Before they burn

From the saved articles:

Richard Rodriguez' Late Victorians from Harpers:

The age-old description of homosexuality is of a sin against nature. Moralistic society has always judged emotion literally, The homosexual was sinful because he had no kosher place to stick it. In attempting to drape the architecture of Sodom with art, homosexuals have lived for thousands of years against the expectations of nature. Barren as Shakers, and interestingly, as concerned with the small effect, homosexuals have made a covenant against nature. Homosexuals survival lay in artifice, in plumage, in lampshades, sonnets, musical comedy, couture, syntax, religious ceremony, opera, lacquer, irony.

and

I am preoccupied by the fussing of a man sitting in the pew directly In front of me- in his seventies. frail. his iodine-colored hair combed forward and pasted upon his forehead. Fingers of porcelain clutch the pearly beads of what must have been his mother's rosary. He is not the sort of man any gay man would have chosen to become m the 1970s. He is probably not what he himself expected to become. Something of the old dear about him wizened butterfly, powdered old pouf. Certainly he is what I fear becoming. And then he rises, this old monkey, with the most beatific dignity, in answer to the microphone, and he strides to the sanctuary to take his place in the company of the blessed

So this is it- this, what looks like a Christmas party in an insurance office and not as in Renaissance paintings. and not as we had always thought, not some flower-strewn, some sequined curtain call of grease-painted heroes gesturing to the stalls. A lady with a plastic candy cane pinned to her lapel. A Castro clone with a red bandanna exploding from his hip pocket. A perfume-counter lady with an Hermés scarf mantled upon her left shoulder. A black man in a checkered sports coat. The pinkhaired punkess with a jewel in her nose. Here, too, is the gay couple in middle age, wearing interchangeable plaid shirts and corduroy pants. Blood and shit and Mr. Happy Face. These know the weight of bodies.

Bill died.

. . . Passed on to heaven.

. . . Turning over in his bed one night and then gone. 

These learned to love what is corruptible, while I , barren skeptic, reader of St. Augustine, curator of the earthly paradise, inheritor of the empty mirror, I shift m tailbone on the cold hard pew.

and

In the 1970s like a lot of men and women in this city, I joined a gym. My club, I’ve even caught myself calling It.

In the gay city of the 1970s. bodybuilding became an architectural preoccupation of the upper middle class. Bodybuilding is a parody of labor. a useless accumulation of the laborer’s bulk and strength. No useful task is accomplished. And yet there is something businesslike about the habitués, and the gym is filled with the punch-clock logic of the workplace. Machines clank and hum. Needles on gauges toll spent calories.

The gym ls at once a closet of privacy and an exhibition gallery. All four walls are mirrored.

I study my body in the mirror. Physical revelation -nakedness- is no longer possible, cannot be desired, for the body Is shrouded in meat and wears itself.

The intent is some merciless press of body against a standard perfect mold. Bodies are “cut" or “pumped" or "buffed” as on an assembly line in Turin. A body becomes so many extrovert parts. Delts, pecs, lats.

I harness myself In a Nautilus cage.

Lats become wings. For the gym Is nothing if not the occasion for transcendence. From
homosexual to autosexual. . .

I lift weights over my head, baring my teeth like an animal with the strain.

...to nonsexual. The effect of the overdeveloped body Is the miniaturization of the sexual organs of no function beyond wit. Behold the ape become Blakean angel, revolving in an empyrean of mirrors.

O

The nineteenth century mirror over the fireplace in my bedroom was purchased by a decorator from the estate of a man who died last year of AIDS. It Is a top-heavy piece, confusing styles. Two ebony-painted columns support a frieze of painted glass above the mirror. The frieze depicts three bourgeois Graces and a couple of free-range cherubs. The lake of the mirror has formed a cataract and at its edges it is beginning to corrode. Thus the mirror that now draws upon my room owns some bright curse, maybe some memory not mine. As I regard this mirror, I imagine St. Augustine’s meditation sIowly hardening Into syllogism, passing down through centuries to confound us: Evil is the absence of good.

We have become accustomed to figures disappearing from our landscape. Does this not Iead us to interrogate the landscape?

With reason do we invest mirrors With the superstition of memory, for they, though glass, though Iiquid captured in a bay, are so often less fragile than we are. They- bright ovals or rectangles or rounds-bump down unscathed, unspilled through centuries, whereas we . . .

Douglas Adams

from Dirk Gently:

“Ah, Patmos, I see." said Watkin, who was clearly mused by the news. “Well, what you have to understand, young lady, is that the Greeks, not content with dominating the culture of the Classical world, are also responsible for the greatest, some would say the only, work of true creative imagination produced this century as well. I refer of course to the Greek ferry timetables. A work of the sublimest fiction. Anyone who has traveled in the Aegean will confirm this. Hmm, yes. I think.”

She frowned at him.

“I found a pot,” she said.

“Probably nothing," interrupted her father hastily. “You know the way it is. Everyone who goes to Greece for the first time thinks they’ve found a pot, don’t they? Ha, ha.”

There were general nods. This was true. Irritating, but true.

“I found it in the harbor,” she said, “in the water. While we were waiting for the damn ferry.”

“Sarah! I’ve told you . . .”

“It’s just what you called it. And worse. You called it words I didn’t think you knew. Anyway, I thought that if everyone here was meant to be so clever, then someone would be able to tell me if it was a proper ancient Greek thing or not. I think it’s very old. Will you please let them see it, Daddy?" .

Her father shrugged hopelessly and started to fish about under his chair.

“Did you know, young lady,” said Watkin to her, “that the Book of Revelation was written on Patmos? It was indeed. By Saint John the Divine, as you know.

To me it shows very clear signs of having been written while waiting for a ferry. Oh, yes, I think so. It starts off, doesn't it, with that kind of dreaminess you get when you're killing time, getting bored, you know, just making things up and then gradually grows to a sort of climax of hallucinatory despair. I find that very suggestive. Perhaps you should write a paper on it.” He nodded at her.

Myth

from S Goldhill

It could be however, that the citizen who guides us around the Parthenon is one of those young intellectuals who had studied with the new and trendy thinkers of the fifth century called sophists and who knew the latest thinking on religion and its stories. Where a traditional Athenian would happily tell you these stories as the history of the foundation of Athens, this more pushy intellectual guide might adopt a rather self-consciously critical line on these stories and dismiss them as ‘myths’ stories for the populace to follow, but not to be accepted at face value by educated men. 

Once they start to become argued about, once they start not to be taken for granted, myths can become a battleground for how we think about the past. The fifth-century Greeks give us the tools for thinking about what happens when ‘myth’ stops being he stories which everyone knows and agrees to tell. These tool are the very ideas ‘myth’ and ‘history’. 

‘Myth’ is a gift of the Greeks. It was in the classical city of Athens that ‘myth’ was first developed as an idea. The fifth century BC is often described as the ‘Greek Enlightenment’ or, in more Romantic days, as the ‘Greek miracle’. This period is unique because in a very short time, and primarily in a single city, so much of what the West prides itself on came into being. Athens invented a democratic constitution, and with it came the law courts with their juries of ordinary people. The theatre produces the tragic masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and the comic genius of Aristophanes. 

But the fifth century is called the ‘Greek Enlightenment’ especially because it was in this period that science, philosophy, history and medicine came into being as disciplines. People have attempted to cure sickness or injury ever since humans have been sick or injured. But for the first time in the fifth century there were recognized experts, trained in a school, who engaged in self-conscious discussion of techniques and principle, and debated the physical causes of disease, and experimented, and tested their results, and published their findings. Some people have been political ever since there was a group to win power over. But for the first time in the fifth century there were political theorists who argued about the theories of different constitutions, and about the abstract nature of power and the city's institutions. This development of self-conscious, theoretical, abstract thought along with new institutions of education and regulation makes medicine and political philosophy disciplines for the first time. These new forms of intellectual activity began as radical innovations, and were immediately seen by more conservative forces as threatening. Each of these new disciplines, as they fought to become established, needed to distinguish their own authonity. One key rhetorical strategy for each discipline was to disparage or diminish its opponents by calling them purveyors of myth. ‘Myth’ becomes the name for what these new disciplines don’t do.  ‘What I offer’, claims one physical scientist, ‘is a true picture of the world scientifically observed and described. I can tell you how the physical world works. Those old stories about how things came to be, they are just myths.’ Myth can no longer mean simply an inherited story of the old days, let alone an authoritative tale. Now ‘myth’ is opposed to true ‘history’. Or it is something to be dispelled by real ‘philosophy’. Or replaced by objective ‘science’. This negative colouring, which develops during the fifth-century Enlightenment, still tinges the concept of ‘myth’ today. We still say ‘mere myth’, ‘just a myth’. With final dismissiveness, myth has come to mean a silly or pernicious tale whose false enticements you should beware. 

The Greek Enlightenment successfully set out to debunk old authorities, and the new discipline of ‘history’ in particular aimed to change how the Past is understood. Herodotus is ‘the father of History'. His great work, circulated in the 430s BC is the first to call Itself ‘history’ historie, or ‘investigation’ in Greek ’ and he has been taken as the founding father of history by ancients and moderns alike.

His topic is the Persian Wars. The Persian Empire was the greatest power in the Mediterranean and it wtwice invaded Greece in the middle of the fifth century in order to conquer it for the Great King's Empire. Twice the far out-numbered Greeks won and pushed back the Persians. It was a stunning and inspirational event for the Greeks. Indeed it was a defining moment for the Greek nation. Before the Persian Wars, there was little awareness of a shared cultural identity of ‘being Greek’. After the War» the Greeks, rather than being just a series of cities which shared the same language, became aware of a national identity. 

Herodotus’ history investigates not just the famous battles by which the Persians were defeated and the invasions turned back Thermopylae, Marathon, Salamis and the like. He also travels the whole Mediterranean and beyond exploring the differences between different cultures. Tellingly, Herodotus too tells us about the Amazons, now to be found in Scythia, and discussed from an anthropological perspective as a still-existing tribe of women, who breed with nomads of the Steppes. He explains the defeat of the Persians by showing how the Greek culture of the West is superior to the Persian culture of the East. Xerxes, the Persian king, is forced to learn ‘what true men are’, and one concluding moral of the whole history is that ‘soft countries produce soft men’. Rugged Greece, by contrast, is ‘a fit nurse of men’. Herodotus is the founding father of the West’s view of the Orient as a dangerous, wealthy, degenerate, sly and threatening other which must be defeated. His image of the Orient still fuels modern Western politics. The conflict between West and East is the subject of the Iliad, the first surviving poem of the Western tradition. But it is Herodotus who gives this conflict the rhetorical slant familiar still in contemporary ideology. In its rhetorical opposition to the East, this is truly a history of where the modem West comes from. 

Herodotus writes the history of the victory of Greece and the Victory of Greekness. But he is far more subtle than that gung-ho bias might suggest. Herodotus maps the variables of cultural difference, with a keen critical eye and critical investigation. Herodotus provides a guide which encourages the reader to place himself within a matrix of of social, moral and political markers- a map to find ourselves.

Brecht, Weill, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Adorno

Adorno was attracted to Mahoganny because it displayed society’s contradictions. Art that aspired to cheerful harmony or resurrected the great soul of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture was delusive entertainment that failed to do what art should do: expose the lie at the heart of capitalism, namely that this economic system could deliver freedom and happiness. In "The Social Situation of Music’, an essay he wrote for the Institute‘s journal in 1932, Adorno opposed two contemporary composers. Schoenberg and Stravinsky, taking them as opposite poles of what music should and shouldn't be under monopoly capitalism. His bracing notion was that music, purportedly the most abstract and therefore the least socially grounded, most autonomous art form, actually contained social contradictions in its own structure. Schoenberg, in whose second Vienna school’s ethos Adorno had been trained while working with the great composer’s disciple Alban Berg in the mid 19203, had evolved during the early years of the twentieth century. He moved from being a composer of expressionist music to one who wrote music that eschewed harmonic resolutions, still less offered hummable tunes, but rather involved a musical twelvetone system, whereby the repetition of any note in a twelve-tone row was prohibited until all of them had been sounded. The harmonic resolution of, say, Schoenberg's 1899 string sextet Verkliz'rte Nacht (Transfigured Night), was unthinkable for a composer who, in the early 1930s, was so bewitched by the aesthetic purity and logic of his twelve-tone method that for the title of his uncompleted operatic masterpiece Moses Und Aron of 1932 he dropped one of the As from Aaron’s name so that it would have twelve rather than thirteen letters. 

Stravinsky, for his part, in the ten years between the premiere of one of the founding texts of musical modernism, Le Sucre Du Printemps, to the premiere of his opera Pulcinella, had mutated from musical revolutionary to conservative revivalist of old forms. In the 1920s Stravinsky disinterred old musical forms the concerto grosso, the fugue, the symphony for a new era. Just as Brecht excoriated opera as culinary a mouthwatering diversion from the realities of modern life so Adorno accused Stravinsky of composing music that Offered false reconciliations, redeploying old forms that served to satisfy his audience’s degraded need for escape into a chimerical past. He also detected a connection between Stravinsky’s neo-classicism and fascism: the irrationality of the composer’s system, Adorno argued, was of a piece with the arbitrary control of a Fuhrer. He was stretching the point, perhaps, but then Adorno was apt to see Nazism in nearly everything he disliked -understandable given what it was about to do to him, his colleagues and his family.

At the time Adorno took Schoenberg, a Jew who like Adorno fled Europe with the rise of Hitler, to represent all that was progressive in music. Schoenberg’s music was, he noted not seduction by harmony and melody but ‘the conglomeration of broken shards'. But there was, he realised later, a problem with his idol’s musical system. Its absorbing logic, like that of a game of chess. detached Schoenberg from the social situation for which it provided a fitting soundtrack. Worse, Schoenberg’s twelvetone system became, Adorno later realised, hypostatised- the revolutionary form of composition became the only game m town for avant-garde composers and therefore, paradoxically, conservative. A system that had seemed to promise a breakout from bourgeois music was reified in its turn. 

How did Weill’s music for Mahoganny map on to this musical taxonomy? Weill once said he would be happy if every taxi driver could whistle his melodies. One might have thought Adorno would have damned Weill’s music as part of the culture industry that helped capitalism run more smoothly, but in fact he enjoyed Weill’s music for Mahoganny. He saw in it what Benjamin loved in surrealist art, which often involved creating montages of historical detritus and thereby producing potentially liberating ‘constellations’. Adorno called Mahoganny the first surrealist opera. “This music,’ he wrote of the score, ‘pieced together from triads and off notes with the good beat of old music hall songs which we hardly recognise anymore but are nonetheless remembered as an heirloom, is hammered and glued together with the fetid mucilage of a soggy potpourri of operas. This music, made up of the debris of past music, is completely contemporary.’ 

Brecht’s libretto, too, sought to make it clear that the bourgeois world was absurd and anarchic. ‘In order to represent this convincingly’, wrote Adorno of the dramatisation of the bourgeois world as absurd and anarchic, ‘it is necessary to transcend the closed world of bourgeois consciousness which considers bourgeois social reality to be immutable. Outside of this framework, however, there is no position to take at least for the German consciousness. there is no site which is non-capitalist.’ This was to become one great theme of critical theory: there is no outside, not in today’s utterly rationalised, totally reified, commodity-fetishising world. When Marx wrote Capital in the mid nineteenth century, the more primitive capitalist system he was diagnosing made commodity fetishism merely episodic; now it was everywhere, poisoning everything. ‘Paradoxically, therefore’, Adorno added, ‘transcendence must take place within the framework of that which is.’ Brecht’s assault on capitalist society in Mahoganny was then paradoxically both from within and from without at the same time, both immanent and transcendent. 

In this, it bore similarities to how Adorno conceived of the role of a serious music critic. In his 1929 essay ‘Motifs’, he wrote that in order for criticism not to collapse into a middlebrow alliance between dillettantism and smug, Olympian expertise, it is ‘essential for the critic to extend his immanent listening as far as possible, while at the same time approaching music radically from the outside. To think about twelve-note technique at the same time as of that childhood experience of Madama Butterfly on the gramophone that is the task of every serious attempt to understand music today?  And what Adorno counselled for music criticism was true too of the critical theory that was being born in Frankfurt as Brecht and Weill’s opera was being attacked by Nazis: it was to be practised by those who realised that there was no non-capitalist perspective from which to critique capitalism and that its practitioners were implicated in what they critiqued. 

Brecht and Weill’s opera, similarly. was an inside job, drawing attention to the art form's self-contradictory nature. ‘The opera Mahagonny pays tribute to the senselessness of the operatic form‘. Wrote Brecht. In this, its techniques parallel those deployed by the Frankfurt School during the 19305 as it developed critical theory in response to a clutch of -isms Horkheimer would lump together under the heading of traditional theory positivism, vulgar Marxism, among others. For Horkheimer each of these disciplines was insufficiently dialectical, and their followers made the error of imagining that there was a transcendental position from which they could observe and analyse an objective world of facts. There was no such position. and so in a sense the critical theorist risked the kind of absurdity Brecht happily embraced in writing Mahoganny. ‘It still perches on happily on the same old bough, perhaps’, he wrote in his notes to the opera. ‘but it has started (out of absent mindedness or bad conscience) to saw it through.’ 

You can almost hear Brecht cackling manically as the branch on which he’s sitting plummets to the ground; but there was nothing absent-minded about where he had decided to place his bottom. He Wanted musicians. singers and audience to realise that they were part of the culture industry, that the first two groups were pandering to prevailing economic interests and deluding themselves by thinking they were making art that floated free, unsullied by capitalism’s dictates; they were supplying to the latter group, at a price, opera which obeyed laws of commodity fetishism. He even, incredibly, attacked his musical partner Kurt Weill for posturing as an avantgarde composer who naively thought he was above being in thrall to economic interests. Through attacking the established ‘dramatic’ form of theatre, Brecht hoped to transform its sated spectators into observ~ ers hungering for political and social engagement. 

Adomo, though he never became close to Brecht, was a kindred spin't. an Agent Orange-style critic scorching all and sundry. Sometimes even himself. But the philosopher never shared the dramatist’s agitprop hopes. Brecht hoped that there would be an abrasion between the grandeur of the opera house and the harsh message. Instead, it became another culinary treat in the operatic repertory, abemntly decoded by its audiences and then happily consumed like whiskey. 'Ihus when Mahogarmy was staged in Covent Garden in 2015, the British novelist Will Self wrote: 

This museum piece a sort of diorama of failed utopianism has nothing to teach us. We can enjoy the lushness of Weill’s through composed score; we can thrill to the unvarnished portrayal of human cupidity; we can admire the repurposing of Brecht’s epic theatre as entertainment. But to expect us to be moved to a critical engagement with the fundamental terms of our social being would be frankly and idiomatically a bit much." 

Something similar may be said of the Institute for Social Research as it evolved in the 1930s. It was Brechtian in its inverse relationship between scabrous critique and changing that which it critiqued. Like Brecht’s theatre, critical theory arguably postured otherwise but became another fetishised commodity the philosophical equivalent of a titillatingly ‘shocking’ night at the opera, made all the more exciting by its brush with fascism, a more or less harmless diversion for the chattering classes. Lukécs, in his damning 1962 critique of the German intelligentsia in general and the Frankfurt School in particular, suggested that, like operagoers in the posh seats watching Mahoganny, thinkers like Adorno had taken up comfortable residence in the Grand Hotel Abyss. Brecht even had a name for the residents of the Hotel. He called them Tuis (an acronym deriving from a scrambling of the German word for intellectual, i.e. Tellekt-Ual-ln). The Tuis were partisan but not members of a party, independent of official institutions yet experienced in surviving within institutions. Such Tuis, among whom Brecht included the Frankfurt School, could have helped overthrow capitalism by instructing the masses in Marxist doctn'ne. Instead, by failing to do so they effectively contributed to the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler. For Brecht, the Frankfurt School were traitors to the revolution they affected to espouse.” Adorno and Horkheimer returned the abuse: they regarded Brecht as a petit-bourgeois poseur and apologist for Stalinism. One might argue there was something of the Tui about Brecht too: his theatre, like the Frankfurt School’s writings, thrived creatively during the escalation of capitalism’s contradictions; instead of destroying the bourgeois art form of opera, he extended its lifespan. 

While Brecht during the 19305 brought together material for a Tui novel that he never completed but which was conceived as a satire on intellectuals in the German Empire and Weimar Republic, it was during his Californian exile that he adopted the term Tuisimus as his name for the Frankfurt School. By then, he regarded the Frankfurt scholars as prostitutes in their quest for foundation support, selling their skills and opinions as commodities in order to support the dominant ideology of oppressive US society.

Ish

Wystan himself is going through a curious phase. He’s as energetic as I‘m idle. He takes Benzedrine regularly, in small doses, followed by Seconal at night. He says that “the chemical life” solves all his problems. He writes a great deal-poems and articles and reviews- makes speeches, goes to tea parties and dinners, is quite brilliantly talkative. It’s a little as if he and I had changed places. Wystan says, however, that he hates all this. But he’s unwilling to return to England, because, there, he’s the center of an even more intensive publicity. 

There is much that is majestic but nothing that is gracious in this city-this huge, raw, functional skeleton, this fortress of capital, this jungle of absolutely free competition. Every street is partly a slum. Where the banks and the brownstone houses end, the slum tenements begin, with their rusty fire escapes and crowds of baseball-playing Dead End Kids. Beyond, on the mainland, is a wilderness of scrapyards and shacks. This country is insanely untidy. 

The Bronx is built almost entirely of billboards and monster advertisements, imploring you to relax. (As if anybody could-when every doorknob gives you an electric shock!) Take the advertisements away, and there would be nothing left; no town at all. At the lower end of the island, and uptown in Harlem, huge tribes of Italians. Negroes and jews have pitched their foul, lively camps-at the feet of the skyscrapers which dominate their heaven like totem poles. Wystan and I call the skyscrapers “the fallen angels.” You imagine them crashing down out of the sky, white-hot as meteors, to bury themselves deep in the Manhattan bedrock and slowly cool, through the ages. But the fallen angels are still angels. They are blasphemously insolvent, and utterly without pity.

and

 When we reached Needles: a patriotic lady passenger began singing “California, here I come!” It seemed little enough to arrive at after such a journey---the furnace-hot, quivering, untidy desert, and then the gigantic truck-garden. Every orange and onion seemed already stamped with the exporter’s trademark. I think one’s disappointment, on first coming to the West, is really due to its size. The European mind cannot grasp such distances, such prodigality, such barrenness, such riches. It grows weary and bored. The eye refuses to look and the ear to listen. 

Toward evening, we came into downtown Los Angeles- perhaps the ugliest city on earth. It was a Saturday night, and the streets were swarming with drunks. We saw three sailors carrying a girl into a house, as though they were going to eat her alive. From the hotel, we telephoned Chris Wood. ‘ ‘How wonderful,” he said, “to hear an effeminate British voice!” 

Next day, we took a taxi into Hollywood. I was amazed at the size of the city, and at its lack of shape. There seemed no reason Why it should ever stop. Miles and miles of little houses, wooden or stucco, under a technicolor sky. Miles of little gardens crowded with blossoms and flowering bushes; the architecture is dominated by the vegetation. A city without privacy, where neighbors share each other’s lawns and look into each other’s bedrooms. The whole place like a world’s fair, quite new and already partly in ruins. The only permanent buildings are the schools and the churches. On the hill, giant letters spell “Hollywoodland,” but this is only another advertisement. It is silly to say that Hollywood, or any other city, is “unreal.” But what the arriving traveller first sees are merely advertisements for a city which doesn’t exist. 

and

The first obstacle is self-consciousness. Gerald himself usually meditated sitting in a chair. My own preference was for something more exotic: I wanted to be as oriental as possible. So I squatted cross~legged in a corner of the room. The advantage of this position was that it was an entirely new one: you saw everything-\ the furniture, the ceiling, the view through the window-fromq ditlerent angle, and this in itself was a reminder of what you were doing. But it was also very embarrassing, even when you were alone. Suppose someone should walk in! I told Vernon, ofcourse what I was doing. I wanted him to get used to the idea and not find) it mysterious or funny. 

As soon as I was settled into position, the Ego began, as it were, to dance around the room, screaming: “Look at me! Look at me! Isn’t it funny? Don’t you think it’s funny? Aren’t I extraordinary? What do you think I’ll do next? I bet you can’t guess! Matter offact, I don’t know, myself. I say-look, look-aren’t I a scream?” 

Gradually, the prancing and the antics subsided. They were followed by the fidgets. “What’s that bird outside? Why does it make that noise? Who can that be in the next garden? I can hear the neighbor’s radio. Damn him-What selfishness, making such a racket! How loud the traffic is! That bird. And now there’s a fly buzzing. It’s too much-” Very often, at this point, I’d break off the attempt and get up. But, if the fldgets passed away, the next trouble would be sex. I sat and throbbed dully with lust. Bed. Darkness. Flesh. Arms. Legs. Lips. Sweat. Grunts and groans. Heaving, straining, jerking. Me. You. Yes. Now if I waited long enough, however, the throbbing would subside, also. It was just a matter of time. 

And then, on another level, the wheel would begin to spin--the roulette wheel of worries, fantasies, plans and plots, vanities and resentments, mixed in with scraps of nonsense, lines from poems, all the odds and ends of the mind’s ragbag. Usually, the wheel whizzed on and on, long past the quarter hour I had set myself, and I would rise from it feeling merely dizzy. Very occasionally, whilel still watched it, it slowed and almost stopped. Then I knew something approaching concentration. 

I talk as if meditation (if you can call what I have just described by so grand a name) had become my regular practice. It hadn’t. As a matter of fact, these first attempts were very irregular, and I soon gave them up altogether. The strangest thing about them was that they actually produced some kind of beneficial effect on my behavior.

and

The Goldwyn Studios at this time were like a ghost town. Goldwyn was going into one of his hibernation periods; perhaps he was waiting to see how the war would develop. Soon, I was almost the only writer on the joke-except for a legendary lady named Jan Fortune, who, it was said, never got fired because nobody could find her. She dodged along the corridors from office to office, and always slept in the building. She was supposed to have parties there, at night. 

I saw Goldwyn himself three or four times. The first time, he was friendly and flattering. The second, at his house in Beverly Hills, he was rude and unmanageable. “It’s all nonsense!” he shouted. “It’s stupid. The boy’s a damn fool. I want something clever.” I drank a big glass of whisky and felt superior-for by this time I knew that I had a job at MGM waiting for me after the New Year. Our last interview was a very curious one, because I had apparently succeeded in hurting his feelings, with a mock-polite letter I had written to the story department, outlining the various stages of our plot development, and Goldwyn’s contradictory suggestions and objections. I had tried to make this letter sound as much as possible like a clinical report, merely substituting “Mr. Goldwyn” for “the patient.” 

Goldwyn sent for me in his office and put on an extraordinary act, in front of several subordinates. He asked, did I think him a stupid, obstinate hick who knew nothing about writers and couldn’t appreciate their work? If so, it was just too bad, because, although he was only a plain business man, he knew a good thing when he saw it-he knew I was a swell writer and a swell person, and he thought of me as a friend, etc. etc. I saw through him a yard, but just the same I was embarrassed. I grinned and mumbled protests. When we were through with the playacting, I told him about the Metro job. This didn’t please him at all. Automatically, he began a line about loyalty and checked himself: he knew that I knew he was going out of business. We said goodbye-one of those wordy Hollywood farewells which have no warmth but much superstition. Film people usually fear an unkind parting. It may bring you bad luck-especially if the other guy makes good, later. 

Some months after this, I had a frank talk with Knopf, who had also left the Goldwyn Studio. “You touched Sam on his sore spot,” he told me. “Call him a son of a bitch and he’ll sock you on the jaw. Tell him he hasn’t acted like a gentleman, and he’ll crawl.” 

It was only much later, discussing Goldwyn with John van Druten, that I realized how cleverly Berthold and I had been handled, right from the beginning. The insult technique is designed to put a writer on his mettle, and make him produce the maximum number of ideas in a very short period, Then when the writer has been well milked, he’s fired, and another writer is called in; Berthold had actually been tricked into presenting Goldwyn with three completely different stories. 

Knopf told me of a talk he’d had with Goldwyn, the day i was hired. 

Goldwyn: If we’ve got to use his characters, we must take care he doesn’t use any of ours. Nothing that’s in the original scrlpt--(looking through the outline of our story) What’s this about the Gestapo? He can’t use the Gestapo. 

Knopf But, Sam, the Gestapo isn’t our property. Goldwyn (after deep thought, sadly): No---I guess you’re right, Eddie, It isn’t.