The Swerve

The prime hunting grounds for Poggio and his fellow book hunters were the libraries of old monasteries, and for good reason: for long centuries monasteries had been virtually the only institutions that cared about books. Even in the stable and prosperous times of the Roman Empire, literacy rates, by our standards at least, were not high. As the empire crumbled, as cities decayed, trade declined, and the increasingly anxious populace scanned the horizon for barbarian armies, the Whole Roman system of elementary and higher education fell apart. What began as downsizing went on to wholesale abandonment. Schools closed, libraries and academies shut their doors, profes~ sional grammarians and teachers of rhetoric found themselves out of work. There were more important things to worry about than the fate of books.

But all monks were expected to know how to read. In a world increasingly dominated by illiterate warlords, that expectation, formulated early in the history of monasticism, was of incalculable importance. Here is the Rule from the monasteries established in Egypt and throughout the Middle East by the late fourth-century Coptic saint Pachomius. When a candidate for admission to the monastery presents himself to the elders,

they shall give him twenty Psalms or two of the Apostles’ epistles or some other part of Scripture. And if he is illiterate he shall go at the first, third and sixth hours to someone who can teach and has been appointed for him. He shall stand before him and learn very studiously and with all gratitude. The fundamentals of a syllable, the verbs and nouns shall be written for him and even if he does not want to, he shall be compelled to read.

“He shall be compelled to read.” It was this compulsion that, through centuries of chaos, helped to salvage the achievements of ancient thought.

Though in the most influential of all the monastic rules, written in the sixth century, St. Benedict did not similarly specify an explicit literacy requirement, he provided the equivalent of one by including a period each day for reading-“prayerful reading,” as he put it-as well as manual labor. “Idleness is the enemy of the soul,” the saint wrote, and he made certain that the hours would be filled up. Monks would be permitted to read at certain other times as well, though such voluntary reading would have to be conducted in strict silence. (In Benedict’s time, as throughout antiquity, reading was ordinarily performed audibly.) But about the prescribed reading times there was nothing voluntary.

The monks were to read, whether they felt like it or not, and the Rule called for careful supervision:

Above all, one or two seniors must surely be deputed to make the rounds of the monastery While the brothers are reading. Their duty is to see that no brother is so acediosus as to waste time or engage in idle talk to the neglect of his reading, and so not only harm himself but also distract others.

Acediosus, sometimes translated as apathetic refers to an illness, specific to monastic communities, which had already been brilliantly diagnosed in the late fourth century by the Desert Father John Cassian. The monk in the grip of acedia would find it difficult or impossible to read. Looking away from his book, he might try to distract himself with gossip but would more likely glance in disgust at his surroundings and at his fellow monks. He would feel that things were better somewhere else, that he was wasting his life, that everything was stale and pointless, that he was suffocating.

He looks about anxiously this way and that, and signs that none of the brethren come to see him, and often goes in and out of his cell, and frequently gazes up at the sun, as if it was too slow in setting, and so a kind of unreasonable confusion of mind takes possession of him like some foul darkness.
Such a monk--and there were evidently many of them-had succumbed to what we would call a clinical state of depression.
Cassian called the disease “the noonday demon,” and the Benedictine Rule set a careful watch, especially at reading times, to detect anyone manifesting its symptoms.
If such a monk is found-God forbid-he should be reproved a first and a second time. If he does not amend, he must be subjected to the punishment of the rule so that the others may have fear.
A refusal to read at the prescribed time-whether because of distraction, boredom, or despair-would thus be Visited first by public criticism and then, if the refusal continued, by blows. The symptoms of psychic pain would be driven out by physical pain. And, suitably chastened, the distressed monk would return-in principle at least-to his “prayerful reading."

There was yet another time in which the Benedictine Rule called for reading: every day at meals one of the brothers was assigned, on a weekly basis, to read aloud. Benedict was well aware that for at least certain of the monks this assignment would occasion pride, and he therefore tried to suppress the sensation as best he could: “Let the incoming reader ask all to pray for him so that God may shield him from the feeling of elation.” He was aware too that for others the readings would be an occasion for mockery or simply for chat, and here too the Rule made careful provision: “Let there be complete silence. No whispering, no speaking-only the reader’s voice should be heard there.” But, above all, he wanted to prevent these readings from provoking discussion or debate: “No one should presume to ask a question about the reading or about anything else, lest occasion be given.”

“Lest occasion be given”: the phrase, in a text normally quite clear, is oddly vague. Occasion to whom or for what? Modern editors sometimes insert the phrase “to the devil” and that indeed may be what is implied here. But why should the Prince of Darkness be excited by a question about the reading? The answer must be that any question, however innocuous, could raise the prospect of a discussion, a discussion that would imply that religious doctrines were open to inquiry and argument.

Benedict did not absolutely prohibit commentary on the sacred texts that were read aloud, but he wanted to restrict its source: “The superior,” the Rule allows, “may wish to say a few words of instruction.” Those words were not to be questioned or contradicted, and indeed all contention was in principle to be suppressed. As the listing of punishments in the influential rule of the Irish monk Columbanus (born in the year Benedict died) makes clear, lively debate, intellectual or otherwise,
was forbidden. To the monk who has dared to contradict a fellow monk with such words as "It is not as you say,” there is a heavy penalty: “an imposition of silence or fifty blows.” The high walls that hedged about the mental life of the monks‘ the imposition of silence, the prohibition of questioning, the punishing of debate with slaps or blows of the whip-were all meant to affirm unambiguously that these pious communities were the opposite of the philosophical academies of Greece or Rome, places that had thrived upon the spirit of contradiction and cultivated a restless, wide-ranging curiosity.

All the same, monastic rules did require reading, and that was enough to set in motion an extraordinary chain of consequences. Reading was not optional or desirable or recommended; in a community that took its obligations with deadly seriousness, reading was obligatory. And reading required books. Books that were opened again and again eventually fell apart, however carefully they were handled. Therefore, almost inadvertently, monastic rules necessitated that monks repeatedly purchase or acquire books. In the course of the vicious Gothic Wars of the mid-sixth century and their still more miserable aftermath, the last commercial workshops of book production folded, and the vestiges of the book market fell apart. Therefore, again almost inadvertently, monastic rules necessitated that monks carefully preserve and copy those books that they already possessed. But all trade with the papyrus makers of Egypt had long vanished, and in the absence of a commercial book market, the commercial industry for converting animal skins to writing surfaces had fallen into abeyance. Therefore, once again almost inadvertently, monastic rules necessitated that monks learn the laborious art of making parchment and salvaging existing parchment. Without wishing to emulate the pagan elites by placing books or writing at the center of society, without affirming the importance of rhetoric or grammar, without prizing either learning or debate, monks nonetheless became the principal readers, librarians, book preservers, and hook producers of the Western world.

Poggio and the other humanists on the trail for lost classics knew all this. Having already sifted through many of the monastic libraries in Italy and having followed Petrarch’s lead in France, they also knew that the great, uncharted territories were Switzerland and Germany. But many of those monasteries were extremely difficult to reach-their founders had built them in deliberately remote places, in order to withdraw from the temptations, distractions, and dangers of the world And once an eager humanist, having endured the discomforts and risks of travel, managed to reach the distant monasteries, what then? The number of scholars who knew what to look for and who were competent to recognize what they had come to find, if they had the good fortune to stumble across it, was extremely small. There was, moreover, a problem of access: to get through the door a scholar would have to be able to persuade a skeptical abbot and a still more skeptical monastic librarian that he had a legitimate reason to be there. Access to the library was ordinarily denied to any outsider. Petrarch was a cleric; he could at least make his appeal from within the large institutional community of the Church. Many of the humanists by contrast were laymen and would have aroused immediate suspicion.

This daunting list did not exhaust the problems. For if a book hunter reached a monastery, got past the heavily barred door, entered the library, and actually found something interesting, he would still need to do something with the manuscript he had found.

Books were scarce and valuable.

The Last of Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

Hemingway fights, predictably poorly:

On the eleventh of August, days before sailing back to Spain, Hemingway dropped by Scribners without calling ahead, took the elevator to the fifth floor, and roamed back to his editor’s corner office. Sitting with Perkins, his back to the door, was Max Eastman. They were planning a new edition of his Enjoyment of Poetry. Ernest barged in and quickly realized who the other party was. Because Hemingway had often told Perkins what he would do if he ever met Eastman, because of that piece Eastman had written several years earlier, ”Bull in the Afternoon,” Perkins swallowed hard and thought fast. Hoping humor would work, Perkins said to Eastman, “Here’s a friend of yours, Max.”

Hemingway shook hands with Eastman and they swapped amenities. Then Ernest, with a broad smile, ripped open his shirt and exposed a chest which Perkins thought was hirsute enough to impress any man. Eastman laughed, and Ernest good-naturedly reached over and unbuttoned Eastman’s shirt, revealing a chest as bare as a bald man’s head. Everyone laughed at the contrast. Perkins got ready to expose his chest, sure that he could place second, when Hemingway truculently demanded of Eastman, "What do you mean [by] accusing me of impotence?”

Eastman denied that he had, and there were sharp words back and forth. Eastman said, "Ernest, you don’t know what you are talking about.
Here, read what I said.” He picked up a copy of Art and the Life Of Action on Perkins's desk, which the editor had there for some other reason, not even remembering that it contained ”Bull in the Afternoon,“ But instead of reading the passage Eastman pointed out, Ernest begin part of another paragraph, and trailed off into muttered profanity. "Read all of it, Ernest,” Eastman urged him. "You don't understand it. . . , Here, let Max read it.”

Perkins saw that things were getting serious. He started to read, thinking that would somehow calm things down. But Ernest snatched the book from him and said, ”No, I am going to do the reading." As he started again, his face flushed, and he turned and smacked Eastman with the open book. Eastman rushed at him. Perkins, fearful that Ernest would kill Eastman, ran around his desk to grab Hemingway from behind. As the two authors grappled, all the precariously balanced books and papers on Perkins’s desk toppled off, and both men fell to the floor. Thinking he was restraining Hemingway, Perkins grabbed the man on top. But when Max looked down, there was Ernest on his back, gazing up at him, his broken glasses dangling and a naughty grin from ear to ear. Apparently he had regained his composure instantly upon striking Eastman and put up no resistance whatever when Eastman landed on top of him.

After Hemingway and Eastman parted, Perkins spoke to the crowd of employees who had gathered. All agreed to say nothing. Max Eastman, however, wrote out an account of the incident, and the next night at a dinner where there were a number of newspaper people, he read it aloud, apparently at the urging of his wife. The next day Perkins’s office swarmed with journalists, and another group interviewed Ernest at the docks just before he sailed for Europe. According to the Times, ”Mr. Hemingway explained that. he had felt sorry for Mr. Eastman, for he knew he had seriously embarrassed him by slapping his face. ‘The man didn’t have a bit of fight. He just croaked, you know, at Max Perkins, “Who’s calling on you, Ernest or me?” ’ So I got out.”

Perkins maintained a public position of silent neutrality, but to spe’ cial friends such as Scott Fitderald and Elizabeth Lemmon he told all. He believed Hemingway could have annihilated Eastman if he had wanted to; but he noted that Eastman did have both Hemingway's shoulders pinned. Fitzgerald was grateful for the blow-by-blow account, because he had heard every possible version of the tussle "save that Eastman has fled to Shanghai with Pauline.”

and

Louise (Perkins) was back in the country for good, but again she found herself with an excess of energy, a surplus that city life had used to burn off. Her passion to perform on stage had eased, but a restlessness still flickered within her. She searched for a life of her own outside the house, and soon she found it.
Early in 1938 several nuns from the local Roman Catholic parish came to the Perkinses’ door to speak to their Catholic cook. Louise chatted with the sisters for a few minutes, then wrote their church a generous check. The nuns stayed to talk some more, and by the time they left, Louise had become impressed with Catholicism. She looked into it a bit further, and several weeks later she found herself in earnest conversation with the parish priest. ”What means the most to you apart from people?” he asked her. Her reply came without hesitation: ”Talent in the theater.” The priest told her to "take that and lay it on the altar of Jesus Christ.” At age fifty, Louise emerged from the wings into her new holy theater with all the vitality of an ingenue and the enthusiasm of a convert. As Elizabeth Lemmon noted, "Louise always had a passion for purple.” Whether or not her motivation was truly religious, it was strong. Friends and relatives indicated that Louise’s conversion had more than theatrical implications. Several people said it was her ”rebellion against the family.” One daughter suggested it was another stage in ”Mother’s lifelong struggle to be creative.”

Max was not convinced by Louise’s new devotion. Once, when she began one of her crusades, attempting to reform her entire household, he pointed out, ”Your voice takes on a phony tone whenever you talk about the Church.” When she asked for the umpteenth time, "Max, why won’t you try it once?”-as though it were some new headache remedy he responded, "And have you tried Buddha?” The harder she fought to save his soul, the harder Max resisted. It was a new version of their perennial battle-silent reserve versus unrestrained enthusiasm. Louise proselytized wherever she went, often to Max’s embarrassment. She sprinkled holy water all over the house, dousing Max’s pillow several times a week. With a sigh he would ask his daughters if they could not ”do something” about their mother. One evening, when she was running low on reasons why Max should convert, she told him if he did not start confessing his sins and taking Communion he would burn in hell. “Thank God I’m not going to heaven--” he came back, ”with all you Catholics.”

and

(Perkins gave contracts to people he) felt had lived interesting lives filled with colorful characters and dramatic events. But often, he eventually realized, these were the very people who lacked the perseverance or talent to write. Perkins gave a middling advance to one artist who was famous for his exploits and wanted to write his life story. The artist used the money to hire a succession of beautiful secretaries, "No matter what chapter from his life he set out to dictate,” Malcolm Cowley related in the N ew Yorker in the early forties, ”he found that the only words he could say were, ‘Miss Jones, did anyone ever tell you that you were beautiful?’ The book hasn’t been started, but Perkins thinks the artist still has it in him, and that someday, barring accidents, he will get it out.”

As did every publisher, Scribners gambled away thousands of dollars on books that never materialized, and the responsibility for every one of them weighed heavily on Max's conscience. When a manuscript came in and was unpublishable, Max felt even worse. "This is the way of it,” he explained to Elizabeth Lemmon. ”All my life, always, I’ve got myself into a jam and had to get out of it or die, all because of carelessness and folly. So I take on these books from something in the writer and my response to it. Then comes the ms. or the first part of it. I can’t give it to anyone else. They would say it was rotten, or not worth labor. I have to do the work, and I do it over and over in desperation. Sometimes I’d be ashamed to show it.”

and

William B. Wisdom had been gathering Wolfe’s writings for years.
He planned to establish a memorial at Harvard-a collection of all the Wolfe material he could get hold of, including, he hoped, the passionate love letters between Wolfe and Mrs. Bernstein. Their sweetest and ugliest sentiments were conveyed in those letters. One of the most memorable salutations, for example, read, ”My heavy-breasted, grey-haired Jewish bitch, I love the stench of your plum-colored arm-pits.” In June, 1943, Aline wrote Perkins,
I daresay I will get used to the idea of my letters to Tom being sold, but I’m not used to it yet in spite of the fact that it is legal. It is all a shock to me, but amounts to little in the scale of people’s sorrow now on earth. So this is the end of it from me to you. I carry with me always though, the pain of the fact that our relationship, Tom’s and mine, was never resolved during his life. Maybe it never could have been. It held so much, for so long a time, time that was magnificent, and even at the end he must have known in his heart’s core, how we were to each other.

In due course Perkins asked Mrs. Bernstein to surrender her own letters from Tom for the collection. She consented, but would not give them to Wisdom-whom she. suspected of profiting from the Wolfe material-for nothing. After several years of negotiating, Wisdom purchased the collection. Mrs. Bernstein demanded that every penny of the money due her go to the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. Writing to Max about this stipulation, she said: "It will be a retaliation for all the insults to the Jews that Tom hurled at me.”

and

That summer Perkins saw the film version of For Whom the Bell Tolls. He was delighted when he first heard that Gary Cooper was going to play the lead role. Perkins admired him so much that he had seen him in Sergeant York twice. After seeing the new film, though, Max realized the limitations of his favorite actor and the medium itself. He wrote Evan Shipman:

Of course Gary Cooper is just the way he always is-which is good, but is not Robert, nor anything like him. That is partly because all the subjective part of the story, or almost all, has got lost. Perhaps necessarily.

The only other motion picture that Perkins had ever shown any interest in was The Charge of the Light Brigade. He did not want to view the entire film, just the charge itself. Max made his middle daughter, Peggy, accompany him to the theater. He stationed her so that she could watch both the screen and her father, who stood in the lobby. They waited an hour and a half for the climactic moment. When she saw that Errol Flynn was about to lead the charge, Peggy signaled, Perkins advanced through the lobby, stood in the aisle, and observed the Brigade’s routing. Then Max and his daughter promptly retreated.
Ernest Hemingway had been in Cuba for the better part of the last year-~“doing whatever it is he is doing,” Max wrote Evan Shipman. Papa was busy patrolling in his boat, searching for German submarines. This was important work, he said, and he could not write while the war was going on. Perkins wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt but knew there was more to it than that.

and

There was no Gulf Stream for Perkins to glide off in, just a multiplying burden of anxieties. His authors’ plights, laid upon him, became more horrific, often macabre: One wanted Perkins’s counsel regarding her daughter who was having a breakdown; another sent him glimpses from her own traumatic childhood-true Gothic tales of being forced to dig up a dead sister’s corpse and dress her in doll’s clothes. There were distant relatives who had to borrow money or were seeking jobs, marriage problems of inlaws, women’s clubs campaigning against smut in literature, ethnic and political groups protesting certain characterizations, young people constantly seeking advice on becoming published writers, more family war casualties, authors whose books demonstrated that the earth was round but that we lived inside of it, or who had written five-volume novels entitled God. Through it all he kept his head while all about him were losing theirs.

The Duchess of Devonshire

From: Wait for Me!
Two things annoyed Farve in my mother's otherwise impeccably run house. If a housemaid was rash enough to remove the deepest ashes from the grate where a wood fire burned, she was in trouble. Farve was right: it is the ashes that hold the heat and ensure a quick start in the morning. He found a way of avoiding the second annoyance. After breakfast he refilled his coffee cup and took it to his study. He let it get cold and drank what he called his ‘suckments’ at intervals during the morning. A tidy, new-to-the-job maid took the cup back to the pantry, emptied and washed it. This enraged my father: ‘Some monkey’s orphan has taken my suckments.’ Thereafter he locked the cup in his safe.

Farve was impatient, intolerant, impulsive, loyal, courageous, loving, fastidious, unread and possessed of great charm, all underwritten with courtly good manners to most. Every now and then his short fuse made him lash out. He was profoundly irritated by some of the young men Nancy invited to the house and more than once lost his temper with her friend James Lees-Milne, the future author and diarist. On one occasion Jim leant down to pick something up and a comb fell out of his pocket: ‘A man carrying a comb well!' On another famous occasion, Jim advocated friendship with Germany and Farve turned him out of the house. Poor Jim went to his motorbike but it was raining hard and it would not start. In despair he found the back door and was rescued by Mabel who hustled him upstairs. As he was creeping out of the house the next morning he met Farve. ‘Good morning,’ said Farve. He had forgotten the whole episode and offered Jim our usual generous breakfast.

Farve either liked you or he did not, there was no middle way. My mother sometimes tried to reason with him, but reason was not part of his makeup and, unlike her, he had favourites. This was unfair but he never tried to hide or moderate his feelings, it was part of his honesty. There was often a ‘Rat Week’ when he would pick on one of us for some] times imaginary offences. Decca, who was able to twist him round her little finger and take liberties with him that none of the rest of us would have dared, fell out of favour for a while for no apparent reason. Unity became more silent and unresponsive in her teens because Farve was always watching her for some trifling misdemeanour.

It had been the same with his own brothers and sisters. He never liked his younger sister Joan but was fond of the man she married, Denis Farrer. ‘The very desiccated Old Dean’, he called him affectionately. Denis was not a dean, it was just a play on his name, but it was a spot-on description of that thin, sharp-featured fellow in middle age. Farve was once talking to an acquaintance about the Farrers and said, 'The only trouble with the Old Dean is that he married a ghastly woman.’ ‘Oh?’ said the acquaintance. ‘I thought she was your sister?’ Yes, she is. A poisonous creature.’

and

Muv told me that had she had to earn her living she would have been happy as the woman at the caisse in a Paris restaurant, usually a formidable female dressed in black who sat enclosed in a raised glass cage above the tables and collected the cash from the diners’ bills. The nearest Muv got to her ambition was to be County Treasurer of the Oxfordshire Federation‘of Women’s Institutes.

Alice Chapter 3

A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale

  They were indeed a queer-looking party that assembled on the bank--the birds with draggled feathers, the animals with their fur clinging close to them, and all dripping wet, cross, and uncomfortable.
  The first question of course was, how to get dry again: they had a consultation about this, and after a few minutes it seemed quite natural to Alice to find herself talking familiarly with them, as if she had known them all her life. Indeed, she had quite a long argument with the Lory, who at last turned sulky, and would only say, `I am older than you, and must know better'; and this Alice would not allow without knowing how old it was, and, as the Lory positively refused to tell its age, there was no more to be said.
  At last the Mouse, who seemed to be a person of authority among them, called out, `Sit down, all of you, and listen to me! I'LL soon make you dry enough!' They all sat down at once, in a large ring, with the Mouse in the middle. Alice kept her eyes anxiously fixed on it, for she felt sure she would catch a bad cold if she did not get dry very soon.
  `Ahem!' said the Mouse with an important air, `are you all ready? This is the driest thing I know. Silence all round, if you please! "William the Conqueror, whose cause was favoured by the pope, was soon submitted to by the English, who wanted leaders, and had been of late much accustomed to usurpation and conquest. Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria--"'
  `Ugh!' said the Lory, with a shiver.
  `I beg your pardon!' said the Mouse, frowning, but very politely: `Did you speak?'
  `Not I!' said the Lory hastily.
  `I thought you did,' said the Mouse. `--I proceed. "Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria, declared for him: and even Stigand, the patriotic archbishop of Canterbury, found it advisable--"'
  `Found WHAT?' said the Duck.
  `Found IT,' the Mouse replied rather crossly: `of course you know what "it" means.'
  `I know what "it" means well enough, when I find a thing,' said the Duck: `it's generally a frog or a worm. The question is, what did the archbishop find?'
  The Mouse did not notice this question, but hurriedly went on, `"--found it advisable to go with Edgar Atheling to meet William and offer him the crown. William's conduct at first was moderate. But the insolence of his Normans--" How are you getting on now, my dear?' it continued, turning to Alice as it spoke.
  `As wet as ever,' said Alice in a melancholy tone: `it doesn't seem to dry me at all.'
  `In that case,' said the Dodo solemnly, rising to its feet, `I move that the meeting adjourn, for the immediate adoption of more energetic remedies--'
  `Speak English!' said the Eaglet. `I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and, what's more, I don't believe you do either!' And the Eaglet bent down its head to hide a smile: some of the other birds tittered audibly.
  `What I was going to say,' said the Dodo in an offended tone, `was, that the best thing to get us dry would be a Caucus-race.'
  `What IS a Caucus-race?' said Alice; not that she wanted much to know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that SOMEBODY ought to speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything.
  `Why,' said the Dodo, `the best way to explain it is to do it.' (And, as you might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will tell you how the Dodo managed it.)
  First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle, (`the exact shape doesn't matter,' it said,) and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there. There was no `One, two, three, and away,' but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out `The race is over!' and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, `But who has won?'
  This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said, `EVERYBODY has won, and all must have prizes.'
  `But who is to give the prizes?' quite a chorus of voices asked.
  `Why, SHE, of course,' said the Dodo, pointing to Alice with one finger; and the whole party at once crowded round her, calling out in a confused way, `Prizes! Prizes!'
  Alice had no idea what to do, and in despair she put her hand in her pocket, and pulled out a box of comfits, (luckily the salt water had not got into it), and handed them round as prizes. There was exactly one a-piece all round.
  `But she must have a prize herself, you know,' said the Mouse.
  `Of course,' the Dodo replied very gravely. `What else have you got in your pocket?' he went on, turning to Alice.
  `Only a thimble,' said Alice sadly.
  `Hand it over here,' said the Dodo.
  Then they all crowded round her once more, while the Dodo solemnly presented the thimble, saying `We beg your acceptance of this elegant thimble'; and, when it had finished this short speech, they all cheered.
  Alice thought the whole thing very absurd, but they all looked so grave that she did not dare to laugh; and, as she could not think of anything to say, she simply bowed, and took the thimble, looking as solemn as she could.
  The next thing was to eat the comfits: this caused some noise and confusion, as the large birds complained that they could not taste theirs, and the small ones choked and had to be patted on the back. However, it was over at last, and they sat down again in a ring, and begged the Mouse to tell them something more.              

Churchill and Chamberlain

From The Dark Valley:
Churchill remained a compelling figure, for all his comic quirks, and a statesman of the front rank even though he had been for so long conlined to the back-benches. Phipps spared no pains to discredit him with the French, assuring Herriot and others that Churchill only spoke for a very small section of the British public and that his utterances should be taken with “liberal sprinklings of salt.”

It was not surprising that Churchill should have provoked mistrust. For although he was brave, eloquent, witty, industrious, dogged, versatile and supremely talented, with most great offices of state under his belt and many gorgeous feathers in his cap, Churchill had given more hostages to fortune than any other politician of his day. Britain’s leading parliamentarian had changed parties twice and policies so often that, Lord Beaverbrook declared, he had held every view on every question. Said to be a warlord at sea during Armageddon, Churchill had sired the Dardanelles disaster. He had treated strikers as the enemy within and earned a reputation as warmonger towards foreign foes. He had returned the pound to the gold standard at too high a rate. He had attacked progress towards Indian independence, branding himself as a blimpish reactionary. In a mood of cavalier romanticism during the abdication crisis he had championed Edward VIII. In short, Churchill seemed to be brilliant but unsound. It was an opinion to which most leading figures of the day subscribed. According to Asquith, Churchill thought with his mouth and had “genius without judgement.” He possessed a powerful brain, noted Lloyd George, but it was prevented from running true by “a tragic flaw in the metal.”‘ Baldwin repeated (and modified) a story told by an early biographer that at Churchill’s birth the good fairies came trooping in with their gifts-imagination, daring, energy, guts-and then a bad fairy arrived to deny him wisdom. It became a commonplace to depict Churchill as a buccaneer: picturesque certainly, but rash, ambitious, dangerous and volatile. R. A. Butler, Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office before the war, considered him “the greatest adventurer of modern political history”

Butler also cast aspersions on Churchill’s origins, calling him a “half breed American.” This was a typical instance of the character assassination by association to which he was subjected. Undoubtedly, though, Churchill’s stock was lowered as much by his rakish relations as by his disreputable friends. They all seemed to identify him as “a particularly way, Ward, rootless and anachronistic product of a decaying and increasingly discredited aristocratic order.”8 Churchill’s mother was not only the daughter of a notorious Wall Street speculator, she also acquired a train of unsuitable husbands and lovers. His father, the erratic and syphilitic Lord Randolph, was a striking example of ducal degeneracy. For “all his remark~ able cleverness” Lord Randolph was, in the estimation of the fifteenth earl of Derby, “thoroughly untrustworthy: scarcely a gentleman, and probably more or less mad.”Winston’s staunch belief in Churchills against the world seemed less like family loyalty than tribal chauvinism when other members of his clan were considered: vapid dilettantes such as Moreton Frewen, known as “Mortal Ruin”; blue-blooded boors such as “Sunny,” ninth Duke of Marlborough, whose wife Gladys said that he was ruled by “black, vicious personal pride like a disease”;‘° the unwelcome and nonpaying Guests; and, the greatest trial of all, Churchill’s spoiled son Randolph, who jovially acknowledged that he was not fit to be allowed out in private.

Churchill’s friends were cast in the same mould, with the partial exception of the vegetarian, non-smoking, teetotalitarian Professor Frederick Lindemann. (Even he was a social carnivore-he once took counsel’s opinion about what place he was entitled to occupy at high table in his Oxford college, Christ Church.) They were high-living and often hard-drinking freebooters who dwelt on the outer edge of respectability. F. E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead, was considered to be a “fluent and plausible bounder”II early in his career, while later, to his fury, he was represented as a “crapulous and corpulent buffoon.”“ Lord Beaverbrook was aptly nicknamed “Been-a-crook” and seemed to be “a kind of Dracula, Svengali, Iago and Mephistopheles rolled into one.” Brendan Bracken, the redhaired financial and political chancer who was (wrongly) rumoured to be Churchill’s illegitimate son, appeared to be a charlatan incarnate. “Everything about you is phoney,” said a journalist; “Even your hair, which looks like a wig, isn’t.”‘With friends and relations like these, Churchill understandably offended the bourgeoisie, though he did not let that worry him. He used “middle-class” as a term of abuse, shared his father’s disdain for suburban “lords of pineries and vineries” and despised “adjectival grocers”“-what he would have made of an adjectival grocer’s daughter can only be imagined.

Churchill’s extravagant style of life was also an affront to more modest folk, especially during the Depression: adopting F. E. Smith’s maxim, he professed to be easily satisfied with the very best. He behaved like a nabob, crowned with flamboyant hats out of doors and robed in garish dressing gowns at home. With the body of an unrepentant sybarite and “the face of a self-indulgent cherub,”‘he exuded an aura of cigar smoke, eau-de-Cologne and good liquor. (His wine merchant’s bills, which were large and paid slowly, as he had a lordly way with tradesmen, included many half bottles of champagne-not for sharing. But he was no alcoholic for, as C. P. Snow said, no alcoholic could drink that much.) Churchill’s appetite for food was gargantuan: he liked roast beef as well as white wine for breakfast, with other meals on an equally carnivorous scale. He made no secret of his patrician taste for gambling, polo and hunting (foxes not women). Servants were part of the tenure of his existence, running his life on oiled wheels. His country house, Chartwell Manor, near Westerham in Kent, was organised like a miniature Blenheim Palace.

Churchill adored Chartwell and spent huge sums on renovating and improving it, with mixed results. The dining-room, for example, scene of oratorical as well as gastronomic feasts, had to accommodate great girders which made it much too low for its length. It was like eating in a basement-except for the wonderful views over Churchill’s happy valley. This he cherished. He planted and dug, laid out a tennis court and excavated a swimming-pool which was heated so that it steamed. He built enormous walls, laying bricks with more energy than skill and often dictating letters as he went. He created lakes, dams, waterfalls, fish-ponds, treating his black swans, golden orfe and other creatures with anthropomorphic indulgence. He farmed in a lavish but inexpert fashion, telling Lloyd George that he was determined to make agriculture pay, “whatever it costs!”

Churchill often guyed himself thus, giving involuntary colour to hostile interpretations of his character and conduct. Equally provocative in deed, he was himself largely responsible for the fact that pre-war contemporaries saw him in caricature terms-as a fabulous soldier of fortune forever plotting some fantastic coup. That view of Churchill was almost entirely effaced by his great achievements during the Second World War and by his subsequent account of them. Since Churchill hung on to his prime-ministerial papers, this account was authoritatively documented as well as unashamedly partisan. History would be his judge, he liked to jest, and he would write the history. So for a generation Churchill remained a gleaming titan marching triumphantly to broad sunlit uplands through the pages of his own works-and those of his many admirers. His was the spirit that inspired the nation in its finest hour. His was the voice that gave the lion’s roar. He was the colossus who won victory over the forces. Churchill’s tragedy, and Britain’s, was that during the late 1930s he found himself cast in the role of Cassandra.

Churchill’s detractors, none of whom was more determined to keep him in the wilderness than Neville Chamberlain, would have been given pause for thought had they seen him reading and dictating with inexhaustible fecundity in his Chartwell bedroom. Surprisingly small and austere, with photographs of Lord Randolph and a wide bedside bookshelf crudely installed by the estate carpenter for his papers, it was not the boudoir of a hedonist but the billet of a campaigner. It plainly contradicted Chamberlain’s view of Churchill as a gaudy magnifico, improvising policies (some good, more bad) between drinks and sustaining them with nothing more than facile rhetoric. In fact Churchill did his homework quite as meticulously as Chamberlain himself, devoting particular attention to his parliamentary “impromptus.” Still, there is no denying that the two men were opposites without mutual attraction. Chamberlain, who succeeded Baldwin as Prime Minister in May 1937, might admire Churchill’s wit and brilliance, his courage and vitality, but he had always felt that there was an unbridgeable “gulf between him and me.” In his opinion Churchill was unstable and amoral. Taking issue with him was “like arguing with a brass band.“ He must at all costs be kept out of the cabinet, which he would dominate and even silence. When the War Minister, Leslie Hore-Belisha, Urged Churchill’s inclusion, Chamberlain replied: “I won’t have anyone who will rock the boat.” For his part, Churchill professed respect for the tough imperial pioneer who had struggled unsuccessfully for seven years to grow sisal on his father’s estate in the Bahamas. But he was essentially out of sympathy with Chamberlain, regarding him as narrow-minded,
cold-hearted and dusty-souled. Theirs was the perennial opposition of the Puritan and the Cavalier. It was the opposition, too, “between Birmingham Town Hall and Blenheim Palace.”

CHAMBERLAIN was often disparaged for being unable to see beyond the confines of local government and petty commerce. Lloyd George maintained that he would have made a good Lord Mayor of Birmingham in a lean year and that he had “a retail mind in a wholesale business.” Experienced diplomats such as Sir Alexander Cadogan said that Chamberlain equated the conduct of foreign affairs with the handling of trade disputes. With a prissy manner, a reedy voice and a smug expression habitually imprinted on his corvine features, Chamberlain seemed every inch the political haberdasher. His conventional clothes added to the impression: the old-fashioned starched wing-collars; the black jacket and striped trousers; the inevitable umbrella, sceptre of the bourgeoisie since the time of Louis-Philippe-almost the only time Chamberlain showed anger was when his umbrella got broken. Although he was quite a cultured man, his amusements were on a similarly modest scale: he liked Christmas cracker jokes and games of musical chairs-at Cliveden, the Astors’ country house, he was allowed to win because it meant so much to him. Chamberlain’s international outlook was equally naive: America was “a nation of cads”; Russia was “semi-Asiatic”; and the French could not “keep a secret for more than half an hour, nor a government for more than nine rnonths.”‘Obviously Neville was a mere shadow of Joseph Chamberlain, lacking his father’s Olympian manner, global vision and volcanic eloquence. Indeed, like his siblings, Neville was “dwarfed and scorched by the towering inferno of his father’s personality.” He once said that reading about his father reminded him of studying the planets: his “own significance diminished with every step.”

Determined to prove himself, though, Chamberlain grew in self-confidence, even arrogance, with every step he took up the political ladder. Having entered parliament in 1918, aged almost 50, he made his name as a reforming Minister of Health during the late 1920s and as a masterful Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1931 to 1937. Stiff, reserved, penny-pinching and self-righteous, he was not a popular figure. Even his half-brother Austen remarked on his killing coldness. But such was his dedication to business, so logical were his policies and so lucid his speeches that he dominated the National Government. Once in 10 Downing Street, Chamberlain became a democratic despot. He was as masterful as Sir Robert Walpole, a portrait of whom (by Vanloo) hung over the marble fireplace behind his leather-upholstered chair in the long, Corinthian columned cabinet room.

Furthermore Chamberlain drew around himself an inner circle of subservient mediocrities, most of them knights remote from the practice of chivalry. Sir John Simon, a serpentine lawyer described as a snake in snake’s clothing, was singularly lacking in resolution at the Treasury: he had sat on the fence so long, Lloyd George famously remarked, that the iron had entered into his soul. Sir Samuel Hoare, now at the Home Office, had learned no lessons from the dictators: he was later said to have “passed from experience to experience, like Boccaccio’s virgin, without discernible effect upon his condition.” Sir Thomas Inskip, Minister for Coordination of Defence, had little ability, less power and no perceptiveness: “He could look with frank and fearless gaze at any prospect, however appalling-and fail to see it.” Other acolytes, such as Sir Horace Wilson, with his “temporising, ‘play for safety,’ formula-evolving mind,” and Sir Kingsley Wood, who on the outbreak of war opposed the bombing of munition works in Germany because they were private property, were equally unable or unwilling to stand up to Chamberlain.

Compliance seemed to validate his growing assumption of infallibility, which was expressed with the jauntiness of a schoolboy and the primness of an old maid. Flattery fed Chamberlain’s vanity for, as one official noted, “he likes to be set on a pedestal and adored, with suitable humility, by unquestioning admirers.” There was “no surer way of gratifying him than to make some allusion to the exceptional importance of his position.” By the same token, criticism, mockery and disrespect infuriated him. Chamberlain became increasingly intolerant of disagreement, equating loyalty to himself with patriotism. He squashed or squared the press with unprecedented vigour, using lobby journalists to manipulate public opinion while contemptuously accusing the occasional dissenter of being duped by “Jewish-Communist propaganda.” Chamberlain deployed his own secret propaganda organ, the supposedly independent journal Truth, to discredit opponents. He tapped their telephones. He harried ministers and extended his control to every aspect of government. He crushed par~ liamentary debate, treating the Labour opposition with open contempt and imposing a ruthless discipline on his own rank and file. One Tory MP said that “they had now a Fuhrer in the Conservative Party.” Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, believed that Chamberlain “au fond had a certain sympathy for dictators, whose efficiency appealed to him.” Ironically, the champion of appeasement in Europe was not a weak Prime Minister but an exceptionally strong one. The would~be conciliator of the continent was a domestic autocrat.

White on Capote

Both Merimée and Capote justly prided themselves on being stylists, not in the Proustian sense (elaborating syntax, rhetoric and metaphor in order to assimilate the most disparate elements into a single sentence), but in the older sense in which ‘style’ meant fashioning the neatest, freshest, most natural classical prose in their respective traditions. Capote is a stylist who never intimidates his reader and whose poetic effects are purely local, never threatening the narrative progression. One lovely phrase follows another. Travel is a state of ‘alert slumber’. Before dawn ‘drooping stars drift at the bedroom window fat as owls’. A nighttime View of Tangier is ‘like a birthday cake blazing in a darkened room’. One can imagine this purist cutting down Proust’s usual three adjectives to the single limpid one, With a predictable loss of Chiaroscuro and gain in brightness and resolution.

He told me that he thought the story closest to perfection in Music for Chameleons was ‘Then It All Came Down’, which records a visit he paid to Robert Beausoleil in prison, the mystery man in the Charles Manson cult. ‘It’s as linear as a fish bone,’ Capote said, drawing the spine in the air with his fan. ‘It moves, it has narrative energy and drive.’ To illustrate, he snapped his fingers and sketched a little dance on the rug with his bare feet. ‘No one understands anything about style, about what I’m trying to do. Now the story “Dazzle” in Music for Chameleons it’s taken me forty years to learn how to write that way, to make it simple. Most writers start simple, then they become more and more complex. Then they have to unlearn everything they’ve acquired. Simplicity and swiftness: that’s what I value.

‘Of course, the most subtle story, the real subtlety ’ he lingered on the word as though he had invented it, or as though it were some foreign expression I might not have caught ~ ‘the most subtle story is “Music for Chameleons”. Even sophisticated readers don’t understand it. They think it’s about a visit with a woman; they think it’s a travel piece about Martinique.’ Spasm of laughter that stopped on a dime. ‘But it’s actually a meditation on murder, about how our passions flog us.’ He took off his glasses and stared at me with two perfectly clear blue eyes, the pupils tiny as gnats in the poisonous yellow light.

I asked him how he ever remembered the conversation he had had with Marilyn Monroe in 1955 after a funeral -one of the most touching and charming pieces in Music for Chameleons. ‘Well, Marilyn was a great friend. I loved her a lot. And never have I read anything that has anything to do with that girl at all except the basic -’ his voice died away and his face sank into a grimace worthy of the Greek mask for tragedy ‘. . . unpleasant facts . . .’ He suddenly brightened and turned to me; unfortunately the sun was glaring on his gray-tinted granny glasses and I’m staring into two silver dollars. ‘But, you see, I keep these extraordinary journals. And I suddenly remembered I had written down everything we’d said that day. Other people who knew her tell me I’ve caught the most perfect likeness. She was my first choice to be in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She and Maureen Stapleton even worked up a wonderful scene for an Actors Studio class; I saw it, but Marilyn was too afraid to do it in class. Excuse me.’

Capote left the room. When he regained the couch, he spoke to me in profile. His voice was high and weak and drawling and his pronunciation slack-jawed, mushy, like a child’s or like Baby Snooks’s. As he picked up confidence, volume, clarity, he turned the two silver dollars toward me. He shook the fan at me to cool me off. I stared down at his long yellow toenails, which reminded me of those four-inch thumbnails the mandarins grew to prove they were so rich they never had to pick anything up. Incapacitating nails and bound feet: emblems of regal dependence on others.

Capote is an entertainer who is never dull, who appeals to the reader’s curiosity without endangering his or her values, Who adds to our store of experience without undermining the categories by which we process that plenitude, whose tales of underdogs and heartbreaking failures only reinforce the political status quo. Capote’s fascinating criminals, lovable maiden aunts, precocious kids and wilted gentry, while appearing to upset the order of things, are in fact the exceptions that prove the rule. They may be rebels but Capote’s presentation of them is never subversive.

(White quotes a passage from Capote's writings) Here we have the pairs of balanced opposites (elegant and tune less, shabby and rich, wraithlike and eternal, comfortable and severe) that serve to stabilize, even freeze character which, moreover, is read through the house and its furnishings.

To interpret the self from its possessions is the great nineteenth~century fictional method (and a bourgeois habit of mind). Earlier novels described actions, not belongings; later novels dramatized inner conflicts, so often at odds with the milieu. That Capote found such a tight fit between his characters and their settings reflected his nostalgia for the traditional society of the Old South. His first novellas Other Voices, Other Rooms and The Grass Harp take place in that South of small towns and big pretensions, of genteel manners and savage prejudices.

Capote shuffled out of the room again. I, too, stood up, as though to throw off the heat squatting on me like a nightmare in a Fuseli painting. Art and fashion books sat in the sort of stylish piles decorators used to distribute around rooms to give them a studied ‘casual’ look. The bookshelf itself contained mostly various editions and translations of Capote’s own titles. Puppies, kittens and cobras seemed to be the dominant motifs everywhere' (Now I’m interpreting Capote from his belongings). As I strolled about I spotted other puppies, kittens and snakes on desks, woven into pillows, resting on the window-sill fitting emblems, I suppose, for a man who celebrated domestic love in ‘A Christmas Memory’ and has written the most detailed modern chronicle of murder, In Cold Blood. A dozen calla lilies fresh from the florist crowned the coffee table, but the geraniums along the window looked parched, neglected, a bachelor’s plants. .

When Capote re-emerged a minute later he’d picked up vitality. The photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe, and his assistant arrived, and Capote and I posed for our picture against a Japanese painting of fish. ‘The Japanese, of course, didn’t paint in oils for the longest time,’ Capote explained. ‘This one, which was done in the nineteenth century, is one of the first oils. The artists reached the 'height and then, naturally, committed suicide. All the best Japanese artists commit suicide.’

Mapplethorpe told us to look at each other, at the window, at him and we did so rather stiffly as though we were puppets gloving arthritic hands. The sweat flowed freely over our bodies. Although Capote, as he told all the world, was homosexual, he seemed not even faintly interested in either the handsome Mapplethorpe or in his friend, Marcus Leatherdale, who resembles James Dean. Not the faintest sexual interest, that is; he does express his admiration of Mapplethorpe’s photographs. Capote let out a sigh and stood: ‘I can’t take it. I can’t be photographed one second more,’ and he hurried down the hall for the third time in twenty minutes.

Mapplethorpe and his friend left. I ambled around the living room and stopped to examine two decorative windows placed on the facing wall. The borders were painted with fruits and birds and the inner surface was studded with abstract shades of tinted glass and mirror. ‘The Shah of Iran gave those to me,’ Capote told me as he returned. ‘They’re very old and valuable national treasures. I’m terrified the Ayatollah will send someone to recover them.’ ,

Capote was now doing a sort of fan dance, listlessly waving his Palmetto and slowly jogging in place. He dropped his fan and rubbed his stomach in long strokes.
In the extant chapters of Answered Prayers, he depicts some of the jumbled elements of his own life (much as Nabokov does in Look at the Harlequins!). The results were so scandalous, the clefs rattled so noisily, that Capote lacked the courage to press on. Drink and drugs dimmed his lights. The book’s jet-set milieu, however, which he’d first touched on in ‘Greek Paragraphs’, a minor travel piece, appealed to his temperament. At last he was free from his sexless youths and corrupted adults, his fairy-tale romances and objective reportage. 

The rich have the means to realize their whims and the effrontery to avow their desires. Sex, travel, gambling and intrigue are their sports, while their itineraries and adulteries provide them with conversation, just as loyalty to the clan, devotion to fashion and the display of perfect manners constitute their virtues. Above all, jet-setters love a good story. Too bad Capote didn’t stay sober long enough to betray his friends more thoroughly.

To find the psychic energy to pursue a long career, it seems to

c, a writer must juggle between a Vigorous, recording curiosny “gout the world and how it works and the ongoing process of :elf.creati0n. It is the imagination, of course, that negotiates be/ tween reality and the ego, between the repetition compulsion and the pleasure principle. If the self is utterly eliminated we end up with journalism: if the ego is shamelessly gratified, we have the [angueurs of the intimate journal. If both the self and the world are held at bay and the imagination is given free reign, then the result would be pure fantasy or tedious sci-fi. The successful novel cleverly adjudicates among these temptations and somehow combines newspaper story, confession and fairy tale.

Capote’s most successful response to these various claims is Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a sort of rewrite of Isherwood’s Berlin stories. Holly Golightly plays Sally Bowles, the impoverished and sexless young Capote stands in for the similarly disabled Herr Issivoo, and in both books the various eccentrics, lovable or menacing, parade past like vaudeville performers doing their exotic ‘turns’. Both Sally and Holly are at once wish-fulfilment and object-lesson, real girls and gay boys in drag, as well as innocents playing at adult vice. In both Capote’s and Isherwood’s tales the results make for very seductive reading.

He excused himself, but when he returned this time he didn’t seem livelier but dangerously fatigued. I started to leave. ‘I’ve been very anxious,’ he said. ‘It’s something that’s been hanging over me for two and a half years. Partly professional and partly personal. I thought it was over, but it isn’t. That’s why I’m so nervous. I can’t tell you about it it’s a secret. But when you do eventually learn about it, then you’ll understand why it’s been so hard for me to finish Answered Prayers. Everything will come clear then.’

The Liar's Tale by Jeremy Campbell

Descartes undertakes a kind of rescue, by saying that rock~bottom truths are installed in our minds at birth, in everyone’s mind, distributed equally; we do not need to receive a special kind of grace to know them. The organ of truth is thus something like the organ of conscience: it is there, and it is up to us to listen to it.

Descartes’s metaphor of the mendacious demon in the Meditation: is the converse of the single Truth: It is the embodiment of the single Lie The philosopher Roger Scruton thinks the demon is arguably a better, more economical explanation of our ordinary experience than the commonsense View that we live in an objective world which corresponds to our opinions. “Instead of supposing the existence of a complex world, with a multiplicity of objects, whose laws we barely understand,” says Scruton, “the demon hypothesis proposes just one object (the demon) operating according to a principle (the desire and pursuit of deception) that we are intimately acquainted with. The hypothesis is both simpler, and more intelligible, than the doctrine of common sense. Maybe it is the best explanation!”

At a time when Descartes was writing his Meditations, ancient skepticism in the form of Pyrrhonism was enjoying a revival, thanks to the rediscovery of the works of Sextus Empiricus, the “methodical” philosopher who flourished in the second and third centuries A.D. Sextus was a champion of his master Pyrrho, a Greek skeptic much taken with the atomic theory of Democritus. Pyrrho taught an extreme form of relativism in which the senses cheat. Eyes and ears are quite capable of lying to us and people are inclined to tell you the first thing that pops into their heads. Faced with that day-in, day-out mendacity, you might as well keep quiet and preserve aphasia, a non-committal silence, an imperturbable serenity. Pyrrho himself was an exemplary Pyrrhonist. According to Diogenes Laertius, he was apt to wander around in traffic. not looking Where he was going, so that his friends had to rescue him from “carts, precipices, dogs and whatnot.”

Sextus touched a seventeenth-century nerve with his insistence on the idea that each person’s constitution is so radically different from anyone else’s we cannot even pretend there is a single, truthful account of ordinary experience. The mental is so intimately linked to the physical, it is impossible to separate body from soul. And since bodies vary wildly from person to person, souls, or minds, must vary to the same extent. “We differ,” Sextus wrote, “in our constitutional peculiarities. For some people, beef is easier to digest than rock-fish, and some suffer diarrhoea from inferior Lesbian wine. There used to be an old woman of Attica, they say, who could drink thirty grams of hemlock with impunity, and Lysis used to take four grams of opium without harm.”

Michel de Montaigne, one of the most widely read Pyrrhonists of the period, took almost the opposite View from that of Descartes on the role of mind and reason. He believed consciousness can be deceived and can also deceive itself. Montaigne, who died four years before Descartes was born, and whose influence on his times has been likened to that of Freud on ours, held that the senses lie to the mind and the mind lies back in return. The two compete in defrauding each other. What is more, Reason is one of the imps of falsehood leading us astray. As an inner presence, it also enables us to deceive ourselves. '

A provocative theme in Montaigne’s writings is that ignorance, Untruth, just not caring whether or not the whole world is a lie, can be a source of happiness and contentment to the human species. We can be deceived, be a prey to falsehoods, and still enjoy our existence. A big mistake is to try to separate our “higher” faculties from our personhood, from the quotidian condition of being human. We are all members of the common herd. The acids of Reason, which for Descartes were an elixir of psychological health, would, if allowed free rein, eat away and destroy our natural instincts, Montaigne j Warned. The mind is always trying to improve on nature, aspiring to be something it was never intended to be; it is artificial and pretentious. It has ideas above its station. The imagination, in particular, is flighty and poor at making a distinction between truth and lies. Like one of today’s critics of the postmodernists, Montaigne pokes fun at the mania of his contemporaries for interpretation, for commentaries on commentaries, never agreeing on a final version. There is more bustle, more ink spilt on more paper, to interpret interpretations, than to interpret things. Critics occupy more space than original writers: “every place swarms With commentaries; of authors there is great scarcity.” The natural disease of the mind is that it “does nothing but ferret and inquire, and is eternally wheeling, juggling and perplexing itself like silkworms, and then suffocates in its Work.”

Whereas Descartes went to great lengths to lift human beings out of nature, out of the common opinions and habits of other people, the conventions of society, Montaigne let himself be “ignorantly and negligently led by the general law of the world.” It would be folly, he said, to worry and fret about whether such a law is correct and true, since it is not private and personal, but public and general. In a strongly worded passage at the end of the Essays, he advises against “disassociating” the mind from the body. People who do so “would put themselves out of themselves, and escape from being men. ’Tis folly; instead of transforming themselves into angels, they transform themselves into beasts. Instead of elevating, they lay themselves lower. These transcendental humors affright me, like high and inaccessible cliffs and precipices.” We escape out of ourselves because we do not know how to live within ourselves.

“’Tis to much purpose to go upon stilts,” Montaigne noted, “for, when upon stilts, we must yet Walk with our legs; and when seated upon the most elevated throne in the world, we are but seated upon our rump.”

There is evidence that Descartes read Montaigne before beginning to write the Discourse. Montaigne’s Essays were popular, went through several reprintings and were taken up by such figures as Father Pierre Charron, a skeptical theologian very close to Montaigne. Charron’s book De la Sagesse was a treatise on the correct method for avoiding error and discovering truth, quite similar to the drift of Descartes’s own approach. He denied that human beings have any sufficient mental apparatus enabling them to tell truth from falsehood. We are apt to believe any old thing under the pressure of social conformity and coercion.

It is clear that Descartes recoiled from Montaigne’s View that mind must not be regarded as distinct and separate from the body or from nature. Montaigne had taken an almost Darwinian approach to the continuity of humans and nonhuman species. To suppose there is a profound break between the two is sheer conceit: “Presumption is our natural and original disease,” he said, cuttingus all down to size. “The most wretched and frail of all creatures is man, and withal the proudest. He feels and sees himself lodged here in the dirt and filth of the world, nailed and riveted to the worst and deadest part of the universe, in the lowest story of the house, and most remote from the heavenly arch, with animals of the worst condition, and yet in his imagination will be placing himself above the circle of the moon, and bringing heaven under his feet.” And what is there in human intelligence that is not present in some degree in other animals? Why does the spider make her web tighter in one place and looser in another, if she does not deliberate and think about it? Look at the intelligence of the fox, who tests the thickness of ice on a river by putting his ear on it, harkening to the sound of the water’s current, how deep it is or how shallow.

Moreover, beasts are at least as cunning and duplicitous as we ourselves. We plot strategems to trap and snare them, but they are a match for us; they are capable of “subtleties and inventions” to thwart such tricks. Consider the case of the mule belonging to Thales, the early Greek natural philosopher. This animal, carrying heavy bags of salt, conceived the dodge of “by accident” stumbling into a river, wetting the sacks and thereby lightening its load some what. Thales, it is said, tumbled to the ruse and made the mule carry Wool instead of salt, whereupon it ceased its ploy forthwith.

Montaigne goes on for pages and pages about the wonderful cleverness of beasts, to deflate our complacently lofty opinion of human reason, which he considered to be nothing special. As for truth, even the vaunted science of Aristotle was being undermined. Had not a New World been discovered on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, an entirely different culture with strange customs and beliefs, different absolutes? The kingdom of the intellect was tottering, the sin. gleness of the Roman Catholic Church under threat from the breakaway movement of the Reformation. “By extending the implicit skeptical tendencies of the Reformation crisis, the humanistic crisis, and the scientific crisis into a total crise pyrrhonienne,” says the historian of skepticism Richard Popkin, Montaigne’s work “became the coup de grace to an entire intellectual world.”

Descartes met the crisis head-on. Earlier he had put on a famous “Sophistical demonstration” at the home of the papal nuncio in Paris. He took some arguments of “incontestable” truths, and by the use of plausible reasoning showed they were false. Then he took what Was obviously a glaring falsehood and dressed it up as a seeming truth.

It was more than a mere philosophical interest in stabilizing the centrifugal dispersion of once unimpeachable truths, however, that motivated Descartes. He had been “devastated” by the condemnation of Galileo by the Roman Catholic Church for heresy, so much so that he decided to suppress his own treatise, Le Monde, which confirmed the Copernican thesis of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, and was within days of going to press. In 1624, Galileo had been given permission to write on the Copernican system as long as he did not take sides. But his next book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, so upset the church that he was called to Rome to be “interviewed” by the Inquisition. The book was banned and burned in 1633, and Galileo was tried and sentenced to life imprisonment, though he was allowed to live under house arrest. Later he was ordered to recite the seven penitential psalms every week for three years. He signed a formal abjuration of his belief in the Copernican doctrine.

Descartes showed signs of panic at the news. It was clear that the church was not interested in truth, but in its own supremacy, its own authority, and Descartes’s priorities were the exact reverse of those. He “quasi” decided to burn all his papers. “I cannot imagine,” he more to a friend, “that an Italian, and especially one well thought of by the Pope from what I have heard, could have been labelled a criminal for nothing other than wanting to establish the movement of the earth.” He saw this turn of events as a threat to the whole basis of his system. If Copernicanism is false, he said, “so too are the entire foundations of my philosophy.” It was around this time that Descartes took up the challenge of skepticism in earnest. His method of metaphysical, “hyperbolical” doubt, the doubt designed to end all doubts, and the confrontation with the demon of falsehood, seem to have been a response to the Galileo affair. “Skepticism was simply a means to an end, and that end had nothing to do with certainty about the existence of the material world, but rather with establishing the metaphysical credentials of a mechanist natural philosophy, one of whose central tenets-the Earth’s motion around the Sun-had been condemned by the Inquisition,” in the view of his biographer Stephen Gaukroger.

One of Descartes’s chief aims was to justify his belief in a mechanistic world. He was opposed to naturalism, the doctrine that what we might suppose to be supernatural acts of God can be explained without reference to God. Nature on its own possessed occult powers, according to the naturalist View. It was active and infinitely more mysterious than we might think, but at the same time more mundane. There were heretical suggestions that such God~linked activities as prayer and the sacraments were really states of mind, psychological attitudes. One answer to this dangerous theory of an active nature which behaved like supemature was to insist that the world is a mechanism. Matter is inactive, the supernatural is the supernatural, and never the twain shall meet. Nature has no occult powers. Descartes was intent on showing that God transcends nature, and that the mind, being entirely different from the body, cannot be part of nature.

Truth is obtained at the cost of a sacrifice. That is the conclusion of Descartes. The search for Truth is a lonely enterprise, a solitary mission. It requires the exclusion of possibilities, because the more possibilities there are, the less truth there is. Falsehood, error, uncertainty, arise because the will is free. Reason is the curb that reins in the licentiousness of the will, when it roams beyond the confines of reason. Reason is unfreedom. It rules out more than it rules in. That is what prompted Ernest: Gellner to aim a withering blast at Descartes for being “profoundly bourgeois,” essentially middle class “unromantic, uncommunal, unhistorical,” the self-made metaphysician, starting with nothing, coming up from nothing, proceeding step by step, tidily, not acting on impulse, above all self-sufficient. “It is indeed in this spirit that the bourgeois entrepreneur deploys his resources and keeps his accounts and records in financial and legal order-slow, careful, judicious, deliberate, omit~ ting naught, accounting for all.” Gellner lets the master of rationalism have it full in the face. Possessed of “a yearning for freedom from any kind of indebtedness, he will not mortgage his convictions to some common bank of custom, whose management is outside his control, and which consequently is not really to be trusted.” The difference between Montaigne and Descartes comes down to this. For Montaigne, there was “something more important” than truth. For Descartes, there was nothing more important. Said Montaigne: “ ’Tis the misery of our condition, that often that which presents itselfto our imagination for the most true does not also appear the most useful to life.” Descartes, by contrast, gives the impression that misery is the absence of truth, and life comes in second place to truth. “Descartes lived an unhappy and indeed, for some considerable periods, a rather disturbed life,” writes one of his biographers. “This is something he made every effort to deny or disguise, and the means he chose were intellectual. His sources of pleasure were few, but intellectual achievements figure prominently amongst these, and these achievements were elevated into virtually the only form of worthwhile pursuit, in a way that goes well beyond a commitment to a ‘life of the mind,’ for example.” In the Discourse, Descartes announces his core ambition: “I always had an excessive desire to learn to distinguish the true from the false.” For sure, Descartes was a notable separator and sifter. He detached God from the world, mind from nature, reason from culture. And he- the bachelor who prized his privacy so highly-privileged singleness as the pot of gold at the end of the philosophical rainbow. His method was to strip down to bare bedrock by doubting everything he had ever been told, suspecting all doctrines and systems, all scholarly worldviews. Start from scratch, alone, with just the elementary, primitive, original apparatus of thought itself and the clear and dis- tinct ideas provided by the “truth conscience” organ with which we are born.

The life of the mind can be a rather removed and isolated existence. It is not necessarily a team sport. In the Discourse on Method, published in 1637, Descartes states in no uncertain terms that something which has evolved, which has a history, which has been been altered over long periods of time by a variety of circumstances, is inferior to a work created all at one time by a single author working on his own. Buildings designed by just one architect are usually more beautiful and better proportioned than those several generations of experts have tried to renovate and improve. A city that has grown up over centuries with ad hoc augmentations and extensions contains much higgledy-piggledy, needlessly complex design, with recent constructions perched on top of ancient masonry, streets crooked and irregular, giving the impression that the city emerged by accident rather than by the careful blueprints of an architect. Similarly, Descartes piously adds, “the constitution of true Religion Whose ordinances are of God alone, is incomparably better regulated than any other.”

A mind created at a stroke, by one and only one divinity, like a city laid out all at once by a single designer, would be immune to deception and falsehood. No crooked streets in the second, no twisted sophistries in the first. It is the long process of unhurried, organic development of knowledge over time and in history that lets in the fiends of error, the imps of delusion and fraud. As long as the mind does not contain its own mental geology, residues of old forms of knowledge buried like fossils in its depths; as long as it is underwritten by a God who finds it impossible to lie, the mind may be trusted not to swindle us. Descartes intended to cheat history by demolishing it with the wrecking ball of his Method, reducing everything to such simple, basic units they could not be false, creating a new science of thought as an architect would raze a whole town in order to build one that is his and his alone. In place of a Rome or Paris there would be a Washington, DC, a Brasilia.

That, of course, was exactly the sort of metaphor that led William Paley, in his Natural Theology of 1802, to the categorical assertion that the universe is like a watch, and a watch must have had a watch\ maker, a single designer who made it at a stroke as a finished instrument for a specific use. There are no useless parts, still present in the Watch just because they are remnants of the history of watchmaking, At the hinge of the intellectual revolution of the nineteenth century, that analogy was thrown back in Paley’s face. It was the heart and soul of Darwin’s theory that life has a history, mind has a history, and the evolution of species, like the partly haphazard structure of an ancient city, often updates obsolete parts of the body, leaving the residue of archaic, obsolete organs in place. In the concluding chapter of the Origin, Darwin introduces a profoundly personal manifesto: “When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as something wholly beyond his comprehension, when we regard every production of nature as one which has a long history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, in the same way as any great mechanical invention is the summing up of the labor, the experience, the reason and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting-I speak from experience-does the study of natural history become!”

In published “Objections” to the Meditations, Descartes, who disliked criticism, was brought down to earth and reprimanded for his refusal to recognize the role that “life,” the wisdom and learning of centuries, has to play in the formation of ideas he held to be the gift of a non-deceiving God to the single individual. How could he be sure that the idea of a perfect, supreme Being would have come to him if he “had not been nurtured among men of culture”? To dismiss as suspect, as a source of falsehood, all that civilization has to offer is cavalier, rash, and ungrateful. Did Descartes ever consider the possibility that these ideas came from books. from conversation with his friends, rather. than being messages hatched in his own mind in isolation, or arriving from a Supreme Being? Is truth a community venture, or an individual operation, with just one demon in attendance? That question Was to haunt Philosophy for centuries to come, culminating in the provocative notion, as diametrically opposed to the Cartesian view as could possibly be imagined, that “truth” is just a social construct,

Sartre and SEX

Sartre was quite squeamish. To judge by the vivid descriptions in his books, he found sex a nightmarish process of struggling not to drown in slime and gloop. (Before we mock him too much for this, let’s remember that we know it only because he revealed it so candidly. Well, okay, let’s mock him a little bit.)

The physical lusciousness of life was never a threat to Beauvoir; she could not get enough of it. As a child, she wanted to consume everything she saw. She would gaze greedily into the windows of sweet shops-‘the luminous sparkle of candied fruits, the cloudy lustre of jellies, the kaleidoscopic inflorescence of acidulated fruit-drops~ green, red, orange, violet-I coveted the colours themselves as much as the pleasures they promised me’. She wished the whole universe could be edible, so it could be eaten as Hansel and Gretel ate from the gingerbread house. Even as an adult, she wrote, ‘I wanted to crunch flowering almond trees, and take bites out of the rainbow nougat of the sunset.’ Travelling to New York in 1947, she felt an urge to eat the neon signs, brightly arrayed against the night sky.

Her appetite extended to collecting things, including many gifts and souvenirs from her travels. When she finally moved from hotel rooms to a proper apartment in 1955, it quickly filled up with ‘jackets and skirts from Guatemala, blouses from Mexico. . .ostrich eggs from the Sahara, lead tom-toms, some drums that Sartre had brought back from Haiti, glass swords and Venetian mirrors that he had bought in the rue Bonaparte, a plaster cast of his hands, Giacometti’s lamps’. Her diarykeeping and memoir-writing also reflected an urge to acquire and relish everything that came into her grasp. .

She explored the world with the same passion, travelling and walking fanatically. While living alone in Marseilles as a young schoolteacher, she would pack buns and bananas on her days off, put on a dress and a pair of espadrilles, and set out at dawn to explore the mountainous countryside. Once, carrying bread, a candle and a water bottle full of red wine, she ascended Mont Mézenc and spent the night in a flint but at the summit. She woke to find herself looking down on a sea of cloud, and ran down the path on rocks which, when the sun came out. heated up and burned her feet through the
soles of her inappropriate shoes. On another walk, she got stuck in a gorge and barely managed to scramble out. Later, in the Alps in 1936, she fell down a sheer rock face while out alone, but escaped with a few scratches.

Sartre was different. He would be persuaded to join her on walks, but didn’t enjoy the sensation of fatigue. Being and Nothingness contains a marvellous description of slogging up a hill behind an unnamed companion, whom one pictures as Beauvoir (although the scene has something in common with Petrarch’s famous ascent of Mont Ventoux). While this companion seems to be having fun, Sartre experiences the effort as a nuisance, something that intrudes on his freedom. He gives in quickly, throws down his knapsack and collapses at the roadside. The other person is tired too, but finds it blissful to forge on, feeling the glow of sunburn on the back of the neck and relishing the way the roughness of the path is revealed afresh by each trudging step. The Whole landscape presents itself differently to the two of them.

Sartre preferred skiing, and that experience also found its way into Being and Nothingness. Walking over a snowfield is hard work, he pointed out, but skiing over it is a delight. The snow itself changes underneath you, phenomenologically speaking; instead of presenting itself as viscous and clinging, it becomes hard and smooth. It bears you up, and you slide flowingly over it, as easily as the notes of Nausea’s jazz song. He added that he was curious about waterskiing, a new invention which he had heard of but not tried. Even on snow, you left a line of ski marks behind you; in water, you left nothing. That was the purest pleasure Sartre could imagine.

His dream was to pass through the world unencumbered. The possessions that delighted Beauvoir horrified Sartre. He too liked travelling, but he kept nothing from his trips. He gave away books after reading them. The only things he always kept by him were his pipe and his pen, and even these were not for getting attached to. He lost them constantly, he wrote: ‘they’re exiles in my hands’.

With people, he was generous to the point of obsession. He gave money away as fast as it came. in order to get it away from him, like a hand grenade.

Sadomasochism from Edmund White

But on any night of the week such sights can be observed in the Village at a private club. Four dollars at the door buys drink and admission to the huge painhouse. As your eyes adjust to the gloom, you see one guy whipping another. Over there someone Who checked all his clothes in the coatroom is hoisted aloft in a leather swing. Those men are pressed to the wall, facing it. A punishment? No, the wall, you discover, has been pierced with crotch-high ‘glory holes’, and on the other side of the partition someone even now is being covered in glory. In the basement two stoned men are kissing under black light. Absurdly, touchingly, anachronistically romantic, they are unaware of everyone around them, their fluorescent white shirts gleaming eerily like Baudelaire’s swan bathing its wings in the dust.

The oldest and dumbest joke about S and M has the masochist saying ‘Beat me’, and the sadist replying ‘No’. What’s all wrong about the joke is that it assumes sadism is the same thing as psychological cruelty. A playwright who’s known to be a sadist is presumed to be cruel to his audiences (‘No wonder that play went on so long’). Of an English poet whose verse follows strictly traditional forms, some Wiseacre remarks, ‘But of course the forms are strict. If you’d seen him in his saturnine leathers you’d understand his craving for discipline.’

So thoroughly corrupted are we by the Freudian parlor game that such interpretations have become the ordinary stuff of conversation; we are all rabbis, and life is the copious Talmud

awaiting our narrow exegesis. The hermeneutics convince us that a life my life, your life, anyone’s life is all of a piece. He’s cruel in bed and cruel at work. Proust tortured mice for fun ”[14 tortures us by going on and on in his Big Book.

But what if each of us is not unified, but piecemeal? What .' parts oppose rather than duplicate one another? Sam the sadist is a loyal and loving son, a beneficent employer; and the motorcycle club he heads sponsors an annual benefit for handicapped kids. The playwright is famous for his own work with the disabled, the poet for his long hours of patient advice to his students; and Proust was a proverb of kindness (when he found 200 mistakes in twenty-three galley pages, he begged the proofreader not to take the discovery of these errors ‘for a reproach’).

More to the point, sadism itself is not cruel. Those gay ‘top men’ I’ve quizzed have admitted, somewhat sheepishly, that they seldom inflict much pain beyond a few slaps and light licks with a belt. So theatrical (or filmic) is sado-masochism that even the blows are designed to look and sound more violent to the (usually imaginary) audience than they actually are; the belt is doubled, the punishing hand is cupped.

Marijuana, poppers, mescalin and beer stimulate the imagination to such a fever that by merely standing over the cowering slave a master is able to suggest an assault. At every point the experienced master can judge whether his slave wants more or less pain. And sometimes the sadist will ask sotto voce if things are getting too heavy. Naturally there are some sadists who, like Sade himself, can be aroused only by inflicting pain, but these are in the minority. Ankle restraints are plush-lined; the paddle is commedia dell’arte slapstick.

The violence resides almost entirely in the language. One man licking another’s Frye boots would be hilarious were the act not labeled ‘humiliation’. Someone once remarked that in adolescence pornography is a substitute for sex, whereas in adulthood sex is a substitute for pornography; the S and M rap (that muttered or shouted stream of abuse, obscenity, military commands) is the conflation of pornography and sex, the marriage of signifier and signified, an act of extraordinary semiotic condensation. 

There’s another theory: that gay S and M is a safe outlet for throttled rage. Sadism is, presumably, a way for uptight men to release their thunderbolts under the guise of passion. The masochist has indicated his readiness to be punished, and to abuse him seems to be simple compliance, almost charity. Still better, the anger can always be ‘disavowed and laughed off later as just part of a game.

Some of Gregersen’s findings support this interpretation. Leather men he’s interviewed report that they are or have been vegetarians or pacifists. If not always liberal, many are at least libertarian in their politics, averse to authoritarianism of every stripe and hell-bent on defending individual rights.

If one rather cynically assumes that pacifism, vegetarianism, humaneness towards animals and libertarianism are indicative of repressed urges towards violence, then a case could be made for the theory that links S and M to contained rage. To me, however, these beliefs and character traits are. more readily attributable to an active imagination, to empathy, to what Keats called ‘negative capability’ the power to project oneself into another creature’s skin. Such a capacity makes S and M itself possible; no one would be drawn towards the drama of domination (nor would he be good at it) unless he could project himself into the mind of the dominated.

France and Daladier from TDV

But France’s industrial capacity was now so restricted that money could hot be turned into munitions overnight. A B-I heavy tank, for example) took two years to build--in three separate factories. Indeed, some machine tools were so old that workers constructed tanks with little more than hammers and files. Efficient production depended on large orders, which Were not forthcoming. The removal of munitions plants from the vulnerable Paris region, notably Pierre Cot’s transfer of the entire aviation industry to Toulouse, Bordeaux and Marseilles, further disrupted rearmament. There were shortages of skilled workers, especially in engineering and metallurgy Still, France made such strides that by 1939 it was outproducing Germany in both tanks and fighter aircraft. Furthermore France’s military equipment was in certain respects superior to that of the Third Reich. Gamelin nOt only had more tanks, some with thicker armour and heavier guns, he also had more artillery than Germany. True, only 44 of his 200 artillery regiments were motorised. But the Wehrmacht itself was more of a “military anachronism” than a “mechanised juggernaut”: when Hitler invaded Russia in 1941 he helded 3,350 tanks and 650,000 horses, over four times as many as had Napoleon in 1812.

However, arms mattered less than men-and ideas. Gamelin and his generals had learned little and forgotten nothing since Verdun. They did not even appreciate the value of the inhltration tactics which had enabled the Germans to make such dramatic advances in 1918, well before the blitzkrieg was envisioned. It was not so much in war matériel that France was old-fashioned-though Vuillemin said that the obsolescence of the air force scared him out of his wits-it was in military doctrine.

Gamelin considered aviation an adjunct to the army and even a progressive such as Charles de Gaulle had little notion of employing aircraft in combined operations with tanks. The French army relied on firepower rather than mobility, understandable perhaps since its infantry, burdened with heavier equipment, was slower in 1939 than it had been in 1914. Gamelin allowed himself to be distracted by Italy and developed no plans to attack Germany. Any offensive, he said, would result in “a modernised form of the battle of the Somme.” As this suggests, Gamelin was as defence-minded as Daladier who, as War Minister, declared that “the first and last word in military art is to build a trench and hold it.” Yet the Maginot Line was palpably incomplete. Like its leaders, the French army was cautious, bureaucratic, fossilised by tradition. Few of its officers envisaged the tank as much more than a lumbering gun platform designed to support ground troops-not one of the copies of General Guderian’
and

Equally inadequate were the evacuation measures-~except in the case of government ministries. Politicians seemed especially prone to “blue funk.” The Aviation Minister, certain that “the destruction of Paris would pass all imagination,” sent his family to Brittany and advised others to do the same. These others had to fend for themselves. So from Lille to Strasbourg there was a “stampede of the well-to-do.”Cars packed with people and possessions jammed the roads leading south and west. Huge crowds besieged the railway stations and people fought for seats on trains. Six hundred thousand Parisians fled in a week. The capital felt empty, though queues still formed outside savings banks. The shops were deserted, apart from those selling trunks. The Louvre closed and its works of art were packed into crates. Factories were camouflaged, trenches were dug in parks, street lamps dimmed to a glimmer. Doctors profited by issuing medical certificates granting exemption from military service. A brisk trade arose in houses for sale or rent in areas remote from invasion routes. Country cousins became popular. By 29 September 1938, in fact, France was consumed by a war scare reminiscent of the Great Fear of 1789. In Paris, Strasbourg, Dijon and elsewhere mobs attacked Jews and looted their shops, shouting: “Down with the Jewish war. ” The spirit of Bonnet stalked the land. “Let us not be heroic,” he urged; “We are not up to it.”

At Munich Daladier was hungry for conciliation. As usual, he looked combative and made a continuing show of resistance. But he was a willing victim of the British “plot,” as Lord Halifax’s private secretary put it, “to frighten the French into ratting and then get out on their shoulders.”94 Daladier revealed his true colours by remarking that the bellicistes in his own cabinet wanted to push France into an “absurd and above all impossible war,” a war that might cost the lives of three million Frenchmen. Harrowed by his country’s weakness, especially in the air, he agreed to the carve-up of Czechoslovakia. But his scowling countenance and hunched posture betrayed his anger, Daladier recognised that Munich was a crushing humiliation for France, but he did not expect it to be hailed with “frenetic joy.”96 By treating the story of Daladier’s return to France as the Climax of his post-war novel The Reprieve, Sartre made it famous: expecting to be booed (if not mobbed.) by the crowd at Le Bourget airport but finding himself cheered, the dumbfounded Premier turned to Leger as they disembarked from the plane and said through gritted teeth, “The cunts!” Ironically, Sartre’s lover Simone de Beauvoir participated in the general euphoria. She was “delighted” with Munich and “felt not the faintest Pang of Conscience” about the betrayal of Czechoslovakia: “Anything, even the cruellest injustice, was better than war. ”

war in which the whole country, besieged behind the Maginot Line, would become a monstrous Verdun fllled, Laval forecast, with “millions of corpses.” Yet, as the decade advanced, more and more Frenchmen bitterly concluded that the alternative to war was slavery, that their choice lay “between Vérdun and Dachau. ” Hence the incessant panics, the visions of catastrophe and the “nightmare of fear”(Julien Green’s phrase) which afflicted France throughout the 1930s.

Disquiet aggravated disunity as Hitler set his sights on Poland. Bonnet sought to squirm out of French obligations. Daladier wavered and procrastinated, his outbursts of anger being invariably followed, as “Pertinax” remarked, by gestures of impotence. Even when he did declare war the Prime Minister tried to keep the door open to peace. Many of his compatriots shared his ambivalence. On the one hand, they knew that unless France fought Germany it was finished as a great power. They resembled the departing soldiers whose excellent morale was, a journalist noted, “curiously mental”:‘37 the poilus were not moved by patriotic fervour but by the grim conviction that a dirty job had to be done at once. On the other hand, a significant section of French society shared Daladier’s mental reservations and such people grew increasingly anxious that the war should remain as phoney as possible. They hoped that there would be little fighting and tried to believe that France was safe behind the Maginot Line, which would, some said, become the largest tourist attraction in Europe after the war. But as propagandists and censors went about their business and the newspapers appeared with large blank spaces, no one knew what was happening. Albert Camus wrote in his journal, “Never has the individual been more alone in the face of the lie-making machine.” An air of gloomy unreality permeated the capital. With its street lights painted dark blue, Paris resembled a ghost city. Car headlamps were also coloured blue and looked like large aquamarines bowling down asphalt canyons. Squares and alleys were full of shadows. The prostitutes carried gas masks, as did the tin’helmeted policemen, slung from their shoulders in dung-coloured satchels. “Everything, underlying everything,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir, “a feeling of unfathomable horror."

Jaspers and Arendt from the Cafe

Another friend was watching Heidegger’s new role in dismay: Karl Jaspers. He and Heidegger had become close after they met at Husserl’s birthday party-the one at which Malvine referred to Heidegger as the phenomenological child’. As Jaspers lived in Heidelberg, they only travelled to see each other occasionally, but their correspondence and long-distance friendship were warm. ‘ They had many points of philosophical contact. Following his early encounter with Husserl’s ideas, Jaspers had gone on to develop his own work, building on his psychology background as well as on Kierkegaardian existentialism. He was especially interested in Kierkegaard's studies of 'either/or' choices and of freedom: the ways in which we face up to dilemmas and decide what to do. Jaspers focused on what he called Grmzsituationen --border situations, or limit situations. These are the moments when one finds oneself constrained or boxed in by what is happening, but at the same time pushed by these events towards the limits or outer edge of normal experience, For example, you might have to make a life-or-death choice, or some thing might remind you suddenly of your mortality, or some event may make you realise that you have to accept the burden of responsibility for what you do. Experiencing such situations is, for Jaspers, almost synonymous with existing, in the Kierkegaardian sense. Although they are hard to bear, these are puzzles in our existence, and thus open the door to philosophising. We Cannot solve them by thinking in the abstract; they must be lived, and in the end we make our choices with our entire being. They are existential situations.

Jaspers’ interest in border situations probably had much to do with his own early confrontation with mortality. From childhood, he had ., sulfered from a heart condition so severe that he always expected to die at any moment. He also had emphysema, which forced him to speak slowly, taking long pauses to catch his breath. Both illnesses meant that he had to budget his energies with care in order to get his work done without endangering his life.

Karl and Gem“ Jaspers were also wrestling with their own decision. and continued to do so through the 19305: should they leave Germany? The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 severely restricted their lives: they stripped Jews of their citizenship and banned mixed marriages, although those already bring: like theirs, were officially tolerated for the moment. The following year, Jaspers lost his university position because Of his marriage. Yet they still could not bring themselves to leave. Instead, they kept their heads down and lived cautiously, very much as Jaspers had learned always to breathe and move cautiously, for fear of damaging his vital organs. Hannah Arendt, instead, left early on: she had the benefit of a powerful warning. Just after the Nazi takeover, in spring 1933, she had been arrested while researching materials on anti-Semitism for the German Zionist Organisation at Berlin’s Prussian State Library. Her apartment was searched; both she and her mother were locked up briefly, then released. They fled, Without stopping to arrange travel documents. They crossed to Czechoslovakia (then still safe) by a method that sounds almost too fabulous to be true: a sympathetic German family on the border had a house with its front door in Germany and its back door in Czechoslovakia. The family would invite people for dinner, then let them leave through the back door at night. From Prague, Arendt and her mother went on to Geneva, then to Paris, and finally to New York, where Arendt settled. She told a television interviewer later that everyone had known from the start how dangerous Nazi Germany was, but knowing it in theory was one thing, while acting on it and turning it into ‘personal destiny’ was very different.