrase which encapsulates more Precisely the ideals of the project — 'findeth but cold intertainment in the world.' Broughton castigated the Translators. Their understanding of Hebrew was inadequate; where they had stumbled on something worthwhile, they had usually relegated it to the margins. These worldly divines, he said, were interested only in promotion in the church and crawl-ing to royal authority. Blasphemy, most damnable corruptions, intolerable deceit and vile imposture were terms scarcely bad enough to describe the depths of their degeneracy. 'The late Bible', he wrote, was sent to me to censure: which bred in me a sadness that will grieve me while I breathe, it is ill done. Tell His Majesty that I had rather be rent in pieces with wild horses, than any such translation by my consent should be urged upon poor churches . . . The new edition crosseth me. I require it to be burnt. Not that Broughton was in any way bitter; these accusations were, he said, not 'the dictates of passion, but the just resentment of a zealous mind'. The Geneva Bible continued to hold its position in English affections, at least partly because it was so useful for its notes and appendices, a guidebook to the world of the divine. It con-tinued to flood off the presses: a folio and a quarto in 1611, another folio in 1612, three quartos in 1614, two more in 1615 and a folio in 1616. Then, in 1616, the king put a halt to it, or at least attempted to: no more editions of the Geneva Bible were to be printed. The King James Bible (henceforth known as the Authorised Version, although no document authorising its use by the king, Council or anyone else survived the 1619 Whitehall fire) was to become, by order, the only English Bible. But the appetite for the Geneva text could not be so easily denied. Presses in Amsterdam and Dort started to roll, producing Geneva Bibles for the English market well into the 163os. All too significantly, Robert Barker, printer to the king, a chaotic man who would end up in debtors' prison, bought up the Dutch Geneva editions, added a title page with the fraudulent date 1599 clearly stamped on it, and flogged them to a ready market. The King James Bible languished on the side, a royal project, whose language it seemed was not the language of the people.
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Hath God forgotten to be gracious? Even more strangely, given the sanctity with which the text of the King James Bible has been regarded in later ages, the very people who might have championed it continued to use the Geneva Bible. Lancelot Andrewes nearly always took his sermon texts from the Geneva. Even William Laud, the most anti-Calvinist bishop in the church, quoted from the Geneva. Most extraordinarily of all, Miles Smith, in the Preface to the new translation, quotes from the very Geneva Bible which it was, in part, intended to replace. And in the Separatist congregations in Amsterdam, Leiden and eventually on the Mayflower, it was of course the Geneva Bible they took with them. Geneva Bibles continued to be printed until 1644, and only after the Restoration in 166o did the King James Bible, hallowed now as something that had its origins before the great rupture of the Civil War, redolent of monarchy and antiquity, come t take its place as the Bible itself, the national text and the symb of England as God's country. In America, a slightly different process occurred, but with the same effect. Calvinist Christianity is inherently fissive. Its emphasis on the primacy of a vengeful God constantly throws into doubt the validity of worldly government, and its repeated emphasis on the difference between the elect, who would be saved, and the rest, who would be damned, is no basis on which to found a nation. These radically disruptive ideas are the repeated threnody of the Geneva Bible, the food and fuel on which the whole phenomenon of Separatism and the emergence of the Pilgrim Fathers was based. As the American settlements widened and deepened, and their political processes matured, the need for a separatist gospel ebbed. The relationship of ,Puritan church and Puritan state in early America soon became, strangely enough, as close as any relationship between the Jacobean Crown and the Church of England. In early Massachusetts, heresy, witchcraft, profanity, blasphemy, idolatry and breaking the Sabbath were all civil offences, to be dealt with by civil courts. The new Americans may have dispensed with bishops, surplices and the Book of Common Prayer, but they had not replaced them with a Utopia of religious freedom. Seventeenth-century America was a country of strictly enforced state religion and as such needed a Bible much more attuned to the necessities of nation-building than anything the Separatists' Geneva Bible could offer. It is one of the strangest of historical paradoxes that the King James Bible, whose whole purpose had been nation-building in the service of a ceremonial and episcopal state church, should become the guiding text of Puritan America. But the translation's lifeblood had been inclus-iveness, it was drenched with the splendour of a divinely sanc-tioned authority, and by the end of the seventeenth century it had come to be treasured by Americans as much as by the British as one of their national texts.
The churches and biblical scholarship have, by and large, aba doned the frame of mind which created this translation. T social structures which gave rise to it — rigid hierarchies; a lo of majesty; subservience; an association of power with glory have all gone. The belief in the historical and authentic truth the scriptures, particularly the Gospels, has been largely aba doned, even by the religious. The ferocious intolerances of ti pre-liberal world have been left behind — it is inconceivable nc that a Henry Barrow would be executed, or a Henry Garnet, that the Scrooby Separatists would have been forced to leave home and country — and perhaps as a result of that Chang
perhaps as a symptom, religion, or at least the conventional religion of ordinary people, has been drained of its passion. There is no modern language that can encompass the realities which the Jacobeans accepted as normal. Modern religious rhetoric is dilute and ineffectual, and where it isn't, it seems mad and aberrational. It is an appalling fact that the manner of speech which approaches most nearly to the language of these Jacobean divines comes from the mouths of murderous fundamentalists. When asked by a reporter in October 2001 if he was responsible for the anthrax attacks then occurring in the United States, Osama bin Laden answered: 'These diseases are a punishment from God and a response to oppressed mothers' prayers in Leb-anon, Iraq, Palestine and everywhere.' That is the kind of remark which would not have raised an eyebrow in Jacobean England. This is not to suggest that the Translators of the King James Bible would have approved of religious terrorism. They certainly wouldn't; their reactions to 5 November prove that. Even so, there is something that connects the God-shaped mentality of Jacobean England more intimately with the world of modern Muslim fundamentalists than with our own softened, liberal tolerance. These men, and their Bible, exist on the other side of a gulf, which can be labelled liberal, secular, democratic modernity. We do not live in the same world. It is impossible now to experience in an English church the enveloping amalgam of tradition, intelligence, beauty, clarity of purpose, intensity of conviction and plangent, heart-gripping godliness which is the experience of page after page of the King James Bible. Nothing in our culture can match its breadth, depth and universality, unless, curiously enough, it is something that was written at exactly the same time and in almost exactly the same place: the great tragedies of Shakespeare. That is no chance effect. Shakespeare's great tragedies and the King James Bible are each other's mirror-twin. Both emerge from the ambitions and terrors of the Jacobean world.

Henry Fonda again from McKinney

The Omaha Community Playhouse is only a year old when Fonda joins, but in its genome are decades of history, theory, aspiration. It grows out of the Progressive Era, a period of political reform and social experiment lasting from the 1890s to the 1920s. A group of Omaha benefactors joins in the Little Theatre movement—what Dorothy Chan-sky terms a concerted effort by "writers, various kinds of activists, uni-versity professors and other educators, clubwomen, settlement workers, artists, and social elites" to bolster local playhouses against the onslaught of Hollywood, whose growing popularity is transforming many stage theaters into movie houses. The Community Playhouse is founded in 1924, and its first president, Omaha architect Alan McDonald, avows its purpose: "To raise the drama from a purely amusement enterprise into an educational, cultural force." Little Theatre was a middle-class phenomenon with progressive in-tentions and a conservative agenda. "Like other reform activities in the era," Chansky writes, it "had contradictory strains; it included forward-looking activism and modernist aesthetics as well as skepticism, nativism, elitism, and nostalgia, sometimes within the same production company or publication." Certainly the movement took for granted the cultural supremacy of those who drove and financed it: "Most Little Theatre workers assumed that their middle-class, Protestant heritage was a standard by which all culture could be measured." But in the context of middle-class, suburban Omaha in the 1920s, the Community Playhouse does not do badly. Under Foley, it cops to light Broadway fare but also stages naturalism, futurism, high farce—Shaw, Wilde, Molnar, O'Neill, Capek. Audiences are kept alive to past classics and modern currents, and the ideological limitations of Little Theatre are perhaps pushed out a few inches. The contradictions noted by Chansky provide the ideal opening into acting for a young man whose exteriors and values are conventional but whose ambitions and perceptions are extraordinary.

and

There's another thing to be pointed out about Hollywood and Henry Fonda, the same thing that accounts for Ronald Reagan's entry into film: the sound of the voice. By 1935, the movies had talked for eight years, and it was accepted that voice as much as body defined the actor, that one could not become a star without distinctive tones. There is not an icon of the Hollywood 1930s whose voice is not central to his or her legend: Tracy's gruffness, Hepburn's clenched jaw, Grant's suave cadence, Cagney's bullet phrasing. Fonda and his contemporaries moved into the space left by the stars whose mystique was built solely on movement and expression, and who now found they were unable to seduce an audience with its ears wide open. David Thomson notes the paradox that the coming of sound placed an unprecedented emphasis on silence—that is, on the trade-off between a voice and the silence that might precede or follow it, or the silence sounded in the timbre of the voice itself. He writes of how "a generation of favorites slipped away because they did not have access to that emotional quietness, and the allure that attaches to any mystery or reticence in a medium that seems to be giving you all the visual evidence." Fonda has that access, that allure. It's partly the voice that leaves people at a loss for how to describe him. Here is a young man of uncom-mon reserve, so much of whom is implied in silence, lack of show. He seems smarter than Cooper, more virtuous than Gable, more melancholy than McCrea, more elusive than Tracy. Viewers who haven't seen any-thing quite like him before, who lack better words to describe it, call it "modest," "honest," "simple." But how do we describe simplicity in a way that does justice to its complexity? How do we prove the existence of the invisible, or translate a message in vanishing ink? Words like sim-ple fall short when applied to Fonda, because they are asked to describe something not at all obvious—something that is there to be felt, yet is not there to be seen.

and regarding the gruesome suicide of Frances:

Men commit actions, women commit gestures... Phyllis Chesler

and on her replacement:

Susan wants what most wives want- sustained intimacy- and Fonda has failed her as many husbands fail their wives.

and on Lee Strasberg's instruction of Jane:
He introduces her for instance to the idea of the counter-need, a secret desire contradicting each conscious motivation.

Jacobean Taste

Enter Hatfield and all the ingredients of Jacobean court mentality hit you like a wave. First, there is a certain anti-quarianism. Although the house is planned in a new way — no courtyards, a clustering of rooms into large and massy blocks, an open Italian loggia on the ground floor over which the Long Gallery runs — there is a recognisable medieval pattern in one's arrival into a screens passage, with the great hall on one side and the kitchens on the other. The great Marble Hall itself reproduces the heart of a medieval house, and the staircase beyond it leads to the richer and more private rooms of the Cecils themselves. This is a deeply traditional arrangement of a great man's house; no break here with the antiquity of England. But the place is dripping in Jacobean style, governed above all by the sheer love of stuff, the early modern lust for substance. Every element of the Marble Hall, with its screen at each end and its original tables and benches still in situ, is carved and enriched as no later taste would have contemplated. Bushy-bearded and vast-breasted hermaphrodites stare out from the hugely enriched screens. On the great staircase beyond it, every post is carved with intricate decoration, every pillar surmounted by a figure, heraldic lion or almost-classical, slightly disproportionate boy, playing the bagpipes or holding aloft not quite spherical spheres. In the seventeenth century both boys and lions were gilded, as was the huge carved pendant which hangs from the ceiling above them. Even the gates at the foot of the staircase, put there to prevent dogs from going upstairs, are pimpled and bobbled, no line left uncurled, no surface plain. In the long gallery on the floor above, to which the staircase gave access, yard after yard of decorated joinery extends in a long disappearing perspective in front of you, the ceiling patterned in interlocking arabesques, the painted fireplaces a display of the classical orders, many of the gilt and jewelled, rock crystal and pearl treasures on show collected by the Jacobean Cecils to decorate this place: it is the most beautiful surviving room of Jacobean England. Enrichment was all and that is one of the keys to Jacobean England: love of decorated stuff. In 1609 Cecil would set up England's first shopping mall on the Strand, called Britain's Burse, in tribute to his sovereign's dream of unification. The world of Britain's Burse was the world 'Cecil-Hatfield' (as its creator wanted it called) was intended to crown and was also the milieu from which the King James Bible would emerge. The country and the world were growing and bursting at the seams. The explorers of the previous century had 'so muche enlarged the boundes of the Worlde, that now we have twice and thrice so much scope for oure earthlie peregrination'. The globe had suddenly become elastic and from all the new corners came the delicious luxuries. Things had never been so rich. Goods were pouring into England: silks, lace, Venetian glass, tin-glazed cer-amics, fine thick Italian paper, German swords and armour, Turkish carpets and Venetian instruments, metal-threaded tex-tiles like the wonderful Italian silk worn by James's Queen Anne, in which the peacock eyes sparkle across its glimmered surface. They came from the other end of the earth. 'What doe you lacke?' one of Ben Jonson's sales boys asked, 'What is't you buy? Veary fine China stuffes, of all kindes and quallityes? China
140
We have twice and thrice so much scope for oure earthlie peregrination... chaynes, China braceletts, China scarfes, China fannes, China girdles, China knives, China boxes, China cabinetts.' At the grand opening of the Burse — with celebratory text by Ben Jonson — Cecil provided a special shop for the king and his wife and children over whose door was written: 'All other places give for money, here all is given for love.' Delicious and perfect presents were provided for the king and queen and princes. Throughout the little stalls of the Burse (no hammering of metals and no sale of vegetables, no dogs, no fighting and no whores allowed) all the most modern and glamorous objects of the mer-cantile world were on sale: eastern satins, golden bracelets, fans, umbrellas, sundials, silk-flowers, perspectives (precursors of the telescope), musical instruments, toy automata and singing birds were all on sale. Everything seemed to be from China or Virginia. For the true elite, England in the first decade of the seventeenth century was life on satin pillows. It was a culture of repetition, of piling richness on richness, in love with the exotic and with the exotic enriched. It wasn't enough to have a china bowl; it should be set in a gilded mount. It wasn't enough to have a wonderful dress; it should be slashed to show the more wonderful material beneath. Every surface was to be alive with decoration and illustration. Embroidery was to overlace richness. Plainness was poverty and unless courtiers looked glorious, they, or what they were seeking, could scarcely be considered. The Earl of Suffolk wrote to Sir John Harington with sage advice on coming to court: I would wish you to bee well trimmed; get a new jerkin well bordered, and not too short; the king saith, he liketh a flowing garment; be sure it not be all of one sort, but diversely coloured, the collar falling somewhat down, and your ruff well stiffened and brisky. We have lately had many gallants who failed in their suits for want of due observance of these matters. The King is nicely heedfull of such points, and dwelleth on good looks and handsome accoutrements.
This love of variegation, of the multiplicity of things, overlay something else: an appetite for the undeniably solid. The hunger for substance was Victorian in its intensity. There is no Augustan or eighteenth-century conception of fineness or slenderness. Chippendale would not have thrived in Jacobean England. What was valuable to a Jacobean was robust and huge. Tables and sideboards sprouted fat melons clamped to their legs. From the high, plain and virginal concealment of Elizabethan taste, women's necklines plunged through the first decade of the cen-tury to a deep, bosom-revealing immodesty. At court masques, the queen and her attendant ladies would appear dressed in noth-ing but the finest silk gauze. The two tastes lay within each other: a love of stuff, of the material thing, was wrapped in a baroque entrancement with the flickering, the dramatic, the elaborated and the enriched. The interplay of these two aesthetic principles, of show and, in Hamlet's famous phrase to his mother, of 'that within which passeth show', is one of the governing tensions of the great Jacobean translation of the Bible. Beauty was about firmness but it was also about brilliance; clarity vied with glitter; candour with bitter irony; simplicity with complexity; a vision of the pure with a relishing of the lush. In public the grandees who would have filled the rooms of Hatfield wore the strict and dignified blacks of the statesman (it was said to be a Spanish habit, a sober, imperial style). In private, all controls were off. The Earl of Northampton, the Henry Howard who had been Cecil's go-between with James before the accession, a complex, political self-promoter, retired from a day dressed in nothing but black to sleep in a bed of Chinese lacquer, overdecorated with silver branches and his own coat of arms on the headpiece, with 'the toppe and valance of purple velvett striped downe with silver laces and knottes of silver, the frindge blewe silke and silver with 8 cuppes and plumes spangled suteable, the 5 curtanes of purple taffeta with buttones and lace . . . of silver, the counterpoint of purple damaske suteable laced.' To wash, at night and in the morning, he had a generous silver basin, in the form of a shell, and a ewer in the shape of a mermaid. The rosewater sprang out into the bowl through the mermaid's large and protuberant nipples. At Hatfield, Cecil also had a sumptuous bed, with its tester, valance and headpiece of crimson velvet, embroidered with his arms. But that lushness and fullness of Jacobean decor, of the Jacobean sense of the beautiful, required one further element: illumination. No buildings in English history until the twentieth century had such enormous light-admitting windows as these great private prodigy houses. The rooms encrusted with the beloved substantiality were also flooded with the all-revealing light. 'Light', Thomas Fuller, the church historian, wrote, was `God's eldest daughter [and] a principal' beauty in a building'. All rooms were arranged with a thought to how the light from the windows would fall into them at different times of the day. Modern conservators, struggling to preserve the gorgeousness of fabrics in vastly overlit rooms, are grappling with precisely the combi-nation of qualities Jacobean taste required. Outside the walls of London, north of the Tower, enormous factories were set up to satisfy the demand for glass. Experts in glass were brought in from the Netherlands. And the grandees who commissioned the glass palaces had their portraits painted in the total, flattening light those windows provided. That depthlessness of Jacobean portraiture, in which there is no chiaroscuro, no moulding shadow, is often seen as a simple technical failure, the chasm between Holbein and Van Dyck. Cecil, like James, hated being painted, which is why nearly all images of him repeat the same, copied pose, in which his flat white face seems to lack definition, or even a third dimension. In portrait after portrait at Hatfield, as elsewhere, his face, with its unresponsive eyes, looks like an oval cut out of paper. But perhaps this two-dimensionality is a symptom of something else: the clarity of a pure unshadowed Protestant light.

from: God's Secretaries by Adam Nicolson

More Operation Shylock

"I was beginning to think Mr. Roth had taken a powder," he said. "And I was hoping the same about you." "Why," he asked, "would I want to do a thing like that?" "Because you're involved in a deceptive practice. Because you're breaking the law." "Which law? Israeli law, Connecticut state law, or international law?" "The law that sayS that a person's identity is his private property and can't be appropriated by somebody else." "All, so you've been studying your. Prosser." "Prosser?" "Professor Prosser's Handbook of the Law of Torts." "I haven't been studying anything. All I need to know about a case like this common sense can tell me." "Well, still, take a look at Prosser. In 1960, in the California Law Review, Prosser published a long article, a reconsideration of the original 1890 Warren and Brandeis Harvard Law Review article in which they'd borrowed Judge Cooley's phrase 'the general right to be let alone' and staked out the dimensions of the privacy interest. Prosser discusses privacy cases as having four separate branches and causes of action—one, intrusion upon seclusion; two, public disclosure of private facts; three, false light in the public eye; and four, appropriation of identity. The prima facie case is defined as follows: `One who appropriates to his own use or benefit the name or likeness of another is subject to liability to the other for invasion of his privacy.
and
 "I meant the way he's set out to change the world." "Well, he's come to the right place for that. Every year they treat dozens of tourists here who go around thinking themselves the Mes-siah and exhorting mankind to repent. It's a famous phenomenon at the mental-health center—local psychiatrists call it 'Jerusalem syn-drome.' Most of them think they're the Messiah or God, and the rest claim to be Satan. You got off easy with Philip." But nothing I said, however disdainful or outright contemptuous
of him, had any noticeable effect on the undampable conviction with which she continued extolling to me the achievements of this blatant fraud. Was it she suffering from that novel form of hysteria known as Jerusalem syndrome? The government psychiatrist who had enter-tained me with a witty exposition on the subject a few years back had told me that there are also Christians they find wandering out in the desert who believe themselves to be John the Baptist.
and
 I try to convince them that there are Jews in the world who are not in any way like these Jews we have here. But to them the Israeli Jcw is so evil they find it hard to believe. They look around and they think, What have they done? Name one single thing that Israeli society has done! And, Philip, my students are right—who are they? what have they done? The people are coarse and noisy and push you in the street. I've lived in Chicago, in New York, in Boston, I've lived in Paris, in London, and nowhere have I seen such people in the street. The arrogance! What have they created like you Jews out in the world? Absolutely nothing. Nothing but a state founded on force and the will to dominate. If you want to talk about culture, there is absolutely no comparison. Dismal painting and sculpture, no musical composition, and a very minor literature—that is what all their arrogance has produced. Compare this to American Jewish culture and it is pitiable, it is laughable. And yet they are not only arrogant about the Arab and his mentality, they are not only arrogant about the goyim and their mentality, they are arrogant about you and your mentality. These provincial nobodies look down on you. Can you imagine it? There is more Jewish spirit and Jewish laughter and Jewish intelligence on the Upper West Side of Manhattan than in this entire country—and as for Jewish con-science, as for a Jewish sense of justice, as for Jewish heart . . . there's more Jewish heart at the knish counter at Zabar's than in the whole of the Knesset!

More Broyard

At Brooklyn College, everyone had been a Communist but me. Modern painting was one more exclusion, one more mystery from which I was shut out. I used to feel this way when people talked about politics, but I didn't mind so much because I wasn't interested in politics. And besides, I secretly thought I was right. I thought that being a Communist was a penalty you had to pay for being interested in politics. It was the adolescence of politics, an awkward stage you had to pass through. But when it came to modern art, I was afraid that maybe the others were right, that I would never be hip or sophisticated, would never belong. I'd never know that smug sense of being of my time, being contemporary. Perhaps this sounds like a fuss over nothing, but when you're young, everything matters, everything is serious. And besides, I was living with a modern painter, I slept with modern painting. The life we led depended on modern art. Without that, all we had was a dirty apartment. There were all sorts of stories about Schapiro. It was rumored that the first time he went to Paris he never sat in a cafe or walked beside the Seine, but spent all his time in museums and libraries. It probably wasn't true, but it fitted him, this story. Reading had turned him into a saint or angel of scholarship, but in some ways I suspected that he was a martyr too, a Saint Se-bastian shot through with arrows of abstraction. A rival critic said that Schapiro loved not paintings but the ex-planations they made possible, and that he valued a painting in proportion to the ingenuity you needed to appreciate it.
Schapiro was about forty at the time. He was a slen-der, medium-sized man with a classically handsome Se-mitic face, bony and ascetic, but lit up like a saint's or a martyr's. He wore, as far as I can remember, the same suit all the time, a single-breasted gray herringbone, and he had two neckties. Like many educated New York City Jews of his generation, Schapiro dentalized his consonants—or per-haps he had a slight lisp that he tried to overcome—and this gave his speech a sibilance, as if he was whispering, or hissing, secrets. The impression of secrecy was in-creased by the fact that he didn't seem to be talking to us, but to the paintings themselves, like a man praising a woman's beauty to her. Sometimes he was so brilliant that he seemed almost insane to me; he seemed to see more than there actually was—he heard voices. His knowledge was so impres-sive as to appear occult. Because he chanted his lectures, he was like a medieval cantor or Gregorian monk. We were so awed by him that when he said some-thing witty, we were afraid to laugh. It was like the German translators taking the puns out of Shakespeare on the assumption that he had not written them, that they had been added by hacks. I wonder now whether Schapiro ever noticed how tense we were, how pious. Did he realize that students were dropping out all the time, to be replaced by other students? They didn't drop out because he was disappointing —in fact, it might have been better if he had disap-pointed us now and then. What drove even his admirers away was a certain remorselessness in his brilliance. It made some of us anxious to think that everything meant something; there was no escape. It was like a fate. Perhaps the things he said have now become commonplaces of art criticism, but at the time they were revelations to me. And of course he talked about paint-ers like van Gogh, Cezanne, and Picasso, who are old masters today. Then, only forty years ago, they were revolutionaries; we still believed in revolutions. I remember Schapiro telling us that before Cezanne, there had always been a place in landscape painting where the viewer could walk into the picture. There was an entrance; you could go there, like walking into a park. But this was not true of Cezanne's landscapes, which were cut off absolutely, abstracted from their context. You could not walk into them—you could enter them only through art, by leaping. Schapiro said that when van Gogh loaded his palette with pigment he couldn't afford, he was praying in color. He put his anxiety into pigment, slapped color into its cheeks. Color was salvation. It had to be thick, and tangible. One night I smuggled Sheri into the class. It was easy because of all the turnover and the flurry of enthu-siasm. The room sloped like a theater and we sat up in the back. Schapiro was going to talk about Picasso, and the place was jammed, with people crouching on the steps in the aisle. Picasso was a perfect subject because there was so much to explain. Schapiro spoke rapidly, rhythmically, hardly paus-ing for breath. When he said that with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon Picasso had fractured the picture plane, I could hear it crack, like a chiropractor cracking the bones at the base of your neck. As he went on, Scha-piro's sentences became staccato, cubistic, full of over-lapping planes. I was so excited that I took Sheri's hand in mine. I felt myself gaining confidence. It was such a relief to me to know that art could be explained. If I couldn't love art for itself, I could love it, like Schapiro, for the explanations. It was better than never to have loved at all.
He was discussing an early still life of Picasso's, an upended table covered with a white cloth, a bowl of flowers, and a bottle of wine, all paradoxically sus-pended in space. What we were seeing, Schapiro said, was the conversion of the horizontal plane—the plane of our ordinary daily traversal of life—into an intimate vertical surface of random manipulation. His voice rose to a cry. He honked like a wild goose. There was delirium in the room. The beam of the pro-jector was a searchlight on the world. The students shifted in their seats and moaned. Schapiro danced to the screen and flung up his arm in a Romanesque ges-ture. As he spoke, the elements of the picture reassem-bled themselves into an intelligible scheme. A thrill of gladness ran through me and my hand sweated in Sheri's.

The death of Proust

according to Ford Madox Ford:
I thought Evans had been killed the day after we had got back to the line—but he obviously hadn't. He had been farming in Canada after a very bad wound. He had had a hard time and that, as much as the war, had made him prematurely bald. Bald men are usually fat but he was thin as it was possible to be, and small, with ecclesiastical features and a rather mournful manner. He was not really mournful for he had done well in Alberta and had come to Paris to have some fun and to buy agricultural machinery. He went on talking and talking in his mournful voice—about putting in rail posts, I think, with the frost at 3o below zero. . . . He fortunately didn't want to do anything but talk and my panic grew and grew. . . . I sat there, watching the crowds of students that go ceaselessly by after the classes of the Sorbonne are over. I sat thinking and thinking till long after Evans had gone—trying to pluck up courage. It would not come.
At last I went to a cocktail party, given by a French writer with an American wife. That party was like death. People sat about with panic-stricken faces, silent. You would have thought that everyone there had lost all his relations and all their fortunes and a war. . . . Proust was dead. He had died that afternoon. My taxi-driver had said to me as I paid him: "Faith qu'il est mort! C'etait bien inattendu!" I had thought he had been speaking of Clemenceau who was sick at the time. Paris was a stricken city. In every house, in every cafe, on all the sidewalks people said continually: "It seems that he is dead. It was very unexpected." They knew that Proust had complained of his health for many years. The whole city knew that. He had adopted fan-tastic modes of life on account of his health. . . . But that had been taken to be merely hypochondria ex-pressed in the terms of a great, exotic novelist. . . . Now—it seemed that he was dead and Paris was a stricken city. I had seen something like it in London—when Marie Lloyd died. London traffic stopped for half a minute whilst the paper boys ran down the streets shouting: "Ma-rie dies! Ma-rie's dead!" But Paris was hushed for three days—and not for a music hall singer. . . . At that time if you said to a waiter: "Where's the funeral?" he told you or if, being in deep black you hailed a taxi, the man, without orders, drove you straight to where Proust lay in state. . . . At the same time Paris was preparing the paroxysm of hatred that attended the
hideously stage-managed last hours of Anatole France. . . . On the boulevards they hissed: "Ten thousand men of letters are starving whilst they walk the pave-ments of the city yet that irreverend dotard who be-trayed France has spent upon his prolonged death-rattle a fortune drawn from the pockets of a world that hates France!" . . . For indeed the fortunes spent on cabling the old man's last babblings to innumerable papers of a gaping world came from German and Anglo-Saxon coffers. Paris would have let him drift out of life quietly enough but for that. Proust represented France of that day with a singular intimacy that is not easy for the poor world-at-large to understand. He was the culmination of a school of writers that had been long in coming and, still more, he was the Unknown Soldier of the literature of that decade. Literature enters with an unparalleled intimacy into French life and the country had a sense of the subterranean and ignored strivings of that steadfast per-sonality—as if indeed he had been the personification of the obscure beings who, working subterraneously with small spades in hidden tunnels, had saved France for the world. I shared the feeling to the full. The death of Proust came to me like the dull blow of a softened club. That statement, I am aware, will read like hypocrisy when I go on to say that I had not read a word he had written. But it is not hypocrisy. I had not read him for a very definite professional reason but I had heard with avidity all that was to be heard of him. Thus for a long time I had had an extremely vivid sense of his personality and of his activities. .. . And indeed it added to the blow that I was to have met Proust himself on the very eve-ning of his death. Nevertheless it was his death that made it certain that I should again take up a serious pen. I think those that know my record will acquit me of the implication that might be read into that statement. I had no idea of occupying Proust's place and even at that date I still dreaded the weaknesses in myself that I knew I should find if I now made my prolonged effort. I was still tired and I have always been lazy. I think I am incapable of any thoughts of rivalry. There is certain literary work to be done. As long as it is done I don't care who does it. The work that at that time—and now—I wanted to see done was some-thing on an immense scale, a little cloudy in immediate attack but with the salient points and the final impres-sion extraordinarily clear. I wanted the Novelist in fact to appear in his really proud position as historian of his own time. Proust being dead I could see no one who was doing that. . . . I was at the time merely passing through darkly tumultuous and crowded Paris.
and also

 Here at the gate of the Cote d'Azur it does not get really warm till April is over and perhaps one should not come here till May. . . . But the greater truth is that one should not come here at all. One should live here all the year round and go away from the end of January till March. In the North, poor devils, they have to know how to heat houses. Here they build their houses against heat and it can be cold on occasion to people softened by living here. Once every ten years or so they even have frost and, in the winter when I was in hospital at Cap Martin, as I have said, the snow even lay and the cold cut down all the olive and lemon trees so that they have only this year begun to bear again. It completely killed the immense mimosa whose limbs, ered with roses and ivy, still tower over the tiny idon. But for the greater part of the year you can, here—and I am doing it today at noon on the feast of St. Servais—sit without clothes in the shade and be un-aware of your corporal existence. The air will be exactly flesh-heat so that you are at one with the universe. That is why I have said that all the calamities of our poor civilisation come from humanity's having left these shores. If you are conscious of either heat or cold you cannot think justly and it is the final carrying out of the curse of Adam that men should have to work at the pit-face or in an atmosphere of crude mineral oil in order to keep humanity overwarmed in regions that are not fitted to support human life. Outside a radius of a hundred miles from these shores —to North or South—barbarism is always creeping in with the North or South winds. Here those deities are the great Mistral and the horripilant Sirocco! Down in the town at the foot of my hill it can be hot enough. It can be so hot that you can hardly drag your feet along the blistered pavements, the very shade of the plane trees is an offense and the Negro troops in their scarlet fezzes stagger beneath their rifles, rivers of sweat coursing down their faces. You would say it was Africa—and indeed it is Africa for the dreaded Sirocco is the fetid breath of the Sahara. It is in short Africa come to take a look at us and to make us under-stand that, pink as we may be, it is but a few degrees of temperature and barometer that separate us from the most abhorred anthropophages of the central Congo.

and additionally...

With regard to methods of writing. . . . For myself I dislike writing with a pen. My writer's cramp has never completely left me and every word I write is accompanied by a little pain. Towards the end of my morning's work it will be a very severe pain running from the knuckle of my third finger to my elbow. But for me, it is worth while. . . . After the volume I began at St. Jean Cap Ferrat the cramp became so severe that I could not hold a pen at all. I took to writing with a machine and then, worst of all, to dictating! I am not to that extent machino-phobe—or even a hater of stenographers—that I consider the one or the other below my dignity. It is that the one—and still more the other! — make me become too fluid. It is as if they waited for me to write and write I do. Whereas if I have to go to a table and face pretty considerable pain I wait until I have something worth saying to say and say it in th fewest possible words. The very ease and speed of a typewriter makes tautology thus likely. And, in myself, there is something worse. On a machine corrections whilst you are writing are relatively difficult to make. You must rub out words and replace them and your rubber is somewhere else. . . Then, too, I detest a typewritten page showing any corrections. Horrible as it may seem, if I happen to type an entirely wrong word,—say "almanach" when I mean "autograph" I will go through the most excruciat-ing mental gymnastics sooner than erase the word and make the correction. I am quite capable, I mean, of writing, when I want to say: "He asked me for an autograph"—"he asked me for an almanach on which, with a red stone, he might mark the happy date of his re-ceiving a specimen of my handwriting." . . . I do not say that I do this very often. But I do do it. The patient and faithful secretary is even more fatal. With his or her services you become a perfect fountain of words. It is so easy to try on any effect that you try them on galore, hoping that, if they do not come off, you will have the strength of mind to correct or eliminate offending passages. But often you do not find the strength of mind to correct or eliminate. Then you will have a terrible page or two of longueurs. Or if you do correct, the passage will lose all spontaneity. . . . Elimination is always good. . . . Conrad and I used, in humorous moments, to shut our eyes—and, at random, scratch out passage after passage of our work in hand.—The result was always improvement. It was the Beau Christ d'Amiens who gave the casting vote for verse as against prose. Because there are fewer words to the page! Then too there is the personal element. The creature of doom rings your bell at ten. If you are in a base mood you say: "I pay this creature to write for me. . . . Quick then, let me give him or her something to do.  .. In better moments the mere aspect—the reproach-ful air—of that amanuensis makes you plunge into work. . . . I have even had secretaries who sighed when I did not keep them busy! And, worst of all, there is the almost irresistible temp-tation to write at the secretary—that, I am convinced, was responsible for the decadence of Henry James's prose in its latest and most faisande developments. . . . You have the silent back or the emotionless face of the doomful creature presented to you. You dictate for a little while and nothing happens. And nothing and nothing. It gets to be like being in the presence of a marble block. At last you say: "Damn it all I will make that creature smile. Or have a tear in its eye!" Then you are lost. . . . When I was dictating the most tragic portion of my most tragic book to an American poetess she fainted several times. One morning she fainted three times. So I had to call in her husband to finish the last pages of the book. He did not faint. But he has never forgiven me. Having since become an eminent English literary critic he attacks me with a hatred and acridity that surpass all those of my worst detractors—with or without occasion. I don't wonder. I should hate anyone whose secretary I was forced to become. I should think I could write so much better than that fellow. . . . So one day—it was on board the Berengarict—I was correcting the typescript of a book I had finished some months before. It was a horrible experience. Partly I had typed the book; partly I had dictated it to a sec-retary who wrote longhand, partly to another who used a machine, and partly to a third who was a re-markable stenographer. At the time of my final correc-tion the book was about six months old. It is six months after finishing a book that it becomes most like stale fish to you. In ten years' time you may be wondering how it was you used to be able to write so well!

Kafka Was The Rage

by Anatole Broyard.

If we stayed home nights I would sit with a book in my lap and watch her paint. But if she glanced around and saw me reading, she would put down her brush and come over and turn all her art on me. She distrusted books. I never saw her read one. I think she believed I might find something in them that would give me an advantage over her, or that I might use against her. I felt the same way about her painting. She was an abstract painter and I couldn't follow her there. She left me outside, like a dog that you tie to a parking meter when you go into a store. I had never been comfortable with abstract painting. I had no talent for abstraction, didn't see the need for it, or the beauty of it. Like liberal politics, it eliminated so many things I liked. Yet if I could understand her paintings, I thought, our sex would be better. We would exist in the same picture plane, pose for each other's portraits, mingle our forms and colors, make compositions. We would be like two people walking through a gallery or museum, exclaiming over the same things. I began to read up on abstract painting. In the li-brary in the Museum of Modern Art, I rummaged through the shelves, studying for my new life. I had come to think that modern art was an initiation into that life, like the hazing before you get into a fraternity. When I was at Brooklyn College, everyone urged me to join the Communist party, but I refused because I thought it was an uninteresting quarrel with the real. Modern art, though, was a quarrel that appealed to me more. Even if I never got to like it, I enjoyed the terms of the argument. I was impressed by the restless dissatis-faction, the aggressiveness, ingenuity, and pretension of all the theories.
I discovered that you could always find your own life reflected in art, even if it was distorted or discolored. There was a sentence, for example, in a book on Surre-alism that stuck in my mind: "Beauty is the chance meeting, on an operating table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella."

and

We admired the German professors. We had won the fight against fascism and now, with their help, we would defeat all the dark forces in the culture and the psyche. As a reaction to our victory, sensitive Ameri-cans had entered an apologetic phase in our national life and there was nothing the professors could say that was too much. We came out of class with dueling scars. I took a course in the'psychology of American cul-ture, given by Erich Fromm. Though he had just ar-rived, he knew America better than we did, because it impinged on him. His Escape from Freedom, which had recently been published, was one of those paeans of lyrical pessimism that Germans specialize in, like Scho-penhauer, Nietzsche, or Spengler. Sitting on a platform behind a desk, like a judge in criminal court, he passed his remorseless judgment on us. We were unwilling, he said, to accept the anguish of freedom. According to him, we feared freedom, saw it as madness, epistemol-ogy run amok. In the name of freedom, we accepted everything he said. We accepted it because we liked the sound of it—no one knew then that we would turn out to be right in trying to escape from freedom. Fromm was short and plump. His jaws were broader than his forehead and he reminded me of a brooding hen. Yet, like everyone else, I sat spellbound through his lectures. I'll never forget the night he de-scribed a typical American family going for a pointless drive on a Sunday afternoon, joylessly eating ice cream at a roadhouse on the highway and then driving heavily home. Fromm was one of the first—perhaps the very first--to come out against pointlessness. It was a his-toric moment, like Einstein discovering relativity or Heidegger coming up against nothingness.

I also studied Gestalt psychology with Rudolf Arn-heim, but here I confess I was disappointed. It seemed to me that Germans were sometimes stunned into a kind of stupor by an ordinary insight, which they would then try to elevate into a philosophy or a system. Colliding with a modest fact in the midst of their abstraction, they just couldn't get over it. The Gestalt psychologists had discovered that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts—something everybody already knew—and Arnheim spent most of the semester demonstrating this. I kept waiting for him to go on, but he just gave us more experiments, more evidence. It all depended on rats. We never talked about people—only rats. In the advanced courses, it was apes. Max Wertheimer, the father of Gestalt psychology, made a guest appearance in the class. He was a small man, dressed in a frock coat, and he wore his hair en brosse. The high point of his lecture was a demonstration of requiredness, a key term in Gestalt thinking. It meant, if I understood him, that each thing implied other things, or a context, something like a counter-point of structures. He showed us what he meant with a little experiment of his own. First he taught us a com-plicated African hand clap, and then when he had us clapping away, he himself set up a weird howling accompaniment. I attended a special lecture in the auditorium, given by Karen Homey, on the psychology of women. Like Fromm, Horney was a Freudian revisionist. In one of her books, she had said that, in a sense, the neurotic was healthier than the so-called normal person, because he "protested." Protesting was like testifying. Since every-one at the New School proudly considered him- or her-self neurotic, it wasn't respectable not to be- it was just what we wanted to hear.

and

I had two gangs unloading the forward hatches of a ship and I was leaning on the rail, under the yellowish overhead spots. It was about three o'clock in the morning and I felt a million miles from home, from anywhere. For something to do, I was thinking about books, trying to see if I could quote passages or whole poems the way some people can. Mostly it was only single lines I remembered, per-haps because I was tired. Wallace Stevens was my favor-ite poet and I murmured a few scraps from his books to myself: "Too many waltzes have ended." "Apostrophes are forbidden on the funicular." "The windy sky cries out a literate despair." "These days of disinheritance we feast on human heads." It was reassuring to think, in the middle of the night in this foreign place, that there were people in the world who would take the trouble to write things like that. This was another, wonderful kind of craziness, at the opposite end from the craziness of the army. We were unloading boxes of condensed milk and as I watched a pallet swing over the rail, I thought that when I got home I would open a bookshop in the Vil-lage. It would be a secondhand bookshop, specializing in twentieth-century literature'. I remember that the idea made me feel warm. I took my hands out of my pockets and squeezed them together. To open a bookshop is one of the persistent romances, like living off the land or sailing around the world. After a couple of months of looking, I bought out an old Italian junk dealer on Cornelia Street. I paid him three hundred dollars and agreed to move his stock to a new location. I hired a truck and we carried out old boilers, radiators, bathtubs, sinks, pipes of all sizes, and miscellaneous bits and pieces of metal. Nineteen forty-six was a good time for a second-hand bookshop, because everything was out of print and the paperback revolution had not yet arrived. People had missed books during the war, and there was a sense of reunion, like meeting old friends or lovers. Now there was time for everything, and buying books became a popular postwar thing to do. For young people who had just left home to go live in the Village, books were like dolls or teddy bears or family portraits. They populated a room. When I left Brooklyn to live in the Village, I felt as if I had acquired a new set of relatives, like a surprising number of uncles I had never met before, men who lived in odd places, sometimes abroad, who had shunned family life and been shunned in turn, who were somewhere between black sheep and prodigal sons of a paradoxical kind. An aura of scandal, or at least of ambiguity, hovered over these uncles, as if they had run away with someone's wife or daughter. There was a flaw in their past, some kind of unhealthiness, even a hint of insanity. These uncles were, of course, my favorite authors, the writers I most admired. I felt them waiting, almost calling out to me. They were more real than anything I had ever known, real as only imagined things can be, real as dreams that seem so unbearably actual because they are cleansed of all irrelevances. These uncles, these books, moved into the vacuum of my imagination. They were all the family I had now, all the family I wanted. With them, I could trade in my embarrassingly ordinary history for a choice of fictions. I could lead a hypothetical life, unencumbered by memory, loyalties, or resentments. The first impulse of adolescence is to wish to be an orphan or an amnesiac. Nobody in the Village had a family. We were all sprung from our own brows, spontaneously generated the way flies were once thought to have originated. I didn't yet see the tragedy of my family: I still thought of them as a farce, my laughable past. In my new incarnation, in books I could be halfway heroic, almost tragic. I could be happy, for the first time, in my tragedy.
I realize that people still read books now and some peo-ple actually love them, but in 1946 in the Village our feelings about books—I'm talking about my friends and myself—went beyond love. It was as if we didn't know where we ended and books began.
...
Seeing how young I was everybody gave me advice. Get Nathaniel West, Celine, Italo Svevo, Baron Corvo, Djuna Barnes- but avove all, at any cost I must get Kafka. Kafka was as popular in the vIllage at the that time as Dickens had been in London. But his books were very difficult to find- they must have been printed in very small editions- and people would rush in wild-eyed, almost foaming at the mouth, willing to pay anything for Kafka.
Literary criticism was enjoying a vogue. As Randall Jarrell said some people consulted their favorite critic about the conduct of their lives as they had once contacted their clergymen. The war had left a bitter taste and literary criticism is the art of bitter tastes.

Henry Fonda

You find Henry Fonda in every corner of the mythic history and imaginative geography mapped by the movies. Like any star of such duration, he puts his name to many bad movies along the way; the career in total recalls John Berryman's remark about the collected works of Stephen Crane: "majesty and trash scrambled together." But in the fullness of time, he creates an image of the national man that is kaleidoscopic, frightening, and wildly improbable. His best performances—You Only Live Once, Young Mr. Lincoln, The Grapes of Wrath, The Ox-Bow Incident, My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, The Wrong Man, Fail-Safe, Once Upon a Time in the West, even The Lady Eve—are animated by the dark energy of contradiction. Viewers sense a man living in public and private dimensions at once, and recognize a continuity of mysteries in the actor. Fonda becomes the body and voice of the satisfied man's paranoia, the good man's bad urge, the hero's despairing shade, and the patriot's doubting conscience. In him and through him, the hidden becomes visible, specters are raised, and shadows begin to move on their own.
"I suppose one human being never really knows much about another." Asked in 1966 to characterize Fonda, his friend of almost three decades, John Steinbeck offered this shrugging axiom. But read on: "My impressions of Hank are of a man reaching but unreachable, gentle but capable of sudden wild and dangerous violence, sharply critical of others but equally self-critical, caged and fighting the bars but timid of the light, viciously opposed to external restraint, imposing an iron slavery on himself. His face is a picture of opposites in conflict."
and
the enormous spaces and silences of the heartland offered hints of the unseen. People out there had a different way of seeing—both more practical and more mystical. Middle Western practicality was founded in the uncertainties of soil, weather, money, movement. But mysticism—as is often the case in unsettled cultures—was practicality's hopeful ghost: Faith in the un-seen meant life might not be reducible to the dirt in one's hand. Legends of the Pawnee, Otoe, Sioux, and the decimated Ponca Nation were still on the plains around Omaha, while white mysticism went back to the pioneer trails and something called "seeing the ele-phant." Diaries, letters, and other reports of the day include references to this apparition, a Great Plains Moby-Dick invented by folk talk and Journalese. "To have seen the elephant," explains an 1889 dictionary of slang is to have had a full experience of life or of a certain subject or object... the popular symbol of the Great Adventure, all the wonder and glory and shivering thrill of the plunge into the ocean of prairie and plains... this creature seldom appeared except on the fringes of danger and then it was only a fleeting glimpse.

Confessions of Felix Krull

I shall never forget the disgusting sight that met my boyish eyes. Muller-Rose was seated at a grubby dressing-table in front of a dusty, speckled mirror. He had nothing on but a pair of gray cotton drawers, and a man in shirt sleeves was massaging his back, the sweat running down his own face. Meanwhile the actor was busy wiping face and neck with a towel already stiff with rouge and greasepaint. Half of his countenance still had the rosy coating that had made him radiant on the stage but now looked merely pink and silly in contrast to the cheese-like pallor of his natural complexion. He had taken off the chestnut wig and I saw that his own hair was red. One of his eyes still had deep black shadows beneath it and metallic dust clung to the lashes; the other was inflamed and watery and squinted at us impudently. All this I might have borne. But not the pustules with which Muller-Rose's back, chest, shoul-ders, and upper arms were thickly covered. They were horri-ble pustules, red-rimmed, suppurating, some of them even bleeding; even today I cannot repress a shudder at the thought of them. Our capacity for disgust, let me observe, is in pro-portion to our desires; that is, in proportion to the intensity of our attachment to the things of this world. A cool indifferent nature would never have been shaken by disgust to the extent that I was then. As a final touch, the air in the room, which was overheated by an iron stove, was compounded of the smell of sweat and the exhalations from the pots and jars and sticks of greasepaint that littered the table, so that at first I thought I could not stand it for more than a minute without being sick. However, I did stand it and looked about—but I can add nothing to this description of Muller-Rose's dressing-room. Indeed, I should perhaps be ashamed at reporting so little and at such length about my first visit to a theatre, if I were not writing primarily for my own amusement and only second-arily for the public. It is not my intention to maintain dramatic suspense; I leave such effects to the writers of imaginative fictions, who are intent on giving their stories the beautiful and symmetrical proportions of works of art—whereas my material comes from my own experience alone and I feel I may make what use of it I think best. Thus I shall dwell on those experiences and encounters that brought me particular understanding and illumination about the world and myself, passing by more quickly what is less precious to me.

My first Roth

Israel was the hospital in which Jews could begin to recover from the devastation of that horror, from a dehumanization so terrible that it would not have been at all surprising had the Jewish spirit, had the Jews them-selves, succumbed entirely to that legacy of rage, humiliation and grief. But that is not what happened. Our recovery actually came to pass. In less than a century. Miraculous, more than miraculous—yet the recovery of the Jews is by now a fact, and the time has come to return to our real life and our real home, to our ancestral Jewish Europe." "Real home?" I replied, unable now to imagine how I ever could have considered not placing this call. "Some real home." "I am not making promiscuous conversation," he snapped back at me sharply. "The great mass of Jews have been in Europe since the Middle Ages. Virtually everything we identify culturally as Jewish has its origins in the life we led for centuries among European Christians. The Jews of Islam have their own, very different destiny. I am not proposing that Israeli Jews whose origins are in Islamic countries return to Europe, since for them this would constitute not a home-coming but a radical uprooting." "What do you do then with them? Ship them back for the Arabs to treat as befits their status as Jews?" "No. For those Jews, Israel must continue to be their country. Once the European Jews and their families have been resettled and the population has been halved, then the state can be reduced to its 1948 borders, the army can be demobilized, and those Jews who have lived in an Islamic cultural matrix for centuries can continue to do so, independently, autonomously, but in peace and harmony with their Arab neighbors. For these people to remain in this region is simply as it should be, their rightful habitat, while for the European Jews, Israel has been an exile and no more, a sojourn, a temporary interlude in the European saga that it is time to resume." "Sir, what makes you think that the Jews would have any more success in Europe in the future than they had there in the past?" "Do not confuse our long European history with the twelve years of Hitler's reign. If Hitler had not existed, if his twelve years of terror were erased from our past, then it would seem to you no more
unthinkable that Jews should also be Europeans than that they should also be Americans. There might even seem to you a much more necessary and profound connection between the Jew and Budapest, the Jew and Prague, than the one between the Jew and Cincinnati and the Jew and Dallas." Could it be, I asked myself while he pedantically continued on in this vein, that the history he's most intent on erasing happens to be his own? Is he mentally so damaged that he truly believes that my history is his; is he some psychotic, some amnesiac, who isn't pre-tending at all? If every word he speaks he means, if the only person pretending here is me. .. . But whether that made things better or worse I couldn't begin to know. Nor, when next I found myself arguing could I determine whether an outburst of sincerity from me made this conversation any more or less absurd, either. "But Hitler did exist," I heard Pierre Roget emotionally informing him. "Those twelve years cannot be expunged from history any more than they can be obliterated from memory, however mercifully for-getful one might prefer to be. The meaning of the destruction of European Jewry cannot be measured or interpreted by the brevity with which it was attained." "The meanings of the Holocaust," he replied gravely, "are for us to determine, but one thing is sure—its meaning will be no less tragic than it is now if there is a second Holocaust and the offspring of the European Jews who evacuated Europe for a seemingly safer haven should meet collective annihilation in the Middle East. A second Holocaust is not going to occur on the continent of Europe, because it was the site of the first. But a second Holocaust could happen here all too easily, and, if the conflict between Arab and Jew escalates much longer, it will—it must. The destruction of Israel in a nuclear exchange is a possibility much less farfetched today than was the Holocaust itself fifty years ago." "The resettlement in Europe of more than a million Jews. The demobilization of the Israeli army. A return to the borders of 1948. It sounds to me," I said, "that you are proposing the final solution of the Jewish problem for Yasir Arafat." "No. Arafat's final solution is the same as Hitler's: extermination. I am proposing the alternative to extermination, a solution not to Ara-fat's Jewish problem but to ours, one comparable in scope and mag-nitude to the defunct solution called Zionism. But I do not wish to be misunderstood, in France or anywhere else in the world. I repeat: In the immediate postwar era, when for obvious reasons Europe was uninhabitable by Jews, Zionism was the single greatest force contrib-uting to the recovery of Jewish hope and morale. But having suc-ceeded in restoring the Jews to health, Zionism has tragically mined its own health and must now accede to vigorous Diasporism." "Will you define Diasporism for my readers, please?" I asked, mean-while thinking, The starchy rhetoric, the professorial presentation, the historical perspective, the passionate commitment, the grave un-dertones . . . What sort of hoax is this hoax? "Diasporism seeks to promote the dispersion of the Jews in the West, particularly the resettlement of Israeli Jews of European back-ground in the European countries where there were sizable Jewish populations before World War II. Diasporism plans to rebuild every-thing not in an alien and menacing Middle East but in those very lands where everything once flourished, while, at the same time, it seeks to avert the catastrophe of a second Holocaust brought about by the exhaustion of Zionism as a political and ideological force. Zionism undertook to restore Jewish life and the Hebrew language to a place where neither had existed with any real vitality for nearly two millennia. Diasporism's dream is more modest: a mere half-century is all that separates us from what Hitler destroyed. If Jewish resources could realize the seemingly fantastic goals of Zionism in even less than fifty years, now that Zionism is counterproductive and itself the foremost Jewish problem, I have no doubt that the resources of world Jewry can realize the goals of Diasporism in half, if not even one tenth, the time." "You speak about resettling Jews in Poland, Romania, Germany? In Slovakia, the Ukraine, Yugoslavia, the Baltic states? And you realize, do you," I asked him, "how much hatred for Jews still exists in most of these countries?" "Whatever hatred for Jews may be present in Europe—and I don't
minimize its persistence—there are ranged against this residual anti-Semitism powerful currents of enlightenment and morality that are sustained by the memory of the Holocaust, a horror that operates now as a bulwark against European anti-Semitism, however virulent. No such bulwark exists in Islam. Exterminating a Jewish nation would ause Islam to lose not a single night's sleep, except for the great night of celebration. I think you would agree that a Jew is safer today walking aimlessly around Berlin than going unarmed into the streets of Ramallah." "What about the Jew walking around Tel Aviv?" "In Damascus missiles armed with chemical warheads are aimed not at downtown Warsaw but directly at Dizengoff Street." "So what Diasporism comes down to is fearful Jews in flight, terri-fied Jews once again running away." "To flee an imminent cataclysm is 'running away' only from extinc-ion. It is running toward life. Had thousands more of Germany's earful Jews fled in the 1930s—" "Thousands more would have fled," I said, "if there had been some-where for them to flee to. You may recall that they were no more welcome elsewhere than they would be now if they were to turn up n masse at the Warsaw train station in flight from an Arab attack."