Donne and Berlin

 Before I recycle them both from NYR 

Donne devoted much thought to the puzzling dilemma of when exactly the soul entered the body and how. There were 2 dominant schools of thought on this issue, Targoff explains: one known as traducianism, which held that the soul derived from one’s parents, like any other organ, and was somehow imparted in the act of propagation; the Other, known as infusionism, which argued that God individually infused a soul into each fetus at some point before it was born. 

In a letter of 1607 to his close friend Sir Henry Goodyer, Donne minutely rehearsed the flaws inherent in both hypotheses: traducianism, he points out, makes it hard to see how the soul might have any “naturall immortality,” whereas the infusion theory leads one to question the beneficence of God, who is pictured as endlessly forcing, against their will, sinless souls into corrupt, fallen bodies—“the soul is forced to take this infection, and comes not into the body of her own disposition.” Traducianism leaves the supposedly divine soul dangerously undifferentiated from the “matter” of the rest of our flesh, while infusionism involves God in the dubious practice of contaminating pure souls by stuffing them into inherently sinful bodies. 

Still more dizzying are Donne’s attempts to envisage the task awaiting the Creator when the last trumpet eventually blows. For Donne fervently believed that he, and all the saved, would be reunited on resurrection day with their earthly bodies, down to the very last particle. His disquisitions on this theme have an especially personal charge:

Ego, I, I the same body, and the same soul, shall be recompact again, and ‘ be identically, numerically, individually the same man. The same integrity of body, and soul, and the same integrity in the organs of my body, and in the faculties of my soul too; | shall be all there, my body, and my soul, and all my body, and all my soul.

The ardent literalism of such a passage points up an anxiety about fragmentation and separation that runs like a leitmotif through Donne’s writings. How, -he wonders again and again, will -God reassemble all the different bits of ali the different people who have died over the centuries? 

Where be all the splinters of that Bone, which a shot hath shivered and scattered in the Ayre? Where be all the Atoms of that flesh, which a Corrasive hath eat away, or a Consumption hath breath’d, and exhal’d away from our arms, and other Limbs? In what wrinkle, in what furrow, in what bowel of the earth, ly all the graines of the ashes of a body burnt a thousand years since? In what corner, in what ventricle of the sea, lies all the jelly of a Body drowned in the generall flood? What cohaeretice, what sympathy, what dependence maintaines any relation, any correSpondence, between that arm that was lost in Europe, and that leg that was lost in Afrique or Asia, scores of yeers between? 

This is from a sermon that Donne preached, with ghoulish inappropriateness, at the wedding of the Earl of Bridgewater’s daughter in 1627. Our decaying corpses produce worms, he goes on, and these worms eat us and then die, dry out, molder into dust, and this dust is blown into a river, and that river water enters the sea, where tt “ebbs and flows in infinite revolutions, and still, still God knows in what Cabinet every seed-Pearle lies, in what part of the world every graine of every mans dust lies.” The great day come, nothing daunted by the dispersals Donne has itemized in such unnerving detail, 

God  beckens for the bodies of his Saints, and in the twinckling of an eye, that body that was scattered over all the elements, is sate down at the right hand of God, in a glorious resurrection. 

Attop his urn then, swathed in his winding sheet, Donne was rehearsing not his fast-approaching earthly de-. rise—he died some two weeks later‘but the moment of his resurrection, or more precisely, Targoff suggests, the moment just before his resurrection. For unlike the figures in all other resurrection monuments of the period, Donne has his eyes closed, as he does in the frontispiece to Deaths Duell, and as he did while posing for the “choice Painter”: the moment is at hand, but has not quite arrived, body and soul have been reunited, but he has not yet ascended.

The lovers of “The Relique,” we learn, have come up with this “device” as a way of enjoying a short reunion on resurrection day; the woman will have to visit his grave to retrieve the strands of her hair that he wears as a bracelet, so she can be physically “recompact” before her ascension into heaven. The poet’s hope is that the gravedigger who had been about to bury another corpse on top of his will take pity, and leave him to await the day of judgment undisturbed. As so often in Donne, it is the weird fusion of a complex, indeed outlandish train of reasoning with a jaggedly particular concrete image that delivers such an unexpected shock to the nervous system. Bony arm and stillshining hair are somehow both dead and alive at once. And it is the same distinctively Donnean mixture of the animate and the inanimate, of the physical and the conceptual, of the implausible and the rational, of self and other, of the intimate and the cosmic, that drives his most famous image of lovers united, in fantasy at least, in body and soul: 

On I Berlin

Many people also remember Berlin for his wit, charm, and acute insights into famous people. Sir Winston Churchill, dazzled by his effervescent writings from Washington—where he worked at the British embassy during the war—wanted to meet him but mistakenly invited Irving Berlin to lunch instead, leading to mutual puzzlement when the discussion came around to Berlin’s work. A new book of his letters has just been published, and they are so lively and occasionally pointed that they have generated a literary tempest in Britain.! 

There seems a deep human tendency to seek one true answer, to search for the ethical equivalent of a Unified Field Theory. For Kant, there is the categorical imperative; for the utilitarians there is happiness. “Monism, and faith in a single criterion, has always proved a deep source of satisfaction both to the intellect and to the emotions,” Berlin notes, but he warns against it. And then he concludes “Two Concepts” with one of the most elegant passages I know of in the literature of ideas: 

It may be that the ideal of freedom to choose ends without claiming eternal validity for them, and the pluralism of values connected with this, is only the late fruit of our declining capitalist civilization: an ideal which remote ages and primitive societies have not recognized, and one which posterity will regard with curiosity, even sympathy, but little comprehension. This may be so; but no skeptical conclusions seem to me to follow. Principles are not less sacred because their duration cannot be guaranteed. 

Indeed, the very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past. “To realize the relative validity of one’s convictions,” said an admirable writer of our time [Joseph Schumpeter], “and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian.” To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow it to determine one’s practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity. 

That passage always takes my breath away. Partly that’s because it recalls the judgment of William Butler Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” We all have seen examples of smart, knowledgeable people so crippled by nuance and tolerance that they make excuses for what is wrong and become ineffective as agents for change. Berlin argued that one must acknowledge the possibility that one is wrong, that one must recognize the complexities of a situation—without letting appreciation of nuance emasculate one’s capacity to make strong moral judgments. 

“I am not a relativist,” he noted in “The Power of Ideas.” “I do not say ‘I like my coffee with milk and you like it without; I am in favor of kindness and you prefer concentration camps.” Finding the boundary between what can be tolerated with gritted teeth and what is morally intolerable may not be easy, but that does not mean that such a boundary does not exist. 

Berlin summed up many of his ideas on pluralism of values in his 1990 hook The Crooked Timber of Humanity. The title comes from one of his favorite quotations, by Kant, that “out of the crooked timber ol humanity no straight thing was ever made.” ‘This belief that humans are by nature knotty and crossgrained added to his doubt about grand solutions and led him instead to favor more tentative, ad hoc approaches. In China, after the failed Utopianism of Chairman Mao, Deng Xiaoping used to describe his policy as mozhe shitou guo he, which roughly translates as fording a river by feeling for the stones with your feet. That is an image that Berlin would have approved of. 

Indeed, this approach is also in accord with much great literature and with what Berlin saw as the fox-like aspect of Tolstoy’s genius, even though Tolstoy himself, as Berlin pointed out, also believed “only in one vast, unitary whole.” 

No author who has ever lived has shown such powers of insight into the variety of life—the differences, the contrasts, the collisions of persons and things and situations, each apprehended in its absolute uniqueness and conveyed with a degree of directness and a precision of concrete imagery to be found in no other writer. No one has ever excelled Tolstoy in expressing the specific flavour, the exact quality of a feeling—the degree of its “oscillation,” the ebb and flow, the minute movements (which Turgenev mocked as a mere trick on his part)—the inner and outer texture and “feel” of a look, a thought, a pang of sentiment, no less than of a specific situation, of an entire period, of the lives of individuals, families, communities, entire nations. 

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Crossroads

  I suppose what I'm asking he said is whether goodness can ever truly be its own reward or whether consciously or not it always serves some personal instrumentality

 Reverend Walsh and the rabbi exchanged glances in which Perry detected pleasant surprise Adam may have a different answer that rabbi said but in the Jewish faith there is only one measure of righteousness do you celebrate God and obey his commandments that would suggest Perry said that goodness and God are essentially synonymous.

“That is the idea,” the rabbi said. “In biblical times, when God mani, fested Himself more directly, He could seem like quite the hard-ass~ striking people blind for trivial offenses, telling Abraham to kill his son But the essence of Jewish faith is that God does what He does, and We obey Him.” 

“So, in other words, it doesn’t matter what a righteous person's privat, thoughts are, so long as he obeys the letter of God’s commandments?” 

“And worships Him, yes. Of course, at the level of folk wisdom, , man can be righteous without being a mensch. I’m sure you see this, too, Adam—the pious man who makes everyone around him miserable. Thay might be more what Perry is asking about.” 

“My question,” Perry said, “is whether we can ever escape our selfishness. Even if you bring in God, and make Him the measure of goodness, the person who worships and obeys Him still wants something for himself. He enjoys the feeling of being righteous, or he wants eternal life, or what have you. If you’re smart enough to think about it, there's always some selfish angle.” 

The rabbi smiled. “There may be no way around it, when you put it like that. But we ‘bring in God, as you say—for the believer, of course, it's God who brought us in—to establish a moral order in which your question becomes irrelevant. When obedience is the defining principle, we don't need to police every little private thought we might have.” 

“I think there’s more to Perry's question, though,” Reverend Walsh said. “I think he’s pointing to sinfulness, which is our fundamental condition. In Christian faith, only one man has ever exemplified pertect goodness, and he was the Son of God. The rest of us can only hope tor glimmers of what it’s like to be truly good. When we perform an act of charity, or forgive an enemy, we feel the goodness of Christ in our hearts. We all have an innate capacity to recognize true goodness, but we're also full of sin, and those two parts of us are constantly at war.” 

“Exactly,” Perry said. “How do I know if I’m really being good or if J'm just pursuing a sinful advantage?” 

“The answer, I would say, is by listening to your heart. Only youl heart can tell you what your true motive is—whether it partakes 0 Christ. I think my position is similar to Rabbi Meyer's. The reason wé need faith—in our case, faith in the Lord Jesus Christ—is that it gives ys a rock-solid basis for evaluating our actions. Only through faith in the perfection of our Savior, only by comparing our actions to his example, only by experiencing his living presence in our hearts, can we hope to pe forgiven for the more selfish thoughts we might have. Only faith in Christ redeems us. Without him, we're lost in a sea of second-guessing 

our motives.” Perry was enjoying his ability to converse on the level of men three times his age, enjoying how well he’d calibrated his alcohol intake, enjoying the easy but unslurred flow of his words. But now Mrs. Haefle, gs if she'd smelled a pleasure in need of immediate stamping out, was approaching them. He repositioned himself, squaring his back to her. 

“I understand what youre saying,” he said to Reverend Walsh. “But what if a person isn’t able to have faith?” 

“Not everyone finds faith overnight. Faith is rarely easy. But if you've ever done a good thing, and felt a glow in your heart, then that’s a little message from God. He’s telling you that Christ is in you, and that you have the freedom and capacity to pursue a closer relationship with him. ‘Seek, and ye shall find.” 

“It's approximately the same if you're a Jew,” the rabbi said, “although we tend to emphasize that you're a Jew whether you like it or not. It’s more a matter of God tracking you down than of you finding God.” 

“I don’t think our positions are so dissimilar in that respect,” Reverend Walsh said stiffly. 

Perry tried to ignore the hovering of Mrs. Haefle at his shoulder. 

“But so,” he said, “what if I feel the kind of glow you're talking about, but it doesn’t lead me to God? What if it’s just one of the feelings that any sentient animal might have? If I never find God, or He never finds me, it sounds like you're saying that, basically, I’m damned.’ 

In principle, I suppose that is the doctrine,” Reverend Walsh said, “But you're very young, and life is long. There’s a near infinity of moments when you might receive God's grace. All it takes is one moment.” 

“In the meantime,” the rabbi said, “I think it’s enough to be a mensch,” 

“Perry?” Mrs. Haefle said, pushing her way in. “I want you to come meet Reverend Walsh’s son Ricky. He’s a junior at Lyons Township.” 

Yet more clippings

  Throwing out most of the articles on the Clinton impeachment, advances in AIDs therapy and racism. But I had to spare this from January 2000

 Bigotry as mental illness. Emily Eakin

In 1851, Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright, a Louisiana Surgeon and psychologist, filed a report in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal on diseases prevalent among the South’s black population. Among the various maladies Dr. Cartwright described was ‘‘drapetomania” or ‘“‘the disease causing slaves to run away.” 

Though a serious mental illness, drapetomania, wrote Dr. Cartwright, was happily quite treatable: ‘‘The cause, in the most of cases, that induces the negro to run away from service, is as much a disease of the mind as any other species of mental alienation, and much more curable. With the advantages of proper medical advice, strictly followed, this troublesome practice that many negroes have of running away can be almost entirely prevented.” 

A particularly absurd chapter in the annals of racist 19th-century science? Without question, but for Alvin Poussaint, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Cartwright’s hopelessly unscientific diagnosis is of more than just historical interest. It is a vivid illustration of how definitions of normal and abnormal behavior are shaped by the values of the society that makes them. ‘“‘The culture influences what you consider pathology,”’ says Dr. Poussaint. ‘‘Cartwright saw slavery as normative. So when slaves deviated from the norm, he called them mentally ill. The business of deciding what’s normal and what’s psychopathology gets influenced by culture and politics. It’s not hard science.” 

Dr. Poussaint says that when it comes to understanding racism, contemporary psychiatry is as in the dark about its own biases as the benighted Dr. Cartwright. Dr. Poussaint’s argument is not with racist psychiafrists but with the psychiatry of racism. Is racism a mental disorder? 

The debate is decades old, but was recently reignited when John Rocker, a pitcher for the Atlanta Braves, made bigoted statements about blacks, homosexuals and foreigners last month in the pages of Sports Illustrated. Last week Mr. Rocker was ordered by the commissioner of major league baseball to undergo a psychological evaluation. Since then, fans, therapists, pundits, spe .. figures, talk show hosts and columnists have all weighed in on the degree to which his comments and the league’s decision were based on science, stupidity, financial concerns and spin control. 

For most psychiatrists, the answer is clear: racism Is Unacceptable social behavtor, but not evidence of a mental disorder. There is no entry for racism in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, a compendium of mental illnesses known as D.S.M.-IV. 

“If psychiatry were to define racism as a mental disorder, you’d have to include the Nazis, and the Serbs who hate Muslims ~ there would be no end,’’ says Dr. Robert Spitzer, a psychiatrist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and a consultant on the D.S.M.-IV. ‘‘Almost everyone would be ill.”” 

Nevertheless, Dr. Spitzer concedes that prevalence alone does not negate a need for diagnosis. To meet the American Psychiatric Association’s criteria for a distinct mental disorder, he says, psychiatrists would have to show that a racist’s mental pro cesses interfered with normal! functioning. 

Dr. Poussaint says he can do that. Arguing that racism can sometimes — though not all the time — be a mental disorder, he says that racists frequently exhibit symptoms associated with major psychopathology, including paranoia (feeling threatened unrealistically by a particular group), projection (imbuing this group with traits that have negative associations). and fixed beliefs (categorical opinions like ‘‘all foreigners are dumb’’). The real reason the psychiatric association hasn’t made racism a mental health issue, he argues, is because “it hasn’t been a mental health issue for them.” To pathologize racism, he said, would require its members ‘‘to look at their friends, their relatives, and themselves” in an uncomfortable light. 

It’s true that the A.P.A. is predominantly white and male. Of its current 38,200 members, only 865, or 2.3 percent, are AfricanAmerican and 1,720, or 4.5 percent, are Hispanic. Some 12,000, or 31 percent, are women. And there is no doubt that psychiatry has been susceptible to some of the same biases harbored by the society at large, most notably toward women and homosexuals. Until well after World War II, instruction in now-discredited Freudian concepts like ‘‘penis envy” and “‘castrating female” was a routine part of psychiatric training. More egregious was the theory of the schizophrenic mother, whose bad parenting was supposedly to blame for her child's schizophrenia. Widely accepted well into the 1970’s, the theory has been supplanted by explanations focusing on brain chemistry and biology. 

Homosexuals fared little better. Until the early 1970's, the A.P.A. regarded homosexuality as a pathology. After heavy lobbying from gay rights activists, including a psychiatrist who was a member of the A.P.A and who spoke at the 1972 annual meeting, his face concealed by a mask to preserve his anonymity, the board of trustees voted to remove homosexuality from the D.S.M.-IV. The membership followed suit in 1974. (One bemused observer labeled it ‘the single greatest cure in the history of psychiatry.’’) Dr. Poussaint credits politics — the women’s movement and gay rights activists — not better science, for overturning faulty psychiatric doctrine. His own politicking to change the association’s opinion on racism has so far been less successful. In the mid-1960’s, Dr. Poussaint joined other civil rights workers in Mississippi, where he helped desegregate the hospitals. The bigotry he witnessed among the region’s white psychiatrists as well as a spate of racist killings convinced him to act. 

Along with seven other black psychiatrists, Dr. Poussaint appealed to the organization to add racism to the D.S.M.-IV. Their request was turned down. ‘‘Let’s say that group of black psychiatrists had been in control of establishing what the diagnoses should be in the D.S.M.,’”’ Dr. Poussaint says now. ‘‘In some way, racism would be in that book.”’ 

Perhaps. Today, many of Dr: Poussaint’s black colleagues say a D.S.M. label would actually be counterproductive. ‘‘Racism is so deeply ingrained in our culture that to try to identify individuals who are racist is in some ways to trivialize the depth and breadth of the problem,”’ says James Jones, a professor of social psychology at the University of Delaware and the director of the minority fellowships program at the American Psychological Association. Others believe that pathologizing racism would inadvertently give racists a legal defense for hate crimes. 

On the whole, psychiatrists were probably more disposed to treat racism as a mental illness 50 years ago than today. In the 1950’s, the profession even flirted with a quasi-medical definition of racism, although at the behest of the American Jewish Committee, not American blacks. In 1950, four scholars published an influential study titled ‘‘The Authoritarian Personality.’”’ Three of the authors were Jewish. Two of them, including the philosopher Theodor Adorno, were refugees from Nazi Germany. 

Their goal was to explain Hitler's genocidal anti-Semitism. Based on their evaluations of more than 2,000 American adults, the authors concluded that extreme racist tendencies were associated with an abnormal ‘‘personality syndrome’’ that they labeled authoritarian. Not a D.S.M.-1V diagnosis exactly, but almost. 

By the end of the decade, however, the theory underlying ‘‘The Authoritarian Personality” had been substantially revised. The book was found to have serious methodological problems, and efforts to test the hypothesis yielded mixed results. The Harvard psychologist Thomas Pettigrew struck a decisive blow. Mr, Pettigrew examined racist attitudes in eight American towns, four in thé North, four in the South. In the North ern towns, he found some correlation of racist attitudes with the syndrome described in ‘‘The Authoritarian Per. sonality.”’ In the South, however, he found that racism was so common it was merely a social norm. ‘You almost had to be mentally ill to be tolerant in the South,”’ says Mr. Pete tigrew, now a retired professor at thé University of California at Santa Cruz. ‘‘The authoritarian personality was a good explanation at the individual level but not at the societal level.” 

By the dawn of the civil rights era psychiatrists had largely abandoned racism to social psychologists. like Mr. Pettigrew who helped formulate today’s model. ‘“‘Racism has very much been depathologized,’’ says Janet Schofield, a social psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh whe studies racial attitudes among chil dren. ‘‘There’s been a major shift from being influenced by things like the authoritarian personality td thinking of stereotyping and prejyw dice as a consequence of norma psychological processes.”’ - 

Bombarded with information, she says, people tend to rely on general concepts. Just as Americans divide daybeds, settees and chaise longue§ into ‘‘chairs’’ and ‘‘sofas,”’ they divide people into categories based to a degree on stereotypes. “Racism,” says Ms. Schofield, ‘‘may be the result of inevitable processes.”’ > 

This is an explanation for racism not an excuse. But Dr. Poussaint’s final appeal is to common sense: ‘‘If you have a mental process that leads some people to commit genocide, how can you not think that’s a mental disorder?” 

More clippings

Marcel Proust, Raymond Chandler and Gore Vidal 

Larry McMurtry on Gore V.

In 1904, when Leonard Woolf steamed off eastward to become a cadet in the Ceylon Civil Service, he took with him seventy large and well-printed volumes of Voltaire, the edition of 1784, in Baskerville type. In Ceylon his duties were not light—from time to time it became necessary to hang a felon. Fortunately, in compensation, native women were available, and also, it appears, cheap. Very little more is heard from Leonard Woolf about Voltaire or the Baskerville type.


If I were planning to embark for a far place and stay for several years I think I’d take my forty-six volumes of the writings of Gore Vidal. (The forty-sixth, a collection of short fiction called Clouds and Eclipses, has just appeared.
) This count does not include the pseudonymous work, which would be for another essay. Given that print is smaller now, and margins meaner, I probably have about as much wordage of Gore Vidal’s as Leonard Woolf had of Voltaire’s; and the two men, Voltaire and Vidal, seem to me to have several things in common. Both were brilliant talkers; likewise brilliant satirists. Both initially needed money and worked very hard to get it. Both also needed courts: Where better to place their well-sharpened darts than in royal rumps?



Fortunately, they had courts: Voltaire the Versailles of Louis XV, as well as the Berlin of Frederick the Great and courts of lesser brilliance. Vidal had the Kennedy Camelot in Washington, D.C., as well as the courts of several emperors of the silver screen: Sam Spiegel, for example, and there is probably no better example.

Gore Vidal has the looks of a prince, the connections of a prince, more wit than any prince I can presently recall, and a prose style that should be the envy of the dwindling few who realize that prose style matters, both for the glory of it and also because if one makes one’s living mainly by the making of prose sentences, as Gore Vidal has, it’s nicer if the sentences are strong, supple, and pleasing. And his are.

&

Well, to each his own, of course, but what I enjoy most from this memorycrammed volume is the passages: where he allows us some glimpse of the literary scene:




From time to time, Saul Bellow would appear in Rome, usually alone. He had, by the. end, five wives, I think, and since they were all so alike I never put their names to memory. Each had a tendency to nag him for trivial J. ses; “I told you not to-forget the yogurt when you went into Red Hook,” our common village. At one point he shared a house with Ralph Ellison,.,, I don’t recall which of his wives was in residence while Ralph’s brilliant wife lived in New York City and visited ’ on weekends. Of contemporary novelists only Saul was, properly speaking, an intcllectual with a wide knowledge of philosophy and that small amount of history he felt connected to. It was always a relief to talk to him about many things as opposed to such deadend subjects as academic tenure, ; bestsellerdom, and, inevitably, adultery, a major theme in the postwar novel. I was fascinated by Saul’s Herzog, none of which, as far as I could tell, was invented, including the villainous Valentine based on one Jack Ludwig, a sort of primitive Iago never quite at home on the Hudson or in the groves of Academe where Mary McCarthy had also served time at Bard, giving rise to a brilliant satire of the world of Bard and what Terry Southern liked to call Quality Lit. The novel Pictures from an Institution was Randall Jarrell’s response to Mary whom he calls Gertrude. “Although,” he wrote, “Gertrude was not much of a novelist, she was a marvelous liar.” What feuds there were in those days when Partisan Review ruled the roost and Delmore Schwartz was the great poet of the second Jewish generation! But Delmore’s reign ended with the appearance of Robert Lowell who proved to be a far more brilliant careerist than the rest of the field despite occasional bouts of madness from which Delmore also suffered. In the end, Lowell was king of the castle while Delmore ended up as the protagonist in one of Saul’s most generous novels, Humboldt’s Gift. As I write these lines I find myself suddenly in the Gotham Book Mart, the bookstore that Frances Steloff had made a center of the “New York School” of the forties. Life magazine did a famous photograph of twenty or thirty writers honoring Edith and Osbert Sitwell on their first tour of America. Although the N.Y. School didn’t think much of the Sitwells, Auden and Spender were also on hand. Auden, perched atop a ladder, picked a book off the shelf nearest him and handed it to me: Problems of Men by John Dewey. Riotously funny.

Well, from this distance it may not seem riotously funny but it does offer a little insight on how the literary life was being lived on the east coast at that time.

Chandler 

...an octogenarian woman who was dying by “half inches” of fibrosis of the lungs. When finally Cissy did expire, in 1954, it was Chandler, gallant to the end, who apparently put down her age on her death certificate as sixty-eight (she was eighty-four), and, under “usual occupation,” wrote “At home.” True to his creed—“She was the beat of my heart for thirty years,” he would Say, and “She was the music heard faintly at the edge of sound”—he ail but collapsed in her absence. He wrote no more substantial books after her death—only the throwaway novel Playback—and he sank back into alcoholism and halfhearted attempts at suicide. When finally he did return to London, he fell clumsily and dutifully in love with almost every woman who tried to look after him, and got thrown out of the Connaught for drinking, and then out of the Ritz. 

.....

When Somerset Maugham met the aging couple (the author of Of Human pondage was, not surprisingly, a great admirer —and Chandler once wrote to his publisher that the one book he would like an inscribed first copy of was 

Maugham’s ground-breaking spy novel, Ashenden), he noted, as many did, that Cissy seemed a figure out of The Great Gatsby, with her bleached blond hair and “rather frivolous gown.” Chandler he took to be ten years younger than he really was, a “most distinguisned person, indeed, who could have been either an Oxford professor or a poet, certainly more British than American.” 

On Proust G Robb

Shortly after midnight on May 18, 1922, in a private dining room at the Hôtel Majestic in Paris, a glittering group of writers, artists, musicians, and patrons of the arts gathered to celebrate the first public performance of Stravinsky’s burlesque ballet Renard, choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska. The ballet had been performed that evening at the Paris Opéra, to a puzzled but polite audience, by the Ballets Russes of Serge Diaghilev, who also stage-managed the supper party. Nine years had passed since the riotous première of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps. To judge by the reviews of Renard quoted by Richard Davenport-Hines, audiences were now more likely to be intrigued than offended by Modernist experiments. According to the New York Herald’s critic, M. Stravinsky “is going through a process of evolution which, however, is not likely to be followed easily by the public.”

Even this muted acknowledgment of creative autonomy would have been unusual a decade before. Incomprehensibility was no longer universally deemed an artistic defect. Stravinsky and the other star guests at the Hôtel Majestic that evening in 1922—Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust—enjoyed the admiration of a small, passionate minority who read the latest volume of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu on the Métro and reveled in the obscurity that seemed to be the mark of genius. They attended Picasso’s exhibitions and Albert Einstein’s lectures on relativity (held in Paris in March and April that year), expecting to be pleasantly baffled.

No doubt this was evidence of intellectual curiosity, but there was also an element of snobbery. Like the luxurious Hôtel Majestic, Proust’s sentences and Einstein’s equations had the charm of exclusivity. Two of Proust’s contemporaries, quoted by Davenport-Hines, significantly likened Proust’s syntactical complexities to what were then exclusive, upper-class pursuits. Violet Hunt found that Proust “backed his sentences in and out of garages like a first-class motorist.” E.M. Forster sniffily compared the experience of negotiating Proust’s expansive, flowery phrases to a shooting expedition: “Three fields off, like a wounded partridge, crouches the principal verb, making one wonder, as one picks it up, poor little thing, whether after all it was worth such a tramp, so many guns, and such expensive dogs.”

The exclusive supper party at the Majestic was the idea of an English couple, Violet and Sydney Schiff, who paid for the whole event. While Violet amused herself with matchmaking, Sydney, whose novels in the Modernist style are now quite forgotten, seems to have spent much of his time ingratiating himself with prominent members of the avant-garde. He was particularly infatuated with Marcel Proust. “He tried to insinuate his way into every corner of Proust’s most intimate existence,” says Davenport-Hines. He pestered him with invitations and sent him strangely tactless and flirtatious letters. On one occasion, he insisted on knowing where Proust’s maid bought his writing paper: “I would love to have the same as yours in the same way that I would provide myself with the same scent as that of a woman whom I loved. Only in your case it’s a great deal more serious.” His passion had not, however, induced him to read the novel that was written on that paper. Ignoring Proust’s theory that writers and their work are entirely separate, Schiff told him that it was pointless to read a friend’s work when the friend could be visited in person, just as it was futile, according to him, to listen to a gramophone record of a singer who was still alive.






Although the party at the Majestic was held in honor of Diaghilev, the Schiffs’ main purpose was to introduce Marcel Proust to James Joyce, whose Ulysses had been published that February. The Schiffs behaved like zookeepers coaxing two rare and skittish beasts into the same cage and hoping that something magical would come of their brief union—a bon mot, a fascinating discussion, a lasting friendship. The scene was set for one of the great meetings of Modernist minds. The food had already been cleared away when a shabby, drunken man blundered in, sat down next to Sydney Schiff, and, according to the art critic Clive Bell, “remained speechless with his head in his hands and a glass of champagne in front of him.” Later, he was heard to snore. This was the author of Ulysses. Then, between two and three o’clock in the morning, a small, dapper figure wrapped in a fur coat slipped into the dining room. If Clive Bell’s description is accurate, he looked somewhat like a rat: “sleek and dank and plastered.” This was the author of À la recherche du temps perdu.

One of the merits of DavenportHines’s account is that it shows the extraordinary degree of deliberation that lay behind almost all of Proust’s activities. He may have suffered from exquisite sensitivity, as he often complained, but he took steps to ensure that that sensitivity never waned. A man who has his walls sound-proofed with cork is inevitably reminded of his sensitivity, and a man who subjects himself to a steady diet of caffeine, opiates, barbiturates, amyl nitrate, and pure adrenalin is unlikely to remain oblivious to the functioning of his brain. The quantity and variety of drugs that went into the writing of A la recherche du temps perdu are probably unparalleled in French literature. Proust urged his critics not to trace facile patterns of cause and effect when analyzing the process of literary creation, but it is probably reasonable to suppose that the vivid, hallucinatory memories that the narrator of his novel enjoys at in tervals of several years Were more com mon occurrences for the author, and that they were produced by subvtances less innocuous than a madeleine dipped ina cup of herbal tea. Davenport-Hines, who has written a fascinating and well-researched hrstory of narcotics,’ recognizes in Proust “the habitual drug user's cunning”: even during World War I, by manipulating a reluctant admirer, Proust managed to keep himself supplied with Swiss and German drugs. But he also recognizes Proust’s habitual intoxication as a means of sustaining “his explorations in the exciting serendipitous jungles of the unconscious.” Like his character Bergotte, Proust experimented with drugs out of professional curiosity rather than simple _ self-gratification. Bergotte’s sampling of narcotics is described in La Prisonniére (one of the posthumously published volumes of A la recherche du femps perdu) as a sexual adventure combined with a voyage of discovery: One absorbs the new product... with delicious anticipation of the unknown. The heart pounds as it does on one’s first meeting with a lover..., By what strange paths, up to what peaks and into what unexplored abysses will the omnipotent master lead us? What new se-. ries of sensations will we discover es 1S Ourne ? 

More clippings

  A page on the history of modern design featuring Alex steinweiss who in 1938 designed the 1st 78 RPM record album cover

 

On Jan Tschichold, the typographer for Penguin books from 1947 on

A controversial figure, known for his strong ideological and artistic stances—Tschichold was taken into protective custody ten days after the Nazis rose to power in 1933. His emphasis on new typography and sans-serif type was deemed a threat to the cultural heritage of Germany—that traditionally used Blackletter typography.

Donald Deskey package design.  The tide detergent Box debuted in 1950 or thereabouts.

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Clippings

Mostly from the NYR. Carried with me for 25 years. Now I can toss them. 

Reflections on Casanova and Dada.

Julian Barnes on Browns bio of Flaubert 

Flaubert loved fairs and sideshows and theatrical dazzle; he was later to write a féerie—a theatrical extravaganza dependent on special effects—in which (and this must have been one of the unlikeliest stage directions to come from the pen of a great novelist) a vast winged stockpot would rise into the air, hover over a town, and upend itself to disgorge carrots, leeks, and_ turnips, which would remain suspended in the air and turn into luminous constellations. Flaubert also loved freaks and sports of nature, both animal and human. “I attract mad people and animals,” he wrote. 

Bouvard et Pécuchet, by contrast, a work of the highest artistic purpose, is an encyclopedia of human endeavor with a directly opposite take—“the Baedeker of futility,” as Cyril Connolly called it. The novel is an exasperated assertion that human resourcefulness is usually directed at foolish projects, and human ingenuity an excuse for gross self-satisfaction. And imagine what it would have been like reading the Copie, which would have doubled the length of the novel we have at the moment? (We can certainly “read” the Copie today, since various versions of it have been published: but it is impossible to read it in the way Flaubert intended, as the lifeleavings of two dogged and defeated clerks. Instead, we read it as something assembled, or not quite assembled, by Flaubert.) The novel’s resistance to easy reading must have been as much part of its appeal to modernism as its curious flatness of tone and its radical innovation of form. At last—the novel was allowed to be difficult, allowed actively to deter certain readers, and to tack a vast appendage of data and pseudodata on the end of something that was half hyperrealism, half tract. Thus Pound thought Bouvard et Pécuchet inaugurated “a new form which had no precedents”; while, according to Cyril Connolly, it was Joyce’s favorite novel.

One of Bouvard and Pécuchet’s many failed projects is biography. Pécuchet Suggests they write about the Duc d’Angouléme, the eldest son of Charles X, and the last-ever dauphin of France. “But he was an idiot!” Bouvard objects. To which Pécuchet has the correct biographer’s cliché waiting in reply: “Secondary figures sometimes have an enormous influence, and this one might turn out to have been a key player.” 

On the death of a PR man James Moran

 One of Mr. Moran's cleverest schemes went nowhere in its own time. An avid kite flyer he hit upon the notion of using kites to fly midgets over Central Park. The police refused to grant him a permit and nipped the scheme in the bud. Mr. Moran was outraged. "it's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" he declared.

 From NYT 1996 when the last imperial eunuch died.

For centuries, the most secretive and grotesque corner of China’s extensive imperial court belonged to the fraternity of special guardians: the eunuchs, whose high voices and soft demeanors often cloaked the viciousness of their back-alley politicking and custody of the Forbidden City’s magnificent exotica. 

When the last emperor’s last eunuch died this week, he closed the final page on a bizarre chapter of Chinese imperial history, even though the last dynasty and its ancient system of governing were overthrown in 1911. 

The eunuch, Sun Yaoting, was just days shy of 94 years old when he died at his home in a Beijing temple on Tuesday evening. 

Like the thousands who preceded him through Chinese history, Mr. Sun was emasculated as a young boy, in a crude and risky operation that was arranged by his family, who were looking for a way out of poverty and into the private domain of China’s highest rulers. 

Aside from the emperor, eunuchs were generally the only men trusted to enter the inner courtyards of the palace, where the women of the imperial family and harem lived. Other men, including officials, military guards and even the emperor’s male relatives, were often required to leave the palace grounds at night. 

Using only hot chili sauce as a local anesthetic, the people who performed this fateful operation typically did so in one swoop, using a small, curved knife. In exchange for a lifetime of humiliation marked by incontinence and sexual frustration, a few  were able to achieve tremendous influence and wealth.

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From 1997 on Schizophrenia 

Scientists have linked a genetic defect to a brain abnormality that might help explain a hallmark of schizophrenia: the inability to filter out irrelevant sounds and other distractions. That lack of filtering can result in a flood of heightened sensation that makes it nearly impossible to concentrate, and may be part of the reason schizophrenics hear voices and hallucinate. 

The defect by itself does not cause schizophrenia, the researchers said but it could be one of the risk factors that combine to bring on the devastating mental illness. And because their research involved a brain structure that responds to nicotine, they also proposed a most unusual , theory: that nicotine might provide fleeting relief for some of the distressing symptoms schizophrenics feel, which might in turn explain their well-documented tendency to smoke heavily. 

The new findings, reported today in The Proceedings of the National: Academy of Sciences, are the first to link a genetic defect to a specific: brain abnormality and a symptom of : mental illness. 

On the Magi from 1995

The Magi, the only word of Persian origin in the original Greek Bible — were evidently priests of Zoroastrianism, which was the official religion of Persia. It is not surprising that they would turn up at the birth of Christ. According to various sources, Magi tended to turn up at portentous events in the ancient world. Pliny records a crowd of them standing amid the smoke and ruins after the great temple of Artemis at Ephesus burned to the ground (circa 356 B.C.). These Magi announced that the great temple’s destruction augured the (virgin) birth of Alexander the Great, who of course would go on to conquer the known world, be declared a god and die at the age of 33. 

Processions of Magi also appear at celebrations hosted by dubious characters like Nero. It iS not always clear whether they come to bless or blame, condone or condemn, and frequently they leave without explaining the purpose of their visit, Just as the prophet Zoroaster Came to be viewed in the West as the supreme Magus, master of occult arts, so Magi were both feared and regnected — and sometimes despised for charging exorbitant fees for their arcane skills.

 Accounts dating to the 2nd and 3rd centuries some of them by saints give the number of kings present at the nativity as high as 14 and as low as 2 . Their names range...

Michiko K mentions Harold Bloom’s digression in his book Omens of Millenium on how Freud "saw everything in terms of the past".

New books on Jos. Smith by McMurtry

Joseph Smith possessed two seer stories or peep stones (crystals?), Urim and Thummin; these he placed in his hat, which sat on the table in front of him. Peering through these peep stones (and the hat) he poured out rapid dictation, welding most of the languages of the ancient world into a quasibiblical English. By this odd method the Book of Mormon got written—not the least of its problems is that the locution “And it came to pass,” with variants, is used more than a thousand times, giving the whole text a stuttery feel.

On O'Neill from Fintan OToole

Eugene O’Neill’s artistic career moves backward. The normal trajectory of a writer is from the particular * to the general, from family to society, from the autobiographical to the im" personal, from more or less unmediC ated realism to experiments in form. > O'Neill travels in the opposite direc, tion. He starts with the human condi- tion and ends with his own. He starts { with the social and ends up with the \ familial. When he finds his voice as playwright it is self-consciously theatrical, highly wrought, expressed through masks and formal contrivances. But when he thinks of the work that will appear in the unknown future, after his death, he moves into a plain, almost primitive naturalism. After Days Without End in 1933, he gave up the use of masks and turned thereafter to something like realism. The suicides and murders, the incestuous and illicit desires of the early plays give way to the minutiae of daily life. This shift away from overt theatricality was not just an exercise in form. As he burrowed beneath the high emotional pitch of his father’s melodrama, he was honing in on the hard reality of his father’s life. This reverse order of O’Neill’s career mirrors his journey toward the past. As Zander Brietzke has put it, “He adopted a traditional form in his final plays but the action became entirely retrospective and time, in a novel way, became the definitive and tragic subject at last.”’ Con Melody in A Touch of the Poet says of himself that he has “no future but the past”

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This apeman shambles around the verbal landscape of O’Neill’s plays before The Hairy Ape, almost always associated with Irish characters. The Englishman Cocky in The Moon of the Caribbees tells Paddy, an Irish fellow sailor, “A ’airy ape, I calls yer.” Paddy reappears in The Hairy Ape and tells Yank that respectable people see in their likes “a queerer kind of baboon than ever you’d find in darkest Africy.” Mat Burke in Anna Christie, another version of Driscoll, appears half-naked “in the full power of his heavy-muscled, immense strength” and announces to Anna, “’Tis a clumsy ape I am.” Later, O’Neill describes Mat’s “impotent animal rage, baffled by its own abject misery.” The slur is also thrown back—Burke calls Chris “ye old ape” and “ye old babboon” and Driscoll in The Long Voyage Home calls Ivan a “Rooshan baboon” and tells the Englishman Cocky to “Shut up, ye ape...” —but this is merely the defensive repetition of an insult that has been so often received. 

The image of the apeman is drawn from Darwinism and from anthropology (the stokers at the start of The Hairy Ape should, according to the stage directions, “resemble those pictures in which the appearance of Neanderthal Man is guessed at”) but it is also situated in Irish-American history. When Mildred utters her fateful cry of “Take me away! Oh, the filthy beast!” her horror 1s in response not simply to the sight of Yank but to a speech of his to which she has just “listened, paralyzed with horror...by the terrific impact of this unknown, abysmal brutality, naked and shameless.” The rant that so terrifies her is not just any sailor’s foul tirade. It is a specific emanation from the sectarian rage of old Ireland, a Catholic’s abuse of a Protestant: 

Come down outa dere, yuh yellow, brass-buttoned Belfast scut, yuh! Come down and Pll knock yer brains out! Yuh lousy, stinkin’ yellow mut of a Catholic-moiderin’ bastard! Come down and IH! motder yuh!... VM crash yer skull in! Ill drive yer teet’ down yer troat! I'll slam yer nose trou de back of yer head!” 

This speech evokes the violence of the Orange riots in New York in the 1870s, when Catholics and Protestants fought each other on the streets of the city and, in response, the image of the simian Irishman came to the surface of American culture. In magazines like Harper's Weekly, Puck, and Judge, Thomas Nast and the other leading ‘New York cartoonists of the 1870s and 1880s did not, as L. Perry Curtis noted, “refrain from simianizing Irish-American Paddics & ho epitomized the tens of thousands of working-class immigrants and their children caught up in urban poverty and slum conditions after their flight from rural poverty and famine in Ireland.”

When Nast drew an Irish-American man, Curtis notes, “he invariably produced a lusus naturae or cross between a professional boxer and an orangutan.” 

Yet though it was directed primarily at poor immigrants, the simian analogy took on such a powerful life that it could attach itself even to the most sophisticated, outwardly civilized Irishman. In 1882, when Oscar Wilde visited the US, he was greeted by a cartoon in The Washington Post. Beneath the heading “Mr Wild of Borneo,” it placed a drawing of an apeman holding a coconut beside one of Wilde, in the same pose, holding a flower, asking the question “How far is it from this to this?”'* Artistic fame and material wealth of the kind that the O’Neills themselves achieved could not entirely ward off the threat of being configured as an ape. 

That threat was all the more keenly felt because it is intimately linked in the warped logic of so-called scientific racism to the notion that the Irish were not white, but black, and therefore barely above the apes on the supposed evolutionary scale. For all his courage in putting black characters on stage, O’Neill himself was not immune to the racist impulse. Lem in The Emperor Jones is “a heavy-set, ape-faced old savage of the extreme African type” and the flight back into the jungle of the title character in that play is enacted, in part, aS a regression to the primitive conditions from which he is assumed to have come, What makes it more complex, however, is that Jones occupies the place in O’Neill’s work that is usually held by an Irish character that O’Neill is, in his own sly, strange way, embracing the racist connection between Irish and African. 

In William Macready’s’ midnineteenth-century comedy The Irishman in London, popular on the New York stage, the climax came, as Dale T. Knobel puts it, when “Murtoch Delaney fell hopelessly in love with his perfect match, the humanoid ‘grinning Cuba.’ The African and the Irishman were made for one another.” The Emperor Jones plays a similar kind of game by making Jones, in effect, an Irishman in blackface. In the stripping away of his outward trappings of civilization and in his reversion to the wild, Jones is linked to Yank, and more specifically to O’Neill’s cruellest version of his own father, Con Melody in A Touch of the Poet. 

On Lovecraft by Luc Sante

It is clear from all available evidence that sexuality, procreation, and the human body itself were among the things that scared him the most. 

He was also frightened of invertebrates, marine life in general, temperatures below freezing, fat people, people of other races, race-mixing, slums, percussion instruments, caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, monumental architecture, non-Euclidean geometry, deserts, oceans, rats, dogs, the New England countryside, New York ary, fungus and molds, viscous sub-. stances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures, the color gray, plant life of diverse sorts, memory lapses, old books, heredity, mists, gases, whistling, whispering — the things that did not frighten him would probably make a shorter list. He evidently took pleasure in his fears, at least those on the creepy-crawly end of the spectrum, and although he really did suffer from his fear of cold, for example, this did not prevent him from exploiting that fear in a couple of stories, one of them (“At the Mountains of Madness”) his best. 

The things that did not scare him are generally absent from his work. Often his stories take place in a continuous landscape of fear, in which every detail contributes oppressively. In “The Lurking Fear,” for example, all of nature is malevolent: “I hated the mocking moon, the hypocritical plain, the festering mountain.... Everything seemed to me tainted with a loathsome contagion and inspired by a noxious alliance with distorted hidden poweis the hidden powers "

Lovecraft only barely managed to exist on the material plane himself, and it certainly was not his subject. His strengths, meanwhile, were unusual and idiosyncratic. ; He had a flair for names, for instance. The monikers he hangs on his other worldly manifestations—Nyarlathotep, ‘ Yog-Sothoth, Tsathoggua—are evocatively miscegenated constructions in which can be seen bits of ancient Egyptian, Arabic, Hebrew, Old Norse. . The terror of Cthulhu is most vivid on the purely linguistic level: “Ja! ShubNiggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!” The New England he fashions is so tangibly haunted in its nomenclature Arkham, the Miskatonic River, Devil’s Hop Yard, Nooseneck Hill—that he would have been wise to stop there and not attempt further description. He savors the dark texture of seventeenthcentury Puritan names: Obed, Peleg, Deliverance, Elkanah, Dutee. He frequently engaged his schoolboy correspondents to send him lists of regional names from their local phone books. Names, real and imagined, accomplish nearly everything his strangled fustian tries and fails to do: suggesting vast stretches of time, experience far outside the modern frame of reference, the subterranean course of genetic inheritance, the repression of dismal ancestral proclivities.

The House of Mirth

  The title is a phrase taken from Ecclesiastes: The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning while the heart of fools is in the House of Mirth

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Your street? Do you live here?” 

She glanced with interest along the mew brick and lime. stone house-fronts, fantastically varied in obedience to the American craving for novelty, but fresh and inviting with their awnings and flower-boxes. 

“Ah, yes—to be sure: The Benedick. What a nice-looking building! I don’t think I ve ever seen it before.” She looked across at the flat-house with its marble porch and pseudoGeorgian facade. “Which are your windows? Those with the awnings down?”

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Of the ladies, this left onlv Mrs. Dorset unaccounted for, and Mrs. Dorset never came down till luncheon: her doctors, she averred, had forbidden her to expose herself to the crude air of the morning. 

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 The young lady who thus formulated her admiration of her brilliant friend did not in her own person suggest such happy possibilities. Miss Gertrude Farish, in fact, typified the mediocre and the ineffectual. If there were compensating qualities in her wide frank glance and the freshness of her smile, these were qualities which only the sympathetic observer would perceive before noticing that her eyes were of a workaday grey and her lips without haunting curves. Lily’s own view of her wavered between pity for her limitations and ympatience at her cheerful acceptance of them. To Miss Bart, as to her mother, acquiescence in dinginess was evidence of stupidity; and there were moments when, in the consciousness of her own power to look and to be so exactly what the occasion required, she almost felt that other girls were plain and inferior from choice. Certainly no one need have confessed such acquiescence in her lot as was revealed in the “useful” colour of Gerty Farish’s gown and the subdued lines of her hat: it is almost as stupid to let your clothes betray that vou know you are ugly as to have them proclaim that you think you are beautiful. 

Of course, being fatally poor and dingy, it was wise of Gerty to have taken up philanthropy and symphony concerts; but there was something irritating in her assumption that existence vielded no higher pleasures, and that one might get as much interest and excitement out of life in a cramped flat as in the splendours of the Van Osburgh establishment. Today, however, her chirping enthusiasms did not irritate Lily. They seemed only to throw her own exceptionalness into becoming telicf, and give a soaring vastness to her scheme of life. 

“Do fet us go and take a peep at the presents before every One else leaves the dining-room!” suggested Miss Farish, linking her arm in her friend’s. It was characteristic of her to take 4 sentimental and unenvious interest in all the details of a Wedding: she was the kind of person who always kept her handkerchief out during the service, and departed clutching a box of wedding-cake. 

“Is n’t everything beautifully done?” she pursued, as they fntered the distant drawing-room assigned to the display of Miss Van Osburgh’s bridal spoils. “I always say no one does things better than cousin Grace! Did you ever taste anything More delicious than that mousse of lobster with champagne sauce? I made up my mind weeks ago that I would n’t miss this wedding. 

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 “We had an awful row this morning. You know, of course, that the Duchess chucked her at dinner last night, and she thinks it was my fault—my want of management. The worst of it is, the message—just a mere word by telephone—came so late that the dinner had to be paid for; and Bécassin had rung it up—it had been so drummed into him that the Duchess was coming!” Mrs. Fisher indulged in a faint laugh at the remembrance. “Paying for what she does n’t get rankles so dreadfully with Louisa: I can’t make her see that it’s one of the preliminary steps to getting what you have n’t paid for—and as I was the nearest thing to smash, she smashed me to atoms, poor dear!” 

Lily murmured her commiseration. Impulses of sympathy came naturally to her, and it was instinctive to proffer her help to Mrs. Fisher. 

“If there ’s anything I can do—if it’s only a question of meeting the Duchess! I heard her say she thought Mr. Bry amusing ——” 

But Mrs. Fisher interposed with a decisive gesture. “My dear, I have my pride: the pride of my trade. I could n’t manage the Duchess, and I can’t palm off your arts on Louisa Bry as mine. I ve taken the final step: I go to Paris tonight with the Sam Gormers. They ’re still in the elementary stage; an Italian Prince is a great deal more than a Prince to them, and they ‘re always on the brink of taking a courier for one. To save them from that is my present mission.” She laughed again at the picture. “But before I go I want to make my last will and testament—TI want to leave you the Brys.” 

“Me?” Miss Bart joined in her amusement. “It ’s charming of vou to remember me, dear; but really——” 

“You ’re already so well provided for?” Mrs. Fisher flashed a sharp glance at her. “Are you, though, Lily—to the point of rejecting my offer?” 

Miss Bart coloured slowly. “What I really meant was, that the Brys would n’t in the least care to be so disposed of.” 

Mrs. Fisher continued to probe her embarrassment with an unflinching eye. “What you really meant was that you ’ve ‘ubbed the Brys horribly; and you know that they know it"

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...was brought home to Lily with increasing clearness during the early weeks of the winter. Hitherto, she had kept up a semblance of movement outside the main flow of the social current; but with the return to town, and the concentrating of scattered activities, the mere fact of not slipping back naturally into her old habits of life marked her as being unmistakably excluded from them. If one were not a part of the gason’s fixed routine, one swung unsphered in a void of socal non-existence. Lily, for all her dissatisfied dreaming, had never really conceived the possibility of revolving about a different centre: it was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region. Her sense of irony never quite deserted her, and she could still note, with self-directed derision, the abnormal value suddenlv acquired by the most tiresome and insignificant details of her former life. Its very drudgeries had a charm now that she was involuntarily released from them: card-leaving, note-writing, enforced civilities to the dull and elderly, and the smiling endurance of tedious dinners—how pleasantly such obligations would have filled the emptiness of her days! She did indeed leave cards in plenty; she kept herself, with a smiling and vallant persistence, well in the eye of her world; nor did she uffer any of those gross rebuffs which sometimes produce a wholesome reaction of contempt in their victim. Society did hot turn away from her, it simply drifted by, preoccupied and inattentive, lecting her feel, to the full measure of her humie pride, how completely she had been the creature of its favour. 

Sparta

 From Persian Fire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

&

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

87 

Legs

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

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

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

Low Man on a Totem Pole

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gertrude and Claudius

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

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

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

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

&

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

&

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

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

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

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

U & I

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

&

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

&

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

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