Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

Ingeborg Middleton, coming downstairs to greet the village children,
said to herself, ' Oh God, let the carol-singing be a success and let the
family arrive in time to hear it and I shan’t mind if on Christmas Day
there are rows and difficulties. I honestly shan’t expect everything to go
right on Christmas Day, if I have what I want now,’ she added, as
though God might not believe her willingness to have only part of
her own way. She feared, perhaps, that God would know her own
temperament as well as she did. A more inner voice added, ‘Let
Robin and Johnnie, but especially johnnie, think that only I could
‘have madeisuch a little Christmas occasion.’ She was careful, how-
ever, not to listen too carefully to this second prayer lest its demand
for filial adoration might be too outrageous and so annoy God that
He would refuse her all her wishes. V
If, at fifty-nine, she had no strong personal experience of God, she
[still believed that if she accepted any disappointment she should be
recompensed for her self-denial. She had brought every power of her
personality to convince other people of this in childhood; and she still
did so. On. occasion, of course, she overreached herself, but on the
whole it had worked very well, except perhaps with her husband. In
return, as she often reflected, she gave people everything she pos-
sessed - warmth, liveliness, love, natural gaiety.

and
 Ingeborg put down her knife and fork and smiled atjohn and Kay.
Papa doesn’t change,’ she said, winking at them in special intimacy.
Even now he believes that he is tired when he is just hungry. Give
 father a large piece of goose,’ she said to Donald. ‘There,
erald, no one can have indigestion from my roast goose.’
 But if Gerald was to be forcibly fed, What would be the reaction of
 Marie Helene, about to receive the Sacrament? In her present mood,
Ingeborg would have no mercy towards hunger-strikers. Donald was
the first to think of this and was delighted, when his mother-in-law
ordered food to be kept back for the late-comers, to be able to say,
Not for Marie Helene surely. I imagine she’ll be going to Midnight
Mass.
 It was soon apparent that Mrs Middleton was going to insist on the
aine scene that she played each Christmas. ‘But, my dear Donald,
liy should you think she wishes to go to church with an empty
tummy?’ she laughed.
Donald was left by the others to argue the dogma of the Real Pre-
ence with her this year. After all, he had raised the subject.
'Very well,’ Ingeborg said at last. ‘If my daughter—in-law is this
 of cannibal.
and
"...impressed or impressing, everybody was superbly flat or dead; even when they had drunk a great deal of champagne and had begun to cut the air with that peculiar harsh sound of cultural voices raised in conversation competition, they never betrayed themselves into saying anything that could possibly mar the tedious triviality with which they clothed serious subjects or the deadly heaviness with which they discussed the trivial.
and
 As Mrs. Middleton's mood of distrust melted back into her usual flow of whimsy, her children's rally to placate her dissolved and their natural antipathies came to the surface again.
and

"Do you?" Clarissa asked. "In a sense of course, you're right". She was unwilling to entirely relinquish her improvised opinion.

The notorious Girodias

And so it went on. ‘It was great fun,’ said Girodias. If the
Atlantic Library and the Traveller’s Companion series
brought him notoriety as well as money, he welcomed it. He
was wholeheartedly committed to his task, and took a special
pleasure in outraging the authoritarian powers of his father’s
homeland. ‘The Anglo-Saxon world was being attacked,
invaded, infiltrated, outflanked, and conquered by this erotic
armada,’ he wrote. ‘The Dickensian schoolmasters of England
were convulsed with helpless rage, the judges’ hair was stand-
ing on end beneath their wigs . . .’
Dealers and private customers would cross the Channel
from England to Paris just to stock up on Olympia titles, stuff-
ing as many books into their pockets and suitcases as they
dared, risking the ignominy of being unmasked and arrested
as pornographers at British customs.
Girodias’s pioneering mission spawned mercenary initia-
tives, much to his annoyance. The Olympia titles began to
fetch high black-market prices, pirate editions of some of them
appeared, and there was even a circulating library operated by
a Soho bookseller, from which the customer could borrow The
Chariot of Flesh or The 120 Days of Sodom,'leaving behind a
fee and a large deposit, the latter to be reclaimed upon return
of the book. There must have been many a frustrated cus-
tomer who, on hearing that a new consignment of the olive-
green paperbacks had arrived in London, skulked down to
Soho and paid his money, only to find that he had been lent
Molloy. Or, perhaps worse, that he had entrusted his deposit
to the bookseller for the privilege of procuring page after page
of euphuistic description of encounters between French trans-
vestites and homosexuals in Our Lady of the Flowers.

He published Lolita which caused a world-wide sensation:

Brian Boyd: _ Twenty-six-year-old Dmitri Nabokov had let a
self-styled publicity agent persuade him to stage a fake cast-
ing contest for the part of Lolita. . . . For two days his Milan
apartment was invaded by ‘decidedly postpubescent aspir-
ing nymphets, some with provincial mothers in tow’. When
his father saw a magazine photograph of the ‘finalists’ sur-
rounding Dmitri on his over-sized, satin-covered bed, he
cabled his son at once to stop the ‘Lolita publicity’ imme-
diately.
Brian Boyd: The process of vulgarization would ultimately
lead to such horrors as the life-size Lolita doll with ‘French
and Greek’ apertures.
Groucho Marx: I’ve put off reading Lolita for six years, until
she’s eighteen.
Brian Boyd: As a Lolita movie looked more and more possi-
ble, he warned Minton that he ‘would veto the use of a real
child. Let them find a dwarfess.’
Girodias: I decided to open a futuristic, multi-levelled night-
club in Paris. For five years I certainly had a lot of fun with
that new toy, but it lost me much more money than it ever
made Q . . and as a side effect forced the Olympia Press into
bankruptcy as well.

The Cat's Table

By Michael Ondaatje

A story set to charm about a young boy's voyage on a great ocean liner (A castle carrying with it two chlorinated pools over the ocean) alone to meet his mother. Spare and enjoyable with memorable flashes of images and then sickeningly rich with symbols and portentous actions. The abandoned daughter who chances upon a roving gymnastics troupe and learns enough to vault over to her handcuffed father with the key in her mouth which she passes to him as they plunge off the ship. The governess whose employer seduces her then causes her to stab herself with manicure scissors. Too thick with intent and contrived set pieces- wobbling between Garcia Marquez and Jeanette Winterson, and ending up so overwrought, it was nauseating.

I went outside but something else held me, so I decided to
walk through the gallery again, this time glad there was hardly
anyone else there. And when I understood what it was that drew
me, I circled the gallery once more, to make sure. I read some-
where that when people first celebrated the distinct point of view
of Lartigue’s early photographs, it took a while before someone
pointed out that it was the natural angle of a small boy with a
camera looking up at the adults he was photographing. What I
was seeing now in the gallery was the exact angle of vision Cas-
sius and I had that night, from the railing, looking down at the
men working in those pods of light. An angle of forty—f1ve degrees,
something like that. I was back on the railing, watching, which
was where Cassius was emotionally, when he was doing these
paintings. Good-bye, we were saying to all of them. Good-bye.

@@@@@

At the Cat's Table they were discussing Italian art. l\/liss Las-
queti, who had lived in ltaly for a few years, was speaking. “The
thing with l\/ladonnas is, they have that look on their faces—
because they know He is going to die when young . . . in spite of
all the hovering angels surrounding the child with the little spurt
of bloodlike flame coming from their heads. Somewhere in the
l\/ladonna’s given wisdom, she can see the finished map, the end
of His life. No matter that the local girl the artist is using cannot
attempt that knowledgeable look. Perhaps even the artist cannot
portray it. So it is only we, the spectators, who can read that face
as someone who knows the future. For what will become of her
is provided by history. The recognition of that woe comes
the viewer.”

@@@@@

In the great centres of power, you see, competition is based not
so much on winning but on stopping your enemy from achiev-
ing what he or she really wants.

More Paris, InterZone

By james Campbell

Beckett turned away from most art in disgust, weary of puny exploits
of doing a little better the same old thing. Preferring what then?
 Replied Beckett: ‘The
expression that there is nothing to‘ express, nothing with
which to express, nothing from which to express.’ Beckett’s
method was to write and write and write at a subject, until the
subject disappeared and only the writing remained.
He had come to Paris as a teacher from Dublin in 1928. He
met Joyce and helped him with some mundane tasks while
Joyce concentrated on Finnegans Wake. Beckett had played a
part in the Resistance during the War, although he was reluc-
tant to reveal what his part was — a restraint which harmonizes
his modesty and integrity. His feet felt secure on French soil,
as did, increasingly, his pen in the rarefied'French language.
In English, he was already a considerable stylist, but he felt
distracted by the ornamentation English proffered. Writing in
French enabled him to rewrite himself, plainer than before. In
French, he said, ‘It is easier to write without style.’
Beckett had a coterie reputation in 1950, made up in part of
his having been ]oyce’s friend, and of his skill as a translator
of difficult texts from both French into English and English
into French. He had even rendered himself into French: his
translation of Murphy, which had been published in London
in 1938, came out in Paris in 1947 — and went again, unno-
ticed. Since the mid-1940s, he had been writing directly in his
adopted language, funnelling his ‘nothing to express . . .
together with the obligation to express’ into a series of novels.
The first discussion of Beckett’s work in a Paris-based
English-language journal came in Points, at the end of 1951, in
the course of a review of Molloy, which had lately appeared in
its original French edition. As was the case with many things
which happened in the pages of Points, the decision to review
Molloy came about as a result of serendipity. Beckett’s novel
was published by Les Editions de Minuit, which happened to
share an address — 7 rue Bernard Palissy — with Points. A
review copy found its way upstairs to the magazine’s disor-
derly office, and an article was put into preparation.
The review was the work of one Iared Shlaes, making his
first appearance in print. It displays a certain prescience in
introducing Beckett to the anglophone readership in Paris,
despite a tendency to be flippant:
Beckett is a saint, but he is not yet a very great saint. He may come
to be that if enough people begin to write and talk about his books
and if one day they begin to publish annotated and critical edi-
tions and argue about the grammar school he went to and the
_ number of cups of coffee he drank a day and the long and bitter
fights in the literary journals and back rooms of bookshops about
what Molloy really means . . . .
Beckett has everything it takes to make a ‘saint’, Shlaes con-
cluded, confusingly, ‘except publicity’. -
It’s unlikely that Beckett ever read this, or any other of the
reviews of his first work. He disdained critical comment. He
would have abhorred the description of himself as a saint, and
publicity was the last thing he was seeking. But in his own reluc-
tant fashion, he did seek publication, in English as well as in
French. That was on its way, in the form of Trocchi and Merlin.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

The reception here was often a mixture of
curiosity and friendliness. Jazz was still popular, and the
American Negro, to French eyes, was jazz. ‘]ouez-vous la
trompette?’ was a typical way of starting a conversation.
Charming, but rather limiting. Baldwin joked that if he ever
came to write an account of his Paris years, he would call it
‘Non, nous ne jouons pas la trompette’.
In the autumn of 1952, the weekly Paris-Match, which
had begun publication three years earlier, made a polite list
of the main grievances behind French anti-Americanism.
The article made the following points:
Seven years after the end of the War, French patience with
the American ‘occupation’ was exhausted, and most people
thought that the Marshall Plan had reached a limit.
American anti-Communism, at first laughable, had now
passed beyond a joke. The Americans, having helped to liber-
ate France from the Nazis, seemed likely to career her into
another war, with the Russians. Furthermore, the ordinary
French citizen foresaw this war taking place not over America
or Russia, but over France.
As a result of McCarthyism, American immigration restric-
tions were severe, even paranoid. The case had recently been
publicized of a French student, who, wishing to study for a
year in America, had had to submit to embarrassing medical
examinations and personal (i.e. political) interviews. By com-
parison, Americans entering France floated through French
Customs with ease. America was too quick to criticize French
treatment of its colonial subjects, while slow to do anything to
improve the lot of its own, imported ‘colonial’ population, the
blacks. In the South, official segregation was still in place, and
the vote continued to be withheld from Negroes.
The Mdtch article concluded: ‘No country was worse pre-
pared than America for the worldwide role that she suddenly
had to play, and on so immense a scale.’ A
Such a striking of attitudes cut deep into American amour-
propre. But, as the article suggested, the expanding black
colony need not feel that the hostile slogan ‘US Go Home’,
which decorated walls all over Paris, was aimed at them.
It was estimated that there were about S00 American
Negroes in France, and that about half of them were living in
the capital. In spite of Richard Wright’s findings that
American firms employed blacks only reluctantly, or not at all,
they included doctors, nurses, scientists, military personnel,
journalists, actors, dancers, writers, and of course trompet-
tistes. Passion for le jazz hot modulated, in keeping with devel-
opments in New York, to a fad for ‘jazz cool’, whose principal
exponent was Miles Davis. New clubs opened up: the Club
St-Germain, where Boris Vian was in charge of proceedings;
the Ringside, near the Champs-Elysées, and the slightly larg-
er Mars Club, off the same avenue, where Annie Ross sang,
sometimes accompanied on drums by her lover, Kenny
Clarke; Chez Inez was named after the black American singer
Inez Cavanaugh, who — like Kenny Clarke - had come to Paris
for a season and decided to stay; and there was the Club
Galerie in Montparnasse, run by the black painter Herbert
Gentry, where his wife, Holly Johnson, “sang, and Art
Simmons, habitué of the Café de Tournon, played piano.
Paris became a haven for musicians banned from working in
their own country for want of a ‘cabaret card’, often as a result
of trouble with the police.
In spite of all this, though, France did not develop a jazz
scene of its own. There was no ‘Paris school’ of trumpeters,
saxophonists, pianists. Growth in the music was taking place
somewhere else - in New York — and those in Europe couldn’t
hear the changes. To be far away from New York might reduce
the amount of tension in one’s daily life, but what if the music
was also drained as a result? The dynamic of jazz, after all,
derived from its oblique and ironic relation to the dominant
culture. Jazz was born by being conceived in opposition to a
threat, had grown up by forging a vocabulary through which
the threat could be confronted and transformed. That was the

Paris, Interzone

Terrifically enjoyable book on the black American expatriates and the pornographers of Paris.

Wright had widened and was more or less unbridgeable.
Hoetis’s congenial notion of having ‘the old black writer and
the young black writer’ at the same table, thrashing out ideas
over café au lait and funnelling the results into Zero, was mis-
judged. The novel which Wright had looked through in 1944,
was nearing completion, and Baldwin was launching it with
high hopes indeed, He knew he was, as he said, ‘smart’. He
even knew he was smarter than Wright.
"All literature is protest" Wright had snapped at him at teh Brasserie Lipp,
a copy of Zero lying between them like disputed territory.
 All literature may be protest, replied the
pupil who has learned so much he can outsmart the teacher,
‘but not all protest is literature’.
###
The gloom which had depressed Paris year upon year lifted on
Easter Sunday, 1949. Not just the gloom of guilt and austerity,
though that was ending too, but the actual gloom of having no
lighting. The lights of Paris, for almost ten years ‘dimmed
with humiliation’, as one journalist put it, were turned back
on. The City of Light was relit.
Great monuments, reduced to vague, ghostly shapes in the
blackout, had their pre-war floodlighting restored. The trans-
formation of the Arc de Triomphe and Notre Dame Cathedral
was not only dramatic but revitalizing. Elliot Paul, an editor of
the original transition, described how Parisians bathed in the
free-shining light, now that regulations curtailing the supply
of electricity had been suspended. There was ‘light in their
houses, homes, hotels and little shops every day . . . permis-
sion was given for all and sundry to turn on electric advertis-
ing signs and illuminate window displays’. The relighting of
Paris was celebrated in a night of festivity. ‘
A The Marshall Plan to help in the reconstruction of Europe
was under way, and France was its main beneficiary. The
Minister of Economic Affairs spoke on the wireless of
France’s gratitude (he meant the French government’s‘ grati-
tude) to the United States: ‘All this merchandise has been
given to us by the American government,‘ he said. ‘A great
lifting of the heart goes up from the French towards the gen-
erous American people.’ For the moment, the painted graffiti
on the walls of Paris saying ‘US Go Home’, the workers’
demands for ‘trade not aid’, the complaints in the fashionable
cafés about ‘loud Americans’ with too much money, the offi-
cial crackdown on the sale of Coca-Cola — for the moment,
those feelings were forgotten, as austerity ended in the flick of
a switch.
The city, which had been running smoothly, if slowly, on
bicycles,-was now fuming with automobiles, hurtling through
the narrow streets of St-Germain, causing an ear-splitting
racket and giving rise to the neologism embouteillage: ‘traffic
jam’. The food markets were also full and tempting again, and
the invidious ‘black traffic’, no longer needed, ran into the
ground. e
‘The hucksters shout their prices and the shop apprentices
have become barkers,’ wrote Janet Flanner in the New Yorker:
standing at the shop doors and bawling about the luscious wares
inside. In the charcuteries there is a mosaic of every known dainty ~
— turkey paté, truffledpigs’ trotters, chicken in half mourning,
whole roast goose livers, boar’s snout jelly, and fresh truffles in
their fragile bronze husks. In the poultry shops, there are
Strasbourg geese and Muscovy ducks. In the entrail shops, there
are indescribable inner items and_ blood sausages. At the fish
stalls, there are costly deep-sea oysters and enormous hairy sea
spiders, to be buried in mayonnaise. The street barrows are filled
with bearded leeks and potential salads. Food is still what
Parisians buy if they can.
An American journalist working for one of the international
news services calculated that during the first half of 1949, he
and his colleagues filed only 60 per cent as many stories as
they had during the previous six months. The news was that
France was __only three-fifths as newsworthy as it had been,
which was good news.

The alphabet etc.

From Rosamund Bernier's "Some Of My Lives"
With his usual itch to change everything he touched, Picasso had
inscribed it all over the cover, making my name part of a face. He
had repeated the inscription inside, possibly from affection for me,
but more probably because he couldn’t bear to leave a blank page
alone. He misspelled my name twice, but that did not surprise me;
He had a very freewheeling eighteenth-century way with spelling. In
fact, he once told me he had never learned the alphabet and had no
intention of ever doing so. “Why should one letter follow another in
a predestined order? Ridiculous!”

and on Max Ernst:

 I met Max Ernst in the early 1940s in New York. He had
managed to get out of German-occupied France and had arrived in
the United States thanks to the support of Peggy Guggenheim. She
prized him as a catch on several levels: he was a leading figure of
the Surrealist movement, and he was outstandingly handsome. He
looked like a cross between a noble bird of prey and a fallen archan-
gel. He was known for his beauty of person, his laserlike intelli-
gence, his idiosyncratic command of at least three languages, and
his gift for the lapidary phrase that stops the stuffed shirt dead in his
tracks.
Although he had lived in France since 1922, German born, he
had never bothered to take out French nationality. As he described
it, he arrived in the United States by plane: “Splendid view of the
Statue of Liberty. I was met by immigrations authorities, who sent
me straight to Ellis Island. Splendid view of the Statue of Liberty.”
The only way out of this impasse was to give in to Peggy Guggen-
heim’s insistence that he marry her, giving him American citizen-
ship. I don’t think either of them expected a smooth crossing. AS
Peggy put it to me, “When Max paints a picture, I like him. When
Max sells a picture, I love him.”
We happened to be fellow houseguests for a weekend in thfi
Hamptons. A group of us had been swimming. The beach was a
short walk to the house, and there were bicycles. Max and I rode
back to the house on bicycles, and so we arrived a few minutes b6-
fore the others. When Peggy arrived, she made a terrible scene, aC"
cusing Max of dalliance with me. Max commented drily, “Not even
I can make love on a bicycle.” Later, Peggy told me about this her-
self and said, “Wasn’t I foolish?” which was endearing.

and on Louise Bourgeois

This is where she used to meticulously iron The New York Times
every morning and flame a spoon and slide it directly into the jam
pot for her breakfast. “No toast,” she explained, “but no germs.”
She told me that all her, subjects for at least the last sixty years
found their inspiration in her childhood. It has never lost its magic,
its mystery for her. “I need my memories, they are my documenta-
tion,” she said.
As we all know from the movies and the great French novelists,
French family life is often full of secrets not quite covered up and
hatreds that leave their mark for a lifetime.
Louise grew up in a large house at Choisy-le—Roi outside of Paris.
It was very large because some thirty people lived and worked there,
besides the family. The family business was repairing tapestries. Liv-
ing with tapestries was a form of education for her, she said. “Through
tapestries I learned what I did not learn in school: stories from
the Old Testament, and the New Testament, antiquity, history,
mythology.
“The characters from the Old Testament were crafty and blood-
thirsty. People just loved that. The New Testament was full of
pieties. As subject for tapestries they had no appeal. Scandalous
subjects were successful. Pious ones bored people.”
There were elements in the Choisy house that made her feel un—
wanted, betrayed. One was the fact that her father already had two
daughters and had no wish for another. Louise’s tactful mother tried
to mollify him: “Can’t you see she looks exactly like you, 6014/H’I’M3
nleuxgouttes nfmu [like two drops of water].>”
i The betrayal that was to haunt her for many years was the fact
that in 1922 a young Englishwoman called Sadie came to live in the
house. Ostensibly, she was there to teach Louise English, but very
soon it was clear that she was sleeping with her father and had been
engaged for that purpose.
Sadie lived in the house ten years. Louise said, “The motivation
for my work is a negative reaction against her. It is the anger that
makes me work. I thought she was going to like me; instead, she
betrayed me. I was betrayed not only by my father but by her too.”

She said that it was because of her father that she was always sur-
rounded by sculptures. “He was really crazy about sculpture; he col-
lected lead sculptures. Our garden at Saint- Cloud was full of them.
“He had his big Panhard, all his other cars. He was always on the
road, looking for sculptures. He would put them on the rumble seat.
“He never knew that I made sculptures; he would never have
tolerated it. He detested artists. They were always out to steal other
people’s wives, he said. He was projecting of course. As he saw it,
every artist was out to swipe his daughter.
“So he put his sculptures all over the garden. Apollo was a favor-
ite subject. My mother would not have allowed them in the house.
We had great respect for my mother’s wishes—no cluttering allowed.
“No cluttering became the number one characteristic of the
house. We had no animals indoors, no dogs, no cats, for that reason.
Tapestry doesn’t clutter. You fold it up, and it doesn’t take any room.
“My father collected chair frames, but they did not clutter the
house, because they were hanging from the ceiling, in the attic.
“Hanging is safe, and it allows for a lot of movement. So the
floor belonged to my mother and her tapestries.”
Louise said she still had this very much in her mind’s eye. Sus-
pended ladders and suspended plants turn up in her work of the
1940s. Many years later she used rubber in the ambiguous image of
two elongated legs, which hang from the ceiling.
In the 1960s Louise started working with marble and going to
the Henraux quarry at Forte dei Marmi, just below Carrara in Italy.
She said it was not a great change for her to work in marble.
She told me that if you are making an outdoor sculpture, it is
important to have the right kind of marble and to know what not to
do with it. If you leave a small chink, and if rain falls into it and it
freezes, the marble will crack.
“That is why there is so much marble in Italy, where there is sup-
posedly no freezing point. In the North you have to use granite or
bronze. That's why there is Rodin in France and archaic sculpture in Greece.

Barry again

National Review rode an impressive postwar tide of conservative intellec-
tual work that, wrote an observer, “would tax the dialectical agility of a thirty-
third degree Trotskyite.” They believed that the bulwark of any civilization
was not industry or riches or men under arms, but ideas. The West was imper-
iled because it was infected by error: by materialism, in the philosophical sense
of the word, believing the World to be wholly composed of ordinary physical
matter and of valuing physical well-being as an ultimate end. And material-
ism’s handmaids: humanism and egalitarianism, which assumed man had
unlimited power to order his own world; pragmatism, which said whatever
worked was right; and utopianism, the doomed attempt to establish the king-
dom of heaven on earth (Buckley liked to call that “immanentizing the escha-
ton”). The offenders were both Democrats (Kennedy: “Our problems are
man-made; they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants”)
and Republicans (Rockefeller: The ideal politician “goes in and says, ‘I want to
find out what the facts are.’ Then he adapts his program and his approach to the
realities”). It was the political water America was swimming in—a swamp,
Buckley’s acolytes thought.
I. If this was abstruse stuff, that only added to the thrill of belonging to the
club. Young National Review readers were discovering one another. The spring
that Conscience of a Conservative was published, the Midwest Federation of
College Republicans meeting in Des Moines, overwhelmed with a record 435
delegates, resolved by voice vote to endorse Barry Goldwater for vice presi-
dent. A group of them who had met through the loyalty oath fight fonned
Youth for Goldwater for Vice President, headed by Caddy and a University of
Indiana student who was active in ISI, Robert Croll. Within a few weeks Youth
for Goldwater had sixty-four campus chapters in thirty-two states, a headquar-
ters in Washington, and a mentor: an edgy right-wing publicist named Marvin
Liebman, for whom Caddy was working that summer, and who was going to
the Republican National Convention to plump for anold China Lobby stalwart,
Republican Walter Judd of Minnesota, for vice president.
Restless, lonely teenagers discovering their first intellectual and political
high; craggy old Midwestern foundry men counting their inflation-addled dol-
lars and chasing the unions from their gates; the newly wealthy in a changing
South—and the gruff and glamorous cowboy aristocrat whom they all pictured
when they closed their eyes and imagined their political beau ideal: quietly,
lllfit below the notice of a media and political establishment for whom such a
¢0nfluence was unimaginable, something was happening—-“like the meeting of
I116 Blue and White Nile,” as William Rusher, publisher of National Review,
Would describe it much later, although at the time he chose a different
metaphor: “I think we had better pull in our belts and buckle down to a long
period of real impotence. Hell, the catacombs were good enough for the Chris-
tians!”
The tributaries would converge in Chicago that summer at Richard
Nixon’s Republican National Convention. Croll began organizing National
Youth for Goldwater for Vice President full-time out of a Chicago attic with
funds raised via a National Review ad and a dollar-a-head membership fee.
Manion’s allies in the South Caro‘lina Republican Party at their state conven-
tion on March 26, clutching advance copies of Conscience of a Conservative,
listened to Goldwater criticize Nixon’s “complacent attitude” toward the South
and, in a move coordinated by Manion that caught Goldwater quite by surprise,
pledged their thirteen convention delegates to him. Manion immediately began
mobilizing for a repeat performance in Mississippi in April. He opened an
Americans for Goldwater headquarters in Chicago on July 7; a full-page ad ran
in the Tribune on July I3. People were coming to the dean and asking how to
organize their own clubs; soon there were hundreds of Americans for Gold-
water chapters.
And, almost incidentally, there was a flesh-and-blood man named Barry
Goldwater, the one who gave twenty-three speeches in thirteen states in the
first two months of I960 on behalf of the Republican Party. Three months after
its debut, the Los Angeles Times column with his name at its head had drawn a
thousand fan letters, three of four expressing a desire to vote for Goldwater for
President; in April the column went into syndication. The book with his name
on the cover would soon be selling in a torrent. A bit shaken by it all, the man
behind the byline, a loyal party soldier, met with the vice president to assure
him how startled and dismayed he had been when the crowd in South Carolina
got so out of hand. But he added that if Nixon ignored the amazing swell in
conservative sentiment in the country, he might be sony. Privately he resolved
to force Nixon’s hand. “In the last six weeks Dick has shown a decided ten-
dency to drift far to the left,” he wrote a friend, Phoenix lawyer William Rehn-
quist, in a letter instructing the Arizona delegation to vote for Nixon at the
convention, “and this has caused such constemation among the party workers
across the country that we must employ means to get him back on track.”
He concluded: “I would rather see the Republicans lose in I960 fighting on
principle, than I would care to see us win standing on grounds we know are
wrong and on which we will ultimately destroy ourselves.”
There was ample provocation that spring and summer for Goldwater’s Cold
War hard line to resonate: It seemed as if Communism was on the march. In
April, student riots in South Korea brought down the government of ally Syng-
T E MEETING or Tl-[E BLUE AND WniTi: NILE 77
ll
man Rhee; in Turkey another friendly govemment held on by a thread after
- ‘ May. Soviet foreign minister Anastas Mikoyan visited Cuba, to an
Hots 1:11 warm reception as part of Khrushchev’s campaign for Third World
untlllsxrieg to rise up against “capitalist imperialism”; then Castro nationalized
fife oil refineries. Eisenhower, in the Far East on a final goodwill tour, was kept
from Japan for fear for his safety after students took to the streets in outrage at
mutual security pact Japan’s government had signed with the United States;
fl Af ‘ca independence celebrations in the new nation of the Democratic
glepulmcof the Congo were followed by the secession of the mineral-rich
province of Katanga, then an invitation by prime minister Patrice Lumumba to
the Soviet Union to intervene, then by Westerners fleeing by the thousands one
step ahead of——a new household phrase-—“anti-American mobs.” Were the
swarms in Turkey and Korea and Japan and the Congo, rising so close in suc-
cession, directed by the Communists? What, for that matter, about the student
mobs from Berkeley who rioted that May in protest against hearings held in
San Francisco by the House Committee on Un-American Activities?
But it wasn’t Goldwater who seized the moment. It was Nelson Rocke-
feller.
J Rockefeller was a Cold War hawk almost to the degree (if not exactly the
kind) of Goldwater. An early proposal he put forward as governor was to
assess each New York family the over $300 it would require to build a bomb
shelter for every household in the state. The argument was the same as in Con-
science: whichever side Was able to render nuclear war less unthinkable had the
advantage. “Are We going to arrive at a point some day,” he asked at El Clvll
defense seminar in March, “when the president will say: ‘Well, how Can W6
afford to stand for freedom? With the people exposed, can we run that risk?i ”
He introduced a new phrase to the American lexicon that summer: “missile
gap”—the assertion that the Soviets had hundreds more nuclear projectiles
than did the United States. He based the charge on one of his. Rockefeller
Brothers Special Studies Fund reports. Then he amplified it to revive his presi-
dential bid. '
In fact, data from U2 spy planes had demonstrated that the USSR’s arsenal
of bombers and missiles that could reach the United States was nearly nonex-
istent. But that intelligence was top secret, unknown even to a New York gov-
ernor—a rule of espionage being that you can’t let your enemy know whatyou
know about them. (“I can’t understand the United States being quite as panicky
as they are,” Eisenhower once said, forgetting that he was one of only a.hand-
ful of people who knew that the empire that threatened to bury us could infact
do no such thing.) Republican leaders scurried to shut Rockefeller up. Nixon
leaked that the govemor was first choice for vice president; Kentucky senator
Thruston Morton, chair of the Republican National Convention, offered him
the keynote speech in Chicago. Rocky rebuffed them. “I hate the thought of
Dick Nixon being president of the United States,” he told confidants.
Events tumed up the temperature. Another East-West summit was coming
up, and it was so eagerly anticipated that it became a pop culture phenomenon;
when Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, Joey Bishop, and Sammy
Davis Jr; began perfomiing together at the Sands in Las Vegas, the act Was
billed as “The Summit.” But then a U2 plane was felled by a Soviet S-75 mis-
sile I,3oo miles deep in Russian territory, and the Soviets canceled the honey-
i"noon——vindicating Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative argument that
Cold War thaws were reliable predictors of imminent Communist outrages. In
Vegas, “The Summit” was rechristened the Rat Pack. And in Albany, Rocke~
feller launched himself back into the nomination race with a grandiloquent
statement on June 8. “The failure of the Paris Conference,” Rockefeller
declared, “places in serious question some of the illusions, as well as the pro—
cedures, that led to the summit itself.” He was, he said, “deeply concerned that
those now assuming control of the Republican Party have failed to make clear
where this party is heading and where it proposes to lead the nation,” a
dilemma that was the “gravest in its history.” The paity’s “destiny,” he con-
cluded, “is to save the nation by saving itself.” For his program, Rockefeller
Brothers Special Studies Fund reports were knocked into a series of campaign
position papers——-a nine-movement symphony of Immanentized Eschatons,
intemationalist idealism, and managerial expertise, delivered in installments
across the country in any forum where his handlers could book him and in any
publication that would grant him space.
Rockefeller hoped to use the convention platform as a wedge to pry open a
nominating process every other Republican presumed was sealed. A platform
draft is composed by a functionary; a resolutions committee (colloquially
called a platform committee) of a hundred or so delegates, usually pledged to
one candidate or another, hears dreary testimony on proposed amendments;
committee members “debate,” then vote the amendments up or down mostly
by instruction of the campaign to which they owe their loyalty—making the
contest interesting only to the tea-leaf readers seeking to gauge the relative
strengths of the contenders. (The Democrats in I944 manfully pledged “such
additional humanitarian, labor, social and farm legislation as time and experi-
ence may require”; Woodrow Wilson’s platform in I912 opposed second
terms.) But Rockefeller rather fantastically assumed that if he could just
demonstrate intellectually how inadequate the platform draft was to modern
needs, concemed Republicans couldn’t but flock to his banner.

Bogey

From Tough Without a Gun by Stephan Kanfer:

I face—toward the audience or toward the other actors?” That was al:
Brady needed. In his view there were but two kinds of actors, profes-
sionals and bums, and he wanted everyone who worked for him to be
a pro. During rehearsals he sat in the balcony, battering the sprig,
shouting “What?” every time the actor failed to enunciate clearly. It
was here that the distinctive Bogart delivery was born——the sudden
rictus, the lips pulled back after a statement, the unique sibilance that
sometimes made him sound tentative and boyish, and at other times
gave him a vaguely malevolent air.
Swzfly was roundly panned. The bad news was conveyed to
Humphrey by his mother the next day when she entered his room with
the morning papers. Sitting on the edge of the bed, Maud briskly
quoted the critics. Heywood Broun of the New York World had found
the play “cheap and implausible,” and Alan Dale of the New York
American said that Humphrey Bogart gave a “rather trenchant exam—
ple of bad acting.” Most of the notices depressed Humphrey, but one
angered him. That column he preserved, as if to toughen his resolve.
For the rest of Humphrey’s life, Alexander Woollcott’s words occu-
pied a central place in his scrapbook, turning yellow with the years. It
read, “The young man who embodies the aforesaid sprig is what is
usually and mercifully described as inadequate.”
Humphrey interpreted Woollcott’s words as a challenge, and urged
Brady to give him bigger and better roles. Instead, the boss kept cast-
ing him in play after play as a juvenile wearing striped jacket and
white ducks, vigorously entering with a racket or a cocktail in hand.
Some journalists claimed to have heard Bogart make the hallowed
inquiry, “Tennis anyoneP,” among them Hearst columnist Louella
Parsons and New York Post critic Richard Watts Ir. But no such docu-
mentary evidence exists. Humphrey did swear to Nathaniel Benchley
:hat he had said “lt’s forty—love outside—-anyone care to watch?” and
zlaimed to have spoken every stage cliché except “Give me the ball,
:oach, and I’ll get you a touchdown.”
Actually, the role of a sprig was a technical necessity. In the era of
large casts, playwrights often needed to clear the stage to get to the next
scene. Hence the device of the young man who invites everyone out-
side to watch a game or have some tea. Quite a few of these male
ingenues were gay and made no attempt to hide their inclinations.

After George Raft turned down the role of Sam Spade ("You promised me that you would not require me to perform in anything but important pictures"):
In Hollywood it was not enough to succeed- your colleague must have failed. So it was not without Schadenfreude that Humphrey read his own good notices and then heard about George Raft's grumbling reference to Falcon,"There but for the grace of me, go I."

Michael Curtiz on the set of casablanca:
(“Who cares about char-
acter?” Curtiz once inquired. “I make it go so fast nobody notices.”)
And his mangling of the English language amused all but his worst
foes. In his study, Casablanca: As Time Goes By, Frank Miller tells the
story of Curtiz demanding “a poodle, a black poodle” for one scene.
The prop man feared to question his boss, and set about finding the
proper canine. Within an hour he presented a panting animal to Cur-
tiz. “Very nice,” he said, “but I want a poodle.” When the “poor tech-
nician tried to explain that’s what he was holding, Curtiz exploded. ‘I
wanted a poodle in the street! A poodle of water! Not a goddamn
dog!’ ” .

Some of his best lines from that time were unscripted and unfilmed.
Mayo had no problems with the Sahara personnel, but thought
Humphrey might be seeing someone when he wasn’t on the set. She
decided to hire a private eye. That worthy shadowed her husband for
several days—apparently with the ineptitude of a Wilmer Cook.
Humphrey spotted the shamus early on, guessed that he worked for
the biggest detective agency in Los Angeles, called the office, and left a
message: “Hello, this is Humphrey Bogart. You got a man on my tail.
Would you check with him and find out where I am?”

The Power and the Glory

Finished the Graham Greene novel of the Despair and the Sanctimony, The Power and The Glory written with Benzadrine after mornings composing the far more enjoyable Confidential Agent. Mercifully, I was able to alternate with Breakfast At Tiffanys.
Benzadrine was the stimulant of choice for artists and scientists, as The Atlantic detailed here:

The poet W. H. Auden considered it a sign of weak character that he had to rely on artificial stimulants to maintain his workday discipline, but rely on them he did. For many years he started his days with bennies and ended them with alcohol and barbiturates: he called this "the chemical life." He strongly disapproved of hallucinogenic drugs, of which he wrote, "One is inclined to suspect that habitual taking of this type of drug, even if it has no harmful physical effects, would lead to a selfish indifference towards the common world we live in and a withering of love and affection for others." But bennies did not alter one's personality or distort one's perceptions of reality; they were, in that sense at least, morally acceptable.

Of course, bennies had a tendency to ruin the body of the person using them. Auden's death from heart failure at age 66 was, to a considerable extent, a result of his decades of practicing, with the connivance of his doctors, "the chemical life." The great polymath Norbert Wiener, in his autobiographical I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy, wrote ruefully, "I tried to work against time. More than once I computed all through the night to meet some imaginary deadline which wasn't there. I was not fully aware of the dangers of Benzedrine, and I am afraid I used it to the serious detriment of my health."

Benzedrine wasn't made a prescription drug until 1959, but by then the fad was already in decline, partly because people could see the damage that bennies were inflicting on their users, but perhaps even more because artistic and intellectual styles were changing. The high-speed, high-energy way was being replaced by something slower, cooler. Kerouac's novel On the Road and Miles Davis's recordThe Birth of the Cool came out in the same year, but the former was a relic of the recent past, the latter the wave of the future.
Norman Mailer's long essay "The White Negro", another landmark work of 1957, documented a white culture drawn increasingly to, and shaped increasingly by, African-American art. Bennies were not, as Mailer saw things, compatible with that shift. Intellectual culture was moving from the way of the (very white) "psychopath" to the (would-be black) "hipster." The signature drug of the psychopath was Benzedrine, which Mailer himself had used throughout the Forties and much of the Fifties. But, he later commented, as he was drawn to the world of Cool, to the black world, to the hipster world, he shifted to the drug appropriate to that style, that speed of life: marijuana.

From a theological blog:

On this outwardly godless road, the reader finds everything pointing to God.We see this pointing in the continual references to the image of God. As the priest has compassion on his yellow-fanged Judas figure, the nameless half-caste, carrying him on his mule, he ponders on these warped figures, these dejected children of Adam: “Something resembling God dangled from the gibbet or went into odd attitudes before the bullets in a prison yard or contorted itself like a camel in the attitude of sex…and God’s image shook now, up and down on the mule’s back, with the yellow teeth stick out over the lower lip.” This is Greene’s sacramental anthropology, an image fractured, the disordered ‘attitudes’ of man from their created telos. Despite his own pariahhood, though, he is still an evocation of his great Lover. In an Augustinian sense, the very acts of sinful nature are not foreign posturings of ruthless godlessness, but instead a good desire disordered. This is how the priest describes to the pious woman the pleasure of sexual passion taking place in the prison cell next to them: “Well, we are not saints, you and I. Suffering to us is just ugly. Stench and crowding and pain. That is beautiful in that corner—to them.”

which made me look up telos so....

A telos (from the Greek τέλος for "end", "purpose", or "goal") is an end or purpose, in a fairly constrained sense used by philosophers such as Aristotle. It is the root of the term "teleology," roughly the study of purposiveness, or the study of objects with a view to their aims, purposes, or intentions. Teleology figures centrally in Aristotle's biology and in his theory of causes. It is central to nearly all philosophical theories of history, such as those of Hegel and Marx. One running debate in contemporary philosophy of biology is to what extent teleological language (as in the "purposes" of various organs or life-processes) is unavoidable, or is simply a shorthand for ideas that can ultimately be spelled out nonteleologically. Philosophy of action also makes essential use of teleological vocabulary: onDavidson's account, an action is just something an agent does with an intention--that is, looking forward to some end to be achieved by the action.

In contrast to telos, techne is the rational method involved in producing an object or accomplishing a goal or objective; however, the two methods are not mutually exclusive in principle.

On the Vatican's opinion of TP&TG:

n common with many Catholics," Graham Greene wrote in a letter to The Times of London in June of 1954, "I have little regard for the Index in the rare cases in which it deals with imaginative writing ... So far as imaginative literature is concerned (according to rumor both Tolstoy and Lewis Carroll have been condemned) most Catholic laymen follow their own consciences." Greene was ostensibly responding to a letter in The Times that had drawn a comparison between the Roman Index and prosecutions for obscenity in British courts. What readers of the newspaper could not have known was that Greene himself had just been sternly reproached by Church authorities. Greene alluded to this episode in later writings. The records of the deliberations at the Vatican over his novel The Power and the Glory, first published in 1940, have recently come to light. They provide a rare glimpse into the exercise of what was once a great power, and one of particular interest in the history of twentieth-century literature—the power of the Church to ban the books it deemed dangerous or offensive.

The Vatican had sought for centuries to wield influence over various kinds of writing; in 1571, at the height of the Counter-Reformation, it established the Congregation of the Index, a department responsible for censoring and even banning books (when it had some power over the author or the publication process), or at the very least for telling Catholics which books they simply shouldn't read. The Congregation of the Index was abolished in 1917, but censorship continued to be exercised by another department, the Holy Office, and an official Index of Forbidden Books was maintained until 1966. 

How did the Holy Office operate during a tense and troubled period in recent history such as the Cold War? What was its policy toward Catholic authors? To what extent was it informed about new developments in scholarship and literature? What kinds of internal disagreements did the department experience? Such questions are prompted by the cases of a number of twentieth-century writers, some of whom were converts to the Church of Rome. Greene was one of these. In the introduction to a later edition of The Power and the Glory he wrote,

The Archbishop of Westminster read me a letter from the Holy Office condemning my novel because it was "paradoxical" and "dealt with extraordinary circumstances." The price of liberty, even within a Church, is eternal vigilance, but I wonder whether any of the totalitarian states ... would have treated me as gently when I refused to revise the book on the casuistical ground that the copyright was in the hands of my publishers. There was no public condemnation, and the affair was allowed to drop into that peaceful oblivion which the Church wisely reserves for unimportant issues.

In July of 1965 Greene had an audience with Pope Paul VI. He told the Pope that The Power and the Glory had been condemned by the Holy Office. According to Greene, the Pope asked, "Who condemned it?" Greene replied, "Cardinal Pizzardo." Paul VI repeated the name with a wry smile and added, "Mr. Greene, some parts of your book are certain to offend some Catholics, but you should pay no attention to that."

These sentences have intrigued me ever since I first read them, some years ago, in Greene's Ways of Escape. The records of censorial investigations undertaken after the death of Leo XIII, in 1903, are in the archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and are not available to be consulted by outside scholars. In February of last year I sought and obtained an audience with the Congregation's prefect, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. To my request that an exception be made to the rules, the reply was one word, uttered without hesitation: "Ja."

he Power and the Glory is set in the southern-Mexican state of Tabasco, which is governed by a ruthless persecutor of Catholics, Tomas Garrido Canabal. It is based on a journey to Mexico that Greene made in 1938. An atheist and a puritan, Canabal detested organized religion and alcohol. The central figure in Greene's book is a whiskey priest, who is put to death by Canabal's police at the end of the novel. The priest, whose prime quality is self-knowledge, is his own strongest critic. Although he anticipates his execution, and knows that he is walking into a trap, he chooses to perform what he sees as his duty and attempts to give the last sacraments to a fatally wounded criminal. The priest puts the chance of saving another man's soul ahead of his own survival. Is this martyrdom? Or is it retribution for moral lapses? The moral and theological criteria of The Power and the Glory are ambiguous—so ambiguous that self-appointed censors have sniffed an odor of heresy in the book. 

Denunciation or inquiry was the usual means by which news reached Rome of a book that deserved investigation. In the case of The Power and the Glory, the news traveled circuitously. Its point of departure was Einsiedeln, in Switzerland. There, in 1949, the Catholic publisher Benziger was planning to bring out a German translation of the novel. Alarmed by the "polemic" that he claimed Greene's book was raising in France, a Swiss priest asked the Holy Office for its opinion. Pressure slowly mounted over the years from other parts of Europe, and finally, in April of 1953, Rome looked into the matter closely. Greene's case was examined (as were similar cases involving Evelyn Waugh and Bruce Marshall). The Holy Office appointed two consultants to consider The Power and the Glory. The first of these wrote in Italian, and he displayed his bewilderment at differences of culture and outlook. Greene's mentality was "odd and paradoxical, a true product of the disturbed, confused, and audacious character of today's civilization," he wrote. "For me, the book is sad." Sadness and sorrow, rather than anger and indignation, colored his tone. The work's title implies an emphasis on God's power and glory, but as the consultant read the book itself, he found only a barren landscape of despair. "Immoral" or married priests; the ambiguity with which the central figure refers to God and the doctrines of the faith; the conviction or the virtue attributed to Protestants and atheists—all this made it impossible for Greene's first reader in the Holy Office to see why the book was regarded as excellent literature. "Troubling the spirit of calm that should prevail in a Christian," The Power and the Glory, in his judgment, ought never to have been written. Since the novel had been written, and published, and widely disseminated, the consultant hoped that its fame was already in decline. A condemnation would do no good, because the author, with his "paradoxical modes of thought," would probably not accept it, and the repercussions of an intellectual condemnation could be dangerous, given the author's fame. Better, the consultant recommended, to have Graham Greene "admonished" by his bishop and "exhorted to write other books in a different tone, attempting to correct the defects of this one." 

The opinion of the second consultant, delivered in Latin, supported that of the first. Both readers acknowledged that Greene was not only the leading Catholic novelist in England but also a convert from Protestantism. Despite his many failings, the comfort he offered to enemies of the Church, and his "abnormal propensity toward ... situations in which one kind of sexual immorality or another plays a role," it would not do to put him on the Index, because his book was a best seller. The second censor therefore concurred that Greene should be told that "literature of this kind does harm to the cause of the true religion," and that "in the future he should behave more cautiously when he writes." 

The mindset of Rome's censors was not malevolent. It is difficult, however, to resist the conclusion that it was dim. Defensive about their authority (which they desired to assert even as they doubted its efficacy), and incapable of grasping the conceptual problems posed by Greene's writing, they could be checked in their course only by intervention from above. That intervention came on October 1, 1953, in the form of a confidential letter written by a highly placed colleague in the Vatican's Secretariat of State. It was a protest addressed to Giuseppe Cardinal Pizzardo, the secretary of the Holy Office.

Years ago, I had occasion to read [The Power and the Glory] which a priest had pointed out to me as a highly significant work of contemporary romantic literature. It is indeed a book of singular literary value.

I see that it is judged a sad book. I have no objection to make to the just observations in the [censure of] this work. But it seems to me that, in such a judgment, there is lacking a sense of the work's substantial merits. They lie, fundamentally, in its high quality of vindication, by revealing a heroic fidelity to his own ministry within the innermost soul of a priest who is in many respects reprehensible; and the reader is led to esteem the priesthood even if exercised by abject representatives ... I venture this opinion because I incline to think that it would be well to have the book examined by another consultant (Monsignor De Luca?) before passing a negative judgment on it, not least because author and book are known worldwide ...

Tact, sensitivity, insight—this letter reflects a different order of intelligence from that displayed in the censures on which it comments. Its author was the Vatican's pro-Secretary of State for ordinary affairs. His name was Giovanni Battista Montini, and in 1963 he would become Pope Paul VI.

hy did Montini stand up for Greene? An intellectual whom John XXIII is said to have likened to Hamlet, Montini was alive to the problem of moral ambiguity. He was capable of discerning links between apparent contraries where less perceptive others saw none. Montini was not only a reader of refined literary tastes but also a collector of literary manuscripts. Among them figured the handwritten original of a booklet on Saint Dominic by Georges Bernanos, which ends with the sentence "There is only one sadness—not to be a saint." Montini treasured that work, echoes of which he cannot have failed to hear inThe Power and the Glory. The words "He knew now that ... there was only one thing that counted—to be a saint" come at the very end of the penultimate chapter of Greene's novel.

As Montini recommended, Greene's case was forwarded to Monsignor Giuseppe De Luca for a second opinion. De Luca was a loyal churchman (in 1952 he had drafted the condemnation of André Gide) but also a maverick (he wrote articles for an Italian Communist newspaper). He found the Holy Office stultifying. "In this suffocating atmosphere of unctuous and arrogant imbecility," De Luca wrote to Montini in June of 1953, "perhaps a scream—chaotic but Christian—would do some good." On November 30, 1953, De Luca addressed the following memorandum to the Holy Office.

Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, according to expert opinion, are to be considered the two major living English novelists: being Catholic they do credit to Rome's faith, and they do credit to it in a country that is of Protestant civilization and culture. How can Rome be gruff and cruel? They are the successors of Chesterton and Belloc and, like them, rather than attempting to convert the small fry, strive to influence superior intelligences and the spirit of the age in a manner favorable to Catholicism. Their level, unlike that of a Bruce Marshall, is not that of average I.Q.s or, like the clergy in general, that of uneducated readers or pure professionals. Their level is the higher intelligentsia in the contemporary world which they sway and influence towards Rome ...

This is not a matter of heresy or even a scandal; it has nothing to do with theologians or depraved persons. We are dealing with great writers, who are often naïve and obstinate like children, in states of mind that are, from time to time, not inclined to praise but gloomy, not exultant but insistent, and such states of mind are familiar to everyone. To see them being expressed with such crudeness may occasionally cause surprise and even consternation, but in the end it is a delight.

To condemn or even to deplore them would be looked askance at in England, and would deal a grievous blow to our prestige: it would demonstrate not only that we are behind the times but also that our judgment is lightweight, undermining significantly the authority of the clergy which is regarded—rightly—as unlettered bondslaves to puerile literature in bad taste. The crew should not be confused with the pilot: today great writers are the real pilots of much of mankind and when the Lord, in His mercy, sends us one, even if he is a nuisance, let's not make a Jonah of him; let's not throw him to the fishes. At the right moment (for they are not bad men), they will yield place to the true pilots—i.e.: to the priests.

In the case of Graham Greene, his harsh and acerbic art touches the hearts of the least receptive and reminds them, however gloomy they be, of the awe-inspiring presence of God and the poisonous bite of sin. He addresses those who are most distant and hostile—those whom we will never reach ...

his priest in touch with contemporary culture inveighed against those in the Holy Office who were not. His arguments, however, came too late. The Holy Office had already written, on November 17, to Cardinal Griffin of Westminster. Griffin was instructed to inform Graham Greene of the Holy Office's "negative judgment," to "exhort him to lend a more constructive tone to his books, from a Catholic point of view," and to advise him not to authorize reprints or translations of The Power and the Glory without making "suitable corrections ... in light of the preceding observations."

Griffin immediately issued a pastoral letter deploring "certain trends in contemporary literature." Without mentioning Greene's name, the cardinal continued,

It is sadly true that a number of Catholic writers appear to have fallen into this error. Indeed, novels which purport to be the vehicle for Catholic doctrine frequently contain passages which, by their unrestrained portrayal of immoral conduct, prove a source of temptation to many of their readers. Though it may well be that such literature can be read in safety by the select few, so great is the danger to the virtue of the majority that its general publication is most undesirable.

Such, we may be sure, was also the tenor of Griffin's private remarks to Greene at the audience Griffin granted the novelist a few months later, in April of 1954. Greene commented on that meeting in the above-cited introduction to The Power and the Glory. In the archives of the Holy Office is an intriguing letter from Greene to Cardinal Pizzardo, written less than a month after the meeting with Griffin. It is a skillful political document, written in a tone of submission that I believe was feigned (the delicious slyness of Greene's paragraph suggesting that the Vatican take the matter up with his publishers gives the game away), and taking pains to refer to communism in a way that would be certain to register positively with both Pizzardo and his superior, Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviano.

It is not without hesitation that I presume to address Your Eminence: but, in the present delicate situation, I have grounds, it seems to me, to present you with an account of the facts.

On 9 April, during an audience which His Eminence Cardinal Griffin, Archbishop of Westminster, granted me, he handed me the copy of a letter which Your Eminence had written to him on 16 November. The delay in the communication of this document is due to my absence from London: I was in Indochina, where I was doing my utmost to make world opinion, for which my articles are intended, understand the difficulties faced by the heroic Catholics of Indochina confronted with the Communist menace.

I wish to emphasize that, throughout my life as a Catholic, I have never ceased to feel deep sentiments of personal attachment to the Vicar of Christ, fostered in particular by admiration for the wisdom with which the Holy Father has constantly guided God's Church. I have always been vividly impressed by the high spirituality which characterizes the Government of Pius XII. Your Eminence knows that I had the honor of a private audience during the holy year 1950. I shall retain my impression of it until my last breath. Your Eminence will therefore understand how distraught I am to learn that my book The Power and the Glory has been the object of criticism from the Holy Office. The aim of the book was to oppose the power of the sacraments and the indestructibility of the Church on the one hand with, on the other, the merely temporal power of an essentially Communist state.

May I remind Your Eminence that this book was written in 1938-39 before the menace which I myself witnessed in Mexico spread to Western Europe?

I beg Your Eminence, in conclusion, to consider the fact that the book was published 14 years ago and, consequently, the rights have passed from my hands into those of publishers in different countries. In addition, the translations to which Your Eminence's letter refers appeared for the most part several years ago and no new translation is envisaged.

I am sending His Eminence the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster the names of the publishers concerned. They alone have the right to reprint.

I wish to assure Your Eminence of my profound respect for any communication emanating from the Sacred Congregation of the Index ...

Your most humble and devoted servant

Graham Greene

Three weeks after Greene had written his letter, Cardinal Ottaviano—he who had gleefully proclaimed his readiness to excommunicate any Catholic who voted for the Communists—scrawled on it that Cardinal Griffin had told him that the Holy Office should "understand and excuse" this right-thinking convert. And that is what was done

And from another blog:

On love: 

'Oh,' the priest said, 'that's another thing altogether - God is love. I don't say the heart doesn't feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn't recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us - God's love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn't it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around' (199-200).

On hate: 

He couldn't see her in the darkness, but there were plenty of faces he could remember from the old days which fitted the voice. When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity - that was a quality God's image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination (131).

On piety: 

He had always been worried by the fate of pious women. As much as politicians, they fed on illusion. He was frightened for them: they came to death so often in a state of invincible complacency, full of uncharity. It was one's duty, if one could, to rob them of their sentimental notions of what was good . . . (127).

One of the novel's main emphases, it seems to me, is the depravity of common piety.

Eco on Peanuts

The whole piece:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1985/jun/13/on-krazy-kat-and-peanuts/

We come to Charles Schulz and Peanuts, which belongs to the “lyric” vein of Krazy Kat. Here, too, the cast of characters is elementary: a group of children, Charlie Brown, Lucy, Violet, Patty, Frieda, Linus, Schroeder, Pig Pen, and the dog Snoopy, who is involved in their games and their talk. Over this basic scheme, there is a steady flow of variations, following a rhythm found in certain primitive epics. (Primitive, too, is the habit of referring to the protagonist always by his full name—even his mother addresses Charlie Brown in that fashion, like an epic hero.) Thus you could never grasp the poetic power of Schulz’s work by reading only one or two or ten episodes: you must thoroughly understand the characters and the situations, for the grace, tenderness, and laughter are born only from the infinitely shifting repetition of the patterns, and from fidelity to the fundamental inspirations. They demand from the reader a continuous act of empathy, a participation in the inner warmth that pervades the events.

The poetry of these children arises from the fact that we find in them all the problems, all the sufferings of the adults, who remain offstage. These children affect us because in a certain sense they are monsters: they are the monstrous infantile reductions of all the neuroses of a modern citizen of industrial civilization.

They affect us because we realize that if they are monsters it is because we, the adults, have made them so. In them we find everything: Freud, mass culture, digest culture, frustrated struggle for success, craving for affection, loneliness, passive acquiescence, and neurotic protest. But all these elements do not blossom directly, as we know them, from the mouths of a group of children: they are conceived and spoken after passing through the filter of innocence. Schulz’s children are not a sly instrument to handle our adult problems: they experience these problems according to a childish psychology, and for this very reason they seem to us touching and hopeless, as if we were suddenly aware that our ills have polluted everything, at the root.

But still more: the reduction of adult myths to childhood myths (a childhood that no longer comes “before” our maturity but “after”) shows us the cracks in an adult mythology and allows Schulz a way out of it. These monster children are capable suddenly of an innocence and a sincerity that call everything into question, sift out the detritus of the grown-up world, and give us back a world that is still and always very sweet and soft, tasting of milk and cleanliness. Thus in a constant seesaw of reactions, within a single story, or between one story and another, we never know whether to despair or to heave a sigh of optimism. But, in any case, we realize that we have emerged from the banal round of consumption and escapism, and have almost reached the threshold of meditation. The most amazing proof of this is that while distinctly “cultivated” comics, like Pogo, appeal only to intellectuals (and are consumed by the mass audience only through distraction), Peanuts charms both sophisticated adults and children with equal intensity, as if each reader found there something for himself, and it is always the same thing, to be enjoyed in two different keys.

Peanuts is thus a little human comedy for the innocent reader and for the sophisticated. In its center is Charlie Brown: ingenuous, stubborn, always awkward, and doomed to failure. Requiring, to a critical degree, communication and popularity, and repaid by the matriarchal, know-it-all girls of his group with scorn, references to his round head, accusations of stupidity, all the little digs that strike home, Charlie Brown, undaunted, seeks tenderness and fulfillment on every side: in baseball, in building kites, in his relationship with his dog, Snoopy, in playing with the girls. He always fails. His solitude becomes an abyss, his inferiority complex is pervasive—tinged by the constant suspicion (which the reader also comes to share) that Charlie Brown is not inferior. Worse: he is absolutely normal. He is like everybody else. This is why he is always on the brink of suicide or at least of nervous breakdown: because he seeks salvation through the routine formulas suggested to him by the society in which he lives (the art of making friends, culture in four easy lessons, the pursuit of happiness, how to make out with girls—he has been ruined, obviously, by Dr. Kinsey, Dale Carnegie, Erich Fromm, and Lin Yutang).

But since he acts in all purity, without any guile, society is prompt to reject him through its representative, Lucy, treacherous, self-confident, an entrepreneur with assured profits, ready to peddle a security that is completely bogus but of unquestioned effect. (Her lessons in natural science to her brother Linus are a jumble of nonsense that turns Charlie Brown’s stomach. “I can’t stand it,” the unfortunate boy groans, but what weapons can arrest impeccable bad faith when one has the misfortune to be pure of heart?)

Charlie Brown has been called the most sensitive child ever to appear in a comic strip, a figure capable of Shakespearean shifts of mood; and Schulz’s pencil succeeds in rendering these variations with an economy of means that has something miraculous about it. The text, always almost courtly (these children rarely lapse into slang or commit anacoluthon), is enhanced by drawings able to portray, in each character, the subtlest psychological nuance. Thus the daily tragedy of Charlie Brown is drawn, in our eyes, with exemplary incisiveness.

To elude this tragedy of nonintegration, each psychological type has its strategies. The girls escape it thanks to an obstinate self-sufficiency and haughtiness: Lucy (a giantess to be admired with awe), Patty, and Violet are all of a piece; perfectly integrated (or should we say “alienated”), they move from hypnotic sessions at the TV to rope-skipping and to everyday talk interwoven with sarcasm, achieving peace through insensitivity.

Linus, the smallest, on the other hand, is already burdened with every neurosis; emotional instability would be his perpetual condition if the society in which he lives had not already offered him the remedies. Linus already has behind him Freud, Adler, and perhaps also Binswanger (via Rollo May); he has identified his baby-blanket as the symbol of a uterine peace or a purely oral happiness—sucking his finger, blanket against his cheek (if possible, with TV turned on, in front of which he can huddle like an Indian; but he can also be without anything, in an oriental sort of isolation, attached to his symbols of protection).

Take away his blanket and he will be plunged once more into all the emotional troubles lying in wait for him day and night. Because, we must add, along with the instability of a neurotic society he has absorbed all its wisdom. Linus represents its most technologically up-to-date product. While Charlie Brown is unable to make a kite that will not get caught in the branches of a tree, Linus reveals suddenly, in bursts, dazzling skills: he performs feats of amazing equilibrium, he can strike a quarter flung in the air with the edge of his blanket, snapping it like a whip (“the fastest blanket in the West!”).

Schroeder, on the other hand, finds peace in aesthetic religion. Seated at his little toy piano from which he draws the tunes and chords of transcendental complexity, slumped in total worship of Beethoven, he saves himself from everyday neuroses by sublimating them in a lofty form of artistic madness. Not even Lucy’s constant, loving admiration can budge him. (Lucy cannot love music, an unprofitable activity, whose reason she doesn’t comprehend: but in Schroeder she admires an unattainable higher being. Perhaps she is stimulated by the adamantine shyness of her pocket Parsifal, and she stubbornly pursues her work of seduction without making a dent in the artist’s defenses.) Schroeder has chosen the peace of the senses in the delirium of the imagination. “Do not speak ill of this love, Lisaweta: it is good and fertile. It contains nostalgia and melancholy, envy and a bit of contempt, and a complete, chaste happiness”—this is not Schroeder speaking, of course: it is Tonio Kroeger. But this is the point; and it is no accident that Schulz’s children create a little universe in which our tragedy and our comedy are performed.

Pig Pen, too, has an inferiority to complain about: he is irreparably, horrifyingly dirty. He leaves home neat and spruce, and a second later his shoelaces come untied, his trousers sag over his hips, his hair is flaked with dandruff, his skin and clothes are covered with a layer of mud. Aware of his vocation for the abyss, Pig Pen turns his plight into a boast; he speaks of the dust of centuries, an irreversible process: the course of history. It might almost be a Beckett character speaking.

A constant antistrophe to the humans’ sufferings, the dog Snoopy carries to the last metaphysical frontier the neurotic failure to adjust. Snoopy knows he is a dog: he was a dog yesterday, he is a dog today, tomorrow he will perhaps be a dog still. For him, in the optimism of the opulent society in which one moves upward from status to status, there is no hope of promotion. Sometimes he essays the extreme resource of humility (we dogs are so humble, he sighs, unctuous and consoled); he becomes tenderly attached to those who promise him respect and consideration. But as a rule he doesn’t accept himself and he tries to be what he is not: a split personality if ever there was one, he would like to be an alligator, a kangaroo, a vulture, a penguin, a snake…. He tries every avenue of mystification, then he surrenders to reality, out of laziness, hunger, sleepiness, timidity, claustrophobia (which assails him when he crawls through big grass), ignorance. He may be soothed, but never happy. He lives in a constant apartheid, and he has the psychology of the segregated; like an Uncle Tom, he has finally, faute de mieux, a devotion, an ancestral respect, for the stronger.

In this encyclopedia of contemporary weakness, there are, as we have said, sudden luminous patches of light, free variations, allegros, and rondos, where all is resolved in a few bars. The monsters turn into children again, Schulz becomes only a poet of childhood. We know it isn’t true, and we pretend to believe him. In the next strip he will continue to show us, in the face of Charlie Brown, with two strokes of his pencil, his version of the human condition.