Tennessee

 By Lahr

THE HEART CAN’T WAIT 107 

Carson McCullers, like Williams, was lion-hearted. Her poem “Love and the Rind of Time” addressed “Those who find it a little harder to live / And therefore live a little harder.” She was Southern; she had battled ill health, alcoholism, insecurity, and her own wayward sexual desires. Williams called McCullers his “sister.” In later years, she would keep a writing room in her Nyack house for Williams. “I feel that once I can be with you nothing will frighten me and I can rest safe,” she wrote him. “My self-confidence—about health, and work, and realization of my inward self—are dependent on you: sometimes it disturbs me to realize how much. But not really—I know nothing but good can come of our alliance.” Williams cherished the memory of that summer—“the last good year before her stroke”—including his first sighting of McCullers disembarking the ferry: a tall girl in slacks and baseball cap, flashing a radiant snaggle-toothed grin. None of the passengers seemed to fit her description, so Williams and Pancho started up the gangplank to see if anyone else was still on board. Just then, her two battered suitcases in hand, McCullers came toward them. “Are you Tennessee or Pancho?” she asked. Williams identified himself. He suggested they go for a swim; Pancho, already drunk at midday, joined them. They changed at the bathhouse. Outside was a patio with a long row of rocking chairs overlooking the water; in each chair sat an old lady. “For some reason Pancho did not like the way they looked and he turned his rage upon them,” Williams recalled. “At the top of his voice, addressing these very proper old ladies, he shouted, ‘What are you looking at? You’re nothing but a bunch of old cock-suckers!’” “Tennessee, honey, that boy is wonderful, you are lucky to have him with you!” McCullers said. Williams was, he said, “by no means convinced of this”; in time, neither was McCullers. Nonetheless, “they went home and set up housekeeping.” McCullers cooked “spuds Carson”—olives and onions mashed with the tatoes—

....of the country’s insecurity about its new abundance, which had brought “the bright idea of property” within range of more citizens than ever before. Fueled by the single greatest rise of individual wealth in world history, the middle class grew to include 60 percent of Americans. In the same period, thirteen million new homes were bought; the number of two-car families doubled; and the nation, which was home to only 6 percent of the world’s population, was consuming a third of the world’s goods and services and producing two-thirds of its manufactures. The suburbs mushroomed; food and hotel chains spread. The increase in consumptios led inevitably to a homogenization of taste; a pall of sameness settled over the land. In this, television had a seismic effect. Madison Avenue’s total television billings were $12.3 million in 1948; by 1951, the figure had ballooned to $128 million. In 1949, Americans owned about oue millios television sets; by the end of the next decade, forty-eight million people did. They watched, on average, six hours a day. “Radio was abandoned like bones at a barbecue,” the comedian Fred Allen quipped. In a real, as well as a symbolic way, society had become spellbound. 

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The legend of each is killing each, but they are fated to cling to it.” Of the autobiographical confusions that Camino explored—confusions about politics, sexuality, mortality, spirituality, and fame—the profoundest, of which Williams was then only dimly aware, was his confusion over the conflict between being great and being good. That moral quandary is represented in the play by the innocent, sweet-natured former champ, Kilroy, who is an essential link between the script and the audience. “Audience are his friends,” Kazan wrote in his notes about Kilroy, who at one point is chased around the theater by police. “They are the witnesses to his final passion. . . . He goes and consults with them, protests to them and seeks refuge in their laps.” (Kilroy was the first character in the legitimate theater to shuttle between the aisles and the stage.) Kilroy is a king who has lost his crown. He enters with the remnants of his glory—his golden gloves—around his neck. Kilroy has a golden heart the size of a baby’s head. In order to woo the whore Esmeralda and to be her Chosen Hero, he foolishly sells his heart for cash, only to steal it back later. “He is the eternal spiritual wanderer,” Kazan wrote. “He is romantic because he is looking, wandering in search of what does not exist—eternal love. He wants to fall in love with everybody. Meantime everyone is looking to take him. HIS ONLY WEAPON IS LOVE.” At the end of the first day's rehearsal, Kazan took Wallach aside to give him a keynote about Kilroy. “He is full of wonder. Jimmy Durante in wonderland.” Kilroy is a totem of resilience, “utterly unaware of his own tragedy,” Kazan wrote; like a slapstick burlesque clown, he bounces back from every blow. In the midst of an extravaganza of betrayal and death, Kilroy embodies Williams's faith in transcendence; at the finale, he and Quixote—both figures of absurd perseverance and hope—exit with a flourish through the Archway of the Camino Real and into “Terra Incognita.” “The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks!” Quixote says 

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WILLIAMS: I’m having a big argument on this subject with my analyst, Mike. I tell him that I don’t feel that way and he—he wants to find out if I do or I don’t, and we're still exploring it. I think I feel more affection and love. He thinks that certain early conditions and experiences in my life made—created a lot of anger and resentment in me, which I am taking out now through my writing. He may be right. I can’t say. .. . Have you ever heard of the term—he didn’t want me to use these analytic terms, he doesn’t approve of them, but I do a lot of reading and I use them to him, he doesn’t use them to me—a term that I’ve come across lately is “infantile omnipotence.” 

WALLACE: “Infantile omnipotence”? 

WILLIAMS: That is what we all have as babies. We scream in the cradle, the mother picks us up, she comforts us, she suckles us, she changes the diaper, whatever is giving us discomfort is tended to, and through this she rocks us to sleep and all that. And whatever gives us discomfort, we find, is—is relieved in response to an outraged cry. . . . This is the infant feeling omnipotent. All it has to do is cry out and it will be comforted, it will be attended to. All right. We grow up a little and we discover that the outcry doesn’t meet this tender response always. After a while the mother realizes that it’s no longer an infant, she gets impatient with its outcry or maybe the father gets impatient with it. Anyway, it meets the world which is less permissive, less tender and comforting, and it misses the maternal arms—the maternal comfortand therefore, then, it becomes outraged, it becomes angry. And that’s where most of our neuroses spring from, from the time when we—. . . We meet a more indifferent world, and then we become angry. That is the root of most anger. 

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Edwina’ consent to a lobotomy, in 1943, was brought on by Rose’s failure to improve during her hospitalization, and especially by her persistent graphic sexual outbursts—one of which Williams witnessed in 1939. “Horrible, Horrible!” he wrote in his diary. “Her talk was so obscene—she laughed and spoke continual obscenities—Mother insisted I go in, though I dreaded it and wanted to go-out stay outside. We talked to the Doctor afterwards—a cold, unsympathetic young man—he said her condition was hopeless that we could only expect a progressive deterioration. It was a horrible ordeal. Especially since I fear that end for myself.” Still, Williams came to believe that the lobotomy had been “tragically mistaken.” “I believe that without it Rose could have made a recovery and returned to what is called ‘normal life? which, despite its many assaults upon the vulnerable nature, is still preferable to an institutional existence,” he said. Moreover, Williams thought that Edwina, who later in life signed herself “Edwin” and thought a horse was living in her room, “was essentially more psychotic than my sister Rose,” he told the Paris Review in 1981.

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As early as 1960, Williams and his thematic tropes had become sufficiently common currency to be parodied from the Broadway stage by the most sophisticated comedy team of the era, Mike Nichols and Elaine May. In their sensational show An Evening with Nichols and May, Nichols, playing the playwright “Alabama Glass,” took a very long gulp from the tumbler beside him, and then drawled, “I want to tell you tonight 

about my new play, “Pork Makes Me Sick in the Summer.” He went on: 

It is a simple story of degradation. The scene is a basement apartment in the Mexican quarter of Detroit. Before the action begins the husband of the heroine, Nanette, has committed suicide on being accused of not being a homosexual. Distraught, she has an affair with a young basketball team, after which she turns to drink, prostitution and putting on airs. During the course of the three acts she gradually begins to go downhill and, finally, she disintegrates and has to be put away. 

Williams saw the show; according to Mike Nichols, however, he didn’t go backstage. “I didn’t and don’t blame him,” Nichols said. “The piece was nastier than necessary, especially if you add my voice and character when doing it. It was less Williams than Capote, whom I truly disliked. I always felt bad about this since I admired Williams inordinately and still do.” 

By 1962, a new wave of American and European playwrights was bringing to their storytelling an allusive minimalism, which challenged both Williams’s florid narrative style and his hegemony. Williams was beginning to feel not just old but old-fashioned. “I'm so tired, so terribly, terribly tired. And now anything that I do is going to be compared to the savagely truthful work of the best New Wave playwrights,” he complained to the director Herbert Machiz in the fall of 1962, after seeing a preview of Edward Albee’s Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which he judged to be “one of those works that extend the frontiers of the stage.” The spareness of Samuel Beckett—whose Waiting for Godot Williams helped to produce in its debut American production—and the “astringency” of Harold Pinter drove him “crazy with jealousy.” Speaking of Pinter’s The Caretaker, which was competing with Iguana on Broadway, Williams was almost in awe. “While I’m in the theatre, I’m enthralled by it and I say, ‘Oh, God, if I could write like that. If only I were twenty-five and just starting out, what these boys could have given me.” During the course of the year, he’d written two “long-short or short-long plays” under the collective title Slapstick Tragedy that were perhaps, he told Jay Laughlin, “my answer to the school of Ionesco.” “They're not just funny, they're also supposed to be sad: I mean ‘touching,’” Williams explained. “Who is touched and by what is the big question these days, which are the days of the untouchables, the emotional astronauts. In which I’m beginning to feel like Louisa May Alcott or the early Fannie Hurst.” 

If Williams couldn't die, he could imagine his death. So, too, could Flora Goforth, the indefatigable “dying monster” of The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, the play that Williams was working on for the 1962 Spoleto Festival—“a poem of death,” he called it—about the Jast two days of an imperious wealthy woman’s existence on her mountaintop estate in Italy, where she has gone to finish writing her memoirs. “Ahhhhhhhh, meeeeeeeeee! . .. Another day, Oh, Christ, Oh, Mother of Christ!”—the first lines that Mrs. Goforth delivers, from offstage—~ sounded the unmistakable note of Beckett’s ennui.

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The plan was for Williams to go to Barnes Hospital by ambulance the next morning, but when the time came, Williams balked. Around noon, with Dakin’s intervention and accompanied by Edwina, Williams admitted himself as “Thomas L. Williams” and underwent tests while ensconced in “Queeny Towers”—the deluxe top-floor wing of Barnes. His room, not far from the swimming pool, had blue satin curtains and a large television on which he watched Shirley Booth in Hazel. (“I thought Shirley was making veiled innuendoes about me,” Williams said.) He was allowed to keep his blue kit bag full of pills, speed, and syringes by his bedside table. Propped up on pillows, with a little stocking cap on his head, as Dakin recalled, Williams “thought he was in full control of everything.” 

That evening, Dakin arrived with a bouquet of flowers and get-well notes to Williams from his nieces; his mother also reappeared, looking like “a little Prussian officer in drag,” Williams recalled in Memoirs: 

There was now, quite clearly, something impending of a fearful nature. I sensed this and scrambled with remarkable agility out of bed and said, “I’m going home right now,” and I ran into the closet to get into my clothes. 

“Oh no, Son.” 

“You all will drive me right home or I’! walk.” 

I got myself dressed with amazing alacrity, all the while shouting abuse at Dakin. 

“God damn you and your two adopted children. How dare you give them our family name.” Dakin: “I don’t have to sit here and listen to this abuse.” 

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 “After all, I have not accumulated too much money for these years of terrific effort as a writer and it must be protected for my sister and me: neither of us is likely to succeed in a future career.” He also claimed to have almost signed a contract with ABC Television, which would have meant that after his death the network could cannibalize his oeuvre to make series about his characters. Because she was in on the deal, Williams claimed, Wood had not brought this fine point to his attention. After his death, he said, she was also planning to develop a Tennessee Williams theme park. “Tennessee was adamant in his belief that such were the evil designs Audrey had on his work, a conspiracy he had discovered and exposed in the nick of time,” Rader said. (There is no archival evidence to support Williams’s notions.) One week after their blowup in Chicago, Williams wrote to Wood: 

To quote a line now deleted from the script, “The punctuation marks in life include periods which includes one that is final.” It is not a good line in a play but it is a true statement. I feel we have both felt for nearly ten years that a long and mutually beneficial professional relationship was wearing itself thin and has now at last worn itself out. . . . 

Of course there are many, many specifics that it would be only hurtful to go into regarding this break in our professional relations. I have been through quite enough of an upsetting nature to feel justified in sparing myself a further account of why the change must be made. 

Almost the Last of Wright's Evolution

.....The principle at work here is familiar. The interpretation of God’s will is obedient to facts on the ground and how they’re perceived. The live-and-let-live philosophy flourishes when there seems nothing to be gained by fighting. That had been Paul’s situation, Christians were a minority, hopelessly outgunned by polytheistic Romans, so no wonder he told his followers, “Bless those who persecute you” and “Do not repay anyone evil for evil.” And no wonder Muhammad, in roughly the same situation, said, “Turn away evil by what is better, and lo! he between whom and thyself was enmity, shall be as though he were a warm friend.”° 

And likewise, as we’ve seen, in the Hebrew Bible. The Israelites, after suffering a setback at the hands of the Ammonites, waxed theologically tolerant in making a peace overture to their next-door neighbors: “Should you not possess what your god Chemosh gives you to possess? And should we not be the ones to possess everything that our god Yahweh has conquered for our benefit?” When, on the other hand, fighting seemed to offer easy gains, religious tolerance faded. Thus are the Israelites told in the book of Deuteronomy to “annihilate” the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, and so on, “so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their gods, and you thus sin against the Lord your God.”?! 

After moving to Medina and mobilizing its resources, Muhammad would, like the Israelites of Deuteronomy, find war a more auspicious prospect. And, as we’ll see, God’s views on fighting infidels would change accordingly, as they did in the Bible. But so long as Muhammad remained in Mecca, fighting was unappealing and religious tolerance expansive. Indeed, at moments when collaboration with the pagans seemed attractive, Muhammad’s tolerance grew so large that he was willing to give up monotheiem iteelf. This, at least, js the apparent upshot of the “satanic verses” 

The Satanic Verses 

What Muslims call the satanic verses aren't in the Koran, At least, they aren't anymore, According to Muslim tradition, they were uttered by the Prophei and thus entered scripture, but were expunged when he realized they had been inspired by Satan. 

The verses involve three goddesses—Al-Lat, A-‘Uzsa, and Manat — who had a big following in Arabia and whom some pagans considered daughters of Allah. Acknowledging their existence and power would have made it easier for Muhammad to do business with their adherents, and some of their adherents were influentral. A nearby town where some Meccan elites owned property featured a shrine to Al-Lat.* 

Apparently Muhammad succumbed to the temptation. In the now expunged utterance, he said of the three goddesses that they are “exalted,” adding: “And truly their intercession may be expected.” 

This concession seems to have proved in one sense or another ill advised. Maybe the pagans rebuffed Muhammad’s overture, and maybe his followers rebelled at his apostasy. (According to Muslim tradition, pagans applauded the initiative but then Muhammad got negative feedback from the angel Gabriel.) In any event, the sura was amended. Today if calls these goddesses not “exalted” but “mere names,” and there’s no mention of them having the power to intercede in anything.” 

The idea of Muhammad turning suddenly pobytheistic doean't fit easily into Muslim tradition, and if is precisely this “theological inconvenience” the label we put on comparable Christian and Jewish anomalies in chapter 10-~that gives the story credibility. As the seminal twentieth-century scholar of Islam Montgomery Watt put it, the story is “so strange that # must be true in essentials.”* 

And certainly the moral of the story makes sense: when people see the prospect of non-zero-sum interaction across religious bounds, tolerance grows. Hopes of fruitful alliance tempted Muhammad to forsake monotheism. 

Even in Meccan suras that didn’t get expunged, there are signs of Muhammad trying to build interfaith coalitions. He seems, for starters, to be reaching out to Jews. The evidence for this doesn’t lie in his extensive reference to Jewish scripture. (It is natural that he’d cite the Judeo-Christian Bible as authority for his otherwise radical pronouncements, given its connection to the august and cosmopolitan Byzantine Empire.) Rather, the evidence lies in the fact that while in Mecca he says nothing bad about the Jews and says some flattering things about their ancestors. God, in his “prescience,” chose “the children of Israel... above all peoples.” *5 

And in a sura normally dated late in the Meccan period, Muhammad seems eager to reach an accommodation with both Jews and Christians. The sura explains how to relate to recipients of “earlier revelations.’?° Muslims are not to argue with them “unless in the mildest manner” (though if the Christian or Jew in question has behaved “injuriously toward you” no such reserve is in order). Instead, they should emphasize common ground: “We believe in what hath been sent down to us and hath been sent down to you. Our God and your God is one.’”?? 

In short, Muhammad was a savvy politician, eager to build coalitions, mindful of muting differences that would impede that project. Some Muslims might reject this use of the word “politician,” along with its implication that Islamic scripture can be seen as mere rhetoric. And some critics of Islam might welcome the word as support for the claim that Muhammad’s “revelation” was just an elaborate ploy, part of the Prophet’s scheme to amass power. 

Both of these reactions are modern reactions. They come from a world in which the realms of religion and politics are often clearly distinct. In earlier times, as we’ve seen again and again, religion and politics were flip sides of the same coin. No doubt Muhammad’s special access to God’s word gave him mundane authority in the eyes of believers. No doubt the same was true of Jesus and of Moses. But that doesn’t mean that any of these men considered their 

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ANY Merger OF religions he may have envisioned Wasi t a merger of equals. 

The Abrahamic Inversion 

The terms of the merger can be seen in the question of Abraham. Muhammad accepted the biblical claim that God had seminally revealed himself to Abraham as the one true god. And he accepted the biblical claim that the Israelites had descended from Abraham. This would seem to place the Israelites, hence Judaism, at the root of the Abrahamic family tree. But Muhammad told the Abraham story in a way that invited a different interpretation, one that put Islam, and indeed Arabs, at the center of things. 

Hidden within the biblical story of Abraham, there had always been a commentary on the relative status of Israelites and Arabs. The nomadic Bedouin tribes that inhabited the part of Arabia near Israel were known as Ishmaelites, because they were thought to be descendants of Ishmael. So the Bible’s depiction of Ishmael is, implicitly, a depiction of Ishmaelites, of Arabs as they were known the ancient Israelites. 

And how is Ishmael viewed through Israelite eyes? The gogoonews for Ishmael is that he was an offspring of Abraham’s. The bad news is that he was the child of Abraham’s slave Hagar. He thus ranked below Abraham’s son Isaac, who was born of Abraham’s wife Sarah and from whom the Israelites descended. 

As if this didn’t bode sufficiently ill for the social status of Arabs, consider the circumstances of Ishmael’s birth. According to Genesis, Sarah drives the pregnant Hagar into the desert to bear her child alone. And later Sarah abandons her child in the desert. An angel prophesies his fate in a way that doesn’t bespeak a favorable Israelite view of Arabs: “He will be a wild ass of a man, his fist against all, and everyone’s fist against him.’ ?8 

Naturally, Muhammad was inclined to cast Ishmael, father of the Arabs, in a more flattering light. And here he didn’t have to break radically new ground. For there was a second biblical view of Ishmael, a more flattering view, subtly woven into the Hebrew Bible alongside the first one. It was put there by P—the “Priestly source,” the author (or authors) who, as we’ve seen, seems to have reflected the aims of the Persian Empire at the end of the Babylonian exile. Judging by P’s depiction of Ishmael, Cyrus the Great must have wanted his Israelite subjects to live in peace with their Arab neighbors, on terms of mutual respect. (This would make sense. His great enemy in that area was Egypt, and the last thing he needed was for the Bedouins of Arabia to ally with their Egyptian neighbors against his empire.) 

The difference between the Bible’s pre-exilic view of Ishmael and its postexilic view as presented by P is so stark that the biblical narrative, read closely, borders on the incoherent. In a pre-exilic verse Sarah, unable to bear children, encourages Abraham to take the Egyptian Hagar as a convenient concubine. “Go in to my slavegirl; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.” But in the subsequent verse, written after the exile by P, Hagar is no mere concubine; she is Abraham’s “wife,” and the polygamous marriage has Sarah’s blessing. And, whereas the pre-exilic verse has Hagar giving birth alone in the desert, a Priestly verse suggests that Abraham 1s present, for itis Abraham who names the newborn child Ishmael.?9 

And as for the pre-exilic angelic prophecy that Ishmael will be a “wild ass of a man” — according to the Priestly source, God himself has higher hopes. Abraham asks God to look after Ishmael and God replies: “I will bless him and make him fruitful and exceedingly numerous; he shall be the father of twelve princes, and I will make him a great nation.” » 

Even in the eyes of P, Arabs don’t quite rank up there with Israel. ites. Immediately after shedding kind words on Ishmael, God says, “But my covenant I will establish with Isaac, whom Sarah shall bear to you at this season next year.” So it is Isaac, progenitor of the Israel. ites, not Ishmael, father of the Arabs, who mediates the contract with God. Still, if the Arabs aren’t quite Israelites, they’re close. The one thing this covenant demands is that Abraham’s offspring —God’s people—should be circumcised if they’re males. And Ishmael, according to the Priestly source, gets circumcised—on the same day as Abraham, no less.3! 

By depicting Ishmael as Abraham’s beloved son, P had given Muhammad a theme he could amplify. In Muhammad’s account Abraham and Ishmael somehow wind up in Mecca together, where they build and purify the Ka’ba so that the God of Abraham can be worshipped there. What’s more, this was part of a “covenant” God had made with Ishmael and Abraham.;? 

Talk about a grand unifying narrative! By making Abraham cobuilder of the Ka’ba, Muhammad had taken the most ancient sacred figure in Jewish and Christian tradition and linked him to the most sacred shrine for Arab polytheists. Just about every religious tradition represented in Muhammad’s vicinity could find a touchstone in the religion he was creating. It was an ingenious way to try to bring all the peoples in the area under a single roof. 

Still, they were all being asked to sacrifice a part of their herttage in order to stay there. Yes, polytheists could keep their shrine, but they’d have to let go of all their gods except one. Yes, Christians and Jews could stay in the Abrahamic lineage, but they’d have to concede that they had strayed from the pure Abrahamic tradition as laid down in the days of Isaac and Ishmael..The Koran describes the appropriate response to people who “say, ‘Be Jews or Christians and you shall be guided’ ”: “Say thou: ‘Nay, rather the creed of Abraham, a man of pure faith.’ ”35 

And what is the name for this “pure faith”? The Koran has Abraham saying, “O my sons, God has chosen this as the faith for you. Do not die except as those who have submitted to God.” And the 

word that means “submitted” is the same word from which “Islam” and “Muslim” are derived. Indeed, some translators have this verse as: Do not die “except in the faith of Islam” or “except as Muslims.” 

So, too, with this Koranic verse: “Abraham was not a Jew, nor yet a Christian; but he was an upright man who had surrendered (to God).” Some translators have this as “Abraham was not a Jew nor a Christian but he was upright, a Muslim.’ 

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The Modernity of Muhammad 

Of course, the moral dimension isn’t the only dimension along which religions are compared. A common complaint about the Koran is that it lacks the sweep and depth of the Holy Bible. There isn’t, for example, the sometimes profound reflection on human existence found in Proverbs, Job, and other examples of the “wisdom literacure.” There aren’t the arcane philosophical allusionsnotably John’s riffing on the Logos — found in the New Testament. 

Then again, the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are repositories of an intellectual heritage that went well beyond the Hebrew and Christian worlds. Composed by legions of urban elites, they captured ideas of great civilizations, from Mesopotamia to Egypt to Christianity’s Hellenistic milieu. The Koran took shape in two desert towns on the margin of empires, uttered by a man who was more a doer than a thinker and was probably illiterate. 

It’s ironic, then, that in important senses the Koran was a more modern work than the Bible, and Muhammad a more modern figure than Moses or Jesus. 

For one thing, Muhammad, in contrast to the key figures in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, has no special powers. He can’t turn a rod into a snake or water into wine. Yes, later Muslims would depict him as a miracle worker, and they would claim that an opaque Koranic verse or two (most famously one about “splitting the moon”) demonstrates such powers. But the Koranic Muhammad, unlike the biblical Jesus and Moses, doesn’t depend on miracle-working for proof of proximity to God. 

The contrast is especially clear when both Muhammad and Jesus face skeptics who ask: if you really have a special link to God, prove it by producing wondrous “signs.” Muhammad doesn’t respond by trying to do anything supernatural.4 He doesn’t raise people from the dead or feed a big crowd on a tight budget. Of course, the historical Jesus—as opposed to the biblical Jesusprobably didn’t do those things, either. But Jesus may well have engaged in faith healing and exorcism; certainly these would have been normal for a wandering Palestinian preacher circa 30 CE. In any event, the historical Jesus probably was asked to show signs. And even when, in the earliest gospel, we see him fail to deliver, his explanation rests on the premise that he could produce signs if his audience deserved them. (“Truly I tell you, no sign will be given to this generation.”)'5 

Here lies the second sense in which the Koran is paradoxically modern—#in its style of theological argumentation. The style is set by the way Muhammad handles the challenge to show “signs.” He defines the word “signs” in a way that gives him an empirical riposte, shifting attention from supernatural wonders to the wonders of nature.'® If you want signs of God’s greatness, he says, just examine the everyday evidence. Look at the world. Note how it seems to have been built for the benefit of humans. Doesn’t a god who would create such a world deserve devotion? 

God “hath sent down rain from Heaven, and by it we bring forth the kinds of various herbs: ‘Eat ye, and feed your cattle.’ Of a truth in this are signs unto men endued with understanding.” And: “Among fruits ye have the palm and the vine, from which ye get wine and healthful nutriment: in this, verily, are signs for those who reflect.” And, of course, the ecosystem includes the human species itself: “And one of His signs it is, that He hath created wives for you of your own species, that ye may dwell with them, and hath put love and tenderness between you. Herein truly are signs for those who reflect.” And consider the splendor of the whole human species: “Among His signs are... your variety of tongues and colour. Herein truly are signs for all men.” 

This amassing of evidence of God’s goodness and grandeur makes the Koran come much closer than the Bible to fitting the description Darwin gave to his book The Origin of Species: “one long argument.” That’s not the only thing the two books have in common. Both arguments purport to explain the exquisite fit between humans and their natural surroundings. Muhammad notes how conducive the ecosystem is to human flourishing and explains it via God’s design of the ecosystem. Darwin notes the same close match between humans and their ecosystem and posits a different explanation: humans were shaped to fit their ecosystem — not the other way around. 

The “signs” Muhammad saw weren’t confined to the organic. Note how nicely God had adapted the inanimate world to human needs: “He causeth the dawn to appear, and hath ordained the night for rest, and the sun and the moon for computing time! The ordinance of the Mighty, the Wise! And it is He who hath ordained the stars for you that ye may be guided thereby in the darknesses of the land and of the sea! Clear have we made our signs to men of knowledge.” ® 

Here again, a modern thinker would invoke evolution: both the biological evolution that adapted our sleep patterns to cycles of the sun, and the cultural evolution by which humans came to quantify time with sundials and calendars, turning the sun and moon into tools for “computing time.” Muhammad, in contrast, sees God as the ultimate explanation of all such synchronous goodness, and the Koran dwells on this goodness at length. The Koran is in no small part a book about gratitude: look around you; count your blessings. The pre-Islamic meaning of one of several Arabic words that the Koran uses to denote “unbelievers” seems to have been “‘those who are ungrateful.” 9 

In defining a blessing, Muhammad could be creative. Thunder and lightning are scary, and sometimes lightning is fatal. But are these really bad things? Thunder brings “awe of Him.” Lightning brings “fear and hope,” and has the added virtue of occasionally eliminating people who spend too much time arguing about theol

ogy and not enough time buying into it: ““He sendeth His bolts and smiteth with them whom He will while they are wrangling about God!’’° 

From a modern vantage point, it is natural to read Muhammad’s litany of “signs” and think that the “argument” he’s making is for the existence of God. It’s not. The existence of God wasn’t something he needed to argue for. His skeptics came in several varieties, but atheists weren’t among them. Indeed, his skeptics accepted not just the existence of one or more gods, but the existence of Allah, who had earned his way into the pantheon of Meccan polytheists. Further, Meccans seem to have agreed that Allah was a creator god. The question was how much of a worshipper’s devotion should go to that creator god. If Muhammad could argue that the creationAllah’s handiwork — showed Allah to be a god of tremendous power and goodness, then the answer would be: a whole lot of the devotion, like all of it. Allah was God. 

The modern world is said to suffer from “disenchantment.” As science explains more of the workings of nature, there seems less mystery, and so less room for a god that accounts for the otherwise mysterious. But in Muhammad’s scheme nature’s obedience to laws is tribute to the god who designed them so adeptly that he could then remove himself from the the day-to-day drudgery of running a universe: “It is God who hath reared the Heavens without pillars thou canst behold; then mounted His throne, and imposed laws on the sun and moon: each travelleth to its appointed goal. He ordereth all things. He maketh His signs clear.” And: “He created the sun and the moon and the stars, subjected to laws by His behest: Is not all creation and its empire His?” And if nature exactingly complies with God’s laws, what is the point of worshipping nature deities? “Bend not in adoration to the sun or the moon, but bend in adoration before God who created them both.””! 

All told, it sounds like an effective rhetorical strategy: Take something Meccans already agree on—Allah is the creator god—and leverage this consensus logically, leading people to conclude that Muhammad’s entire theology is on target. 

Reading Chekhov

 And Astrov in Uncle Vanya: 

Those who will live a hundred or two hundred years after us, and who will despise us for having lived our lives so stupidly and tastelessly—they will, perhaps, find a means of being happy. .. . 

Astrov is also—and chiefly—known for his concern about the destruction of the Russian forests and for his remarkable grasp of the principles of ecology, decades before the term came into use as we now know it. A. P. Chudakov and Simon Karlinsky have both written of Chekhov as a kind of protoenvironmentalist. “In the twentieth century the preservation of nature has long been and will be more and more the measure by which the moral potential of each person is tested,” Chudakov writes in Chekhov’s Poetics (1971; published in English in 1983). “[Chekhov] was the first in literature who included the relationship of man to nature in his sphere of ethics.” Karlinsky, in the introduction to his invaluable Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary (1973), and in an essay entitled “Huntsmen, Birds, Forests and Three Sisters” (1981), writes of Chekhov’s prescient uneasiness about the destruction of ecosystems. In the essay, Karlinsky speculates about the literary and scientific sources of Chekhov’s environmentalism, citing Thoreau, James Fenimore Cooper, the French geogra. pher Elisée Reclus, and the Russian climatologist Alexande, Voyeykov. But writing of the nature symbolism in Three Sisters, he makes a telling error: 

At the end of the play, Natasha intends to consolidate her victory by chopping down the beautiful trees. . .. 

“I will order them first of all to chop down this avenue of firs, and then this maple tree here. . . . It is so ugly in the evening.” After destroying the magnificent trees that meant so much to the departing Vershinin and the exterminated Tuzenbach, Natasha plans to replace free nature with a tame variant of it that is acceptable to her: “And here I will order them to plant little flowers, lots of little flowers, and they’ll smell... .” 

Avenues of firs and specimen maples are, of course, no more a part of “free nature” than are beds of tacky little flowers. They belong to what Michael Pollan has wonderfully called “second nature”—the sphere of horticulture. In his writings, as in his life, Chekhov was a good deal less involved with trees growing in the forest than with those planted in an orchard. He was a poet of the domesticated landscape rather than of the Sublime, drawn more to the charm of a shady old garden than to the grandiloquence of untouched wilderness. In the story “Ariadne” (1895), a character named Lubkov “would sometimes stand still before some magnificent landscape and say: ‘It would be nice to have tea here.’ ” 

&

In his stories and plays, Chekhov is afraid for all men. He was Only in his twenties and thirties when he wrote most of them, but like other geniuses—especially those who die prematurely—he wrote as if he were old. Toward the end of “Ward No. 6,” he veers off—as he does in other dark and terrible works, such as “Peasants” and “In the Ravine”—to rejoice for all men in the beauty of the world. There is always this amazing movement in Chekhov from the difficult and fearful to the simple and beautiful. As Ragin lies dying, Chekhov tells us, he sees “a greenness before his eyes”; then “a herd of deer, extraordinarily beautiful and graceful, of which he had been reading the day before, ran by him.” 

“Life is given to us only once.” The line (or a variant) appears in story after story and is delivered so quietly and 

offhandedly that we almost miss its terror. Chekhov was never one to insist on anything. He didn’t preach, or even teach. He is our poet of the provisional and fragmentary. When a story or play ends, nothing seems to be settled. “Ward No. 6,” for instance, does not end with the image of the beautiful deer. Before Ragin dies another thought passes through his mind: “A peasant woman stretched out her hand to him with a registered letter... . Mihail Averyanitch said something, then it all vanished, and Andrey Yefimitch sank into oblivion forever.” The registered letter—there is a bit of theatricality in its not being an ordinary letter—glints with meaning. What does it say? Who sent it? The ending of “Ward No. 6” inevitably evokes (and was surely influenced by) the ending of “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” but Chekhov declines to report the mystical experience that Tolstoy confidently reports his hero to have had. Chekhov enters the dying Ragin’s mind, but emerges with the most laconic and incomplete of reports. Tolstoy’s audacious authorial omniscience gives him his position as the greatest of the’ nineteenth-century Russian realists. Chekhov’s experiments with authorial reticence—equally audacious in their waypoint toward twentieth-century modernism. 

Here at the New Y

...most of the drama consists of the uncanny moving about in an old house of a skeleton, referred to as “the bones.” Now it happened that a couple of us at the reading were members of the celebrated secret society at Yale known as Skull and Bones, or “Bones” for short. In those days, secret societies in general and that secret society in particular were of great importance; indeed the very name of Bones was held in awe, and not at Yale alone. people out in the world believed that if the sacred name were ever to be mentioned in the presence of a Bones man, he woul immediately get up and leave the room. As for Bones men themselves, they never uttered the word except to other Bones men and then, by preference, only deep within the windowless stone tomb on High Street in which the society has had its headquarters for nearly a hundred and fifty years. 

“The Witch of Coés” is a ghost story told in verse, and Frost was accustomed to reading it to great effect, making his auditors’ flesh creep; but that evening in Pierson his hushed reiteration of “the bones’ sent my Bones clubmate and me into childish fits of giggles, which, try as hard as we could, we failed to suppress. It was a humiliating moment for us, and still more humiliating for Frost, who hurried the poem to its close and the evening to an end. The scandalous ruin of his reading was entirely our fault, and yet we could not so much as offer him an apology; for to explain our unbecoming conduct would have required us to mention the unmentionable word, which in the Yale of that day would have caused a second scandal greater than the first. 

Many years later, at about the time of his eightieth birthday (and taking care not to refresh his recollection of our previous encounter), I interviewed Frost for a possible “Talk” piece in the magazine. As it happened, though I took ample notes, I never got around to writing it. | experience failures of this kind often and for a variety of unpredictable reasons. Perhaps I thought Frost had been getting too much newspaper publicity to make a New Yorker piece seem desirable at that moment; perhaps, less rationally, I & hore a grudge against Frost because he had once caused me to do him an injury, and I was punishing him by failing both him and me. In any event, Frost at eighty was a formidable figure, well worth my study whether I wrote about him or not, He had spent a lifetime perfecting himself in the role of a humorous Yankee cracker-barrel philosopher, and of course he was no such thing. Every gesture and glance and modulation of voice gave proof of his skill as an actor; it was like a game to stand in his presence and try to gauge the degree of his being other and elsewhere ~ try to catch a glimpse of the hard-as-nails maker of the poems inside the lovable old stager who went around reciting them. The poems themselves were so often truculent, unloving, and unforgiving (‘the art of life is passing losses on”), while the speaker on the lecture platform and in the college common room was just the sort of genial foxy grandpa who in his younger days would have seen fit to stop by woods on a snowy evening. 

Frost was an exceedingly handsome man. The thickening of his body as he grew older suited him; it provided a proper base for the big, chunky, Roman head, crowned with white hair that appeared to have known only his fingers for a comb. Though born in San Francisco, educated in part at Harvard, and long a resident of England, he had acquired and naturalized the laconic drawl of a New Hampshire hayseed and he moved like one, never in haste. At the time of my interview, I was eager to get behind the skilled actor and come to grips with the cutthroat competitor of whom I had heard. There were stories — the truth of which became evi dent when his letters began to be published after his death ~ that much of Frost's life had been devoted to sedulously puffing himself and putting down rivals. I wanted to hear from his own lips at that late point in his fame and age an appraisal of his ruthless behavior. I had wrung a considerable measure of truth out of Frank Lloyd Wright under similar circumstances, but Frost was too wily for me. Again and again to any question that threatened the embittered and embittering author with having to emerge and face examination, he would reply with a superlatively homely “Oh, come!” His eyes would twinkle, not benignty but with the Satisfaction of having withheld from me something of value. 

Wallace Stevens took care not to become, like Frost, a public figure, He was not good copy for reporters. “Words of the world,” he had written, “are the life of the world.” It is a stunning claim to make for letters, and he was the only writer in America in his time superb enough to make it. In his carefully guarded, magisterial pride, he must have known that he had the right to do so, Not for him an unseemly scrambling to attain a place at the top of the steeple; where he stood on the ground, none stood higher than he. 

And

In my memory is an episode the leading figures of which are Frost and Stevens. I was told it by Stevens and I often play it over in my mind, like a short home movie, for the pleasure it gives me. The time is late at night and the place is Florida. Frost and Stevens, who are staying at the same resort hotel, have been out drinking at a bar somewhere along the beach. Tipsily, in perfect contentment, they are making their way back to the hotel on a boardwalk that runs a foot or so above the sand. They are holding fast to each other, and each is sure that it is he who is supporting his companion. Frost staggers, catches his heel on the edge of the boardwalk, and starts to fall. Stevens strengthens his hold on him, but in vain — over Frost goes, with Stevens on top of him. The two bulky old poets fall in a single knot onto the sand and start rolling over and over in the moonlight down the long slope of the beach to the edge of the sea. 

&

4 —_ > 

Our traditional confusion in respect to people’s identities has extended to and embraced the jobs people hold. Most of us tend not only to put the wrong names to people but to put them in the wrong jobs as well. There are writers that I assume are editors, editors that | assume are artists, artists that | assume are space salesmen on the business side of the magazine. (The latter mistake js a result of the unexpected way some artists dress, in the pinstripe plumage of Madison Avenue.) Our errors are the result of an ignorance that may have come into existence by chance, in the hysteria of Ross’s reckless hiring, firing, and switching about of jobs in the early days of the magazine, but there are those on the staff — our conspiracy seekers? — who suspect its continuance of being cultivated for a reason. To the extent that anything with a structure as meager as The New Yorker's may be said to have “management,” maybe it is useful for the management to leave writers and editors as much in the dark about each other as possible. What was once a mere awkward not-knowing has been transformed over the years into a secrecy imposed from above, and one can imagine that this secrecy has its Byzantine advantages. Ross could never keep a secret for long, but Shawn relishes keeping them and will go to his grave in happy possession of many thousands of confidences, most of them (for Shawn will surely outlive us all) no longer of the slightest importance. I suspect Truax, the master secret-keeper, of having taught Shawn the art, but how apt a pupil Shawn has proved to be! It was a case of one genius pointing out the way to another. Truax is a man SO exceedingly secretive that he would gladly make up a story in order not to be able to tell it to anyone; Shawn does not go that far, but he goes pretty far. Once he said to me, “I hope I am not betraying a confidence, but | have been talking with Joe Liebling and he tells me that he has just finished drinking a full quart of orange juice.” 

& on Shirley J.

Shirley Jackson Hyman wrote under her maiden name. Early in her career, she published a story in The New Yorker called ‘‘The Lottery,” which caused a sensation. It was about a scapegoat chosen by lot to be stoned to death in a community that the author was purposely vague about — perhaps the dreadful events of the story had taken place long ago, in some foreign backwater of civilization, or perhaps (and more likely) they were taking place here in America, in the twentieth century. Hundreds of letters came in from troubled and excited readers, causing a furor not to be equalled until the publication of Salinger’s “Franny.” 

The story made Shirley Jackson famous. She became increasingly preoccupied with witchcraft and claimed, with apparent seriousness, to be able to exercise diabolical powers. Once, when for some reason she was angry with her publisher, Alfred Knopf, she learned that he was journeying up to Vermont to ski. The Hymans had then recently moved to Bennington, so Knopf was unwittingly putting himself within close range of Shirley’s evil eye. She made an image of wax and stuck a pin in one leg of the image, and, sure enough, Knopf broke a leg skiing — broke it, indeed, in three places. Shirley would hint darkly that she had enjoyed a good many other triumphs of that nature. 

Shirley and Stanley had met as undergraduates at Syracuse University. She was a bluff, good-looking Californian, who wore glasses and weighed too much — a classic fat girl, with the fat girl’s air of clowning frivolity to mask no telling what depths of unexamined self-loathing. As for Stanley, he was the classic bright jewish boy from Brooklyn, also wearing glasses and also a self. mocker. He was a disciple of Kenneth Burke and was burning to become a celebrated critic; until that time came, he would earn a living by journalism and teaching. Though without money, they married and set about having a family; soon there were four children and then almost at once, so it seemed, grandchildren. 

The Hymans lived at first in Greenwich Village and later in a forlorn, ill-dusted house in Westport. That house was the scene of many drunken revels, one of them especially notable for its lack of charm. Dylan Thomas was on one of his reading tours in America; somebody brought him to a party at the Hymans’, where Thomas took a shine to Shirley. By this stage of his life, Thomas was no longer the promising romantic boy of the Augustus John portrait; he was a tubby little man, with thinning hair and brown teeth with holes in them. Despite his appearance, he enjoyed a considerable sexual success among suggestible college girls, whom he would approach with the honest if unappealing inquiry, “Can I jump you?” At the Hymans’, a drunken Thomas put the question to a drunken Shirley, while a drunken Stanley sat contentedly in front of his TV screen, watching a night baseball game. Hearing no negative in response to his question, Thomas made a pass at Shirley, who leapt to her feet and lumbered past Stanley, with Thomas in close pursuit. She mounted the front Stairs, ran along the hall, stumbled down the back stairs, and again lumbered past Stanley. Shirley and Thomas made the circuit three or four times before Stanley, irritated at having his view of the ball game repeatedly interrupted by the gross beasts jogging past him, reached out and grabbed Thomas by the belt of his trousers, causing him to fall to the floor, while the winded Shirley mounted the stairs for the last time. 

Shirley grew so fat that it became painful for her to walk; bones in her feet threatened to break under the heavy burden of her body. The last time Anne and I saw her before she died — death came to her in her sleep, of a heart attack — was at a party we gave to celebrate our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. The party took place at our country place in Norfolk. On a stretch of lawn between our house and the surrounding woods, we had pitched an enormous white marquee; metal-lined boxes, ordinarily used to hold potted flowers, were filled with ice and scores of bottles of Piper-Heidsieck, and a very satisfactory occasion it turned out to be. Shirley and Stanley had arranged to be driven down from Bennington. Shirley was wearing a shapeless reddish coverall, which served to exaggerate her size and not, as she must have hoped, to diminish it, and with her sharp writer’s eye she cannot have failed to note that to many of the other guests she seemed an apparition, impossible to account for in their world of strict bodily discipline. The Hymans stayed late, as they always did, drinking and talking. Stanley sat slumped in a cloud of cigarette smoke on a couch in the living room; at his feet were some boys and girls of college age, a couple of Gills among them. They saw the relish with which Stanley in his cups took the bait of hard questions; joyously he lashed out at them, scolding them and instructing them as he coughed and choked and laughed and scattered ashes and liquor down the front of his rumpled clothes. Shirley in the dining room was determined to be helpful — she would assist Anne and me in drawing up a list of all the presents we had received that day. (One of them was the Hymans’ own present, an ingot of pure silver that Stanley had ordered from the Treasury. “A silver anniversary is a silver anniversary,” Stanley said. He was shocked that one of our Norfolk neighbors had given us a quart-tin of homemade maple syrup.) Shirley scribbled away diligently in the candlelit dusk of the dining room, smiling a child’s smile at the accomplishment of the task she had set herself. In the morning, when we looked at the list, not a word of it was legible. 

&

In this country more than in any other that I know of, the relationship between writers and alcohol is a curiously close one. 

I have often asked literary scholars for an explanation of the fact that while in the nineteenth century few of our writers except Poe were heavy drinkers, in the twentieth century almost every writer worthy of the name has been one. Among the dead, we have only to think of Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Lardner, Marquand, Sinclair Lewis, O’Hara, Crane, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Wallace Stevens, O’Neill, Barry, Millay, Dorothy Parker, Hammett, Roethke, Benchley, and Berryman. Among the living, the list is equally long, if not equally distinguished. Surely the provocation to drink that was faced by Melville, James, Twain, and other leading literary figures of the nineteenth century was as great as any provocation we face today, but none of them drank too much and most of us do. It is a mystery, which I am content to leave to scholars; I wish only to be understood as feeling admiration for my colleagues when I speak of their enjoyment of drink and of their willing capitulation to it. The more abstinent of my readers are reminded that “symposium” comes from the Greek word for “drinking party,” and that if getting tight was good enough for Socrates, it is surely good enough for the rest of us. 

With that caveat, I count myself free to mention what happy times Wilson used to have, drinking in the Algonquin lobby, or at the Princeton Club, or in any number of bars and restaurants around town. He had an enviable gift for seeming to remain sober, or, at any rate, for remaining coherent. He would seat himself on a couch at the Algonquin, surrounded by such young folk as Epstein, the artist Edward Gorey, and Clelia Delafield, who, with Epstein and Gorey, had founded an attractive, financially unsuccessful publishing house for children’s books, called The Looking Glass Library. Wilson would order a double martini, or, if he was in his bourbon phase, a double bourbon; that would be followed by another double, and then another. Alcohol banished his shyness and made him eloquent; after a few hours of talk, it was possible that when he attempted to get up, he would fall down. No matter. He was still in command of his beautiful mind, and the abused body must shift for itself as best it could. 

&

Oh, but John O’Hara was a difficult man! Indeed, there are those who would describe him as impossible, and they would have their reasons. At a memorial service held for him shortly after his death, in 1970, his publisher, Bennett Cerf, delivered the eulogy. I proved to consist in large part of stories about O’Hara’s often wounded feelings and about his many broken-off relationships. Cerf appeared not to notice that he was sketching a thoroughly unpleasant likeness of his close friend. It was said of O’Hazra, nobody any longer remembers by whom, that he was a master of the fancied slight. Once it befell that Robert Benchley and his daughter-in-law Marjorie, catching sight of O’Hara at “’21,” called him over to their table. Marjorie said, “John, we’ve just been seeing Pal Joey again, and, do you know, I like it even better than I did the first time.” O’Hara: “What was the matter with it the first time?” 

&

In his teens, Capote served for a time as an office boy on The New Yorker. He was a tiny, round-faced, slender creature, as exotic as an osprey. He and Daise Terry, who was in charge of the office help and who also took charge of running the weekly art meetings, doted on each other. There was a gap of fifty years or so between them in respect to age, but they were a close couple, alike in size, in their relish for gossip, and in their cynical view of other members of the staff. Capote dressed with an eccentricity that wasn’t to become a commonplace among the young for another twenty-five years; I recall him sweeping through the corridors of the magazine in a black opera cape, his long golden hair falling to his shoulders: an apparition that put one in mind of Oscar Wilde in Nevada, in his velvets and lilies. 

The story goes that after Capote’s departure from the magazine it was discovered that he had been serving as a sort of self-appointed art editor. One of his tasks was to open the envelopes that contained drawings sent in by artists from all round the country; when Capote didn’t like a drawing, he dropped it over the far edge of the big table at which he worked. Years passed, and someone thought to move the table. Behind it were found hundreds of drawings that Capote had peremptorily rejected, instead of sending them along to Geraghty and Ross. True or false? Nobody knows, for Capote anecdotes are hard to check. If he didn’t invent the non-fiction novel, he early became the master of the self-serving anecdote, many of them composed out of the thinnest possible air, but told with a zestful self-love that renders them irresistible. 

Moll Flanders

 

I began now to be very wary, having so narrowly escaped a scouring, and having such an example before me; but I had a new tempter, who prompted me every day—I mean my governess; and now a prize presented, which as it came b her management, so she expected a good share of the booty. There was a good quantity of Flanders lace lodged in a private house, where she had gotten intelligence of it, and Flanders lace being prohibited, it was a good booty to any custom-house officer that could come at it. I had a full account from my governess as well of the quantity as of the very place where it was concealed, and I went to a custom-house officer, and told him I had such a discovery to make to him of such a quantity of lace, if he would assure me that I should have my due share of the reward. ‘This was so just an offer, that nothing could be fairer; so he agreed, and taking a constable and me with him, we beset the house. As I told him I could go directly to the place, he left it to me; and the hole being very dark, I squeezed myself into it, with a candle in my hand, and so reached the pieces out to him, taking care as I gave him some so to secure as much about myself as I could conveniently dispose of. There was near £300 worth of lace in the hole, 

And

 Accordingly she came to me, and told me all the discourse; in short, she soon biassed me to consent, in a case which I had some regret in my mind for declining before; so I prepared to see him. I dressed me to all the advantage possible, I assure you, and for the first time used a little art; I say for the first time, for I had never yielded to the baseness of paint before, having always had vanity enough to believe I had no need of it. 

The Darkening Age

 Catherine Nixey

Celsus professes himself baffled by the extent to which Jesus’s teachings seem to contradict many of those laid down in the Old Testament. Have the rules of an allegedly omniscient god changed over time? If so, then “who is wrong? Moses or Jesus? Or when the Father sent Jesus had he forgotten what commands he gave to Moses?” Or maybe God knew he was changing his mind, and Jesus was a legal messenger, sent to give notice that God wished to “condemn his own laws and change his mind.” 

Celsus cannot understand, either, why there was such a ‘reat gap between the creation of mankind and the sending of Jesus. If all who don’t believe are damned, why wait so long to enable them to be saved? “Is it only now after such a long age that God has remembered to judge the life of men? Did he not care before?”* Moreover, why not send Jesus somewhere a bit more populous? If God “woke up out of his long slumber and wanted to deliver the human race from evils, why on earth did he send this spirit that you mention into one corner” of the world — and, Celsus implies, a backwater at that?” He also queries why an omniscient, omnipotent God would need to send someone at all. “What is the purpose of such a descent on the part of God?” he asks. “Was it in order to learn what was going on among men? . . . Does not he know everything?’” 

Jesus’s logistical abilities are, like God’s, called into question. Celsus attacks the tendency for some of his most miraculous moments to be witnessed by the fewest number of people. “When he was punished he was seen by all; but by only one person after he rose again; whereas the opposite ought to have happened.”** What witnesses the Bible did offer were, for Celsus, rarely reliable. Of the Resurrection he says: “Who saw this? A hysterical female, as you say” —and one other person who then went on to invent this “cock-and-bull story.” The Resurrection was therefore either “wishful thinking” or perhaps “a hallucination.”” 

The claim that Christ was divine seems to Celsus a logical impossibility: “How can a dead man be immortal?”* The idea that Jesus came to save sinners also comes in for short shrift. “Why on earth this preference for sinners?” he asks. “Why was he not sent to those without sin? What evil is it not to have sinned?””? 

The arguments go on, hammering at Christianity’s central beliefs. The Creation story itself takes a particular bashing, Celsus disdains the idea of an omnipotent being needing ta piece out his work like a builder, to make so much on one day, so much more on a second, third, fourth and so on—and particularly the idea that, after all this work, “God, exactly like a bad workman, was worn out and needed a holiday to have rest.” 

To many intellectuals such as Celsus, the whole idea of , “Creation myth” was not only implausible but redundant During this period in Rome, a popular and influential philo. sophical theory offered an alternative view. This theory—an Epicurean one — stated that everything in the world was made not by any divine being but by the collision and combination of atoms. According to this school of thought, these particles were invisible to the naked eye but they had their own struc. ture and could not be cut (temno) into any smaller particles: they were a-temnos“the uncuttable thing”: the atom. Everything that you see or feel, these materialists argued, was made up of two things: atoms and space “in which these bodies are and through which they move this way and that.”” Even living creatures were made from them: humans were, as one (hostile) author summarized, not made by God but were instead nothing more than “a haphazard union of elements.”* The distinct species of animals were explained by a form of proto-Darwinism. As the Roman poet and atomist Lucretius wrote, nature put forth many species. Those that had useful characteristics —the fox and its cunning, say, or the dog and its intelligencesurvived, thrived and reproduced. Those creatures that lacked these “lay at the mercy of others for prey and profit... unt! nature brought that race to destruction.” 

The intellectual consequences of this powerful theory weré summarized succinctly by the Christian apologist Minucius Fe jix. If everything in the universe has been “formed by a fort jtous concourse of atoms, what God is the architect?” The obvious answer is: no god at all. No god magicked up mankind out of nothing, no divinity breathed life into us; and, when we die, our atoms are simply reabsorbed into this great sea of stuff. “No thing is ever by divine power produced from noth: ing,” wrote Lucretius in his great poem On the Nature of Things, and “no single thing returns to nothing.”* Atomic theory thus neatly did away with the need for and possibility of Creation, Resurrection, the Last Judgment, hell, heaven and the Creator God himself. 

As indeed was its intention. Thinkers in the classical world frequently lamented the mortal fear of divine beings. Superstition, wrote the Greek biographer Plutarch, was a terrible affliction that “humbles and crushes a man.”* People saw earthquakes and floods and storms and lightning and assumed, in the absence of any other explanation, that they are “done by divine power.’*” The consequence of this was that people tried to propitiate these temperamental gods. Writers such as Lucretius argued that atomism, correctly applied, could blast this fear into tiny pieces. If there was no Creator—if lightning, earthquakes and storms were not the actions of irate deities but simply of moving particles of matter—then there was nothing to fear, nothing to propitiate and nothing to worship.* Including no Christian God. 

In the ensuing centuries, texts that contained such dangerous ideas paid a heavy price for their “heresy.” As has been lucidly argued by Dirk Rohmann, an academic who has produced a comprehensive and powerful account of the effect of Christianity on books, some of the greatest figures in the early Church rounded on the atomists.” Augustine disliked atomism for precisely the same reason that atomists liked it: it weakened mankind’s terror of divine punishment and hell. Texts by philosophical schools that championed atomic theory suffered. 

The Greek philosopher Democritus had perhaps done more than anyone to popularize this theory — though not only this one. Democritus was an astonishing polymath who had written works on a breathless array of other topics. A far from complete list of his titles includes On History, etc etc. Today Democritus’s most famous theory is his atomism. What did the other theories state? We have no idea: every single one of his works was lost in the ensuing centuries. As the eminent physicist Carlo Rovelli recently wrote, after citing an even longer list of the philosopher’s titles: “the loss of the works of Democritus in their entirety is the greatest intellectual tragedy to ensue from the collapse of the old classical civilisation.’ 

Democritus’s atomic theory did, however, come down to us —pbut on a very slender thread: it was contained in one single volume of Lucretius’s great poem, which was held in one single German library, which one single intrepid book hunter would eventually find and save from extinction. That single volume would have an astonishing afterlife: it became a literary sensation, returned atomism to European thought, created what Stephen Greenblatt has called “an explosion of interest in pagan antiquity” and influenced Newton, Galileo and later Einstein. 

In the Renaissance, Lucretius and his atomic theories were revolutionary. In Celsus’s time they were utterly unremarkable. It wasn’t just the fact that Christians were ignorant about philosophical theories that annoyed Celsus; it was that Christians actually reveled in their ignorance. Celsus accuses them of actively targeting idiocy in their recruitment. “Their injunctions are like this,” he wrote. “Let no one educated, no one wise, no one sensible draw near. For these abilities are thought by us to be evils.” 

He went on: Christians “are able to convince only the fool ish, dishonourable and stupid, and only slaves, women and little children.”“? They made overtures to children, cobblers, jaundry-workers and yokels, then dripped honeyed intelleccual poison into uneducated ears, claiming “that they alone... know the right way to live, and if the children would believe ghem, they would become happy.’ Christianity’s lack of inv gellectual rigor worried Celsus for the same reasons that it had  Bothered gaylen. Christian's Celsius wrote do not want to give or to receive a reason for what they believe and use such expressions as do not ask questions just believe. To men as educated as Celsius and gaylen this was unfathomable in Greek philosophy faith was the lowest form of cognition.

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Celsus, however, implied that if people were better educated they would be more resistant to such hucksters as Peregrinus — or indeed to Jesus, whom Celsus considered little more than a “sorcerer. ” The “miracles” that Jesus performed were, he felt, no better than the sort of thing that was constantly being peddled by tricksters to the gullible across the Roman Empire. Ina world in which medical provision was rare, many laid claim to magical powers. Travel in the east and you would come across any number of men who “for a few obols make known their sacred lore in the middle of the market-place and drive daemons out of men and blow away diseases,” and display “dining-tables and cakes and dishes which are non-existent.” Even Jesus himself, observes Celsus, admits the presence of such people when he talks about men who can perform similar wonders to his own. Modern scholarship supports Celsus’s accusations: ancient papyri tell of sorcerers who had the power to achieve such biblical-sounding feats as stilling storms and miraculously providing food.” 

Celsus touches on a sore point here. Early Christianity would have to spend a considerable amount of time and effort policing the boundaries between sanctity and sorcery. A large amount of ink was spilled on the subject of Simon Magus (the Magician). A quick summary of Simon’s life makes it clear why he was so threatening: Simon performed various miracles, gathered a following of people who thought he was a god ~including a former prostitute — and one of Simon’s disciples “persuaded those who adhered to him that they should never die.”® His followers even honored him with a statue inscribed with the words “To Simon, the Holy God” — in Latin, Simoni Deo Sancto. Interestingly, it is not Simon’s supernatural abilities that are denied by Christian accounts —the texts admit he can perform amazing feats — merely his divine right to do so. The criticism seems to be not one of religious fakery but of rel. gious fuel: Simon gains his power not from God but “by virtue of the art of the devils operating in him.” 

Christians debunked pretenders. The ancient world debunked everyone else. Stories of witty atheists were treasured, told and retold. When one man asked a Greek philosopher to go with him to a shrine to pray, the friend replied that he must think the god was very deaf if he couldn’t hear them from where they were.” 

Some Romans had so little patience for Roman religious rites that they discarded them entirely. One moonlit night in the third century Bc, a Roman consul called Publius Claudius Pulcher decided to launch a surprise attack against an enemy fleet. Before he moved, he took the usual auspices required before military action. In accordance with these rites, the sacred chickens were released from their cage. They refused to eat —a terrible omen and a clear sign to all that the gods did not favor this attempt and that it should be abandoned. It was not clear to Publius Claudius Pulcher. Throwing the chickens into the sea he scoffed: “Let them drink, since they don’t wish to eat,” and sailed into what would be a disastrous battle.

There was a strong strain of skepticism in Greek and Roman thought. As Pliny the Elder put it: “I deem it a mark of human stupidity to seek to discover the shape and form of God. Whoever God isprovided there is a God—. . . he consists wholly of sense, sight and hearing, wholly of soul, wholly of mind, wholly of himself.”® Pliny suggested that what divinity there was, was to be found in humanity itself: “God,” he wrote, “is one mortal helping another.” Rome was not an empire of atheists—-emperors were even deified after their death, and their “genius” (divine spirit) then worshipped. Nevertheless, even the emperors themselves didn’t always take this too seriously. The emperor Vespasian is said to have announced the severity of his final illness by declaring: “Gah I seem to be turning into a god.”

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So influential were such tales that, as the academic Robin Lane Fox has pointed out, when a group of Christians were martyred by the Muslim authorities in Cordoba in the ninth century, the accounts of their trials set them before a “consul,” as if this was all taking place in ancient Rome.” Walk around any great European art gallery today and the walls will be peopled by the most agonizing deaths depicted in lovingly — and often alarmingly — graphic detail. 

Martyrs became art. And not always good art. While the earliest—and most reliable martyr tales were often affecting in their simplicity and their honesty, many of the later and more fictional ones suffered from crass characterization, barely sublimated sexuality and lashings of gore. The Victorians, naturally, adored them. In the nineteenth century, hymns flowed from pious pens. “Bright the stones which bruise thee gleam,” ran one verse on St. Stephen, who had been stoned to death, “Sprinkled with thy life blood’s stream.” Another hymned the saints who “met the tyrant’s brandished steel / the lion’s gory mane.”

Four centuries after Caxton, these lurid stories could stil sell copies. In 1895 the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz published a novel that became an international bestseller and contributed to his being awarded the Nobel Prize for litera ture. This seventy-three-chapter behemoth told the story of the Christian martyrs who were put to death by the emperof Nero. It concluded with the observation that “Nero passed on, as a whirlwind, as a storm, as a fire, as war or death passes, but the Basilica of Peter still stands on the Vatican Hill and rules over the city and the world.”” Today, the book has been all but forgotten but its title, Quo Vadis, has not. Hollywood went on to make numerous film and television series by this name. The most famous was the 1951 swords-and-sandals epic in which a rotund Peter Ustinov as Nero smirkingly looks on while Christians, wearing white and looking pious, are pursued by lions in the arena, managing to sing hymns up to the very moment of mauling.” 

But although martyr stories have often made for arresting and compelling drama, very few, if any, of these tales are based on historical fact. There were simply not that many years of jmperially ordered persecution in the Roman Empire. Fewer than thirteen —in three whole centuries of Roman rule. These years may have loomed understandably large in Christian accounts but to allow them to dominate the narrative in the way that they have—and still do—is at best misleading and at worst a gross misrepresentation. During these first centuries of the new religion, local persecutions of Christians occurred. But we know of no government-led persecution for the first 250 years of Christianity with the exception of Nero’s —and Nero, with even-handed lunacy, persecuted everyone. For two and a half centuries the Roman imperial government left Christianity alone. 

The idea, therefore, of a line of satanically inspired emperors, panting for the blood of the faithful, is another Christian myth. As the modern historian Keith Hopkins wrote, “the traditional question: “Why were the Christians persecuted?’ with all its implications of unjust repression and eventual triumph, should be re-phrased: “Why were the Christians persecuted so little and so late?” 

Nevertheless, martyr tales have been hugely influential, not least on Christianity’s image of itself. The academic Candida Moss has argued that in the years that followed the persecutions, Christianity came to see itself, with great pride, as a persecuted Church. Its greatest heroes were not those who did good deeds but those who died in the most painful way. If you were willing to die an excruciating end in the arena then, whatever your previous holiness or lack thereof, you went straight to heaven: martyrdom wiped out all sins on the point of death. As well as getting there faster, martyrs enjoyed preferential terms in paradise, getting to wear the much-desire, martyr’s crown. Tempting celestial terms were offered: it wa, said that the scripture promised “multiplication, even to a hyp, dred times, of brothers, children, parents, land and homesx Precisely how this celestial sum had been calculated is not clea, but the general principle was: those who died early, public and painfully would be best rewarded. 

In many of the martyr tales the driving force is less thy the Romans want to kill—and more that the Christians wan to die. Why wouldn't they? Paradoxically, martyrdom hel considerable benefits for those willing to take it on. One was its egalitarian entry qualifications. As George Bernard Shaw ac. idly observed over a millennium later, martyrdom is the only way aman can become famous without ability. More than that, in a socially and sexually unequal era it was a way in which women and even slaves might shine. Unlike most positions of power in the highly socially stratified late Roman Empire, this was a glory that was open to all, regardless of rank, education, wealth or sex. The sociologist Rodney Stark has pointed out that — provided you believe in its promised rewards — martyrdom is a perfectly rational choice. A martyr could begin the day of their death as one of the lowliest people in the empire and end it as one of the most exalted in heaven. So tempting were these rewards that pious Christians born outside times of persecution were wont to express disappointment at being denied the opportunity of an agonizing death. When the later emperor Julian pointedly avoided executing Christians in his reign, one Christian writer, far from being grateful, sourly recorded that Julian had “begrudged the honour of martyrdom to our combatants. 

There were incitements for Christians not only to die but to die as painful a death as possible. As one soon-to-be martyred Christian irritably explained, the greater the pain, the greatef the gain: “Those whose victory is slower and with greater dif ficulty, these receive the more glorious crown.” As martyr literature developed the descriptions of the deaths became graphic to the point of prurient.

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The Most Dangerous Book

 Kevin Birmingham

—_ . a 4 

Fatherhood was a burden for Joyce. At twenty-three, he was unprepared for the responsibility, and the prospect of dragging children from one impoverished household to another, as his own father had done, haunted him. The passionate life with Nora was fading, and she was indifferent to his work, which was more vexing than if she had despised it. When she saw him copying small scenes into his manuscript from loose sheets, she asked, “Will all that paper be wasted?” 

Joyce’s brother Stannie joined them in Trieste a couple of months after Giorgio’s birth. He took a job at Berlitz, and together they made eighty-five crowns a week. It was on the lower end of the average Triestine salary, but it would have been sufficient for a thrifty lifestyle. To save money, they shared a flat on the outskirts of town with the school’s other English teacher, Alessandro Francini, and his wife. But Joyce was bad with money. Instead of saving the few spare crowns they had, he insisted that they dine out at restaurants, preferably the one with electric lighting. Later in the evenings, he would venture into the Cittavecchia, the old city, passing small wineshops and trundling oxcarts—some of the streets were too steep and narrow for carriages. He was drawn to working-class trattorias and grungy osterte where men shouted at one another in Czech or Hungarian. Joyce drank absinthe and sang songs with the wharf porters before making his way to the brothels. 

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Weaver approached printer after printer only to have each one refuse, sometimes brusquely. “We could not for one moment entertain any idea of printing such a production,” Billing & Sons wrote to her. “We are convinced that you would run very great risk in putting such a book on the market,” and they advised her to scour the text and cut any objectionable passages. Over the next few months, thirteen printers refused to print A Portrait in its entirety. Every time a printer suggested an expurgated version, Miss Weaver declined. 

Pound, who was nothing if not resourceful, came up with an idea: they could leave large blank spaces in the text wherever a printer wished to cut words or passages. Then they could type out all of the deleted portions on quality paper and paste the omitted words into every single copy—“‘And damn the censors.” Joyce thought it was ingenious. The printers, unfortunately, thought it was madcap. 

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In June 1915, Joyce was unemployed, two months’ salary in debt and a Britie citizen residing in enemy territory. He put up his furniture as collateral to purchase train fare from Trieste to neutral Switzerland for himself, his wife and his two children, ten-year-old Giorgio and eight-year-old Lucia. The circuitous route through the Austrian war zone took three nerve-racking days before they arrived in Zurich, which had become a haven for smugglers and spies, forgers and deserters, propagandists and black market tycoons. Food was scarce, especially in winter, when the corn and potatoes planted along the lake were dormant. When meat wasn’t available, people ate boiled chestnuts and frog legs. Instead of sugar cubes, cafés served coffee with saccharine pills. 

The war gave Zurich a surreal atmosphere. In July 1916, Hugo Ball read out the Dada Manifesto in a Zurich guild house: “How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada. How does one become famous? By saying dada. With a noble gesture and delicate propriety. Till one goes crazy. Till one loses consciousness.” Dadaists wearing masks and outlandish costumes performed dances bordering on madness in the Cabaret Voltaire. They recited poems of nonsense words, hiccups, whistles, moos and meows. Dadaism was Futurism with buffoonery instead of violence. What the two movements shared was a desire to start from scratch. In the midst of a war of unprecedented scale, they wanted to begin civilization anew. The Swiss did not approve. 

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docks, where they were alone for the first time. June 16, 1904. The ink of each word in his manuscript made those fugitive moments incrementally more indelible. Ulysses was his final love letter. 

The erotic letters between James Joyce and Nora Barnacle are one of the secret headwaters of modern literature. For it was here that Joyce had an epiphany about language itself: the souls of the commonest words illuminated the fact that the ultimate power of writing is its ability, like love, to render the writer helpless. His most intrepid letters dissolved into abject pleas (“Forgive me!”) and feeble iterations of Nora’s name. Joyce was discovering the paradox of words when he was most apt to benefit from it—he had left Dublin to become a writer only to return five years later as an agent for a short-lived cinema. He had spent those years belaboring a novel that no one had read—that perhaps no one would ever read. But with Nora, Joyce had an audience. She was not a scholar or an aesthete, not a patron or a literary critic, but she was devoted, and she read his letters carefully. It was in their secret exchanges in 1909 that Joyce, who spent so much time gaining mastery over words, abruptly found himself mastered by them. That helplessness gave his diligent craftsmanship a dimension of awe, a fear and a thrilling freedom, a recklessness and an openness that must have felt like endless talking. 

An intellectual gulf separated the Galway girl from the artist, and yet in some ways she became a model for every reader he ever wanted. The “ideal reader,” Joyce would write years later, suffers from “an ideal insomnia.” He wanted people to read novels as carefully, as ardently and as sleeplessly as they would read dirty letters sent from abroad. It was one of modernism’s great insights. James Joyce treated readers as if they were lovers. 

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premises and asked Miss Beach if there was anything he could fix for her, He applied his expertise to a cigarette box from Sarajevo and a wobbly chair. 

Sytvia Beach had impeccable timing. The First World War had created a generation of transnationalists. Young men and women who never thought of leaving their hometowns found themselves serving 1n allied or enemy countries and imagining cosmopolitan lives. The booming American and British economies and the plummeting franc made Paris the perfect cosmopolis. Between 1915 and 1920, the franc lost nearly two-thirds of its value against the dollar, and Paris’s affordability made its charms irresistible. Only fifteen thousand Americans had visited France annually before the war. In 1925, American tourists numbered four hundred thousand, and many of them stayed. There were eight thousand American permanent residents in Paris in 1920. Three years later, there were thirty-two thousand. The influx made Paris’s changes seem like Americanizations. One-way streets and electric signs appeared along with English-language newspapers. There were American churches and grocery stores, Masonic lodges and basketball leagues. Cabarets and café concerts were supplanted by large music halls where expatriates listened to jazz while sipping bright jumbles of alcohol they called “cocktails” without having to worry about federal raids. 

Shakespeare and Company transformed an Anglophone convergence into a community. It was, in fact, a thinly monetized social center. Library membership fees barely covered expenses, and the shop made only one hundred dollars in profit in 1921. The importance of Shakespeare and Company had nothing to do with money. By the end of the year, it was a place where readers and writers could talk to one another, where older and younger people exchanged ideas and where Sylvia Beach introduced writers to editors and publishers. If you wrote or read literature and found yourselfin Paris fora week, amonth oradecade you knew where to go. Shakespeare and Company became a literary node ina cultural metropolis, 

Culture needs locations. It is not a seamless backdrop so much as a patchwork of local phenomena. Cultures have centers, specific arenas where artists join institutions, where people influence and repel one another, where active ties change because of planned and unplanned events and where one can be exposed to people and ideas from Japan, Moscow, West Africa and Dublin all in the same day—cultural centers exist because they are hubs for the peripheries. If modernism had a preeminent location, it was Paris: atop Montmartre before the war and then, when prices became too high, the Left Bank, less than two square miles of narrow streets and wide boulevards south of the arcing River Seine. 

Left Bank neighborhoods were diverse, inexpensive and saturated with cafés, This was especially true of Montparnasse, a Left Bank neighborhood where working-class people, immigrants and political refugees mixed with artists and the bourgeoisie as well as students from the adjacent Latin Quarter. Artists like Chagall and Brancusi drank with butchers at the Café Dantzig because Montparnasse’s major artist colony was next to a slaughterhouse. 

Cafés were more than just the accoutrements of Paris’s cultural life. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were more drinking establishments in Paris than in any other city in the world—one for about every three hundred people. That was three times as many per capita as in New York and more than ten times as many as in London. The sheer number of Parisian cafés facilitated the formation of small groups in uncrowded spaces, which allowed people to talk, plan and argue freely. If the arguments became fierce, the café culture helped with that, too—there was always another one down the street, and their sidewalk access facilitated the chance encounters that allow groups to form, dissolve and reconfigure. Though fluid, café interactions were far from frivolous. They thrived in France partly because they were havens from stringent nineteenth-century assembly laws. Uprisings from 1848 to the Paris Commune to 1919 arose seemingly spontaneously because workers organized in cafés rather than through unions. Left Bank cafés were at once intimate and ephemeral, playful and consequential, semipublic proving grounds for ideas and semiprivate sanctuaries from the state. They were the perfect spaces for modernism and for a book as urban as Ulysses. 

Shakespeare and Company was a hybrid space, something between an open café and an ensconced literary salon, which suited Anglophone patrons for whom café culture was always adoptive. Sylvia Beach’s bookshop gave British and American travelers a dose of the stability that cafés didn’t provide. Several members had their mail sent to Shakespeare and Company (for some writers it was their only reliable address), and Beach used a pigeonhole box to sort their mail alphabetically. The Lost Generation had a home. 

ON a HOT SUNDAY AFTERNOON in July 1920, Adrienne invited Sylvia Beach to an early dinner party at the home of a French poet named André Spire. Beach didn’t want to go. She admired Spire’s poetry, but she didn’t know him personally, and he hadn’t invited her. Adrienne nevertheless insisted and, aS usual, she had her way. Spire’s warm welcome put his American guest at ease, but as they entered, he pulled her aside and whispered something that terrified her. “The Irish writer James Joyce is here.” 

....his r’s trilled upward. The novel he was writing was “Oolissays.” Joyce’s skin was fair and flushed. He had a small goatee, and there were lines etched into his forehead. She thought about how handsome he must have been asa young man. But there was something abnormal about his right eye, something mag. nified or distorted by his thick glasses. It was nearly grotesque. 

The name Shakespeare and Company made him smile, almost as much, perhaps. as “Sylvia Beach.” He was looking for signs of luck in Paris, and these were auspicious names. As she told him about her bookstore, he pulled a small notebook out of his pocket and held it close to his eyes so he could write down the address. It was heartbreaking. Just then, Joyce jumped at the sound of barking from across the road. She went to the window and saw Spire’s tiny dog bounding after a ball. 

“Is it coming in? Is it feerrce?” 

She assured Mr. Joyce that the dog did not look at all fierce, and he was certainly not charging toward the library. He had been bitten by a dog on the chin when he was a boy, he explained, and they had terrified him ever since. The great James Joyce was a blushing, trembling man with weak eyes and a fear of dogs. He was adorable. 

The next day, Joyce walked into Shakespeare and Company wearing a dark blue serge suit and a black felt hat. He had a slender cane and a regal bearing undercut by dirty canvas shoes. He ambled over to the photographs of Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman, and if she wondered in those brief moments what he thought about her small bookshop, her anxiety was relieved as he sat down in an armchair and asked to join Miss Beach’s lending library. He could afford a subscription for one month. 

Sylvia Beach saw Joyce as sensitive and vulnerable. His list of fears included the ocean, heights, horses, machinery and, above all, thunderstorms. As a child, he hid in the cupboard at the sound of thunder, and the tempests seemed to pursue him all his life. Beach remembered him cowering in his hallway during thunderstorms, which he blamed on the preponderance of Parisian radio broadcasts. Beach encouraged Joyce to talk about his troubles, and he had a few to discuss. The apartment that Pound got for Joyce and his family was a small, fifth-floor servants’ flat in Passy. It had one double bed, no bath

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“over-ripe, the thing that burst itself” The “Lesbianisms” of Greenwich Vil. lage, the scrotumtightening sea of Manhattan’s immigrants and James Joyce’s epic of the human body all reminded Quinn of his own failing body and the lethal rupture to come. Joyce seemed to be making an art form out of the many ways death and decay could bloom within the living. Quinn’s mortality pursued him no matter how many artworks he purchased or how many cases ‘won. 

A stirring courtroom argument did nevertheless stave off the feeling of death, and a defense of Joyce against obscenity charges required the sophisticated legal creativity he found envigorating. Quinn had to base his courtroom argument on mid-nineteenth-century British law, for the definition of obscenity that guided Anglo-American jurisprudence in 1920 was articulated by a British judge in 1868: “I think the test of obscenity is this, whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.” This definition of obscenity became known as the Hicklin Rule, and it transformed obscenity law. Instead of targeting pornographers profiting from books that were offensive to “any well-regulated mind,” as the author of the Obscene Publications Act put it, the Hicklin Rule defined obscenity by a book’s effects on society’s most susceptible readersanyone with a mind “open” to “immoral influences.” The purview of the law shifted from protecting well-regulated minds to sheltering ill-regulated minds. Lecherous readers and excitable teenage daughters could deprave and corrupt the most sophisticated literary intent. The Hicklin Rule inspired Quinn to argue that a book couldn’t be filthy if it was unintelligible or disgusting or private. “You could not take a piece of jiterature up in an aeroplane fifteen thousand feet into the blue sky, where there would be no spectator, and let the pilot of the machine read it out and have it denounced as ‘filthy, within the meaning of the law.” It had to “corrupt” or “deprave” a mind, and judges generally read “corruption” as a synonym for “arousal.” What this implied was that if Gerty were ugly—if she were entirely unarousing—she would be legal. Quinn continued: “Ifa young man is in love with a woman and his mother should write to him saying: ‘My boy, the woman you are infatuated with is not a beautiful woman . . . She sweats, she stinks, she is flatulent. Her flesh is discolored, her breath is bad. She makes ugly noises when she eats and discharges other natural functions’”—the mother would be writing ugly truths for her son’s moral benefit. Gerty MacDowell, Quinn argued, similarly sends men running toward virtue. He insisted that Joyce was like Swift or Rabelais: he was not an artist of corrupting beauty. He was an artist of ugly truths. 

It was not clear what, precisely, Quinn found so disgusting about Gerty MacDowell. 

She leaned back far to look up where the fireworks were and she caught her knee in her hands so as not to fall back looking up and there was no one to see only him and her when she revealed all her graceful beautifully shaped legs like that, supply soft and delicately rounded, and she seemed to hear the panting of his heart his hoarse breathing. 

Were readers supposed to be disgusted by Gerty because she is mawkish or because, as we discover later in the chapter, she is lame? One of the Joycean touches is that reality topples Bloom’s fantasy when Gerty limps away pages after her beautifully shaped legs appear. If that’s what makes her unappealing, surely Joyce’s story was at least plausibly filthy under the law. 

A single word in the Hicklin Rule—a word that Quinn studiously ignoreddramatically expanded judges’ authority by making censorship a preemptive activity. Publishers, booksellers, printers and writers were liable not just for corrupted readers but for a publication’s “tendency” to corrupt. By focusing on a book’s hypothetical effects on hypothetical readers, the Hicklin Rule made an obscenity judgment a feat of the imagination—for certainly the judge himself was above such “immoral influences.” Rather, it was his task to determine whether the book would deprave someone entirely unlike him. Judge Corrigan would have to peer into the mind of Ogden Brower’s young daughter (herself peering into the mind of Gerty MacDowell) and imagine her potential reactions. The law required the judge to be a bit like Joyce. 

Quinn could be right about Joyce’s moral lessons and ugly truths, and it still wouldn’t matter. So long as there was some measure—any measure—of potentially corrupting beauty, Joyce’s episode was illegal. Gerty’s charms got Ulysses indicted for obscenity as Judge Corrigan decided to hold the editors of The Little Review for trial. Quinn retorted that his decision proved he had a dirty mind. It was a sly comment—almost a Jab. Was Corrigan aroused when he read the magazine in his chambers? Corrigan merely smiled as he made out the warrant for the imprisonment of Anderson and Heap and set their bail at twenty-five dollars each, which Quinn reluctantly paid. 

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...the god Hermes gives him an herb that will protect him from her spell. The herb that saves Ulysses is called Moly (things like this were no coincidence), Joyce wondered if the word sypAilis had its origins in Circe—perhaps it was Greek: ovgtAta, Su + philis. “Swine love,” the spell that drove men to brute madness. After Ulysses compels Circe to transform his men back into humans, she regales them with a celebration that lasts a full year. Joyce toiled on “Circe” months longer than he planned. The episode became at turns a carnival, a nightmare, a phantasmagoria and a hallucination. Miracles are performed and humiliations enacted. Genders change. Hours dance. Moths speak. Nearly everything and everyone the reader has seen through the day returns as a nightmare. Gerty MacDowell reproaches Bloom (“Dirty married man! I love you for doing that to me.”). Blazes Boylan tosses him a coin and hangs his hat on Bloom’s antlered head (“I have a little private business with your wife, you understand?”). Bloom shakes hands with the blind stripling (“My more than brother!”). “Bronze by gold,” the prostitutes whisper. The nanny goat, dropping currants, ambles by. Father Dolan emerges to uphraid Stephen for the glasses he broke in A Portrazt when he was six years old (“lazy idle little schemer”). The ghost of Stephen’s mother, like Joyce’s mother, appears with green bile trickling from her mouth (he asks her to tell him that she loves him). Bloom’s father, who committed suicide years ago, touches Bloom’s face with “vulture talons.” The long-awaited Elyah finally arrives and begins to dispense judgment (“No yapping, if you please .. . ”). Rudy, Bloom’s son, appears as he would have if he had survived infancy.

The prospects for the publication of Ulysses in the United States were bleak, and Quinn felt genuine remorse. He wrote to Anderson, “I thought of Joyce and of his need for the money and that he was abroad and out of touch with things here, and perhaps not in the best of health. And I remembered how hard it was for serious writers to live in these years and months and days .. . [have done the best I could, and I failed.” Word spread that the Post Office had sent the seized copies of The Little Review to the Salvation Army, where fallen women in reform programs were instructed to tear them apart. 

ANDERSON AND Heap were lucky. No one at the Little Review trial noticed the most scandalous aspect of “Nausicaa,” the obscurity at the heart of the episode: while Gerty MacDowell is leaning back on the rocks, Leopold Bloom is masturbating. The judges, the reporters, the innocent girl’s father and John Sumner himself missed it, which is understandable. Even if one were looking for something so improbably, outlandishly offensive, it wasn’t easy to find. When Gerty limps away, Bloom “recomposed his wet shirt,” but Pound had cut the word wet. A few pages later, the manuscript read, “O sweety. All your little white up I saw. Dirty girl. Made me do love sticky.” Pound crossed out “up I saw. Dirty girl” and, prudently, “love sticky” so that The Little Review’s version was more discreet though less coherent: “O sweety all your little white 

I made me do we too naughty darling.” An especially astute reader might con

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But why should it matter? The end of style seems a long way from FeALAR bombs and the collapse of civilization, yet the critics’ comparisons were trying to capture the novel’s apparent recklessness. To turn style into futility, it seemed, was to lay waste to all foundations. When a well-known poet named Alfred Noyes delivered a lecture in front of the Royal Society of Literature in October 1922, he launched into a familiar diatribe about the unprecedented obscenity of Ulysses. But what infuriated Noyes most was that Joyce’s emergence signaled the degradation of the United Kingdom’s foundational values. Literary critics were casting aside the best of English literary tradition for madmen calling themselves modernists. It was as if an entire civilization were in the process of forgetting itself. 

To be oblivious of English values did not strike Noyes as a matter of losing the past. It struck him as a matter of losing grasp of reality. “The lack of any conviction that there are realities, standards, and enduring foundations in literature has had a deadly effect,” he told the Royal Society. Groundless literary criticism was introducing “elements of chaos” into the minds of the younger generation. 

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He had a point. Narratives are the way we make sense of the world. We parcel existence into events and string them into cause-and-effect sequences. The chemist comparing controls and variables and the child scalded by a hot stove are both understanding the world through narrative. Novels are important because they turn that basic conceptual framework into an art form. A beautiful narrative arc reassures us that the baffling events around us are meaningful—and this is why Ulysses appeared to be an instrument of chaos, an anarchist bomb. To disrupt the narrative method was to disrupt the order of things. Joyce, it seemed, wasn’t devoted to reality. He appeared to be sweeping it away. 

If you were a modernist—if you believed the order of things was already gone—you thought differently. T. S. Eliot defended Ulysses by objecting to its critics’ premise. Life in the age of world war was no longer amenable to the narrative method, and yet Ulysses showed us that narratives weren’t the only way to create order. Existence could be layered. Instead of a sequence, the world was an epiphany. Instead of a tradition, civilization was a day. The chaos of modernity demanded a new conceptual method to make sense of the contemporary world, to make life possible for art. And that is what Ulysses gave us. 

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Joyce spent the years after Ulysses tunneling into a denser, more obscure novel. Finnegans Wake is written in the weltering language of dreams, Words spill out of definitions and syntax like a river breaking the banks, and puns are as destructive as they are playful. Joyce felt as if he had arrived at the end of the English language. 

All the world’s in want and is writing a letters. A letters from a person to a place about a thing. And all the world’s on wish to be carrying a letters. A letters to a king about a treasure from a cat. When men want to write a letters. Ten men, ton men, pen men, pun men, wont to rise a ladder. And den men, dun men, fen men, fun men, hen men, hun men wend to raze a leader. 

This is one of the more lucid passages. Finnegans Wake kept Nora up at night. “Jim is writing at his book,” she told a friend. “I go to bed and then that man sits in the next room and continues laughing about his own writing.” She would get out of bed and pound on the door, “Now, Jim, stop writing or stop laughing.” 

Almost no one liked Finnegans Wake. When Ezra Pound first read a por tion in 1926, he replied, “I make nothing of it whatever. Nothing so far as make out, nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clapp can possibly be worth all the circumambient peripherization."

Dubliners

 From my favorite story

It was Joe Dillon who introduced the Wild West to us. He had a little library made up of old numbers of The Union Jack, Pluck and The Halfpenny Marvel. Every evening after school we met in his back garden and arranged Indian battles, He and his fat young brother Leo, the idler, held the loft of the stable while we tried to carry it by storm; or we fought a pitched battle on the grass. But, however well we fought, we never won siege or battle and all our bouts ended with Joe Dillon’s war dance of victory. His parents went to eight-o’clock mass every morning in Gardiner Street and the peaceful odour of Mrs. Dillon was prevalent in the hall of the house. But he played too fiercely for us who were younger and more timid. He looked like some kind of an Indian when he capered round the garden, an old tea-cosy on his head, beating a tin with his fist and yelling: 

“Yal yaka, yaka, yaka!”’ 

Everyone was incredulous when it was reported that he had a vocation for the priesthood. Nevertheless it was true. 

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A spirit of unruliness diffused itself among us and, under its influence, differences of cuiture and constitution were waived. We banded ourselves together, some boldly, some in jest and some almost in fear: and of the number of these latter, the reluctant Indians who were afraid to seem studious or lacking in robustness, I was one. The adventures related in the literature of the Wild West were remote from my nature but, at least, they opened doors of escape. I liked better some American detective stories which were traversed from time to ume by un. kempt fierce and beautiful girls. Though there was nothing wrong in these stories and though their intention was sometimes literary they were circulated secretly at school. One day when Father Butler was hearing the four pages of Roman History clumsy Leo Dillon was discovered with a copy of The Halfpenny Marvel. 

“This page or this page? This page? Now, Dillon, up! ‘Hardly had the day’ . . . Goon! What day? ‘Hardly had the day dawned’ . . . Have you studied it? What have you there in your pocket?” 

Everyone’s heart palpitated as Leo Dillon handed up the paper and everyone assumed an innocent face. Father Butler turned over the pages, frowning. 

‘What is this rubbish?” he said. “The Apache Chief! Is this what you read instead of studying your Roman History? Let me not find any more of this wretched stuff in this college. The man who wrote it, I suppose, was some wretched fellow who writes these things for a drink. I’m surprised at boys like you, educated, reading such stuff. I could understand it if you were . » - National School boys. Now, Dillon, I advise you strongly, get at your work or...” 

This rebuke during the sober hours of school paled much of the glory of the Wild West for me and the confused puffy face of Leo Dillon awakened one of my consciences. But when th restraining influence of the school was at a distance  I began to hunger again for wild sensations, for the escape which those Chronicles of disorder alone seem to offer me. The mimic warfare of the evening became at last as wearisome to me as the routine of school in the morning because I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures I reflected do not happen to people who were made at home they must be sought abroad.