Sparta

 From Persian Fire

For it was the goal of instructors not merely to crush a boy’s individuality, but to push him to startling extremes of endurance, discipline and impassivity, so that he might prove himself, supremely, as a being reforged of iron. When, at the age of seven, a young Spartan left his home to live communally with other boys, it was more than his sense of family that was being fractured and reset: the very notion that he possessed a private identity was, from that moment on, to be placed under continuous assault. Spartans termed his training the ‘agoge’, a word more conventionally applied to the raising of cattle. His supervisor was a ‘paidonomos — literally, a ‘herder of boys’. Denied adequate rations, the young Spartan would be encouraged to forage from the farms of neighbouring Lacedaemonians, stalking and stealing like a fox, refining his talent for stealth.* Whether in the heat of summer or in the cold of winter, he would wear one style of tunic, identical to that worn by his fellows, and nothing else, not even shoes. Strict limits on his conversation would be set, to foster the terse style of speech known all over Greece as ‘Laconic’. Yet, even as a young Spartan submitted to these ferocious and uniform disciplines, he was continuously being studied, compared and ranked: ‘As the boys exercised, they would always be spurred on to wrestle and contend with one another, so that the elders could then better judge their characters, their courage, and how well they were likely to perform when the time came for them, finally, to take their place in the line of battle. Even girls might get in on the act: the boys would routinely be ordered to strip before them, to be subjected to either praise or mocking giggles. A true Spartan never had anything to hide. 

A lesson most alarmingly brought home to a boy when, at the age of twelve, he became legal game for cruising. Pederasty was widely practised elsewhere in Greece, but only in Sparta was it institutionalised — even, it is said, with fines for boys who refused to take a lover. Girls too, it was rumoured, if not married, might expect to be sodomised repeatedly during their adolescence.* In-both cases, the justification was surely the same: nowhere was so private, so intimate, but the state had the right to intrude there. Yet, traumatic though the experience of submitting must have been for most young Spartans, there were, for boys at least, some significant compensations. Not only was it acceptable for a lover to serve his young boyfriend as a patron; it was positively expected. The more honoured a citizen, and the better connected, the more effectively he could further his beloved’s career. Elite would advance elite: so it was that a boy, yielding to the nocturnal thrustings of a battle-scarred older man, might well find the secret well-springs of Spartan power opened up to him. 

Certainly, by the time he finished the agoge, a young man would know for sure whether he had been marked out for future greatness. To the most promising graduates was granted the honour of one final, bloody challenge. Enrolled into a crack squad known as the Crypteia, they would be sent into the mountains, armed only with a single dagger each, and ordered to live off the land. This period of exile from their city, however, was much more than a mere endurance test. Travelling alone, each member of the Crypteia would inevitably cross the Taygetos range and slip into Messenia. There, advancing soundlessly by night, as every graduate of the agoge had been trained to do, they would be expected to prove themselves as killers. Of all men, it was said, only the Spartans denied that homicide was necessarily a crime; for it was, in their opinion, perfectly legitimate to cull their slaves. Nervous lest the gods be provoked against them, however, the Spartans would proclaim each year a state of war against the helots, a manoeuvre of typically murderous circumspection, calculated to spare the Crypteia any risk of blood pollution.” How else, after all, save by careful pruning of the most able Messenians, could the Spartans hope to breed natural serfs? Just as they condemned to the Apothetae the dregs of their own city, so they aimed to extinguish any spark of talent or rebellion in their slaves. Only the truly servile could be permitted to reproduce. Individual masters who failed to stunt the growth and aptitudes of their helots would be fined. The matter would be brought to the attention of the elders. The Crypteia, tipped off, would then glide in and set about its business. 

Hitman though he was, the young Spartan who brought his dagger to the throat of a condemned Messenian was performing something more than an execution: it was almost an initiation rite, a deed of magic. As he felt his blade slice deep, he was privileged to know himself an acolyte of the profoundest mysteries of his state. No Spartan could Jead his people who had shrunk from killing in cold blood. The elders who gave the Crypteia its commissions were simultaneously putting its members to the test. Only once he had smelled for himself the hatred of a hunted Messenian, and seen it in his eyes, could a Spartan truly appreciate the full extent of his city’s peril. Only once he had murdered could he truly appreciate what was required to keep it at bay. 

Such, for the agent of the Crypteia, was the particular knowledge which he put on with his power. Not that ignorance could be permitted any Spartan, of course ~ whether male or female. Helen, it was said, while still a little girl, had been surprised as she danced before the sanctuary of Artemis, and raped. Messenian raiders, prior to the enslavement of their country, had similarly violated a whole chorus of dancers. And they might do so again, given half a chance. Every Spartan girl knew what her fate would be should her city’s whip-hand fail. It was left to her brothers, however, to test this certainty to the limits of their endurance. Every citizen, as part of his boyhood training, had learned what it was to suffer the lash. With their rough tunics slashed to ribbons, and their shoulders scarred and bleeding, the children of Lacedaemon's masterrace might sometimes, after rituals that demanded a whipping, look little better than the meanest, lowest born slaves. And yet they had proved themselves the very opposite of servile. The whip which degraded the helot served to ennoble the Spartan boy. ‘Brief suffering leads to the joy of lasting fame,” Lycurgus had instructed his people. It was those who endured the lash with the sternest fortitude who went on, no doubt, to be enrolled in the Crypteia. The master was most the master who could best endure the toils ofa slave. 

An insight which governed the Spartan throughout hus adult hfe. Although a graduate of the agoge would never again have to endure the humiliation of a whipping, his life continued to be trammelled by restrictions that a citizen of any other Greek state would have found insufferable. A Spartan could not stand for office or even control hs own finances until he was thirty. Rather than live with his wife, he would be obliged instead to sneak from his barracks for hurried, animal couplings. He might bear the scars of battle, but a young man who came to blows with another could expect to be treated by his elders hke a naughty child — or, indeed, a slave. Symbolic of his ambiguous status was the tact that a Spartan warrior in his twenties would wear his hair short, just like a helot. So too, even more shockingly, would a Spartan bride.* 

in Greece, the only women generally seen with shaven beads were slave-girls shorn af their tresses for wigs, but it was typical of the many peculiarities of the Spartans that they should have regarded what was elsewhere a mark of humiliation as an emblem of matronly pride. Having been rawed to breed, the newly married Spartan woman ~ a fit, healthy and already anally proficient virgin could at last embrace her destiny. Society encouraged her all the way. 

&

That the Spartans should have had a particular admiration for Apollo was hardly surprising. Just as their ancestors had migrated to Lacedaemon, so the archer-god had come to Delphi as an invader from the north. Leaving the halls of Olympus behind him, Apollo had travelled the world ‘with his far-shooting bow, searching for an oracle that might speak to mortal men’.® He had found it where a monstrous python, bloated upon human prey, slumbered by a sweetflowing, icy spring, its coils heaped against the sheer rock of Parnassus, while below it eagles soared over a lonely and dappled gorge. A single shot from his deadly bow had been sufficient to end the monster’s reign, and from that moment on it was Apollo who had ruled as lord of Delphi. Sprigs of laurel planted by the god served to purify the sanctuary. In time, men raised a temple there, out of boughs cut from the laurel bushes, it was said, and Apollo had uttered prophecies through the rustling of the leaves. Since the youth of the god, foundation had succeeded foundation. The second had been built of fern-stalks, the third of wax and feathers, the fourth of bronze — for the history of Apollo’s oracle was a fabulous one, and marked by ceaseless change. In time, the laurel leaves themselves had fallen silent, and the god chose to speak instead through the ecstasies of a young priestess, the Pythia, in whose title could be heard an echo of Apollo’s long-rotted foe. Around 750 ac, when Delphi’s history first begins to emerge from myth, a temple of stone was raised. Shortly afterwards, it appears, it was decided that only an old woman should be appointed to serve as the Pythia, although she was still, as a symbol of purity, obliged to wear a young girl’s dress. In 548 Bc, the temple burned to the ground. Still, amid all this turmoil, the voice of Apollo spoke on. 

There was no other oracle to compare with it. Indeed, such was the prestige of Delphi that it became, of all the many temples founded by the Greeks, the only one to be served by a body of full-time priests. While the notion of such a cadre would hardly have raised eyebrows amid the great temple bureaucracies of the East, it was, for the Greeks, a decided innovation. Travellers’ tales of the bizarre doings of Egyptian or Babylonian priests never ceased to amaze them. The news that in Persia only a Magus could preside over a sacrifice was greeted with particular astonishment. In Greece, anyone, even women, even slaves, could sacrifice. Only the Delphians, far removed in their mountain valley from all other possible forms of income, made a living from the proceeds of their shrine. ‘Guard my temple,’ Apollo had instructed them, ‘receive the crowds of men.’?’ The Delphians, obeying him, had lavishly cashed in. Other cities, far from begrudging the priests their professionalism, were happy to collude in it. The arrangement suited everyone. What better assurance could there be of the priests’ even-handedness than that they charged everyone the same flat fee? When rival factions turned to the oracle for adjudication, they needed to be able to trust the words of the god absolutely. No one could afford to see Delphi’s neutrality compromised. When, in 595 ac, the neighbouring city of Crisa attempted to annex the oracle, the whole of Greece had been shocked into ruthless action. A great league of cities had marched to the god’s defence. The norms of civilised behaviour, which banned chemical warfare as a crime against the gods, had been temporarily suspended: poison had been added to Crisa’s water supply, so that ‘the defenders were afflicted by violent bouts of diarrhoea, and had to keep rushing from their positions’.” The walls were stormed, the impious city wiped out. Centuries later, the plain on which Crisa had once stood remained barren and bare of trees, ‘as though labouring under a curse’. 

The terrifying lesson had been learned. Delphi was either an oracle for all the Greeks or it was nothing. Sacred flames rose eternally upon the public altar of the temple in illustration of precisely this truth: tended busily by priestesses, fed with pine and laurel wood, never permitted to go out, they blazed as the hearth-fire of the whole of Greece. 

Yet even those who were not Greek might approach Apollo and hope for an answer. Delphi’s claims to holiness were on a truly global scale. In the beginning, it was said, when Zeus had first come into the kingdom of the universe, he had sought to measure the scale of his inheritance by releasing one eagle from the east and one from the west, and watching them fly, to locate the centre of the world. The two birds had met at Delphi, and a great egg of rock, the ‘Navel Stone’, or Omphalos, still marked the spot. It was only natural, then, that the priests should have welcomed foreign supplicants as merely their temple’s due. When Croesus, for instance, faced with the growing threat of Persia, had sought divine guidance, he had sent messengers to all the world’s leading oracles, with instructions, on a given day, to ask what their master was doing back in Lydia. Only Delphi had provided the right answer: that Croesus was boiling up a lamb and tortoise casserole. From that moment on, the King of Lydia had become the oracle’s most generous patron. Unparalleled gifts of gold, mixing bowls, ingots and statues of lions had been sent to join the treasures that already cluttered the shadows of the temple. Apollo, in return, had offered Croesus foreign-policy advice. It had been upon the suggestion of the god, for example, that the King of Lydia had formed his alliance with the Spartans. 

Not that this had saved him in the long run, of course. If Apollo’s advice often appeared clear, then it was not always so. ‘The lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor keeps silent, but offers hints.” Those who misinterpreted the god, who failed to recognise the ambiguities which might haunt his pronouncements, who blundered into actions on the basis of what they wanted to believe, would invariably come to ruin. Croesus, having grown reliant upon Apollo's counsel, had ultimately been deceived by his own vainglory and obtuseness into disaster. Pondering whether to attack Cyrus, he had consulted Delphi and received the answer that a mighty empire would fall if he did. Croesus had duly gone to war and seen his own empire fall. 

When Apollo was accused of ingratitude towards his benefactor, his priests at Delphi retorted that the god, while he was unable to avert the course of destiny, had granted to Croesus three more years of prosperity than had been allotted him by Fate. This explanation was readily believed: kings had always been the favourites of the gods. Such was clear from the stories of ancient times, when the heroes had invariably possessed roval blood. But what was acceptable in legend had become, first to the aristocracies of the various Greek states and then to every class of citizen, increasingly offensive. The claim that one mortal might be privileged over his fellows did not, as in the East, serve to legitimise the concept of monarchy, but rather to tarnish it — for no Greek cared to imagine that he might naturally be a slave. ‘Only know the yoke of servitude,’ it was said, ‘and Zeus, the thunderer, will rob you of half your virtue.’ It was all very well, perhaps, for the servile peoples of the East to live like women with a despot’s foot upon their necks ~ but not for a free-born Greek. Kings, unless safely confined to remote and effeminate lands, properly belonged in ancient poems. Only as a title awarded to certain priests did the rank, in some Greek cities, maintain a ghostly after-life — for the intimacy which it had once been the privilege of royalty to share with the gods could not be lightly set aside, and venerable ceremonies might still depend upon it. Even as a priest, however, a ‘king’ remained a figure of danger. The charisma natural to his title had to be scrupulously trammelled. No powers could be permitted him beyond the religious. Even his term of office, in a city such as Athens, was sternly limited to one year. 

How extraordinary, then, it might be thought, that in Sparta, of all states, where the communal was everything, kingship should not merely have endured but been illuminated by a sacral, haunting glow. Other Spartans were homoioipeers — but royalty was something more. As a boy a crown prince was exempted from the agoge. As commanderin-chief, a king led his countrymen into war. As head of state, he stood for no man in the city; nor was anyone permitted to touch him or even brush against him in public. Most eerie of all, and what truly set him apart from his countrymen, was his intimacy with the gods. Certainly, no mortal in the world could look for a closer relationship with the Delphic oracle than that enjoyed by a Spartan king. Each one, in an arrangement unparalleled in any other state, had two ambassadors, the ‘Pythians’, on permanent stand-by, ready upon a royal gesture to gallop north and put questions to Apollo. Such were the privileges of breeding. The kings were, after all, the distant relatives of Zeus. 

Their countrymen, naturally, looked to benefit from such a bloodline. Respectful of royalty though they were, the Spartans did not indulge it out of a craven servility. Just the opposite. While other Greeks flinched from the mystique of kingship, the Spartans, with that blend of common sense and superstition so typical of all their policy, looked to exploit it for their own ends. If the kings had the ears of Apollo, then the state had the ruling of the kings. Like magnificent but captive predators, they were kept, in the strictest Spartan manner, under close and ceaseless watch. By each other; by the Gerousia; by the mass of the people. Even when, as was increasingly the case by the late sixth century Bc, the kings were absent from the city on campaigns, the surveillance never slackened. 

In fact, if anything, the screws began to tighten. As Spartan greatness flourished, and the opportunities for foreign adventures with it, a once insignificant magistracy, the Ephorate, began to operate as both inquisitor and guardian of the kings. Five in number, the ephors were elected annually from the whole assembly of citizens, and so could legitimately claim to represent the people. A king, although he might ignore their first and second summons, was obliged to rise and answer their third. This calling of royalty to account by the Ephorate, a ritual which would occur at least once a month, represented a piquant reversal of roles. In the beginning, it was said, the ephors had served the kings as their servants, but over the years, by a secretive and cunning process, they had advanced to become their masters’ shadows. Faceless in comparison to the kingship they may have been, and yet they too had unearthly powers. They would meet in darkness and trace the future in the sky. Should it be discovered there that a king was ‘an offender against the gods,” the ephors had the right to dismiss him from his throne. They could then take it upon themselves to do as the king himself traditionally did, and dispatch messengers to Delphi. The oracle, it was assumed, would confirm the judgement of the heavens. 

87 

Legs

 ...God-figure in the Masonic symbology. on the wall in the upstairs bathroom. Alice raised this issue. Obviowsly a recurring one. ‘It sees you, Alice,”’ Jack told her, “even when you pee.” 

"My God doesn’t watch me when I pee.” Alice said. "My God Is a gentleman.”

 "As I get it,’ Jack said, "Your God is two gentlemen and a bird.” 

Low Man on a Totem Pole

 For all her reputation as a coolheaded businesswoman, Sally is high strung, nervous, inordinately proud of he fame and given to fits of anger in which she has been known to scream piercingly. These angry demonstration, usually have a natural climax when, no matter what the provocation, Sally cries out in a voice redolent of ham, I'll sue!” 

And for all her fame as a sharp bargainer, she has been taken in again and again. She once bought a boxcar full of elegant statuary which, the man told her, was produced by the great sculptors of ancient Italy. She wrapped and stored the pieces in a barn on her California property against the day when she might own a castle. Then she found out that the statues of cherubim and crusaders and whiskered saints had all been stolen from a Middle Western cemetery. ; 

Once I had an evening appointment to see Sally backstage at the Casa Mafiana. Somehow I happened to de velop a technical interest in a bottle of scotch and missed the date. On the next evening I walked into her dressing room. She was in a fury. 

“You are no gentleman!” she shouted, hitching up het girdle. “You can’t do this to me. I won’t stand for it. Not one minute. I'll sue you!” 

In a little while she was sitting down and talking about a play in which she hoped to make a Broadway appear ance within the next six months. 

On another day I called on Sally in her rooms at the Park Central and found her nervously plucking hairpins from her blond tresses. 

“Pardon me from here to there,” she said, “while J take my hair down. I’m sorry you came in on me like this, with my face bare of make-up. I don’t mind if you see any other part of me bare, but not my face.” 

Gertrude and Claudius

Not a mother alone raises a prince; the entire state is responsible. Having endured the labor, you discharged the major duty—God often welcomes a young mother to Paradise at that point. By giving the infant suck for a year, you performed what many a noble lady, fastidious of her high bosom, delegates to an uncouth peasant girl. As Amleth learned to walk, to lisp, to string together sentences, to make sense of letters, to begin to grasp the tools and usages and necessities of the world, you were attentive beyond the accustomed royal behavior. Shamefully often, a child born to be God’s agent on earth is worse neglected than the offspring of a trull and a passing highwayman. You have done lovingly by your boy. Let go, my good queen. Amleth at thirteen is formed for good or ill. The quirks that disturb you I would lay to his predilection for the actor’s trade. He must try on many attitudes in rapid succession. To be sincere, then insincere, and then sincere in his insincerity; such shifts fascinate him, How marvellous, to his student mind, is this human capacity to be many things, to take many roles, to enlarge one’s preening, paltry identity with many half-considered feints and deceptions. You have noticed, I am sure, his animation and awe when a troop of players travels to Elsinore- how avidly he studies their rehearsals, takes note of the fine points of their illusions, imitates while private in our lobbies and cloisters the rolling cadence of their recitations.” 

“Yes,” the Queen interrupted eagerly, “I hear him in his solar, orating to himself!” 

Corambus held to his chain of thought. “The Church has done ill, I sometimes believe, in letting up, in these lax times, its imprecations against this unholy travesty of theatrical performance, which, aping Creation, distracts men from last things and from first things as well. 

And how close, come to think upon it, the boy clung to the late Yorik, unul that tireless jester, shaky from all his merry dissipations, joined the mass of mankind in the last, best joke on us all. Your son loved him, madame, and loves all clowns and triflers, as releasing him from heavy thoughts of rule and self-discipline. Your husband sets the boy, it may be, too stern an example. But I have no doubt, when clear duty is set before him, that Amleth, though turning it this way and that in his mind, will end in doing the needful.” 

&

what blissful submission, nailed down, dispatched. Feng, Horwendil’s brother, had returned from adventuring in the south, having placed his sword and lance and versatile tongue at the service, most recently, of the masters of Genoa in its long struggles with Pisa over the control of Corsica and Sardinia. “The Mediterranean,” Feng explained to Gerutha, “is warm enough for a man to swim in pleasurably, if certain transparent bell-shaped creatures do not sting him to death. On the other shore lies Africa, where the Muslim infidels refine their tortures and abominations, and to the east lies an empire of curious Oriental Christians, who send armies to dispute the presence or absence of an ‘1’ in a Greek theological term, and who permit their priests to marry and wear beards. I would like, next, to visit there. Their nobles, rather than wield the cudgel and broadsword as in these backward northern lands, prefer the dagger and have greatly developed the art of poisoning, so I have been told.

&

“He doesn’t talk to me about what he thinks,” she said, “or indeed about anything. But I understand from what Corambis has let drop of what Laertes tells him, there’s a ferment going on in cultivated circles to the south, various bits of ancient knowledge the Crusaders brought back, the Arabs and the Byzantine monks have been transcribing them for centuries but nobody read them, something about a new way of looking at the world scientifically, whatever that is, letting nature tell us about itself in little details, one after another, as if women and children and millers and farmers haven’t been doing that all along. Instead of taking everything on faith from the priests and the Bible, I mean. Instead of arguing from first principles, you deduce your principles from a host of observed particulars. I’m sorry, ’m not making a great deal of sense; it’s still too early in the morning, my dearest.” 

“You confirm my worst suspicions. My son is down there on the Elbe learning how to doubt—learning mockery and blasphemy when I’m trying to instill piety and order into a scheming, rebellious conglomeration of Danes.” 

“What else did Corambis say?” Geruthe mused, as colorful electricity played about her head. “Something about man being the measure of things, which makes a kind of sense, really, since men and women are right here all around us while God, though we can all feel He’s here somewhere. is a lot harder to observe.  Still you can't help wondering if people are ready to be the measure of things. We can hardly measure ourselves. We are the only animal that makes mistakes.” 

“We must get Hamblet back, or the regional thing will choose another when I—if I were toAs I say, I have these uncanny spells of fatigue.” 

U & I

 I wanted to know if this edition of Rabbit, Run had some front matter I had not read. Finally my resistance collapsed and I pulled the weighty collector’s volume off the shelf. The padded, bright red binding was somewhat more reminiscent of a comfortable corner booth at an all-night, all-vinyl coffee shop than one might have thought fitting for so aggressively “classic” an enterprise; but even so a bible-ready black fabric bookmark did curl with high seriousness out of the gilt-edged, acid-free solidity of the massed pages like a dried umbilicus: I said, “Wow!”—moved to mingled feelings of tenderness and stern disapproval by the prematurely ornate, bootstrappingly heirloomish, “undercooked” look it had, and I was unable to keep from opening it up. Within I saw a Reader’ Digestive illustration of boys playing basketball, and then...

&

 I wondered whether the tone I took in places here might share its quality of unease with Beckett’s book—an unease that arose from intense, rivalrous, touchy admiration combined with an impatience with criticism as a literary form. Updike himself, I recalled, had in an essay neatly maneuvered past Beckett’s exegesis of Proust: “rather acerb,” he’d called it. (The same essay on Proust, by the way, contains one of my favorite things in all Updike, when he mentions that a page or two of his copy of Moncrieff’s translation is stained with drops of his now-alimonied wife’s suntan oil: suntan oil, the thicker exstillation of summer and leisure, crushed from the Palm at the End of the Mind—and I wonder, is this Stevensian sense of “palm” the explanation for why Updike mysteriously changed the title of one of his best early stories from “Walter Briggs” to the less good “Walter Palm” in an eighties trade paperback reissue?—has a Proustlan viscosity, I think; I envision the near transparency that the drops of lotion must have created in the paper as methylparaben portholes in Marcel’s prose through which we glimpse for a moment the knowable, verifiable life we have now, in America, with spouses and deck chairs and healing sunlight, as opposed to the unknowable life of a homosexual genius in France before the First World War.) 

&

Most good novelists have been women or homosexuals. The novel is the triumphant evolved creation, one increasingly has to think, of these two groups, who have cooperated more closely in this domain perhaps than in any other. This important truth couldn’t hit us over the head until fairly recently: my own generation was the first to grow up with hard-core stars like Annette Haven a mere seventeen-year-old bike ride away, but more important, we were the first generation to grow up exposed to the range and subtlety and complexity of distinctively gay interests and ways of acting. These became common knowledge: they were no longer sexual semaphore among a gay elite, but were now a constant subject of discussion, delight, disgust, amusement, and enlightenment across an entire educated middle class. Our generation, I think it is fair to say, thinks it knows more about the moeurs of gaiety than any group so big and so mixed ever knew before, and armed with this marginally more sophisticated and less sniggering knowledge as we read past minorpieces and masterpieces, we gather hints and leap to conclusions with a confidence that would have horrified Edwardian bachelorettes. And slowly, with dawning amazement, as the results of our various informal surveys come in, we realize how staggeringly disproportionate our debt is to gaydom, in every possible area of literary deportment, but especially in the novel; and we mingle this knowledge with the long. recognized preeminence of women in the invention and perfection of the form, and we begin to get the uncomfortable sense, if we aren’t gay or female, that we may have chosen a field we can’t quite master. Heterosexual male nov. elists don’t for the most part really get it, instinctively: they agree with Jane Austen that the novel is a magnificent thing, toward whose comprehension all other forms of writing, and indeed of art, aspire, and this big-time grandeur attracts them, but they find, much to their perplexity, that they can’t internalize and refine upon its ways with quite the unstraining unconscious directness they displayed when thrashing happily through earlier intellectual challenges. At first they blame their false starts and archnesses on their own inexperience and continuing apprenticeship, and they redouble their efforts, but little by little they come to see, at first dispiritedly and then soon righteously, that they “stand outside the tradition”—that it is in a fundamental way alien to them. But they ave smart, and ambitious, and hardworking, some of them, and they find that they can bleed off and redirect some of their other proficiencies in order artificially to bulk up the central novelistic understanding they want s© badly and don’t innately possess. They stretch the stretchiest of all forms so that it embraces what they do well. And finally they produce things that are, though great, oddities: Ulysses, War and Peace, Pnin. In a field, then, in which heterosexuals end up so often on the periphery—as the legal counsel, drunken reviewers, imitative followers, codifiers, interpreters, academic apologists—for homosexual greatness, a person like Updike, who can be as tarabiscoté as George Saintsbury or Henry James, as foxily ironical as Lytton Strachey, as stylistically up to snuff as Pater, as metaphorically mother-witted as Proust, as zealously thematic as Melville, and who is thus in the same league at least with the bachelor-adepts of history, becomes supremely important to a writer like me, as a model of a man who has in his art successfully moved outside the limitations of his carnal circuitry. 

I offer this line of argument tentatively, with every expectation that I will be laughed at for believing in so primitive a form of sexual determinism; it seems, however, unusually convincing to me at present because many of the novels that I’ve liked lately (The Beautiful Room Is Empty, The Swimming-Pool Library, A Single Man) have been so directly premised on gaiety: you feel their creators’ exultation at having so much that wasn’t sayable finally available for analysis, and you feel that the sudden unrestrained scope given to the truth-telling urge in the Eastern homosphere has lent energy and accuracy to these artists’ nonsexual observations as well, as if they’re thinking to themselves, Well fuck it, while ’'m humming along at this level of candor, why should I propagate all the other received fastidious. nesses? Truths are jumping out at me from every direction! My overemphasis on sex is leading me back toward subtler revelations in the novel’s traditional arena of social behavior, by jingo! (Have people talked, incidentally, about the prompting influence that Angus Wilson’s Hemlock and After may have had on Lolita? Nabokov must have seen this gay book from 1952, in which the sole pure baddie is the heterosexual child molester, and thought that it was finally possible to amplify his reluctantly incinerated short story and show, now that gaiety was to an extent fictionally normalized, that even Humbert’s unthinkable perversion was more complicated and remorse-filled than Angus Wilson had made it out to be. Nabokov must have noticed how the undisguisedly gay angle of attack lit the old, overnovelized mores from new angles, and that a similarly reawakened sense of nanomanners might result from a fictional situation whose raking unthinkableness stirred his own endocrines more.) Of course, Edmund White’s apostrophe to the narrators boyfriend’s bottom (in a recent story in Granta) would not have been possible without Updike’s wide-screen description of a neighbor’s pussy; but nonetheless it is the homosexual novel right now, perhaps to an unusual degree, that seems to be driving us all toward advances and improvements. 

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 

hw 

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. 

&

(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. 

&

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.

&

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. 

&

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 

&

 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. 

&

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. 

& 

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. 

&

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.