On FyDost.

Raskolnikov is both a completely realized individual and emblematic of the condition Dostoevsky explored most extensively in the tour-de-force monologue Notes From the Underground (1864), in which the speaker is self-divided: forced to try to connect with his world, but unable to sustain integration. Philip Rahv has written: that Dostoevsky is the first novelist to have fully accepted and dramatized the principle of uncertainty or indeterminacy in the presentation of character. In terms of novelistic technique this principle manifests itself as a kind of hyperbolic suspense—suspense no longer generated merely by the traditional means and devices of fiction, though these are skillfully brought into play, but as it were by the very structure of human reality. , To take this hyperbolic suspense as a literary invention pure and simple is to fail in comprehending it; it originates rather in Dostoevsky’s acute ree awareness (self-awareness at bottom) of the problematic nature of the hit modern personality and of its tortuous efforts to stem the disintegration iy threatening it. h | tk As Rahv makes clear, all of Dostoevsky’s protagonists are marked by a é sense of “spiritual and mental self-division and self-contradiction,” in which he criminal becomes an archetype of a peculiarly modern psychological condition of alienation and self-destruction. 

Lives of the Novelists

 Sutherland 

Spillane himself acknowledged the influence of only one crime writer on his work, Carroll John Daly, creator of the private eye, Race Williams. He flaunted his lack of authorial polish, claiming, mischievously, never to introduce characters with moustaches or who drank cognac because he could not spell those words. I, the Jury introduced the series hero Mike Hammer, whose tough-talking, woman-beating, whisky-swilling machismo answered the needs of the post-war ‘male action’ market and its nervous uncertainties about masculinity now that there weren't Japs or Krauts to kill. Estimates suggest global sales of around 200 million. By 1980, seven of the top fifteen all-time bestselling fiction titles in America were Hammer novels. ‘People like them,’ Spillane blandly explained. The climax of a Mike Hammer narrative invariably features sadistic execution. The most hilarious is in Vengeance is Mine (1950), which ends with the line (just before she/he gets it in the gut) ‘Juno was a Man!’ 

Last of Sennett

_ fo that real Venice, the desire for Christian community lay somewhere between a dream and an anxicty. The impurities of difference haunted the Venetians: Albanians, Turks, and Greeks, Western Christians like the Germans, all were segregated in guarded buildings or clusters of buildings. Difference haunted the Venetians, yer L exerted a seductive power. 

When they shut the Jews inside the Ghetto, the Venetians claimed and believed they were isolating a disease that had infected the Christian community, for they identified the Jews in particular with corrupting bodily vices. Christians were afraid of touching Jews: Jewish bodies were thought to carry venereal diseases as well as to contm More mysterious polluting powers. The Jewish body was unclean. A little detail of ritual in business illuminated this unease of touch; whereas among Christians a contract was sealed with a kiss or with a handshake, contracts with Jews were sealed with a bow, so thar the bodies of the parties need not touch. The very contract Shylock draws with Antonio, the payment in flesh, conveyed the fear the Jew would defile a Christian’s body by using his power of money. 

Ja the medieval era, the Imitation of Christ made people more sympathetically aware of the body, especially the suffering body. The fear of touching Jews represents the frontier of that conception of 4 coramon body; beyond the frontier lay a threat—a threat redoubled 

because the impurity of the alien body was associated with sensual. ity, with the lure of the Oriental, a body cut free from Christian constraints. The touch of the Jew defiles, yet seduces. The segre. gated space of the Ghetto represented a compromise between the economic need of Jews and these aversions to them, between practi. cal necessity and physical fear. 

The making of the Ghetto occurred at a crucial moment for Ven. ice. The city leaders had lost a great advantage in trade, and suffered a crushing military defeat, a few years before. They blamed these losses largely on the state of the city’s morals, bodily vices provoked by the very wealth now slipping from its grasp; from this moral cam. paign to reform the city came the plan for the Ghetto. By segregating those who were different, by no longer having to touch and see them, the city fathers hoped peace and dignity would return to their city. This was the Venetian version of Brueghel’s tranquil dreamscape in Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. 

It is easy to imagine today that Jews had always lived in Europe isolated in ghetto space. Indeed, from the Lateran Council of 1179 forward, Christian Europe had sought to prevent Jews living in the midst of Christians. In all European cities which harbored colonies of Jews, such as London, Frankfurt, and Rome, they were forced to live apart. Rome typified the problem of enforcing the edict of the Lateran Council. Rome had what is now called its Ghetto from early medieval times; a few streets in the Jewish quarter of medieval Rome were gated, but the urban fabric was too disordered for the Jews to be totally sealed in. In Venice, the physical character of the city made it possible finally to realize the rule prescribed by the Lateran Council—Venice a city built on water, water the city’s roads which separated clusters of buildings into a vast archipelago of islands. In the making of the Jewish Ghetto, the city fathers put the water to use to create segregation: the Ghetto was a group of islands around which the canals became like a moat. 

If the Venetian Jews suffered from the struggle to impose a Christian Community on the economic mosaic, they did not suffer as passive victims. The formation of the Jewish Ghetto tells the story of a people who were segregated but who then made new forms of community life out of their very segregation; indeed, the Jews of Renaissance Venice gained a certain degree of self-determination in the Ghettos. Moreover, the city protected a Jew or a Turk against Christian mobs at Lent or at other times of high religious passion, so Jong as the non-Christian was in the space reserved for the outsider. 

...the desire for Christian community lay somewhere between a dream and an anxicty. The impurities of difference haunted the Venetians: Albanians, Turks, and Greeks, Western Christians like the Germans, all were segregated in guarded buildings or clusters of buildings. Difference haunted the Venetians, yer L exerted a seductive power. 

When they shut the Jews inside the Ghetto, the Venetians claimed and believed they were isolating a disease that had infected the Christian community, for they identified the Jews in particular with corrupting bodily vices. Christians were afraid of touching Jews: Jewish bodies were thought to carry venereal diseases as well as to contm More mysterious polluting powers. The Jewish body was unclean. A little detail of ritual in business illuminated this unease of touch; whereas among Christians a contract was sealed with a kiss or with a handshake, contracts with Jews were sealed with a bow, so thar the bodies of the parties need not touch. The very contract Shylock draws with Antonio, the payment in flesh, conveyed the fear the Jew would defile a Christian’s body by using his power of money. 

Ja the medieval era, the Imitation of Christ made people more sympathetically aware of the body, especially the suffering body. The fear of touching Jews represents the frontier of that conception of 4 coramon body; beyond the frontier lay a threat—a threat redoubled because the impurity of the alien body was associated with sensuality, with the lure of the Oriental, a body cut free from Christian constraints. The touch of the Jew defiles, yet seduces. The segre. gated space of the Ghetto represented a compromise between the economic need of Jews and these aversions to them, between practical necessity and physical fear. 

The making of the Ghetto occurred at a crucial moment for Ven. ice. The city leaders had lost a great advantage in trade, and suffered a crushing military defeat, a few years before. They blamed these losses largely on the state of the city’s morals, bodily vices provoked by the very wealth now slipping from its grasp; from this moral cam. paign to reform the city came the plan for the Ghetto. By segregating those who were different, by no longer having to touch and see them, the city fathers hoped peace and dignity would return to their city. This was the Venetian version of Brueghel’s tranquil dreamscape in Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. 

It is easy to imagine today that Jews had always lived in Europe isolated in ghetto space. Indeed, from the Lateran Council of 1179 forward, Christian Europe had sought to prevent Jews living in the midst of Christians. In all European cities which harbored colonies of Jews, such as London, Frankfurt, and Rome, they were forced to live apart. Rome typified the problem of enforcing the edict of the Lateran Council. Rome had what is now called its Ghetto from early medieval times; a few streets in the Jewish quarter of medieval Rome were gated, but the urban fabric was too disordered for the Jews to be totally sealed in. In Venice, the physical character of the city made it possible finally to realize the rule prescribed by the Lateran Council—Venice a city built on water, water the city’s roads which separated clusters of buildings into a vast archipelago of islands. In the making of the Jewish Ghetto, the city fathers put the water to use to create segregation: the Ghetto was a group of islands around which the canals became like a moat. 

If the Venetian Jews suffered from the struggle to impose a Christian Community on the economic mosaic, they did not suffer as passive victims. The formation of the Jewish Ghetto tells the story of a people who were segregated but who then made new forms of community life out of their very segregation; indeed, the Jews of Renaissance Venice gained a certain degree of self-determination in the Ghettos. Moreover, the city protected a Jew or a Turk against Christian mobs at Lent or at other times of high religious passion, so Jong as the non-Christian was in the space reserved for the outsider. 

aaa CE ONE Q”” su me ——_er rae 26S Ww ——s dT ws ~~ ys ~ wv. 

On March 13, 1512, the Venetian Senate, at the behest of Giovann; Sanuto, voted in a decree whose aim was “to placate the anger of ou Lord” by preventing “immoderate and excessive expenditure.” The decree defined moral reform in terms of a new bodily discipline. The decree of 1512 sought to put an end co the overt display of sensual. ity: jewelry was regulated for both men and women; “transparent materials were forbidden and lace could not be used [by women}, Men were forbidden attire which would increase physical attrac. tiveness. Shirts should cover the entire upper part of the body and close neatly around the neck.”!4 

Fifteen years before the Venetians enacted their laws against sensuality, the monk Girolamo Savonarola had led a similar campaign against “vanities” in Florence, after that city had also been defeated by a foreign power in 1494. In Florence, as later in Venice, “inglorious defeat and inexplicable reversal were necessarily seen as signs of God’s displeasure.”!? Like Sanuto, Savonarola had also called for a stricter code of sexual behavior and a renunciation of jewels, perfumes, and silk clothes in order to restore the city’s fortunes. However, Savonarola’s attack on the sensuous body was meant as 4a recovery of the supposedly severe virtues of the early Florentine Republic; the Venetian revulsion against the sensual body could not be framed in the same terms. It was a city whose fortunes were too bound to pleasure; moreover, many of the diseased bodies in Venice were heathens and infidels who could never have a place in a Christian Community. 

The Venetian attack against the Jews intertwined with this revulsion against bodily sensuality. Syphilis was one focus of the attack, buc the ways Jews made money also focused discussion and decision. Jews made money through usury, and usury had a direct connection to bodily vice. 

As practiced in Venice from the twelfth century on, usury co sisted in lending money at rates from 15 to 20 percent, which w less on the whole than rates charged in late medieval Paris. Usury 

contrasted to an honorable loan, which had a lower and also a variable rate of interest. More, an honorable loan was one in which the lender would not collect on the security offered for the loan, if ig would destroy the borrower; instead, as in modern bankruptcies, collecting on a bad loan meant renegotiating the relations between creditor and debtor in future dealings. 

Usury appeared to medieval Christians as a “theft of time.” An even more ancient charge was made against usury: its connection to sex. In the Politics, Aristotle had condemned usury as a “gain out of money itself,” as though money could breed like an animal.!° “During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,” the sociologist Benjamin Nelson writes, the definition of usury “took its shape from the analogy of the prostitute in the brothel.”!? A contemporary of Shakespeare’s declared, in The Seven Deadly Sins of London, that “The usurer lives by the lechery of money, and is bawd to his own bags.”!® The Jews who lent money were all thought to engage in usury, and therefore to be like prostitutes; another Christian critic of the Jews wrote that the usurer “puts his money to the unnatural act of generation.”!? Moreover, the sinful practice of usury among Jews could not be cleansed through confession. In Venice, this economic stereotype now co-existed with the official effort to purify the bodies of Venetians and so recover the fortunes of the city-state. 

The refugee doctors in Venice provoked Christians in the city in an even more direct way. Touch is a bodily experience deeply encoded in Christian culture. “The image of touch, from Eve touching Adam ... through the seduction of Bathsheba or the healing touch of Christ’s ministry that cleanses Mary Magdalene,” asserts the historian Sander Gilman, “haunts all of the representations of biblical images of sexuality.”2° For St. Thomas, the sense of touch was the most base of all the body’s sensations.”! If the touch of Jews seemed like a physical, sexual infection, as Jews became associated in the public mind with the spread of syphilis, Jewish doctors were also called on to treat the disease. The race of the doctor became in the public mind inseparable from the taint of the disease itself. In 1520 Paracelsus railed against these Jews who “purge {syphilitics], smear them, wash them, and perform all manner of impious deceptions”; again in their impurity Jews were associated with the leper’s touch: “The Jews were more subject to {leprosy} than any other people... because they had neither linen, nor domestic baths. These people were so negligent of cleanliness and the decencies of life that their legislators were obliged to make a law to compel them even to wash 

re ‘ Serer TB, 1) 

Up to the eighteenth century, Christian doctors hotly debate where the soul lurked in the body, whether the soul made cont with the body via the brain or the heart, or if the brain and heir were “double organs,” containing both corporeal matter and spiriru essence. While in his writings Harvey clung to the medieval Chns tian notion of the heart as an organ of compassion, by the ume te published his findings he knew that it was also a machine. He insted 

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on scientific knowledge gained through personal observation a experiment rather than on reasoning from abstract principles. Some of Harvey’s adversaries, such as Descartes, were prepared to believe that the body is a machine, just as the Deity itself might operate by ,kind of celestial mechanics. God is the principle of the machine. To che question, “Does the rational (immaterial) soul have physiological functions?” Descartes answered yes.* Harvey’s science led to answering no. In Harvey’s own view, though the human animal has an immaterial soul, God’s presence in the world does not explain how che heart makes the blood move. 

Harvey's researches into the blood prompted other researchers to jook at other body systems in similar ways. The English doctor Thomas Willis, who lived from 1621 to 1675, sought to understand how the nervous system in the body operates in some fashion through mechanical circulation. Though he could not see the visible movement of “nerve energy” along the nerve fibers as Harvey could watch blood pulsing, Willis could study the tissues of the brain. Like Harvey’s pupils he found, by comparing the brains of human beings and animals, that there was “little or no difference . . . as to the Figures and Exterior Conformations of the Parts, the Bulk only excepted ... from hence we concluded, the Soul Common to Man with the Brutes, to be only Corporeal, and immediately to use these Organs.”? Willis’s successors in late seventeenthand eighteenthcentury neurology discovered, by experimenting on living frogs, that throughout a living body the ganglia of nerve fibers responded equally to sensory stimulation; by experimenting on fresh human corpses, the doctors found that the ganglia in human beings continued to respond as did frog nerve fibers, even after the soul had presumably departed the body to meet its Maker. In terms of the neural system, the body had no need of “spirit” in order to sense. Since all the nerve ganglia seemed to operate in the same fashion, the soul might hover everywhere, but existed nowhere in particular. Empirical observation could not locate the soul in the body.4 

Thus mechanical movement in the body, nervous movements as well as the movements of the blood, created a more secular understanding of the body in contesting the ancient notion that the soul (the anima) is the source of life’s energy. 

This shift led researchers to challenge the hierarchical imagery of the body which governed medieval thinkers like John of Salisbury. Long before the discovery of the electrical nature of the movements between nerve fibers, for instance, it had become evident to eighteenth-century doctors that the nervous system was more than a sim

through the body, and the skin is the membrane which allows the body to breathe air in and out. Dirt seemed to Platner the prime enemy of the skin's work; Platner maintained, in the words of the historian Alain Corbin, that dirt clogging the pores “held back the excremental humors, favored the fermentation and putrefaction of substances; worse, tt facilitated the ‘pumping back of the rubbish’ that loaded the skin.”® The movement of air through the skin gave a new, secular meaning for the word “impure.” Impurity meant dirty skin rather than a stain on the soul. Skin became impure due to peo. ple’s social experience rather than as a result of moral failure. 

In the country, among peasants, dirt crusted on the skin appeared natural and seemed indeed health-giving. Human urine and faeces helped nourish the earth; left on the body they also seemed to forma nourishing film, especially around infants. Therefore country people believed that “one should not wash too often . .. because the crust of dried faeces and urine formed part of the body, and played a protective role, especially in [swaddling} babies. . . .”” 

Scrupulously cleaning excrement off the body became a specifcally urban and middle-class practice. In the 1750s, middle-class people began to use disposable paper to wipe the anus after excretion; chamber pots were by that date emptied daily. The very fear of handling excrement was an urban fear, born of the new medical beliefs about impurities clogging the skin. More, purveyors of that medical knowledge lived in the city. “Peasants and physicians were literally unable to communicate within an agreed world of representations of the body and its fortunes,” the historian Dorinda Outram writes; the peasants knew men of science only in the persons of barbers who also served as surgeons in villages, and these barber-surgeons numbered only about one in a thousand by 1789 in France, while licensed doctors numbered one in ten thousand and lived mostly in cities.'° 

Such beliefs in the importance of letting the skin “breathe” helped to change the way people dressed, a change which became evident as early as the 1730s. Women lightened the weight of their clothes by using fabrics like muslin and cotton-silk; they cut gowns to drape more loosely on the human frame. Though men kept the artifice of wigs, which in fact grew more complicated during the eighteenth century, below the hairline men too sought to lighten and unbind the clothing around their bodies. The body free to breathe was healthier because its noxious vapors were easily dispelled. 

More, for the skin to breathe, people had to wash more frequently than they had before. The Roman’s daily bath had disappeared by 

medieval times; bathing was considered by some medieval doctors to be, in fact, dangerous, since it radically unbalanced the temperacure of the body. Now people who dressed lightly and bathed often ao longer had to disguise with heavy perfumes the smell of swear; che perfumes used by women, and the tonic waters used by men, had been compounded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with oils which frequently caused skin rashes, so that men and women gained sweet-smelling bodies at the price of blotchy skins. 

The desire to put into practice the healthy virtues of respiration and circulation transformed the look of cities as well as the bodily practices in them. From the 1740s on, European cities began cleaning dirt off the streets, draining holes and swampy depressions filled with urine and faeces, pushing dirt into sewers below the street. The very street surface changed in this effort. Medieval paving consisted of rounded cobblestones, between which pieces of animal and human excrement clung. In the middle of the eighteenth century the English began to repave London using flat, squared granite flagstones which fitted closely together; Paris first laid these stones down in the early 1780s around the streets of the modern Odéon theatre. The streets could then be cleaned more thoroughly; below them, urban “veins” replaced shallow cesspools, the sewers in Paris carrying dirty water and excrement to new sewage canals. 

These changes can be charted in a series of municipal health laws in Paris. In 1750, the city of Paris obliged people to sweep away the dung and debris in front of their houses; in this same year it began to sluice down major public walkways and bridges; in 1764, it took steps to clear overflowing or blocked gutters throughout the city; in 1780, it forbade Parisians to throw the contents of their chamber pots into the streets. Within houses, Parisian architects used smooth plaster on walls for the same purpose; the plaster sealed the wall surface, making it easy to clean. 

Enlightened planners wanted the city in its very design to function like a healthy body, freely flowing as well as possessed of clean skin. Since the beginnings of the Baroque era, urban planners had thought about making cities in terms of efficient circulation of people on the city’s main streets. In the remaking of Rome, for instance, Pope Sixtus V connected the principal Christian shrines of the city by a series of great, straight roads on which pilgrims could travel. The medical imagery of life-giving circulation gave a new meaning to the Baroque 

The Brothers Karamazov

 Perhaps some of my readers will think that my young man was a sickly, ecstatic, poorly developed person, a pale dreamer, a meager, emaciated little fellow. On the contrary, Alyosha was at that time a well-built, red-cheeked nineteen-year-old youth, clear-eyed and bursting with health. He was at that time even quite handsome, slender, of above-average height, with dark brown hair, a regular though slightly elongated face, and bright, deep gray, widely set eyes, rather thoughtful, and apparently rather serene. Some will say, perhaps, that red cheeks are quite compatible with both fanaticism and mysticism, but it seems to me that Alyosha was even more of a realist than the rest of us. Oh, of course, in the monastery he believed absolutely in miracles, butin my opinion miracles will never confound a realist. Itis not miracles that bring a realist to faith. A true realist, if he is not a believer, will always find in himself the strength and ability not to believe in miracles as well, and ifa miracle stands before him as an irrefutable fact, he will sooner doubt his own senses than admit the fact. And even if he does admit it, he will admit it as a fact of nature that was previously unknown to him. In the realist, faith is not born from miracles, but miracles from faith. Once the realist comes to believe, then, precisely because of his realism, he must also allow for miracles. The Apostle Thomas declared that he would not believe until he saw, and when he saw, he said: “My Lord and my God!” Was it the miracle that made him believe? Most likely not, but he believed first and foremost because he wished to believe, and maybe already fully believed in his secret heart even as he was saying: “I will not believe until I see.” 

&

“Yes, for real Russians the questions of the existence of God and immortality, or, as you just said, the same questions from the other end, are of course first and foremost, and they should be,” Alyosha spoke, looking intently athis brother with the same quiet and searching smile. 

“You see, Alyosha, sometimes it’s not at all smart to be a Russian, but stil] it’s even impossible to imagine anything more foolish than what Russian boys are doing now. Though I’m terribly fond of one Russian boy named Al. yoshka.” 

“Nicely rounded off,” Alyosha laughed suddenly. 

“Now, tell me where to begin, give the order yourself—with God? The existence of God? Or what?” 

“Begin with whatever you like, even ‘from the other end.’ You did proclaim yesterday at father’s that there is no God,” Alyosha looked searchingly at his brother. 

“I said that on purpose yesterday, at dinner with the old man, just to tease you, and I saw how your eyes glowed. But now I don’t mind at all discussing things with you, ard I say it very seriously. I want to get close to you, Alyosha, because I have no friends. I want to try. Well, imagine that perhaps I, too, accept God,” Ivan laughed, “that comes as a surprise to you, eh?” 

“Yes, of course, unless you’re joking again.” 

“ Joking.’ They said yesterday at the elder’s that I was joking. You see, my dear, there was in the eighteenth century an old sinner who stated that if God did not exist, he would have to be invented: S’il n’existait pas Dieu, il faudrait V’inventer.” And man has, indeed, invented God. And the strange thing, the wonder would not be that God really exists, the wonder is that such a notion—the notion of the necessity of God—could creep into the head of such a wild and wicked animal as man—so holy, so moving, so wise a notion, which does man such great honor. As for me, I long ago decided not to think about whether man created God or God created man. Naturally, I will not run through all the modern axioms [aid down by Russian boys on the subject, which are all absolutely derived from European hypotheses; because what is ahypothesis there immediately becomes an axiom for a Russian boy, and that is true not only of boys but perhaps of their professors as well, since Russian professors today are quite often the same Russian boys. And therefore I will avoid all hypotheses. What task are you and I faced with now? My task is to explain to you as quickly as possible my essence, that is, what sort of man I am, what believe in, and what | hope for, is that right? And therefore I declare that I accept God pure and simple. But this, however, needs to be noted: if God exists and if he indeed created the earth, then, as we know perfectly well, he created it in accordance with Euclidean geometry, and he created human reason with a conception of only three dimensions of space. At the same time there were and are even now geometers and philosophers, even some of the most outstanding among them, who doubt that the whole universe, or, even more broadly, the whole of being, was created purely in accordance with Euclidean geometry; they even dare to dream that two parallel lines, which according to Euclid cannot possibly meet on earth, may perhaps meet somewhere in infinity. I, my dear, have come to the conclusion that if I cannot understand even that, then itis not for me to understand about God. I humbly confess that I do not have any ability to resolve such questions, I have a Euclidean mind, an earthly mind, and therefore it is not for us to resolve things thatare not of this world. And I advise you never to think about it, Alyosha my friend, and most especially about whether God exists or not. All such questions are completely unsuitable to a mind created with a concept of only three dimensions. And so, I accept God, not only willingly, but moreover I also accept his wisdom and his purpose, which are completely unknown to us; I believe in order, in the meaning of life, I believe in eternal harmony, in which we are all supposed to merge, I believe in the Word for whom the universe is yearning, and who himself was ‘with God,’ who himself is God, and so on, and so onand so forth, to infinity.° Many words have been invented on the subject. Itseems I’m already ona good path, eh? And now imagine that in the final outcome | do notaccept this world of God’s, Ido not admitit atall, though I know it exists. It’s not God that I do not accept, you understand, it is this world of God's, created by God, that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept. With one reservation: I have achildlike conviction that the sufferings will be healed and smoothed over, that the whole offensive comedy of human contradictions will disappear like a pitiful mirage, a vile concoction of man’s Euclidean mind, feeble and puny as an atom, and that ultimately, at the world’s finale, in the moment of eternal harmony, there will occur and be revealed something so precious that it will suffice for all hearts, to allay all indignation, to redeem all human villainy, all bloodshed; it will suffice not only to make forgiveness possible, but also to justify everything that has happened with men—let this, let all of this come true and be revealed, but I do not accept it and do not want to accept it! Let the parallel lines even meet before my own eyes: I shall look and say, yes, they meet, and still I will not accept it. That is my essence, Alyosha, that is my thesis. I say it to you in all seriousness. I purposely started this talk of ours as stupidly as possible, but 1 arrived at my confession, because my confession is all you need. You did not need to know about God, you only needed to know what your beloved brother lives by. And I’ve told you.” Ivan ended his long tirade suddenly with a sort of special and unexpected feeling. 

“And why did you start out ‘as stupidly as possible’?” Alyosha asked, looking at him thoughtfully. 

“Well, first, for the sake of Russianism, let’s say: Russian conversations on these subjects are all conducted as stupidly as possible. And second, then, the stupider, the more to the point. The stupider, the clearer. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while reason hedges and hides. Reason is ascoundrel, stupidity is direct and honest. I brought the case around to my despair, and the more stupidly I’ve presented it, the more it’s to my advantage.” 

“Will you explain to me why you ‘do not accept the world’?” said Alyosha. 

“Of course I'll explain, it’s no secret, that’s what I’ve been leading up to. My dear little brother, it’s not that I want to corrupt you and push you off your foundation; perhaps I want to be healed by you,” Ivan suddenly smiled just like a meek little boy. 

White's Lives

 Edmund White 2005

The only moment when Moloney would truly pay attention to me was when I reported a dream to him. To remember a dream I had to write it down right away. On Sundays, when we were allowed to sleep in an extra hour, till eight, I had the greatest likelihood of awakening slowly, not to a bell, and of recalling the last episode or two of a dream. 

Moloney was Freudian, I suppose, in believing that a dream was ‘the royal road to the unconscious,’ although he had a different system of interpretation, more Jungian in that it traced the ponderous movements of an endlessly proliferating tribe of archetypes. Now I agree with an Italian doctor friend who ascribes the primacy of dreams in Freud’s system to the Viennese habit of eating cheese after dinner, and who says, ‘Cheese produces excessive neural transmitters; dreams are the downshifting of the brain’s gears.’ 

Like Freud, Moloney felt that one of the analyst’s main tools is picking through the transference. Freud, however, insists that the patient must know nothing concrete about the analyst, so that it will be clear even to him that he has invented everything and attributed it to the doctor. In the classic Freudian transference, the analysand re-creates with his analyst his damaging relationship with his parents; when he recognizes that the doctor has done nothing at all to justify such wrath, resentment or fear, he is forced to admit (and abandon) his habit of endlessly ‘projecting’ bad motives and harmful feelings onto everyone around him. With Moloney, however, the experiment was compromised because ours wasn’t a laboratory-pure isolate. Because he constantly chattered about himself I did know a lot about him, which I had the right to interpret as I saw fit. He might say, ‘Stop projecting!’ but only his authority lent credibility to such an objection. 

He was my first shrink, I had nothing to compare him to and he was my only chance of becoming a heterosexual, of ending the terrible suffering I was enduring as an outcast. He told me so himself; he was certain he was the only qualified doctor around. I contemplated suicide more than once. Never had I met or read anyone who defended homosexuality, although the Kinsey Report had recently done so (I just didn’t happen to know anything about it, since copies were kept out of kids’ hands). 

But even if someone had tried to refute my horror of homosexuality I would have instantly rejected his insinuating proposals, tempting me to settle for second best. I knew that only the most insulting pity and condescension could lead someone to recommend that I surrender to my disease. 

&

Of course I had to confess I missed the fuss, the scrutiny, the accountability of being in therapy. My new shrink-free liberty was as disappointing as the silence and solitude that follows a definitive rupture with a fiendishly jealous lover. I couldn’t help but feel that all my juicy dreams were going to waste, that my most recent sidesplitting lapsus linguae was just one more neural or vocal blip, devoid of humor or even significance. All the wrong notes my brain struck on the high-strung keyboard of my psyche went unheard. I was alone with the suddenly pointless minutiae of my life. 

Two decades later, in the fall of 1993, I started seeing a shrink once again. My young French lover, Hubert Sorin, was dying. I found a gay American therapist, Rik Gitlin, who hailed from San Francisco. Although I had been living in Paris for a decade I didn’t want a French psychoanalyst. I despised Lacan, a double-talking charlatan who counted his money while his patients talked and who invented the twenty-minute ‘hour’ and felt authorized to reduce it to five minutes if the spirit moved him, probably so he could cram in one more lucrative turnover. Lacan had long since been dead, but his influence was felt everywhere for typically chauvinistic reasons — he was France’s answer to Freud. No matter that he wrote incomprehensible gibberish when he wasn’t spouting dangerous untruths or tricking truisms out in fancy words. (Entredeux-morts, it turns out, is a ‘technical term’ that refers to the period between someone’s death and the extinction of his memory among the living. That’s it, folks. Basta.) 

I wanted to talk to my own kind of funny, disabused American gay man, someone who’d laugh when I laughed and who developed his ideas by moving from anecdote to anecdote, like a longarmed ape brachiating from branch to branch. 

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(His grandmother) practiced her religion all by herself in Denton. Today people scorn Christian Science for its unconscionable rejection of modern medicine, but when I was a boy attending Sunday School it was a religion for the rich and ‘progressive’ — all those who didn’t want to be troubled by virgin births and an improbable trinity and who liked the up-todate idea of combining Christianity and science, who thought of Jesus as someone like Plato, and who enjoyed visits at home when they were ill from other perfumed, mono-bosomed ladies, the Christian Science ‘healers’ reading to them in cultured tones from Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health and Key to the Scriptures. It was a murmuring, matronly religion that published a top-notch national newspaper and opened a Reading Room in every major city (run by more matronly volunteers). Now Eddy is treated as a dangerous charlatan whose doctrine brought brain damage to countless children denied antibiotics and even aspirin, and gripped by high fevers that caused encephalitis. We all knew at least one woman who’d been eaten alive by a horridly painful and smelly breast cancer and whose friends would murmur over her closed coffin that now, at last, she was ‘healed.’ Back then Mrs. Eddy was perceived (at least by us) as advanced, intellectual, classy, Bostonian. Nonetheless my mother would always break down and call a doctor if we were seriously ill, but only then. To this day I tend to forget to take prescribed pills and, as Mrs. Eddy would have liked, I am blind to evil. If forced to stare it in the eye I dismiss it as she did as a manifestation of ignorance. 

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If my father regretted sharing his name with me, I was always worried about being confused with my grandfather, the author of three books of ‘nigger jokes.’ More respectably, he’d written Mental Arithmetic, hints about how to do sums in the head. But his real life’s work, or rather the ornament to his life, was composing his joke books, which he published at his own expense. He’d also written his memoirs. Even in his formal writings he enjoyed peppering his sentences with bits of Negro humor: ‘I have tried to keep in mind the philosophy of Uncle Solomon: “‘De littler de ideas a man have de louder he talks!”’ Or, in dismissing his own modest academic career and its shared duties, he would recollect, ‘The “Supreme Potentate” of the lodge, “Dat am one of the little: offices in de whole unscrupulous lodge!’ No, I have been only small cog in the giant wheels of progress.’ In speaking of a difficult period at his college, he wrote, ‘I would characterize the two-year period in the language of the Negro maid who quit her job, “There’s too much shiftin’ uv the dishes fuh de fewness uv dg vittles!”” ’ 

At one point in his short memoir my grandfather wrote: ‘Since I was reared in the West where there were comparatively few members of the colored race, I am often asked how I became interested in Negro stories. In the first place, I had a Southern background. My father used to tell amusing incidents about colored folks in Louisiana. Then about 1890, my father used to read to us the Uncle Remus stories by Joel Chandler Harris, which were first published serially in the Atlanta Constitution, a paper that we read with great zeal. I was well prepared for the fun I was to have later.’ Dean White’s laws for a good Negro story included observing the ‘truths’ of Negro psychology and recounting them in Negro dialect, as outlined in his memoir. His collections, such as Senegambian Sizzles and Chocolate Drops from the South, were his homage to this ‘lovable and amusing race’ and their ‘antics.’ AS a child I learned that my grandfather was a member of the Ku Klux Klan only because on one occasion I had mispronounced the ‘Ku’ as ‘Cue’ instead of ‘Coo’ and Dean White corrected me with a big laugh. My father told me with a wink that Granddaddy should know. 

Granddaddy loved to hold forth for hours. I can remember sitting with him and my father on the veranda of the big hotel in Mineral Wells, Texas, where he’d gone to take a cure. For squirming, sweating, panicky hours he’d tell us his cursed nigger jokes, spitting tobacco into a cuspidor beside his rocking chair and drawing everything out at a snail’s pace: ‘Now, Eddie, did you ever hear the one about Old Sambo who wanted to go ce hunting?’ I’'d frown and squint into the sunlight and shake head no and he’d get lost in a brown study as he tried to resurret advance every twist and turn in his tale. Suddenly his eyes would light up, he’d lift his straw hat, then rescttle it farther back on his hair, which was slick and pressed down from the sweatband. He’d stagily slap his knce with his pnarled, liver-spotted hand — or maybe those spots were just the ghosts of freckles, for he’d told us he’d been a redhead as a lad and covered with big, overlapping freckles, his hair so bright that the boy behind him in school pretended to warm his hands above the fiery locks. The story ended with the first Edmund turning on the boy and knocking him flat. In all his stories there was violence. When he was still a teenager he began teaching in a one-room schoolhouse where there were three boys bigger and older than he. His superior worried about hiring so young a teacher because he wasn’t certain my grandfather could discipline the three boys, but he ended up birching them all, though first he had to box one into submission. He was a lifelong advocate of corporal punishment. 

My grandfather, my father and my Uncle Bill all had a cold selfsufficiency, something approaching smugness except there was no real joy in any form, no eagerness to communicate one’s own importance to anyone else. They were self-contained, distant men, though my father was given to towering, furniture-breaking rages and Uncle Bill was too crazily angry for his wife and two daughters to live with him. My father supported them all, none too grandly, Bill in a trailer where he menaced his neighbors by waving a loaded pistol at them. Twice he had to be hospitalized for getting out of control. Late in life he had brain surgery — was it a lobotomy? All three of them — Bill and the first two Edmunds — picked their teeth and told long, unfunny stories that gloried in other people’s ignorance or naiveté, often tales of happy but dim Negroes trying out big words or learned theories and getting them all mixed up. My grandfather told the one about the black recruit who nodded enthusiastically rather than looking to one side when his commanding officer called out, ‘Eyes right.’ When the officer said, ‘Solomon, I said eyes right,’ Solomon replied, ‘Yassuh, boss, you’s always right.’ 

When he wasn’t telling me funny stories my grandfather was asking me to solve mental arithmetic riddles or poking fun at me while digging an elbow into my father’s side. I'd been assured by my mother that I was a genius, but I couldn’t do the sums in my head. Nor could I laugh at his jokes, or respond to his taunts except by squirming in my seat and blushing with confusion and the desire to disappear. I was supposed to defend myself politely, standing up straight, throwing in lots of ‘sirs,’ but I was too much of a neurotic sissy and too much of a Yankee to know how to behave in the right way, like a manly cadet. My father, I could see, was ashamed of me ~ of my lack of feistiness, of my slovenly rudeness, of my babyish pouting. 

Sometimes I’ve feared that I was dying inside and becoming as gloomily self-regarding as my predecessors — those Roman numerals after our names seeming to denote doom. Once, in my thirties, ] dreamed that I was buried alive inside a mummiform coffin that resembled me exactly. The dream occurred during a period when my work was being rejected and I was living with a young man who didn’t love me - though I was besotted by him, both as a writer and as a human being. I feared the slow extinction of my feelings. I kept picturing my father asleep by day in his shuttered, air-conditioned room, as motionless as Dracula in his diurnal casket. 

Living up North, even in such a conservative, racist city as Cincinnati, my father had learned to keep his condescension toward blacks to himself. He was a misanthrope who slept all day and stayed up all night, working at his blond mahogany desk under a big, tacky painting of ocean waves in the moonlight. The whole time he listened to 78s and later LPs of classical music, everything from Bach to early Stravinsky (he often played a suite from The Nightingale). He disliked the human voice and avoided the opera, though he permitted me to attend the summer opera in the zoo and even volunteer there as a supernumerary. 

The janitor in his office (and in his warehouse) was an ageless black man named Charles, whom he enjoyed lightly chiding to his face and ridiculing behind his back. Charles was a deacon in his Baptist church who’d memorized much of the Bible, his only book but one he knew thoroughly. Whenever Charles quoted long passages from it to me my father would stand behind him winking at me, as if we were watching a performing monkey. Yankee intellectuals, spoon-fed on Freud, often asserted thth Southern whites were afraid of black male sexuality and that was the source of their racism. This supposition has been widely accepted, perhaps because it can’t be verified or disproved, since an entirely unconscious motive cludes study or introspection. Ascribing racism to sexual fear is both demeaning to the resentful whites and flattering to the erotically superior blacks; the matter is complicated by an ambiguity about whether such superiority is real or assigned. I suppose a cynic might say that whites are willing to concede excessive virility to black men as long as they can retain wealth and power; it’s an easy trade-off. 

But I who’ve lived among real racists believe that their condescension is far more withering than sexual envy. For them a black is shiftless and stupid, smells bad and is easily confused, childishly frightened by ghosts, boasting about chimerical victories, clever only in avoiding work or punishment, naturally musical and athletic, quickly deflated, and finally all too happy to obey a firm and fatherly white master. My nephew, who married a Japanese woman and lived with her in Tokyo, told me that his Japanese friends speak of American whites in the same terms — lazy workers, great dancers, undependable friends, good in bed, reeking of foul odors; his wife said it was torture to ride in a closed subway with whites smelling of fermented dairy products. 

Charles, standing in his old work clothes and smelling of sweat and labor, would cite biblical passages, demonstrating how the Old Testament prefigured the New, and my father would always be there behind him, smiling faintly through a cloud of cigar smoke and winking conspiratorially at me. After all, Dad was the boss man who paid Charles thirty dollars a week, with a twenty-dollar bonus at Christmas. 

Whereas Charles might lecture me vehemently when we were alone (one of my summer jobs was whitewashing Dad’s warehouse with him), the minute my father showed up, Charles would shift into a grinning, soft-shoe parody of his own erudition. My father, in his stained tailor-made trousers, his cast-off work clothes, would join in and whitewash with us, but despite his democratic ways Dad’s simple presence always reduced Charles to Steppin Fetchit. In the waning years of the twentieth century, fifty years later, I once happened to take a long taxi ride in St. Louis, and there, suddenly, I had Charles vividly re-created.

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Dad and Kay criticized everyone they came into contact with. Kay was a convinced if not very skillful mimic. All her impersonations of people sounded alike — a high, funny whine and a scrunched-up grimace. She'd seize on something someone had said ...anything — and repeat it in her high-pitched mimicry voice, even if the person in question had an abnormally low voice. 

She and Dad speculated about other people’s motives, invariably attributing to them the crassest, most venal ambitions. ‘Roy is just sticking around,’ Kay said, ‘because he thinks Margaret is a hairress’ (she mispronounced ‘heiress’ as if that were an example of Roy’s illiteracy, though in fact he did mumble an educated English). ‘Well,’ Dad said, ‘you can’t say I didn’t warn her.’ When she’d first announced she wanted to marry Roy, Dad had sent her on a month-long trip to Europe, hoping she’d meet someone more suitable. When she decided to go ahead with the marriage, Dad refused to give her away. Nor did he attend or pay for the wedding. 

Dad and Kay saw nothing but greed, envy and spite on every side, and their only way to think of other people was to patronize or snub them. Dad could be a bit more egalitarian if he was dealing with another engineer on the job or even a garage mechanic. Incompatible myths about society shifted violently about in his head like tectonic plates: some people were better than others, which you could tell by their wealth. A ‘good family’ or a ‘fine man’ or ‘lovely lady’ were always rich, though some rich people were climbers and upstarts and crooks (Jews). On the other hand, one man was as good as another, so long as he was white and Christian and didn’t wear brown shoes with blue suits or grow a mustache or affect a wristwatch or cigarettes or mumble or have a weak handshake. In fact the exact bandwidth of acceptability was extremely narrow. If a man strayed a fraction too far from the precise signal of masculine firmness and attractive modesty he’d reveal himself as a weakling or blowhard. My father was always judging people. Almost no one passed muster. 

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My first publication was a story I wrote about the Oakeses for the Stephenville newspaper when I was just nine. The article was published with a disturbing photo of me, looking like a timid sissy jn short pants, white shoes and with huge eyes, seated with both knees to one side, my head resting against the tawny flanks of our collie, Timmy, like a starlet nestling into a great fur ruff. I looked small and expensive to maintain. 

I remember I didn’t much want to write the article since it entailed asking all our relatives for their recollections of Ma and Pa Oakes. I was too self-absorbed and neurotic to do the research, and I didn’t want to dwell on our Texas past. I'd been born in Cincinnati and was attending grade school in Evanston, Illinois ~ a city I liked with its big Congregational and Episcopal churches no one seemed to take too seriously, since there religion was a pleasant social habit, not an occasion for red-faced fervor. In Evanston there were hundred-year-old elms shading wood houses behind their underclipped hedges. Plain girls straddled cellos at home and practiced for hours. Boys wrestled with one another after school in piles of autumn leaves. Everything smelled of quietly smoldering leaves. Fathers were professors of geography at Northwestern. Mothers got out the vote for liberal causes. But in Texas people were obese and talked with a country twang and laughed at Amos and Andy jokes. Their gardens turned to brown, burnedover patches by June. Those who weren’t violent drunks were Church of Christ, Baptist or teetotaling fanatics. 

My mother’s brother, Uncle Jack, seemed an exception. He avoided church with a quip (‘Hard to smoke in there’). A short little plump man, Uncle Jack was shaped like Tweedledum, with curly brown hair that grew low on his forehead and an unemphatic mutter people found killingly funny. He was the president of the Farmers’ First National Bank, a position he’d reached, it seemed, merely by murmuring wisecracks, which he delivered with just a pained pass at a smile. He never looked at the person he was addressing. His eyes always rolled here and there like a dented metal ball ricocheting its lazy way down through a pinball machine ~ though every time it collided with something it lit the machine up 

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 Certainly no japanese restaurant would have dreamed of serving raw fish back then. My mother and I were left in stocking feet alone at a table in a high-ceilinged tatami room of our own with smudged scrolls on the walls and rice paper glued to the windowpanes, filtering the already shadowy Chicago winter light. Beside us the vegetables and beef strips were cooking down in a thick, sweet-smelling sauce. 

Although we were alone my mother and I dared not speak to each other above a whisper. The waitress came back periodically to fool with the setting on the tabletop stove and to feed the iron skillet with more chopped cabbage. The bubbling, the filtered light, the rich smells, the sound of tires outside sluicing through the melting snow — all tranquilized us, though when we’d arrived we'd been nearly hysterical with United Nations pep. 

That meal had followed a disappointing service at the Chicago Buddhist Church on the South Side. Mother had encouraged Margaret and me to have our own religion, whatever it might be (perhaps this ecumenical spirit she’d acquired while writing her , thesis on children and religion). I’d gone every afternoon for weeks to the neo-Gothic library at Northwestern to read Max Miiller’s Sacred Books of the East. I'd dipped into the Torah, the Koran and the Upanishads. But I’d been gripped by the Buddhist sutras. No matter how pessimistic I might become, I could never begin to approach the extent of Gotama’s nihilism. He saw the self as an illusion, desire as the root of all evil, rebirth as the worst of fates and extinction as the only goal. In this world the most and the least one could expect was sickness, old age and death. Whereas the Hindus posited an irreducible soul, the atman, the Buddh, preached the doctrine of ‘no soul,’ anatta. In an unpeopled univers, full of nothing but illusion and suffering, not a single entity existe certainly no deity. 

This is realism, I thought with grim satisfaction. No interceding ranks of angels, no accountancy of sins and good deeds, no heavep nor hell, no nosy-parkering into other people’s bedroom hijinks The opposite of hateful, intolerant Christianity. 

But when we arrived at the Chicago Buddhist Church in g rundown South Side neighborhood nearly thirty miles from where we lived we encountered a group of smiling, waving Japanese men, women and children worshiping Amida, the Lord of the Western Paradise, a personage very much like a Catholic saint. He was a bodhisattva in the (to my eyes at least) ‘degraded’ form of Mahayana Buddhism, someone pledged to stave off the horrors of rebirth and the bleak solitude of nirvana by spiriting his followers away to a paradise where they could struggle toward enlightenment in comfort and in the busy, bustling society of likeminded souls. 

I was bitterly disappointed — by the organ and hymns that sounded suspiciously Methodist, by the flutter of arriving parishioners in big hats exchanging kisses, by the depressingly secular announcements of upcoming bingo games and covered-dish suppers. I fled. Where I’d expected a bald abbot stony with meditation, a trickle of sandalwood smoke and a superb indifference to all forms of striving, I'd found a congregation of ordinary folks besotted in the ordinary way with the little pains and little rewards of everyday life. 

‘I thought it was nice,’ Mother said, puzzled by my contempt. 

‘You liked it because it was just like some dismal Christian service,’ I said nastily. 

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Freud hypothesized that many of civilization’s greatest accomplishments, including acts of altruism, were powered by repressed homosexuality. I thought of that when I first resurfaced in Manhattan. Now that no one would dream of repressing anything, | said to myself, civilization is crumbling, kindness has vanished, and altruism has evaporated. Certainly greed had become more naked, hearts were harder and there was no repressed desire investing music, painting or the dance. To be sure my own interest in the arts struck me as evidence against the veracity of Freud’s theory, for! had never failed to act on my erotic impulses. Repression had played no role in my acquisition of culture or my accomplishments. Maybe gay life had just been dumbed down like the rest of American society. A duller cultural edge and the new Puritanism didn’t add up to an attractive combination for an aesthete and se¥ addict like me. 

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As a homosexual growing up in Cincinnati and Chicago and Texas and Michigan in the 1950s, ‘Europe’ represented a benign and mysterious alternative to the beastly oppression we knew at home, a time in the States when we were persecuted by shrinks on one side and priests on the other and deliberately entrapped by the police, the three institutions that corresponded to the three prevailing interpretations of homosexuality: as mental illness, as sin and as crime. | 

Although we ourselves had no other available model, we still could dimly hold out for ‘tolerance’ or even ‘decadence,’ and these qualities, piquant and somehow aristocratic, we located in ‘Europe.’ [ remember when I was fifteen discussing Julius Caesar with Fred Mitchell, an abstract expressionist painter who taught at the art academy next door to my boarding school. Mr. Mitchell, a Southerner in his thirties who thrived on ambiguity and the unspoken, told me with a little smile that Caesar had ‘married’ several of his soldiers and that ‘people in Rome are still talking about it.’ Imagine all that said in a nearly inaudible Tidewater drawl. 

I found his comment electrifying because a respected artist and teacher was referring to my most shameful vice lightly, and as if it were the most recent gossip. Even more extraordinary, he was suggesting that Caesar (the boring author of The Gallic Wars which I’d had to translate in class) had an off-color reputation that was being kept alive by the Romans of today. Europe, it seemed, was a place where homosexuality was joked about and rumors Were passed down from one millennium to the next. 

Tynan

 On Bea Lillie

The traditional comic formula is: Tell them what you’re going to do; do it; then tell them you’ve done it. Miss Lillie’s is: Tell them what you might do; do something else; then deny having done it. Even the famous purchase of the double-damask dinner napkins embodies her basic theme: the utter futility of the English language. Nobody is a more devout anthologist of the whimpers, sighs, and twitters that the human race emits in its historic struggle against intelligibility.

A Caribbean Mystery and Murder with Mirrors

 He went on: “And witches, you know. There’s a lot of interesting things known now about witches. Why did they always confess, why did they admit so readily that they were witches, that they had flown on broomsticks to the Witches’ Sabbath?” 

“Torture,” said Miss Marple. 

“Not always,” said Jackson. “Oh, yes, torture accounted for some of it, but they came out with some of those confessions almost before torture was mentioned. They didn’t so much confess as boast about it. Well, they rubbed themselves with ointments, you know. Anointing they used to call it. Some of the preparations, belladonna, atropine, all that sort of thing; if you rub them on the skin they give you hallucinations of levitation, of flying through the air. They thought it all was genuine, poor devils. And look at the Assassins—medieval people, out in Syria, the Lebanon, somewhere like that. They fed them Indian hemp, gave them hallucinations of paradise and houris, and endless time. They were told that that was what would happen to them after death, but to attain it they had to go and do a ritual killing. Oh, I'm not putting it in fancy language, but that’s what it came to.” 

“What it came to,” said Miss Marple, “is in essence the fact that people are highly credulous.” 

“Well, yes, I suppose you could put it like that.” 

“They believe what they are told,” said Miss Marple. “Yes, indeed, we’re all inclined to do that,” she added. Then she said, “Who told you these stories about India, about the doping of husbands with datura?” and she added sharply, before he could answer, “Was it Major Palgrave?” 

Jackson looked slightly surprised. “Well—yes, as a matter of fact, it was. He told me a lot of stories like that. 

Afterwards read another Marple, Murder with Mirrors, in which the murderers flee being exposed and conveniently drown one another in a nearby pond. 

The perpetrators of the murder were painfully apparent from the nearly the moment of its commission. The motive was fairly easy to guess. There were no mirrors. Anywhere. 

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.