Eudora Welty

The Optimist's Daughter

But who could there be that she wanted to tell? Her mother. Her dead mother only. Laurel must have deeply known it from the start. She stopped at the armchair and leaned on it. She had the proof, the damnable evidence ready for her mother, and was in anguish because she could not give it to her, and so be herself consoled. The longing to tell her mother was brought about-face, and she saw the horror. 

Father, beginning to lose his sight, followed Mother, But who am I at the point of following but Fay? Laurel thought. The scene she had just imagined, herself confiding the abuse to her mother, and confiding it in all tenderness, was a more devastating one than all Fay had acted out in the hospital. What would I not do, perpetrate, she wondered, for consolation? 

and

Wings beat again. F lying in from over the mountain, over the roof and a child’s head, high up in blue air, pigeons had formed a cluster and twinkled as one body. Like a great sheet of cloth whipping in a wind of its own making, they were about her ears. They came down to her feet and walked on the mountain. Laurel was afraid of them, but she had been provided with biscuits from the table to feed them with. They walked about, opalescent and solid, on worm-pink feet, each bird marked a little differently from the rest and each with a voice soft as a person’s. 

Laurel had stood panic-stricken, holding a biscuit in a frozen gesture of appeal. 

“They’re just Grandma’s pigeons.” 

Her grandmother smoothed Laurel’s already too straight hair and pushed it behind her ears. “They’re just hungry.” 

But Laurel had kept the pigeons under eye in their pigeon house and had already seen a pair of them sticking their beaks down each other’s throats, gagging each other, eating out of each other’s craws, swallowing down all over again what had been swallowed before: they were taking turns. The first time, she hoped they might never do it again, but they did it again next day while the other pigeons copied them. They convinced her that they could not escape each other and could not themselves be escaped from. So when the pigeons flew down, she tried to position herself behind her grand‘ mother’s skirt, which was long and black, but her grandmother said again, They're just hungry, like we are.

Walt Benjamin and the Work of Art

Works of art weren't just beautiful autonomous expressions of human creative impulses, but rather had an instrumental role in maintaining the ruling class’s power. By being situated in a cultural tradition that conferred status on them and the tradition, works of art became fetishes and served the same mystifying purposes as the commodities Marx wrote about: they airbrushed the bloody social conflict and glorified a disharmonious situation a fundamentally harmonious. Benjamin wanted to reduce that whole tradition to rubble.

Robespierre had reappropriated ancient Rome for the French Revolution and thereby had, as Benjamin put it in his 'Theses’, blasted open the continuum of history. Benjamin wanted to blast open the continuum of cultural heritage, so that the oppressed could see the circumstances in which they were living, reveal the barbarism that underlay the beauty, shake the masses from their slumbers. What seems normal must be exposed as perverse and oppressive. Benjamin thought he could see how this could be done. ‘Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual’, he wrote. The force of this gnomic remark may be difficult to grasp, since we don’t immediately think of the work of art as being involved in ritual. But that’s precisely what Benjamin thought had been the function of the work of art. ‘As we know’, he wrote, ‘the earliest artworks originated in the service of rituals? No doubt, but the leap from that to this next sentence was at least counterintuitive. ‘In other words: the unique value of the “authentic” work of art always has its basis in ritual'. But that is far from obvious. Perhaps we might see ritual in the ancient Greeks‘ veneration of a statue of Venus, but not in a trip to the Louvre to see the Venus de Milo. Benjamin’s point, his biographer argued is that if a work of art is reproduced mechanically, the viewer or listener doesn't have to receive it in the space consecrated to its cult, such as a museum, concert hall. or church. But, one might retort, surely sitting in a cinema or listening to a record is as much (or as little) about cultic practices and rituals as experiencing arts that are not reproduced mechanically.

Benjamin's suggestion -and It’s a suggestion that has to be constructed from the rubble of his thoughts. since the essay is written in a manner parallel to the montage techniques that he admired II that art's ritual basis is maintained even when, as it did during the Renaissance. it steps down from the sacred altar and joins the profane cult of beauty. The picture gallery and the concert hall are temples that don’t declare themselves as such. Even in an age when God is dead and beauty secularised (roughly, the era from the Renaissance to the start of the twentieth century in Benjamin’s view), the work of art still has its basis in ritual. 

But then something remarkable happens. Photography is born. Around the same time and, Benjamin implied, not coincidentally. socialism is too. The former, for Benjamin, is the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction; the latter the politics that will destroy the ruling class and all its works. Together they will liquidate art’s dependence on ritual. Only one problem: art refuses to be recast in a political role on the world stage of history. Instead, art spends the nineteenth century dressing itself up and pretending to be that which, for Benjamin, it is not: it denies itself any social function. The work of art affects to be intrinsically valuable, not valuable in part because it helps uphold the status quo. Thus, perhaps, the insistence in Kant’s Critique of Judgment that the aesthetic judgement is necessarily disinterested. Hence the nineteenth-century aesthetic movement that called for art tor art’s sake. In this aesthetic movement, art was making a last stand, asserting its autonomy and purity when, if Benjamin was right, its destiny was political. Photography, Benjamin argued, separated art from its basis in cult and its autonomy disappeared forever. Instead of art for art’s sake, the twentieth century would see art for politics’ sake.

And when art became political in the age of mechanical reproduction, that involved two things: first revolutionising the sensory apparatuses of the masses so that they could see for the first time how they have become the handmaidens to the powers that be; and destroying the aura of the work of art itself.

The aura is a mystifying phenomenon. Benjamin wrote: ‘that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art’, defining it in terms of nature: ‘If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch. Aura then involved distance; mechanical reproduction, he suggested, involved abolishing that distance. But the distance to which Benjamin referred in his essay need not be physical: rather it’s the psychological distance, or authority, that gives the work of art its aura. That distance may involve a naturalised peek-a-boo with the spectator. ‘Certain sculptures in cathedrals‘, noted Benjamin, ‘are invisible to the spectator on ground level.' Some sculptures of the Madonna are covered nearly all year round, Some statues of gods were available to be seen only to the priests in the inner chamber of Greek and Roman temples. 

Thus, in various ways, the aura of the work of art is inapproachable; the riff-raff are often held at a distance in something like awe, admitted on special occasions with timed tickets; meanwhile, the initiates have access all areas, confirming their status and the power of the work of art. Of course, all this is equally true of the class-stratified demographics of today’s rock festivals or opera houses. At the former, the unfortunates risk trench foot in muddy fields, while the elite have backstage passes and helicopters to whisk them from the horrors of the campsite to their boutique hotels. At the latter, the unfortunates either don’t have what it takes to buy tickets or get vertigo in the Gods, while the privileged few recline in the dress circle plush with enviable views of the action on stage and the prospect of liquid treats in the crush bar at the interval. All of which only goes to show how mechan- ical reproduction didn’t eliminate the cultural heritage of auratic an as Benjamin had hoped. The secular ritual think Glastonbury, think Bayreuth survived the liquidation Benjamin yearned for.

The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, Benjamin thought. abolished this privileged access, and detonated cultural heritage. He saw cultural heritage as the debased glorification of a site of bloody conflict, and that which preened and postured as beautiful wasn’t much to be trusted either. But. you might object, surely reproduction has been commonplace in art and literature for centuries and has repeatedly revolutionised not just art and culture, but human society -albeit not in the ways Benjamin wanted? For example, think of scribes. These men laboriously copied by hand the wisdom of the ages from fragile and decaying manuscripts. For generations they were indispensable in refreshing cultural memory, until in the mid fifteenth century Gutenberg's invention of movable type not only made their skills obsolete, but facilitated the Protestant Reformation, In 1492. the Abbot of Sponheim wrote a tract called In Defence of Scribes urging that the scribal tradition be maintained because the very act of handcopying sacred texts brought spiritual enlightenment. One problem: the abbot had his book set in movable type so his argument could be spread quickly and cheaply. 

Benjamin didn’t deny any of this. He noted that any work of art is in principle reproducible: since time immemorial, pupils would copy masters’ work for practice, and for financial gain. The Greeks knew only two ways of technically reproducing works of art stamping and founding, so their reproductions were confined to bronzes, terracottas and coins. Only with the woodcut would graphic art become reproducible; then during the Middle Ages etching and engraving were added. But, Benjamin argued, it was only with lithography that the reproduction of graphic art caught up with the Gutenberg revolution in printing. But lithography was soon surpassed by photography which, for Benjamin, was the revolutionary form of technological reproduction par excellence, since it ‘freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into the lens’.

What was the significance of that? In the past the presence of the original was the prerequisite for the concept of authenticity. The manual reproduction of a work of art confirms the authority of the original; by contrast, mechanical reproduction may subvert that authority indeed, in some circumstances, it may even mean it doesn’t make any sense to speak of an original. ‘From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic" print makes no sense’, wrote Benjamin. Is there an original print of Porky’s 3? It’s not impossible, but even if there is, it won’t stand in the same relation to its reproductions as the original of the Mona Lisa stands to any of the billions of reproductions of Da Vinci’s painting. There is no original work of art imperiously conferring legitimacy on copies and withholding it from forgers- the king is dead, long live the democracy of things.

But Benjamin couched this death of distance in odd terms, arguing that the ‘contemporary masses’ desired to bring things "closer“ spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent towards overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction’. But where did this desire come from? Here Benjamin, and it was a charge that Adorno laid at his door more than once during the 1930s, was insufficiently dialectical. More plausibly, we might argue, improvements in reproduction technologies change what it is possible for capitalists to sell to those whom Benjamin calls the ‘masses’. Desires, that is to say, don’t spring from nowhere. They can be constructed. They are, perhaps, even in dialectical relationship with technology. Technology changes not only what humans can do; it changes humans, makes them desire things they didn’t know existed before. Benjamin realised this, writing: ‘One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand that could only be satisfied later.' 

Cinema, radio, TV, recorded music, the internet and social media all involve technological innovations that enable capitalists to provide products that change our desires and so change us. Consider the internet. 'The development of the internet has more to do with human beings becoming a reflection of their technologies: the German post-structuralist philosopher and media theorist Friedrich Kittler once argued. ‘After all, it is we who adapt to the machine. The machine does not adapt to us.’ Kittler was countering the benign vision of the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who took technological innovations to be human prostheses (hence the subtitle to McLuhan’s book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man). On the contrary. Kittler argued, ‘media are not pseudopods for extending the human body. They follow the logic of escalation that leaves us and written history behind it.” 

As for Benjamin, he certainly envisaged technology as prosthetic. He noted that a photograph may capture what the eye can't see. As a result, the original would not be a point of comparison, through which we judge the success of the photo as a reproduction. It would make no sense in such a case to speak of a forgery. Benjamin also argued that technical reproduction can put the copy into situations impossible for the original: 'The cathedral leaves its locale to be studied in the studio on lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room.’ He was considering. in the case of the former, a photograph; In the case of the latter, a phonograph.

But,if photography and other art forms of the era of mechanical reproduction extend human perceptual powers, Benjamin imagined that these arts have a political purpose, namely to bring the nature of reality into high definition. 

"Our taverns end our metropolitan streets, our office. and furnished rooms. our railway stations and our factories appeared to have locked us up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go travelling. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended . . . The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does 
psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses." 

Many years later, in 1962, Alfred Hitchcock, whose films have the logic of dreams as if they are realisations on celluloid of unconscious impulses. echoed Benjamin’s insights here when he told Francois Truffaut what cinema was for: it was, he said, to contract time and to extend it. 

Just as Freud placed his hand gently on the back of his patients‘ heads and pushed them into their dirty linen, acquainting them with the dark forces that underlay their rational selves, so the camera exposes the brutal dissonances of modern life. And just as there is work for the analysand to do, so there is work for the moviegoer too, Benjamin suggested. But the work doesn’t involve long periods of concentration of the kind that was characteristic of standing before a painting in a picture gallery and taken to heroic extremes by the philosopher of art Richard Wollheim. who wrote: ‘I spent long hours in the Church of San Salvatore in Venice, in the Louvre, in the Guggenheim Museum, coaxing a picture into life. I noticed that I became an object of suspicion to passers-by, and so did the picture 
that I was looking at." Instead, Benjamin called for ‘reception in distraction’. He imagined such reception as a revolutionary form of perception -an incendiary notion, especially for us to read about in hindsight. Today distraction is more vice than virtue. Indeed, it’s why you can‘t get anything done. Technological innovation keeps us leaping from one pointless task after the other, replying to emails, updating Facebook status, tweeting, texting, always working at our screens, like victims of a cyberspace Sisyphean curse. This distracted way of living runs counter to the popular theory of the Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly that people are happiest when they are in a state of flow. But then Benjamin was not a poet hymning work, or a philosopher of happiness. More likely, he would have regarded happiness, flow, absorption and the cult of fulfilling labour as fatuous quests for wholeness, delusions that stop us realising we are in a broken world, knee deep in accumulated rubble, downtrodden and exploited. 

Absorption and flow are characteristic of the creation and reception of auratic art. The kind of art Benjamin prized and took to have revolutionary potential was otherwise: it involved disruption and estrangement, bursting open the smooth surface of reality. Instead of meditation on delusive harmonies, it meant being discombobulated by dissonances, jump-cuts, deranging montages. Absent-mindedness was very nearly a virtue for Benjamin. You might say that cinema, for him, was a Brechtian alienation technique with better technology. Film, as he put it, isn’t so much an art form that soothes as one that trains its viewers ‘in the vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily’. Here apparatus means the phantasmagoric world of urban commodity capitalism that we take to be real, natural and given, and so accept fatalistically. 

But there is more. Think of Greta Garbo or, if you prefer, George Clooney. Movie stars seem to be auratic, that is to say, their worship appears to be like that of Greek statues. As a result, the cinema appears to be another temple for the enactment of rituals. Benjamin had an incendiary idea about this which subverts the thought that Garbo and Clooney are akin to gods. Film acting. he maintained, is different from earlier forms of acting in that every film performance is a composition of separate takes, each of which has been assembled not by the actor, but by the director, cinematographer, lighting designer, executive producer, lighting designer. So the actor’s performance is broken up and edited back together. 

As Benjamin’s biographers argued: 

this disjunctive, testable nature of the performance before the apparatus [i.e. camera‘ editing studio, cinema projection] makes visible something otherwise hidden: the self-alienation of the modern, technologised subject, the susceptibility to measurement and control. The actor thus places the apparatus in the services of a triumph over the apparatus, a triumph of humanity. 

Benjamin thought that the cinema held up to us a mirror of our condition we too are technologised subjects, broken up, studied, reified in the same way actors’ performances are. For him, the new technology of mechanical reproduction meant that the actor’s performance was ‘detachable from the person mirrored’. While earlier forms of acting, particularly in the theatre, involved performances that were not detachable and so had about them an aura, film acting was different. The film star’s performance was ‘transportable and subject to a different control that of the viewers, who confront it en masse’. As a result, we could break up the cult of the movie star by reflecting on how his or her performance has been mechanically assembled. ‘During long periods of human history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence: wrote Benjamin, and his hope was that since our mode of sense perception changes thanks to technological innovation, from the enhanced perception that cinema allows us we can see that we have become things. 

Benjamin’s technological utopianism is beguiling, and one can understand his hopes for it under fascism, but one could also argue the opposite: instead of making self-alienation visible, cinema can erase it. Instead of annulling approachability, cinema can extend auratic distance. The technology may, but needn’t, help us realise our alienation. And the training that Benjamin recommended in order to hone the new sensory powers cinema offers us is one that few have undertaken. What he seemed to be arguing for here is a kind of aberrant decoding. But the hope for such decoding involves an active, informed, politicised role for the cinema audience that, we realise with hindsight, it didn’t have, and is incredibly rare. Cinema, certainly in the hands of the Hollywood culture industry that Adorno and Horkheimer would excoriate in Dialectic of Enlightenment, has been an ideological tool for the domination of the masses rather than revealing to them their plight under monopoly capitalism. What Benjamin hoped would be consciousness raising has, quite often, been merely brain numbing. 

Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual’, wrote Benjamin. Again, one could just as well argue the opposite: that it tightens the bonds with more sophisticated technology. Our film stars are subjects of cultic veneration. The Italian devotee of Walter Benjamin, Roberto Calasso, wrote in The Ruin of Kasch that ‘every movie star is a constellation, incorporated into the heavens after being devoured by the gods’. The movie star is thus both a god and a sacrifice to the gods. More precisely, we might say that the movie star becomes a god only after being sacrificed And what is true of movie stars is true of all celebrities: the culture industry produces gods and sacrificial victims by means of the same technology; indeed, it erases the distinction between them. 

-Stuart Jeffries: Grand Hotel Abyss

All the King's Men

“No, the Boss corrected, I'm not a lawyer. I know some law. ... but I'm not a lawyer. That's why I can see what the law is like. It's like a single-bed blanket on a double bed and three folks in the bed and a cold night. There ain't ever enough blanket to cover the case, no matter how much pulling and hauling, and somebody is always going to nigh catch pneumonia. Hell, the law is like the pants you bought last year for a growing boy, but it is always this year and the seams are popped and the shankbone's to the breeze. The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind. The best you can do is do something and then make up some law to fit and by the time that law gets on the books you would have done something different.”

and 

 This was like a dress rehearsal after the show has closed down. I stood there and felt like God - Almighty brooding on history.
Which must be a dull business for God - Almighty, Who knows how it is going to come out. Who knew in fact, how it was going to come out even before He knew there was going to be any history. Which is complete nonsense, for that involves Time, and He is out of Time. For God is the fullness of Being and in Him the End is the Beginning. Which is what you can read in the little tracts written and handed out on the street corners by the fat, grubby, dandruff - sprinkled old man, with the metal - rimmed spectacles, who used to be the scholarly attorney and who married  the girl with the gold braids and the clear, famished - looking cheeks, up in Arkansas. But those tracts he wrote back then  were crazy, I thought back then.  I thought God cannot be fullness of being. For Life is Motion.

(I use the capital letters as the old man did in the tracts, I had sat across the table from him, with the foul unwashed dishes on one end of it and the papers and books piled on the other end, in the room across the railroad tracks, and he had talked and I had heard the capital letters in his voice. He had said "God is the Fullness of Being."  And I had said, "You've got the wrong end of the stick. For life is Motion. For --

Life is Motion toward Knowledge. If God is Complete Knowledge then He is Complete Non-Motion, which is Non-Life, which is Death. Therefore, if there is such a God of Fullness of Being, we would worship Death, the Father.

Life is a fire burning along a piece of string—or is it a fuse to a powder keg which we call God?—and the string is what we don't know, our Ignorance, and the trail of ash, which, if a gust of wind does not come, keeps the structure of the string, is History, man's Knowledge, but it is dead, and when the fire has burned up all the string, then man's Knowledge will be equal to God's Knowledge and there won't be any fire, which is Life. Or if the string leads to a powder keg, then there will be a terrific blast of fire, and even the trail of ash will be blown completely away."

I'll draw you another picture. It is a picture of a man trying to paint a picture of a sunset. But before he can dip his brush the color always changes and the shape. Let us give a name to the picture which he is trying to paint: Knowledge. Therefore if the object which a man looks at changes constantly so that Knowledge of it is constantly untrue and is therefore Non-Knowledge, then Eternal Motion is possible. And Eternal Life. Therefore we can believe in Eternal Life only if we deny God, Who is Complete Knowledge."

and

"If you meant to imply," I said, "that politics, including that of erstwhile pals, I not exactly like Easter Week in a nunnery, you are right. But I will beat you to the metaphysical draw this time. Politics is action and all action is but a flaw in the perfection on nonbeing. Which is God. For if God is perfection and the only perfection is in nonbeing, then God is nonbeing. Then God is nothing. Nothing can give no basis for the criticism of Thing in its thingness. Then where do you get anything to say? Then where do you get off?"

"Foolishness, foolishness," he said, "foolishness and foulness!"

and

"Adam wet his lips and said, "There is one question I should like to ask you. It is this. If, as you say, there is only the bad to start with, and the good must be made from the bad, then how do you ever know what the good is? How do you even recognize the good? Assuming you have made it from the bad. Answer me that."

"Easy, Doc, easy," the Boss said.

"Well, answer it."

"You just make it up as you go along/"

"Make up what?"

"The good," the Boss said. "What the else are we talking about? Good with a capital G."

"So you make it up as you go along?" Adam repeated gently.

"What the hell else you think folks been doing for a million years, Doc? When your great-great-grandpappy climbed down out of the tree, he didn't have any more notion of good or bad, or right and wrong, than the hoot own that stayed up in the tree. Well, he climbed down and he began to make Good up as he went along. He made up what he needed to do business, Doc. And what he made up and got everybody to mirate on as good and right was always just a couple of jumps behind what he needed to do business on. That's why things change, Doc. Because what folks claim is right is always just a couple of jumps short of what they need to do business. Now, an individual, one fellow, he will stop doing business because he's got a notion of what is right, and he is a hero. But folks in general, which is society, Doc, is never going to stop doing business. Society is just going to cook up a new notion of what is right. Society is sure not ever going to commit suicide. At least, not that way and of a purpose. And is a fact. Now ain't it?"

"It is?" Adam said.

"You're damned right it is, Doc. And right is a lid you put on something and some of the things under the lid look just like some of the things not under the lid, and there never was any notion of what was right if you put it down on folks in general that a lot of them didn't start squalling because they just couldn't do any human business under that kind of right. Hell, look at when folks couldn't get a divorce. Look at all the good women got beat and the good men got nagged and couldn't do any human damned thing about it. Then, all of a sudden, a divorce got to be right. What next, you don't know. Nor me. But I do know this." He stopped, leaned forward again, the elbows again cocked out.

What?" Adam demanded.

"This. I'm not denying there's got to be a notion of right to get business done, but by God, any particular notion at any particular time will sooner or later get to be just like a stopper put tight in a bottle of water and thrown in a hot stove the way we kids used to do at school to hear the bang. The steam that blows the bottle and scares the teacher to wet her drawers is just the human business that is going to get done, and it will blow anything you put it in if you seal it tight, but you put it in the right place and let it get out in a certain way and it will run a freight engine." 

and

We wrote every day, but the letters began to seem like checks drawn on the summer's capital. There had been a lot in the bank but it is never good business practice to live on your capital and I had the feeling, somehow of living on the capital and watching something dwindle.

and

For a while it looked as though Anne and I had made it up, but somehow a gear slipped and it was like before. I didn’t finish the Ph D. So I went back to the Chronicle, where I was a reporter, and a damned good one. I even got married. To Lois, who was damned good looking, a lot better-looking, I suppose, than Anne, and juicy while Anne was inclined to bone and muscle under flesh. Lois looked edible, and you knew it was tender all the way through, a kind of mystic combination of filet mignon and a Georgia peach aching for the tongue and ready to bleed gold. Lois married me for reasons best known to herself. But one was, I am sure, that my name was Burden. I am forced to this conclusion by the process of elimination. It could not have been my beauty, grace, charm, wit, intellect, and learning, for, in the first place, my beauty, grace, and charm were not great, and in the second place Lois didn't have the slightest interest in wit, intellect, and learning. Even if I had had them. It could not have been my mother’s money, for Lois's own widowed mother had plenty of money, which Lois’s father had made from a lucky war contract for gravel, a little too late to give those things called advantages to his daughter at her most impressionable age. So it must have been the name of Burden. Unless it was that Lois was in love with me. I put this possibility in the list merely for logical and schematic completeness,. for I am quite sure that the only things Lois knew about love were how to spell the word and how to make the physiological adjustments traditionally associated with the idea. She did not spell very well, but she made those adjustments with great skill and relish. The relish was nature, but the skill was art and ars longa est. I knew this despite the very expert and sustained histrionics of which Lois was capable. I knew it,  but I succeeded in burying it out in the back yard of my mind, like a rat that had been caught in the pantry gnawing the cheese. I didn't really care, I suppose, so long as nothing happened to make me have to face the fact. And once in my arms, Mrs. Burden was very faithful or very discreet, for nothing ever happened. And the arrangement was perfect. 

“Jack and I are perfectly adjusted sexually,” Lois used to gay primly, for she was very advanced in what with her passed for thought and was very sophisticated in her language. She would look around at the faces of the guests in the very slick modernistic apartment (her taste ran that way and not to balconies overlooking charming old patios, and her money paid the rent), and would tell them how perfectly adjusted she and I were, and in telling them would add about two extra chocolate cream-puff syllables to the word sexually. For a while l didn’t mind her telling the guests about how well adjusted we were. It even flattered my ego, for nobody would mind having his name coupled with that of Lois or having his picture taken with her in a public place. So I would beam modestly around the little group, while Lois told them about that perfect adjustment. But later it began to annoy me. 

As long as I regarded Lois as a beautiful, juicy, soft, vibrant, sweet-smelling, sweet-breathed machine for provoking and satisfying the appetite (and that was the Lois I had married), all was well. But as soon as I began to regard her as a person, trouble began. All would have been well, perhaps, had Lois been struck dumb at puberty. Then no man could have withstood her. But she could talk, and when something talks you sooner or later begin to listen to the sound it makes and begin, even in the face of all other evidence, to regard it as a person. You begin to apply human standards to it, and the human element infects your innocent Eden pleasure m the juicy, sweet-breathed machine. I had loved Lois the machine, the way you love the filet mignon or the Georgia peach. but I definitely was not in love with Lois the person. In fact. as the realization grew that the machine Lois belonged to, and was the instrument of, the person-Lois (or at least of the thing which could talk), the machine-Lois which I had innocently loved began to resemble a beautiful luscious bivalve open and pulsing in the glimmering deep and I some small speck of marine liie being drawn remorselessly. Or it resembled the butt of wine in which the duke was drowned, and I was sure-God the Duke of Clarence. Or it resembled a greedy. avid, delicious quagmire which would swallow up the lost, benighted traveler with a last tired, liquid, contented sigh. Yes, in that greedy, delicious quagmire, the solemn temples, the gorgeous palaces, towers, battlements. libraries, museums. huts, hospitals, houses and all the works of man might be swallowed up, with that last luxurious sigh. Or so, I recall. it seemed. But the paradox is that as long as Lois was merely the machine-Lois, as long as she was simply a well-dressed animal, as long as she was really a part of innocent nonhuman nature, as long as I hadn’t begun to notice that the sounds she made were words, there was no harm in her and no harm in the really extraordinary pleasure she could provide. It was only when I observed that this Lois was mixed up with the other Lois, with certain human traits, that I began to feel that all the works of man might be swallowed up in the quagmire. It is a delicate paradox. 

I did not make a decision not to be swallowed up. The instinct for self preservation is more deep-seated than decision. A man doesn't make a decision to swim when he falls into the creek. He starts kicking. I simply began to wriggle and squirm and kick. First. I recall, there was the matter of Lois‘s friends (no friends of mine ever set foot in the slick apartment, if as a matter of fact, the people I knew in the city room and the speak easy and the press club could be called friends). I began to take a distaste in the friends Lois had. There was nothing particularly wrong with them. They were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage. There were some who had what Lois, who was not mo well informed on the subject, regarded as "Position" but who didn't have much money and liked Lois’s free likker. There were some who didn’t have any “position” but who had more money than Lois and knew which fork to use. And there were some who didn't have very much of either position or money, but who had some credit at the better clothing stores and who could be bullied by Lois. They all read Vanity Fair or Harper's Bazaar (according to sex, and some read both) and Smart Set, and they quoted Dorothy Parker, and those who had been merely to Chicago licked the spittle of those who had been to New York and those who had been merely to New York licked the spittle of those who had been to Paris. As I say there was nothing particularly wrong with these people, many of whom were quite agreeable and attractive. The only thing I found wrong with them, I admit as I look back was was that they were Lois’s friends. First, I developed a certain reserve in my dealings with them, then I developed an attitude which Lois defined as snotty. After one of my exhibitions Lois would try to discipline me by withholding the sweets of her gender. 

That was the matter of Lois’s friends. But there was, second, the matter of Lois's apartment. I took a distaste for the apartment. I told Lois I didn’t want to live there. That we would get a place on which I could afford to pay the rent out of my salary. We had some rows on that point, rows which I didn’t expect to win. Then the sweets would be withheld. 

That was the matter of the apartment. But there was, third, the matter of my clothes and what Lois loved to call my “grooming.” I was accustomed to thirty-dollar suits, shirts that had been worn two days, a bimonthly haircut, unpolished shoes, a hat with a brim that looped and sagged, and fingernails always broken and sometimes dirty. And I regarded the habit of pressing pants as something which had not come to stay. In the early days when I looked on Lois as merely the luscious machine, I had allowed certain scarcely perceptible changes to be made in my appearance. But as I began to realize that the noises she made with her mouth resembled human speech and were more than rudimentary demands for, or expressions of gratification at, food or copulation, a certain resistance began to grow in me. And as the pressure to improve my grooming increased, so the resistance increased, too. More and more often, accustomed objects of my wardrobe disappeared, to be replaced by proclaimed or surreptitious gifts. Originally I had interpreted these gifts as springing from a misguided and love-inspired attempt to give me pleasure. In the end I understood that my pleasure was the last consideration involved. The crisis came when I polished a shoe with a new tie, A row ensued, the first of many occasioned by the divergence of our tastes in haberdashery. And the sweets would be withheld on that count. 

They were withheld on many counts. But never for very long at a stretch. Sometimes I would capitulate and apologize. My early apologies were sometimes sad and, for the moment, even sincere, though sometimes sincere with a kind of self-pity. Then later, they became masterpieces of irony, double-entendre, ind histrionics, and I would lie in bed, uttering them, aware

that my face in the dark was twisted into a mask of self-congratulatory cunning, bitterness and loathing.  for sometimes the juicy machine-Lois got the upper band over the dry and brittle person-Lois She might utter an invitation in a low voice tense with hatred and then in the subsequent process avert her face from me, or if she did look at me, she would glare like a cornered animal. Or if she did not invite me, she might collapse in the heat of a scuffle which she had undertaken against me in all seriousness but which had proved too much for the dry and brittle person-Lois and had given the other Lois the upper hand. In any case, whether she cracked or I, we demonstrated, in the midst of tangled bedclothes, unspoken loathing, and the wreckage of somebody's self respect. that we were, as Lois had affirmed to many of her guests, perfectly adjusted sexually. And we were. 

The fact that the adjustment was so perfect merely meant that in the end, with the deep-seated instinct for self-preservation, I was consorting with common whores. I was at that time on the evening edition, and finished my stint about two in the afternoon. After a couple of drinks and a late lunch in a speakeasy, then a couple more drinks and a game of billiards at the press club, I might call on one of my friends. Then at dinner, if I managed to get home to dinner, and in the evening I would study Lois with a clinical detachment and a sense of mystic regeneration. It even got so that almost at will I could produce an optical illusion. I could look at Lois in a certain way and find that she seemed to be withdrawing steadily, the whole room elongating with her, until it would be as though I were staring at her through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. By this practice I gained great spiritual refreshment. 1 finally grew so adept at it that I could hear her voice, if it was one of her vituperative and not sullen evenings, as though it were coming from a great distance and were not, as a matter of fact, even addressed to me.  

Then came the final phase, the phase of the Great Sleep. Immediately after dinner every evening. I went to bed and slept soundly with the sweet feeling of ever falling toward the center of delicious blackness, until the last possible moment the next morning. Sometimes I did not even wait for dinner and the pleasure of observing Lois. I would just go to bed. I remember this became almost a habit in the late spring. I would come in from my afternoon's occupation and draw the shade in the bedroom and go to bed, with the mild light oozing in from around the shade and the birds twittering and caroling in the trees of the little park next the apartment building and children calling musically from the playground in the park going to bed in the late spring afternoon or just at the beginning of twilight with those sounds. m your ears, gives you a wonderful sense of peace, a peace which must resemble the peace of old age after a well-spent life. 

But of course there was Lois. Sometimes she would come into my bedroom-by this time I had moved into the guest room for my serious sleeping-and sit on the edge of the bed and give me long descriptions of myself, rather monotonous descriptions, as a matter of fact, for Lois had little gift of phrase and had to fall back on the three or four classic terms Sometimes she would beat me with her clenched lists. She had a feeble, female way of using her little white fists. I could sleep through the descriptions, and almost through the beating of the clenched lists on my side or back. Sometimes she would cry and give vent to a great deal of self-pity. Once or twice she even snuggled into bed with me. Sometimes she would open the door to my room and turn up the phonograph in the living room until the joint shook. But no soap. I could sleep through anything I lust about. 

Then the morning came when I opened my eyes and felt the Finger of Fate upon me; I knew the time had come. I got up and packed my suitcase and walked out the door and didn't  come back. To the slick apartment and to Lois who was beautiful and to whom I was so perfectly adjusted.

I never saw her again, but I know what she looks like now when cocktails, bonbons, late hours, and nearly fourty years have done their work on the peach bloom of cheeks, the pearly ripe but vigorous bosom, the supple midriff, the brooding, black velvety liquid eyes, the bee-stung lips, the luxurious thighs. She sits on a divan somewhere, held more or less in shape by the vigor of a masseuse and the bands of lastex which secretly sheath her like a mummy, but bloated with the entire universe she has ingurgitated with a long delicious sigh. 

Universal love?

Tertullian: “What marks us in the eyes of our enemies is our loving-kindness: ‘Only look,’ they say, ‘look how they love one another! One another, not everyone.

This discernment is also reflected in a famous utterance of Jesus in the book of Matthew. Jesus is telling his followers that they should treat even the Iowliest as if they were Jesus himself, so that on Judgement Day he can say to them: “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave clothing, I was sick and you took care of me. I was in prison and ou visited me." This seeming call for boundless compassion is followed by a rarely noted qualifier. After Jesus’s followers ask in puzzlement “When was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?" Jesus answers: "Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of these who are members of my family [sometimes translated as “these my brothers"], you did it to me.” Brothers? Family? In common early Christian usage. that would have meant other Christians. 

Of course. if Paul is the one who pioneered that usage, then maybe terms like “brothers” had a different. more truly universal. connotation back when Jesus spoke. But the book of Matthew wasn‘t written until after Paul’s time, so its language should be interpreted in that light. And in that light, this passage is so consistent with Paul’s instrumental use of the idea of brotherly love as to suggest that maybe these weren’t the words of Jesus but rather were put in his mouth to justify a strategy that, by the tme Matthew was written, had proved its value. (They don't appear in the earliest gospel, Mark, or in the possibly early, hypothetically reconstructed Q source-only in Matthew.) 

Though membership in one of Paul’s churches allowed you to enjoy brotherly love, it didn't guarantee that privilege for life. Once a brother. you would be monitored, and extreme self-indulgence could lead to expulsion. The same letter to the Corinthians that bears Paul's famous ode to love contains this passage: “I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother who is sexually immoral or greedy, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard or robber. Do not even eat with such a one....Dnve out the wicked person from among you. Paul’s church had generous criteria for joining the brotherhood but strict grounds for expulsion. 

THis membership policy helps explain how Chistianity could afford to accept members from all social classes. including the indigent. So long as they didn’t exploit generosity and succumb to vice, they could be rendered productive. Indeed, Christian churches seem to have been tools of social mobility. giving education to aspiring students. A second century Christian remarked, “Not only do the rich among us pursue our philosophy, but the poor enjoy instruction for free. We admit all who desire to hear.

It was a solid formula: reach out to all, and hang on to the honest and earnest. But an implication of this formula was to keep “universal love" from being truly “universal.” Love was extended beyond the brotherhood of Christians tentatively and conditionally; the fullest form of love would be dented to those who didn’t join the brotherhood and to those who joined but didn’t keep earning their membership The result was to make the early church organically cohesive As Paul put it, “we, who are many. are one body In Christ, and individually we are members one of another“ 

The meaning of the Hebrew Bible‘s injunction to love your neighbor as yourself had always depended on the definition of “neighbor." Paul did change that definition, but he didn’t give it infinite compass. A “neighbor" wasn’t just any “Jew or Greek.” As Peter Brown has written of the Roman Empire in the third century, “The teaching of the church defined for the Christian who was not his neighbor: the neighbor of the Christian was not necessarily his kinsman. not his fellow dweller in a quarter, not his compatriot or his fellow townsman. His neighbor was his fellow Christian.

-Robert WRight

The Evolution of God

Trollope, Fanny

The priest who stood in the middle was praying; the prayer was extravagantly vehement, and offensively familiar in expression; when this ended, a hymn was sung, and then an- other priest took the centre place, and preached. The sermon had considerable eloquence, but of a frightful kind. The preacher described, with ghastly minuteness, the last feeble fainting moments of human life, and then the gradual progress of decay after death, which he followed through every process up to the last loathsome stage of decomposition. Suddenly changing his tone, which had been that of sober accurate description, into the shrill voice of horror, he bent forward his head, as if to gaze on some object beneath the pulpit. And as Rebecca made known to Ivanhoe what she saw through the window, so the preacher made known to us what he saw in the pit that seemed to open before him. The device was certainly a happy one for giving effect to his description of hell. No image that fire, flame, brimstone, molten lead, or red-hot pincers could supply; with flesh, nerves, and sinews quivering under them, was omitted. The perspiration ran in streams from the face of the preacher; his eyes rolled, his lips were covered with foam, and every feature had the deep expression of horror it would have borne, had he, in truth, been gazing at the scene he described. The acting was excellent. At length he gave a languishing look to his supporters on each side, as if to express his feeble state, and then sat down, and wiped the drops of agony from his brow.
The other two priests arose, and began to sing a hymn. It was some seconds before the congregation could join as usual; every up-turned face looked pale and horror struck. When the singing ended, another took the centre place, and began in a sort of coaxing affectionate tone, to ask the congregation if what their dear brother had spoken had reached their hearts? Whether they would avoid the hell he had made them see? "Come, then!" he continued, stretching out his arms towards them, "come to us, and tell us so, and we will make you see Jesus, the dear gentle Jesus, who shall save you from it. But you must come to him! You must not be ashamed to come to him! This night you shall tell him that you are not ashamed of him; we will make way for you; we will clear the bench for anxious sinners to sit upon. Come, then! come to the anxious bench, and we will shew you Jesus! Come! Come! Come!"
Again a hymn was sung, and while it continued, one of the three was employed in clearing one or two long benches that went across the rail, sending the people back to the lower part of the church. The singing ceased, and again the people were invited, and exhorted not to be ashamed of Jesus, but to put themselves upon "the anxious benches," and lay their heads on his bosom. "Once more we will sing," he concluded, "that we may give you time." And again they sung a hymn.
And now in every part of the church a movement was perceptible, slight at first, but by degrees becoming more decided. Young girls arose, and sat down, and rose again; and then the pews opened, and several came tottering out, their hands clasped, their heads hanging on their bosoms, and every limb trembling, and still the hymn went on; but as the poor creatures approached the rail their sobs and groans became audible. They seated themselves on the "anxious benches;" the hymn ceased, and two of the three priests walked down from the tribune, and going, one to the right, and the other to the left, began whispering to the poor tremblers seated there. These whispers were inaudible to us, but the sobs and groans increased to a frightful excess. Young creatures, with features pale and distorted, fell on their knees on the pavement, and soon sunk forward on their faces; the most violent cries and shrieks followed, while from time to time a voice was heard in convulsive accents, exclaiming, "Oh Lord!" "Oh Lord Jesus!" "Help me, Jesus!" and the like.
and

 The theatre was really not a bad one, though the very poor receipts rendered it impossible to keep it in high order; but an annoyance infinitely greater than decorations indifferently clean, was the style and manner of the audience. Men came into the lower tier of boxes without their coats; and I have seen shirt sleeves tucked up to the shoulder; the spitting was incessant, and the mixed smell of onions and whiskey was enough to make one feel even the Drakes’ acting dearly bought by the obligation of enduring its accompaniments. The bearing and attitudes of the men are perfectly indescribable; the heels thrown higher than the head, the entire rear of the person presented to the audience, the whole length supported on the benches, are among the varieties that these exquisite posture-masters exhibit. The noises, too, were perpetual, and of the most unpleasant kind; the applause is expressed by cries and thumping with the feet, instead of clapping; and when a patriotic fit seized them, and “Yankee Doodle” was called for, every man seemed to think his reputation as a citizen depended on the noise he made.
Two very indifferent figurantes, probably from the Ambigu Comique, or la Gaiete, made their appearance at Cincinnati while we were there; and had Mercury stepped down, and danced a pas seul upon earth, his godship could not have produced a more violent sensation. But wonder and admiration were by no means the only feelings excited; horror and dismay were produced in at least an equal degree. No one, I believe, doubted their being admirable dancers, but every one agreed that the morals of the Western world would never recover the shock. When I was asked if I had ever seen any thing so dreadful before, I was embarrassed how to answer; for the young women had been exceedingly careful, both in their dress and in their dancing, to meet the taste of the people; but had it been Virginie in her most transparent attire, or Taglioni in her most remarkable pirouette, they could not have been more reprobated. The ladies altogether forsook the theatre; the gentlemen muttered under their breath, and turned their heads aside when the subject was mentioned; the clergy denounced them from the pulpit; and if they were named at the meetings of the saints, it was to show how deep the horror such a theme could produce. I could not but ask myself if virtue were a plant, thriving under one form in one country, and flourishing under a different one in another? If these Western Americans are right, then how dreadfully wrong are we! It is really a very puzzling subject.
But this was not the only point on which I found my notions of right and wrong utterly confounded; hardly a day passed in which I did not discover that something or other that I had been taught to consider lawful as eating, was held in abhorrence by those around me; many words to which I had never heard an objectionable meaning attached, were totally interdicted, and the strangest paraphrastic sentences substituted. I confess it struck me, that notwithstanding a general stiffness of manner, which I think must exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees, the Americans have imaginations that kindle with alarming facility. I could give many anecdotes to prove this, but will content myself with a few.
A young German gentleman of perfectly good manners, once came to me greatly chagrined at having offended one of the principal families in the neighbourhood, by having pronounced the word corset before the ladies of it. An old female friend had kindly overcome her own feelings so far as to mention to him the cause of the coolness he had remarked, and strongly advised his making an apology. He told me that he was perfectly well disposed to do so, but felt himself greatly at a loss how to word it.
An English lady who had long kept a fashionable boarding-school in one of the Atlantic cities, told me that one of her earliest cares with every new comer, was the endeavour to substitute real delicacy for this affected precision of manner; among many anecdotes, she told me one of a young lady about fourteen, who on entering the receiving room, where she only expected to see a lady who had enquired for her, and finding a young man with her, put her hands before her eyes, and ran out of the room again, screaming “A man! a man! a man!”
On another occasion, one of the young ladies in going up stairs to the drawing-room, unfortunately met a boy of fourteen coming down, and her feelings were so violently agitated, that she stopped panting and sobbing, nor would pass on till the boy had swung himself up on the upper banisters, to leave the passage free.
At Cincinnati there is a garden where the people go to eat ices, and to look at roses. For the preservation of the flowers, there is placed at the end of one of the walks a sign-post sort of daub, representing a Swiss peasant girl, holding in her hand a scroll, requesting that the roses might not be gathered. Unhappily for the artist, or for the proprietor, or for both, the petticoat of this figure was so short as to shew her ancles. The ladies saw, and shuddered; and it was formally intimated to the proprietor, that if he wished for the patronage of the ladies of Cincinnati, he must have the petticoat of this figure lengthened. The affrighted purveyor of ices sent off an express for the artist and his paint pot. He came, but unluckily not provided with any colour that would match the petticoat; the necessity, however, was too urgent for delay, and a flounce of blue was added to the petticoat of red, giving bright and shining evidence before all men of the immaculate delicacy of the Cincinnati ladies.
I confess I was sometimes tempted to suspect that this ultra refinement was not very deep seated. 
and
Then. — “Well, I do begin to understand your broken English better than I did; but no wonder I could not make it out very well at first, as you come from London; for every body knows that London slang is the most dreadful in the world. How queer it is now, that all the people that live in London should put the h where it is not, and never will put it where it is.”
I was egotistical enough to ask the lady who said this, if she found that I did so.
“No; you do not,” was the reply; but she added, with a complacent smile, “it is easy enough to see the pains you take about it: I expect you have heard how we Americans laugh at you all for it, and so you are trying to learn our way of pronouncing.”
One lady asked me very gravely, if we had left home in order to get rid of the vermin with which the English of all ranks were afflicted? “I have heard from unquestionable authority,” she added, “that it is quite impossible to walk through the streets of London without having the head filled.”
I laughed a little, but spoke not a word. She coloured highly, and said, “There is nothing so easy as to laugh, but truth is truth, laughed at or not.”
I must preface the following anecdote by observing that in America nearly the whole of the insect tribe are classed under the general name of bug; the unfortunate cosmopolite known by that name amongst us is almost the only one not included in this term. A lady abruptly addressed me with, “Don’t you hate chintzes, Mrs. Trollope?”
“No indeed,” I replied, “I think them very pretty.”
“There now! if that is not being English! I reckon you call that loving your country; well, thank God! we Americans have something better to love our country for than that comes to; we are not obliged to say that we like nasty filthy chintzes to shew that we are good patriots.”
“Chintzes? what are chintzes?”
“Possible! do you pretend you don’t know what chintzes are? Why the nasty little stinking blood-suckers that all the beds in London are full of.”
I have since been informed that chinche is Spanish for bug; but at the time the word suggested only the material of a curtain.
Among other instances of that species of modesty so often seen in America, and so unknown to us, I frequently witnessed one, which, while it evinced the delicacy of the ladies, gave opportunity for many lively sallies from the gentlemen. I saw the same sort of thing repeated on different occasions at least a dozen times; e.g. a young lady is employed in making a shirt, (which it would be a symptom of absolute depravity to name), a gentleman enters, and presently begins the sprightly dialogue with “What are you making Miss Clarissa?”
“Only a frock for my sister’s doll, sir.”
“A frock? not possible. Don’t I see that it is not a frock? Come, Miss Clarissa, what is it?”
“Tis just an apron for one of our Negroes, Mr. Smith.”
“How can you. Miss Clarissa! why is not the two side joined together? I expect you were better tell me what it is.”
“My! why then Mr. Smith, it is just a pillow-case.”
“Now that passes. Miss Clarissa! ’Tis a pillow-case for a giant then. Shall I guess, Miss?”
“Quit, Mr. Smith; behave yourself, or I’ll certainly be affronted.”
Before the conversation arrives at this point, both gentleman and lady are in convulsions of laughter. I once saw a young lady so hard driven by a wit, that to prove she was making a bag, and nothing but a bag, she sewed up the ends before his eyes, shewing it triumphantly, and exclaiming, “there now! what can you say to that?”
One of my friends startled me one day by saying in an affectionate, but rather compassionate tone, “How will you bear to go back to England to live, and to bring up your children in a country where you know you are considered as no better than the dirt in the streets?”
I begged she would explain.
“Why, you know I would not affront you for any thing; but the fact is, we Americans know rather more than you think for, and certainly if I was in England I should not think of associating with anything but lords. I have always been among the first here, and if I travelled I should like to do the same. I don’t mean, I’m sure, that I would not come to see you, but you know you are not lords, and therefore I know very well how you are treated in your own country.”
I very rarely contradicted statements of this kind, as I found it less trouble, and infinitely more amusing, to let them pass; indeed, had I done otherwise, it would have been of little avail, as among the many conversations I held in America respecting my own country, I do not recollect a single instance in which it was not clear that I knew much less about it than those I conversed with.
On the subject of national glory, I presume I got more than my share of buffeting; for being a woman, there was no objection to their speaking out. One lady, indeed, who was a great patriot, evinced much delicacy towards me, for upon some one speaking of New Orleans, she interrupted them, saying, “I wish you would not talk of New Orleans;” and, turning to me, added with great gentleness, “It must be so painful to your feelings to hear that place mentioned!”

Ish again

A surprisingly large number of elevator boys and messengers were still at their jobs despite the draft. A writer told me how Victor Saville had reprimanded him for writing a scene in which a man runs in and takes his hat and coat from a bedroom chair. My dear fellow said Saville, surely you know that the only place a man leaves his coat on the back of a chair is in a whorehouse?

We discussed the almost pathological mania which nearly ever Hollywood producer has for 'virility'. Dore Schary told Samuels that a scene was 'faggoty' merely because it showed an older man talking to some youths of college age.



With John van Druten to have tea with the Beesleys- Dodie Smith the playwright and her husband Alec.  They live in Beverly Hills, on Palm Drive. Johnny has often talked to me about them-they used to live up in Carmel and have only moved down here lately: Dodie, it seems, is wildly neurotic about ants and bathroom taps. She lies awake fearing that the ants will be killed or the taps left running. Also, she and Alec have two extremely nervous dalmatian dogs, who run the house and are waited on hand and foot, Dodie reminds me a great deal of Forster. She has his nervous, touching eagerness to communicate with you, to be friendly, to understand what you mean. She isn’t tense, like Peggy. And if she’s: bit crazy, at least it’s about something demonstrably silly, which is a great advantage. Craziness is only sinister when it’s concerned with something apparently reasonable. Better ants than America, any day.