The scientific method from The Anatomy of Revolution

So common is the misunderstanding of scientific method that we must attempt here to put the matter ; clearly as possible in a very few words.

First, not even the “exact” sciences like astronomy or physics are exact in the sense of “absolute" or “infallible.” Their firmest laws or uniformities are to be regarded as tentative. They may be upset at any time by further work. But at any given moment they are not to be tampered with unless they prove unreliable in relation to observed facts. In the contemporary revolution in physics, Newton’s laws have not been “disproved”; nor has the principle of indeterminacy been so firmly established as to make all men equal before the game of poker. What has happened in modern physics, as far as a layman can judge, is that the physicist has been sharply reminded that even his neatest uniformities are not absolutes, but are subject to correction, that he is safer in regarding these uniformities as based on observations rather than on the will of God, or the nature of things, or on reality. Or more radically, he should regard these uniformities as his invention rather than his discovery. .

This brings us easily to the second point. Science makes no attempt to study or describe reality-certainly not ultimate reality. Science is not even concerned with truth, in the sense that word has for theologians, for most philosophers, for a good many other people, and perhaps for common sense. The desire to find a final cause, an unmoved mover, a Ding an sich, seems to be so common in men that we have no grounds for believing that this search is not, in one form or another, a fairly constant and in fact essential element in human society. Only, scientists as scientists can have no part in such a search. Eddington, Jeans, even Whitehead, ceased to practice science while they were pursuing theology. Science is based, not on faith, but on skepticism, on a skepticism that will not even worry itself over its status in the universe. And so the scientist works on serenely, undisturbed by the philosopher’s final thrust: that to be constantly skeptical is to believe in doubt, which is after all a form of faith.

Third, the scientist by no means confines himself to “the facts and nothing but the facts.” Dangerous epistemological depths yawn at this point, but we shall have to try and go ahead in spite of them. The popularization of Baconian ideas on induction is probably the chief source of the erroneous notion that the scientist does nothing to the facts he laboriously and virtuously digs up, except to let them fall neatly into a place they make for themselves. Facts themselves are not just “out there" and we should be willing to accept L. J. Henderson’s definition of “fact” as an empirically verifiable statement (italics mine) about phenomena in terms of a conceptual scheme. Actually the scientist cannot work without a conceptual scheme; and though the relation between facts and conceptual schemes is not by any means clear, it is at least clear that a conceptual scheme involves something besides facts, involves, indeed, a working mind.
Let no one be frightened of the term "conceptual scheme." The meaning is really very simple: thunder and lightning impinge on our senses of hearing and sight probably the mere differentiating of this sound and this flash from other sounds and flashes means that we are employing a conceptual scheme. Certainly when we think of Jupiter with his bolts, Thor with his hammer, or the electrical discharge of modern physics, we have clearly arranged our sense-perceptions in accordance with definite conceptual schemes. We possess, indeed, the basic elements of three different theories of thunder and lightning, three differently stated uniformities in these phenomena. But the crucial reason why we should prefer our electrical discharge to Jupiter or Thor as a conceptual scheme is that it is more useful, and that we can by using it get on better also with other conceptual schemes we use for similar purposes. But in the sense which the word true has for the theologian, and most moralists and philosophers, our electrical discharge is not a bit truer than the old notions about Jupiter and Thor.

We may even use two contradictory conceptual schemes, choosing one or the other of convenience, or from habit. We are all of us educated out of the old Ptolemaic conceptual scheme, which saw the sun moving about a stationary earth, into the Copernican conceptual scheme, which sees the earth moving about a stationary sun. Einstein, of course, used a conceptual scheme somewhat different from both of these, but most of us are not yet up to Einstein; in daily life we all, however, contentedly say “the sun rises,” and should be very pedantic indeed if we insisted on saying in Copernican terms “the earth has revolved into sight of the sun.” .

The scientist, then, goes to work roughly in some such fashion as this. He starts with a conceptual scheme of some sort, and with questions, or even hypotheses, which he frames in terms of that scheme. He then hunts for a suitable supply of facts. These facts he seeks to arrange in uniformities or theories which will answer his questions, and 'perhaps suggest other questions. He then immerses himself in the hunt for facts, and emerges with new or ed uniformities. The scientist is not interested in where his conceptual scheme came from, or whether it preceded or followed on facts, or whether it is “subjective” and the facts “objective.” These questions he leaves to the philosophers, who have not settled them yet after two thousand years of debate. But the scientist does, by his recognition that a conceptual scheme is as essential to his activity as are observed facts, emancipate himself completely from self-styled “scientific” materialists, positivists, empiricists, who naively assert that our sense-perceptions filtered through a “mind” are somehow in themselves an orderly and sole reality, or a “reflection” of such a reality. For, note particularly, the facts with which the scientist deals are not phenomena, sense-perceptions, the “external world,” those dear absolutes of innocent positivists, but merely statements about phenomena. A properly verifiable statement about Cromwell or Lenin is then as much a fact as the reading of a thermometer in a laboratory. We cannot here go into the thorny problem of what satisfactory verification is; the practicing scientist, the practicing historian, the practicing judge (and, one hopes, jury) have their own well-tried craft-methods of verification.

Fourth, though the scientist is very careful indeed about matters of definition, and is as disdainful of sloppiness as any historian and of bad thinking as any logician, be distrusts rigidity and attempts at perfection. He is interested less in beauty and neatness of definition than in having his definitions fit not his sentiments and aspirations, but the facts. Above all, he does not dispute over words. He is less interested in the accurate theoretical distinction between a mountain and a hill than he is in making sure that he is ‘ dealing with concrete elevations on this earth. He does not expect class terms to be perfect, mutually exclusive; when he distinguishes between a plant and an animal, he is not at all offended if you call his attention to a living thing that seems to belong to both his classifications at once. He sets to work studying the living thing and will, if necessary, modify his class terms. But he is quite willing also, if it proves more convenient, to set up a new class term of borderline plant-animals. This simple willingness to be guided by convenience is of course one of the amazing things about the scientist and one of the most difficult for those who have not had a scientific training to adapt ourselves to. Most of us are early trained to prefer our opinions to our convenience.

Fifth, perfectly respectable scientific work can be and is constantly done in fields where the kind of controlled experimentation classically associated for instance with physics and chemistry is not possible. We may call this sort of scientific work, based indeed on experimental work auxiliary to it, but not in itself a series of controlled experiments, clinical. The clinician is best known in the medical sciences, where he appears very early in fifth-century Greece with Hippocrates. The clinician works through the case method. His data are amassed, not through experiments he can control, but through a series of cases which he observes and compares. The clinician, again, is not sloppy; but he can rarely be rigorously exact. He is helped greatly when he can draw on experimental sciences-organic chemistry, for example. But in his own right the good clinician is a good scientist. Obviously the social sciences can depend but to a limited extent on actual controlled experimentation; but they can be clinical sciences depending more on observation than on experimentation.

Finally, scientific thinking cannot be, except perhaps in suggesting problems, what nowadays most of us know well enough as wishful thinking. The scientist’s own hopes and fears, his own standards of what he would like to have prevail on this earth must be kept as far as possible out of his work, and especially out of his observations of, or dealing with, facts. How far such hopes and fears and standards enter into his choice of conceptual schemes, how far they influence the kind of questions he asks, are difficult problems we may perhaps be permitted to dodge. Sufficient that the techniques of most of the established sciences provide a very effective check on the cruder forms of wishful thinking. History, which because it has been so long an art and a craft is perhaps the most respectable of the social sciences, provides in the technical training undergone by most professional historians a surprisingly effective and not wholly dissimilar check on the more violent forms of partisan writing and thinking.

All in all, there is no reason why we should feel that the natural scientist uses methods, set standards, forever quite unattainable by the social scientist. Natural science as the more innocent materialists of the last century saw it-exact, infallible, a cosmos built on what in modern folk-usage is called induction-must seem remote to a struggling economist or sociologist. But natural science as it has always been understood by its ablest practitioners and is now widely understood-natural science as expounded methodologically by a Poincare-is no such thin substitute for Divine Providence, no such metaphysical abstraction.

Only God is exact, infallible, omniscient, unchanging, and modern science has been content to leave the search for God to disciplines fitted by long success for such a search.

Of the bare elements of scientific thinking-conceptual scheme, facts, especially “case histories,” logical operations, uniformities-the social sciences in general come out well on the score of facts. Even in the field of history, where neither laboratory nor questionnaire methods of research are available, our existing supply of facts is surprisingly good. .You cannot draw Cromwell back to life, but neither can you call the dinosaurs back to life. What we know about Cromwell from the written record is in many ways as reliable as what we know about dinosaurs from the fossil record. To say that history is a fable agreed upon, or a set of tricks played upon the dead, is to slander, or at least to misjudge, the great body of industrious and sober workers who have carried on the study of history. Notably the last century or so has seen the formation of a body of research workers in history who, with all their faults, maintain standards comparable in some ways to those maintained by similar groups in the natural sciences. These research workers do not indeed uncover the simple raw material of facts. The humblest antiquarian arranges the facts he digs out of his documents into some kind of pattern.

Jeremy Campbell

Plato's anti-sophistic view of truth and lies threw its imposing shadow across the span of time historians call the Middle Ages. He fiercely denied that the words we use to describe reality are mere counters that can be shuffled and tweaked to befuddle weak minds in a game of power. In its pure form, Plato’s theory says words refer to the eternally true, absolutely real, and context-free Ideas. Consciousness is not an artifact built up in a person by years of observing the world, accumulating and memorizing facts. It is something we are born possessing, and it is somehow in communication with the superworld of the Ideas.
This doctrine, that truth is not to be found in differences but in identity, was strong in medieval times, from the third century on. There was a bias against originality and a belief that every singular thing in the world, including every person, should be as like as possible to its ideal type.
Then, toward the end of the eleventh century, a reaction against this sovereignty of the abstract absolute set in. The particular began to stake its claim in opposition to the universal, and to a marked extent subvert the strenuous efforts Plato had made to keep language honest. As long as Truth was external to minds, external to. sentences and even to individual “true” things, it was safe. Language
could not trivialize or belittle it. Plato said we know what truth is because Truth is an independent entity in a separate domain, and the Sophists should keep their greedy hands off it.

Danger beckoned once the reality of universals was under question, since Christianity itself was based on such otherworldly absolutes as God and the Trinity. What if these eternal entities were not real at all, not outside time and space and even human thoughts, but simply words, names, that human beings had invented? That unsettling thesis came to be known as “nominalism,” originating in the teachings of the eleventh-century scholastic philosopher Roscellinus, whose Latin formula was universalis sunt nomina, “universals are (only) names.” Nominalism was destined to cast its influence over most of Europe. It was known as the via modema, or modern way, and eventually it was to spell the collapse of the Whole grand synthesis of medieval thought. By arguing that there is no reality apart from the single individual, that the world can be understood only one thing, one fact, at a time, nominalism made all human knowledge suspect. It also threw into question the entire relationship between language and thought. Loosely speaking, nominalism was a latter-day revival of the Sophistic distinction between pbysis and nomos, the natural and the artificial, between what is given and what is made. A Sophist, holding the View that there is a profusion of “truths”-perhaps as many as there are people to believe them-but no single, final Truth, and that language makes its own reality, would have been a nominalist in the fourteenth century AD.

In fact, Antisthenes, a leading Sophist who was among the handful of close associates present in the room with Socrates when he drank hemlock, has been called “the first nominalist.” Antisthenes denied the existence of the Platonic Forms as independent realities. There is a tale that he once said to Plato: “I see a horse, but I don’t see horseness.” Don’t feel proud of yourself, was the gist of Plato’s response. Regard it as a defect of intuition. “For you have the eye with which a horse is seen, but you have not yet acquired the eye to see horseness.” Or treeness. or blueness. or chariotness, presumably. To a nominalist, each tree, each shade of blue, every chariot, is uniq,1Q and different. Even if we could conceive horseness, the universal equine essence, it would exist only in our minds, and is just a fiction of reason. A thing has one and only one Logos; it cannot be spoken of except by its own proper description. Therefore there we go again-it is impossible to speak falsely or to contradict. Aristotle, the philosopher of common sense, called Antisthenes foolish and his followers “crude thinkers.”

At first, the rise of nominalism seemed to pose no deadly harm to church teaching and in fact tended to underscore the importance of revelation, since it also contested the Platonic idea that human rea. son can show that universals are real. You had to rely on faith. In the fourteenth century, however, nominalism, with its world-altering message that mankind can never know ultimate truth by the power of reason alone, burst onto the scene with renewed intensity and force. On the night of May 26, 1328, William of Ockham, a young Franciscan friar accused of propagating ideas deeply subversive of church authority, together with a handful of. like-minded colleagues, fled from his convent in Avignon, home of the popes in exile. Barely escaping arrest, they took ship secretly down the Rhone. At AiguesMortes, an imperial galley waited to take them to the emperor Louis of Bavaria. Ayear earlier, Louis had deposed the Avignon pope, John XXII, and set up an anti-pope in Rome. ,Ockham, a lecturer at Oxford, had been summoned to Avignon, where a committee of six theologians decided that fifty-one items in his commentaries were “heretical and pestilential.” He refused to disown them, inviting more grief for himself by taking sides against the pope on the bitterly controversial question of poverty. Ockham championed the cause of the Spirituals, a group of Franciscans who believed in practicing absolute poverty, as did the early Christians. Property, after all, did not exist in the Garden Of Eden. Two years later, he signed a protesi against a papal bull which condemned the doctrine. His escapt enabled him to carry on his polemical opposition from a secure dis/ game. He and his companions finally reached Pisa, where he pui pimself under the protection of the emperor, campaigning for political democracy in church and State, and stressing the importance of the individual over society as a whole.

The nocturnal flight of Ockham has been called a decisive moment in the history of European thought, comparable to the secret journey of Lenin in 1917 from Switzerland to Petrograd in a Sealed train, there to spread the virus of an untested ideology. In a phrase intended to emphasize that the force of ideas is not weaker diam the might of armies, Ockham’s first words to the emperor are reputed to have been: “Protect me with your sword, and I will defend You with my pen.” ’

Was Ockham the Lenin of his day? An exaggeration, certainly. In fact, he has been likened to a nineteenth-century liberal, someone like John Stuart Mill, for his utilitarian theory of property, his advocacy of civil and, to a limited extent, religious liberty and freedom of debate, and his strong belief that exceptions to rules are one of the inescapable facts of life. Like Darwin, Ockham also held fast to the view that metaphysics must be separated absolutely from the task of understanding nature. His ideas ultimately helped to bring about a fundamental change. in Western ways of thinking. Well into the twentieth century, one scholar notes, “Ockham’s name continued to carry the faint odor of disreputability and scandal in certain quarters.” His ideas have been compared to those of the twentieth-century theorist of “language games,” Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Ockham became a household word, thanks to his celebrated razor, the ever sharp blade of logic that shaves away superfluous terms and finicky distinctions that Scholasticism had manufactured in bulk over centuries of medieval thought. He probably never used such a word, but the metaphor of the razor as an instrument of economy and parsimony runs through all his work. “To employ a number of principles when it is possible to use a few is a waste of time,” is a typical Ockhamist statement of belief in the power of logital frugality.

Ockham was profoundly loyal to the church. He did not place under suspicion such theological untouchables as the Trinity. He merely shelved all aspirations to match up the inadequate instrument of the human mind with the enormous mystery of God’s operations. Like Protagoras, though in very different terms, Ockha,11 decided it was a waste of time even to attempt such an ambitious task. God must remain incomprehensible, a book closed to reason His Logos and ours are just completely different, and that is that, '

Putting the divine purpose off-limits to discussion in that way had a tremendously liberating effect on secular thought. One could do philosophy, study the natural world, uninhibited by the encumbrances of theological dogma, speculation, and authority. This implied a clean separation of the human mind from the superhuman, of history from theology, the political from the ecclesiastical) and to some extent the present from the past. Eventually, Ockham’s nominalism would lead to the vast upheavals of the Reformation, to Martin Luther. Already, in the fourteenth century, John Wycliffe in England had sided with nominalism in his campaign to make the scriptures available to all and sundry.

The sense that language had lost its moorings can be noticed in the work of William Langland, a younger contemporary of Ockham. His Piers Plowman, an allegorical poem about the search for truth, is full of tricky wordplay, verbal ambiguity, mistaken meaning, puns, and warped syntax. The scholar Mary Carruthers sees as a basic concern of the poem the task of redeeming a language that has lost its . metaphysical connection with truth. The biggest fool in Piers Plowman is a character named Will, who has a hugely inflated idea of his own ability to interpret what others say to him on important matters.

Chaucer, the greatest poet of the fourteenth century, was familiar with nominalist thinking and tinkered with the notion that no two people can communicate with each other in any meaningful way. john Gardner presents Chaucer to us moderns as a philosophical poet fascinated with nominalism, especially the idea that since my abstraction from the concrete individual thing is not “real,” but just a thought-up name, it may be entirely different from yours. I see a tomato and classify it as a fruit, but you may call it a vegetable, In the extreme version, the unreality of universals means that all ideas are private and uncommunicable: judgment subsides into mere opinion. Gardner inserts the fateful word “relativism” into his discussion pf late medieval nominalism. Our minds are just not up to the task.

Max Beerbohm

Be it remembered that long before this time there had been in the heart of Chelsea a kind of cult for Beauty. Certain artists had settled there, deliberately refusing to work in the ordinary official way, and “wrought," as they were wont to asseverate, “for the pleasure and sake of all that is fair.” Little commerce had they with the brazen world. Nothing but the light of the sun would they share with men. Quietly and unbeknown, callous of all but their craft, they wrought their poems or their pictures, gave them one to another, and wrought on. Meredith, Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, Holman Hunt were in this band of shy artificers. In fact, Beauty had existed long before 1880. It was Mr. Oscar Wilde who managed her debut. To study the period is to admit that to him was due no small part of the social vogue that Beauty began to enjoy. Fired by his fervid words, men and women hurled their mahogany into the streets and ransacked the curio-shops for the furniture of Annish days. Dados arose upon every wall, sunflowers and the feathers of peacocks curved in every corner, tea grew quite cold while the guests were praising the Willow Pattern of its cup. A few fashionable women even dressed them selves in sinuous draperies and unheard-of greens. Into whatsoever ballroom you went, you would surely find, among the women in tiaras and the fops and the distinguished foreigners, half a score of comely ragamufhns in velveteen, murmuring sonnets, posturing, Waving their hands. Beauty was sought in the most unlikely places. Young painters found her mobled in the fogs, and bank-clerks, versed in the writings of Mr. Hamerton, were heard to declare, as they sped home from the City, that the Underground Railway was beautiful from London Bridge to Westminster, but not from Sloane Square to Notting Hill Gate.

Estheticism (for so they named the movement) did indeed permeate, in a manner, all classes. But it was to the haut monde that its primary appeal was made. The sacred emblems of Chelsea were sold in the fashionable toy-shops, its reverently chanted creeds became the patter of the boudoirs. The old Grosvenor Gallery, that stronghold of the few, was verily invaded. Never was such a fusion of de’ lightful folk as at its Private Views.* There was Robert Browning the philosopher, dofiing his hat with a courtly sweep to more than one Duchess. There, too, was Theo Marzials, poet and eccentric, and Charles Colnaghi, the hero of a hundred tea-fights, and young Brookfield, the comedian, and many another good fellow. My Lord of Dudley, the virtuoso, came there, leaning for support upon the arm of his fair young wife. Disraeli, with his lustreless eyes and face like some seamed Hebraic parchment, came also, and whispered behind his hand to the faithful Corry. And Walter Sickert spread the latest mat of “the Master? who, with monocle, cane and tilted hat, flashed through the gay mob anon.

Autrement, there was Coombe Wood, in whose shade the Lady Archibald Campbell suffered more than one of Shakespeare’s plays to be enacted. Hither, from the garish, indelicate theatre that held her languishing, Thalia was hidden, if haply, under the open sky, she might resume her old charm. All Fashion came to marvel and so did all the aesthetes, in the heart of one of whose leaders, Godwin, that superb architect, the idea was first conceived. Real Pastoral Plays!

This passage, which I found in a contemporary chronicle, is so
quaint and so instinct with the spirit of its time that I am fain to quote it: “There were quaint, beautiful, extraordinary costumes walking about-ultra aesthetics, artistic-aesthetics, zsthetics that made up their minds to be daring, and suddenly gave way in some important point-put a frivolous bonnet on the top of a grave and flowing garment that Albert Diirer might have designed for a mantle. There were fashionable costumes that Mrs. Mason or Madame Elise might have turned out that morning. The motley crowd mingled, forming into groups, sometimes dazzling you by the array of colours that you never thought to see in full daylight. . . .Canary-coloured garments flitted cheerily by garments of the saddest green. A hat in an agony of pokes and angles was seen in
company with a bonnet that was a gay garland of flowers. A vast cape that might
have enshrouded the form of a Mater Dolorosa hung by the side of a jauntily striped Langtry-hood.”

and

My collection, like most collections, began imperceptibly. A man does not say to himself “I am going to collect’ this thing or that. True, the schoolboy says so; but his are not, in the true sense of the word. collections. He seeks no set autobiographic symbols, for boys never look back-~there is too little to look back on, too much in front. Nor have the objects of his collection any intrinsic charm for him. He starts a collection merely that he may have a plausible excuse for doing something he ought not to do. He goes in for birds' eggs merely that he may be allowed to risk his bones and tear his clothes in climbing; for butterflies, that he may be encouraged to poison and impale; for stamps . . . really, I do not know why he, why ant sane creature, goes in for Stamps. It follows that he has no real love
of his collection and soon abandons it for something else. The art oollector, how different! His hobby has a solid basis of pet~ preference. Some one gives him (say) a piece of jade. He admires it. He sees another piece in a shop, and buys it; later, he buys another. He does not regard these pieces of jade as distinct from [ha rest of his possessions; he has no idea of collecting jade. It is not till he has acquired several other pieces that he ceases to regard them a, mere items in the decoration of his room, and gives them a little table or a tray of a cabinet, all to themselves. How well they look there! How they intensify one another! He really must get some One to give him that little pedestalled Cupid which he saw yesterday in Wardour Street. Thus awakes in him, quite gradually, the spirit of the collector. Or take the case of one whose collection is not of beautiful things, but of autobiographic symbols: take the case of the glut ton. He will have pocketed many menus before it occurs to him to arrange them in an album. Even so, it was not until a fair number of labels had been pasted on my hat-box that I saw them as souvenirs, and determined that in future my hat-box should always travel with me and so commemorate my every darling escape.

In the path of every collector are strewn obstacles of one kind or another; and the overleaping of them is part of the fun. As a collector of labels I had my pleasant difficulties. On any much-belabelled piece of baggage the porter always pastes the new label over that which looks most recent; else the thing might miss its destination. Now, paste dries before the end of the briefest journey; and one of my canons was that, though two labels might overlap, none must efface the inscription of another. On the other hand, I did not wish to lose my hat-box, for this would have entailed inquiries, and dcscriptions, and telegraphing up the line, and all manner of agitation. What, then, was I to do? I might have taken my hat-box with me in the carriage? That, indeed, is what I always did. But unless a thing is to go in the van it receives no label at all. So I had to use a mild stratagem. “Yes,” I would say, “everything in the van!” The labels would be duly affixed. “Oh,” I would cry seizing the hat-box quickly. “I forgot. I want this with me in the carriage.” (I learned to seiieii quickly, because some porters are such martinets that they will whisk the label off and confiscate it.) Then, when the man was not looking, I would remove the label from the place he had chosen for it and press it on some unoccupied part of the surface.

Schiaparelli and Chanel from TDV

Elsa Schiaparelli, in particular, took full advantage of it. An Italian aristocrat and an anti-Fascist autocrat, who had contrived an evening ensemble based on an Ethiopian warrior’s tunic with trousers of imperial purple to honour Haile Selassie, she was by 1935 the “undisputed queen of Paris fashion.”I6 She had won the position, toppling Coco Chanel from her throne, largely by dint of audacity. Reacting against the subdued pastels, beiges and navies formerly thought sophisticated, Schiaparelli produced clothes in Fauvist hues: canary yellow, Mars orange and shocking pink (her trademark). Other schools of artists-Futurists, Dadaists and Surrealists-also contributed to her more avant-garde outfits. Thus she fabricated hats shaped like television sets, vegetable baskets, shoes. She created trompe-l’oez'l skeleton sweaters and fingernail gloves. She sold buttons that looked like lollipops, necklaces apparently threaded with aspirins, a handbag resembling a telephone, a white satin evening gown decorated with a huge Daliesque lobster. No garment-maker better appreciated the publicity value of being different: at the Exposition Schiaparelli caused a sensation by burying a naked plaster mannequin in flowers and stringing up a washing line on which she hung “all the clothes of a smart woman, even to panties, stockings and shoes.” Gendarmes had to hold back the crowds.

However, Schiaparelli owed her own vogue to practicality as well as to eccentricity. She used natural fabrics which moved with the body, as well as cheap synthetics such as rayon. Like Chanel, she appealed to the young with functional sports garb, well-cut suits and neat little black dresses. But Whereas Chanel had made proletarian styles elegant, producing apache sweaters for the beau monde and dungarees a la mode, Schiaparelli, as Jean Cocteau wrote, invented “for all women what was once the privilege of few---to be individual.” She also made them less androgynous, accentuating soft curves and fluid lines at a time when, thanks to diet and exercise, better-off women were more willowy than ever before. She narrowed waists and emphasised busts, moving away from the tubular shape of the 1920s and in 1935 pioneering padded brassieres. She also broadened shoulders, perhaps adumbrating the epaulettes of war, perhaps echoing the Balinese bapangs (projecting collars) seen at France’s Colonial Exhibition of 1931. Certainly Schiaparelli ransacked the globe for inspiration, finding it in Indian turbans, Cossack jackets, Mexican boleros, Tuareg pantaloons, Italian masks. Chic versions of such exotica were displayed at her boutique, the first of its kind, at 21 Place Vendome. There, in what was said to be the most famous window in the world, customers discovered an Aladdin’s cave of sartorial fantasy. It doubtless represented an “escape from reality”‘ at a time of Depression. Maybe, too, it was a protest against the uniform garb and the uniform mentality of totalitarianism. But it also reflected other influences, especially, in 1937, that of the International Exposition. Its glitter provoked an explosion of spangles and sequins. Its extravagance prompted the use of brighter colours, richer fabrics, more exuberant embroideries and more opulent styles-puffed and frilled tulle capes, for example. Schiaparelli called her mid-season collection “Paris, 1937”and won plaudits at home and abroad for her new, tall, svelte evening silhouette.

The Dark Valley on Austria

Schuschnigg refused to flee from Vienna and for the next seven years he remained a prisoner of the Nazis. So did his country; but most Austrians rejoiced in their captivity. The Wehrmacht, which marched in without firing a shot, was welcomed with unfeigned enthusiasm. It was greeted by
so many new brown uniforms and swastika flags that factories ran out of cloth and towns succumbed to “decorative monotony.” Church bells pealed and loyal addresses were read in front of cheering crowds. Men saluted and bellowed “Sieg Hail. ” Women wept for joy and uttered thanksgivings. Girls garlanded steel-helmeted troops as though they were an army of liberation. When the Fuhrer arrived, on the afternoon of 12 March 1938, people even knelt in the tracks of his big black Mercedes to collect the dust its wheels had touched. Hitler was so moved by the manifestations in his home town of Linz that, over a dinner of pea soup and rice at the Hotel Weinzinger, he abandoned the temporary expedient of making Austria a satellite state and decided to restore fully his “homeland to the German Reich.” In Vienna the former down-and-out was received with “an ecstasy of emotional fervour. “The whole city behaved like an aroused woman, vibrating, writhing, moaning and sighing lustfully for orgasm.“ wrote one witness, George Clare. who stated that this was no purple passage but an “exact description.” The climax came on 13 March in the Heldenplatz. where 100,000 people took part in an orgy of adoration as Hitler spoke from the balcony of the semicircular Hofburg. Austria‘s new mission, he said, was to be the youngest bastion of the German nation. It was a mission which the vast majority embraced, including Cardinal lnnitzer. He hailed Hitler, flew Nazi banners from St. Stephen’s Cathedral and urged Catholics to “do their duty to the German Father~ land.” lnnitzer subsequently recanted, but by then 99.73 per cent of the electorate had voted for the Anschluss: which he had sanctified. Austria had become Ostmark, a province of greater Germany, and postcards were on sale in Vienna showing “a swastika sun rising over the Stephanskirche.”

Why the Austrian mood swung so sharply towards Hitler has never been quite clear, even to Viennese analysts of the national psyche. It seemed inconceivable that such a hideous change could suddenly overtake a people famed for their golden-hearted Gemutlichkeit and blithe Schlamperei, for their addiction to light waltzes and sentimental operettas, for their indulgence in café conversation accompanied by patisseries, croissants, strudels, pancakes so thin that a newspaper could be read through them, and a hundred varieties of coffee, best served with whipped cream. Doubtless Austria’s surrender to the Fuhrer can partly be explained as a release from pent-up tension, an emotional catharsis. Partly it was due to Nazi propaganda, which played so effectively on the susceptibilities of the mutilated state. More important, in a country still reeling from the Depression, were hopes of economic improvement and full employment. These not only were realised but were reflected in a 300 per cent rise in Vienna’s birth rate, formerly one of the lowest in the world. But on a more sinister level the Anschluss was welcomed because it liberated monsters from the Austrian id.

Many Austrians, who (as the writer Alfred Polgar sardonically observed) made bad Nazis but good anti-Semites, burned to unleash their hostility on the country’s 400,000 Jews. There was a massive attack, the ferocity of which embarrassed even the Gestapo. As the German playwright Carl Zuckmayer wrote,

The city was transformed into a nightmare painting by Hieronymus Bosch . . . [the] air filled with an incessant, savage, hysterical screeching from male and female throats . . . [in an] uprising of envy, of malevolence, of bitterness, of blind vicious lust for revenge.

Mobs shouted “Destruction to the Jews.”‘°3 Thugs daubed anti-Semitic signs on walls and smashed Jewish windows. Looting was rampant: when Stormtroopers took 6,000 Austrian schillings from Sigmund Freud’s apartment he remarked wryly, “Never have I been paid so much for a single visit.” Repulsive scenes occurred in which Jews were forced to eat grass in the Prater park or to scrub pavements and public lavatories while crowds jeered that Hitler had at last found work for parasites. Aptly enough, Jews had nicknamed the moustached Fuhrer “Pemsel”-“brush” for cleaning lavatories.

However, the cataclysm of arrests, beatings and murders did have one great incidental benefit for Austria’s Jews. They were not lulled into a sense of false security like the Jews of Germany, where anti-Semitism was less acute and the persecution mounted more gradually. Instead, they sought to flee. One British diplomat recorded that his consulate was “stormed by hundreds of terrified hysterical Jews begging for a visa to go anywhere out of Austria.” He called the police. Other diplomats were equally unhelpful, reflecting the reluctance of their countries to admit Austrian Jews. Switzerland even insisted that their passports should be stamped with a large red “J.” When Hitler mentioned his plan to solve Europe’s “Jewish problem by way of emigration to the colonies” the Polish Ambassador promised the Fuhrer that, if it was successful, “we will erect him a beautiful monument in Warsaw." Neither scheme was realised and everywhere doors slammed against Jewish refugees. Austrian passport offices bore signs saying, “All frontiers are closed to the Jews.” Yet most of them managed to escape, though some only travelled as far as France, Czechoslovakia or Italy, where they were later caught by the Nazis. Driven to despair, thousands took a more direct way out, a route endorsed by Goring, who publicly said that he “could not put a policeman behind every Jew to prevent suicides.” This hardly squared with his promise to Sir Neville Henderson that Austrian Jews would be treated with “tolerance and leniency.” Nevertheless, Viennese newspapers and radio insisted that foreign reports of “de-Jewing” were an “orgy of lies.”

Absurd though official denials were, outsiders were bound to acknowledge that Austria had submitted voluntarily to Germany. Opponents of Hitler might harp on “the rape of Austria,” and in due course the myth that Austria was the first victim of Nazi aggression became enshrined in the heart of the nation. It even helped to ensure Austria’s post-war independence from the Soviet Union. However, as Ward Price remarked (with characteristic crudity) after accompanying German troops to Vienna, “If this was rape never have I seen a more willing victim." Price ignored the fact that many Austrians, and not only Jews, were horrified by the invasion.

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The Fuhrer worked himself into a rage over Polish brutalities...castrations, killings, rapes-inflicted on German minorities. As Ciano sardonically observed, he seemed to believe his own atrocity stories. In fact there was ample reason to disbelieve everything Hitler said, especially after his volte-face over Bolshevism. Mussolini endorsed the Nazi-Soviet agreement even though it cleared the decks for war. Ciano and other senior Fascists urged him to remain neutral, to break the Pact of Steel. The Duce swung to and fro like a weathercock in a storm. He yearned to march wit ‘ Hitler. He lusted for triumphs and spoils. He ached to turn his warlike rhetoric into reality. But, as Dino Grandi wrote, his Nietzschean warmongering had always been a game, “a bluff, a fraud.”

Mussolini wanted war as St. Augustine had wanted chastity-not yet. He knew that Italians were unwilling to light beside Germans and that the nation was unprepared for a major conflict. His troops were short of basic necessities, such as uniforms. His ships lacked fuel and nobody seemed to know how many aeroplanes he had-Ciano suggested that someone should be sent round the airhelds to count them. Italy was desperately short of raw materials and, running such a large trade deficit that it resorted to selling munitions to the democracies, its capacity for imports was only “about one-half of What it had been in I913.” So the Duce told the Fuhrer that he could not fight unless Germany supplied Italy with millions of tons of coal, oil, steel, arms and other matériel. The demand could not be met and Mussolini therefore espoused “non-belligerence”-a less shameful term, in his View, than neutrality. This was a Wise course for, when Hitler’s victories did finally tempt him to fight, Italian forces made little progress during the “hundred hours’ war” against France. But in September I939 Mussolini was mortified by his inglorious stance. Europe was going up in flames, he remarked to Ciano, and after 18 years of bellicose propaganda the Duce of Italy had become the champion of peace.

Max

and his authors from the marvelous A. Scott Berg:

Max cared little for the nonliterary arts-there was something almost effeminate about them, a delicacy that was at odds with his Evarts upbringing. He did appreciate classical sculpture, and he said every young boy should have a picture of the masculine Thinker by Michelangelo from the Medici tombs. (Even though he had only daughters, he saw to it that there was always one in the Perkins home.) No doubt because of his bad hearing and a ringing in his ears, he showed almost no interest in music. On the few occasions when he was coerced into attending a concert, he instructed his daughters not to applaud too much, for ”they might start in again.” The tunes he liked most were such old favorites as ”Sweet Afton” and "There Are Eyes of Blue.” He saw Victor Herbert’s Babe; in Toyland over and over. John Hall Wheelock remembered how embarrassed Max was when, having let himself be dragged to a nightclub, he saw a chorus line of male dancers starting to perform, he had to shield his eyes with his hand until the men two-stepped away.

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On the wagon longer than he had been in ages, Scott found his life “uninspiring,” whereas, he believed, these should be his most productive years. ”I’ve simply got to arrange something for the summer that will bring me to life again,” he wrote Perkins, "but what it should be is by no means apparent.”

For lack of a better suggestion, Max urged Scott to continue work on a novel he had begun which was set in medieval Europe-a long way from West Egg. Fitzgerald replied that the 90,000-word book would be called Philippe, Count of Darkness. His hero was a Frankish tough guy in armor-"It shall be the story of Ernest,” Fitzgerald put down in a notebook. Then he outlined parts of it that he could sell separately to magazines. He said Perkins could have it all by the late spring of 1936. ”I wish I had these great masses of mss. stored away like Wolfe and Hemingway,” Fitzgerald wrote Perkins, "but this goose is beginning to be pretty thoroughly plucked, I am afraid.”

In May, 1935, Fitzgerald Visited Perkins in New York. A bright period in Zelda’s health had proved to be just a flash, and Scott’s mood the evening they were together reflected it. He was scrappy, putting Max on the spot about books Scribners was publishing. He expressed his greatest dissatisfaction over Tom Wolfe. Scott had recently read Wolfe’s story "His Father’s House” in the latest issue of Modern Monthly, published by V. F. Calverton. It embodied all Wolfe’s faults and virtues and made Fitzgerald wish Tom were the sort of person with whom one could dis“ cuss his writing.

How he can put side by side such a mess as “With chitterling tricker fast fluttering skirrs of sound the palmy honied birderies came” and such fine phrases as "tongue-trilling chirrs, plumbellied smoothness, sweet lucidity” I don’t know. He who has such infinite power of suggestion and delicacy has absolutely no right to glut people on whole meals of caviar.

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Ernest .Hemingway thought the "Crack-Up” pieces were ”miserable.” People experienced emptiness many times in life, he said, and he thought they should come out of it fighting, not whining in public. He wrote Scott a few times to cheer him up but found him taking pride in his ”shamelessness of defeat.” Ever since he first met F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway said, he had thought that if the man had gone to that war he always felt so bad about missing, he would have been shot for cowardice. Hemingway was convinced that Scott’s troubles were selfinflicted. It was a terrible thing for Scott to love youth so much that he leapfrogged from childhood to senility without experiencing manhood.

Hemingway made one of his infrequent visits to New York that season. He was nervous about the reception of Green Hills of Africa, and with just cause. As fascism rose in Europe in the thirties, leftist ”essayists,” as many American literary critics preferred to call themselves, proclaimed that the purpose of literature was to remedy the world’s social ills. They were angry that Hemingway, one of the best-known voices of America, had not joined their cause. He remained unaffiliated with any group, committed only to his writing. His reputation was in great shape, he told Perkins-Andre Gide, Romain Rolland, and André Malraux, he pointed out, had just invited him to an international writers’ congress-but he was not deceived; the critics would have their knives out. He doubted, however, that they could kill him off for a while yet. ”Papa is pretty durable,” he assured Perkins.

When Perkins received the proofs of Green Hills of Africa from Ernest in late August, 1935, he thought everything about them was all right, except for a backhanded swipe at Gertrude Stein which Ernest had inserted. "I think it was better not to call the old girl a bitch,” Perkins wrote Hemingway of the indirect reference to her. Hemingway pointed out that he had not mentioned Miss Stein by name and there was nothing that proved it was definitely she. Besides, he asked Max, what Should be put in place of "bitch”? Certainly not ”Whore.” Hemingway offered to modify the noun with "lousy” or "lesbian,” but if anyone was ever a bitch, he said it was Gertrude Stein. He did not see what Perkins was fussing about, unless he thought the word would just give the critics something else to "burp about.”

In Green Hills of Africa, Hemingway pointed out that writers who read the critics practically destroyed themselves.

If they believe the critics when they say they are great then they must believe them when they say they are rotten and they lose confidence. At present we have two good writers who cannot write because they have lost confidence through reading critics. If they wrote, sometimes it would be good and sometimes it would be quite bad, but the good would get out. But they have read the critics and they must write masterpieces. The masterpieces the critics said they wrote. They weren’t masterpieces, of course. They were just quite good books. So now they cannot write at all.

Hemingway had discussed Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe with Perkins in almost identical phraseology. At last he made what, for him, was a conciliatory gesture, by altering his reference to Gertrude Stein, calling her a "female.” He thought that would anger her the most, and please Perkins.

Max expected a cold critical reaction to Green Hills, but not because of the vendetta Hemingway predicted. Max had observed enough careers to believe in their natural ebb and flow. He knew that if the critics did not have an issue at hand on which to take Hemingway to task, they would invent one. ”Every writer seems to have to go through a period when the tide runs against him strongly,” Perkins wrote Fitderald, ”and at the worst it is better that it should have done this when Ernest was writing books that are in a general sense minor ones.”

And indeed, the reviews of Green H ill; of Africa were tepid. Charlef Poore in the New York Times wrote that it was the "best-written story of big-game hunting anywhere” and that Ernest’s writing was “better than ever, fuller, richer, deeper and only looking for something that can use its full powers.” Edmund Wilson took what Max called a "Marxist crack” at it in the New Republic, calling it Hemingway’s “weakest book". Wilson had been one of Hemingway’s earliest admirers, but over the next few years he became one of his most outspoken critics. .

Ernest took the reviews hard.

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Six months into the writing, Marjorie Rawlings was still hunting for a title. She sent a list of alternatives to Perkins and asked for his opinion. He did not care much for The Flutter Mill. Of Juniper Island he said: ”I do not think place names are good for a book. There is not enough human suggestion in them.” Of her third title he wrote, “I would think one which carried the meaning of T/ae Yearling was probably right.” The more he spoke of it, the better it sounded to him. He wrote her in the spring of 1937, "It seems to have a quality even more than a meaning that fits the book.” It stuck.

After almost a year on the book, Mrs. Rawlings abruptly decided that what she had written was poor, and she threw out the manuscript. Perkins was shocked when she told him. There was nothing for him to do but to try to get her going again. He kept sending heartening letters, and eventually she resumed writing, more slowly but with more confidence.

In December, 1937, she sent the manuscript off to Perkins. He took days to read it, but, as he told her, that was a good sign. “The better a book is, the slower I go,” he explained. ”I think the last half is better than the first and that the book gets increasingly good. But the very beginning now is perfect, it seems to me, and of course the father and mother, and all about that life, and Cody’s on the island, are as good as can be.” He felt a few parts of the book were tainted with theatricality and romanticism and suggested that they be sacrificed in order to maintain the book’s naturalism, its honest depiction of a world that was sometimes cruel and terrifying. The Yearling was full of very tough people, he reminded Mrs. Rawlings, “and the toughness ought to be more evident.”

Marjorie Rawlings’s previous books had had hard luck, but every. thing went right for this one. The Book-of-the-Month Club made The Yearling its main selection in April, 1938. In general, book sales that year were only a third of what they had been before the Depression, but The Yearling became a runaway best seller overnight. It also won the Pulitzer Prize.

Two years before this bonanza, in June, 1956, Marjorie Rawlings had gone game-fishing in Bimini with a friend. There she learned that Ernest Hemingway had become the hero of the most popular legends down there. The latest story concerned Hemingway’s knocking a man down for calling him a big fat slob. ”You can call me a slob,” Hemingway had said, “but you can’t call me a big fat slob.” Then he struck him down. The natives of Bimini set the incident to music, and if they were sure Hemingway was not within earshot, they would sing in a calypso beat, “The big fat slob’s in the harbor.”

When Hemingway heard that one of Max Perkins’s authors was in the same waters, he called on her. ”I should have known from your affection for him that he was not a fire-spitting ogre,” Marjorie wrote back to Perkins, "but I’d heard so many tales in Bimini of his going around knocking people down, that I half-expected him to announce in a loud voice that he never accepted introductions to female novelists. In“ stead, a most lovable, nervous and sensitive person took my hand in a big gentle paw and remarked that he was a great admirer of my work."

The day before she left, Hemingway tussled six hours and fifty minutes with a 514-pound tuna. When his Pilar cruised into harbor at 9:30 that night, the whole population of the island flocked to see hi5 fish and hear his tale. "A fatuous old man-with a new yacht and a young bride had arrived not long previously, announcing that tunafishing, of whose difficulties he had heard, was easy,” Mrs. Rawlings wrote to Perkins. ”So as the Pilar was made fast, Hemingway came swimming up from
below-decks, gloriously drunk, roaring, 'Where’s the son of a bitch who said it was easy.’ The last anyone saw of him that night, he was standing alone on the pier using the tuna as a punching bag.

"Ernest seems to be ever on the defensive. He is so vast, so virile, that he does not need ever to hit anybody, Mrs. Rawlings wrote Perkins. ”Yet he is constantly defending something that he, at least, must consider vulnerable.” She thought the conflict might be due in part to the company he was keeping mainly sportsmen. 

Hemingway is among these people a great deal, and they like and admire him-his personality, his sporting prowess, and his literary prestige. It seems to me that unconsciously he must value their opinion. He must be afraid of laying bare before them the agony that tears the artist. He must be afraid of lifting before them the curtain that veils the beauty that should be exposed only to reverent eyes, as in Death in the Afternoon, he writes beautifully, and then immediately turns it off with a flippant comment, or a deliberate obscenity. His sporting friends would not understand the beauty. They would roar with delight at the flippancy.

The Movies from TDV

Hollywood also collaborated with the grotesquely restrictive British censors: on the eve of the Second World War their chief declared that “We may take pride in observing that there is not a single film showing in London today which deals with any of the burning issues of the day.”

For home consumption Hollywood’s plots ceased to be dangerous explorations of subliminal desires. They became instead nostalgic evocations of small-town virtues, treacly affirmations of New Deal values. This was fair enough in the sense that most movie-goers had no wish to be purged with pity and terror. They wanted release from care and pain, “fairyland” pictures which would “supply the lacks in their existence.” They craved short cuts to Nirvana. Still, it suited the government that too much reality did not appear on the screen. President Roosevelt was doubtless familiar with the lines of New Yorkers who gathered as early as 8:00 A.M. under the lights of Broadway, Times Square and 42nd Street to take refuge in theatres showing three features. Certainly he prescribed the celluloid anodyne. “During the Depression,” he said, “when the spirit of the people is lower than at any other time, it is a splendid thing that for just fifteen cents an American can go to a movie and . . . forget his troubles.

Hollywood manufactured optimistic myths to cheer a depressed civilisation. The movie magnates dispensed tinsel and glitter, as befitting their flashy emblems-Columbia’s torch of liberty, the star-circled mountain peak of Paramount, the questing searchlights of Twentieth Century Fox. Hollywood sold a “gaudier version of religion,” said writer Ben Hecht, in the shape of “Mother Goose platitudes and primitive valentines.” It transported audiences to Shangri-La and the Land of Oz. Often, they found, the balsa-wood Wild West was more substantial than the asphalt jungle outside the doors of the picture palace. The gimcrack underworld became more solid than the world of flesh and blood. Once enter “the dark of the theatre,” said director Josef Von Sternberg, and “the thin line dividing what is real and what is imagined is severed.” Fact blurred into fantasy like images dissolving on the screen. Authentic grief and joy carried less conviction than the glycerine tears and the orthodontic smiles of film stars. True lovers paled beside Clark Gable and Greta Garbo. Genuine thugs had less charisma than Edward G. Robinson and George Raft. Even monsters like Boris Karloff and Shirley Temple did not seem incredible. Everyday life was eclipsed by the glamour and melodrama of films such as Gone with the Wind. The cinema provided a ==== gate existence for many people. They spoke like Humphrey Bogart. They vamped like Marlene Dietrich. They postured like Errol Flynn. Life imitated Hollywood.

Nowhere was this more true than in Hollywood itself. Los Angeles’ most celebrated suburb occupied a gigantic proscenium between sepia mountains and technicolor coast. Nature herself sometimes provided authentic dramas-flood, drought, fire and earthquake. But in all other respects the place, which housed only some of the film companies, seemed artificial. The sunshine appeared to have been switched on by Warner Brothers, thought]. B. Priestley. The gardens (with their scentless flowers) and the orchards (with their tasteless fruits) looked like the work of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The streets resembled a vast junkyard of studio sets, all “slapdash cheap picturesqueness.” Oil derricks punctuated the skyline like exclamation marks, while the foreground was a jumble of white apartment buildings, stucco bungalows, Himsy stores, hamburger stalls, petrol pumps, blinking signs and lurid hoardings advertising such enticing amenities as “Los Angeles’ fastest growing cemetery.”33 Freak buildings turned up like the lost properties of some bizarre spectacular. Restaurants were constructed to resemble ice-cream cones, brown bowler hats, monstrous women. And film stars throwing parties in them accomplished further metamorphoses, transforming them into cardboard ships or papier maché cathedrals. Beyond the fringe of Hollywood, in gilded enclaves like Pasadena, Beverly Hills, Bel-Air, Santa Monica and Malibu, architectural mimesis ran riot. Houses were not houses but Art Deco palazzos, Mexican haciendas, Gothic castles, Tudor manors, French Chateaux, Swiss chalets, Japanese temples, Tuscan villas, Samoan huts or any combination of such styles. Greta Garbo lived in a green-shuttered Algerian monastery. Charlie Chaplin inhabited a red-brick colonial mansion. Marion Davies’s beach house was a “white-pillared manse, huge as a railway terminal.”34 Everything was sham and fantasy. No wonder that film director James Whale exclaimed, “All the world’s made of plaster of Paris!”

It was a pardonable exaggeration. From the vast studio hangars came a cascade of scenery as substantial as a Dadaist delirium. Here, in painted canvas and plywood, mocked-up lath and plaster, was a cyclorama featuring the entire history and mythology of mankind, NO one caught the chaos of conflicting images more vividly than Nathanael West past flapping marble porticoes and cellophane waterfalls, his hero (in The Day of the Locust) encounters :

the skeleton of a Zeppelin, a bamboo Stockade, an adobe fort, the wooden horse of Troy, a flight of baroque palace stairs that started in a bed of weeds and ended against the branches of an oak, part of Fourteenth Street elevated station, a Dutch windmill, the bones of a dinosaur, the upper half of the Merrimack, a corner of a Mayan temple.

Like these evanescent tableaux, the costume drama overflowed from the studio lots. Sunset Boulevard and its surroundings witnessed a perpetual masquerade, a strutting procession of mimic men and women dressed for their parts. Females wore mink coats over purple lounging pyjamas. Males sported green trousers, orange sneakers, pastel handkerchiefs. Stars concealed themselves behind dark glasses with large white rims, “a triumph of conspicuous anonymity.”37 Extras competed in exhibitionism. Hollywood attracted a huge company of supporting players-small-town beauty queens and vaudeville midgets, cabaret dancers and circus strong men, burlesque comedians and opera soubrettes. Following like prospectors in a gold rush came barkers, mountebanks, swamis, “healers,” beauticians, morticians. Of all the make-belief merchants none were more extraordinary than the so-called “cinemoguls” or cellulords.”

Almost without exception these men-they were all men, many of them Jewish-had risen from humble beginnings. Sam Goldwyn had been a glove salesman, Louis B. Mayer a rag-picker, Harry Cohn a furrier, Eddie Mannix a bouncer in an amusement park. The Warner brothers were butcher’s sons. The Schenks had owned a drugstore. Marcus Loew and Adolph Zukor had run penny arcades. Most had come to Hollywood via the slums of show business: flea circuses, theatrical agencies, nicke elodeons, vaudeville. Once established as the rulers of movie-land they became, as often as not, a prey to fantasy, vanity and megalomania. They confused cinema with ve’rz'té: Walt Disney reckoned that the centaur sequence in his cartoon film Fantasia would be the making of Beethoven. Monarchs of the “marzipan kingdom” moved in “an aura of greatness,” said Ben Hecht, “and reports of their genius would have embarrassed Michelangelo.”38 Like royalty, Sam Goldwyn never carried money. The film producers became pocket dictators.
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Goldwyn and his kind were particularly smart when it came to defending their fiefdom against the only man of letters who ever seriously threatened it. This was Upton Sinclair, who sought election as Governor of California in 1934 on the Democratic ticket and a utopian socialist platform. “What does Sinclair know about anything?” growled Louis B. Mayer. “He’s just a writer.”

Hemingway and Wolfe via A Scott Berg

From Max Perkins- Editor of Genius:
In the middle of December, 1932, Hemingway invited Perkins to Arkansas, where they would live for a week on a rented houseboat and shoot ducks. All Max had to put in his duffel bag was some warm clothes. Ernest guessed that Max’s lady writers and gaggle of girls at home would squawk at his leaving, but he thought his editor needed to get away, He promised the sort of shooting their great-grandfathers once had, and that if Perkins did not have the time of his life, he would wheelbarrow him all the way back to New York.

Max met Ernest in Memphis during a cold snap, then traveled five more hours with him, half by train, the rest by car. That first night, on their houseboat, Max stripped down to a pair of longjohns and crawled into bed. Early the next morning, in the pitch dark, Ernest awakened him, and they headed up the ice-caked river and found a blind. All that sunless morning and for five mornings afterward they crouched there in the snow, loading and firing and watching the birds fall. In the afternoons they tracked through forests all silvery with ice. They also went aboard several houseboats to buy corn whiskey and to talk with men who had lived all their lives on that river. One afternoon, at dusk, Max and Ernest heard a terrific racket around the bend. An old-time Mississippi steamboat with large sidewheels and two parallel funnels pouring out wood smoke thrashed toward them. ”To Hemingway this was a commonplace,” Max wrote years later to an author, Ann Chidester, ”but to a Vermont Yankee it was like going back eighty or ninety years and coming into Mark Twain’s world.”

Together Max and Ernest shot a few dozen ducks, though not nearly so many as Hemingway said they should have. Max was more interested in the company than the game anyway. They talked a lot about what Ernest might work on next. Max said he looked forward to the day when Ernest would write a book about Key West and the fishing there, a work ”full of incidents about people and about weather and the way things looked and all that.” In the evenings after dinner the men warmed themselves with highballs, and Max listened while Ernest took shots at some of his other writers.

He professed to be “simply wild” about Thomas Wolfe’s writing and said he wanted to meet the man he called Perkins’s "world genius," though he was afraid that their conflicting natures would set them off once they met. Max and Ernest also talked a great deal about the Fitzgeralds. Ernest had picked up Zelda’s novel but found it "completely and absolutely unreadable." Scott, he believed, had gone in for the cheap "Irish love of defeat, betrayal of himself.” So far as Hemingway could see, only two things could make a writer of Scott Fitzgerald again: Zelda’s death, "which might put a term to things in his mind”; or for his stomach to give out, so that he could never drink again. Despite Hemingway’s tough talk, these nighttime hours alone with him by the fire were for Max the best part of the trip.

Once Max started to enjoy himself, he got anxious to go home. Ernest explained to Charles Scribner years later that Max had that "awful puritanical thing” that made him give up anything as soon as he had fun doing it.

Weeks after Perkins left Arkansas, Hemingway announced that he was coming to New York. Thomas Wolfe was in Brooklyn Heights, and so Max arranged for Scribners' two mightiest novelists to meet. He knew that no two writers were farther apart in style and method, but he thought Wolfe could benefit from an informal seminar with Ernest. ”I brought it about,” Perkins later told Wolfe’s friend John Terry, "because I hoped Hem would be able to infiuence Tom to overcome his faults in writing, even though they were the defects of his qualities, such as his tendency to repetitions and excessive expression.” Max took them to lunch at Cherio’s on Fifty-third Street. At a large round table he sat between the two of them and said little. For the most part he let Hemingway hold forth on writing, and Tom sat there in rapt attention. One of the helpful tips Ernest passed on was always "to break off work when you ‘are going good.’---Then you can rest easily and on the next day easily resume.” "[Hemingway] can be blunt,” Perkins wrote John Terry, ”but he can also be more gentle in speech than anyone I know. He wanted to help Tom, and everything went well, except I think Tom was not in the least affected.”

Hemingway continued to express admiration for Wolfe, mostly out of respect for Perkins, but he really had no patience for such ”literary Writers.” When he was told of an author who could not get on with his work until he found the right place in which to create, Hemingway insisted there was only one place for a man to write-in his head. He thought of Tom as something like a born but undisciplined fighter: the "Primo Camera of writers,” he called him. He told Perkins that Wolfe
had that quality endemic to all geniuses-he was “Really a great child. But such people, he wrote Perkins, were a "hell of a responsibility.“ Hemingway believed Wolfe had a magnificent talent and a delicate spirit, but he knew that Perkins was doing a lot of the author's thinking for him. He cautioned Perkins never to lose Tom's confidence, for the author's Sake,

The June, 1933, number of the New Republic carried a late review of Death in the Afternoon by Max Eastman, an erstwhile friend of Hemingway and the author of several books for Scribners, including The Enjoyment of Poetry. It was an attack entitled "Bull in the Afternoon.” It taunted Hemingway for “juvenile romantic gushing and sentimentalizing of simple facts." "Hemingway is a full-sized man,” wrote Eastman, but he "lacks the serene confidence that he is a full-sized man."

Most of us too delicately organized babies who grow up to be artists suffer at times from that small inward doubt. But some circumstance seems to have laid upon Hemingway a continual sense of the obligation to pour forth evidences of red-blooded masculinity. It must be obvious not only in the swing of the big shoulders and the clothes he puts on, but in the stride of his Prose style and the emotions he permits to come to the surface of things.

Eastman charged that Hemingway had slung "an unconscionable quantity of bull" and helped beget a literary style “that was comparable to wearing false hair on the chest."
Hemingway, enraged, construed the review as impugning his sexual potency. He wrote a hotheaded letter to the New Republic asking them to "have Mr. Max Eastman elaborate his nostalgic speculations on my sexual incapacity." He let off more steam writing Perkins that if Eastman ever got a solvent publisher to print that "libel" between covers it would cost them plenty of money and Eastman would have to serve time in jail for it. Legal retaliation and financial remuneration were secondary. He swore to his editor that if he ever saw Max Eastman anywhere he would get redress in his own fashion.

Still infuriated, Hemingway admitted to Perkins that he was tempted never to publish another damned thing, because the droves of critical "swine” simply were not worth writing for. He found every phase of that "whole racket” as disgusting as vomit. Ernest insisted that every word he had written about the Spanish fighting bull was absolutely true, the result of careful observation, and he was irate that someone would pay Eastman. who knew nothing about it, to say that Hemingway wrote sentimental nonsense, as though the critic really knew what bulls were like. What they could not get over, he told Perkins, was that Ernest Hemingway was a man, that he could "beat the shit" out of any of them, and, most upsetting, that he could write.

Perkins assured Hemingway that the Eastman article could do no harm. "The reality," he said, "is in the quality of what you write and cannot be hurt by anybody, or only momentarily." Before Hemingway departed for Spain, where he and bullfighter Sidney Franklin were producing a motion picture of Death in the Afternoon, Max Eastman apologized in what Hemingway called a "kissass letter" for the misunderstanding between them; he denied any personal slurs in his review. Hemingway was not mollified.

Perhaps the contest between writer and critics inspired his choice of title for his new collection of stories: Winner Tate Nothing. Hemingway sent it oil: to Perkins with a brief parable, whose moral was never to lose confidence in Old Papa. If at the end of the first hour the fish was killing him, at the end of two hours Hemingway w0uld always kill the fish. THINK TITLE EXCELLENT, Perkins wired, AND YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY INVULNERABLE TO EASTMAN AND OTHERS.

Another "other" appeared that summer. Gertrude Stein's memoirs, masquerading as The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, were being serialized in the Atlantic Monthly. In them she got in a few licks at several of her former friends. Like Max Eastman’s, her criticism fused Hemingway the man with his writing. Stein stated that she and Sherwood Anderson had in effect created Hemingway and "were both a little proud and a little ashamed of the work Of their minds.” Then she questioned Ernest's strength and endurance. Hemingway railed at her public betrayal of him and deplored the loss of "poor old Gertrude Stein’s" judgment. He told Perkins that he had always been completely loyal to Miss Stein until she practically threw him out of her house. Then she reached menopause, went “gaga,” took up with a “fourth-rate lot of fairies," and her entire sense of taste went "phtt." That alleged deterioration made it easier for Ernest to tolerate some of the "fine apocryphal incidents" she invented about him. NOW, he said, he only felt sorry for her, because she had written a “damned pitiful book.” He resolved to write good memoirs someday because he was jealous of nobody and had a steel-trap memory.

Saintly Max Perkins and the truly awful Zelda Fitzgerald

As he approached middle age, Perkins’ s tendency toward eccentricity began to flourish. He maintained an embarrassed belief in phrenology, the study of character as revealed by the protuberances of the skull. A prominent nasal bone was, he felt, the sign of individuality. He did not think any man who had a small nose or a flat back to his head could be especially worthwhile. To Perkins, it was a sign of mental weakness to confess a lapse of memory. "Never admit you can’t remember,” he would say. "Send a bucket into your subconscious.”

In his own engaging way he was becoming a fussbudget. Babies sucking on bottles disgusted him. Once, after a dinner honoring a famous beauty, he criticized her because "she had marks of her day clothes on her bare back.” He believed no "real lady” would ever drink beer or use Worcestershire sauce. -"In our family,” he admonished his own daughters, "we say underclothes, not underwear.”

When he brought books home to put on his shelves, he immediately ripped off their dust jackets and threw them away. He instinctively closed volumes he found lying open, pages down, and he winced when he observed someone licking fingers to turn pages.

He was a doodler and would ceaselessly sketch portraits of Napoleon, always 1n profile He also found pleasure 1n dreaming up "practical” solutions to everyday problems. Among his notions were that honey ought to be packaged in transparent containers and squeezed out like toothpaste. He went so far as to suggest to a friend in advertising that they should market the product as "Tubes of Liquid Sunshine.” He also thought typewriter paper ought to come in a long, perforated roll, like bathroom tissue.

Yet Perkins had no aptitude whatever for anything mechanical. "He couldn’t even drive in a screw,” said one daughter. One day several people on the fifth floor of the Scribner Building went running into Max’s office because they smelled smoke. They found Max totally ignoring a blaze in his wastebasket and carrying on with his work. One of old Charles Scribner’s grandsons, George Schieffelin, said, "I’m sure Max had no idea how it got started and even less how to put it out.”

Perkins’s daughters agreed their father was all but a menace behind the wheel of a car. Peggy said: ”He would drive along at a breakneck speed until he began to think about something that interested him. Then he would slow up and creep along. It infuriated him to have people pass him. He always refused to dim his lights. He said it was silly. Once we came up behind a man and woman walking together by the side of the road. He slowed up and drove very slowly behind them, trying to make us see from an artist’s point of view the difference between the way a man and a woman walk. We begged him to go past, because of course the poor people were bewildered, but he wouldn't. He was too interested in the problem of how to draw the difference.” '

****

Save Me The Waltz was the story of Alabama Beggs, a Montgomery judge’s daughter who married a handsome, promising artist she met during the war; through his early triumphs, she found herself unhappy and unfulhlled and started up a ballet career. Zelda had named the artist Amory Blaine, the protagonist of This Side of Paradise. Within the week Zelda wired Perkins: ACTING ON SCOTTS ADVICE WILL YOU RETURN MANUSCRIPT’ PHIPPS‘ CLINIC JOHNS HOPKINS WITH MANY THANKS REGRETS AND REGARDS. Fitzgerald had at last heard about the manuscript and wanted to read it himself before Max did. Perkins complied, writing: HAD READ ABOUT 60 PAGES WITH GREAT INTEREST VERY LIVE AND MOVING HOPE YOU WILL RETURN IT.

Perkins wrote Hemingway about the novel. "It looked as if there were a great deal that was good in it,” he said, ”but it seemed rather as though it somewhat dated back to the days of The Beauliful and Damned And of course it would not do at all the way it was, with Amory Blaine It would have been mighty rough on Scott. . . . I think the novel will be quite a good one when she finishes it.”

Scott interrupted his own novel to confer with Zelda, then wrote Max that the entire middle section of her book would have to be "radically rewritten.” The name of the artist, he said, would of course be changed. But Scott’s objections, in truth, went beyond the qualities of the manuscript itself. He was furious with Zelda. It was not just that she had sent the manuscript to Perkins before showing it to him, as if going behind his back. It was also that he soon realized how much use she had made of incidents from their life together-the rich material he had been too busy to use in the last few years because he had had to write cheaper stories to pay Zelda’s doctor bills.

In trying to placate Scott, Zelda all but threw herself at his feet. In a breast-beating letter she wrote, "Scott, I love you more than anything on earth and if you were offended I am miserable.” She knew what She had done: "I was . . . afraid we might have touched the same material.” But she explained: "Purposely I didn’t [send my book to you before I mailed it to Max]--knowing that you were working on your own and honestly feeling that I had no right to interrupt you to ask for a serious opinion. Also, I know Max will not want it and I prefer to do the corrections after having his opinion. . . . So, Dear, My Own, please realize that it was not from any sense of not turning first to you-but time and other ill-regulated elements that made me so bombastic about Max."

Fitzgerald had left Alabama on March 30 to be near his wife in Baltimore. In May he reported to Max, "Zelda's novel is now good. Improved in every way. It is new. She has largely eliminated the speakeasy-nights-and’ our-trip-to-Paris atmosphere. You’ll like it. . . . I am too close to it to judge it but it may be even better than I think.” In the middle of the month, when he mailed the manuscript to Perkins for a second reading he noted that it had the faults and virtues of any first novel.
She agreed to change any ”questionable parts,” but Perkins found Save Me the Waltz, strangely enough, virtually beyond editing. The entire manu. script was honeycombed with some of the most flowery language he had ever seen. Her similes flowed naturally if not always sensibly, some. times dozens of them on a single page. In describing the boatloads of Americans who wandered around France in the late twenties, for example, Zelda wrote:

"They ordered Veronese pastry on lawns like lace curtains at Versailles and chicken and hazlenuts at Fountainebleau where the woods wore powdered wigs. Discs of umbrellas poured over surburban terraces with the smooth round ebullience of a Chopin waltz. They sat in the distance under the lugubrious dripping elms, elms like maps of Europe, elms frayed at the end like bits of Chartreuse wool, elms heavy and bunchy as sour grapes. They ordered the weather with a continental appetite, and listened to the centaur complain about the price of hoofs."

Hardly a character, emotion, or scene was not adorned with her grandiloquence. But that was the very quality that distinguished her writing, just as it enlivened her speech. For the most part, Perkins benignly neglected the problem and chose to let it appear in public as it was, to live or die on its own.

Under her husband’s eye, Zelda revised the galley proofs considerably. The book was shortened, mostly by filing down the accounts of their marital jags. During the next few months proofs were shuttled around so hectically from Perkins to the author to the typesetter, to Perkins, back

.to the author, and back to the typesetter-that it seemed at last that every one, exhausted, had just quit, as if to avoid another mailing. Max thought of warning the Fitzgeralds they would have to pay for the excessive corrections, but he knew they wanted the book the way they thought it should be, regardless of cost. Ultimately, countless misspellings, unclear passages, and most of the rococo language found their way into print. Impressed with the bulk of her book once it was bound, Zelda wrote Max, “1 only hope it will be as satisfactory to you as it is to me.”

The Fitzgeralds’ marriage worked like a seesaw. In the spring of 1932, while Zelda was high with expectations for her book, Scott W215 feeling low. He was torn from his past but unattached to any future.

Up Close and Personal

Reading 'Monster' by John Gregory Dunne on the writing of the screenplay of what eventually became 'Up Close and Personal' which starred Robert Redford, hence

Max Perkins

On one of James’s visits to New York, Max took a fancy to his ten. gallon hat. James sent one to Perkins, and it fit perfectly. ”I happened to be walking in it with a portrait painter,” Max wrote in thanking him, "and he begged me to let him paint me in it, and that never happened before I got this hat.” From that day forward, there was hardly a moment when Perkins did not wear a hat, indoors and out. Eventually he traded off permanently to a soft gray-felt fedora, size seven, which he wore so low that it folded his ears forward.

His habit of hat-wearing became Perkins’s most famous eccentricity and the subject of much speculation. ”Why the hat?” people kept wondering. The answer seems to be that he found it useful as well as ornamental. It gave the impression to unexpected office visitors that he was on his way out, and this kept them from buttonholing him into idle conversation. The hat also thrust his ears forward, which helped his hearing. Miss Wyckoff suggested that Perkins wore his hat to keep customers in the Scribners bookstore from mistaking him for a clerk as he made his afternoon promenade. Perkins himself revealed something of his attitude on the matter in a column he wrote for the Plainfield newspaper. The slouch hat, he apotheosized, was “the hat of independence and individuality, the American hat.”

Perkins’s attachment to his hat was hardly greater than his attachment to his clothing in general. At first glance he seemed to be an elegantly dressed New Yorker, but under close scrutiny he looked rather ragged. His daughters often pointed out his white shirt peeking through the thinning fabric of his suit-jacket elbows. Louise once tried to shame him into buying a new suit by telling him all his clothes looked secondhand, but that did not bother Max. Only at her sternest insistence would he give in to her demand that he buy a new suit. He would allow her to pick one suit from his closet, take it to the tailor, and have another made exactly like it.

This Yankee penchant for the sparse made Perkins the ideal editor for President Calvin Coolidge. Max published a collection of his speeches; it took months to talk "Silent Cal” down from 160,000 to 98,000 words. 

As publication neared, Fitzgerald lacked Perkins’s confidence. He was shakiest about the title. In early March he wired Max, asking if it was too late to change it to Gold-Hatted Gatsby. Max cabled that such a change would cause not only a harmful delay but also considerable confusion. The author tried to live with The Great Gatsby, but he still believed in his heart that the title would forever stand as his book’s one flaw.

Perkins went right on making the final preparations for The Great Gatsby’s April 10 publication; but on March 19 Fitzgerald could not re frain from sending him an exigent telegram from Capri: CRAZY ABOUT TITLE UNDER THE RED WHITE AND BLUE. WHAT WOULD DELAY BE? Perkins responded that there would be a delay of several weeks. Besides, he wired THINK IRONY IS FAR MORE EFFECTIVE UNDER LESS LEADING TITLE EVERYONE LIKES PRESENT TITLE URGE WE KEEP IT. Three days later Fitzgerald acceded. He wired: YOU’RE RIGHT. But his nervousness mounted. ‘ 

....

Perkins said, "If a young man worked beside [Brownell] for some years and failed to become a passable editor he simply had no capacity for the work.” One of Brownell's hard and fast principles was that almost as much could be learned about an author's abilities through an interview as by reading his manuscript, since "water cannot rise above its source." Another Brownell adage that Perkins subscribed to was that the worst reason for publishing anything was that it resembled something else, that however unconscious, ”an imitation is always inferior." Sometimes a second-rate manuscript was marked by some rare characteristics that made it hard for the staff to surrender it. Brownell would close the debate by saying, "We can’t publish everything. Let someone else make a failure of it."

Brownell was always considerate of the authors he turned down. Whenever a book of promise had to be rejected, it was Brownell who wrote the most sympathetic letters. Perkins admired these compassionate rejections as works of art. One was so warmhearted that the author mailed his manuscript back, having written in the margin of the letter: "Then why the devil don’t you publish it?” 

Sein and Being

So what is the being that Heidegger wants us to marvel at and what are the beings that have it? Heidegger's word Sein (being) cannot be easily defined, because what it refers to is not like other categories or qualities. It certainly is not an object of any kind. Nor is it an ordinary shared feature of
objects. You can teach someone what a 'building’ is by pointing to a lot of different structures from grass huts to skyscrapers; it may take a While but eventually they will get it. But you could go on forever pointing out huts, meals, animals, forest paths, church portals, festive atmospheres, and looming thunderclouds, saying each time, ‘Look: being!’, and your interlocutor is likely to become more and more puzzled.

Heidegger sums this up by saying that Being is not itself a being. That is, it is not a deiined or delineated entity of any kind. He distinguishes between the German word Seiende, which can refer to any individual entity, such as a mouse or a church door, and Sein, which means the Being that such particular beings have. (In English, one way of signalling the distinction is by using the capital ‘B’ for the latter.) He calls it the ‘ontological difference-from ‘ontology’, the study of what is. It is not an easy distinction to keep clear in one’s mind, but the ontological difference between Being and beings is extremely important to Heidegger. If we get confused between the two, we fall into errors-for example, settling down to study some science of particular entities, such as psychology or even cosmology, while thinking that we are studying Being itself.

Unlike beings, Being is hard to concentrate on and it is easy to forget to think about it. But one particular entity has a more noticeable Being than others, and that is myself, because, unlike clouds and portals, I am the entity who wonders about its Being. It even turns out that I have a vague, preliminary, non-philosophical understanding of Being already otherwise I would not have thought of asking about it. This makes me the best starting point for ontological inquiry I am both the being whose Being is up for question and the being who sort of already knows the answer.

I myself, then, will be the path. But Heidegger re-emphasises that this does not mean I should sign up for courses in human sciences such as biology, anthropology, psychology or sociology. These merely ‘ontical’ inquiries have nothing to contribute to an ontological investigation. Like the speculative debris cleared away by Husserl’s epoché, they are likely only to get in the way by clogging up our inquiry with irrelevant ideas. If I want to know what a human being is, it’s no good wiring one up to a EEG machine to measure brain waves, or analysing examples of behaviour. Just as Karl Jaspers had turned from psychology to phenomenology in order to practise ‘a different thinking', Heidegger felt that the question of Being must be truly philosophical or it is nothing. Moreover, it should not be philosophical in the old. fashioned way, focused narrowly on questions of what we can know. A new new beginning is needed.

For Heidegger, this means not only starting with Being but ensuring constant vigilance and care in thinking. He generously helps us to achieve this by using a frustrating kind of language.

As his readers soon notice, Heidegger tends to reject familiar philosophical terms in favour of new ones which he coins himself. He leaves the German Sein or Being more or less as it is, but when it comes to talking about the questioner for whom its Being is in question (i.e. me, a human), he strenuously avoids talk of humanity, man, mind, soul or consciousness, because of the scientific, religious or metaphysical assumptions such words conceal. Instead, he speaks of ‘Dasein’, a word normally meaning ‘existence’ in a general way, and compounded of da (there) and sein (to be). Thus, it means ‘there-being’, or 'being-there’.

The effect is at once disconcerting and intriguing. Reading Heidegger, and feeling (as one often does) that you recognise an experience he is describing, you want to say, ‘Yes, that’s me!’ But the word itself deflects you from this interpretation; it forces you to keep questioning. Just getting into the habit of saying Dasein takes you halfway into Heidegger’s world. It is so important a term that English translators tend to leave it in the original German; an early partial French translation by Henry Corbin rendered it as ‘réalité humaine’, which created another layer of confusion.

Why, one often wails, can’t Heidegger speak plainly? His tangled and unnatural terms invite parody; as in Gunter Grass’ 1963 novel Dog Years, where a character falls under the influence of an unnamed philosopher and goes around calling underdone potatoes ‘spuds forgetful of Being’, and clearing rodents out of the kitchen’s water pipes while wondering, ‘Why rats and not other essents? Why anything at all rather than nothing?’ One might think that, if Heidegger had anything worth saying, he could have communicated it in ordinary language.

The fact is that he does not want to be ordinary, and he may not even want to communicate in the usual sense. He wants to make the familiar obscure, and to vex us. George Steiner thought that Heidegger’s purpose was less to be understood than to be experienced through a ‘felt strangeness’. It is something like the 'alienation’ or estrangement effect used by Bertholt Brecht in his theatre, which is designed to block you from becoming too caught up in the story and falling for the delusion of familiarity. Heidegger’s language keeps you on edge. It is dynamic, obtrusive, sometimes ridiculous and often forceful; on a page of Heidegger, things are typically presented as surging or thrusting, as being thrown forward, lit up or broken open. Heidegger admitted that his way of writing produced some ‘awkwardness’, but he thought that a small price to pay for overturning the history of philosophy and bringing us back to Being.

For non-German readers, it should be added, some of the awkwardness is an artefact of translation. German welcomes monumental word constructions, but in English they tend to come out as long hyphenated lines, trundling along like mismatched railway carriages. The Question of Being, for example, is an elegant Seinsfrage in German. But even German cannot comfortably accommodate Sich-vorveg-schon-sein-in-(der-Welt) als Sein-bei, or ‘ahead-of-itself-already-being-in-(the-world) as beingtogether-with (beings encountered within the world)’.

One way of thinking about Heidegger is as a literary innovator, and perhaps even as a kind of modernist novelist. I was well into working on this book when, via Janet Malcolm’s study Two Lives, I came across excerpts from Gertrude Stein’s experimental novel The Making of Americans. Stein sets out as if to relate a standard family saga, but abandons conventional ways of writing in order to say things like this about her characters:

I am always feeling each kind or them as a substance darker, lighter, thinner, thicker, muddier, clearer, smoother, lumpier, granularer, mixeder, simpler. . . and always I am feeling in each one of them their kind of stuff as much in them, as little in them, as all of a piece in them, as lumps in them held together sometimes by parts of the same sometimes by other kinds of stuff in them. . . [S]ome. . . are made of little lumps of one kind of being held together or separated from each other, as one comes to feel it in them, the lumps in them from each other by other kind of being in them, sometimes by other kind of being in them that is almost the complete opposite of the lumps in them, some because, the lumps are melting always in to the surrounding being that keeps the lumps from touching, in some because the kind of being in them is spread out so thin in them, that everything that they have learned, that they like to be in living, all reaction to everything interesting, in them, has really nothing to do in them with the thin spread being in them...Some are always Whole ones though the being in them is all a mushy mass with a skin to hold them in and so make one.

The ‘being’ in them, she explains, ‘can be slimy, gelatinous, gluey, white opaquy kind of thing and it can be white and vibrant and clear and heated and this is all not very clear to me’.

Heidegger would have disliked Stein’s imprecision, but he might have appreciated the sight of a writer stretching language to its utmost to avoid the dulling effect of ordinary perceptions. He might also have recognised that her distinction between characters and the ‘being’ in them foreshadows his own notion of the ontological difference.

Thus, it can help to think of Heidegger as an experimental novelist, or a poet. Yet, even while rejecting the traditional philosophical virtue of clarity, he was adamant that he was a philosopher, and that there was nothing merely literary or playful about his language. His purpose was to overturn human thinking, destroy the history of metaphysics, and start philosophy all over again. A little violence done to language is to be expected, given an overall aim that is so extreme and so violent

The biggest overturning that Being and Time inflicts on old-school philosophy is to approach the question of Dasein and its Being in a way that Husserl had been supposed to do but did not make very evident: through everyday life.

Heidegger gives us Dasein in its weekday clothes, as it were: not in its Sunday best, but in its ‘everydayness’. Other philosophers have tended to start with a human being in an unusual state, such as sitting alone in a room staring into the embers of a fire and thinking-which was how Descartes began. They then go on to use simple, everyday terms to describe the result. Heidegger does the opposite. He takes Dasein in its most ordinary moments, then talks about it in the most innovative way he can. For Heidegger, Dasein’s everyday Being is right here: it is Being-in-the-world, or In-der-Welt-sein.

The main feature of Dasein’s everyday Being-in-the-world right here is that it is usually busy doing something. I don’t tend to contemplate things; I pick them up and act on them. If I hold a hammer, it is not normally to ‘stare at the hammer-Thing’, as Heidegger puts it. (He uses the lovely word das Hammerding.) It is to go to work hammering nails.

Moreover, I do my hammering in service of some purpose, such as building a bookcase for my philosophy tomes. The hammer in my hand summons up a whole network of purposes and contexts. It reveals Dasein’s involvement with things: its ‘concern’. He cites examples: producing something, using something, looking after something, and letting something go, as well as negative involvements such as neglecting something, or leaving it undone. These are what he calls "deficient’ forms, but they are still forms of concern. They show that Dasein’s Being in general is one of ‘care’. The distinction between 'care’ and 'concern’ (Besorgen and Sorge) is confusing, but both mean Dasein is in the world up to the elbows, and it is busy. We are not far from Kierkegaard and his point that I don’t just exist, but have an interest or an investment in my existence.
My involvements, Heidegger continues, lead me to deploy 'useful things’ or 'equipment’ -items such as the hammer. These have a par. ticular Being which Heidegger calls Zuhandenheit: ‘readiness-to~hand’ or 'handiness’. While I am hammering, the hammer has that kind of Being for me. If, for some reason, I lay down the hammer and gawp at it as a Hammerding, then it has a different kind: Vorhandenheit or 'presence-at-hand’.

For Heidegger, the philosophers’ second-biggest mistake (after forgetfulness of Being) has been to talk about everything as though it was present-at-hand. But that is to separate things from the everyday ‘concernful’ way in which we encounter them most of the time. It turns them into objects for contemplation by an unconcerned subject who has nothing to do all day but gaze at stuff. And then we ask why philosophers seem cut off rom everyday life!

By making this error, philosophers allow the whole structure of worldly Being to fall apart, and then have immense difficulty in getting it back together to resemble anything like the daily existence we recognise. Instead, in Heidegger’s Being-in-the-world, everything comes already linked together. If the structure falls to pieces, that is a ‘deficient’ or secondary state. This is why a smoothly integrated world can be revealed by the simplest actions. A pen conjures up a network of ink, paper, desk and lamp, and ultimately also a network of other people for whom or to whom I am writing, each one with his or her own purposes in the world. As Heidegger wrote elsewhere, 2 table is not just a table: it is a family table, where ‘the boys like to busy themselves’, or perhaps the table where ‘that decision was made with a friend that time, where that work was written that time, where that holiday was celebrated that time’. We are socially as well as equipmentally involved. Thus, for Heidegger, all Being-in-the-world is also a ‘Being-with’ or Mitsein. We cohabit with others in a ‘with-world’, or Mitwelt.

The old philosophical problem of how we prove the existence of other minds has now vanished. Dasein swims in the with-world long before it wonders about other minds. Others are those 'from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself -those among whom one is too’. Mitsei'n remains characteristic even of a Dasein that is shipwrecked on a desert island or trying to get away from everyone by living on the top of a pillar, since those situations are defined mainly by reference to the missing fellow Daseins. The Dasein of a stylite is still a Being-with, but it is (Heidegger loves this word) a ‘delicient’ mode of Being-with.

Heidegger gives an example that brings everything together. I am out for a walk, and I iind a boat by the shore. What Being does the boat have for me? It is unlikely to be ‘just’ an object, a boat-thing which I contemplate from some abstract vantage point. Instead, I encounter the boat as (1) a potentially useful thing, in (2) a world which is a network of such things, and (3) in a situation where the boat is clearly useful for someone else, if not for me. The boat lights up equipment, world and Mitsein all at once. If I want to consider it a mere ‘object’, I can, but this does violence to everyday Being.

The surprising thing is that philosophy had to wait so long for someone to say these things. American pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey and William James had explored human life as a practical, active affair, but they did not share Heidegger’s grand philosophical vision, and were more inclined to use pragmatism to bring philosophy down to earth rather than to remind it of its greatest tasks and questions. Husserl did share Heidegger’s scale of ambition, but he had relocated everything in his idealist cavern. For Heidegger, that was a fatal mistake: Husserl had bracketed out the wrong thing. He had bracketed out Being, the one thing that is indispensable.

Heidegger is philosophy’s great reverser. In Being and Time, it is everyday Being rather than the far reaches of cosmology or mathematics that is most ‘ontological’. Practical care and concern are more primordial than reflection. Usefulness comes before contemplation, the ready-to-hand before the present-at-hand, Being-in-the-world and Being~with-others before Being-alone. We do not hover above the great rich tangle of the world, gazing down from on high. We are already in the world and involved in it-we are ‘thrown’ here. And 'thrownness’ must be our starting point.

from S Bakewell

Ethel Merman by Wolcott Gibbs

  It is even possible to get along with none of the accepted gifts at all, substituting for them some quality so hard to define that it is usually just called personal-ity. Helen Morgan's talent, for instance, fitted no pattern. She was not beautiful nor very bright and her sad little voice belonged in a speakeasy, providing synthetic tears for the synthetic gin. All she had was the faculty of communicating a vague, enormous melancholy, but it was enough, at least for the peculiar temper of her time. Un-orthodox triumphs like hers, however, are rare; the quadruple threat is the ideal. The fact that Miss Merman can triumphantly carry a show all by herself is an imposing mystery, since, at first glance, she would seem to be even more limited than most of her sisters. Ethel Merman is s feet 51/2 inches tall. When she first appeared on Broadway she weighed 118 pounds, but now 130 seems more probable. She has an abundance of black hair; long-lashed, dark-brown eyes; a nose that has a rather Jewish cast, although she is not, and a generous mouth that is usually ajar, displaying handsome teeth, a little out of line along the bottom row. These conventional details, however, haven't much to do with what really makes her a figure of rare and irresistible humor on the stage before she even opens her mouth. It is partly a matter of structure and arrangement. Artists, in an attempt to impose some kind of order on the human body, have stated that, ideally, the female head is one-seventh the length of the whole figure, though in fashion drawing this is reduced to one-tenth for the purpose of achieving that unearthly grace. Working from photographs, since it is hardly practicable to apply a ruler to a lady piece by piece, statisticians have estimated that Miss Merman's head accounts for a little more than one-sixth of the total, making it measure about a foot, or nearly four inches beyond the length attained by less ambitious girls. Since the width is proportionate, it can safely be said that she has an almost record face. To borrow a useful phrase from Ring Lardner, it
is a sleeper jump from her hairline to her chin and another none from ear to ear. The features on this plane are whimsically designed.  The arching brows she offers to the public are a little higher than the ghostly traces of her own and give her a perpetually astounded air, heightened by her bright, round eyes, and her mouth, squared off by art likewise expresses a constant pleased surprise. Nature obviously intended her to have a rather inexpressive face and  the look of intense vivacity that usually adorns it is as comic and unnatural as the look of glassy distinction worn by the odd celebrities in those whisky advertisements.
 Her figure diminishes rapidly from her wide, square shoulders to her pretty feet so that, as one critic noted, the effect is curiously foreshortened, as if you were looking down at her from a stepladder. She walks with a rather jaunty swing, an appearance of elbowing her way through a crowd that may have been borrowed originally from Jimmy Durante, but now has a bustle unmistakeably her own. Sometimes it amuses her to waddle like a duck, usually when the scene would normally call for classic grace, ands and then she kicks one foot up in the air in queer, perfunctory gaiety. Miss Merman's voice somehow defies studious analysis. One critic, generally more at home at the Metropolitan Opera House than the Imperial Theatre, recently spoke of it with respect. "It is a big, well-focused contralto," he began carefully. "You might say it goes on a straight line." At this point, however, his educated man-ner deserted him. "Hell, it's quite an organ," he said. "Got ping, you know what I mean. I guess she's got leather or something down there." Others have mentioned her exactp itch (when she sharps or flats it is invariably for her own humorous purposes), her extraordi-nary sense of rhythm and the enunciation that, without the hideous grimaces that usually disfigure the precise vocalist still makes every intricate syllable clear all over the house. Whatever her qualities, she acquired them without training, never having taken a formal lesson in her life. She has never learned to breathe according to the rules, simply doing so whenever she happens to feel like it, and she has had no experience with those elocution-class favorites like "The rain in Spain falls gently on the plain" that are guaranteed to make any young woman talk like Lynn Fontanne.
of everything she has sung, up to Annie, Miss Merman has named I Got Rhythm as her favorite fast song, Mississinewah as the funniest song generally, I Get a Kick Out of You as the ballad that affected her most, and Eadie Was a Lady as the best character piece. A good many people might dissent mildly from this selection, especially from the omission of You're the Top, which certainly involved the greatest amount of stylish reference ever crowded into one lyric, but they were all fine songs and the words from them still bring back very cheerful memories to those who first heard that stirring and jubilant trumpet in the days when we were all certainly in far better shape. While Miss Merman has certainly been fortunate in her authors, she has a firm mind Of her own and hasn't hesitated to veto ideas that don't appeal to her. Once, for instance, Cole Porter thought it might be a good idea to incorporate some topical references in a song. The show was in a late stage of rehearsal and anyway she wasn't much impressed with the news item he had in mind. "Listen," she told him firmly, "I'm not going to go louse up my lyrics just because some big dope did something." When she refused to appear in Sadie Thompson the only show she ever declined, her objections were largely based on a difference of opinion with Howard Dietz about lyrics. He had a verse that amused him involving the word Malmaison, but Miss Merman was not convinced. "What's it mean?" she asked. He told her that Malmaison was a famous kind of lipstick and she went away, but obviously still doubtful. The next day she came back and delivered her ultimatum. "Hey, Howard," she said. "That Malmaison. I asked twenty-five other dames and none of them ever heard of it either. It goes out." It didn't, but Miss Merman did. About the only time she has ever lost in such a contest, in fact, was when she was in Hollywood, and the forces of purity proved too much for her. "One look at you and I get hot pants" was nervously altered to "One look at you and I get that way" and "feet" was substituted in a line that once ran genially: "Oh, she started a heat wave, by making her seat wave." Neither of these alterations struck her as an improvement, but, after all, she wasn't God.