For his star, DeMille used the legendary stage actress Fannie Ward in only her second movie. Ward wasn't famous for her acting, but for her youthful appear-ance in spite of the fact that she was at least forty-three years old and working in a medium whose harsh lighting could make thirty-year-olds look fifty. Geraldine Farrar characterized her as "a baffling ingenue [who] carried the inevitable parasol to shade her baby-like complexion, which she candidly confessed 'took hours to fix up.' " Besides a complicated makeup regimen, Ward also endured several face-lifts as did her husband, Jack Dean. DeMille's casting instincts led him to the young Japanese actor Sessue Hay-akawa, who responded with an astonishing portrayal keying on sexual malice. In outline, Hayakawa's character is the heavy, but the actor's sexual magnetism is so intense, his acting so contained, that the audience's sympathy invariably gravitates toward him rather than Ward's silly society bitch.
_____
Hopper asked about DeMille's closed office door. "Shhh", he was told, "Mr. DeMille is thinking!"
"Is that possible?" Hopper asked.
__________
She walked across the white bearskin rug to DeMille's desk. Behind him there were two stained glass windows. The precisely calibrated effect was of a lord in his Gothic castle. "He liked that idea of being, shall I say, remote from you," wrote Julia. "He told me later that he got his desire for such an office from David Belasco, for whom he had worked as a young man." He glanced at her story idea. Faye wondered if there was a part for her in his next picture. "Yes, I think so," he told her, "but you will never be a star in pictures. "Because you haven't the right kind of personality. You are the 'cute' type.
In the theater we call them soubrette. Also, your face is too round, your nose too long and I want you to write. He told her that he thought she might be able to alternate with Miss Macpherson as a scriptwriter.
________
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
At Freddie's by the brilliant Penelope Fitzgerald
The manager said that this was a matter for his staff. It seemed, however, that the Temple School, with its forty years of Shakespearean training, was carrying on the old traditions in a state not far from destitution, with crippled furniture, undraped windows, and floors bare to the point of indecency, and it was not to be believed that a prosperous theatre like the Alexandra would stand by and watch such things happen without giving a helping hand. The manager knew what was happening to him, even though it was for the first time, for he had heard it described by others. He was being Freddied, or, alternatively, Shakespeare would have been pleased, dear-ed, although the phrase had not passed between them. Thirty-seven minutes later he had agreed to send the old covers and carpeting round to the Temple, on indefinite loan. He felt unwell. Weakmindedness makes one feel as poorly as any other over-indulgence.
Everyone who knew the Temple School will remember the distinctive smell of Freddie's office. Not precisely disagree-able, it suggested a church vestry where old clothes hang and flowers moulder in the sink, but respect is called for just the same. It was not a place for seeing clearly. Light, in the morning, entered at an angle, through a quantity of dust. When the desk lamp was switched on at length the circle of light, although it repelled outsiders, was weak. Freddie herself, to anyone who was summoned into the room, appeared in the shadow of her armchair as a more solid piece of darkness. Only a chance glint struck from her spectacles and the rim of great semi-precious brooches, pinned on at random. Even her extent was uncertain, since the material of her skirts and the chair seemed much the same. The covers from the Alexandra, of drab crimson with bald patches, were put on to the furniture as soon as they arrived, but made, after all, little difference. Opposite was another, much smaller, armchair, which, though Freddie kept no pets, gave the impression that a dog had just been sitting in it. Placed there, the caller had to meet Freddie's eyes, which, though not at all bright — they were of a pale boiled blue — expressed an interest so keen as to approach disbelief. The face, like the ample skirt, was creased with lines, as though both had been crumpled together at the same time. What might a good ironing not reveal? Although Freddie usually began by saying something gracious, the caller's first instinct was that of self-preser-vation, or even to make sure that the door, now to the rear, could be reached in a hurry. Ye; in fact no one left before they had to. The margin between alarm and fascination was soon crossed. Partly it was her voice, a croak suggestive of long suffering, which adjusted itself little by little, as though any difficulties were worthwhile, to caressing flattery. This flattery usually saved Freddie money. — I hope you don't mind the room being rather cold, I don't notice it myself while I'm talking to you — knowing that this kind of thing could be seen through, but that in itself constituted a further flattery. Certainly she could create her own warmth, a glow like the very first effects of alcohol. As to what she wanted, no mystery was made. She wanted to get the advantage, but on the other hand human beings interested her so much that it must always be an advantage to meet another one. When she smiled there was a certain lopsidedness, the shade of a deformity, or, it could be, the aftermath of a slight stroke. Freddie never tried to conceal this — Take a good look — she advised her pupils — I'm not nearly so amusing as you're going to be when you imitate me. — But the smile itself was priceless in its benevolence, and in its amusement that benevolence could still exist. One had to smile with her, perhaps regretting it later. Her shabbiness was a grossly unfair reproach. Her devotion to the things of the spirit was a menace. The trouble, of course, was that she never asked anything exactly for herself. Why, after all, had the Alexandra parted with so many lengths of rep and velvet? Why did the Royal Opera House, at every end-of-season auction, allow so much indulgence to bids from the Temple School?
and
At this point it came to her that she was not good enough for Pierce, and nobody can bear this feeling for any length of time. Lyons teashops might almost have been particularly designed for the resolution of such awkward situations, and perhaps when, fifteen years later, the "teashops were dis-continued as uneconomic the situations disappeared with them. In a Lyons, as Hannah had reflected, the limits of communication had to be reached by seven o'clock, while at the same time it was necessary to share a table or at all events to sit very close to other customers, so that although everyone restricted their elbows, their 'bodies and their newspapers and by a long established convention showed no signs of understanding what they overheard, they provided all the same a certain check on human intimacy. The rosy-tinted looking-glasses on every wall also acted as a restraint on the undemanding clientele who would rather keep their eyes on their plates than be caught looking at their own reflexions. At Lyons, the females, if escorted, sat at a table and 'kept the place' while the males queued for what was needed and carried it back, as their remote forbears had done, with difficulty. During this process the tea overflowed into the saucers. Later the sugar, which was only put out on every fourth table, had to be borrowed and exchanged. There was always a good deal of apologising at Lyons.
and
Perhaps the whole thing would turn out in the end to have been a help to hom and next tme he wouldn't make a mess of it. But unfortunately, as she knew, real life is not susceptible to rehearsals.
Everyone who knew the Temple School will remember the distinctive smell of Freddie's office. Not precisely disagree-able, it suggested a church vestry where old clothes hang and flowers moulder in the sink, but respect is called for just the same. It was not a place for seeing clearly. Light, in the morning, entered at an angle, through a quantity of dust. When the desk lamp was switched on at length the circle of light, although it repelled outsiders, was weak. Freddie herself, to anyone who was summoned into the room, appeared in the shadow of her armchair as a more solid piece of darkness. Only a chance glint struck from her spectacles and the rim of great semi-precious brooches, pinned on at random. Even her extent was uncertain, since the material of her skirts and the chair seemed much the same. The covers from the Alexandra, of drab crimson with bald patches, were put on to the furniture as soon as they arrived, but made, after all, little difference. Opposite was another, much smaller, armchair, which, though Freddie kept no pets, gave the impression that a dog had just been sitting in it. Placed there, the caller had to meet Freddie's eyes, which, though not at all bright — they were of a pale boiled blue — expressed an interest so keen as to approach disbelief. The face, like the ample skirt, was creased with lines, as though both had been crumpled together at the same time. What might a good ironing not reveal? Although Freddie usually began by saying something gracious, the caller's first instinct was that of self-preser-vation, or even to make sure that the door, now to the rear, could be reached in a hurry. Ye; in fact no one left before they had to. The margin between alarm and fascination was soon crossed. Partly it was her voice, a croak suggestive of long suffering, which adjusted itself little by little, as though any difficulties were worthwhile, to caressing flattery. This flattery usually saved Freddie money. — I hope you don't mind the room being rather cold, I don't notice it myself while I'm talking to you — knowing that this kind of thing could be seen through, but that in itself constituted a further flattery. Certainly she could create her own warmth, a glow like the very first effects of alcohol. As to what she wanted, no mystery was made. She wanted to get the advantage, but on the other hand human beings interested her so much that it must always be an advantage to meet another one. When she smiled there was a certain lopsidedness, the shade of a deformity, or, it could be, the aftermath of a slight stroke. Freddie never tried to conceal this — Take a good look — she advised her pupils — I'm not nearly so amusing as you're going to be when you imitate me. — But the smile itself was priceless in its benevolence, and in its amusement that benevolence could still exist. One had to smile with her, perhaps regretting it later. Her shabbiness was a grossly unfair reproach. Her devotion to the things of the spirit was a menace. The trouble, of course, was that she never asked anything exactly for herself. Why, after all, had the Alexandra parted with so many lengths of rep and velvet? Why did the Royal Opera House, at every end-of-season auction, allow so much indulgence to bids from the Temple School?
and
At this point it came to her that she was not good enough for Pierce, and nobody can bear this feeling for any length of time. Lyons teashops might almost have been particularly designed for the resolution of such awkward situations, and perhaps when, fifteen years later, the "teashops were dis-continued as uneconomic the situations disappeared with them. In a Lyons, as Hannah had reflected, the limits of communication had to be reached by seven o'clock, while at the same time it was necessary to share a table or at all events to sit very close to other customers, so that although everyone restricted their elbows, their 'bodies and their newspapers and by a long established convention showed no signs of understanding what they overheard, they provided all the same a certain check on human intimacy. The rosy-tinted looking-glasses on every wall also acted as a restraint on the undemanding clientele who would rather keep their eyes on their plates than be caught looking at their own reflexions. At Lyons, the females, if escorted, sat at a table and 'kept the place' while the males queued for what was needed and carried it back, as their remote forbears had done, with difficulty. During this process the tea overflowed into the saucers. Later the sugar, which was only put out on every fourth table, had to be borrowed and exchanged. There was always a good deal of apologising at Lyons.
and
Perhaps the whole thing would turn out in the end to have been a help to hom and next tme he wouldn't make a mess of it. But unfortunately, as she knew, real life is not susceptible to rehearsals.
Wednesday, March 04, 2015
Hero
Emir Nuri Shaalan, who led the desert tribes in Syria and the Lebanon mountains was one of the four great men ruling the Ara-bian desert. The others were Feisal's father, Emir Hussein of Mec ca, whose control over the Hejaz, the holy city of Mecca, and the Red Sea ade him formidable; his greatest rival, ibn Saud, emir of the ports m Rashids, a ferocious and implacable warrior who controlled the vast d fol-es-ert space to the east of Hejaz, with his capital at Riyadh, and whose lowers were Wahhabis, fierce Muslim puritans and fundamentalists; and the idrisi, Sayid Mohammed ibn Ali, who controlled the region south of the Hejaz. The competition between the four desert rulers was intense, and in many ways more important to them than any quarrel they might have with Turkey. As to their loyalties to outsiders, Hussein was of course now the ally of Britain and France, supported by the Foreign Office in though he remained London and the Arab Bureau in Cairo, ned always aware of the growing power of ibn Saud. Ibn Saud received support and backing from the government of India and the Colonial Office in London. The idrisi took money from both sides and was notoriously unreliable; and Nuri Shaalan was in the pay of the Turks, though higher bids hough open to from the Allied Powers. British policy, as can be seen, was confused—indeed, when open warfare finally broke out between Hussein and ibn Saud after the end of World War I, the Foreign Office and Cairo backed and supported Hussein, while the Colonial Office and New Delhi backed and supported ibn Saud, so the British taxpayer ended up paying for both sides in that war. None of the four was a Jeffersonian idealist of course Hussein's enemies in Mecca were kept in chains in the dungeons beneath his palace, ibn Saud punished infringements of sharia with public behead-ings, and both the idrisi and Nuri Shaalan were feared despots. Lawrence had already taken the precaution of sending one of Nuri's men on ahead with a message making it clear that they came in peace and sought his hospitality, but, in typical desert fashion, the messenger failed to arrive, and was later found lying in the desert, a desiccated corpse—a victim of thirst or murder—with the remains of his camel beside him. The Howeitat were on the move, as they sought grazing for
the camels, heading northwest along Wadi Sirhan in the direction of Azrak, which was less than 120 miles from Jerusalem to the west, and from Damascus to the north, and fell within Nuri's sphere of influence. Lawrence was now deep behind the Turkish lines, where a large part of the population favored the Ottoman Empire, or was in its pay. When Auda returned, bringing with him more tribesmen as well as the somewhat ambiguous blessing of Nuri Shaalan, Lawrence's relief was quickly ruffled by a burst of overoptimism from Sharif Nasir and Auda, who now proposed to change the objective of the attack from Aqaba to Damascus itself, and raise the tribes of Syria and Lebanon to make an army. Lawrence was alarmed by this. The Turks had more than enough troops in Syria to put down such a rising; besides, Aqaba would become, from the British point of view, a more important conquest than Damas-cus, since it would ensure that as the Arab forces moved north they would provide the desert right wing of any British advance through the Holy Land to Jerusalem. However attached Lawrence was to the Arab cause and to Feisal, he could never altogether forget the demands of British strategy. Like any man who has two masters with opposing interests, he was torn between them. Lawrence's position was equivocal. In theory, at any rate, Sharif Nasir was in command of the expedition, with Auda as his coequal military leader. Lawrence had already found out that neither of them was willing to accept an order from the other, and that his best policy was to win over one at a time to what he wanted to do, playing each man off skillfully against the other, and both of them against Nesib el Bekri, whose only interest was in reaching Damascus. It was obvious to Lawrence that even if all of Syria could be raised against the Turks, which was doubtful, try-ing to take Damascus before the British broke through the Turkish lines at Gaza and while Aqaba remained in Turkish hands would lead to a disaster. By suggesting to Auda that an advance on Damascus would make Sharif Nasir the man of the hour, and to Nasir that raising the local tribes to advance on Damascus would put Auda in effective control of the expedition, Lawrence managed to stave off the change in plans.
the camels, heading northwest along Wadi Sirhan in the direction of Azrak, which was less than 120 miles from Jerusalem to the west, and from Damascus to the north, and fell within Nuri's sphere of influence. Lawrence was now deep behind the Turkish lines, where a large part of the population favored the Ottoman Empire, or was in its pay. When Auda returned, bringing with him more tribesmen as well as the somewhat ambiguous blessing of Nuri Shaalan, Lawrence's relief was quickly ruffled by a burst of overoptimism from Sharif Nasir and Auda, who now proposed to change the objective of the attack from Aqaba to Damascus itself, and raise the tribes of Syria and Lebanon to make an army. Lawrence was alarmed by this. The Turks had more than enough troops in Syria to put down such a rising; besides, Aqaba would become, from the British point of view, a more important conquest than Damas-cus, since it would ensure that as the Arab forces moved north they would provide the desert right wing of any British advance through the Holy Land to Jerusalem. However attached Lawrence was to the Arab cause and to Feisal, he could never altogether forget the demands of British strategy. Like any man who has two masters with opposing interests, he was torn between them. Lawrence's position was equivocal. In theory, at any rate, Sharif Nasir was in command of the expedition, with Auda as his coequal military leader. Lawrence had already found out that neither of them was willing to accept an order from the other, and that his best policy was to win over one at a time to what he wanted to do, playing each man off skillfully against the other, and both of them against Nesib el Bekri, whose only interest was in reaching Damascus. It was obvious to Lawrence that even if all of Syria could be raised against the Turks, which was doubtful, try-ing to take Damascus before the British broke through the Turkish lines at Gaza and while Aqaba remained in Turkish hands would lead to a disaster. By suggesting to Auda that an advance on Damascus would make Sharif Nasir the man of the hour, and to Nasir that raising the local tribes to advance on Damascus would put Auda in effective control of the expedition, Lawrence managed to stave off the change in plans.
Tuesday, March 03, 2015
Cleo
That diplomatic formula mattered—it had been worth its weight in Auletes' gold—but had not previously entailed costly statues of foreign monarchs at sacred addresses in the heart of Rome. It struck an odd chord in a city where humans did not tradition-ally mingle among cult images. Cleopatra may or may not have fully grasped the irregularity of Caesar's tribute; gold statues were not new to her. She would in his villa have acutely felt the oddities of the situation. The very palette of Rome was different. She was accustomed to ocean views, invigorat-ing sea breezes, to sparkling white walls and a cloudless Alexandrian sky. There was no glinting turquoise Mediterranean out her window, no purple light at the end of the day. Nor was there any rapturous architecture. Rome was monochromatic next to the blaze of color to which Cleopatra was accustomed. All was wood and plaster. Music pervaded every aspect of Alexandrian life, where the flutes and lyres, rattles and drums, were everywhere. Only reluctantly did the Romans admit such frivolities to their culture. One apologized for one's ability to dance or play the flute well. "No one dances while he is sober," offered Cicero, the greatest of Roman killjoys, "unless he happens to be a lunatic."* If she spent any time in the thick of the city, Cleopatra found her-self amid a gloomy welter of crooked, congested streets, with no main avenue and no central plan, among muddy pigs and soup vendors and artisans' shops that tumbled out onto footways. By every measure a less salubrious city than Alexandria, Rome was squalid and shapeless, an oriental tangle of narrow, poorly ventilated streets and ceaseless, shutter-creaking commotion, perpetually in shadow, stiflingly hot in
*(Some took Cicero's distaste further. If a man was an excellent piper, it followed that he was a worthless man. "Otherwise he wouldn't be so good a piper," notes Plutarch, quoting approvingly. The axiom did not work to the advantage of Cleopatra's father. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, he would be written off as "not a real man, but a pipe-player and a charlatan.")
summer. Isolated though Cleopatra was on her wooded hill, there were advantages too in Caesar's address. She was at a remove from the incessant hawking and haggling, the pounding of blacksmiths and the hammering of stonemasons, the rattling of chains and squeaking of hoists below. Rome was a city of nonstop construction, as homes collapsed or were torn down regularly. To ease the racket Caesar had curtailed daytime traffic in the streets, with the predictable result: "You have to be a very rich man to get sleep in Rome," asserted Juve-nal, who cursed the evening stampede, and felt he risked his life each time he set foot outside. To be trampled by litters or splattered with mud constituted peripheral dangers. Pedestrians routinely crumpled into hidden hollows. Every window represented a potential assault. Given the frequency with which pots propelled themselves from ledges, the smart man, warned Juvenal, went to dinner only after having made his will. Cleopatra had any number of reasons to yearn for what a Latin poet would later term her "superficially civilized country." At the time of her visit Rome had only just discovered urban design, another Eastern import. You would search in vain for the famous landmarks; the Coliseum, "the last word in amphitheatres," had not yet been built. Nor were the Pantheon or the Baths of Cara-calla. Pompey's theater had been Rome's only structure of distinction; it had inspired Caesar's Forum, which now eclipsed it. Rome remained provincial, but increasingly aware of itself as such. Greece continued to spell culture, elegance, art. If you wanted a secretary, a doctor, an difficult to get a decent copy of anything in Rome, which nursed a animal trainer, a craftsman, you wanted a Greek. And if you wanted healthy inferiority you dearly hoped to find yourself in Alexandria. It was iy inferiority complex as a result. It manifested itself the time-honored way: The Roman waxed superior. His was hardly the first civilization merrily to impugn the one it aspired to be. So the pyra-mids--marvels of engineering and of ancient exactitude, constructed with primitive tools and equally primitive arithmetic—could be reduced to "idle and foolish ostentations of royal wealth." Gulping down his envy with a bracing chaser of contempt, a Roman in Egypt found himself less awed than offended. He wrote off extravagance as detrimental to body and mind, sounding like no one so much as Mark Twain resisting the siren call of Europe. Staring an advanced civiliza-tion straight in the face, the Roman reduced it either to barbarism or decadence. He took refuge in the hard edges and right angles of his own language, even while—sniffing and scorning—he acknowl-edged it to be inferior to the sinuous, supple, all-accommodating Greek tongue. Latin kept its speaker on the straight and narrow. Regrettably, there was no word in that language for "not possessing!' But neither, blessedly, was there a Latin term for "gold-inlay utensils" or "engraved glasses from the warm Nile." With Caesar's overseas campaigns, with Rome's rising might and fortune, the splendors of the Greek world began to penetrate the Ital-ian peninsula. It would be difficult to overstate the ramifications of those imports for Cleopatra. Pompey had only just introduced ebony to Rome. Myrrh and cinnamon, ginger and pepper, were newly arrived. For the first time, decorative pillars graced the entries of pri-vate homes. Only one house in Rome sported marble-paneled walls, although in a few years that home would be rivaled by a hundred oth-ers. The culinary arts flourished, as turbot, stork, and peacock found their place on tables. During Cleopatra's stay the relative virtues of mantis prawns versus African snails were vigorously debated. Hers was a Rome in transition; there were both luxurious entertainments and those who stole the fine linen napkins. Latin literature was in its infancy and Greek literature soon to be discounted, written off—the metaphor was apt—as a beautiful vase full of poisonous snakes. The beauty, of a toga—that plain, natural wool garment, as uncomfortable as it was impractical—was, like the Latin language itself, in the constraints. At his entertainments Caesar arranged for silk awnings, to shade the spectators along the Via Sacra and up the Capitoline Hill. As Alexandrian imports, those awnings automatically qualified as "a barbarian luxury."
With the nouveau riche embrace of the East came those who parsed each import and read in it the end of civilization, the road to degeneracy. To that end Caesar reenacted the city's long-neglected sumptuary laws, designed to curb private expenditures. He was strict on this count as only a lover of magnificence—as the first host in his-tory to offer his guests a selection of four fine wines— can be. He dis-patched agents to confiscate delicacies in the market, to confiscate ornate tableware, midmeal, in private homes. With few exceptions, he prohibited litters, scarlet garments, pearls. To anyone accustomed to Alexandria, the fashion capital of the world, the idea that Caesar's Rome needed sumptuary laws was laughable. A woman who knew when it was time to downgrade her dinnerware could be trusted to dress appropriately, however; Cleopatra may have toned down the wardrobe. A Roman matron wore white, where the Alexandrian woman relished color. And a woman who could calibrate her humor for different audiences knew better than to scorn a dinner that in no way rivaled her fare at home. As has been observed over the millen-nia, luxury is more easily denounced than denied; Caesar's edict was that who weaned himself with difficulty that winter from peacock, giant oysters, and saltwater eel. (Peacock meat was notoriously tough, but popular with some than others. It won few points from Cicero, offend rev: Paat c not the point.) Oysters and eels, Cicero moaned, had never his digestive system as did turnips. Cleopatra thought of the puritans real and purported—among whom she found herself we do not know. We know well what they thought of her. Marriage, and women, were done differently in rome, where female authority was a meaningless concept. (Similarly, for a man to be called effeminate was the worst insult.) The Roman deft. nition of a good woman was an inconspicuous woman, something that defied Cleopatra's training. In Alexandria she needed to make a spectacle of herself Here the mandate was reversed. Not only was a Roman woman without political or legal rights, but she was without a personal name; she carried only the one derived from her father. Caesar had two sisters, both named Julia. Roman women cast their eyes down in public, where they were silent and recessive. They did not issue the dinner invi-tations. They were invisible in intellectual life, represented less often in art than they were in Egypt, where female workers and female pharaohs appear in painting and sculpture, in tomb scenes and on chapel walls, trapping birds, selling goods, or making offerings to the gods. For a foreign sovereign the rules —like the sumptuary laws —did not entirely apply, but Cleopatra could not have felt at her ease.* As always, what kept women pure was the drudge's life. ( Juvenal sup-plied the traditional, formula: "Hard work, short sleep, hands chafed and hardened" from housework.) As a marriage crasher who had somehow hustled herself into Venus's exalted company, Cleopatra unsettled Rome on any number of counts: she was female and for-eign, an Eastern monarch in what still believed itself to be a king-crushing republic, a stand-in for Isis, whose cult was suspect and subversive and whose temples were notorious spots for assignations. Cleopatra confused the categories and flouted convention. Even by modern standards, she posed problems of protocol. If she was the mis-tress of a Roman dictator, was she mistress of the Roman world as well?
(*The prevailing ethos is preserved in the literature. In the Iliad, women are the most perfect things in creation. They are also, as has been observed, as a general rule teas' ing, scolding, thwarting, contradicting, and hoodwinking." In the Greek plays, women have the key parts. There are few outsize female heroines in Roman ture, in which wives come in two varieties: the tyrannical rich and the spencithrlie poor. Roman literature is notably short as well on deceived husbands, a comic stag from Aristophanes to Moliere.)
No matter how she comported herself—at all times she seems to have been as deft with her image as her person—she broke every rule in the book. A queen at home, she was a courtesan out of her country. And she was something more dangerous still: a courtesan with means. Cleopatra was not merely economically independent, but richer than any man in Rome. Her very wealth—the same wealth that had fed Rome during the triumphs—impugned her morals. To wax eloquent on someone's embossed silver, his sumptuous carpets, his marble statuary, was to indict him. The implications were greater for the lesser sex. "There's nothing a woman doesn't allow herself, nothing she considers disgust-ing, once she has put an emerald choker around her neck and has fas-tened giant pearls to her elongated ears," went the logic. In that respect the length of her ears would do more to seal Cleopatra's fate than that of her nose.* Even assuming she had left her best jewelry in Alexandria, she was synonymous in Rome with the "reckless extravagance" of that world. It was no less than her birthright. (A proper Roman woman con-sidered her children her jewels.) By Roman standards, even Cleopatra's eunuchs were rich. This meant that every unpardonable evil in the prof-ligacy family attached itself to her. Well before she became the sorceress oflegend— a reckless, careless destroyer of men—she was suspect as an extrav-agance extravagant weak Easterner, a reckless, careless destroyer of wealth. If moral rbeis it turpitude began with shellfish and metastasized into purple and scarlet o 'less for lbund its ostentatious apogee in pearls, which topped the :ale in Rome. Suetonius invoked them to prove Caesar's luxury.
*(Some took Cicero's distaste further. If a man was an excellent piper, it followed that he was a worthless man. "Otherwise he wouldn't be so good a piper," notes Plutarch, quoting approvingly. The axiom did not work to the advantage of Cleopatra's father. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, he would be written off as "not a real man, but a pipe-player and a charlatan.")
summer. Isolated though Cleopatra was on her wooded hill, there were advantages too in Caesar's address. She was at a remove from the incessant hawking and haggling, the pounding of blacksmiths and the hammering of stonemasons, the rattling of chains and squeaking of hoists below. Rome was a city of nonstop construction, as homes collapsed or were torn down regularly. To ease the racket Caesar had curtailed daytime traffic in the streets, with the predictable result: "You have to be a very rich man to get sleep in Rome," asserted Juve-nal, who cursed the evening stampede, and felt he risked his life each time he set foot outside. To be trampled by litters or splattered with mud constituted peripheral dangers. Pedestrians routinely crumpled into hidden hollows. Every window represented a potential assault. Given the frequency with which pots propelled themselves from ledges, the smart man, warned Juvenal, went to dinner only after having made his will. Cleopatra had any number of reasons to yearn for what a Latin poet would later term her "superficially civilized country." At the time of her visit Rome had only just discovered urban design, another Eastern import. You would search in vain for the famous landmarks; the Coliseum, "the last word in amphitheatres," had not yet been built. Nor were the Pantheon or the Baths of Cara-calla. Pompey's theater had been Rome's only structure of distinction; it had inspired Caesar's Forum, which now eclipsed it. Rome remained provincial, but increasingly aware of itself as such. Greece continued to spell culture, elegance, art. If you wanted a secretary, a doctor, an difficult to get a decent copy of anything in Rome, which nursed a animal trainer, a craftsman, you wanted a Greek. And if you wanted healthy inferiority you dearly hoped to find yourself in Alexandria. It was iy inferiority complex as a result. It manifested itself the time-honored way: The Roman waxed superior. His was hardly the first civilization merrily to impugn the one it aspired to be. So the pyra-mids--marvels of engineering and of ancient exactitude, constructed with primitive tools and equally primitive arithmetic—could be reduced to "idle and foolish ostentations of royal wealth." Gulping down his envy with a bracing chaser of contempt, a Roman in Egypt found himself less awed than offended. He wrote off extravagance as detrimental to body and mind, sounding like no one so much as Mark Twain resisting the siren call of Europe. Staring an advanced civiliza-tion straight in the face, the Roman reduced it either to barbarism or decadence. He took refuge in the hard edges and right angles of his own language, even while—sniffing and scorning—he acknowl-edged it to be inferior to the sinuous, supple, all-accommodating Greek tongue. Latin kept its speaker on the straight and narrow. Regrettably, there was no word in that language for "not possessing!' But neither, blessedly, was there a Latin term for "gold-inlay utensils" or "engraved glasses from the warm Nile." With Caesar's overseas campaigns, with Rome's rising might and fortune, the splendors of the Greek world began to penetrate the Ital-ian peninsula. It would be difficult to overstate the ramifications of those imports for Cleopatra. Pompey had only just introduced ebony to Rome. Myrrh and cinnamon, ginger and pepper, were newly arrived. For the first time, decorative pillars graced the entries of pri-vate homes. Only one house in Rome sported marble-paneled walls, although in a few years that home would be rivaled by a hundred oth-ers. The culinary arts flourished, as turbot, stork, and peacock found their place on tables. During Cleopatra's stay the relative virtues of mantis prawns versus African snails were vigorously debated. Hers was a Rome in transition; there were both luxurious entertainments and those who stole the fine linen napkins. Latin literature was in its infancy and Greek literature soon to be discounted, written off—the metaphor was apt—as a beautiful vase full of poisonous snakes. The beauty, of a toga—that plain, natural wool garment, as uncomfortable as it was impractical—was, like the Latin language itself, in the constraints. At his entertainments Caesar arranged for silk awnings, to shade the spectators along the Via Sacra and up the Capitoline Hill. As Alexandrian imports, those awnings automatically qualified as "a barbarian luxury."
With the nouveau riche embrace of the East came those who parsed each import and read in it the end of civilization, the road to degeneracy. To that end Caesar reenacted the city's long-neglected sumptuary laws, designed to curb private expenditures. He was strict on this count as only a lover of magnificence—as the first host in his-tory to offer his guests a selection of four fine wines— can be. He dis-patched agents to confiscate delicacies in the market, to confiscate ornate tableware, midmeal, in private homes. With few exceptions, he prohibited litters, scarlet garments, pearls. To anyone accustomed to Alexandria, the fashion capital of the world, the idea that Caesar's Rome needed sumptuary laws was laughable. A woman who knew when it was time to downgrade her dinnerware could be trusted to dress appropriately, however; Cleopatra may have toned down the wardrobe. A Roman matron wore white, where the Alexandrian woman relished color. And a woman who could calibrate her humor for different audiences knew better than to scorn a dinner that in no way rivaled her fare at home. As has been observed over the millen-nia, luxury is more easily denounced than denied; Caesar's edict was that who weaned himself with difficulty that winter from peacock, giant oysters, and saltwater eel. (Peacock meat was notoriously tough, but popular with some than others. It won few points from Cicero, offend rev: Paat c not the point.) Oysters and eels, Cicero moaned, had never his digestive system as did turnips. Cleopatra thought of the puritans real and purported—among whom she found herself we do not know. We know well what they thought of her. Marriage, and women, were done differently in rome, where female authority was a meaningless concept. (Similarly, for a man to be called effeminate was the worst insult.) The Roman deft. nition of a good woman was an inconspicuous woman, something that defied Cleopatra's training. In Alexandria she needed to make a spectacle of herself Here the mandate was reversed. Not only was a Roman woman without political or legal rights, but she was without a personal name; she carried only the one derived from her father. Caesar had two sisters, both named Julia. Roman women cast their eyes down in public, where they were silent and recessive. They did not issue the dinner invi-tations. They were invisible in intellectual life, represented less often in art than they were in Egypt, where female workers and female pharaohs appear in painting and sculpture, in tomb scenes and on chapel walls, trapping birds, selling goods, or making offerings to the gods. For a foreign sovereign the rules —like the sumptuary laws —did not entirely apply, but Cleopatra could not have felt at her ease.* As always, what kept women pure was the drudge's life. ( Juvenal sup-plied the traditional, formula: "Hard work, short sleep, hands chafed and hardened" from housework.) As a marriage crasher who had somehow hustled herself into Venus's exalted company, Cleopatra unsettled Rome on any number of counts: she was female and for-eign, an Eastern monarch in what still believed itself to be a king-crushing republic, a stand-in for Isis, whose cult was suspect and subversive and whose temples were notorious spots for assignations. Cleopatra confused the categories and flouted convention. Even by modern standards, she posed problems of protocol. If she was the mis-tress of a Roman dictator, was she mistress of the Roman world as well?
(*The prevailing ethos is preserved in the literature. In the Iliad, women are the most perfect things in creation. They are also, as has been observed, as a general rule teas' ing, scolding, thwarting, contradicting, and hoodwinking." In the Greek plays, women have the key parts. There are few outsize female heroines in Roman ture, in which wives come in two varieties: the tyrannical rich and the spencithrlie poor. Roman literature is notably short as well on deceived husbands, a comic stag from Aristophanes to Moliere.)
No matter how she comported herself—at all times she seems to have been as deft with her image as her person—she broke every rule in the book. A queen at home, she was a courtesan out of her country. And she was something more dangerous still: a courtesan with means. Cleopatra was not merely economically independent, but richer than any man in Rome. Her very wealth—the same wealth that had fed Rome during the triumphs—impugned her morals. To wax eloquent on someone's embossed silver, his sumptuous carpets, his marble statuary, was to indict him. The implications were greater for the lesser sex. "There's nothing a woman doesn't allow herself, nothing she considers disgust-ing, once she has put an emerald choker around her neck and has fas-tened giant pearls to her elongated ears," went the logic. In that respect the length of her ears would do more to seal Cleopatra's fate than that of her nose.* Even assuming she had left her best jewelry in Alexandria, she was synonymous in Rome with the "reckless extravagance" of that world. It was no less than her birthright. (A proper Roman woman con-sidered her children her jewels.) By Roman standards, even Cleopatra's eunuchs were rich. This meant that every unpardonable evil in the prof-ligacy family attached itself to her. Well before she became the sorceress oflegend— a reckless, careless destroyer of men—she was suspect as an extrav-agance extravagant weak Easterner, a reckless, careless destroyer of wealth. If moral rbeis it turpitude began with shellfish and metastasized into purple and scarlet o 'less for lbund its ostentatious apogee in pearls, which topped the :ale in Rome. Suetonius invoked them to prove Caesar's luxury.
Monday, March 02, 2015
Cleopatra
By Stacy Schiff
At the outskirts of Rome a fragrant dusting of cassis, myrrh, and cinnamon hung in the air. Modest tombs and colossal mausoleums lined both sides of the road, as did shrines to Mercury, the patron saint of travelers. If they had not done so already, Caesar's representatives met Cleopatra outside the city walls and directed her, across a wooden bridge, to his large country estate, on the west bank of the Tiber. With assistance, Cleopatra settled on the southeastern part of the Janicu-lum Hill, a fine address if by no means as prestigious as those across town, on the opposite hill. In Caesar's villa she found herself sur-rounded by an extensive collection of painting and sculpture, a colon-naded court, and a mile-long, lushly planted garden, lavish by Roman standards, which to an Egyptian queen was fairly meaningless. By contrast she enjoyed a clear view of the city below. Through the pines and cypresses Cleopatra looked out over the yellowish Tiber to the outlying hills and the red-tile rooftops of Rome, a metropolis that consisted for the most part of a jumble of twisting lanes and densely packed tenements. Rome had recently overtaken Alexandria in popu-lation; in 46 it was home to nearly z million people. On all other levels it qualified as a provincial backwater. It was still the kind of place where a stray dog might deposit a human hand under the breakfast table, where an ox could burst into the dining room. As displacements went, this one was akin to sailing from the court of Versailles to eighteenth-century Philadelphia. In Alexandria, the glorious past Wa,: very much in evidence. Rome's glorious future was from Cleopatra quarters nowhere visible. It was just still possible to mistake which was the Old World and which the New. There is every indication that Cleopatra kept a low profile, low as she could keep under her unusual circumstances: "For she had come to the city with her husband and settled in Caesar's own house, so that he too derived an ill reputation on account of both of them," chides Dio. As everyone knew, Caesar lived in the center of town, near the Forum, with his wife, Calpurnia. Cleopatra's influence and that of her country were all the same much felt, directly and indi-rectly. On his return Caesar had begun to institute a number of reforms drawn from his Egyptian stay, during which he had evidently studied innovation as attentively as tradition. Most conspicuously, he went to work on the Roman calendar, which by 46 had crept three months ahead of the season. For some time a Roman year had con-sisted of 355 days, to which the authorities added an extra month irreg-ularly, when doing so suited their purposes. As Plutarch has it, "Only the priests could say the time, and they, at their pleasure, without giv-ing any notice, slipped in the intercalary month." The result was a thorough mess; at one juncture, Cicero did not know what year he was living in. Caesar adopted the Egyptian calendar of twelve thirty-day months, with an additional five-day period at the end of the year, subsequently deemed "the only intelligent calendar which ever existed in human history." He adopted as well the twelve-hour divi-sion between night and day that he had known in Alexandria. Gener-ally speaking, time was a vaguer, more elastic notion in Rome, where it was subject to perpetual debate.* Cleopatra's astronomers and math-ematicians assisted in Caesar's planning. The result was a bold correc-tion in .6, 4 the last year of muddled reckoning' and one of 445 days, the extra weeks inserted between November and December. The Egyptian episode had exerted a profound influence on Caesar; the only question in the eighteen months to come would be to what degree it had done so.
*As Seneca observed: "Easier for two philosophers to agree than two clocks."
At the outskirts of Rome a fragrant dusting of cassis, myrrh, and cinnamon hung in the air. Modest tombs and colossal mausoleums lined both sides of the road, as did shrines to Mercury, the patron saint of travelers. If they had not done so already, Caesar's representatives met Cleopatra outside the city walls and directed her, across a wooden bridge, to his large country estate, on the west bank of the Tiber. With assistance, Cleopatra settled on the southeastern part of the Janicu-lum Hill, a fine address if by no means as prestigious as those across town, on the opposite hill. In Caesar's villa she found herself sur-rounded by an extensive collection of painting and sculpture, a colon-naded court, and a mile-long, lushly planted garden, lavish by Roman standards, which to an Egyptian queen was fairly meaningless. By contrast she enjoyed a clear view of the city below. Through the pines and cypresses Cleopatra looked out over the yellowish Tiber to the outlying hills and the red-tile rooftops of Rome, a metropolis that consisted for the most part of a jumble of twisting lanes and densely packed tenements. Rome had recently overtaken Alexandria in popu-lation; in 46 it was home to nearly z million people. On all other levels it qualified as a provincial backwater. It was still the kind of place where a stray dog might deposit a human hand under the breakfast table, where an ox could burst into the dining room. As displacements went, this one was akin to sailing from the court of Versailles to eighteenth-century Philadelphia. In Alexandria, the glorious past Wa,: very much in evidence. Rome's glorious future was from Cleopatra quarters nowhere visible. It was just still possible to mistake which was the Old World and which the New. There is every indication that Cleopatra kept a low profile, low as she could keep under her unusual circumstances: "For she had come to the city with her husband and settled in Caesar's own house, so that he too derived an ill reputation on account of both of them," chides Dio. As everyone knew, Caesar lived in the center of town, near the Forum, with his wife, Calpurnia. Cleopatra's influence and that of her country were all the same much felt, directly and indi-rectly. On his return Caesar had begun to institute a number of reforms drawn from his Egyptian stay, during which he had evidently studied innovation as attentively as tradition. Most conspicuously, he went to work on the Roman calendar, which by 46 had crept three months ahead of the season. For some time a Roman year had con-sisted of 355 days, to which the authorities added an extra month irreg-ularly, when doing so suited their purposes. As Plutarch has it, "Only the priests could say the time, and they, at their pleasure, without giv-ing any notice, slipped in the intercalary month." The result was a thorough mess; at one juncture, Cicero did not know what year he was living in. Caesar adopted the Egyptian calendar of twelve thirty-day months, with an additional five-day period at the end of the year, subsequently deemed "the only intelligent calendar which ever existed in human history." He adopted as well the twelve-hour divi-sion between night and day that he had known in Alexandria. Gener-ally speaking, time was a vaguer, more elastic notion in Rome, where it was subject to perpetual debate.* Cleopatra's astronomers and math-ematicians assisted in Caesar's planning. The result was a bold correc-tion in .6, 4 the last year of muddled reckoning' and one of 445 days, the extra weeks inserted between November and December. The Egyptian episode had exerted a profound influence on Caesar; the only question in the eighteen months to come would be to what degree it had done so.
*As Seneca observed: "Easier for two philosophers to agree than two clocks."
Cecil B. DeMille
FRom Empire of Dreams:
As he was readying the production, Cecil wrote the playwright Stewart Edward White, "I am about to produce The Warrens of Virginia, and expect to kill a lot of perfectly good actors and some good horses. Why don't you come down and see the fun?" White responded: "Nothing would please me better ... especially if you will guarantee to kill a lot of actors." Cecil began The Warrens on December 5, finished it on January 9, 1915, and it was released on February 15. Cecil remembered that it was on that picture that
1914-1928 93
he devised what he referred to, with some exaggeration, as "the birth of artificial [screen] lighting." "When we first went to California, everything was sunlight. No artificial light was employed. Having come from the stage, I wanted an effect, so I borrowed a spotlight from an old theater in Los Angeles [DeMille later remembered it was the Mason Opera House] when I was taking a photograph of a spy. The spy was coming through a curtain and I lighted half of his face [with] only just a smash of light from one side, the other side being dark. I saw the effect on the screen and carried out that idea of lighting all through the rest of the picture, that is, a smash of light from one side or the other." When DeMille sent the finished picture east, Sam Goldfish sent a violent telegram: "Have you gone mad? Do you expect us to be able to sell a picture for full price when you show only half of the man?" "This isn't an exaggeration," DeMille would insist when telling the story in later years. "This is exactly as it occurred. . . I was really desperate. As I told you, the director has to go through; he has to do something. So Allah was very kind to me and suggested the phrase 'Rembrandt lighting.' I sent a telegram to New York saying 'If you fellows are so dumb that you don't know Rembrandt lighting when you see it, don't blame me.' The sales department said, 'Rembrandt light-ing! What a sales argument!' They took the picture out and charged the exhibitor twice as much for it because it had Rembrandt lighting." The story sounds a little too well rounded, the stuff of anecdotal history, but both DeMille and Lasky remembered the same set of circumstances and the same responses. Actually, "Rembrandt" lighting soon became "Lasky" lighting, because early filmmakers understood the importance of what a later generation called branding. "I was trying to get composition and light and shadow," DeMille would recall, "and I would say to [Alvin Wyckoff] 'You mustn't make this part so light, under the table mustn't be light—it should be dark and the back corner of the room shouldn't be light—it should be dark.' So they all said, 'He likes it contrasty'— contrasty!—that was the phrase. There were some terrible battles because of that, because that meant expose it for contrast. It didn't mean shadow it, it just meant make the whites whiter and the blacks blacker." DeMille films began to use spotlighting for dramatic effect, in the same way that it was used on the stage: to guide the viewer's eye and to heighten a dramatic moment with harsh pools of light in the midst of darkness. The result, as histo-rian Lea Jacobs noted, is "confined and shallow areas of illumination, sharp-edged shadows and a palpable sense of the directionality of light." DeMille's lighting was innovative for the movies, although it seems likely that he was adapting the techniques of David Belasco to the screen. but his concern with composition and lighting makes him a true innovator in a period where the principal concern was recording a clean unambiguous image.
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This is the way it was: Visitors stayed at the Hollywood Hotel, a wooden building at Hollywood and Highland that ran half a block fronting on Highland. It looked like a slightly shopworn summer hotel, with rocking chairs lined up on the front veranda. The lobby was small, and in the dining room food was served in white porcelain bowls that looked like bird baths. The rooms had matting instead of carpeting, the beds were iron, the windows had white net curtains, and there was a small closet with three hooks. "The odor," remembered Bessie Lasky, "was like left-over food that had been fried in stale bacon fat." The atmosphere was sleepy and depressing, the boarders "looking blank and useless, rocking alone on the porch, filling the air with futility and gloom, transparent in their shabby clothes." To get to the studio, people would either be picked up by the studio car, or rent horses and ride down Vine Street and tie the horses off in front of the barn with a large wooden sign: "Lasky Studio." Directly across the street was an orange grove with an old stucco house in the middle. People who had never been far west—or far south—would marvel at the orange blossoms and the way their scent could perfume the air for hundreds of yards, or the way the pepper trees on Vine swayed in the breeze. The hotel would send over box lunches: cold chicken, a hard-boiled egg, a piece of tomato, a bread and butter sandwich, and salt and pepper. Chairs would placed around the perimeter of the set. There, remembered Bessie Lasky, "the handsome, picturesque young director in puttees, boots and cap . . . acted out the scenes for the people and put on the best show himself."
As he was readying the production, Cecil wrote the playwright Stewart Edward White, "I am about to produce The Warrens of Virginia, and expect to kill a lot of perfectly good actors and some good horses. Why don't you come down and see the fun?" White responded: "Nothing would please me better ... especially if you will guarantee to kill a lot of actors." Cecil began The Warrens on December 5, finished it on January 9, 1915, and it was released on February 15. Cecil remembered that it was on that picture that
1914-1928 93
he devised what he referred to, with some exaggeration, as "the birth of artificial [screen] lighting." "When we first went to California, everything was sunlight. No artificial light was employed. Having come from the stage, I wanted an effect, so I borrowed a spotlight from an old theater in Los Angeles [DeMille later remembered it was the Mason Opera House] when I was taking a photograph of a spy. The spy was coming through a curtain and I lighted half of his face [with] only just a smash of light from one side, the other side being dark. I saw the effect on the screen and carried out that idea of lighting all through the rest of the picture, that is, a smash of light from one side or the other." When DeMille sent the finished picture east, Sam Goldfish sent a violent telegram: "Have you gone mad? Do you expect us to be able to sell a picture for full price when you show only half of the man?" "This isn't an exaggeration," DeMille would insist when telling the story in later years. "This is exactly as it occurred. . . I was really desperate. As I told you, the director has to go through; he has to do something. So Allah was very kind to me and suggested the phrase 'Rembrandt lighting.' I sent a telegram to New York saying 'If you fellows are so dumb that you don't know Rembrandt lighting when you see it, don't blame me.' The sales department said, 'Rembrandt light-ing! What a sales argument!' They took the picture out and charged the exhibitor twice as much for it because it had Rembrandt lighting." The story sounds a little too well rounded, the stuff of anecdotal history, but both DeMille and Lasky remembered the same set of circumstances and the same responses. Actually, "Rembrandt" lighting soon became "Lasky" lighting, because early filmmakers understood the importance of what a later generation called branding. "I was trying to get composition and light and shadow," DeMille would recall, "and I would say to [Alvin Wyckoff] 'You mustn't make this part so light, under the table mustn't be light—it should be dark and the back corner of the room shouldn't be light—it should be dark.' So they all said, 'He likes it contrasty'— contrasty!—that was the phrase. There were some terrible battles because of that, because that meant expose it for contrast. It didn't mean shadow it, it just meant make the whites whiter and the blacks blacker." DeMille films began to use spotlighting for dramatic effect, in the same way that it was used on the stage: to guide the viewer's eye and to heighten a dramatic moment with harsh pools of light in the midst of darkness. The result, as histo-rian Lea Jacobs noted, is "confined and shallow areas of illumination, sharp-edged shadows and a palpable sense of the directionality of light." DeMille's lighting was innovative for the movies, although it seems likely that he was adapting the techniques of David Belasco to the screen. but his concern with composition and lighting makes him a true innovator in a period where the principal concern was recording a clean unambiguous image.
and
This is the way it was: Visitors stayed at the Hollywood Hotel, a wooden building at Hollywood and Highland that ran half a block fronting on Highland. It looked like a slightly shopworn summer hotel, with rocking chairs lined up on the front veranda. The lobby was small, and in the dining room food was served in white porcelain bowls that looked like bird baths. The rooms had matting instead of carpeting, the beds were iron, the windows had white net curtains, and there was a small closet with three hooks. "The odor," remembered Bessie Lasky, "was like left-over food that had been fried in stale bacon fat." The atmosphere was sleepy and depressing, the boarders "looking blank and useless, rocking alone on the porch, filling the air with futility and gloom, transparent in their shabby clothes." To get to the studio, people would either be picked up by the studio car, or rent horses and ride down Vine Street and tie the horses off in front of the barn with a large wooden sign: "Lasky Studio." Directly across the street was an orange grove with an old stucco house in the middle. People who had never been far west—or far south—would marvel at the orange blossoms and the way their scent could perfume the air for hundreds of yards, or the way the pepper trees on Vine swayed in the breeze. The hotel would send over box lunches: cold chicken, a hard-boiled egg, a piece of tomato, a bread and butter sandwich, and salt and pepper. Chairs would placed around the perimeter of the set. There, remembered Bessie Lasky, "the handsome, picturesque young director in puttees, boots and cap . . . acted out the scenes for the people and put on the best show himself."
Sunday, March 01, 2015
Agent Zigzag
ALL WARS - BUT this war in particular—tend to be seen in mono-chrome: good and evil, winner and loser, champion and coward, loyalist and traitor. For most people, the reality of war is not like that, but rather a monotonous gray of discomforts and compro-mises, with occasional flashes of violent color. War is too messy to . produce easy heroes and villains; there are always brave people on the wrong side, and evil men among the victors, and a mass of per-fectly ordinary people struggling to survive and understand in be-tween. Away from the battlefields, war forces individuals to make impossible choices in circumstances they did not create, and could never have expected. Most accommodate, some collaborate, and a very few find an internal compass they never knew they had, point-ing to the right path.
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"There is a well-defined class of people prone to spy mania," wrote Churchill, who was not immune to the mania himself. "War is the heyday of these worthy folk." German spies were spotted everywhere, and nowhere. Police were deluged with reports of strange figures in disguise, lights flash-ing at night, burning haystacks, and paranoid neighbors hearing tapping through the walls. One avid amateur spy catcher reported seeing a man with a "typically Prussian neck." Robert Baden-Powell, the original scoutmaster, insisted you could spot a German spy from the way he walked. Anyone and everyone might be a spy. Evelyn Waugh lampooned the frenzy: "Suspect everyone—the vicar, the vil-lage grocer, the farmer whose family have lived here for a hundred years, all the most unlikely people." The spies were said to be spreading newspaper on the ground to give secret signals to air-borne Germans, poisoning chocolate, infiltrating the police, re-cruiting lunatics from asylums to act in a suicide squad, and sending out murderous agents into the British countryside disguised as fe-male hitchhikers. Vast energy and resources was devoted to following up the re-ports, with a complete lack of success. The most grievous outcome of the panic was the internment of twenty-seven thousand Germans, Italians, and other "enemy aliens," most of whom were not only in-nocent, but also strongly opposed to Nazism. The failure to uncover the plotters merely redoubled the conviction that they must be agents of the highest quality. The secret service, wrote an insider, "was left with the very uncomfortable feeling that there must be agents in this country whom it was unable to discover." The simple truth was that apart from Arthur Owens and his band of imaginary Welsh extremists, the Abwehr had utterly failed to recruit an effective team of spies in Britain before the war. But as Operation Sea Lion, the plan for the German invasion of Britain, took shape, the German secret service set about rectifying this fail-ure with a vengeance. From late 1940, as the air duel between the RAF and the Luftwaffe intensified, the Abwehr began pouring agents into Britain: They came by rubber dinghy, U-boat, seaplane, and parachute; they came disguised as refugees and seamen. Some
came armed with the latest wireless transmitters and carefully forged identity documents; others arrived with nothing more than the clothes they stood up in. Between September and November 1940, it is estimated that at least twenty-one Abwehr agents were dis-patched to Britain, with instructions to report on troop movements, identify and sabotage targets vital to British defense, prepare for the imminent invasion, and then mingle with the retreating British army. A list of prominent Britons to be arrested by the Gestapo was drawn up, and at the Abwehr headquarters in Berlin there was little doubt that Hitler's storm troopers would soon be marching down Whitehall. The Abwehr spies were a mixed bag. Some were Nazi ideo-logues, but most were the human jetsam that tends to float toward the spy world: opportunists, criminals, and a handful of fantasists. The vast majority of the "invasion spies" had one thing in common, though: They were amateurs. Many spoke English badly, or not at all. Few had received more than rudimentary training. They were poorly briefed and often ignorant of English life. One was arrested after he tried to pay £10 and 6 shillings for a train ticket costing "ten and six." The Abwehr would never find out that its entire espionage pro-gram in Britain had been discovered, dismantled, and turned against it. Many of its agents, it is true, seemed to vanish without a trace, but this was only to be expected. Several had begun sending messages by wireless and secret ink, and a few seemed to be flourish-ing undercover. That, at least, is what Hitler was told. Yet the more professional and experienced German intelligence officers knew that the caliber of spies being sent to Britain was pitifully low. The little information coming out of Britain was low-grade stuff. No sab-otage operation of any note had been carried out. The Abwehr leadership decided that in order to penetrate Britain's intelligence defenses, they would need to look beyond the eager amateurs deployed so far. An altogether superior sort of spy was needed: someone handpicked and properly trained by profes-sionals for a specific, highly dangerous mission. This individual should be dedicated, ruthless, and, if possible, British.
and
"There is a well-defined class of people prone to spy mania," wrote Churchill, who was not immune to the mania himself. "War is the heyday of these worthy folk." German spies were spotted everywhere, and nowhere. Police were deluged with reports of strange figures in disguise, lights flash-ing at night, burning haystacks, and paranoid neighbors hearing tapping through the walls. One avid amateur spy catcher reported seeing a man with a "typically Prussian neck." Robert Baden-Powell, the original scoutmaster, insisted you could spot a German spy from the way he walked. Anyone and everyone might be a spy. Evelyn Waugh lampooned the frenzy: "Suspect everyone—the vicar, the vil-lage grocer, the farmer whose family have lived here for a hundred years, all the most unlikely people." The spies were said to be spreading newspaper on the ground to give secret signals to air-borne Germans, poisoning chocolate, infiltrating the police, re-cruiting lunatics from asylums to act in a suicide squad, and sending out murderous agents into the British countryside disguised as fe-male hitchhikers. Vast energy and resources was devoted to following up the re-ports, with a complete lack of success. The most grievous outcome of the panic was the internment of twenty-seven thousand Germans, Italians, and other "enemy aliens," most of whom were not only in-nocent, but also strongly opposed to Nazism. The failure to uncover the plotters merely redoubled the conviction that they must be agents of the highest quality. The secret service, wrote an insider, "was left with the very uncomfortable feeling that there must be agents in this country whom it was unable to discover." The simple truth was that apart from Arthur Owens and his band of imaginary Welsh extremists, the Abwehr had utterly failed to recruit an effective team of spies in Britain before the war. But as Operation Sea Lion, the plan for the German invasion of Britain, took shape, the German secret service set about rectifying this fail-ure with a vengeance. From late 1940, as the air duel between the RAF and the Luftwaffe intensified, the Abwehr began pouring agents into Britain: They came by rubber dinghy, U-boat, seaplane, and parachute; they came disguised as refugees and seamen. Some
came armed with the latest wireless transmitters and carefully forged identity documents; others arrived with nothing more than the clothes they stood up in. Between September and November 1940, it is estimated that at least twenty-one Abwehr agents were dis-patched to Britain, with instructions to report on troop movements, identify and sabotage targets vital to British defense, prepare for the imminent invasion, and then mingle with the retreating British army. A list of prominent Britons to be arrested by the Gestapo was drawn up, and at the Abwehr headquarters in Berlin there was little doubt that Hitler's storm troopers would soon be marching down Whitehall. The Abwehr spies were a mixed bag. Some were Nazi ideo-logues, but most were the human jetsam that tends to float toward the spy world: opportunists, criminals, and a handful of fantasists. The vast majority of the "invasion spies" had one thing in common, though: They were amateurs. Many spoke English badly, or not at all. Few had received more than rudimentary training. They were poorly briefed and often ignorant of English life. One was arrested after he tried to pay £10 and 6 shillings for a train ticket costing "ten and six." The Abwehr would never find out that its entire espionage pro-gram in Britain had been discovered, dismantled, and turned against it. Many of its agents, it is true, seemed to vanish without a trace, but this was only to be expected. Several had begun sending messages by wireless and secret ink, and a few seemed to be flourish-ing undercover. That, at least, is what Hitler was told. Yet the more professional and experienced German intelligence officers knew that the caliber of spies being sent to Britain was pitifully low. The little information coming out of Britain was low-grade stuff. No sab-otage operation of any note had been carried out. The Abwehr leadership decided that in order to penetrate Britain's intelligence defenses, they would need to look beyond the eager amateurs deployed so far. An altogether superior sort of spy was needed: someone handpicked and properly trained by profes-sionals for a specific, highly dangerous mission. This individual should be dedicated, ruthless, and, if possible, British.
1876
Yet I have, as much as possible, avoided them. Somehow they never seem to fit our way of life at Paris: this includes Bryant, though he and I have met in Europe off and on over the years, usually in Italy. I once debated (and the negative won) taking him to Princess Mathilde's, where he might meet her circle, particularly my especial friend Taine, as well as such amusing novelists as Gautier, the Goncourt brothers and the Russian Turgenev. But somehow I could not imagine William Cullen Bryant in that circle (where even I, after forty years, am still known as the "blond wild Indian"). I fear that that brilliant circle would sooner roast a waterfowl than apostrophize it. Lately the young journalist-writers have been descending on Europe like termites on an ancient frame house, and London has taken them very much to heart. The English can never get enough of the grotesque; they particularly delight in those Americans who seem to them truly American, preferably the ones with long hair and Western twangs, who chew tobacco and tell tall tales—ah, those tall tales of wild Indians and of drunken bears and of jumping frogs. N.P. Willis, Joaquin Miller, Mark Twain and, most interesting of all, I am told, a Californian called (I think) Pierce whose work I have not read, but whose brilliant mordant conversation has been reported to me by the Princess Mathilde who hears of him from the Empress at Chislehurst. Our Empress may be bored by literary men and explorers, but appar-ently a son of the American West has discovered how to make her exile amusing. Needless to say, nothing west of Seine-et-Oise interests Paris, including, alas, their former Empress. Stedman mentioned any number of literary men I must meet and I pretended interest, although I have never found congenial the company of professional writers. Also I do not read novels anymore while today's poetry makes me quite angry, since, at best it is no more than carefully ruined prose.
and
From her voice I could not guess her mood. I suspect that this is because we now speak only English to each other and in English she is someone else as am I. Languages do bend one morally to their grammatical requirements.
and
Gilder has sent me a number of books he thinks I should read. The new work by Mark Twain is all about a boy in a small town on the Mississippi. I cannot say that the doings of any boy quite seizes my attention. I suspect that this book is more in the line of William de La Touche Clancey. Thumbing through it, I did find some nice jokes, no doubt taken from the lecture hall. Yet, when it comes to raw Western vernacular, I much prefer the novels of Edward Eggleston, particularly The Hoosier Schoolmaster. Although a clergyman, Eggleston appears not to like Christian-ity, at least in its more wild evangelical frontier manifestations, and I can read him as easily as I do Balzac. I have also been fascinated by a writer named De Forest—a failure according to everyone in publishing. Gilder concedes the man's talent, "but novels are for the ladies and his are much too brutal, too close to sordid life, too full of politics." In other words too interesting and too real. The curious thing about this ongoing "aesthetic" debate be-tween the romantic writers on the one hand and the realists on the other is that neither school achieves anything but romantic false effects. American realists feel that to describe the workings of a factory is somehow to be vivid and truthful, and to a point they are right. But when it comes to writing about the men and women in the factories and what they really do to one another, particularly at work or within marriage, these realists are every bit as romantic and unrealistic as the popular, busy women writ-ers or even, to turn to the highest peak, that dark veiled lady of New England letters Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, faced with any truth about the way we are, swiftly evokes ghosts and haunted houses on those nights when silvery clouds cross a beauteous skull-like but, oh, so fictive moon. If I were more interested I would do something on the French realists, who are not much known here. Howells at the Atlantic seems well-disposed; he has even written on Turgenev. Yet when one reads his own easy lady-flattering fictions, one wonders if for all his intelligence he can ever cease to be the opposite of what he affects to admire. I have several times mentioned Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale as a novel that perfectly shows human life as it is—the undifferentiated drift down the years which most lives are—and yet the author is able to make every eddy in that slow progress glitter with some truthful light, so unlike the fool-ish jokes of a Mark Twain or the melodramatic romances of Hawthorne.
and
From her voice I could not guess her mood. I suspect that this is because we now speak only English to each other and in English she is someone else as am I. Languages do bend one morally to their grammatical requirements.
and
Gilder has sent me a number of books he thinks I should read. The new work by Mark Twain is all about a boy in a small town on the Mississippi. I cannot say that the doings of any boy quite seizes my attention. I suspect that this book is more in the line of William de La Touche Clancey. Thumbing through it, I did find some nice jokes, no doubt taken from the lecture hall. Yet, when it comes to raw Western vernacular, I much prefer the novels of Edward Eggleston, particularly The Hoosier Schoolmaster. Although a clergyman, Eggleston appears not to like Christian-ity, at least in its more wild evangelical frontier manifestations, and I can read him as easily as I do Balzac. I have also been fascinated by a writer named De Forest—a failure according to everyone in publishing. Gilder concedes the man's talent, "but novels are for the ladies and his are much too brutal, too close to sordid life, too full of politics." In other words too interesting and too real. The curious thing about this ongoing "aesthetic" debate be-tween the romantic writers on the one hand and the realists on the other is that neither school achieves anything but romantic false effects. American realists feel that to describe the workings of a factory is somehow to be vivid and truthful, and to a point they are right. But when it comes to writing about the men and women in the factories and what they really do to one another, particularly at work or within marriage, these realists are every bit as romantic and unrealistic as the popular, busy women writ-ers or even, to turn to the highest peak, that dark veiled lady of New England letters Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, faced with any truth about the way we are, swiftly evokes ghosts and haunted houses on those nights when silvery clouds cross a beauteous skull-like but, oh, so fictive moon. If I were more interested I would do something on the French realists, who are not much known here. Howells at the Atlantic seems well-disposed; he has even written on Turgenev. Yet when one reads his own easy lady-flattering fictions, one wonders if for all his intelligence he can ever cease to be the opposite of what he affects to admire. I have several times mentioned Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale as a novel that perfectly shows human life as it is—the undifferentiated drift down the years which most lives are—and yet the author is able to make every eddy in that slow progress glitter with some truthful light, so unlike the fool-ish jokes of a Mark Twain or the melodramatic romances of Hawthorne.
Monday, February 23, 2015
MURDER!
Sick to the point that I could only read Agatha Christie and then had fever dreams of the mystery's solution.
1876
Emma is to spend the day with John’s sister, visiting the shops
—or stores, as they call them here. Did they always? Or have I
forgotten? It is plain that I am no longer a New Yorker. But then
this New York is no longer the New York that was.
Restless, the article finished and sealed in its envelope and
addressed to Harper? Monthly, I decided to take Bryant at his
word and pay him a breakfast call. He lives now at 24 West
Sixteenth Street.
Without delight, I entrusted myself to the perpendicular rail-
way. “Fine morning, sir. But near to freezing,” said the operator
who looked to be, at the very least, a commodore in full uniform.
#
In no time at all, Bryant returned, fully clothed and the picture
of, as the British say, rude health. Together we descended to the
drafty downstairs dining room furnished with depressingly “sin-
cere” Eastlake furniture.
We breakfasted alone. Bryant’s wife died ten years ago and “my
daughter ]ulia is out of the city. So I am a bachelor.”
The maid served us hominy with milk, brown bread and but-
ter. I waited for tea, for colfee—in vain.
Bryant was greatly affected by Tweed’s escape from prison.
“Of course he paid his gaolers. They’re all alike, you know.” Who
“they” were he did not specify, but I assume that he meant the
lower orders, the Democrats, the Irish, the enemies of the Repub-
lican Evening Post, which supports the Grant Administration re-
gardless of scandal. The radical crusading spirit is now entirely
dead at the Post. But Bryant is old.
Glumly I chewed brown bread whilst Bryant expressed him-
self at length on the hopeless corruption of New York City until,
bored, I diverted him with an inquiry about his forthcoming
history of the United States.
#
What,” I asked, only because it has been preoccupying me
since my arrival yesterday, “has happened to the American
voice?”
“Voice?” Bigelow was startled by the question; his own is
resonant and clear, like Bryant’s.
“Yes, voice. The way Americans speak.”
“You mean the immigrants? Well, it takes time . . .”
“No, I mean the Americans. Like us. When I lived here, people
spoke like you, like me . . .”
“But you had a Dutch accent, Charlie, which you’ve gone and
lost in Paris!”
I don’t know why that should have made me want to blush, but
it did. In my youth, Dutch-ness was a sort of prickly virtue to us
and an occasion for dull mockery to others.
“Certainly I never . . . we never spoke through our noses. Or
made that curious flat whining sound. One hears it everywhere.
And the women! Is there anything more dreadful than an Ameri-
can woman’s laughter?”
Bigelow was amused. After some thought, he agreed that there
has been a change in the way our countrymen speak. He thinks
it might be the influence of those popular fundamentalist church
groups that go in for “canting”—the word for praying aloud in
a whining nasal voice.
I thought that this might make an interesting article for Har-
per’s, but Bigelow thought not. “No one may criticize American
manners, except at a safe distance like Paris. When do you go
back?”
—or stores, as they call them here. Did they always? Or have I
forgotten? It is plain that I am no longer a New Yorker. But then
this New York is no longer the New York that was.
Restless, the article finished and sealed in its envelope and
addressed to Harper? Monthly, I decided to take Bryant at his
word and pay him a breakfast call. He lives now at 24 West
Sixteenth Street.
Without delight, I entrusted myself to the perpendicular rail-
way. “Fine morning, sir. But near to freezing,” said the operator
who looked to be, at the very least, a commodore in full uniform.
#
In no time at all, Bryant returned, fully clothed and the picture
of, as the British say, rude health. Together we descended to the
drafty downstairs dining room furnished with depressingly “sin-
cere” Eastlake furniture.
We breakfasted alone. Bryant’s wife died ten years ago and “my
daughter ]ulia is out of the city. So I am a bachelor.”
The maid served us hominy with milk, brown bread and but-
ter. I waited for tea, for colfee—in vain.
Bryant was greatly affected by Tweed’s escape from prison.
“Of course he paid his gaolers. They’re all alike, you know.” Who
“they” were he did not specify, but I assume that he meant the
lower orders, the Democrats, the Irish, the enemies of the Repub-
lican Evening Post, which supports the Grant Administration re-
gardless of scandal. The radical crusading spirit is now entirely
dead at the Post. But Bryant is old.
Glumly I chewed brown bread whilst Bryant expressed him-
self at length on the hopeless corruption of New York City until,
bored, I diverted him with an inquiry about his forthcoming
history of the United States.
#
What,” I asked, only because it has been preoccupying me
since my arrival yesterday, “has happened to the American
voice?”
“Voice?” Bigelow was startled by the question; his own is
resonant and clear, like Bryant’s.
“Yes, voice. The way Americans speak.”
“You mean the immigrants? Well, it takes time . . .”
“No, I mean the Americans. Like us. When I lived here, people
spoke like you, like me . . .”
“But you had a Dutch accent, Charlie, which you’ve gone and
lost in Paris!”
I don’t know why that should have made me want to blush, but
it did. In my youth, Dutch-ness was a sort of prickly virtue to us
and an occasion for dull mockery to others.
“Certainly I never . . . we never spoke through our noses. Or
made that curious flat whining sound. One hears it everywhere.
And the women! Is there anything more dreadful than an Ameri-
can woman’s laughter?”
Bigelow was amused. After some thought, he agreed that there
has been a change in the way our countrymen speak. He thinks
it might be the influence of those popular fundamentalist church
groups that go in for “canting”—the word for praying aloud in
a whining nasal voice.
I thought that this might make an interesting article for Har-
per’s, but Bigelow thought not. “No one may criticize American
manners, except at a safe distance like Paris. When do you go
back?”
Wednesday, February 11, 2015
Wolf Hall
There is an obdurate winter ahead. But he feels a force ready to break, as
spring breaks from the dead tree. As the word of God spreads, the peoplgs
eyes are opened to new truths. Until now, like Helen Barre, they knew
Noah and the Flood, but not St. Paul. They could count over the SO1'1‘OW$ of
our Blessed Mother, and say how the damned are carried down to Hell. But
they did not know the manifold miracles and sayings of Christ, nor the
words and deeds of the apostles, simple men who, like the poor of London,
pursued simple wordless trades. The story is much bigger than they ever
thought it was. He says to his ‘nephew Richard, you cannot tell people just
part of the tale and then stop, or just tell them the parts you choose. They
have seen their religion painted on the walls of churches, or carved in stone,
but now God’s pen is poised, and he is ready to write his words in the
books of their hearts.
But in these same streets Chapuys sees the stirrings of sedition, a city
ready to open its gates to the Emperor. He was not at the sack of Rome but
there are nights when he dreams of it as if he had been there: the black guts
spilled on antique pavements, the half-dead draped in the fountains, the
chiming of bells through the marsh fog, and the flames of arsonists’ torches
leaping along the walls. Rome has fallen and everything within it; it was
not invaders but Pope Iulius himself who knocked down old St. Peter’s,
which had stood for twelve hundred years, the site where the Emperor
Constantine himself had dug the first trench, twelve scoops of soil, one for
each of the apostles; where the Christian martyrs, sewn into the skins of
wild beasts, had been torn apart by dogs. Twenty-five feet he dug down to
lay his new foundations, through a necropolis, through twelve centuries of
fish bones and ash, his workmen’s shovels powdering the skulls of saints. In
the place where martyrs had bled, ghost-white boulders stood: marble,
waiting for Michelangelo.
In the street he sees a priest carrying the host, no doubt to a dying
Londoner; the passers—by uncover their heads and kneel, but a boy leans
out of an upper window and jeers, “Show us your Christ—is-Risen. Sh0W
us your Jack-in-the-Box.” He glances up; the boy’s face, before it van-
ishes, is vivid with rage.
He says to Cranmer, these people want a good authority, one they Can
properly obey. For centuries Rome has asked them to believe what 0111)’
children could believe. Surely they will find it more natural to obey an E11‘
glish king, who will exercise his powers under Parliament and under God-
Two days after he sees More shivering at the sermon, he conveys 3
a pardon to Lady Exeter. It comes with some blistering words from the
king, directed to her husband. It is St. Catherine’s Day: in honor of the
saint who was threatened with martyrdom on the wheel- we all walk in circles
to our destination. At least, that’s the theory. He has never seen any-
one over the age of twelve actually doing it.
. There’s a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through
the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an ax when you take it into
your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold
back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted
thing.
rs, >
spring breaks from the dead tree. As the word of God spreads, the peoplgs
eyes are opened to new truths. Until now, like Helen Barre, they knew
Noah and the Flood, but not St. Paul. They could count over the SO1'1‘OW$ of
our Blessed Mother, and say how the damned are carried down to Hell. But
they did not know the manifold miracles and sayings of Christ, nor the
words and deeds of the apostles, simple men who, like the poor of London,
pursued simple wordless trades. The story is much bigger than they ever
thought it was. He says to his ‘nephew Richard, you cannot tell people just
part of the tale and then stop, or just tell them the parts you choose. They
have seen their religion painted on the walls of churches, or carved in stone,
but now God’s pen is poised, and he is ready to write his words in the
books of their hearts.
But in these same streets Chapuys sees the stirrings of sedition, a city
ready to open its gates to the Emperor. He was not at the sack of Rome but
there are nights when he dreams of it as if he had been there: the black guts
spilled on antique pavements, the half-dead draped in the fountains, the
chiming of bells through the marsh fog, and the flames of arsonists’ torches
leaping along the walls. Rome has fallen and everything within it; it was
not invaders but Pope Iulius himself who knocked down old St. Peter’s,
which had stood for twelve hundred years, the site where the Emperor
Constantine himself had dug the first trench, twelve scoops of soil, one for
each of the apostles; where the Christian martyrs, sewn into the skins of
wild beasts, had been torn apart by dogs. Twenty-five feet he dug down to
lay his new foundations, through a necropolis, through twelve centuries of
fish bones and ash, his workmen’s shovels powdering the skulls of saints. In
the place where martyrs had bled, ghost-white boulders stood: marble,
waiting for Michelangelo.
In the street he sees a priest carrying the host, no doubt to a dying
Londoner; the passers—by uncover their heads and kneel, but a boy leans
out of an upper window and jeers, “Show us your Christ—is-Risen. Sh0W
us your Jack-in-the-Box.” He glances up; the boy’s face, before it van-
ishes, is vivid with rage.
He says to Cranmer, these people want a good authority, one they Can
properly obey. For centuries Rome has asked them to believe what 0111)’
children could believe. Surely they will find it more natural to obey an E11‘
glish king, who will exercise his powers under Parliament and under God-
Two days after he sees More shivering at the sermon, he conveys 3
a pardon to Lady Exeter. It comes with some blistering words from the
king, directed to her husband. It is St. Catherine’s Day: in honor of the
saint who was threatened with martyrdom on the wheel- we all walk in circles
to our destination. At least, that’s the theory. He has never seen any-
one over the age of twelve actually doing it.
. There’s a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through
the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an ax when you take it into
your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold
back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted
thing.
rs, >
Saturday, January 31, 2015
The Pursuit of Love
Uncle Matthew fell asleep practically at the
dinner-table. He would then doze in his business-room
for an hour or so before dragging himself, in a somnam-
bulist trance, to bed, Where he slept the profound sleep of
one who has been out of doors all day until cockcrow the
following morning, when he became very much awake.
This was the time for his never-ending warfare with the
housemaids over wood-ash. The rooms at Alconleigh
were heated by wood fires, and Uncle Matthew main-
tained, rightly, that if these were to function properly, all
the ash ought to be left in the fireplaces in a great hot
smouldering heap. Every housemaid, however, for some
reason (an early training with coal fires probably) was
bent on removing this ash altogether. When shakings,
imprecations, and being pounced out at by Uncle Mat-
thew in his paisley dressing-gown at six a.m., had con-
vinced them that this was really not feasible, they became
absolutely determined to remove, by hook or by crook,
just a little, a shovelful or so, every morning. I can only
suppose they felt that like this they were asserting their
personalities.
The result was guerrilla warfare at its most exciting.
Housemaids are notoriously early risers, and can usually
count upon three clear hours when a house belongs to
them alone. But not at Alconleigh. Uncle Matthew was
always, winter and summer alike, out of his bed by five
a.m., and it was then his habit to wander about, looking
like Great Agrippa in his dressing-gown, and drinking
endless cups of tea out of a thermos flask, until about
seven, when he would have his bath. Breakfast for my
uncle, my aunt, family and guests alike, was sharp at eight,
and unpunctuality was not tolerated. Uncle Matthew was
no respecter of other people’s early morning sleep, and,
after five o’clock one could not count on any, for he raged
round the house, clanking cups of tea, shouting at his
dogs, roaring at the housemaids, cracking the stock whips
which he had brought back from Canada on the lawn
with a noise greater than gun-fire, and all to the accom-
paniment of Galli Curci on his gramophone, an abnor-
mally loud one with an enormous horn, through which
Would be shrieked “Una voce poco fa”—-“The Mad
Song” from Lucia—“L0, here the gen-tel lar-ha-hark”—
and so on, played at top speed, thus rendering them even
higher and more screeching than they ought to be.
Nothing reminds me of my childhood days at Alcon-
ltfigh so much as those songs. Uncle Matthew played them
incessantly for years, until the spell was broken when he
Went all the way to Liverpool to hear Galli Curci in
Person. The disillusionment caused by her appearance was
$0 great that the records remained ever after silent, and
Were replaced by the deepest bass voices that money
could buy,
and
THE engagement was duly announced in The Timex.
The Kroesigs now invited the Alconleighs to spend a
Saturday to Monday at their house near Guildford. Lady
Kroesig, in her letter to Aunt Sadie, called it a Week-end,
and said it would be nice to get to know each other bet-
ter. Uncle Matthew flew into a furious temper. It was one
of his idiosyncrasies that, not only did he never stay in
other people’s houses (except, very occasionally, with
relations), but he regarded it as a positive insult that he
should be invited to do so. He despised the expression
“week-end,” and gave a sarcastic snort at the idea that it
would be nice to know the Kroesigs better.
and
He did not succeed in making an asset out of Linda.
Poor Linda was incapable of understanding the Kroesig
point of view; try as she might (and in the beginning she
tried very hard, having an infinite desire to please) it re-
mained mysterious to her. The fact is that, for the first
time in her life, she found herself face to face with the
bourgeois attitude of mind; and the fate often foreseen for
me by Uncle Matthew as a result of my middle-class ed-
ucation had actually befallen her. The outward and visible
signs which he so deprecated were all there—the Kroesigs
said notepaper, perfume, mirror and mantelpiece, they
even invited her to call them Father and Mother, which,
in the first flush of love, she did, only to spend the rest of
her married life trying to get out of it by addressing them
to their faces as “you,” and communicating with them by
postcard or telegram. Inwardly their spirit was utterly
commercial, everything was seen by them in terms of
money. It was their barrier, their defence, their hope for
the future, their support for the present, it raised them
above their fellowmen, and with it they Warded off evil.
The only mental qualities that they respected were those
Which produced money in substantial quantities, it was
their one criterion of success, it was power and it was
glory. To say that a man was poor was to label him a rot-
ter, bad at his job, idle, feckless, immoral.
and
She was far too young to be interested in politics, which were
anyhow, in those days before Hitler came along to brighten
them up, a very esoteric amusement.
and
Linda looked at the list of families. It took the form Qf
a card index, the head of each family having a card on
which was written the number and names of his depend-
ents. ~
“It doesn’t give their ages,” said Linda. “How am I to
know if there are young babies?”
“That’s a point,” said Robert. “HoW is she to?”
“Quite easy,” said Christian. “With Spaniards you can
always tell. Before the war they were called either after
saints or after episodes in the sex life of the Virgin-
Annunciata, Asuncion, Purificacion, Concepcion, Consal-
acion, etc. Since the Civil War they are all called Carlos
after Charlie Marx, Federico after Freddie Engels or Es-
talina (very popular until the Russians let them down
with a wallop), or else nice slogans like Solidaridad-Ob-
reara, Libertad, and so on. Then you know the children
are under three. Couldn’t be simpler, really.”
dinner-table. He would then doze in his business-room
for an hour or so before dragging himself, in a somnam-
bulist trance, to bed, Where he slept the profound sleep of
one who has been out of doors all day until cockcrow the
following morning, when he became very much awake.
This was the time for his never-ending warfare with the
housemaids over wood-ash. The rooms at Alconleigh
were heated by wood fires, and Uncle Matthew main-
tained, rightly, that if these were to function properly, all
the ash ought to be left in the fireplaces in a great hot
smouldering heap. Every housemaid, however, for some
reason (an early training with coal fires probably) was
bent on removing this ash altogether. When shakings,
imprecations, and being pounced out at by Uncle Mat-
thew in his paisley dressing-gown at six a.m., had con-
vinced them that this was really not feasible, they became
absolutely determined to remove, by hook or by crook,
just a little, a shovelful or so, every morning. I can only
suppose they felt that like this they were asserting their
personalities.
The result was guerrilla warfare at its most exciting.
Housemaids are notoriously early risers, and can usually
count upon three clear hours when a house belongs to
them alone. But not at Alconleigh. Uncle Matthew was
always, winter and summer alike, out of his bed by five
a.m., and it was then his habit to wander about, looking
like Great Agrippa in his dressing-gown, and drinking
endless cups of tea out of a thermos flask, until about
seven, when he would have his bath. Breakfast for my
uncle, my aunt, family and guests alike, was sharp at eight,
and unpunctuality was not tolerated. Uncle Matthew was
no respecter of other people’s early morning sleep, and,
after five o’clock one could not count on any, for he raged
round the house, clanking cups of tea, shouting at his
dogs, roaring at the housemaids, cracking the stock whips
which he had brought back from Canada on the lawn
with a noise greater than gun-fire, and all to the accom-
paniment of Galli Curci on his gramophone, an abnor-
mally loud one with an enormous horn, through which
Would be shrieked “Una voce poco fa”—-“The Mad
Song” from Lucia—“L0, here the gen-tel lar-ha-hark”—
and so on, played at top speed, thus rendering them even
higher and more screeching than they ought to be.
Nothing reminds me of my childhood days at Alcon-
ltfigh so much as those songs. Uncle Matthew played them
incessantly for years, until the spell was broken when he
Went all the way to Liverpool to hear Galli Curci in
Person. The disillusionment caused by her appearance was
$0 great that the records remained ever after silent, and
Were replaced by the deepest bass voices that money
could buy,
and
THE engagement was duly announced in The Timex.
The Kroesigs now invited the Alconleighs to spend a
Saturday to Monday at their house near Guildford. Lady
Kroesig, in her letter to Aunt Sadie, called it a Week-end,
and said it would be nice to get to know each other bet-
ter. Uncle Matthew flew into a furious temper. It was one
of his idiosyncrasies that, not only did he never stay in
other people’s houses (except, very occasionally, with
relations), but he regarded it as a positive insult that he
should be invited to do so. He despised the expression
“week-end,” and gave a sarcastic snort at the idea that it
would be nice to know the Kroesigs better.
and
He did not succeed in making an asset out of Linda.
Poor Linda was incapable of understanding the Kroesig
point of view; try as she might (and in the beginning she
tried very hard, having an infinite desire to please) it re-
mained mysterious to her. The fact is that, for the first
time in her life, she found herself face to face with the
bourgeois attitude of mind; and the fate often foreseen for
me by Uncle Matthew as a result of my middle-class ed-
ucation had actually befallen her. The outward and visible
signs which he so deprecated were all there—the Kroesigs
said notepaper, perfume, mirror and mantelpiece, they
even invited her to call them Father and Mother, which,
in the first flush of love, she did, only to spend the rest of
her married life trying to get out of it by addressing them
to their faces as “you,” and communicating with them by
postcard or telegram. Inwardly their spirit was utterly
commercial, everything was seen by them in terms of
money. It was their barrier, their defence, their hope for
the future, their support for the present, it raised them
above their fellowmen, and with it they Warded off evil.
The only mental qualities that they respected were those
Which produced money in substantial quantities, it was
their one criterion of success, it was power and it was
glory. To say that a man was poor was to label him a rot-
ter, bad at his job, idle, feckless, immoral.
and
She was far too young to be interested in politics, which were
anyhow, in those days before Hitler came along to brighten
them up, a very esoteric amusement.
and
Linda looked at the list of families. It took the form Qf
a card index, the head of each family having a card on
which was written the number and names of his depend-
ents. ~
“It doesn’t give their ages,” said Linda. “How am I to
know if there are young babies?”
“That’s a point,” said Robert. “HoW is she to?”
“Quite easy,” said Christian. “With Spaniards you can
always tell. Before the war they were called either after
saints or after episodes in the sex life of the Virgin-
Annunciata, Asuncion, Purificacion, Concepcion, Consal-
acion, etc. Since the Civil War they are all called Carlos
after Charlie Marx, Federico after Freddie Engels or Es-
talina (very popular until the Russians let them down
with a wallop), or else nice slogans like Solidaridad-Ob-
reara, Libertad, and so on. Then you know the children
are under three. Couldn’t be simpler, really.”
Sunday, January 25, 2015
Norman, oh Norman..
Mailer was right to insist in his essay that the hipster took his
key, his beat, from the Negro, and that the two shared a place
on the margin of a society which, though free, constantly
threatened them. He omitted to stress a crucial distinction,
however: the hipster refused to accept conventional society;
the Negro was refused by it. Mailer’s essay is bursting with
insight, but his black man was still an invisible man. He did
not pause to consider what the negro Negro thought about all
this white Negro stuff. His new-found friend from Paris,
Baldwin, whomhe began to see regularly back in New York,
was about to inform him. '
Baldwin, though he had friends who considered themselves
beatniks or hipsters (Mailer’s distinction was that hipster was
a beatnik who reads), was inclined to be contemptuous of their
‘we-gotta-go’ ways of conceiving freedom. To him, being free
could never be a matter of dropping out of school, or giving up
your job, and hitching a lift to Denver. The people Baldwin
had grown up with in Harlem had little chance of getting in to
school. And he could hardly ever find a proper job. At the end
of the 1940s, Baldwin had had difficulty getting a place to rent
in Greenwich Village (supposedly the most liberal section of
New York), and not because of a shortage of rooms.
And now the bars and streets were overrun with white kids
saying ‘man’ and ‘cool’ and digging chicks and smoking
reefers and blowing horns and looking for kicks and bringing
down squares as a drag — as if these things had just been dis-
covered. Chester Himes may not have been able to give a
baroque definition of ‘cool’, but he knew what it meant. He
had learned it ‘in the body’. Compare what Mailer wrote
about the white hipster’sreaction to ‘ever-threatening danger’
with how Himes responded to the danger he felt surrounded
him, even in the free atmosphere of Paris:
I remained the same, a thinking animal, filled with regrets, experi-
encing hunger, stirred by anger along with the acceptance of the
necessity to live. . . . I had become very violent, dangerous, with a
wild skyrocketing temper. Sex and violence held me in a vice.
In ‘The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy’, a personal essay
about Mailer written in 1960, Baldwin looked back on their
Paris nights fondly, but he could not help a little weariness
creeping in when forced to consider his friend’s intellectual
romance with the outlaw. Baldwin administered a gentle but
effective put-down, which was, however, intended to make a
serious point about Hip and the different perspectives of black
and white. I
‘I could not, with the best will in the world,’ Baldwin wrote,
‘make any sense out of “The White Negro”.’ In searching for the
likely spark of Mailer’s essay, he recalled their nights in Paris:
" the Negro jazz musicians, among whom we sometimes found our-
selves, who really liked Norman, did not for an instant consider
him as being even remotely ‘hip’ and Norman did not know this
and I could not tell him. He never broke through to them . . . and
they were far too ‘hip’, if that is the word I want, even to consid-
er breaking through to him. They thought he was a real sweet ofay
cat, but a little frantic.
Baldwin is having fun, but it s hardly surprising that he
should have taken up an attitude before ‘The White Negro’.
What makes hip language a special language, Mailer wrote, ‘is
that it cannot really be taught’. Which is just what Baldwin
was trying to tell him.
key, his beat, from the Negro, and that the two shared a place
on the margin of a society which, though free, constantly
threatened them. He omitted to stress a crucial distinction,
however: the hipster refused to accept conventional society;
the Negro was refused by it. Mailer’s essay is bursting with
insight, but his black man was still an invisible man. He did
not pause to consider what the negro Negro thought about all
this white Negro stuff. His new-found friend from Paris,
Baldwin, whomhe began to see regularly back in New York,
was about to inform him. '
Baldwin, though he had friends who considered themselves
beatniks or hipsters (Mailer’s distinction was that hipster was
a beatnik who reads), was inclined to be contemptuous of their
‘we-gotta-go’ ways of conceiving freedom. To him, being free
could never be a matter of dropping out of school, or giving up
your job, and hitching a lift to Denver. The people Baldwin
had grown up with in Harlem had little chance of getting in to
school. And he could hardly ever find a proper job. At the end
of the 1940s, Baldwin had had difficulty getting a place to rent
in Greenwich Village (supposedly the most liberal section of
New York), and not because of a shortage of rooms.
And now the bars and streets were overrun with white kids
saying ‘man’ and ‘cool’ and digging chicks and smoking
reefers and blowing horns and looking for kicks and bringing
down squares as a drag — as if these things had just been dis-
covered. Chester Himes may not have been able to give a
baroque definition of ‘cool’, but he knew what it meant. He
had learned it ‘in the body’. Compare what Mailer wrote
about the white hipster’sreaction to ‘ever-threatening danger’
with how Himes responded to the danger he felt surrounded
him, even in the free atmosphere of Paris:
I remained the same, a thinking animal, filled with regrets, experi-
encing hunger, stirred by anger along with the acceptance of the
necessity to live. . . . I had become very violent, dangerous, with a
wild skyrocketing temper. Sex and violence held me in a vice.
In ‘The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy’, a personal essay
about Mailer written in 1960, Baldwin looked back on their
Paris nights fondly, but he could not help a little weariness
creeping in when forced to consider his friend’s intellectual
romance with the outlaw. Baldwin administered a gentle but
effective put-down, which was, however, intended to make a
serious point about Hip and the different perspectives of black
and white. I
‘I could not, with the best will in the world,’ Baldwin wrote,
‘make any sense out of “The White Negro”.’ In searching for the
likely spark of Mailer’s essay, he recalled their nights in Paris:
" the Negro jazz musicians, among whom we sometimes found our-
selves, who really liked Norman, did not for an instant consider
him as being even remotely ‘hip’ and Norman did not know this
and I could not tell him. He never broke through to them . . . and
they were far too ‘hip’, if that is the word I want, even to consid-
er breaking through to him. They thought he was a real sweet ofay
cat, but a little frantic.
Baldwin is having fun, but it s hardly surprising that he
should have taken up an attitude before ‘The White Negro’.
What makes hip language a special language, Mailer wrote, ‘is
that it cannot really be taught’. Which is just what Baldwin
was trying to tell him.
Ginsburg and the Awful, Awful Beats
Nevertheless, they smell all right. The audience was clean and
Ginsberg was clean and Corso was clean and Orlovsky was clean.
Maybe Ginsberg says he doesn’t bathe or shave; Corso, I know,
declares that he has never combed his hair; Orlovsky has a line in
one of the two poems he read . . . ‘If I should shave, I know the bugs
would go away.’ . . . Kerouac, in crisis, didn't appear, but if he had
V come he would have been clean and shaven too. . . . And anyway,
there’s nothing dirty about a checked shirt or a lumberjacket and
blue jeans, they're standard uniform in the best nursery schools.
When Ginsberg dedicated a poem to her husband, Mrs
Trilling was surprised by how much she liked it - she heard it
as a ‘passionate love poem’. (Ginsberg had actually intended
the dedication ironically.) She was also impressed by the way
in which. Ginsberg resisted attempts during the question-
answer period to make him speak about the ‘philosophy’ of the
Beat Generation, explaining his production instead in terms of
inspiration, ecstasy, illumination. She was less taken with
Orlovsky, who, the audience was told, had read only two
poems because he was still writing his third, and with Corso
whom she saw as a small boy carrying on a private battle
against powerful grown-ups. But of Ginsberg, she wrote, in
one of her ever-spreading, encompassing sentences, with a
kind of motherly impatience:
Ginsberg, with his poems in which there was never quite enough
talent or hard work, and with his ambiguous need to tell his
teacher exactly what flagrancy he was now exploring with his
Gide-talking friends at the West End Café had at any rate the dis-
tinction of being more crudely justified in his emotional distur-
banceythan most; he had also the distinction of carrying mental
unbalance in the direction of criminality, a territory one preferred
to leave uncharted by student or friend.
Withoutquite intending to, Diana Trilling managed to pin to
the floor with one stroke of the pen two of the fakirs of the era
in store: the poet-as-psychopath and the poet-as-outlaw.
Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, the first book by a major poet
(apart from Howl itself) to make its subject matter the mental
disturbance of the poet, was published in 1959, the same year
as her essay appeared. Other contemplations of the poet’s own
psychopathology — by Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Anne
Sexton — would follow.
’ But it was the parallel career — poet-as-outlaw - that was
taken by the Beats, Ginsberg’s stay in the mental ward
notwithstanding. His poems do not so much explore illness in
the hope of healing the poet, as they seek to do to social norms
and intellectual conventionality what, he wrote to Fer-
linghetti, he had wanted to do to his old university on the
night of the poetry reading: ‘break its reactionary back’. It was
society's requirement of uniform behaviour and its rejection of
aliens which was, Ginsberg believed, the cause of his mental
crisis. Instead of accepting the doctors and professors’ opin-
ions (this was what Mrs Trilling failed to understand) and try-
ing to ‘adjust’, he should embrace his maladjustedness in the
cause of ultimate self-fulfilment. He wanted the freedom of
his visions, the freedom to write poems with titles like ‘Under
the World There s a Lot of Ass, a Lot of Cunt’, containing
‘lines such as ‘There’s a lot of Shit under the world, flowing
beneath cities into rivers,/a lot of urine floating under the
‘world,/a lot of‘ snot’, and to write about his mother’s vagina
and his own anus. He wanted the freedom to undress in front
of the camera, or anywhere else, to make love in the street if he
felt like it, and not to pretend in interviews that his literary
focus was purely intellectual, or even that his literary habits
were purely literary: ‘As I often do, I had been jacking off
while reading,’ he told an interviewer, momentarily interrupt-
ing an exposition of Supreme Reality with a capital S and R .
With nothing of the hard criminal in him, this was
Ginsberg’s way of chipping at the stubborn, bland, smother-
ing social fabric. Some of his friends had been more orthodox
in their ways of subversion. Corso, a genuine streetboy, had
spent three years in prison. Lucien Carr, another member of
the circle, though not a writer, had also done time for stabbing
and killing a man who made a pass at him (the motive for the
crime, and its ramifications, inspired Baldwin’s‘early drafts for
Giovanni ’s Room). William Burroughs had shot his wife in the
head in 1951 during a game of ‘William Tell’, though he man_
aged to convince the police that her death was an accident, and
escaped punishment. Neal Cassady, the original for Dean
Moriarty in On the Road, was a larger-than-life, irresponsible
sponger, with an appetite for women and cars and petty crime.
The Beats found other ways of being outside the law,
Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Burroughs and occasionally Cassady were
sexual ‘criminals’, being homosexual, or bisexual, while
Burroughs and several of his less literary (but more authenti-
cally ‘beat-up’) friends were junkies. Kerouac was more inter-
ested in drink than in drugs, and in women than in men, but
he cut loose from everyday regulation by taking flight with
Cassady and writing On the Road to the rhythm of the inter-
nal-combustion engine.
The Beat Generation raises its head as the suppressed
demon in ordinary American life, as the urge for total anar-
chical freedom, without respect for laws or civilizing norms.
The form which they gave to this impulse was not only in
verse and prose, but in a lifestyle. Ginsberg and Kerouac did
not just write about ways to be free; they were free. Life mag-
azine had caught them in the act. And American youth real-
ized, much more quickly than its elders, that the pre-eminent
characteristics of the Beat Generation were not beards and
uncleanliness, as Diana Trilling seemed to think, but rebellion
and eroticism, and the beguiling dance between the two.
While the Beat writers were still unknown and largely
unpublished, Hollywood provided a prototype. Marlon
Brando in On the Waterfront is casual in manner and style,
unimpressed by authority, if not downright disrespectful of it,
conferring some sort of nobility on the rebel which he had pre-
viously wanted. Until then, the rebel, in modern myth, had
been the feckless hobo or the always ambiguous red. Brando
also made it clear - as James Dean did — that sex existed as
more than an immobile screen kiss, or as bait used by women
to ensnare husbands. Their sexual language was body lan-
guage, but the Beats transferred the knowledge to the lan-
guage of poetry and prose. A large amount of Beat Generation
sexuality is homosexuality, which remains an unexplored part
of its appeal, although a simple explanation would be to say
that the clubbing together of boys, unencumbered by domes-
ticating girls, creates an ethos of freedom and the promise of
adventure which might lead to misadventure.
They gained their education, of course, not only from
Parisian writers, but from writers who could only be pub-
lished in Paris, mainly Henry Miller and Jean Genet. ‘Have
Genet’s foumal of a Thief [sic] in English,’ Burroughs wrote
from Tangier to Ginsberg in New York in 1955, ‘and have
read it over many times. I think he is the greatest living writer
of prose.’
If Miller is the father of the Beat Generation, Genet is its
transvestite mother. An outlaw of the pre-war world, Genet
committed himself to his criminality and homosexuality as
articles of faith: he pledged to serve them. So Ginsberg tried
to keep faith in his visions, and, later, to be as open about his
homosexuality in public as about blowing his nose. ‘I decided
to be what crime made of me,’ Genet had said, and Ginsberg
and Kerouac might have appropriated and adapted the phrase:
‘I decided to be what being beat made of me.’
From its outpost in Paris, the movement which had begun
in New York as a fraternity of unsuccessful writers began to
spread, leaving traces everywhere. No country in the Western
world was untouched by the liberal revolution which the Beat
Generation had started.
A monument survives on rue Git-le-coeur, where, for ever
after, Mme Rachou’s establishment would be known as the
Beat Hotel.
Ginsberg was clean and Corso was clean and Orlovsky was clean.
Maybe Ginsberg says he doesn’t bathe or shave; Corso, I know,
declares that he has never combed his hair; Orlovsky has a line in
one of the two poems he read . . . ‘If I should shave, I know the bugs
would go away.’ . . . Kerouac, in crisis, didn't appear, but if he had
V come he would have been clean and shaven too. . . . And anyway,
there’s nothing dirty about a checked shirt or a lumberjacket and
blue jeans, they're standard uniform in the best nursery schools.
When Ginsberg dedicated a poem to her husband, Mrs
Trilling was surprised by how much she liked it - she heard it
as a ‘passionate love poem’. (Ginsberg had actually intended
the dedication ironically.) She was also impressed by the way
in which. Ginsberg resisted attempts during the question-
answer period to make him speak about the ‘philosophy’ of the
Beat Generation, explaining his production instead in terms of
inspiration, ecstasy, illumination. She was less taken with
Orlovsky, who, the audience was told, had read only two
poems because he was still writing his third, and with Corso
whom she saw as a small boy carrying on a private battle
against powerful grown-ups. But of Ginsberg, she wrote, in
one of her ever-spreading, encompassing sentences, with a
kind of motherly impatience:
Ginsberg, with his poems in which there was never quite enough
talent or hard work, and with his ambiguous need to tell his
teacher exactly what flagrancy he was now exploring with his
Gide-talking friends at the West End Café had at any rate the dis-
tinction of being more crudely justified in his emotional distur-
banceythan most; he had also the distinction of carrying mental
unbalance in the direction of criminality, a territory one preferred
to leave uncharted by student or friend.
Withoutquite intending to, Diana Trilling managed to pin to
the floor with one stroke of the pen two of the fakirs of the era
in store: the poet-as-psychopath and the poet-as-outlaw.
Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, the first book by a major poet
(apart from Howl itself) to make its subject matter the mental
disturbance of the poet, was published in 1959, the same year
as her essay appeared. Other contemplations of the poet’s own
psychopathology — by Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Anne
Sexton — would follow.
’ But it was the parallel career — poet-as-outlaw - that was
taken by the Beats, Ginsberg’s stay in the mental ward
notwithstanding. His poems do not so much explore illness in
the hope of healing the poet, as they seek to do to social norms
and intellectual conventionality what, he wrote to Fer-
linghetti, he had wanted to do to his old university on the
night of the poetry reading: ‘break its reactionary back’. It was
society's requirement of uniform behaviour and its rejection of
aliens which was, Ginsberg believed, the cause of his mental
crisis. Instead of accepting the doctors and professors’ opin-
ions (this was what Mrs Trilling failed to understand) and try-
ing to ‘adjust’, he should embrace his maladjustedness in the
cause of ultimate self-fulfilment. He wanted the freedom of
his visions, the freedom to write poems with titles like ‘Under
the World There s a Lot of Ass, a Lot of Cunt’, containing
‘lines such as ‘There’s a lot of Shit under the world, flowing
beneath cities into rivers,/a lot of urine floating under the
‘world,/a lot of‘ snot’, and to write about his mother’s vagina
and his own anus. He wanted the freedom to undress in front
of the camera, or anywhere else, to make love in the street if he
felt like it, and not to pretend in interviews that his literary
focus was purely intellectual, or even that his literary habits
were purely literary: ‘As I often do, I had been jacking off
while reading,’ he told an interviewer, momentarily interrupt-
ing an exposition of Supreme Reality with a capital S and R .
With nothing of the hard criminal in him, this was
Ginsberg’s way of chipping at the stubborn, bland, smother-
ing social fabric. Some of his friends had been more orthodox
in their ways of subversion. Corso, a genuine streetboy, had
spent three years in prison. Lucien Carr, another member of
the circle, though not a writer, had also done time for stabbing
and killing a man who made a pass at him (the motive for the
crime, and its ramifications, inspired Baldwin’s‘early drafts for
Giovanni ’s Room). William Burroughs had shot his wife in the
head in 1951 during a game of ‘William Tell’, though he man_
aged to convince the police that her death was an accident, and
escaped punishment. Neal Cassady, the original for Dean
Moriarty in On the Road, was a larger-than-life, irresponsible
sponger, with an appetite for women and cars and petty crime.
The Beats found other ways of being outside the law,
Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Burroughs and occasionally Cassady were
sexual ‘criminals’, being homosexual, or bisexual, while
Burroughs and several of his less literary (but more authenti-
cally ‘beat-up’) friends were junkies. Kerouac was more inter-
ested in drink than in drugs, and in women than in men, but
he cut loose from everyday regulation by taking flight with
Cassady and writing On the Road to the rhythm of the inter-
nal-combustion engine.
The Beat Generation raises its head as the suppressed
demon in ordinary American life, as the urge for total anar-
chical freedom, without respect for laws or civilizing norms.
The form which they gave to this impulse was not only in
verse and prose, but in a lifestyle. Ginsberg and Kerouac did
not just write about ways to be free; they were free. Life mag-
azine had caught them in the act. And American youth real-
ized, much more quickly than its elders, that the pre-eminent
characteristics of the Beat Generation were not beards and
uncleanliness, as Diana Trilling seemed to think, but rebellion
and eroticism, and the beguiling dance between the two.
While the Beat writers were still unknown and largely
unpublished, Hollywood provided a prototype. Marlon
Brando in On the Waterfront is casual in manner and style,
unimpressed by authority, if not downright disrespectful of it,
conferring some sort of nobility on the rebel which he had pre-
viously wanted. Until then, the rebel, in modern myth, had
been the feckless hobo or the always ambiguous red. Brando
also made it clear - as James Dean did — that sex existed as
more than an immobile screen kiss, or as bait used by women
to ensnare husbands. Their sexual language was body lan-
guage, but the Beats transferred the knowledge to the lan-
guage of poetry and prose. A large amount of Beat Generation
sexuality is homosexuality, which remains an unexplored part
of its appeal, although a simple explanation would be to say
that the clubbing together of boys, unencumbered by domes-
ticating girls, creates an ethos of freedom and the promise of
adventure which might lead to misadventure.
They gained their education, of course, not only from
Parisian writers, but from writers who could only be pub-
lished in Paris, mainly Henry Miller and Jean Genet. ‘Have
Genet’s foumal of a Thief [sic] in English,’ Burroughs wrote
from Tangier to Ginsberg in New York in 1955, ‘and have
read it over many times. I think he is the greatest living writer
of prose.’
If Miller is the father of the Beat Generation, Genet is its
transvestite mother. An outlaw of the pre-war world, Genet
committed himself to his criminality and homosexuality as
articles of faith: he pledged to serve them. So Ginsberg tried
to keep faith in his visions, and, later, to be as open about his
homosexuality in public as about blowing his nose. ‘I decided
to be what crime made of me,’ Genet had said, and Ginsberg
and Kerouac might have appropriated and adapted the phrase:
‘I decided to be what being beat made of me.’
From its outpost in Paris, the movement which had begun
in New York as a fraternity of unsuccessful writers began to
spread, leaving traces everywhere. No country in the Western
world was untouched by the liberal revolution which the Beat
Generation had started.
A monument survives on rue Git-le-coeur, where, for ever
after, Mme Rachou’s establishment would be known as the
Beat Hotel.
Richard Wright, Idiot
From Paris, Interzone:
Wright was not in disagreement with the point about roots.
But he had no intention of returning to America to reconnect
with them. He wished to trace different and, he hoped, deep-
er roots.'The African project had had a long gestation. To his
journal six years earlier, he had pledged to write ‘the only book
about Africa that will be written in my time’ (maybe he meant
the only ‘good’ book). And he gave his text a splendidly
heraldic title: Black Power.
But Wright was lost in Africa, where he had hoped to find
himself. His mind was of a different cast from that of the
Africans he met, and of a different century. Even the colour of
his skin, he discovered, could not be said. to be the same as
theirs: in Africa, shades of brown_tended to be locally specif-
ic, whereas the Afro-American experience had melded them.
He tried hard to identify with the people, but the people hard-
ly recognized the point of his identification. He was the
Outsider here.
Wright may have had pioneering insights into the political
future of African peoples, but his ideas about progress are
frozen in their era, and some sound startling now, coming
from one who considered himself a liberal thinker. In a letter
addressed directly to Nkrumah and postscripted to Black
Power, Wright referred to ‘our people’ — the people of the
Gold Coast — who ‘must be made to walk, forced draft, into
the twentieth century. The direction of their lives, the duties
they must perform to overcome the stagnancy of tribalism, the
sacrifices that must be made - all of this must be placed under
firm social discipline!’
It's possible that this exclamatory call grew out of his own
sensation of having lost his grip on reality in Africa. As he
admitted in his book, everything from the religion (‘juju’ and
ancestor worship) to the nudity he witnessed in the villages,
either appalled him or left him wondering how to reconcile
this ancient ‘stagnancy’ with the progressive demands of mod-
ern society to which he believed the new African nations must
aspire. Seeing men holding hands and dancing together in an
club, he immediately blamed ‘the vices of the English public-
school system. . . . Just as the African had taken inordinately
to alcohol, had he taken to this too? . . . I leaned toward” my
host and whispered: “Look here. What's going on?’”
That ‘Look here’ is pertinently phrased, and speaks vol-
umes. Wright was not an African: he was an American, with at
least as many ties to modern Europe as to his ancestral home-
land. His host assured him that he had not landed in a scene
from James Baldwin’s latest novel, but that the men’s physical
intimacy was an aspect of traditional tribal dancing, a part of
the culture. Wright’s response was to want to see the culture
changed. The ‘progressive’ thinker on Third World issues was
to find, over the coming years, that Third World thinkers
themselves considered his ideas reactionary.
i
Wright chose to write about the Gold Coast, rather than any
other African country, for several reasons: first, because of its
early struggle to gain independence; then because it was
British and thus permitted him reflections on the slave trade
(he began his journey to Africa in Liverpool); and, of course,
because of his personal connection with Nkrumah.
But there was another reason: the Gold Coast was not
French. Had the first African state to cry out for self-rule been
a part of the French empire, Wright would have left it alone.
There was a war going on at that very moment involving a
French Third World ‘property’, Vietnam. And when the
French got out of that frying pan, itwas only to land in the fire
of Algeria. Wright then had an African colonial revolution tak-
ing place on his doorstep, posing the ‘black or white’ question
in terms of the immediate vicinity. But far from answering the
question apropos of Algeria, Wright never even asked it.
Wright was not in disagreement with the point about roots.
But he had no intention of returning to America to reconnect
with them. He wished to trace different and, he hoped, deep-
er roots.'The African project had had a long gestation. To his
journal six years earlier, he had pledged to write ‘the only book
about Africa that will be written in my time’ (maybe he meant
the only ‘good’ book). And he gave his text a splendidly
heraldic title: Black Power.
But Wright was lost in Africa, where he had hoped to find
himself. His mind was of a different cast from that of the
Africans he met, and of a different century. Even the colour of
his skin, he discovered, could not be said. to be the same as
theirs: in Africa, shades of brown_tended to be locally specif-
ic, whereas the Afro-American experience had melded them.
He tried hard to identify with the people, but the people hard-
ly recognized the point of his identification. He was the
Outsider here.
Wright may have had pioneering insights into the political
future of African peoples, but his ideas about progress are
frozen in their era, and some sound startling now, coming
from one who considered himself a liberal thinker. In a letter
addressed directly to Nkrumah and postscripted to Black
Power, Wright referred to ‘our people’ — the people of the
Gold Coast — who ‘must be made to walk, forced draft, into
the twentieth century. The direction of their lives, the duties
they must perform to overcome the stagnancy of tribalism, the
sacrifices that must be made - all of this must be placed under
firm social discipline!’
It's possible that this exclamatory call grew out of his own
sensation of having lost his grip on reality in Africa. As he
admitted in his book, everything from the religion (‘juju’ and
ancestor worship) to the nudity he witnessed in the villages,
either appalled him or left him wondering how to reconcile
this ancient ‘stagnancy’ with the progressive demands of mod-
ern society to which he believed the new African nations must
aspire. Seeing men holding hands and dancing together in an
club, he immediately blamed ‘the vices of the English public-
school system. . . . Just as the African had taken inordinately
to alcohol, had he taken to this too? . . . I leaned toward” my
host and whispered: “Look here. What's going on?’”
That ‘Look here’ is pertinently phrased, and speaks vol-
umes. Wright was not an African: he was an American, with at
least as many ties to modern Europe as to his ancestral home-
land. His host assured him that he had not landed in a scene
from James Baldwin’s latest novel, but that the men’s physical
intimacy was an aspect of traditional tribal dancing, a part of
the culture. Wright’s response was to want to see the culture
changed. The ‘progressive’ thinker on Third World issues was
to find, over the coming years, that Third World thinkers
themselves considered his ideas reactionary.
i
Wright chose to write about the Gold Coast, rather than any
other African country, for several reasons: first, because of its
early struggle to gain independence; then because it was
British and thus permitted him reflections on the slave trade
(he began his journey to Africa in Liverpool); and, of course,
because of his personal connection with Nkrumah.
But there was another reason: the Gold Coast was not
French. Had the first African state to cry out for self-rule been
a part of the French empire, Wright would have left it alone.
There was a war going on at that very moment involving a
French Third World ‘property’, Vietnam. And when the
French got out of that frying pan, itwas only to land in the fire
of Algeria. Wright then had an African colonial revolution tak-
ing place on his doorstep, posing the ‘black or white’ question
in terms of the immediate vicinity. But far from answering the
question apropos of Algeria, Wright never even asked it.
Donleavy and The Ginger Man from Campbell's Paris
The Ginger Man switches between straightforward third-per-
son narration and the disconnections of interior monologue,
sometimes without signalling. Even in the minds of publishers
who had rejected the work as unsaleable, there must have been
little doubt that The Ginger Ma,n was serious, a Joycean
picaresque There could be no mistaking the quality of the
writing. There certainly could be no mistaking it for a work of
pornography.
And yet, The Ginger Man, which Donleavy went on revis-
ing obsessively, was turned down by one American publisher
after another. ‘Sheer rejection,’ Donleavy called it. It led to his
quitting his native country for good“.
Donleavy was an American who had studied in Dublin and
now lived in London. Convinced of his literary destiny, he had
pledged never to distract himself with a job. He spent a lot of
his time, though, drinking in London pubs with the likes of
Brendan Behan, and it was from him that Donleavy first heard
about the Olympia Press. Behan recommended Girodias’s
firm as publishers for books that had proved unpublishable.
Donleavy had read Beckett, and he knew that Beckett, like
Joyce, had been published in Paris: Ioyce (in small amounts)
by Kahane, and Beckett by Kahane’s son. So when Girodias
accepted his novel, Donleavy was pleased to think that his
name would sit next to Beckett’s on the Collection Merlin list,
and perhaps in spirit beside ]oyce’s.
This was late in 1954, before Girodias had created the
Traveller’s Companion series, at a time when it could be seri-
ously argued that the good outweighed the bad in Olympia
production. Nabokov’s retrospective sneer at ‘the common
grave of Traveller's Favourites or whatever Olympia’s little
green books were called’ lacks his characteristic accuracy, for
in its first edition Lolita was not published in the Traveller’s
Companion series but under the plain imprint of the Olympia
Press, which at the time included Apollinaire, Bataille,
Beckett, Genet, Miller, Restif de la Bretonne and Sade. It was
only in their first or second reprints that Nabokov, Beckett,
Genet and all the rest were drafted into the Traveller’s
Companion series.
This may seem a fine point to some, but not to J. P.
Donleavy, for whom it became a structural beam of prolonged
legal argument.
There was no contract for The Ginger. Man. Nabokov. was
M; unusual among Olympia authors in having a proper Written
agreement with the publisher, as Girodias preferred to rely on
informal methods. His fullest explanation of this came in his
autobiography, published in Paris in 1990:
Dgnleavy would have wished to have had a classic contract, but .
_ _ _ sinee the beginning of Olympia, I had dealt directly with peo-
ple who had the same reservations as I did about contracts, and
who preferred to protect their anonymity in view of our irregular
‘ legal situation. Drawing up a contract seemed to me useful only in
special situations, such as that of the fifth volume of Frank Harrls
memoirs. For the rest, I managed with simP1° Pieces °f Papa’
and, more often, with verbal agreements. To those who were sur-
prised by this, I explained pompously that contracts, like virgins,
called irresistibly to be violated. The more clauses you strung
together, the more room for dispute you created; the agreements
became constraints, from which it became a matter of urgency to
free oneself. . . . The charm of my enterprise lay in its unsophisti-
’ catedness' when working with friends, a handshake would suffice.
I was persuaded that if Donleavy were to come to Paris, the ques-
tion of a contract could be cleared up.
/
On this last point, he was to be proved right — at first — and
then seriously wrong. ‘ _
son narration and the disconnections of interior monologue,
sometimes without signalling. Even in the minds of publishers
who had rejected the work as unsaleable, there must have been
little doubt that The Ginger Ma,n was serious, a Joycean
picaresque There could be no mistaking the quality of the
writing. There certainly could be no mistaking it for a work of
pornography.
And yet, The Ginger Man, which Donleavy went on revis-
ing obsessively, was turned down by one American publisher
after another. ‘Sheer rejection,’ Donleavy called it. It led to his
quitting his native country for good“.
Donleavy was an American who had studied in Dublin and
now lived in London. Convinced of his literary destiny, he had
pledged never to distract himself with a job. He spent a lot of
his time, though, drinking in London pubs with the likes of
Brendan Behan, and it was from him that Donleavy first heard
about the Olympia Press. Behan recommended Girodias’s
firm as publishers for books that had proved unpublishable.
Donleavy had read Beckett, and he knew that Beckett, like
Joyce, had been published in Paris: Ioyce (in small amounts)
by Kahane, and Beckett by Kahane’s son. So when Girodias
accepted his novel, Donleavy was pleased to think that his
name would sit next to Beckett’s on the Collection Merlin list,
and perhaps in spirit beside ]oyce’s.
This was late in 1954, before Girodias had created the
Traveller’s Companion series, at a time when it could be seri-
ously argued that the good outweighed the bad in Olympia
production. Nabokov’s retrospective sneer at ‘the common
grave of Traveller's Favourites or whatever Olympia’s little
green books were called’ lacks his characteristic accuracy, for
in its first edition Lolita was not published in the Traveller’s
Companion series but under the plain imprint of the Olympia
Press, which at the time included Apollinaire, Bataille,
Beckett, Genet, Miller, Restif de la Bretonne and Sade. It was
only in their first or second reprints that Nabokov, Beckett,
Genet and all the rest were drafted into the Traveller’s
Companion series.
This may seem a fine point to some, but not to J. P.
Donleavy, for whom it became a structural beam of prolonged
legal argument.
There was no contract for The Ginger. Man. Nabokov. was
M; unusual among Olympia authors in having a proper Written
agreement with the publisher, as Girodias preferred to rely on
informal methods. His fullest explanation of this came in his
autobiography, published in Paris in 1990:
Dgnleavy would have wished to have had a classic contract, but .
_ _ _ sinee the beginning of Olympia, I had dealt directly with peo-
ple who had the same reservations as I did about contracts, and
who preferred to protect their anonymity in view of our irregular
‘ legal situation. Drawing up a contract seemed to me useful only in
special situations, such as that of the fifth volume of Frank Harrls
memoirs. For the rest, I managed with simP1° Pieces °f Papa’
and, more often, with verbal agreements. To those who were sur-
prised by this, I explained pompously that contracts, like virgins,
called irresistibly to be violated. The more clauses you strung
together, the more room for dispute you created; the agreements
became constraints, from which it became a matter of urgency to
free oneself. . . . The charm of my enterprise lay in its unsophisti-
’ catedness' when working with friends, a handshake would suffice.
I was persuaded that if Donleavy were to come to Paris, the ques-
tion of a contract could be cleared up.
/
On this last point, he was to be proved right — at first — and
then seriously wrong. ‘ _
Saturday, January 17, 2015
More Vestal Fire by Compton Mackenzie
-‘ No, I won’t do it, my dear woman,” he declared. “ No f
ee-aw! ]oseph’s getting a damned bore. He is really.
I can’t stand any more of his blasted Dante. I really can’t.
Besides, Joseph himself doesn’t care a button about Dante.
He simply takes a geographical interest in Hell because he
thinks he’ll go there one day. He just uses the Divine
Commedia as a kind of Baedeker. No, I won’t spend the
evening with him.”
“ Oh, Mr. Maxwell,” the wife expostulated, “how can
you talk so? It’s most unkind.”
“ People are a jolly sight too kind to Joseph. That’s
the trouble with him. He just lives on kindness and gruel
and purgatives. No, you ask Scudamore to dine with him
and keep him amused. And that’ll be a kindness to poor
old Scudamore, because every dinner he gets without Nita’s
cooking will keep him alive for a few days longer.”
and
“I beg your pardon,” Bookham exclaimed. “ But do
you mean Count Marsac ? ”
“That’s right. Marsac-Lagerstrom, to give it him in
full. What does Sirene make of bim ? ”
“Well, I think we all liked him very much at first,”
Bookham replied, “ though I hear that one or two people
have been a little inclined to give him the cold shoulder
lately. I believe there has been some rumour about his
having been mixed up in a rather unsavoury mess in Paris.
But I keep myself as free as I can from gossip. You see,
I’m the senior British resident here, and somebody’s got to
set an example, don’t you know.”
“ Did you never hear of the Lagerstrom scandal ? ”
The little American leaned across the table and lowered
his voice to remind Bookham what that had been.
“ Miners ? ” the churchwarden bellowed. “ Good lord,
what a degenerate brute! Not coalminers surely ? ”
“ Minors not miners,” the little lawyer made haste to
explain.
Bookham mopped his crimson brow with a purple handker-
chief. '
“ Well, that’s bad enough,” he rumbled.
“ The Napoleonic code, however, regards it, and rightly
I cannot help feeling, as more reprehensible than the other.
and
It was not even a moderately good novel, and in justice
to Marsac it should be said that he could write a good deal
better than this when he expressed himself in verse. The
poems in La V ictime Ravie, however embarrassing as an
exhibition of hysteria, had at least a directness which,
granted that one could stand directness on such a topic,
occasionally achieved a kind of tortured beauty. La
Statue Mutilee had all the hysteria without any of the
sincerity of the poems, and the tawdry prose with which
it was bedizened made that insincerity nauseating. Any-
body who knew the story of Madame Protopopesco would
recognize that she was really the Hungarian count. As for
the wicked young American girl, she was Carlo dressed up
in the petticoats of Angela Pears. And Marsac like so many
writers of his temperament attributed to two young people
supposed to be normal the characteristics of an abnormal
passion. It is remarkable how nearly always fatal prose is
to the pretentiously styled Uranian temperament, which
time after time shirks honest self-revelation in such a
medium, but continually seeks by an endogenous under-
standing of women, an almost uterine intelligence, to atone
for its inability to create men. One day a novelist with
that temperament will have the courage to write about
himself as he is, not as he would be were he actually Jane
or Gladys or Aunt Maria. And that will be a novel worth
reading, not an obstetrical feat. However, for this story
the importance of La Statue Mutilee did not _lie in the
quality of its literary style or of its psychological fancy-dress,
but in the bitterness of the personal attacks, so thinly
disguised as hardly to be disguised at all, upon various
residents interspersed with abuse of Christianity, eulogies
of paganism, and florid apostrophes menacing the island
itself with destruction. In spite of that flattering exordium,
by the time the author came to the end of his book he had
worked himself up into such _a phrenzy of rage over the
thought of Carlo’s seduction, the affair of the cistern, and
the opposition to his statue of Tiberius, that he was making
his hero address the island in these terms:
‘ Land of murder, of vice and luxury, listen to tbe voice
of one w/Jo will conquer t/Jee at last. One day despite t/Jy
scents and sound ofjoy, despite tby perfumed slopes and gleam-
ing wbite terraces, despite (a page of overloaded description),
thou s/salt disappear, O Sirene, because t/Jau art no more
tbyself, because tbou bast denied that wbicb made tbee great.’
This was followed by a denunciation of Woman, and a
particular word of warning to the young men of Sirene
who by persisting in kneeling before that shameless Mother
of Calamities would end by destroying all that made them
Virgin Kings.
But it is idle to quote any more. There was hardly a
person or a profession, a nationality or an individual on Sirene
that did not find something to insult him in Marsac’s book.
A hive of bees robbed of their honey could not have
buzzed more furiously than the people of Sirene thus robbed
of their reputations. Everybody was walking about the
Piazza reading to one another the insulting descriptions of
his neighbour. We may agree with La Rochefoucauld that
nothing gives us greater pleasure than to hear of the mis-
fortunes of our friends, but the aphorist would have to
admit that nothing makes us more indignant than to read
about their misfortunes in a novel, whether we read about
our own at the same time or not.
ee-aw! ]oseph’s getting a damned bore. He is really.
I can’t stand any more of his blasted Dante. I really can’t.
Besides, Joseph himself doesn’t care a button about Dante.
He simply takes a geographical interest in Hell because he
thinks he’ll go there one day. He just uses the Divine
Commedia as a kind of Baedeker. No, I won’t spend the
evening with him.”
“ Oh, Mr. Maxwell,” the wife expostulated, “how can
you talk so? It’s most unkind.”
“ People are a jolly sight too kind to Joseph. That’s
the trouble with him. He just lives on kindness and gruel
and purgatives. No, you ask Scudamore to dine with him
and keep him amused. And that’ll be a kindness to poor
old Scudamore, because every dinner he gets without Nita’s
cooking will keep him alive for a few days longer.”
and
“I beg your pardon,” Bookham exclaimed. “ But do
you mean Count Marsac ? ”
“That’s right. Marsac-Lagerstrom, to give it him in
full. What does Sirene make of bim ? ”
“Well, I think we all liked him very much at first,”
Bookham replied, “ though I hear that one or two people
have been a little inclined to give him the cold shoulder
lately. I believe there has been some rumour about his
having been mixed up in a rather unsavoury mess in Paris.
But I keep myself as free as I can from gossip. You see,
I’m the senior British resident here, and somebody’s got to
set an example, don’t you know.”
“ Did you never hear of the Lagerstrom scandal ? ”
The little American leaned across the table and lowered
his voice to remind Bookham what that had been.
“ Miners ? ” the churchwarden bellowed. “ Good lord,
what a degenerate brute! Not coalminers surely ? ”
“ Minors not miners,” the little lawyer made haste to
explain.
Bookham mopped his crimson brow with a purple handker-
chief. '
“ Well, that’s bad enough,” he rumbled.
“ The Napoleonic code, however, regards it, and rightly
I cannot help feeling, as more reprehensible than the other.
and
It was not even a moderately good novel, and in justice
to Marsac it should be said that he could write a good deal
better than this when he expressed himself in verse. The
poems in La V ictime Ravie, however embarrassing as an
exhibition of hysteria, had at least a directness which,
granted that one could stand directness on such a topic,
occasionally achieved a kind of tortured beauty. La
Statue Mutilee had all the hysteria without any of the
sincerity of the poems, and the tawdry prose with which
it was bedizened made that insincerity nauseating. Any-
body who knew the story of Madame Protopopesco would
recognize that she was really the Hungarian count. As for
the wicked young American girl, she was Carlo dressed up
in the petticoats of Angela Pears. And Marsac like so many
writers of his temperament attributed to two young people
supposed to be normal the characteristics of an abnormal
passion. It is remarkable how nearly always fatal prose is
to the pretentiously styled Uranian temperament, which
time after time shirks honest self-revelation in such a
medium, but continually seeks by an endogenous under-
standing of women, an almost uterine intelligence, to atone
for its inability to create men. One day a novelist with
that temperament will have the courage to write about
himself as he is, not as he would be were he actually Jane
or Gladys or Aunt Maria. And that will be a novel worth
reading, not an obstetrical feat. However, for this story
the importance of La Statue Mutilee did not _lie in the
quality of its literary style or of its psychological fancy-dress,
but in the bitterness of the personal attacks, so thinly
disguised as hardly to be disguised at all, upon various
residents interspersed with abuse of Christianity, eulogies
of paganism, and florid apostrophes menacing the island
itself with destruction. In spite of that flattering exordium,
by the time the author came to the end of his book he had
worked himself up into such _a phrenzy of rage over the
thought of Carlo’s seduction, the affair of the cistern, and
the opposition to his statue of Tiberius, that he was making
his hero address the island in these terms:
‘ Land of murder, of vice and luxury, listen to tbe voice
of one w/Jo will conquer t/Jee at last. One day despite t/Jy
scents and sound ofjoy, despite tby perfumed slopes and gleam-
ing wbite terraces, despite (a page of overloaded description),
thou s/salt disappear, O Sirene, because t/Jau art no more
tbyself, because tbou bast denied that wbicb made tbee great.’
This was followed by a denunciation of Woman, and a
particular word of warning to the young men of Sirene
who by persisting in kneeling before that shameless Mother
of Calamities would end by destroying all that made them
Virgin Kings.
But it is idle to quote any more. There was hardly a
person or a profession, a nationality or an individual on Sirene
that did not find something to insult him in Marsac’s book.
A hive of bees robbed of their honey could not have
buzzed more furiously than the people of Sirene thus robbed
of their reputations. Everybody was walking about the
Piazza reading to one another the insulting descriptions of
his neighbour. We may agree with La Rochefoucauld that
nothing gives us greater pleasure than to hear of the mis-
fortunes of our friends, but the aphorist would have to
admit that nothing makes us more indignant than to read
about their misfortunes in a novel, whether we read about
our own at the same time or not.
Cleo by Stacy
Even when
they are neither tendentious nor tangled, the accounts are often over-
blown. As has been noted, there were no plain, unvarnished stories in
antiquity. The point was to dazzle. I have not attempted to fill in the
blanks, though on occasion I have corralled the possibilities. What
looks merely probable remains here merely probable—though opin-
ions differ radically even on the probabilities. The irreconcilable
remains unreconciled. Mostly I have restored context. Indeed Cleopa-
tra murdered her siblings, but Herod murdered his children. (He
afterward wailed that he was "the most unfortunate of fathers”) And
as Plutarch reminds us, such behavior was axiomatic among sovereigns.
(Even the fiction writers cannot agree about Caesar and Cleopatra. He loves her (Han-
del) he loves her not (Shaw); he loves her (Thornton Wilder)).
Cleopatra was not necessarily beautiful, but her wealth’— and
her palace—left a Roman gasping. All read very differently on one
side of the Mediterranean from the other. The last decades of research
on women in antiquity and on Hellenistic Egypt substantially illumi-
nate the picture. I have tried to pluck the gauze of melodrama from
the final scenes of the life, which reduce even sober chroniclers to
soap opera. Sometimes high drama prevails for a reason, however.
Cleopatra’s was an era of outsize, intriguing personalities. At-its end
the greatest actors of the age exit abruptly. A world comes crashing
down after them.
WHILE THERE IS a great deal We do not know about Cleopatra, there
is a great deal she did not know either. She knew neither that she was
living in the first century BC nor in the Hellenistic Age, both of them
later constructs. (The Hellenistic Age begins with the death of Alex-
ander the Great in 323 BC and ends in 30 BC, with the death of Cleopa-
tra. It has been perhaps best defined as a Greek era in which the Greeks
played no role.) She did not know she was Cleopatra VII for several
reasons, one ofwhich is that she was actually the sixth Cleopatra. She
never knew anyone named Octavian. The man who vanquished and
deposed her, prompted her suicide, and largely packaged her for pos-
terity was born Gaius Octavius. By the time he entered Cleopatra’s
life in a meaningful way he called himself Gaius Julius Caesar, after
his illustrious great-uncle, her lover, who adopted him in his will. We
know him today as Augustus, a title he assumed only three years after
Cleopatra’s death. He appears here as Octavian, two Caesars remain-
ing, as ever, one too many.
and
BEHIND EVERY GREAT fortune, it has been noted, is a crime; the Ptole-
mies were fabulously rich. They were descended not from the Egyp-
tian pharaohs whose place they assumed but from the scrappy,
hard-living Macedonians (tough terrain breeds tough men, Herodo-
tus had already warned) who produced Alexander the Great. Within
months of Alexander’s death, Ptolemy—the most enterprising of his
generals, his official taster, a childhood intimate, and by some
accounts a distant relative—had laid claim to Egypt. In an early dis-
play of the family gift for stagecraft, Ptolemy kidnapped Alexander
the Great’s body. It had been headed for Macedonia. Would it not be
far more useful, reasoned young Ptolemy, intercepting the funeral
cortege, in Egypt, ultimately in Alexandria, a city the great man had
founded only decades earlier? There it was rerouted, to be displayed
in a gold sarcophagus at the center of the city, a relic, a talisman, a
recruiting aid, an insurance policy. (By Cleopatra’s childhood, the sar-
cophagus was alabaster or glass. Strapped for funds, her great-uncle
had traded the original for an army. He paid for the substitution with
his life.)
The legitimacy of the Ptolemaic dynasty would rest on this tenu-
ous connection to the most storied figure in the ancient world, the
one against whom all aspirants measured themselves, in whose man-
tle Pompey had wrapped himself, Whose feats were said to reduce
Caesar to tears of inadequacy. The cult was universal. Alexander
played as active a role in the Ptolemaic imagination as in the Roman
one. Many Egyptian homes displayed statues of him. So strong was
his romance—and so fungible was first-century history—that it
would come to include a version in which Alexander descended from
an Egyptian wizard. Soon enough he was said to have been related to
the royal family; like all self-respecting arrivistes, the Ptolemies had a
gift for reconfiguring history.* Without renouncing their Macedonian
heritage, the dynasty’s founders bought themselves a legitimacy-
conferring past, the ancient~world equivalent of the mail-order coat of
arms. What was true was that Ptolemy descended from the Macedo-
nian aristocracy, a synonym for high drama. As a consequence, no
one in Egypt considered Cleopatra to be Egyptian. She hailed instead
from a line of rancorous, meddlesome, shrewd, occasionally unhinged
Macedonian queens, a line that included the fourth-century Olym-
pias, whose greatest contribution to the world was her son, Alexander
the Great. The rest were atrocities.
‘If outside Egypt the Ptolemies held to the Alexander the Great nar-
rative within the country their legitimacy derived from a fabricated
link with the pharaohs. This justified the practice of sibling marriage,
Understood to be an Egyptian custom. Amid the Macedonian aristoc-
racy there was ample precedent for murdering your sibling, none for
marrying her. Nor was there a Greek word for “incest.” The Ptolemies
carried the practice to an extreme.
*
Alexander the Great consulted a famed oracle about his parentage. He had some
questions, which is what happens when your mother is said to have mated with a snake.
Wisely he left his entourage outside the
ttmple and submitted a bribe in advance. he was, the oracle assured him, the son of Zeus.
they are neither tendentious nor tangled, the accounts are often over-
blown. As has been noted, there were no plain, unvarnished stories in
antiquity. The point was to dazzle. I have not attempted to fill in the
blanks, though on occasion I have corralled the possibilities. What
looks merely probable remains here merely probable—though opin-
ions differ radically even on the probabilities. The irreconcilable
remains unreconciled. Mostly I have restored context. Indeed Cleopa-
tra murdered her siblings, but Herod murdered his children. (He
afterward wailed that he was "the most unfortunate of fathers”) And
as Plutarch reminds us, such behavior was axiomatic among sovereigns.
(Even the fiction writers cannot agree about Caesar and Cleopatra. He loves her (Han-
del) he loves her not (Shaw); he loves her (Thornton Wilder)).
Cleopatra was not necessarily beautiful, but her wealth’— and
her palace—left a Roman gasping. All read very differently on one
side of the Mediterranean from the other. The last decades of research
on women in antiquity and on Hellenistic Egypt substantially illumi-
nate the picture. I have tried to pluck the gauze of melodrama from
the final scenes of the life, which reduce even sober chroniclers to
soap opera. Sometimes high drama prevails for a reason, however.
Cleopatra’s was an era of outsize, intriguing personalities. At-its end
the greatest actors of the age exit abruptly. A world comes crashing
down after them.
WHILE THERE IS a great deal We do not know about Cleopatra, there
is a great deal she did not know either. She knew neither that she was
living in the first century BC nor in the Hellenistic Age, both of them
later constructs. (The Hellenistic Age begins with the death of Alex-
ander the Great in 323 BC and ends in 30 BC, with the death of Cleopa-
tra. It has been perhaps best defined as a Greek era in which the Greeks
played no role.) She did not know she was Cleopatra VII for several
reasons, one ofwhich is that she was actually the sixth Cleopatra. She
never knew anyone named Octavian. The man who vanquished and
deposed her, prompted her suicide, and largely packaged her for pos-
terity was born Gaius Octavius. By the time he entered Cleopatra’s
life in a meaningful way he called himself Gaius Julius Caesar, after
his illustrious great-uncle, her lover, who adopted him in his will. We
know him today as Augustus, a title he assumed only three years after
Cleopatra’s death. He appears here as Octavian, two Caesars remain-
ing, as ever, one too many.
and
BEHIND EVERY GREAT fortune, it has been noted, is a crime; the Ptole-
mies were fabulously rich. They were descended not from the Egyp-
tian pharaohs whose place they assumed but from the scrappy,
hard-living Macedonians (tough terrain breeds tough men, Herodo-
tus had already warned) who produced Alexander the Great. Within
months of Alexander’s death, Ptolemy—the most enterprising of his
generals, his official taster, a childhood intimate, and by some
accounts a distant relative—had laid claim to Egypt. In an early dis-
play of the family gift for stagecraft, Ptolemy kidnapped Alexander
the Great’s body. It had been headed for Macedonia. Would it not be
far more useful, reasoned young Ptolemy, intercepting the funeral
cortege, in Egypt, ultimately in Alexandria, a city the great man had
founded only decades earlier? There it was rerouted, to be displayed
in a gold sarcophagus at the center of the city, a relic, a talisman, a
recruiting aid, an insurance policy. (By Cleopatra’s childhood, the sar-
cophagus was alabaster or glass. Strapped for funds, her great-uncle
had traded the original for an army. He paid for the substitution with
his life.)
The legitimacy of the Ptolemaic dynasty would rest on this tenu-
ous connection to the most storied figure in the ancient world, the
one against whom all aspirants measured themselves, in whose man-
tle Pompey had wrapped himself, Whose feats were said to reduce
Caesar to tears of inadequacy. The cult was universal. Alexander
played as active a role in the Ptolemaic imagination as in the Roman
one. Many Egyptian homes displayed statues of him. So strong was
his romance—and so fungible was first-century history—that it
would come to include a version in which Alexander descended from
an Egyptian wizard. Soon enough he was said to have been related to
the royal family; like all self-respecting arrivistes, the Ptolemies had a
gift for reconfiguring history.* Without renouncing their Macedonian
heritage, the dynasty’s founders bought themselves a legitimacy-
conferring past, the ancient~world equivalent of the mail-order coat of
arms. What was true was that Ptolemy descended from the Macedo-
nian aristocracy, a synonym for high drama. As a consequence, no
one in Egypt considered Cleopatra to be Egyptian. She hailed instead
from a line of rancorous, meddlesome, shrewd, occasionally unhinged
Macedonian queens, a line that included the fourth-century Olym-
pias, whose greatest contribution to the world was her son, Alexander
the Great. The rest were atrocities.
‘If outside Egypt the Ptolemies held to the Alexander the Great nar-
rative within the country their legitimacy derived from a fabricated
link with the pharaohs. This justified the practice of sibling marriage,
Understood to be an Egyptian custom. Amid the Macedonian aristoc-
racy there was ample precedent for murdering your sibling, none for
marrying her. Nor was there a Greek word for “incest.” The Ptolemies
carried the practice to an extreme.
*
Alexander the Great consulted a famed oracle about his parentage. He had some
questions, which is what happens when your mother is said to have mated with a snake.
Wisely he left his entourage outside the
ttmple and submitted a bribe in advance. he was, the oracle assured him, the son of Zeus.
Harold Stassen et al.
In Indiana the “anything but” vote went to the redoubtable Harold E.
Stassen: boy-wonder governor of Minnesota in I936, a presidential prospect in
1940, the loser in an upset to Dewey in I948, sold out by a young lawyer
named Warren Burger in his favorite-son bid in I952, architect of a failed
Richard Nixon purge in I956, the losing candidate for governor of Pennsylva-
nia and mayor of Philadelphia in the years since——the Republican Party’s
embarrassing old Don Quixote. (When he announced he was running for Pres-
ident once more, a politically precocious youngster in Queens dubbed his soap-
box derby car “Harold Stassen’s Ticker Tape Parade”) Stassen had managed
to find his name the only other one on the Indiana Republican ballot besides
Goldwater’s. He financed a raft of brochures promising “progress for all along
the middleway, avoiding both extremes,” and asserting that a Stassen delega-
tion would “open the door at the convention to consideration of the other five
Republican candidates: Ambassador Lodge, Richard Nixon, Govemor Rocke-
feller, Governor Romney, and Governor Scranton.” Anyone-but-Goldwater
and the middle-of-the-road: that was all it took foroafish Harold Stassen to
siphon off an embarrassing 27 percent of the votes from Goldwater in one of
the most conservative states in the country. And thanks to Kleindienst’s inabil-
ity to put up a publicity firewall, commentators continued to refer to Gold-
water’s “wretched showing” in a primaiy where he won upwards of 70 percent
of the vote.
At any rate, few were paying attention to the Republican race. Indiana was
George Wallace’s stand-or-fall battle. Open-primary Wisconsin could be writ-
ten off as a fluke. But party loyalty was sacred in Indiana. If Wallace could pee]
off significant numbers from Johnson’s stand-in, Governor Matthew Welsh,
that would mean the backlash was for real. Dozens of print and television CO]:
“respondents descended on the Hoosier State; Walter Cronkite moved his news-
cast to a storefront in downtown Indianapolis. Wallace’s act had been polished
until it gleamed; at Butler University, his kickoff speech began to jeers and
closed with 56 percent of those present saying he had their vote.
‘ Since taking the podium in front of Bronco Gruber and his friends in Mil-
waukee’s Serb Hall, Wallace drew sustenance from a new theme. A crime
upsurge was now the obsession of barrooms and water coolers across the land:
on March 27 the New York Times reported that in a white middle-class neigh-
borhood in Queens, thirty-eight neighbors were awakened by the screams of a
young woman named Kitty Genovese as she was raped and murdered over the
course of an hour, and no one bothered to call the police. That the perpetrator
was black, although the Times did not print the fact, soon became well known.
And Wallace began playing the attendant fears like a violin.
“If you are knocked in the head on a street in a city today, the man who
knocked you in the head is out of jail before you get to the hospital,” he said.
“They’re building a new bridge over the Potomac for all the white liberals
fleeing to Virginia.”
“Anyone here from Philadelphia? You know, they can’t even have night
football games anymore because of the trouble between the races. And that’s
the city of brotherly love!”
The message was moving voters. Governor Welsh wamed thousands of
patronage employees that they backed Wallace on pain of their jobs. Regis-
tered Republicans requesting a Democratic ballot were forced to pledge to vote
for the Democratic candidate for President in November (and were threatened
with having their names published). The state’s two Democratic senators sent
out franked letters pronouncing that a vote for Welsh was a vote for the mem-
ory of John F. Kennedy.
In Indiana Wallace beat his Wisconsin totals by 5 percentage points. He
earned almost three-quarters of the vote in one Gary steelworkers’ district.
“The noises you hear now,” he declared, “are the teeth falling out in Indiana.”
It was a good thing few people were paying attention to the Republicans
in Indiana, because by now it appeared that White was presiding over a coup.
He didn’t count the number of delegates he’d secured anymore; he counted
down from the 655 needed to nominate. His secret ledger read 400, four-fifths of
those chosen to date. He claimed 250 publicly. He wanted to have at least I72
with which to surprise the public if Rockefeller won California on June 2. But
once more undisciplined Arizonans spilled the secret. Not long ago Time had
deglaféd Goldwater “flat on his back.” Now the magazine reported: “Suddenly,
fike a brush fire racing out of control, the word crackled among informed
Republicans: _Goldwater’s almost got it. . . . Goldwater kept collecting dele-
gates while the unavoweds and disavowed collected press clippings.”
Though how the party would sell a candidate to the nation that polls sug-
gested only I4 percent of Republicans supported, White did not appear to con-
sider.
“Far more united and at peace with itself, except over the issue of Negro rights,
than it has been for a long time ”: future generations might be excused for won-
dering how many conflagrations need burn, or how few votes Bill Scranton
need win, before columnists would break down and concede the point that
America was a nation deeply divided against itself. But the architecture of their
thought would not permit it.
and
The candidate landed, exhausted, to a Goldwater circus. Only after Kitchel
screamed in his face, “Dammit, Parry, you’re a national figure!” did Goldwater
stride out to receive his adoration. A reporter poked a microphone in his snoot;
Goldwater scowled. A pretty young thing tried to plop a big white cowboy hat
on his head; he shoved her away. A guy was peddling a canned soft drink with
the unfortunate name of “Gold Water” (“The Right Drink for the Conservative
Taste”) from the tailgate of his truck. Goldwater was offered a sip. He spit it
Out. “This tastes like piss! I wouldn’t drink it with gin!”
and
Now, with nearly as many reporters covering the reporters as were covering the
results, for the first time CBS News was using Lou Harris’s new computer-
sampling exit poll techniques to attempt to call the race before the polls closed
at 7 p.m. local time——during, that is, prime time in the East.
With three hours to go, news chief Bill Leonard and Fred Friendly pored
over printouts that showed Rockefeller with a small but significant lead. A few
minutes later new numbers came in: Goldwater had pulled ahead with 51.6 per-
cent. They started sweating: 51.6 was just barely on the safe side of their mar-
gin of error. A few more samples came in; the Goldwater trend was confirmed.
It was 7:15 Pacific standard time.
Leonard turned to Lou Harris: “I want to be 100 percent sure.” Harris shot
back confidently, “We’re within our guidelines.”
Leonard called Cronkite in Washington—and, at 7:21 p.m., astonishment
evident in his voice at both the news and speed with which he was able to
deliver it, Cronkite told America that CBS News was projecting Barry Gold-
water as the winner.
Several hours passed. No other network called the race. Friendly and
s final samplings arrived: Goldwater, still—but this time below their
error. The actual precinct tabulations flooding in were distinctly.
ockefeller.
Fred Friendly had to get on a plane to make an important meeting in New
York the next morning. He fell asleep and awoke to the pilot’s voice: “Good
morning, ladies and gentlemen. We’re just about to make our approach into the
New York City area, and it’s going to be a beautiful day. . . . And by the way,
if you’re interested, Governor Rockefeller has won the Califomia primary.” '
Walter Cronkite, it turned out, was not nearly as trusted a man as CBS had
thought. The wire services, using their old-fashioned methods, had called the
election for Rockefeller; so did the CBS local station in New York City, hours
after Cronkite gave the race to the Arizonan senator on the national broadcast.
It was only the counting of the absentee ballots that gave the race officially to
Barry Goldwater, 1,120,403 votes to 1,052,053. The tumout was 72 percent.
Rus Walton’s polling suggested that Goldwater got 20 percent more votes in
precincts where A Choice Not an Echo had been distributed. Scores of wob-
bling delegates in other states committed for Goldwater. It was now hard t0
imagine a scenario in which Barry Goldwater would not be nominated. H6
responded to the news by drinking so much he had to be helped onto the plane
back to Washington. Rockefeller refused to quit the race, promising, “Fm
going right down the line no matter what happens.”
Goldwater people celebrated as if they were witnessing the risen Lord. But
hating Barry Goldwater was taking on transcendent overtones, too: in Missis-
sippi, Freedom Summer organizers found sharecroppers who were terrified that
a Goldwater victory would give locals license to shoot them in their homes.
Everywhere cartoonists pictured Goldwater’s base as “little old ladies in tennis
shoes”-——an image California attorney general Stanley Mosk used in his report
on the John Birch Society in 1961 to portray conservatives as the kind of peo-
ple taken in by aluminum-siding salesmen (and for which Mosk received angry
packages filled with loafers, sandals, and pumps for weeks on end). The Glas-
gow Herald called Goldwater “stupid to a degree that is incredible”;,the Lon-
don Times keened over “a major party endorsing and promoting a man so
blatantly out of touch with reality, so wild in his foreign policy, so backward in
his domestic ideas, and so inconsistent in his thinking”; and the Frankfurter
Rundschau called Goldwater “a confused and weak man who hides his weak-
ness and uncertainty with fiery speeches”—no small thing coming from Ger-
many, then witnessing a dramatic suicide epidemic among old men threatened
by new “dc-Nazification” trials.
Graham Molitor, unwinding from the Califomia bout at a religious retreat,
confessed ashamedly to a divine that when he first came to Washington in the
1950s, Goldwater had been his hero. Now he had worked to destroy the man’s
very name. The priest replied that considering the gravity of the situation,
Molitor had done no wrong.
from Before the Storm
Stassen: boy-wonder governor of Minnesota in I936, a presidential prospect in
1940, the loser in an upset to Dewey in I948, sold out by a young lawyer
named Warren Burger in his favorite-son bid in I952, architect of a failed
Richard Nixon purge in I956, the losing candidate for governor of Pennsylva-
nia and mayor of Philadelphia in the years since——the Republican Party’s
embarrassing old Don Quixote. (When he announced he was running for Pres-
ident once more, a politically precocious youngster in Queens dubbed his soap-
box derby car “Harold Stassen’s Ticker Tape Parade”) Stassen had managed
to find his name the only other one on the Indiana Republican ballot besides
Goldwater’s. He financed a raft of brochures promising “progress for all along
the middleway, avoiding both extremes,” and asserting that a Stassen delega-
tion would “open the door at the convention to consideration of the other five
Republican candidates: Ambassador Lodge, Richard Nixon, Govemor Rocke-
feller, Governor Romney, and Governor Scranton.” Anyone-but-Goldwater
and the middle-of-the-road: that was all it took foroafish Harold Stassen to
siphon off an embarrassing 27 percent of the votes from Goldwater in one of
the most conservative states in the country. And thanks to Kleindienst’s inabil-
ity to put up a publicity firewall, commentators continued to refer to Gold-
water’s “wretched showing” in a primaiy where he won upwards of 70 percent
of the vote.
At any rate, few were paying attention to the Republican race. Indiana was
George Wallace’s stand-or-fall battle. Open-primary Wisconsin could be writ-
ten off as a fluke. But party loyalty was sacred in Indiana. If Wallace could pee]
off significant numbers from Johnson’s stand-in, Governor Matthew Welsh,
that would mean the backlash was for real. Dozens of print and television CO]:
“respondents descended on the Hoosier State; Walter Cronkite moved his news-
cast to a storefront in downtown Indianapolis. Wallace’s act had been polished
until it gleamed; at Butler University, his kickoff speech began to jeers and
closed with 56 percent of those present saying he had their vote.
‘ Since taking the podium in front of Bronco Gruber and his friends in Mil-
waukee’s Serb Hall, Wallace drew sustenance from a new theme. A crime
upsurge was now the obsession of barrooms and water coolers across the land:
on March 27 the New York Times reported that in a white middle-class neigh-
borhood in Queens, thirty-eight neighbors were awakened by the screams of a
young woman named Kitty Genovese as she was raped and murdered over the
course of an hour, and no one bothered to call the police. That the perpetrator
was black, although the Times did not print the fact, soon became well known.
And Wallace began playing the attendant fears like a violin.
“If you are knocked in the head on a street in a city today, the man who
knocked you in the head is out of jail before you get to the hospital,” he said.
“They’re building a new bridge over the Potomac for all the white liberals
fleeing to Virginia.”
“Anyone here from Philadelphia? You know, they can’t even have night
football games anymore because of the trouble between the races. And that’s
the city of brotherly love!”
The message was moving voters. Governor Welsh wamed thousands of
patronage employees that they backed Wallace on pain of their jobs. Regis-
tered Republicans requesting a Democratic ballot were forced to pledge to vote
for the Democratic candidate for President in November (and were threatened
with having their names published). The state’s two Democratic senators sent
out franked letters pronouncing that a vote for Welsh was a vote for the mem-
ory of John F. Kennedy.
In Indiana Wallace beat his Wisconsin totals by 5 percentage points. He
earned almost three-quarters of the vote in one Gary steelworkers’ district.
“The noises you hear now,” he declared, “are the teeth falling out in Indiana.”
It was a good thing few people were paying attention to the Republicans
in Indiana, because by now it appeared that White was presiding over a coup.
He didn’t count the number of delegates he’d secured anymore; he counted
down from the 655 needed to nominate. His secret ledger read 400, four-fifths of
those chosen to date. He claimed 250 publicly. He wanted to have at least I72
with which to surprise the public if Rockefeller won California on June 2. But
once more undisciplined Arizonans spilled the secret. Not long ago Time had
deglaféd Goldwater “flat on his back.” Now the magazine reported: “Suddenly,
fike a brush fire racing out of control, the word crackled among informed
Republicans: _Goldwater’s almost got it. . . . Goldwater kept collecting dele-
gates while the unavoweds and disavowed collected press clippings.”
Though how the party would sell a candidate to the nation that polls sug-
gested only I4 percent of Republicans supported, White did not appear to con-
sider.
“Far more united and at peace with itself, except over the issue of Negro rights,
than it has been for a long time ”: future generations might be excused for won-
dering how many conflagrations need burn, or how few votes Bill Scranton
need win, before columnists would break down and concede the point that
America was a nation deeply divided against itself. But the architecture of their
thought would not permit it.
and
The candidate landed, exhausted, to a Goldwater circus. Only after Kitchel
screamed in his face, “Dammit, Parry, you’re a national figure!” did Goldwater
stride out to receive his adoration. A reporter poked a microphone in his snoot;
Goldwater scowled. A pretty young thing tried to plop a big white cowboy hat
on his head; he shoved her away. A guy was peddling a canned soft drink with
the unfortunate name of “Gold Water” (“The Right Drink for the Conservative
Taste”) from the tailgate of his truck. Goldwater was offered a sip. He spit it
Out. “This tastes like piss! I wouldn’t drink it with gin!”
and
Now, with nearly as many reporters covering the reporters as were covering the
results, for the first time CBS News was using Lou Harris’s new computer-
sampling exit poll techniques to attempt to call the race before the polls closed
at 7 p.m. local time——during, that is, prime time in the East.
With three hours to go, news chief Bill Leonard and Fred Friendly pored
over printouts that showed Rockefeller with a small but significant lead. A few
minutes later new numbers came in: Goldwater had pulled ahead with 51.6 per-
cent. They started sweating: 51.6 was just barely on the safe side of their mar-
gin of error. A few more samples came in; the Goldwater trend was confirmed.
It was 7:15 Pacific standard time.
Leonard turned to Lou Harris: “I want to be 100 percent sure.” Harris shot
back confidently, “We’re within our guidelines.”
Leonard called Cronkite in Washington—and, at 7:21 p.m., astonishment
evident in his voice at both the news and speed with which he was able to
deliver it, Cronkite told America that CBS News was projecting Barry Gold-
water as the winner.
Several hours passed. No other network called the race. Friendly and
s final samplings arrived: Goldwater, still—but this time below their
error. The actual precinct tabulations flooding in were distinctly.
ockefeller.
Fred Friendly had to get on a plane to make an important meeting in New
York the next morning. He fell asleep and awoke to the pilot’s voice: “Good
morning, ladies and gentlemen. We’re just about to make our approach into the
New York City area, and it’s going to be a beautiful day. . . . And by the way,
if you’re interested, Governor Rockefeller has won the Califomia primary.” '
Walter Cronkite, it turned out, was not nearly as trusted a man as CBS had
thought. The wire services, using their old-fashioned methods, had called the
election for Rockefeller; so did the CBS local station in New York City, hours
after Cronkite gave the race to the Arizonan senator on the national broadcast.
It was only the counting of the absentee ballots that gave the race officially to
Barry Goldwater, 1,120,403 votes to 1,052,053. The tumout was 72 percent.
Rus Walton’s polling suggested that Goldwater got 20 percent more votes in
precincts where A Choice Not an Echo had been distributed. Scores of wob-
bling delegates in other states committed for Goldwater. It was now hard t0
imagine a scenario in which Barry Goldwater would not be nominated. H6
responded to the news by drinking so much he had to be helped onto the plane
back to Washington. Rockefeller refused to quit the race, promising, “Fm
going right down the line no matter what happens.”
Goldwater people celebrated as if they were witnessing the risen Lord. But
hating Barry Goldwater was taking on transcendent overtones, too: in Missis-
sippi, Freedom Summer organizers found sharecroppers who were terrified that
a Goldwater victory would give locals license to shoot them in their homes.
Everywhere cartoonists pictured Goldwater’s base as “little old ladies in tennis
shoes”-——an image California attorney general Stanley Mosk used in his report
on the John Birch Society in 1961 to portray conservatives as the kind of peo-
ple taken in by aluminum-siding salesmen (and for which Mosk received angry
packages filled with loafers, sandals, and pumps for weeks on end). The Glas-
gow Herald called Goldwater “stupid to a degree that is incredible”;,the Lon-
don Times keened over “a major party endorsing and promoting a man so
blatantly out of touch with reality, so wild in his foreign policy, so backward in
his domestic ideas, and so inconsistent in his thinking”; and the Frankfurter
Rundschau called Goldwater “a confused and weak man who hides his weak-
ness and uncertainty with fiery speeches”—no small thing coming from Ger-
many, then witnessing a dramatic suicide epidemic among old men threatened
by new “dc-Nazification” trials.
Graham Molitor, unwinding from the Califomia bout at a religious retreat,
confessed ashamedly to a divine that when he first came to Washington in the
1950s, Goldwater had been his hero. Now he had worked to destroy the man’s
very name. The priest replied that considering the gravity of the situation,
Molitor had done no wrong.
from Before the Storm
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