This conception of the writer as genius only encourages a cer-tain personality to focus even harder on how to succeed. It is like the young Luther rushing back to confess the pride he felt in his original confession. Purity of heart, like the purity of the writer's devotion, is not to be found—according to Gilbert—by trying hard to eradicate all impure thoughts. Gilbert has an essentially Lutheran view of genius. Not the young Luther, who thought he could purify his soul by confessing properly and well and often, but Luther after his revelation, Luther after he has come to believe that good works on their own are irrelevant, for only by the grace of God can one achieve salvation. That's sort of what Gilbert thinks about writing. It doesn't involve the Christian God in particular for her, of course, and this is an obvious distinction from Luther. But Gilbert does think that one writes well only when the god of writing shines upon her, only by the grace of the attendant spirit—the genius—who comes to tell her what to write. One can see the appeal of such a view; it does a lot to ease the pres-sure of creative performance by taking the responsibility for success out of the hands of the writer, just as it did a lot to ease the pressure of the demand to achieve purity for the early Luther. If one could con-vince oneself of the truth of this properly Lutheran vision, and really manage to live it, then perhaps one could avoid Wallace's fate. Luther's actual revelation—the vision that switched his focus from works to faith, from the idea that salvation comes through the good work of confession and other hard-won indications of purity to the idea that God's grace alone can do the trick—this revelation is often described as turning on the interpretation of a biblical phrase about
the "righteousness of God." God is not righteous in the sense that he gazes into your soul and passes a just judgment upon you, seeing clearly how much purity you have achieved, as the medieval Catholic view held. God is righteous instead, in Luther's mature view, in the sense that he justifies your existence through His love, a love he may offer no matter how sinful you have been. In this mature Lutheran view, God's grace is literally nothing over which the individual has control. We are pure, passive recipients of it, in just the way that Gil-bert imagines the writer is a pure, passive recipient of her genius's inspiration. Gilbert exemplifies this receptive view of creative genius in a story from the American poet Ruth Stone. Stone is in her nineties now but in reminiscences about her childhood, Gilbert reports, she vividly re-calls her early encounters with the force of poetry.
When she was growing up in rural Virginia, [Stone] would be out working in the fields, and . . . she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. . . . It was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her . . . And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page.
This idea of the poem as an external force, something wander-ing the world looking for a receptacle, a place to reside, is Gilbert's Lutheran ideal; it is what she thinks can save great artists from the de-structive force and the dark times, from drinking gin at nine o'clock in the morning. As in the case of Luther, to get this understanding of the human being as writer requires a Gestalt shift, a shift that turns what was an onerous, pressure-filled, probably inachievable task into something that is entirely outside the artist's realm of responsibility.
It is not clear that this is a reason for the truth of the view, but it is at least Gilbert's instrumental reason for wanting to believe it. About Wallace's Nietzschean-type approach she says:
I got to tell you, I think that was a huge error. You know, I think that allowing somebody . . . to believe that he or she is . . . the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery is just a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile, human psyche. It's like asking somebody to swallow the sun. It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance. And I think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years.
The idea that we must "become gods ourselves" as Nietzsche says,48 that we must become the source of all "divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery," this dramatically self-aggrandizing view was indeed prefigured by the Renaissance notion of genius—and of rational hu-manism more generally. And we think Gilbert is right to resist it. It's not just too much responsibility for the human psyche, as she points out, but it's probably inconsistent with what are deeply human kinds of comfort and happiness too, as we will see in Melville. So on this issue we side with Gilbert over Wallace. But there are disadvantages to Gilbert's pure receptivity view as well. For if the poem is a purely external force that rumbles through us—if the sacred and the divine and the meaningful can't be earned but depend on God's inscrutable grace—then this receptive view is just as incapacitating as Wallace's kind of Nietzschean nihilism. Whereas Wallace gives us an unachievable task, Gilbert gives us no task at all. We can pray for inspiration from the genius, of course, just as the mature Luther can pray for the grace of God. But what really matters in the end has nothing to do with how we live our lives.49 What matters is only whether we happen to be near a pencil at the
David Foster Wallace's Nihilism l 57
moment the poem rumbles through. Perhaps this is good news for pencil companies, but the rest of us can feel little joy in such a vision. The question that remains is whether Gilbert and Wallace between them have completely covered the terrain. In Wallace's Nietzschean view, we are the sole active agents in the universe, responsible for gen-erating out of nothing whatever notion of the sacred and divine there can ever be. Gilbert, by contrast, takes a kind of mature Lutheran view. On her account we are purely passive recipients of God's divine will, nothing but receptacles for the grace he may choose to offer. Is there anything in between? We think there is, and we will try to de-velop it in the final chapter of the book.
-"■111111
Sunday, May 31, 2015
Thursday, May 28, 2015
ATS
Only Dante's extreme kind of bliss- a bliss so powerful that it supercedes any kind of human commitment or attachment or project whatsoever, a bliss so overwhelming that it reveals earth and all earthly goods as completely insignificant, so ecstatic that it takes you out of the world and into an infinitely better one-
only this kind of experience of the sacred will do. If this is the goal that Wallace seeks, then nothing available on earth can achieve it. The joy of a crowd rising as one in the spontaneous celebration of a feat of human greatness, the cozy warmth of the fireside, the comfort and gratitude of a family meal—none of these human kinds of happi-ness will do. Only in the ecstatic bliss of a levitating Mitchell Drinion does salvation lie. But Wallace's vision is demanding in a second sense as well. For it demands that this bliss be experienced constantly, without cease, through even the most banal and frustrating and painful and awful aspects of existence. Indeed it demands that Hell itself be experienced as fully paradisiacal bliss. There is some question whether this radically demanding picture of salvation is actually attractive. For it seems to level all possible ex-periences, leaving no room for the idea that any experience is bet-ter than any other. One wonders whether bliss of this eternal sort is even desirable at all. Is bliss—when there is nothing to contrast it with—actually enjoyable for human beings? Or is it rather that the full range of human emotions is required for any one of them to take on significance? We will see that this is Melville's view. The Catskill eagle that he admires can soar to the highest heights and descend into the blackest gorges, and by way of this variety sees the true meaning in all our states. Finally, however, Wallace's vision of the sacred is also deeply im-poverished. As we have seen, there is no sense whatsoever in Wal-lace that the "sacred" moments of existence are gifts, so there is no place for gratitude. The bliss that Wallace seeks is not only ecstatic and unworldly—extreme in a sense known only to Dante's medieval Christian monotheism it is in addition generated solely by the indi-vidual will.38 This divorces Wallace's notion of the sacred completely from its traditional support in some external notion of the divine. In Dante's world, by contrast, ecstatic bliss is possible only when one gives up one's individual will completely and releases it into the will of
David Foster Wallace's Nihilism I 49
God. "But mine were not the wings for such a flight," Dante writes, in the very lines from which Wallace was quoting:
Here my powers rest from their high fantasy But already I could feel my being turned . • . By the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars."
No wonder Wallace worried he was not strong enough to write the story he wanted. Only inhuman, divine strength would have been sufficient for the task. Nietzsche thought we were strong enough for a project like this, that the true free spirits could live this way with joy. Indeed, Nietzsche believed that the only possibility for existence was for each of us to become gods ourselves. Nietzsche is thinking of this kind of infi-nite freedom when he describes the free spirits as living forever upon the open sea, the stable but constraining land to be discarded like a crutch. "We have left the land and have embarked," Nietzsche writes.
We have burned our bridges behind us—indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us. . . . Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom—and there is no longer any "land.""
The person who feels homesick for land, in other words, who wishes for some stable ground to stand upon, some externally imposed con-straint to guide him in his choice, this person is simply not strong enough, in Nietzsche's view, to experience the joy of infinite freedom. To see what extraordinary strength this requires, we need to keep in mind the radical freedom that Wallace is aiming for. It is a freedom of will so complete that by its force one can experience searing pain as overwhelming joy; crushing, crushing boredom as instant bliss; hell itself as the sacred, mystical oneness of all things deep down. There are literally no constraints whatsoever to the meaning we can con-struct for our experiences. In the context of this infinite freedom any restriction whatsoever—even of the land beneath our feet—is woeful, romdeplorable; it chafes and burns. But what if this is impossible for human beings? What if our very umanness sets limitations to the way we can experience ourselves and our world? What if it isn't possible to create meaning or find a sense of the sacred ex nihilo without some kind of constraints? In such a world, as Melville understood, grim perseverance is possible for a while; but in the end suicide is the only choice. Melville too considers a character—Bulkington is his name—who is at home only in the infinite openness of the sea, for whom land "seemed scorching to his feet." And he thinks there is something seri-ous and terrifying and wonderful about such a character.
I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in midwinter just landed from a four years' danger-ous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term.4'
But there is no happiness in Melville's Bulkington: "in the deep shadows of his eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem to give him much joy."42 Indeed, by contrast with Nietzsche's joy-ful free spirit, Melville sees in Bulkington a grim, dangerous exis-tence—one that is wonderful and awe-full, to be sure; indeed one that is devoted to the highest truth—but an existence, for all that, that is not livable for a mortal man. Bulkington himself is a "mor-tally intolerable truth."" Bulkington reveals a deep tension, perhaps even a paradox, of human existence, in Melville's view. As a human being Bulkington has to work hard to keep his freedom; the seduction of the shore's safety is a constant danger. For upon the land is where all normal human comfort and vulnerability lies. And though these comforts and vulnerabilities are not true realities but only seeming ones, al-thpugh they are not as stable as they seem to be and grounded in God,
and although Bulkington himself recognizes this, nevertheless their comfort appeals to every human being.
The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that's kind to our mortalities.“
For Bulkington these human comforts and vulnerabilities must be resisted. Sure, the happiness of friendship seems a joy to normal folks, but Bulkington knows this joy is sanctioned by no God, and therefore in it lies no eternal truth; he knows that boredom, and anger, and frustration, and melancholy—yes, even the "damp, drizzly November in the soul" that we shall see is so important to Melville's central char-acter Ishmael—all these are a mirage, a nothing, and so can properly have no effect. He is not driven to the sea by melancholy, like Ishmael is. Rather, the "slavishness" of the land can only be counteracted by the complete lack of constraint one finds at sea. In Wallace this is the freedom to treat melancholy as happiness, boredom as bliss, to make a comfort of even the stormiest waters. But this kind of infinite freedom, according to Melville, is not a human freedom at all. The freedom to gaze at the eternal chaos of the universe and impose an arbitrary meaning upon it, to live eter-nally upon this open sea, that is the freedom of a god, a freedom no mortal life can sustain. Perhaps we should think of Wallace himself, therefore, as we read the description of Bulkington's last hour. When he is absent one morning, presumably having jumped from the ship, Melville describes Bulkington as a demigod.
"But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling in-finite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart. O Bulkington, bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing. Straight up leaps thy apotheosis!"
Bear thee grimly demigod, indeed!
only this kind of experience of the sacred will do. If this is the goal that Wallace seeks, then nothing available on earth can achieve it. The joy of a crowd rising as one in the spontaneous celebration of a feat of human greatness, the cozy warmth of the fireside, the comfort and gratitude of a family meal—none of these human kinds of happi-ness will do. Only in the ecstatic bliss of a levitating Mitchell Drinion does salvation lie. But Wallace's vision is demanding in a second sense as well. For it demands that this bliss be experienced constantly, without cease, through even the most banal and frustrating and painful and awful aspects of existence. Indeed it demands that Hell itself be experienced as fully paradisiacal bliss. There is some question whether this radically demanding picture of salvation is actually attractive. For it seems to level all possible ex-periences, leaving no room for the idea that any experience is bet-ter than any other. One wonders whether bliss of this eternal sort is even desirable at all. Is bliss—when there is nothing to contrast it with—actually enjoyable for human beings? Or is it rather that the full range of human emotions is required for any one of them to take on significance? We will see that this is Melville's view. The Catskill eagle that he admires can soar to the highest heights and descend into the blackest gorges, and by way of this variety sees the true meaning in all our states. Finally, however, Wallace's vision of the sacred is also deeply im-poverished. As we have seen, there is no sense whatsoever in Wal-lace that the "sacred" moments of existence are gifts, so there is no place for gratitude. The bliss that Wallace seeks is not only ecstatic and unworldly—extreme in a sense known only to Dante's medieval Christian monotheism it is in addition generated solely by the indi-vidual will.38 This divorces Wallace's notion of the sacred completely from its traditional support in some external notion of the divine. In Dante's world, by contrast, ecstatic bliss is possible only when one gives up one's individual will completely and releases it into the will of
David Foster Wallace's Nihilism I 49
God. "But mine were not the wings for such a flight," Dante writes, in the very lines from which Wallace was quoting:
Here my powers rest from their high fantasy But already I could feel my being turned . • . By the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars."
No wonder Wallace worried he was not strong enough to write the story he wanted. Only inhuman, divine strength would have been sufficient for the task. Nietzsche thought we were strong enough for a project like this, that the true free spirits could live this way with joy. Indeed, Nietzsche believed that the only possibility for existence was for each of us to become gods ourselves. Nietzsche is thinking of this kind of infi-nite freedom when he describes the free spirits as living forever upon the open sea, the stable but constraining land to be discarded like a crutch. "We have left the land and have embarked," Nietzsche writes.
We have burned our bridges behind us—indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us. . . . Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom—and there is no longer any "land.""
The person who feels homesick for land, in other words, who wishes for some stable ground to stand upon, some externally imposed con-straint to guide him in his choice, this person is simply not strong enough, in Nietzsche's view, to experience the joy of infinite freedom. To see what extraordinary strength this requires, we need to keep in mind the radical freedom that Wallace is aiming for. It is a freedom of will so complete that by its force one can experience searing pain as overwhelming joy; crushing, crushing boredom as instant bliss; hell itself as the sacred, mystical oneness of all things deep down. There are literally no constraints whatsoever to the meaning we can con-struct for our experiences. In the context of this infinite freedom any restriction whatsoever—even of the land beneath our feet—is woeful, romdeplorable; it chafes and burns. But what if this is impossible for human beings? What if our very umanness sets limitations to the way we can experience ourselves and our world? What if it isn't possible to create meaning or find a sense of the sacred ex nihilo without some kind of constraints? In such a world, as Melville understood, grim perseverance is possible for a while; but in the end suicide is the only choice. Melville too considers a character—Bulkington is his name—who is at home only in the infinite openness of the sea, for whom land "seemed scorching to his feet." And he thinks there is something seri-ous and terrifying and wonderful about such a character.
I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in midwinter just landed from a four years' danger-ous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term.4'
But there is no happiness in Melville's Bulkington: "in the deep shadows of his eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem to give him much joy."42 Indeed, by contrast with Nietzsche's joy-ful free spirit, Melville sees in Bulkington a grim, dangerous exis-tence—one that is wonderful and awe-full, to be sure; indeed one that is devoted to the highest truth—but an existence, for all that, that is not livable for a mortal man. Bulkington himself is a "mor-tally intolerable truth."" Bulkington reveals a deep tension, perhaps even a paradox, of human existence, in Melville's view. As a human being Bulkington has to work hard to keep his freedom; the seduction of the shore's safety is a constant danger. For upon the land is where all normal human comfort and vulnerability lies. And though these comforts and vulnerabilities are not true realities but only seeming ones, al-thpugh they are not as stable as they seem to be and grounded in God,
and although Bulkington himself recognizes this, nevertheless their comfort appeals to every human being.
The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that's kind to our mortalities.“
For Bulkington these human comforts and vulnerabilities must be resisted. Sure, the happiness of friendship seems a joy to normal folks, but Bulkington knows this joy is sanctioned by no God, and therefore in it lies no eternal truth; he knows that boredom, and anger, and frustration, and melancholy—yes, even the "damp, drizzly November in the soul" that we shall see is so important to Melville's central char-acter Ishmael—all these are a mirage, a nothing, and so can properly have no effect. He is not driven to the sea by melancholy, like Ishmael is. Rather, the "slavishness" of the land can only be counteracted by the complete lack of constraint one finds at sea. In Wallace this is the freedom to treat melancholy as happiness, boredom as bliss, to make a comfort of even the stormiest waters. But this kind of infinite freedom, according to Melville, is not a human freedom at all. The freedom to gaze at the eternal chaos of the universe and impose an arbitrary meaning upon it, to live eter-nally upon this open sea, that is the freedom of a god, a freedom no mortal life can sustain. Perhaps we should think of Wallace himself, therefore, as we read the description of Bulkington's last hour. When he is absent one morning, presumably having jumped from the ship, Melville describes Bulkington as a demigod.
"But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling in-finite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart. O Bulkington, bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing. Straight up leaps thy apotheosis!"
Bear thee grimly demigod, indeed!
Sunday, May 17, 2015
1876
"It is a fascinating game." Sanford puffed on his cigar. "I think about it sometimes for myself." "Politics?" "Yes. If you have the money and the feel of the thing, why, it's as simple as can be. It would take me maybe two hundred thou-sand dollars to buy a seat in the Senate. Conkling paid a bit more for his seat but then New York's more prosperous than Rhode Island."
"But why would you want it? After all, don't men go to the Senate in order to acquire the sort of money that you already have?" Sanford laughed. "Good point! I suppose it's to see if you can get the top prize. Become the president. After all, that's worth having for itself, isn't it?" "I can't think why. As far as I can tell, our presidents have almost no function, except perhaps in wartime." "But they are there! Don't you see? Now, when you worry about corruption—" "Mr. Sanford, I promise you that I have not lost a moment's sleep at the thought of a bribe given or received." "Sir, I know your writing. I know who your friends are. You're shocked by all this. But how else can you run a country where half the people don't even speak English and everybody's in a scramble to get his share of the pie? I'll tell you something," he told me. "Personally, I'm like you. I don't like anything about this so-called democracy. I'd like a well-run country with honest peo-ple in the government, the way they have in Prussia . . ." "A tyranny?" "If that's the only way to clean things up, make things run right, well, I'd accept that." "With yourself as the tyrant, naturally." "Oh, I'd accept that in a flash!" He laughed to show that he was not joking. "Mrs. Sprague has true `tong.'"My other ear was duly filled with the sound of McAllister's voice; he had heard a magical name and responded in character. "Whenever I hear New York-ers say there is no society at Washington, I say, why, you have never been to Mrs. Sprague's for New Year's Day nor seen her enter a room, any room, with her hair done in braids like a coronet, and those marvellous jewels. Gone now, I should think. They are flat broke, don't you know? the Spragues." This last item was added as if it were a charming detail of the poor woman's regalia. McAllister then gave me a recipe for terrapin, "taught me by a Maryland darkey," involving a good deal of cream and butter. He also asked me if I had noticed how Americans of the same class say "sir" to one another whereas in England only servants say "sir." "But we do say `sir' in England. To royalty." I was benign.
and
"Have you been to the White House yet?" John was curious to see how Emma would respond to American grandeur. But she was demure. "Only to pay a call on Mrs. Grant. We are, she said, to be invited to her next 'large' dinner. She emphasized the 'large.' Unless, of course, Papa offends the President with his pieces." "Then you've not seen the President, Mr. Schuyler?" "Oh, I've seen him, yes, but I've not met him." I should have noted earlier in these pages that two days ago, at about ten o'clock in the evening the President appeared in the rotunda of Willard's Hotel. I had been warned that he often likes to stroll over from the White House to sit in the lobby and smoke a cigar, to speak to no one, and then go home. The hotel people respect his incog-nito, if that's the word. But sometimes he is recognized by the guests, as he was by Nordhoff and me. Nordhoff saw him first. We were seated at the far end of the rotunda, going over my second piece. "Here he comes. Don't stare." I glanced casually toward the main door and there stood Gen-eral Grant. None of the other guests recognized him, but then he is not, to say the least, a vivid-looking man. For one thing he is a good deal smaller than I had expected, and though, ostensibly, robust of build, he seems curiously fragile because of the way he moves: the upper part of the body inclines forward as he walks, while the head is held slightly to one side. I would suspect that he is pigeon-toed, with one leg shorter than the other like my mother, whose gait resembled his. The hair is short, turning grey, and parted on the left side (it is said that he has a violent prejudice against men who part their hair in the middle). The famous beard is neatly tended and covers, or rather masks, the entire lower part of the face. Clenched between his teeth was a long black cigar that remained unlit for the whole time he sat in the lobby: he chewed rather than smoked. Just back of his chair stood the sole detective who guards the President on his strolls. Ears, nose, eyes are unexceptional, but the face in repose is very curious. There is something hurt, damaged, puzzled in the ex-pression. "Does he always look so wretched?" I asked. "Pretty much. He laughs little, smiles less. And for an army man he is most prudish. He'll walk out of the room if someone tells a dirty story—" "But he drinks, doesn't he?" "He used to. Certainly before and even during the war he was often drunk. But now I think he's rather abstinent. Most of his time is spent with horses. In fact, he will only talk to you about horses or the war. He gets upset at any mention of politics." "Quite understandable." "He has no interest in the arts. He actively dislikes music. Yet he is partial, curiously enough, to flowers." "Men are not easy to fathom, are they?" "Heroes least of all." So we stared for half an hour at General Grant as he took his ease, chewed his cigar, looked at the people coming and going like any other war veteran come home to grow old, to sit on the courthouse steps of an evening and watch others live. Finally, the President was recognized. Two political types (of the lobby, not the Congress: I've got so I can tell them apart with a glance) emerged from the barroom and, rather drunkenly, pre-sented themselves for Grant's attention. The hero's face did not once lose its puzzled expression while the blue eyes did not, to say the least, invite any intimacy with the strangers. As Grant got to his feet one of the men seized his hand. The President allowed the hand to be held for an instant. Then he pulled it—and himself—away. The two men suddenly were faced not with the President but with the tall detective who had placed his large presence between them and the retreating small figure. In an instant the scene was done. "Is he stupid?" I asked, genuinely curious. "No. But limited. Without much curiosity. Yet he has come to know a good deal more about government than most people suspect. But he has—obviously—no gift for presiding over this country."
and
"Make history? But there is no history," I said, trying out in my own voice Baron Jacobi's theory, "only fictions of varying degrees of plausibility." "What?" "I meant to tell you that I had an amusing conversation with Garfield about history. He assured me that one can learn the truth about the past through old newspapers, letters, diaries. Then he proposed to help me write, as it were, the history of Mr. Blaine, by setting down in the Herald all the lies he would like to see in print." "But now you know the truth. And the truth always comes out." "Dear Nordhoff, in this case I know only what you tell me is the truth. And you could be mistaken. As for the truth always coming out, why, I think it never does. But even if it did, who would know?"
and
"But what is there new to write about? I mean politically. No one seems very interested in either candidate." This is true, and I find it astonishing, considering the issues involved. Yet all sum-mer long the country ha's been entirely preoccupied with the Centennial Exhibition, with sewing machines, Japanese vases, popped corn, typewriters and telephones, not to mention inces-sant praise for those paladins who created this perfect nation, this envied Eden, exactly one century ago. "Things will heat up, Charlie, and you're the man to do the heating." "No, Jamie. Nordhoff heats the pot, which I simply stir from time to time." "That's all right, too." He gave me a passing grade for this conceit. "Zach. Chandler has ordered the Interior Department to investigate Tilden's taxes. Back in '62, during the worst of the war, Tilden said that his income for the year was only seven thousand dollars. Actually, it was more than a hundred thou-sand." "I should think that by not paying the infamous tax on income, Tilden would be something of a hero." "Boys in blue," said Jamie, combing his moustache with his fingers. "Union in peril. Slaves to be freed. Every dollar needed. Patriotic duty. Down with Copperhead Democrats. Oh, The New York Times is getting ready to pour it on. There is no crime their editors would not commit to help the Republican party." "I don't think that I can be lyric on the subject of taxes not paid." "There's good stuff assembled. And something very sweet about Hayes." Jamie looked suddenly happy. "Some years ago he shot his mother with a pistol, in a sudden fit of insanity." "This need not make him unpopular." I thought Jamie was joking. But apparently he was repeating the latest rumour to make the rounds. All in all, I do not think that democracy, as practised in these states, is a success. While Tilden grimly, laboriously presents to the people his plans to reform what is, probably, the most corrupt society in the Western world, the press is busy with idiotic irrelevaneies about Tilden's alleged drunkenness, syphilis, close-ness to Tweed—all set to music in a pretty song called "Sly Sam, the Railroad Thief." Hayes's taxes are also under review, since he, too, is a rich lawyer who did not pay, it is rumoured, any tax at all in '68 and '69. Lately he has been accused of stealing the money entrusted him by one of his soldiers killed in the war. "Charlie, go South. Please. I beg you. Get that pony out of the sun, you stupid Irish bastard!" shouted Jamie to his groom. "Even the heat at Newport is too much for me. I would perish at the South. Besides, Nordhoff's already done you proud." Nord-hoff's pieces for the Herald on the so-called cotton states have been most sympathetic and vivid; he appears to want some sort of re-alignment to the present political balance. "Always a breeze at New Orleans, and Florida is a paradise this time of year. That's where the trouble's going to be." "How do you know?" Although I have no high opinion of Jamie's general intelligence (certainly he has managed to keep well outside Western civilization and all its works), I am con-stantly impressed by his sense of this country. He is a sort of human barometer, able to anticipate before anyone else a political scandal, an Indian massacre. "South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana are all under Federal control. Grant's got the troops down there." "Less than three thousand in the whole South." I am, after all, An Authority. Jamie ignored my Authoritativeness. "So what's going to hap-pen if they vote Democratic?" "But they will vote Democratic, and Tilden will be the presi-dent." "That's only a part of it." Jamie looked about him vaguely. "I'll give you half again as much as I've been overpaying you if you just go to New Orleans, talk to the leaders there . . ." I was firm. I refused to go South. But I did agree to resume my weekly pieces in September, since the last eight weeks of a pre dential election are the crucial ones. At least from the point view of learning who stole what from whom. "Did Hayes really shoot his mother?" I was curious about that detail. Jamie was donning his helmet, pony at hand. "Certainly." "Shot her dead?"
"But why would you want it? After all, don't men go to the Senate in order to acquire the sort of money that you already have?" Sanford laughed. "Good point! I suppose it's to see if you can get the top prize. Become the president. After all, that's worth having for itself, isn't it?" "I can't think why. As far as I can tell, our presidents have almost no function, except perhaps in wartime." "But they are there! Don't you see? Now, when you worry about corruption—" "Mr. Sanford, I promise you that I have not lost a moment's sleep at the thought of a bribe given or received." "Sir, I know your writing. I know who your friends are. You're shocked by all this. But how else can you run a country where half the people don't even speak English and everybody's in a scramble to get his share of the pie? I'll tell you something," he told me. "Personally, I'm like you. I don't like anything about this so-called democracy. I'd like a well-run country with honest peo-ple in the government, the way they have in Prussia . . ." "A tyranny?" "If that's the only way to clean things up, make things run right, well, I'd accept that." "With yourself as the tyrant, naturally." "Oh, I'd accept that in a flash!" He laughed to show that he was not joking. "Mrs. Sprague has true `tong.'"My other ear was duly filled with the sound of McAllister's voice; he had heard a magical name and responded in character. "Whenever I hear New York-ers say there is no society at Washington, I say, why, you have never been to Mrs. Sprague's for New Year's Day nor seen her enter a room, any room, with her hair done in braids like a coronet, and those marvellous jewels. Gone now, I should think. They are flat broke, don't you know? the Spragues." This last item was added as if it were a charming detail of the poor woman's regalia. McAllister then gave me a recipe for terrapin, "taught me by a Maryland darkey," involving a good deal of cream and butter. He also asked me if I had noticed how Americans of the same class say "sir" to one another whereas in England only servants say "sir." "But we do say `sir' in England. To royalty." I was benign.
and
"Have you been to the White House yet?" John was curious to see how Emma would respond to American grandeur. But she was demure. "Only to pay a call on Mrs. Grant. We are, she said, to be invited to her next 'large' dinner. She emphasized the 'large.' Unless, of course, Papa offends the President with his pieces." "Then you've not seen the President, Mr. Schuyler?" "Oh, I've seen him, yes, but I've not met him." I should have noted earlier in these pages that two days ago, at about ten o'clock in the evening the President appeared in the rotunda of Willard's Hotel. I had been warned that he often likes to stroll over from the White House to sit in the lobby and smoke a cigar, to speak to no one, and then go home. The hotel people respect his incog-nito, if that's the word. But sometimes he is recognized by the guests, as he was by Nordhoff and me. Nordhoff saw him first. We were seated at the far end of the rotunda, going over my second piece. "Here he comes. Don't stare." I glanced casually toward the main door and there stood Gen-eral Grant. None of the other guests recognized him, but then he is not, to say the least, a vivid-looking man. For one thing he is a good deal smaller than I had expected, and though, ostensibly, robust of build, he seems curiously fragile because of the way he moves: the upper part of the body inclines forward as he walks, while the head is held slightly to one side. I would suspect that he is pigeon-toed, with one leg shorter than the other like my mother, whose gait resembled his. The hair is short, turning grey, and parted on the left side (it is said that he has a violent prejudice against men who part their hair in the middle). The famous beard is neatly tended and covers, or rather masks, the entire lower part of the face. Clenched between his teeth was a long black cigar that remained unlit for the whole time he sat in the lobby: he chewed rather than smoked. Just back of his chair stood the sole detective who guards the President on his strolls. Ears, nose, eyes are unexceptional, but the face in repose is very curious. There is something hurt, damaged, puzzled in the ex-pression. "Does he always look so wretched?" I asked. "Pretty much. He laughs little, smiles less. And for an army man he is most prudish. He'll walk out of the room if someone tells a dirty story—" "But he drinks, doesn't he?" "He used to. Certainly before and even during the war he was often drunk. But now I think he's rather abstinent. Most of his time is spent with horses. In fact, he will only talk to you about horses or the war. He gets upset at any mention of politics." "Quite understandable." "He has no interest in the arts. He actively dislikes music. Yet he is partial, curiously enough, to flowers." "Men are not easy to fathom, are they?" "Heroes least of all." So we stared for half an hour at General Grant as he took his ease, chewed his cigar, looked at the people coming and going like any other war veteran come home to grow old, to sit on the courthouse steps of an evening and watch others live. Finally, the President was recognized. Two political types (of the lobby, not the Congress: I've got so I can tell them apart with a glance) emerged from the barroom and, rather drunkenly, pre-sented themselves for Grant's attention. The hero's face did not once lose its puzzled expression while the blue eyes did not, to say the least, invite any intimacy with the strangers. As Grant got to his feet one of the men seized his hand. The President allowed the hand to be held for an instant. Then he pulled it—and himself—away. The two men suddenly were faced not with the President but with the tall detective who had placed his large presence between them and the retreating small figure. In an instant the scene was done. "Is he stupid?" I asked, genuinely curious. "No. But limited. Without much curiosity. Yet he has come to know a good deal more about government than most people suspect. But he has—obviously—no gift for presiding over this country."
and
"Make history? But there is no history," I said, trying out in my own voice Baron Jacobi's theory, "only fictions of varying degrees of plausibility." "What?" "I meant to tell you that I had an amusing conversation with Garfield about history. He assured me that one can learn the truth about the past through old newspapers, letters, diaries. Then he proposed to help me write, as it were, the history of Mr. Blaine, by setting down in the Herald all the lies he would like to see in print." "But now you know the truth. And the truth always comes out." "Dear Nordhoff, in this case I know only what you tell me is the truth. And you could be mistaken. As for the truth always coming out, why, I think it never does. But even if it did, who would know?"
and
"But what is there new to write about? I mean politically. No one seems very interested in either candidate." This is true, and I find it astonishing, considering the issues involved. Yet all sum-mer long the country ha's been entirely preoccupied with the Centennial Exhibition, with sewing machines, Japanese vases, popped corn, typewriters and telephones, not to mention inces-sant praise for those paladins who created this perfect nation, this envied Eden, exactly one century ago. "Things will heat up, Charlie, and you're the man to do the heating." "No, Jamie. Nordhoff heats the pot, which I simply stir from time to time." "That's all right, too." He gave me a passing grade for this conceit. "Zach. Chandler has ordered the Interior Department to investigate Tilden's taxes. Back in '62, during the worst of the war, Tilden said that his income for the year was only seven thousand dollars. Actually, it was more than a hundred thou-sand." "I should think that by not paying the infamous tax on income, Tilden would be something of a hero." "Boys in blue," said Jamie, combing his moustache with his fingers. "Union in peril. Slaves to be freed. Every dollar needed. Patriotic duty. Down with Copperhead Democrats. Oh, The New York Times is getting ready to pour it on. There is no crime their editors would not commit to help the Republican party." "I don't think that I can be lyric on the subject of taxes not paid." "There's good stuff assembled. And something very sweet about Hayes." Jamie looked suddenly happy. "Some years ago he shot his mother with a pistol, in a sudden fit of insanity." "This need not make him unpopular." I thought Jamie was joking. But apparently he was repeating the latest rumour to make the rounds. All in all, I do not think that democracy, as practised in these states, is a success. While Tilden grimly, laboriously presents to the people his plans to reform what is, probably, the most corrupt society in the Western world, the press is busy with idiotic irrelevaneies about Tilden's alleged drunkenness, syphilis, close-ness to Tweed—all set to music in a pretty song called "Sly Sam, the Railroad Thief." Hayes's taxes are also under review, since he, too, is a rich lawyer who did not pay, it is rumoured, any tax at all in '68 and '69. Lately he has been accused of stealing the money entrusted him by one of his soldiers killed in the war. "Charlie, go South. Please. I beg you. Get that pony out of the sun, you stupid Irish bastard!" shouted Jamie to his groom. "Even the heat at Newport is too much for me. I would perish at the South. Besides, Nordhoff's already done you proud." Nord-hoff's pieces for the Herald on the so-called cotton states have been most sympathetic and vivid; he appears to want some sort of re-alignment to the present political balance. "Always a breeze at New Orleans, and Florida is a paradise this time of year. That's where the trouble's going to be." "How do you know?" Although I have no high opinion of Jamie's general intelligence (certainly he has managed to keep well outside Western civilization and all its works), I am con-stantly impressed by his sense of this country. He is a sort of human barometer, able to anticipate before anyone else a political scandal, an Indian massacre. "South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana are all under Federal control. Grant's got the troops down there." "Less than three thousand in the whole South." I am, after all, An Authority. Jamie ignored my Authoritativeness. "So what's going to hap-pen if they vote Democratic?" "But they will vote Democratic, and Tilden will be the presi-dent." "That's only a part of it." Jamie looked about him vaguely. "I'll give you half again as much as I've been overpaying you if you just go to New Orleans, talk to the leaders there . . ." I was firm. I refused to go South. But I did agree to resume my weekly pieces in September, since the last eight weeks of a pre dential election are the crucial ones. At least from the point view of learning who stole what from whom. "Did Hayes really shoot his mother?" I was curious about that detail. Jamie was donning his helmet, pony at hand. "Certainly." "Shot her dead?"
Monday, May 11, 2015
Jesus and Cecil B. DeMille
Production was complicated by a major blowup between DeMille and Paul Iribe, after which the director ordered Mitch Leisen to take over. It was Leisen who devised a way for H. B. Warner to hang on the Cross for the two weeks neces-sary to shoot the Crucifixion sequence. He made casts of Warner's hands, and the casts were bolted to the cross, with blood modeled down the wrists. The casts had leather pads built into the back; Warner would insert his hands into the casts and grasp the leather so that he could hang convincingly for several minutes at a time. Besides that, a bicycle seat was mounted on the Cross so that Warner's weight would be supported yet another way. Although DeMille was clearly concerned about money, he didn't cut corners and the proprieties were observed. A curtain was dropped in front of the Gol-gotha set whenever Warner had to get on or off the Cross. There was no smoking, and bad language was discouraged. "Whenever DeMille started to get apoplectic about something," remembered Mitch Leisen, "I would say very quietly, `There's a bishop right behind you.' That was my one revenge for all the hell I got from him most of the time." Poor H. B. Warner hung on the Cross for fourteen days, followed by three days of shooting on the Resurrection, followed by two days of shooting on the Ascension. Warner's drinking problem was reactivated by the pressure. Monte West-more was in charge of Warner's makeup, and when the actor would show up in the morning still weaving, Westmore would make him drink cod liver oil. After
vomiting, Warner would be shaken but sober. Westmore continued this rough treatment for several weeks until Warner decided sobriety was preferable to cod liver oil. Sally Rand, who would become famous for her Fan Dance in the 1933 Chi-cago World's Fair, played one of Mary Magdalene's slaves. Rand and Warner began an affair, which infuriated DeMille. Rand would tell friends about the day when DeMille spotted her and Warner coming to the set together. DeMille grabbed his ever-present microphone and boomed out, "Miss Rand! Leave my Jesus Christ alone! If you must screw someone, screw Pontius Pilate!" Visiting the production was a young Jesuit from St. Louis named Daniel Lord, who would become a friend of DeMille's and an advisor on the film. Lord collapsed under the onslaught of DeMille's charm, but always managed to main-,. tain an overall sense of objectivity about the man. In his memoirs, Lord described DeMille as "a strange and fascinating blend of absolute monarch and charming gentleman, of excellent host and exacting taskmaster, of ruthless drive on the set and complete letdown the moment that the day's shooting had come to an end; a Renaissance prince who had the in-stincts of a Barnum and a magnified Belasco; frankly in love with hokum (which he liked to discuss and reduce to terms of understandable basic emotion)." The plot invention of Judas's love affair with Mary Magdalene induced some-thing approaching physical pain in Lord, but DeMille was adamant; he told Lord that the audience had to be won over; that they had to have a sense of luxury and beauty. "If they fall in love with Magdalene, then when she leaps into her chariot and says, 'I go to find a Carpenter,' they will go along," said DeMille. Actually, the title uttered by the Magdalene, one of the juiciest in all of silent films, is "Go fetch my richest perfumes! Harness my zebras—gift of the Nubian king! This carpenter shall learn that He cannot hold a man from Mary Magda-lene!" It is only after another character tells the Magdalene that he has observed this man healing the blind that she says, "I have blinded more men than He hath ever healed. . . . We go to call upon a carpenter!" Soon, Jesus casts out her demons: the Seven Deadly Sins.
and
DeMille had a habit of bestowing nicknames on employees, which was not function of affection but derived from the fact that he had a terrible memory fo, names. As Richard deMille would remember, "He could easily list the twelve apo& ties, but not the fifty technicians." The music editor would always be addressed "Mr. Music," while a minor actress was always referred to as "Dottie Coughdrop.' "Get Dottie Coughdrop;" he would tell Joe Egli, the casting director, and Egli would have to match a face to the vague name. His demeanor around the younger women on his staff was rigorously profes. sional and fatherly. When a gorgeous Iowa girl named Mary Bennett came to work in his office, he offered her a screen test and acting training if she wanted it. She didn't and later regretted her decision, but all her life idolized DeMille as an ideal father figure. Professionally, he agonized over major decisions, especially subject and cast. ing. "DeMille always had a hell of a time [making] decisions, about anything," remembered Henry Noerdlinger, his highly regarded head of research. "[But] once he had made a decision then there was no deviation from it." "He was a very exacting person," said A. C. Lyles. "If you went to him for something, he would want to know exactly what the subject was and wanted to know exactly the answers when he asked you what they were. And you couldn't con him. He knew the business. He made the business. I always found him to be very friendly, cordial, very open to suggestions, very willing to help people who wanted to be helped." Mitchell Leisen would assert that "He had very positive ideas of what he wanted and he wasn't satisfied until he got it. . . . I owe him everything I ever learned about making pictures. The most important thing of all is the power of concentrating, never deviating from your objective. Once he started on a project, he concentrated on that and thought of nothing else." On the set of a picture, he was everywhere, even directing the taking of the stills. Robert Parrish, who worked for him as an extra, said that "he often seemed to spend as much time and energy on the still as he did on the actual scenes." For stills, he would get in front of the company and do what he never did during the picture itself: act out the scene. As the actors mimicked him, he would wait for the expression he wanted, then yell "STILL!" and everyone would freeze. If anyone moved and spoiled the shot, he would become irate. One day, Parrish witnessed an episode that would grow into a legend, as two men in the back of the crowd began talking while DeMille was launching into an oration about a full day's work for a full day's pay. DeMille stopped and asked what the men were talking about. One of them refused to say. He was promptly sent home. The other fellow was called up to the camera platform. "There are four hundred people waiting for lunch because of you. Will you kindly tell them what you had to say that was so important?" The extra, Eddie Boyle, took the proffered microphone and said, "I said, ,I wonder when he's going to call lunch.' " The crowd erupted into applause. DeMille's response was a trace of a smile. The assistant promptly called "Lunch. One hour." Parrish asserted that the response that became the stuff of a hundred Hollywood anthologies—"I wonder when that bald headed old son of a bitch is going to call lunch" was strictly a myth. "Eddie Boyle was tough and seasoned," Parrish wrote, "but he was not as tough and seasoned as all that, though some of us at the time wished he had been." Parrish also witnessed a moment when DeMille's chair boy accidentally nudged his script binder so that dozens of script pages fell out. There was a wind machine cranking away right behind the director, and the pink, blue, and white pages went sailing out over the set. DeMille lashed out and smacked the chair boy on the buttocks. For men like DeMille, telling actors where to stand and camera-men where to put the camera was only directing a movie; to order people around, to intimidate them, was to direct life itself. Several times during production, he would seize his microphone and launch into a condemnation of chatter on the set. "WHAT I WANT IS QUIET! QUIET BEHIND THE CAMERA AND INTELLIGENCE IN FRONT OF IT. I KNOW I CAN'T HAVE BOTH AT THE SAME TIME BUT LET'S SEE IF I CAN GET ONE OR THE OTHER." DeMille would almost never criticize a star on the set. It just wasn't good sense to unnerve someone the public was paying to see. But he often worked on the star through other luckless people. If an actress was late to the set, he would grab the microphone and lay into the hairdresser, and the point would be made. With few exceptions, his rages were calculated for effect; DeMille was the Sun Tzu of filmmaking, employing the Art of War to achieve the Art of DeMille. DeMille despised limp, halfhearted acting. For that matter, he despised limp, halfhearted anything. He wanted projection, he wanted dynamism, and he wanted it from stars and extras alike. He would also excoriate extras that failed to give him the level of excitement he needed.
vomiting, Warner would be shaken but sober. Westmore continued this rough treatment for several weeks until Warner decided sobriety was preferable to cod liver oil. Sally Rand, who would become famous for her Fan Dance in the 1933 Chi-cago World's Fair, played one of Mary Magdalene's slaves. Rand and Warner began an affair, which infuriated DeMille. Rand would tell friends about the day when DeMille spotted her and Warner coming to the set together. DeMille grabbed his ever-present microphone and boomed out, "Miss Rand! Leave my Jesus Christ alone! If you must screw someone, screw Pontius Pilate!" Visiting the production was a young Jesuit from St. Louis named Daniel Lord, who would become a friend of DeMille's and an advisor on the film. Lord collapsed under the onslaught of DeMille's charm, but always managed to main-,. tain an overall sense of objectivity about the man. In his memoirs, Lord described DeMille as "a strange and fascinating blend of absolute monarch and charming gentleman, of excellent host and exacting taskmaster, of ruthless drive on the set and complete letdown the moment that the day's shooting had come to an end; a Renaissance prince who had the in-stincts of a Barnum and a magnified Belasco; frankly in love with hokum (which he liked to discuss and reduce to terms of understandable basic emotion)." The plot invention of Judas's love affair with Mary Magdalene induced some-thing approaching physical pain in Lord, but DeMille was adamant; he told Lord that the audience had to be won over; that they had to have a sense of luxury and beauty. "If they fall in love with Magdalene, then when she leaps into her chariot and says, 'I go to find a Carpenter,' they will go along," said DeMille. Actually, the title uttered by the Magdalene, one of the juiciest in all of silent films, is "Go fetch my richest perfumes! Harness my zebras—gift of the Nubian king! This carpenter shall learn that He cannot hold a man from Mary Magda-lene!" It is only after another character tells the Magdalene that he has observed this man healing the blind that she says, "I have blinded more men than He hath ever healed. . . . We go to call upon a carpenter!" Soon, Jesus casts out her demons: the Seven Deadly Sins.
and
DeMille had a habit of bestowing nicknames on employees, which was not function of affection but derived from the fact that he had a terrible memory fo, names. As Richard deMille would remember, "He could easily list the twelve apo& ties, but not the fifty technicians." The music editor would always be addressed "Mr. Music," while a minor actress was always referred to as "Dottie Coughdrop.' "Get Dottie Coughdrop;" he would tell Joe Egli, the casting director, and Egli would have to match a face to the vague name. His demeanor around the younger women on his staff was rigorously profes. sional and fatherly. When a gorgeous Iowa girl named Mary Bennett came to work in his office, he offered her a screen test and acting training if she wanted it. She didn't and later regretted her decision, but all her life idolized DeMille as an ideal father figure. Professionally, he agonized over major decisions, especially subject and cast. ing. "DeMille always had a hell of a time [making] decisions, about anything," remembered Henry Noerdlinger, his highly regarded head of research. "[But] once he had made a decision then there was no deviation from it." "He was a very exacting person," said A. C. Lyles. "If you went to him for something, he would want to know exactly what the subject was and wanted to know exactly the answers when he asked you what they were. And you couldn't con him. He knew the business. He made the business. I always found him to be very friendly, cordial, very open to suggestions, very willing to help people who wanted to be helped." Mitchell Leisen would assert that "He had very positive ideas of what he wanted and he wasn't satisfied until he got it. . . . I owe him everything I ever learned about making pictures. The most important thing of all is the power of concentrating, never deviating from your objective. Once he started on a project, he concentrated on that and thought of nothing else." On the set of a picture, he was everywhere, even directing the taking of the stills. Robert Parrish, who worked for him as an extra, said that "he often seemed to spend as much time and energy on the still as he did on the actual scenes." For stills, he would get in front of the company and do what he never did during the picture itself: act out the scene. As the actors mimicked him, he would wait for the expression he wanted, then yell "STILL!" and everyone would freeze. If anyone moved and spoiled the shot, he would become irate. One day, Parrish witnessed an episode that would grow into a legend, as two men in the back of the crowd began talking while DeMille was launching into an oration about a full day's work for a full day's pay. DeMille stopped and asked what the men were talking about. One of them refused to say. He was promptly sent home. The other fellow was called up to the camera platform. "There are four hundred people waiting for lunch because of you. Will you kindly tell them what you had to say that was so important?" The extra, Eddie Boyle, took the proffered microphone and said, "I said, ,I wonder when he's going to call lunch.' " The crowd erupted into applause. DeMille's response was a trace of a smile. The assistant promptly called "Lunch. One hour." Parrish asserted that the response that became the stuff of a hundred Hollywood anthologies—"I wonder when that bald headed old son of a bitch is going to call lunch" was strictly a myth. "Eddie Boyle was tough and seasoned," Parrish wrote, "but he was not as tough and seasoned as all that, though some of us at the time wished he had been." Parrish also witnessed a moment when DeMille's chair boy accidentally nudged his script binder so that dozens of script pages fell out. There was a wind machine cranking away right behind the director, and the pink, blue, and white pages went sailing out over the set. DeMille lashed out and smacked the chair boy on the buttocks. For men like DeMille, telling actors where to stand and camera-men where to put the camera was only directing a movie; to order people around, to intimidate them, was to direct life itself. Several times during production, he would seize his microphone and launch into a condemnation of chatter on the set. "WHAT I WANT IS QUIET! QUIET BEHIND THE CAMERA AND INTELLIGENCE IN FRONT OF IT. I KNOW I CAN'T HAVE BOTH AT THE SAME TIME BUT LET'S SEE IF I CAN GET ONE OR THE OTHER." DeMille would almost never criticize a star on the set. It just wasn't good sense to unnerve someone the public was paying to see. But he often worked on the star through other luckless people. If an actress was late to the set, he would grab the microphone and lay into the hairdresser, and the point would be made. With few exceptions, his rages were calculated for effect; DeMille was the Sun Tzu of filmmaking, employing the Art of War to achieve the Art of DeMille. DeMille despised limp, halfhearted acting. For that matter, he despised limp, halfhearted anything. He wanted projection, he wanted dynamism, and he wanted it from stars and extras alike. He would also excoriate extras that failed to give him the level of excitement he needed.
Sunday, April 26, 2015
Light in August and LaSalle
Read Light in August after much procrastination. I was probably in my least receptive mind to any of his works- his compound words grated, his inability to see any of his men as possible objects of aesthetic appraisal annoyed me. My least favorite of his books to date. Possibly his 4th novel. Sandwiched between Pylon and Sanctuary I think. But punctuated, very sparingly, with moments of profound insight.
Like:
She was waiting on the porch—a patient, beaten creature without sex demarcation at all save the neat screw of graying hair and the skirt—when the buggy drove up. It was as though instead of having been subtly slain and corrupted by the ruthless and bigoted man into something beyond his intending and her knowing, she had been hammered stubbornly thinner and thinner like some passive and dully malleable metal, into an attenuation of dumb hopes and frustrated desires now faint and pale as dead ashes.
It will certainly require a 5th. Maybe a 6th before I entirely give up.
Also read LaSalle by John Vernon, an excellent story told in two concurrent narrations by LaSalle and his cartographer.
From which:
The Sieur La Salle showed us one of their (Chicaza) ingenious calendars which are knotted thngs- when each day passes they untie the knot.
La Salle builds forts the way other men make shoes. When they come to someplace new, the Spanish build a church, the English a tavern, but we French build a fort or trading post."
Like:
She was waiting on the porch—a patient, beaten creature without sex demarcation at all save the neat screw of graying hair and the skirt—when the buggy drove up. It was as though instead of having been subtly slain and corrupted by the ruthless and bigoted man into something beyond his intending and her knowing, she had been hammered stubbornly thinner and thinner like some passive and dully malleable metal, into an attenuation of dumb hopes and frustrated desires now faint and pale as dead ashes.
When the buggy stopped she came forward as though she had already planned it, practiced it: how she would lift him down from the seat and carry him into the house. He had never been carried by a woman since he was big enough to walk. He squirmed down and entered the house on his own feet, marched in, small, shapeless in his wrappings. She followed, hovering about him. She made him sit down; it was as though she hovered about with a kind of strained alertness, an air baffled and alert, waiting to spring it again and try to make himself and her act as she had planned for them to act. Kneeling before him she was trying to take off his shoes, until he realised what she wanted. He put her hands away and removed the shoes himself, not setting them onto the floor though. He held to them. She stripped off his stockings and then she fetched a basin of hot water, fetched it so immediately that anyone but a child would have known that she must have had it ready and waiting all day probably. He spoke for the first time, then. “I done washed just yesterday,” he said.
She didn’t answer. She knelt before him
he watched the crown of her head and her hands fumbling a little clumsily about his feet. He didn’t try to help her now. He didn’t know what she was trying to do, not even when he was sitting with his cold feet in the warm water. He didn’t know that that was all, because it felt too good. He was waiting for the rest of it to begin; the part that would not be pleasant, whatever it would be. This had never happened to him before either.
Later she put him to bed. For two years almost he had been dressing and undressing himself, unnoticed and unassisted save by occasional Alices. He was already too tired to go to sleep at once, and now he was puzzled and hence nervous, waiting until she went out so he could sleep. Then she did not go out. Instead she drew a chair up to the bed and sat down. There was no fire in the room; it was cold. She had a shawl now about her shoulders, huddled into the shawl, her breath vaporising as though she were smoking. And he became wide awake now. He was waiting for the part to begin which he would not like, whatever it was; whatever it was that he had done. He didn’t know that this was all. This had never happened to him before either.
It began on that night. He believed that it was to go on for the rest of his life. At seventeen, looking back he could see now the long series of trivial, clumsy, vain efforts born of frustration and fumbling and dumb instinct: the dishes she would prepare for him in secret and then insist on his accepting and eating them in secret, when he did not want them and he knew that McEachern would not care anyway; the times when, like tonight, she would try to get herself between him and the punishment which, deserved or not, just or unjust, was impersonal, both the man and the boy accepting it as a natural and inescapable fact until she, getting in the way, must give it an odor, an attenuation, and aftertaste.
Sometimes he thought that he would tell her alone, have her who in her helplessness could neither alter it nor ignore it, know it and need to hide it from the man whose immediate and predictable reaction to the knowledge would so obliterate it as a factor in their relations that it would never appear again. To say to her in secret, in secret payment for the secret dishes which he had not wanted: “Listen. He says he has nursed a blasphemer and an ingrate. I dare you to tell him what he has nursed. That he has nursed a nigger beneath his own roof, with his own food at his own table.”
Because she had always been kind to him. The man, the hard, just, ruthless man, merely depended on him to act in a certain way and to receive the as certain reward or punishment, just as he could depend on the man to react in a certain way to his own certain doings and misdoings: It was the woman who, with a woman’s affinity and instinct for secrecy, for casting a faint taint of evil about the most trivial and innocent actions. Behind a loose board in the wall of his attic room she had hidden a small hoard of money in a tin can. The amount was trivial and it was apparently a secret to no one but. her husband, and the boy believed that he would not have cared. But it had never been a secret from him. Even
he was still a child she would take him with her when with all the intense and mysterious caution of a playing child she would creep to the attic and add to the hoard meagre and infrequent and terrific nickels and dimes (fruit of what small chicanery and deceptions with none anywhere under the sun to say her nay he did not know), putting into the can beneath his round grave eyes coins whose value he did not even recognise. It was she who trusted him, who insisted on trusting him as she insisted on his eating: by conspiracy, in secret, making a secret of the very fact which the act of trusting was supposed to exemplify.
It was not the hard work which he hated, nor the punishment and injustice. He was used to that before he ever saw either of them. He expected no less, and so he was neither outraged nor surprised. It was the woman: that soft kindness which he believed himself doomed to be forever victim of and which he hated worse than he did the hard and ruthless justice of men. ‘She is trying to make me cry,’ he thought, lying cold and rigid in his bed, his hands beneath his head and the moonlight falling across his body, hearing the steady murmur of the man’s voice as it mounted the stairway on its first heavenward stage; ‘She was trying to make me cry. Then she thinks that they would have had me.”
Also began Anna Karenina for the 4th time.Also read LaSalle by John Vernon, an excellent story told in two concurrent narrations by LaSalle and his cartographer.
From which:
The Sieur La Salle showed us one of their (Chicaza) ingenious calendars which are knotted thngs- when each day passes they untie the knot.
La Salle builds forts the way other men make shoes. When they come to someplace new, the Spanish build a church, the English a tavern, but we French build a fort or trading post."
Goldwater final
LBJ was "Light Bulb Johnson" for his scheme to save money by turn_ ing off lights in the White House ("Why doesn't he turn them on for once!) "the interim president," who "knows only one thing—how to acquire fortune and power." Goldwater's supporters crowded the speaking stand and cheered him on. Much of the audience hung back in disgust. Everyone associated with the campaign was getting bitter. Local branches began compiling affidavits on vandalism on their offices; on highways across the fruited plain, billboards admonishing "IN YOUR HEART YOU KNOW HE'S RIGHT" were subverted to read "IN YOUR GUTS YOU KNOW HE'S NUTS" (later reclaimed by conservatives with signs reading "PLEASE EXCUSE THE JOHNSON EXTREMISTS"). Stodgy Time printed crude jokes: "Goldwater's first major address as President: 'Ten ... nine . . . eight . . . seven . . "; "What would a Goldwater presidency be like? Brief." In Tulsa, blacks crashed the hall where Goldwater was speaking and wouldn't stop singing "We Shall Overcome" for fifteen minutes straight. In Winston-Salem, civil rights activists and conservatives were booked for assaulting one another. Each had begun chanting their opposing stories about freedom, slavery, and justice at the other; things escalated from there. (Teddy White liked to ask civil rights demonstrators and Goldwater partisans what they meant by "freedom." Each camp would denounce him for even asking such a patronizing question. "It is quite possible that these two groups may kill each other in cold blood," he wrote, "both wear-ing banners bearing the same word.") American campaigns had been like this before, perhaps more often than not; Lord Bryce wrote in wonderment that the presidential election of 1884 seemed to be being decided between the "copulative habits" imputed to one candidate and the "prevaricative habits" of the other. But eighty years later, the Philadelphia Inquirer could insist: "Presidential elections have been waged without untoward incident until this year." Historians forgot their history. "The peaceful arts of negotiation and persuasion," "our sagacity and our passion for the peaceful enjoyment of our national life": these, Columbia's Richard Hofstadter assured readers that October, were the hallmarks of political decision making in America. It was a foregone conclusion: when Goldwaterism was vanquished once and for all on November 3, civility would return, the two par-ties would return to their time-honored moderating role, and the nation would be restored to a healing consensus once again. Johnson's first actual campaign trip—tarmac speeches, motorcades, rallies, the works—was a twenty-four-hour sweep through every New England state on September 28. It happened against a backdrop of extraordinary events.
CAMPAIGN TRAILS On September 26, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released its report on the New York City riots. There was a kind of rhetorical protocol that usually held sway when judgment was handed down on moments when the fabric of American civility had been rent. J. Edgar Hoover's report on the students who disrupted the HUAC hearings in San Francisco in 196o, "Communist Target—youth," was a paradigm case: it blamed the Communists, who had made stu-dents their unwitting dupes. And Nelson Rockefeller's Bastille Day proclamation: it concluded that the 1963 Young Republican convention had been upended by "vociferous and well-drilled extremist elements boring within." The story they told was: America was a good nation, a unified nation, peaceful, safe, a land of persuasion and compromise; when violence came, some exogenous toxin was always to blame. That story was immediately and instinctually told when Harlem went up in flames in the summer of 1964. Accusations for planning and executing the disturbance were hurled at Harlem's tiny number of self-proclaimed Maoists, at its scattered bands of black nationalists, at hirelings of H. L. Hunt (LBJ's favorite theory), or (as Goldwater himself feared) at agents of the Goldwater campaign. Special attention was paid to the mysterious youths that were seen lurking at key street corners with walkie-talkies and matching berets; it wa discovered that they were actually helping authorities identify the most egregious acts of looting and arson. There was no conspiracy to be found in this est FBI report. In its place were ordinary people—" 'school dropouts,' y punks,' common hoodlums,' and 'drunken kids' " making "senseless on all constituted authority without purpose or objective." J. Edgar went looking for conspiracy; he always did. He just couldn't find one. It ' - even the Communists' fault. Then, two days later, there was the Warren Report. In later days it would be the locus for theorists propounding baroque triangulations of every imagi-nable group that might gain from having the President dead; its very meaning became conspiracy. But it was digested at breakfast tables on September 28, 1964—a time when three-quarters of Americans, according to surveys, trusted the government to do the right thing—differently. A conspiracy would have been far more comforting. Instead most Americans read the news at face value, and learned that all it took to rock their society to its foundations was a single man with a grievance and a gun. They had learned that all it took to fire up a riot was a bunch of rock-throwing kids—and that even a majestic Civil Rights Act would not deter them. The idea that the nation could be shielded from danger by its unique genius for conciliation and consensus was becoming a far less tenable thing.
Oswald, a magazine pointed out, "was a product of Texas (and of New York City), of the American lower-middle class, of the U.S. Marines. . . . All of those places and associations are as American as baseball. . . . There is vio.. lence in the American character, probably more than in any other national character." As if to give this new American story an exclamation point, on Sep-tember 29, after four bombings in eight days in the town of McComb, Missis-sippi, three Klansmen were arrested off the street. They admitted that they chose bombing victims weekly out of a hat. They were released on suspended sentences. The judge ruled that they had been "unduly provoked" by "unhy-gienic" outsiders of "low morality." And, that same day, thirteen civil rights workers were arrested for the crime of Southern hospitality—"serving food without a license," the charge read. And then, that same week, came Berkeley.
and
But the direct line from Lyndon John-son to Kitty Genovese was rather hard to swallow. Only once did he devote an entire speech to how "the moral fiber of the American people is beset by rot and decay." It was broadcast on TV from the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. It was the highest-rated nonpresidential political address in the history of television—a fact, of course, that the candi-date likely ignored as a point of pride. But "morality" was political gold. It was the only Goldwater theme that the White House felt compelled to react to. But Johnson's people weren't exactly sure how. Memos flew back and forth: Enlist "a group of friendly criminologists"? "Judicious use of the candidate's family," "inclusion of prominent women"? Public appearances with Billy Graham and Cardinal Spellman? They were floundering. No other presidential candidate had tried staking a political claim for these issues before Goldwater. They had never been at issue before. It was a watershed year in American mores. The Supreme Court declared school prayer a menace to the Constitution; the Boston Strangler, Kitty Gen-ovese, and other dramatic murders were forever removing America's domi-nant image of crime from the benign realm of the 1950s-vintage "juvenile delinquent." Adlai Stevenson told Colby College students, "In the great strug-gle to advance human rights even a jail sentence is no longer a dishonor but a proud achievement." It all seemed to fit together somehow. Do-gooders uprooting neighborhoods and school districts; a smut magazine like Playboy running interviews with politicians like some kind of cultural arbiter; mari-juana smokers; what J. Edgar Hoover called "one of the most disturbing trends I have witnessed in my years in law enforcement—an overzealous pity for the criminal, and an equivalent disregard for his victim." Privileged col-lege students in California whining like victims and holding their own univer-sity hostage; the Beatles and their long hair; topless bathing suits; climbing divorce rates; this Warhol displaying Brillo boxes as "art"; that outrageous professional atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair—the list went on. Suddenly, it all seemed political—something people wanted to take a side on. Since it was a presidential year, they looked for a presidential candidate who was on their side, too. It was hardly foreordained that it would be Goldwater. The salty high-desert rebel and nightclub habitué certainly hadn't complained when Goldwa-ter Girls in bikinis passed the collection plate at one of his rallies in Beverly Hills back in May. One faction of conservatives, in fact, "libertarians"—exem-plified by the YAFers who put their founding convention at loggerheads by
CITIZENS
485
decrying the Sharon Statement's reference to God and the Berkeley co-ed who was the Rosa Parks of the trolley-car running boards—defined their political identity by their live-and-let-live attitude on moral questions. Republicans were the party of Middle American piety. But America was a pious country. God talk on the stump wasn't so much political as pro forma; at the governors' confer-ence in Cleveland there was hardly a peep of opposition to a resolution in favor of a school prayer amendment to the Constitution. It was a liberal Democrat who denounced Ralph Ginzburg on the House floor (the notorious sex researcher Dr. Alfred Kinsey, on the other hand, was a confirmed Republican). It was Bobby Kennedy who, besides J. Edgar Hoover, was the man most likely to be thought "tough on crime." The politician best known for crusading against smutty rock and roll was Governor Matthew Welsh of Indiana—otherwise lib-eral enough to earn George Wallace's full wrath in the Indiana presidential pri-mary that spring. There was little the eminently liberal Teddy White scorned more than the Berkeley radicals at the Cow Palace: "girls with dank blond hair, parading in dirty blue jeans, college boys in sweat shirts and Beatle haircuts; shaggy and unkempt intellectuals," their rhetoric inspiring Northern Negroes to riot as "revenge for Mississippi and Alabama." And the response to Rocke-feller's remarriage had been, of course, bipartisan and ecumenical. Goldwater raised these issues as they came to concern him, on the fly, almost as a quirk. "The origin of this commendable but somewhat novel resolve is not clear," The New Yorker's Richard Rovere wrote when the candi-date started his morality talk at the convention. "Goldwater exegetes say that it has never been a theme in his earlier writings and speeches." (There were hints of it in the home stretch of New Hampshire, although when Walton looked for a Goldwater speech devoted to religious piety he had to go back to early 1962 to find one.) Now the candidate raised such issues constantly. All those folks who were angry at domestic disorder, at immorality, at crime—most of whom would never consider calling themselves conservatives; some of whom had long called themselves liberals—now had a side to join: Goldwater's. And Walton knew that for millions of undecideds and lukewarm Johnson support-ers, this appeal might close the gap. The RNC' s publicity division realized it, too—and once more it badly squandered the opportunity. About half of the campaign's TV spots attacked the new morality theme, but they were sixty- and thirty-second primers on how to make even your most diehard supporters cringe with embarrassment.
and
"You don't foresee that you can keep a lid on this, can you?" he asked For-tas. (No way.) Fortas was ordered to remove "certain confidential material" from Jenkins's office. (Perhaps it included the results of an investigation Jen-kins had made on his boss's behalf of the sexual peccadilloes of their accuser in the Baker case.) And so, as two thousand well-heeled Democrats dressed for dinner (many in front of the TV, cheering the Yanks' Joe Pepitone as he blasted the grand slam that brought the Series even at three games apiece), the waiting game began. It ended at 8:02. The RNC had gotten hold of the story and released a statement: "The White House is desperately trying to suppress a major news story affecting the national security." At that, United Press ran with what it knew. Within the hour another window of vulnerability would open up—a bay window. At 9 p.m., the diners far below eagerly awaited the evening's final speaker; that speaker, meanwhile, was in his suite, fretting that the diners would greet him as a laughingstock and the Catholic hierarchs at the head table as auxiliaries to wickedness, when another story came over the wire: Jenkins had been arrested for the same crime in 1959. At this, Johnson finally lost his cool. "Why didn't Walter tell you about it this morning?" he snapped at Fortas. This new revelation could do more damage as than the previous one. It was a complex of the times. "The sexual pervert's . . . lack of emotional stability," as a government report put it, "and weakness of moral fiber make him susceptible to the blandishments of foreign agents." In 1953 Eisenhower signed an executive order demanding homosexuals be fired not just from all federal jobs but from all companies with federal contractors—one-fifth of the U.S. workforce. Thus the meaning of the 1959 arrest. Already official Wash-ington was in the process of writing off the Jenkins news as a kind of tempo-rary insanity, a product of nervous exhaustion. "I just know that he must have been a very tired—had to have been very tired—a very tired man," muttered one White House official. The beloved Kansas columnist William White called the incident "a case of combat fatigue as surely as any man ever suffered it in battle"—almost to be expected, went the implication, when the enemy is one so savage as Barry Goldwater. Two arrests changed the equation. Perhaps there had been three, or a dozen, and perhaps there had been dozens of other sordid assignations that had escaped the notice of the D.C. constabulary. Perhaps this wasn't a nervous breakdown but full-fledged mental illness. Had Lyndon John-son knowingly brought a security risk into the White House, into cabinet meet-ings, into gatherings of the National Security Council? Had Lyndon Johnson done so unknowingly? So who knew how many perverts and Communists the
executive mansion might be crawling with? "They're going to play this secu-rity angle big," Johnson railed at Fortas. "They're going to say, 'Here's a man that sat in the highest councils. Who else might he have something to do with? What secrets might he give away?' " A conventional man in such matters, Lyndon Johnson must have wondered the same thing himself. He had no idea about this character-rotting failing of a man who scurried to and fro with Johnson's secrets close to his breast. He liked to repeat J. Edgar Hoover's boast: "You can spot one by the way they walk." Johnson had walked beside this one for twenty-five years. The humiliation must have been crushing. Which made his political presence of mind within moments of learning the latest news all the more astonishing. He rang up Deke DeLoach. First—small talk—he propounded his theory that the waiters at the party Jenkins attended before the arrest must have been Republican agents who put some kind of mind-control drug in his drink. "I only wish it were true," DeLoach replied. (Perhaps he had known; he and Jenkins were close friends.) Then the President got down to business: ordering an immediate, full FBI investigation. It was a brilliant way of reminding J. Edgar Hoover that he was right there on the hook with the President. Security investigations were routine for top government officials; Jenkins had been the subject of scrutiny in 1957 upon taking an administrative job on the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee. The FBI missed his secret then. And since they didn't even check White House staff, who knew how many perverts and Communists the executive mansion might have been crawling with—Johnson's White House, Kennedy's, Eisenhower's, Truman's . ?
CAMPAIGN TRAILS On September 26, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released its report on the New York City riots. There was a kind of rhetorical protocol that usually held sway when judgment was handed down on moments when the fabric of American civility had been rent. J. Edgar Hoover's report on the students who disrupted the HUAC hearings in San Francisco in 196o, "Communist Target—youth," was a paradigm case: it blamed the Communists, who had made stu-dents their unwitting dupes. And Nelson Rockefeller's Bastille Day proclamation: it concluded that the 1963 Young Republican convention had been upended by "vociferous and well-drilled extremist elements boring within." The story they told was: America was a good nation, a unified nation, peaceful, safe, a land of persuasion and compromise; when violence came, some exogenous toxin was always to blame. That story was immediately and instinctually told when Harlem went up in flames in the summer of 1964. Accusations for planning and executing the disturbance were hurled at Harlem's tiny number of self-proclaimed Maoists, at its scattered bands of black nationalists, at hirelings of H. L. Hunt (LBJ's favorite theory), or (as Goldwater himself feared) at agents of the Goldwater campaign. Special attention was paid to the mysterious youths that were seen lurking at key street corners with walkie-talkies and matching berets; it wa discovered that they were actually helping authorities identify the most egregious acts of looting and arson. There was no conspiracy to be found in this est FBI report. In its place were ordinary people—" 'school dropouts,' y punks,' common hoodlums,' and 'drunken kids' " making "senseless on all constituted authority without purpose or objective." J. Edgar went looking for conspiracy; he always did. He just couldn't find one. It ' - even the Communists' fault. Then, two days later, there was the Warren Report. In later days it would be the locus for theorists propounding baroque triangulations of every imagi-nable group that might gain from having the President dead; its very meaning became conspiracy. But it was digested at breakfast tables on September 28, 1964—a time when three-quarters of Americans, according to surveys, trusted the government to do the right thing—differently. A conspiracy would have been far more comforting. Instead most Americans read the news at face value, and learned that all it took to rock their society to its foundations was a single man with a grievance and a gun. They had learned that all it took to fire up a riot was a bunch of rock-throwing kids—and that even a majestic Civil Rights Act would not deter them. The idea that the nation could be shielded from danger by its unique genius for conciliation and consensus was becoming a far less tenable thing.
Oswald, a magazine pointed out, "was a product of Texas (and of New York City), of the American lower-middle class, of the U.S. Marines. . . . All of those places and associations are as American as baseball. . . . There is vio.. lence in the American character, probably more than in any other national character." As if to give this new American story an exclamation point, on Sep-tember 29, after four bombings in eight days in the town of McComb, Missis-sippi, three Klansmen were arrested off the street. They admitted that they chose bombing victims weekly out of a hat. They were released on suspended sentences. The judge ruled that they had been "unduly provoked" by "unhy-gienic" outsiders of "low morality." And, that same day, thirteen civil rights workers were arrested for the crime of Southern hospitality—"serving food without a license," the charge read. And then, that same week, came Berkeley.
and
But the direct line from Lyndon John-son to Kitty Genovese was rather hard to swallow. Only once did he devote an entire speech to how "the moral fiber of the American people is beset by rot and decay." It was broadcast on TV from the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. It was the highest-rated nonpresidential political address in the history of television—a fact, of course, that the candi-date likely ignored as a point of pride. But "morality" was political gold. It was the only Goldwater theme that the White House felt compelled to react to. But Johnson's people weren't exactly sure how. Memos flew back and forth: Enlist "a group of friendly criminologists"? "Judicious use of the candidate's family," "inclusion of prominent women"? Public appearances with Billy Graham and Cardinal Spellman? They were floundering. No other presidential candidate had tried staking a political claim for these issues before Goldwater. They had never been at issue before. It was a watershed year in American mores. The Supreme Court declared school prayer a menace to the Constitution; the Boston Strangler, Kitty Gen-ovese, and other dramatic murders were forever removing America's domi-nant image of crime from the benign realm of the 1950s-vintage "juvenile delinquent." Adlai Stevenson told Colby College students, "In the great strug-gle to advance human rights even a jail sentence is no longer a dishonor but a proud achievement." It all seemed to fit together somehow. Do-gooders uprooting neighborhoods and school districts; a smut magazine like Playboy running interviews with politicians like some kind of cultural arbiter; mari-juana smokers; what J. Edgar Hoover called "one of the most disturbing trends I have witnessed in my years in law enforcement—an overzealous pity for the criminal, and an equivalent disregard for his victim." Privileged col-lege students in California whining like victims and holding their own univer-sity hostage; the Beatles and their long hair; topless bathing suits; climbing divorce rates; this Warhol displaying Brillo boxes as "art"; that outrageous professional atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair—the list went on. Suddenly, it all seemed political—something people wanted to take a side on. Since it was a presidential year, they looked for a presidential candidate who was on their side, too. It was hardly foreordained that it would be Goldwater. The salty high-desert rebel and nightclub habitué certainly hadn't complained when Goldwa-ter Girls in bikinis passed the collection plate at one of his rallies in Beverly Hills back in May. One faction of conservatives, in fact, "libertarians"—exem-plified by the YAFers who put their founding convention at loggerheads by
CITIZENS
485
decrying the Sharon Statement's reference to God and the Berkeley co-ed who was the Rosa Parks of the trolley-car running boards—defined their political identity by their live-and-let-live attitude on moral questions. Republicans were the party of Middle American piety. But America was a pious country. God talk on the stump wasn't so much political as pro forma; at the governors' confer-ence in Cleveland there was hardly a peep of opposition to a resolution in favor of a school prayer amendment to the Constitution. It was a liberal Democrat who denounced Ralph Ginzburg on the House floor (the notorious sex researcher Dr. Alfred Kinsey, on the other hand, was a confirmed Republican). It was Bobby Kennedy who, besides J. Edgar Hoover, was the man most likely to be thought "tough on crime." The politician best known for crusading against smutty rock and roll was Governor Matthew Welsh of Indiana—otherwise lib-eral enough to earn George Wallace's full wrath in the Indiana presidential pri-mary that spring. There was little the eminently liberal Teddy White scorned more than the Berkeley radicals at the Cow Palace: "girls with dank blond hair, parading in dirty blue jeans, college boys in sweat shirts and Beatle haircuts; shaggy and unkempt intellectuals," their rhetoric inspiring Northern Negroes to riot as "revenge for Mississippi and Alabama." And the response to Rocke-feller's remarriage had been, of course, bipartisan and ecumenical. Goldwater raised these issues as they came to concern him, on the fly, almost as a quirk. "The origin of this commendable but somewhat novel resolve is not clear," The New Yorker's Richard Rovere wrote when the candi-date started his morality talk at the convention. "Goldwater exegetes say that it has never been a theme in his earlier writings and speeches." (There were hints of it in the home stretch of New Hampshire, although when Walton looked for a Goldwater speech devoted to religious piety he had to go back to early 1962 to find one.) Now the candidate raised such issues constantly. All those folks who were angry at domestic disorder, at immorality, at crime—most of whom would never consider calling themselves conservatives; some of whom had long called themselves liberals—now had a side to join: Goldwater's. And Walton knew that for millions of undecideds and lukewarm Johnson support-ers, this appeal might close the gap. The RNC' s publicity division realized it, too—and once more it badly squandered the opportunity. About half of the campaign's TV spots attacked the new morality theme, but they were sixty- and thirty-second primers on how to make even your most diehard supporters cringe with embarrassment.
and
"You don't foresee that you can keep a lid on this, can you?" he asked For-tas. (No way.) Fortas was ordered to remove "certain confidential material" from Jenkins's office. (Perhaps it included the results of an investigation Jen-kins had made on his boss's behalf of the sexual peccadilloes of their accuser in the Baker case.) And so, as two thousand well-heeled Democrats dressed for dinner (many in front of the TV, cheering the Yanks' Joe Pepitone as he blasted the grand slam that brought the Series even at three games apiece), the waiting game began. It ended at 8:02. The RNC had gotten hold of the story and released a statement: "The White House is desperately trying to suppress a major news story affecting the national security." At that, United Press ran with what it knew. Within the hour another window of vulnerability would open up—a bay window. At 9 p.m., the diners far below eagerly awaited the evening's final speaker; that speaker, meanwhile, was in his suite, fretting that the diners would greet him as a laughingstock and the Catholic hierarchs at the head table as auxiliaries to wickedness, when another story came over the wire: Jenkins had been arrested for the same crime in 1959. At this, Johnson finally lost his cool. "Why didn't Walter tell you about it this morning?" he snapped at Fortas. This new revelation could do more damage as than the previous one. It was a complex of the times. "The sexual pervert's . . . lack of emotional stability," as a government report put it, "and weakness of moral fiber make him susceptible to the blandishments of foreign agents." In 1953 Eisenhower signed an executive order demanding homosexuals be fired not just from all federal jobs but from all companies with federal contractors—one-fifth of the U.S. workforce. Thus the meaning of the 1959 arrest. Already official Wash-ington was in the process of writing off the Jenkins news as a kind of tempo-rary insanity, a product of nervous exhaustion. "I just know that he must have been a very tired—had to have been very tired—a very tired man," muttered one White House official. The beloved Kansas columnist William White called the incident "a case of combat fatigue as surely as any man ever suffered it in battle"—almost to be expected, went the implication, when the enemy is one so savage as Barry Goldwater. Two arrests changed the equation. Perhaps there had been three, or a dozen, and perhaps there had been dozens of other sordid assignations that had escaped the notice of the D.C. constabulary. Perhaps this wasn't a nervous breakdown but full-fledged mental illness. Had Lyndon John-son knowingly brought a security risk into the White House, into cabinet meet-ings, into gatherings of the National Security Council? Had Lyndon Johnson done so unknowingly? So who knew how many perverts and Communists the
executive mansion might be crawling with? "They're going to play this secu-rity angle big," Johnson railed at Fortas. "They're going to say, 'Here's a man that sat in the highest councils. Who else might he have something to do with? What secrets might he give away?' " A conventional man in such matters, Lyndon Johnson must have wondered the same thing himself. He had no idea about this character-rotting failing of a man who scurried to and fro with Johnson's secrets close to his breast. He liked to repeat J. Edgar Hoover's boast: "You can spot one by the way they walk." Johnson had walked beside this one for twenty-five years. The humiliation must have been crushing. Which made his political presence of mind within moments of learning the latest news all the more astonishing. He rang up Deke DeLoach. First—small talk—he propounded his theory that the waiters at the party Jenkins attended before the arrest must have been Republican agents who put some kind of mind-control drug in his drink. "I only wish it were true," DeLoach replied. (Perhaps he had known; he and Jenkins were close friends.) Then the President got down to business: ordering an immediate, full FBI investigation. It was a brilliant way of reminding J. Edgar Hoover that he was right there on the hook with the President. Security investigations were routine for top government officials; Jenkins had been the subject of scrutiny in 1957 upon taking an administrative job on the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee. The FBI missed his secret then. And since they didn't even check White House staff, who knew how many perverts and Communists the executive mansion might have been crawling with—Johnson's White House, Kennedy's, Eisenhower's, Truman's . ?
Saturday, April 25, 2015
Hero
From the brilliant book by Michael Korda:
The government of India vigorously contested both the idea of the Arab Revolt and any promise to the Arabs of a future state. The govern-ment of India saw no signs in Basra that the Arabs wanted or would know what to do with self-government, and they proposed to run Mesopota-mia as an extension of colonial rule in India. In the same spirit, they were backing ibn Saud with arms, support, and money, which, since he was the mortal rival of Sharif Hussein, put Delhi and London at loggerheads. Sykes does not seem to have been deeply troubled by any of this—he was a man who could hold several passionate enthusiasms in his head at the same time without apparently noticing that they were contradictory. He was at once sincerely in favor of an Arab state and a wholly commit-ted supporter of Zionism;* he was determined to give the French what they wanted, and at the same time in favor of McMahon's correspondence with Sharif Hussein. He was sympathetic toward both Turks and Arabs, as well as Armenians and Kurds. If Sykes was aware that the one point most Arabs agreed on, whatever their other differences, was that the heart of any viable Arab state must be Syria, and that under no circumstances would they accept French domination, given France's colo-nial record in North Africa, he managed to suppress this when he finally returned to London to report on his mission. It is typical of Sykes that he not only helped form the sentiment behind, and draft the language of the Balfour Declaration, but also designed the flag of the Arab Revolt, "a combination of green, red, black and white." (Variations of this design would become the national flags of Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Palestine.) Sykes is an example of a fatal British ability to see both sides of a dispute in an area of the world where there are only absolutes.
" This was a fairly common delusion among the British at the time, right up to the Balfour Declaration in 1917. It was based on the assumption that—the Arabs and Jews both being Semitic peoples—the Jews would contribute to an Arab state their knowl-edge' of international finance, science, and medicine, as well as the growing agricultural expertise of the Zionists. This was, and has since proved to be, overoptimistic.
To say that the Christmas spirit was lacking in these discussions would be putting it mildly. Although it would be only two months before the Germans launched the Battle of Verdun in an attempt to bleed the French army to death (the battle would last nine months and cost the French nearly 400,000 casualties), the French were already impatient with their British ally, which, they thought, was not pulling its weight in the war; and they were as well deeply distrustful of British policy. Picot was a master of detail and a determined negotiator, and virtually the product of French colonial ambitions. His father was a founding member of the Comite de l'Afrique Francaise, and his brother the treasurer of the Com le de 1'Asie Francaise, both well-financed right-wing organizations with solid bourgeois support for the promotion of French colonialism. Picot himself had a deep, instinctive belief not only in France's mission civilisatrice, but in its imperative need to emerge from the war with a substantial gain in overseas territory as some compensation for the enor-mous sacrifices it was making. Quite apart from that, Picot, like many of the French, had an almost mystical belief in France's deep historical con-nections to Lebanon and Syria, going back nearly 1,000 years to the Cru-sades and continuing through Napoleon Bonaparte's conquest of Egypt. Syria and Lebanon were referred to as La France du Moyen-Orient, and in Paris it was widely assumed that the indigenous inhabitants of "France of the Middle East" were eagerly awaiting the imposition of French cul-ture, laws, prosperity, and commerce. For a number of reasons rooted in the history of the Crusades, it was also assumed that "Syria" included not only Lebanon—You only had to look at the map, voyons, to see that Leba-non was nothing more than the Mediterranean coastline of Syria!—but Palestine. Had not Godefroy de Bouillon, after all, conquered Jerusalem and founded the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099, creating a state where 100,000 French-speaking soldiers ruled over 400,000 Muslims and Jews?
The British had a touching faith in the value of royalty- hence their support of the princely states in India until 1947, and their eagerness to place Emir Feisal on the throne of Iraq and his brother Abdulla on the throne of Jordan- both of these monarchies were invented overnight on the British model. Ibn Saud had at least turned himself into a king without British help.
and
He was moved in part by the plight of the residents of Tafileh, whom the Turks would certainly punish severely for surrendering the town, and in part by a desire to prove to Allenby that the Arabs could fight and win a conventional battle. Until now, Lawrence had been following his own maxim: "To make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife," and his aim was to keep the Turks trying to eat soup with a knife for as long as possible. His model was Marshal de Saxe, who had written, "I am not in favor of giving battle, especially at the outset of a war—I am even con-vinced that an able general can wage war his whole life without being compelled to do so." Now, Lawrence, a convinced admirer of de Saxe, was following instead the formula of Napoleon: "There is nothing I desire so much as a great battle." He had not changed his opinion about de Saxe, whose maxims would remain the essential basis for all guerrilla wars on into the present, but he recognized the political reality, which was that the British, and especially the French, were unlikely to take the Arabs' claims to territory seriously until the Arabs had demonstrated an ability to hold their ground and beat the Turks in a conventional battle of posi-tions. It was not that Lawrence's philosophy of war had changed; it was that politics, and its by-product, public relations—Lawrence had already learned something from Lowell Thomas—required something more than blowing up bridges and looting trains if the Arabs were to get Damascus. Since Lawrence considered it his job to get them Damascus, he made up his mind to fight the Turks at Tafileh. In desert skirmishes Lawrence's command was direct and unchal-lenged; by contrast, the force at Tafileh had, if anything, too many leaders for its size. The overall commander of the march toward the Dead Sea was Feisal's younger half brother Zeid, "a cool and gallant fighter," who did not have much experience directing a battle but who, as a son of the sharif of Mecca (now king of the Hejaz), had the respect of all the tribes, and even of Auda. The uniformed regulars were under the command of Major-General Jaafar Pasha, a former officer in the Turkish army and now Feisal's chief of staff, a competent professional soldier. Lawrence's bodyguard was led by Abdulla el Nahabi, a fearless adventurer with a series of murders and assaults on his head, as well as a price. As for the Bedouin, the bulk of them were divided into two mutually hostile fac-tions, since Auda's tribe and the Motalga were traditional blood enemies. By means of a lavish payment in gold, Auda was sent "back to his desert beyond the railway to contain the garrisons of the Turkish stations," thus removing one source of friction, but clearly the battle could not be won unless Lawrence took command of it, though he passed his orders through the Arabs' chief. It is always difficult to compare battles, but to anybody interested in military history, once allowance is made for the difference in climate and scale, the topography of Tafileh bears a startling resemblance to that of Gettysburg. Lawrence, then, was in the position of Lee, and Hamid Fakhri Bey in the position of Meade, when Longstreet launched his attack against Cemetery Ridge on the afternoon of July 3, 1863—with the crucial difference that Lawrence succeeded.
and
The Bedouin disliked townsmen to begin with, and the popula-tion of Tafileh was mixed and therefore doubly offensive to them. The Ottoman government had force-marched to Tafileh nearly 1,000 Arme-nians who had escaped the massacre, as well as "a colony of freebooting Senussi from North Africa," part of the long-standing Turkish policy of settling areas with mutually hostile groups in order to give the local pop-ulation a presence they would hate more than they did the Turks. Zeid and Jaafar thought the townspeople were probably pro-Turk, and would welcome the Turks back, but Lawrence disagreed, and to prove his point made his way into Tafileh by night. He found that the local people, whether Arab, Armenian, or Senussi, were united only by their hatred of the Turks, and terrified by the fact that the Arab forces had marched out of town and abandoned them to their fate. The town was in chaos and terror, as people, in Lawrence's vivid description, "rushed to save their goods and their lives. . . . It was freezing hard, and the ground crusted with noisy ice. In the blustering dark the crying and the confusion through the narrow streets were terrible." The Motalga further terrified the townspeople by firing their rifles into the sky to keep their spirits up as they clattered out of the town at a gallop, while the approaching Turks fired back in the darkness to demonstrate how close they were. Under the circumstances, it seemed to Lawrence that the townspeople might be persuaded to fight in their own defense. As dawn broke he gath-ered up a score or so of the Motalga tribesmen and sent them forward with a few of the local peasantry to engage the Turks, who were deploying on the long ridge at the top of the triangular plain to the east of Tafileh. He then went off to find Zeid and persuade him that Jaafar was positioned on the wrong side of the town, and that the right place to fight a "pitched battle" was in front of the town, on the triangular plain, not on the hills behind. Fortunately, Zeid had already come to the same conclusion. Lawrence, when he wrote about the Battle of Tafileh, would dismiss the action as a military parody—"I would rake up all the old maxims and rules of the orthodox army text-book, and parody them in cold blood today"—
but there is no evidence of this in the report he wrote after the battle. On the contrary, no less a judge than Colonel A. P. Wavell, the future field marshal, would describe it as "one of the best descriptions of a battle ever penned." What strikes one most about Tafileh is that Lawrence could hardly have fought with more professional skill and personal daring.
The government of India vigorously contested both the idea of the Arab Revolt and any promise to the Arabs of a future state. The govern-ment of India saw no signs in Basra that the Arabs wanted or would know what to do with self-government, and they proposed to run Mesopota-mia as an extension of colonial rule in India. In the same spirit, they were backing ibn Saud with arms, support, and money, which, since he was the mortal rival of Sharif Hussein, put Delhi and London at loggerheads. Sykes does not seem to have been deeply troubled by any of this—he was a man who could hold several passionate enthusiasms in his head at the same time without apparently noticing that they were contradictory. He was at once sincerely in favor of an Arab state and a wholly commit-ted supporter of Zionism;* he was determined to give the French what they wanted, and at the same time in favor of McMahon's correspondence with Sharif Hussein. He was sympathetic toward both Turks and Arabs, as well as Armenians and Kurds. If Sykes was aware that the one point most Arabs agreed on, whatever their other differences, was that the heart of any viable Arab state must be Syria, and that under no circumstances would they accept French domination, given France's colo-nial record in North Africa, he managed to suppress this when he finally returned to London to report on his mission. It is typical of Sykes that he not only helped form the sentiment behind, and draft the language of the Balfour Declaration, but also designed the flag of the Arab Revolt, "a combination of green, red, black and white." (Variations of this design would become the national flags of Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Palestine.) Sykes is an example of a fatal British ability to see both sides of a dispute in an area of the world where there are only absolutes.
" This was a fairly common delusion among the British at the time, right up to the Balfour Declaration in 1917. It was based on the assumption that—the Arabs and Jews both being Semitic peoples—the Jews would contribute to an Arab state their knowl-edge' of international finance, science, and medicine, as well as the growing agricultural expertise of the Zionists. This was, and has since proved to be, overoptimistic.
To say that the Christmas spirit was lacking in these discussions would be putting it mildly. Although it would be only two months before the Germans launched the Battle of Verdun in an attempt to bleed the French army to death (the battle would last nine months and cost the French nearly 400,000 casualties), the French were already impatient with their British ally, which, they thought, was not pulling its weight in the war; and they were as well deeply distrustful of British policy. Picot was a master of detail and a determined negotiator, and virtually the product of French colonial ambitions. His father was a founding member of the Comite de l'Afrique Francaise, and his brother the treasurer of the Com le de 1'Asie Francaise, both well-financed right-wing organizations with solid bourgeois support for the promotion of French colonialism. Picot himself had a deep, instinctive belief not only in France's mission civilisatrice, but in its imperative need to emerge from the war with a substantial gain in overseas territory as some compensation for the enor-mous sacrifices it was making. Quite apart from that, Picot, like many of the French, had an almost mystical belief in France's deep historical con-nections to Lebanon and Syria, going back nearly 1,000 years to the Cru-sades and continuing through Napoleon Bonaparte's conquest of Egypt. Syria and Lebanon were referred to as La France du Moyen-Orient, and in Paris it was widely assumed that the indigenous inhabitants of "France of the Middle East" were eagerly awaiting the imposition of French cul-ture, laws, prosperity, and commerce. For a number of reasons rooted in the history of the Crusades, it was also assumed that "Syria" included not only Lebanon—You only had to look at the map, voyons, to see that Leba-non was nothing more than the Mediterranean coastline of Syria!—but Palestine. Had not Godefroy de Bouillon, after all, conquered Jerusalem and founded the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099, creating a state where 100,000 French-speaking soldiers ruled over 400,000 Muslims and Jews?
The British had a touching faith in the value of royalty- hence their support of the princely states in India until 1947, and their eagerness to place Emir Feisal on the throne of Iraq and his brother Abdulla on the throne of Jordan- both of these monarchies were invented overnight on the British model. Ibn Saud had at least turned himself into a king without British help.
and
He was moved in part by the plight of the residents of Tafileh, whom the Turks would certainly punish severely for surrendering the town, and in part by a desire to prove to Allenby that the Arabs could fight and win a conventional battle. Until now, Lawrence had been following his own maxim: "To make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife," and his aim was to keep the Turks trying to eat soup with a knife for as long as possible. His model was Marshal de Saxe, who had written, "I am not in favor of giving battle, especially at the outset of a war—I am even con-vinced that an able general can wage war his whole life without being compelled to do so." Now, Lawrence, a convinced admirer of de Saxe, was following instead the formula of Napoleon: "There is nothing I desire so much as a great battle." He had not changed his opinion about de Saxe, whose maxims would remain the essential basis for all guerrilla wars on into the present, but he recognized the political reality, which was that the British, and especially the French, were unlikely to take the Arabs' claims to territory seriously until the Arabs had demonstrated an ability to hold their ground and beat the Turks in a conventional battle of posi-tions. It was not that Lawrence's philosophy of war had changed; it was that politics, and its by-product, public relations—Lawrence had already learned something from Lowell Thomas—required something more than blowing up bridges and looting trains if the Arabs were to get Damascus. Since Lawrence considered it his job to get them Damascus, he made up his mind to fight the Turks at Tafileh. In desert skirmishes Lawrence's command was direct and unchal-lenged; by contrast, the force at Tafileh had, if anything, too many leaders for its size. The overall commander of the march toward the Dead Sea was Feisal's younger half brother Zeid, "a cool and gallant fighter," who did not have much experience directing a battle but who, as a son of the sharif of Mecca (now king of the Hejaz), had the respect of all the tribes, and even of Auda. The uniformed regulars were under the command of Major-General Jaafar Pasha, a former officer in the Turkish army and now Feisal's chief of staff, a competent professional soldier. Lawrence's bodyguard was led by Abdulla el Nahabi, a fearless adventurer with a series of murders and assaults on his head, as well as a price. As for the Bedouin, the bulk of them were divided into two mutually hostile fac-tions, since Auda's tribe and the Motalga were traditional blood enemies. By means of a lavish payment in gold, Auda was sent "back to his desert beyond the railway to contain the garrisons of the Turkish stations," thus removing one source of friction, but clearly the battle could not be won unless Lawrence took command of it, though he passed his orders through the Arabs' chief. It is always difficult to compare battles, but to anybody interested in military history, once allowance is made for the difference in climate and scale, the topography of Tafileh bears a startling resemblance to that of Gettysburg. Lawrence, then, was in the position of Lee, and Hamid Fakhri Bey in the position of Meade, when Longstreet launched his attack against Cemetery Ridge on the afternoon of July 3, 1863—with the crucial difference that Lawrence succeeded.
and
The Bedouin disliked townsmen to begin with, and the popula-tion of Tafileh was mixed and therefore doubly offensive to them. The Ottoman government had force-marched to Tafileh nearly 1,000 Arme-nians who had escaped the massacre, as well as "a colony of freebooting Senussi from North Africa," part of the long-standing Turkish policy of settling areas with mutually hostile groups in order to give the local pop-ulation a presence they would hate more than they did the Turks. Zeid and Jaafar thought the townspeople were probably pro-Turk, and would welcome the Turks back, but Lawrence disagreed, and to prove his point made his way into Tafileh by night. He found that the local people, whether Arab, Armenian, or Senussi, were united only by their hatred of the Turks, and terrified by the fact that the Arab forces had marched out of town and abandoned them to their fate. The town was in chaos and terror, as people, in Lawrence's vivid description, "rushed to save their goods and their lives. . . . It was freezing hard, and the ground crusted with noisy ice. In the blustering dark the crying and the confusion through the narrow streets were terrible." The Motalga further terrified the townspeople by firing their rifles into the sky to keep their spirits up as they clattered out of the town at a gallop, while the approaching Turks fired back in the darkness to demonstrate how close they were. Under the circumstances, it seemed to Lawrence that the townspeople might be persuaded to fight in their own defense. As dawn broke he gath-ered up a score or so of the Motalga tribesmen and sent them forward with a few of the local peasantry to engage the Turks, who were deploying on the long ridge at the top of the triangular plain to the east of Tafileh. He then went off to find Zeid and persuade him that Jaafar was positioned on the wrong side of the town, and that the right place to fight a "pitched battle" was in front of the town, on the triangular plain, not on the hills behind. Fortunately, Zeid had already come to the same conclusion. Lawrence, when he wrote about the Battle of Tafileh, would dismiss the action as a military parody—"I would rake up all the old maxims and rules of the orthodox army text-book, and parody them in cold blood today"—
but there is no evidence of this in the report he wrote after the battle. On the contrary, no less a judge than Colonel A. P. Wavell, the future field marshal, would describe it as "one of the best descriptions of a battle ever penned." What strikes one most about Tafileh is that Lawrence could hardly have fought with more professional skill and personal daring.
Cleo additionally
Explosive though it was, that interview came as a relief to the Sen-ate, to which there was only one danger greater than a public feud between the two Caesarians. Antony wielded political power. Octa-vian was respected, and surprisingly popular. Enthusiastic demon-strations greeted him throughout his travels. Far better that the two rivals obstruct each other, went the thinking, than that they join forces. Antony noted as much in his garden that spring morning. Octavian was fresh from his studies. Certainly in the course of them he had learned that the populace considered it their business to pro-long discord, that they built up demagogues for the pleasure of knocking them down, that they encouraged them to destroy each other. He was of course right. And no one was better at fomenting dissension than Cicero, who could always be counted on, as a contemporary put it, to malign the prominent, blackmail the powerful, slander the distinguished. He now gamely obliged. To Cicero the contest was a baneful one between weakness and villainy. In truth there were a dizzying number of options. Am°4 Caesar's assassins, Brutus and Cassius remained very much in the Pic ture. A bold young man with a gift for assembling armies, Pompey 5
Man Is by Nature a Political Creature • 157
son was in Spain with the greater part of the Roman navy. Sextus Pompey had on his side his own father's still-bright reputation; he, too, was looking to avenge a parent and recover an inheritance. (He arguably had a greater claim on vengeance. As an adolescent, he had witnessed his father's beheading off the coast of Egypt.) The consul Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, having succeeded Antony as Caesar's sec-ond in command, having dined with Caesar the night before his murder, dreamed too of succeeding Caesar. He controlled a faction of Caesar's army. Additional legions reported to additional consuls. Brutus had unexpectedly raised his army in record time.* It seemed that
Octavian
alone was without a command.
The most influential man in Rome after the Ides, Cicero found himself in much the same bind as Cleopatra. Which side to join? He could see that neutrality would on this occasion—the fifth civil war of his lifetime—not be possible. At the same time, he knew all the
parties in question and was enchanted by none. In 44 Octavian struck him as a mere schoolboy, a nuisance rather than a prospect. "I don't trust his age and I don't know what he's after," Cicero carped. It was difficult to imagine Octavian— a pale-faced teenager in a city that preferred its complexions ruddy—as a commander in chief. He profferred himself as leader, and yet was so naïve as to believe that Rome could keep a secret! (It is interesting that few deigned to take Octavian seriously at eighteen, at which age Cleopatra already ruled Egypt.)
and
For Cleopatra's visit we have 'only one source, hostile to his native East, much taken with Rome, working at least partially from Herod's account. The Jewish historian Josephus obscures but cannot entirely camouflage what transpired: Herod and Cleopatra spent some inten-sive time in each other's company, part of it hammering out the details of his obligations. Antony had granted Cleopatra the exclusive right to the Dead Sea bitumen, or asphalt, glutinous lumps of which floated to the surface of the lake. Bitumen was essential to mortar, incense, and insecticide, to embalming and caulking. A reed basket, smeared with asphalt, could hold water. Plastered with it, a boat is waterproof The concession was a lucrative one. Also Cleopatra's were the proceeds of Jericho, the popular winter resort, lush with date-palm groves and bal-sam gardens. Very likely she rode out across a searing desert to inspect those two hundred acres in the Jordan River valley, where Herod had a secondary palace. All other scents paled in comparison to sweet balsam, which grew exclusively in Judaea. The fragrant shrub's oil, seed, and bark were precious. They constituted the region's most valuable export. As for Jericho's dates, they were the finest in the ancient world, the source of its most potent wine. In modern terms, it was as if Cleopatra had been granted no part of Kuwait, only the proceeds of its oil fields. Herod found the transaction particularly painful as Judaea was a poor country, parched and stony, with few fertile areas, no port, and a rapidly expanding population. His revenues were a risible fraction of Cleopatra's. At the same time his ambitions exceeded his territorY; he had no desire to be "King of a wilderness." There appears to have been some bickering over terms, in a negotiation that proved Cleopatra more intently focused on bitumen deliveries than seductions. She was relent-less and unsparing; the result was highly favorable to her. Herod agreed to lease the Jericho lands for zoo talents annually. He consented as well to guarantee and collect the rent on the bitumen monopoly from his neighbor, the Nabatean king. By agreeing to do so Herod spared him-self the company of any of Cleopatra's agents or soldiers. Otherwise the arrangement worked entirely to her benefit, all the more so as it made both men miserable. It left Herod to extract funds from a sovereign who had denied him refuge during the Parthian invasion, and who made his payments only under duress. Purposely and effectively, Cleo-patra set two men who disliked her, a Jew and an Arab, against each other. (Malthus, the Nabatean sovereign, would have his revenge later.) Herod nonetheless upheld his end of the agreement with Cleopatra. He felt that "it would be unsafe to give her any reason to hate him." The visit was by all other measures an unsuccessful one. The two inveterate charmers failed entirely to endear themselves to each other. Cleopatra may have patronized her fellow sovereign. As his royal mother-in-law tirelessly reminded him, Herod was a commoner. Nor was he exactly Jewish, given his mother's religion; in the eyes of the Jews Herod was a gentile, while in all other eyes he was a Jew. He was
as a consequence perennially insecure about his throne, a situation not unfamiliar to Cleopatra, who may have exacerbated it. Her Ara-maic may have been better than his Greek; several years her senior, D Herod was little educated, sorely deficient in history and culture, sen-sitive on both counts. (It says a good deal that when he decided to remedy the situation years later he hired the finest tutor in the busi ness, one who—in addition to his own literary and musical accom-plishrnent Cleopatra appeared , Wr graceless in Cleopatra's silken presence. heres had the best credential possible: he had been tutor to — 's children.) It could not have helped that Herod would have passions run high, the reverse of the great foreign policy
and
Also on Caesar's behalf, Antony proceeded to name his sons with Cleopatra as King of Kings. Producing the boys in turn, he assigned vast territories to each; the Eastern-inflected names came in handy now. At his cue, little Alexander Helios stepped forward, in the loose leggings and caped tunic of a Persian monarch. On his head he wore an upright, pointed turban topped with a peacock feather. His territories stretched to India; he was to rule over Armenia, Media, and—once his father had conquered it—Parthia. (He was again promised in marriage, this time to the daughter of the Median king, Artavasdes' traditional enemy.) Two-year-old Ptolemy Philadelphus, the fruit of Antony and Cleopatra's Antioch reunion, was an Alexander the Great in minia-ture. He wore the high boots, the short purple cloak, and the brimmed woolen hat—in this case wrapped with a diadem—of a Macedonian. To him went Phoenicia, Syria, and Cilicia, the lands west of the Euphrates. Cleopatra Selene was to preside over Cyrene, the Greek settlement in what is today eastern Libya, hundreds of miles across the desert. The distributions made, each of the two younger boys rose to kiss his parents. They were then surrounded by a colorful phalanx of bodyguards, Armenians in Alexander's case, Macedonians in PtolernY's. In such a way Antony parceled out the East, including lands not yet in his possession. For the young woman who fourteen years earlier had smuggled herself into Alexandria to plead for her diminished kingdom, it was a sensational reversal. Cleopatra stood divine and indomitable, less queen than empress, the supreme Roman air
mander at her side. Her rule extended over a vast swath of Asia, its frontiers established and now at peace. She was protected by Roman legions; with her children, she now reigned, at least nominally, over more land than had any Ptolemy in centuries. On coins minted for the occasion—with them she became the first foreigner to appear on a Roman coin—she appears majestic, authoritative. She has also aged. Her mouth is fuller, and she is noticeably fleshier, especially around the neck It is im. possible to say whose ambition had brought about the spar-kling ceremony, to be known later as the Donations of Alexandria. It is especially difficult to locate Cleopatra's fingerprints; the truth is smudged forever by Roman manhandling. At least in part the mes-sage of the day was clear. On their golden thrones sat what even a coolheaded modern historian has reasonably called "the two most magnificent people in the world." Together they seemed to resurrect if not expand upon the dream of Alexander the Great, promoting a universal empire, one that transcended national boundaries and announced embraced common culture, that reconciled Europe and Asia. They nn a new order. Cleopatra presided over the ceremony and the citywide banqueting that followed not only as a sovereign but as a deity after all, with the divine Caesar's son on one side, Dionysian Antony on the other. Old prophecies evidently resurfaced now. The Jews linked Cleopatra's rule with a golden age and with the coming of the Messiah. The queen of Egypt answered the call for an Eastern savior. She would rise above Rome for a better world. In conflating the Political and the religious, the imagery was all on Cleopatra's side. Mark Antony had a habit of jumping to conclusions, and in many ways the Donations were an exercise in wishful thinking. Certainly they made no difference to the administration of the lands in ques-tion, many of them governed by Roman proconsuls. The Armenian king was still very much alive. Parthia was not Antony's to distribute.
At best the celebrations were simply tone-deaf. At worst they were an insult to Octavian, a brazen power play. The intention hardly mattered given how the exercise looked in Rome, which wa how Octavian wanted it to: as an empty gesture, a farcical overreach ing by two slightly demented, power-drunk dissolutes, "a Dionysia, revel, led by an eastern harlot." With the Donations a munificent An tony handed out plenty of gifts, none more generous than that he set tied on Octavian.
Man Is by Nature a Political Creature • 157
son was in Spain with the greater part of the Roman navy. Sextus Pompey had on his side his own father's still-bright reputation; he, too, was looking to avenge a parent and recover an inheritance. (He arguably had a greater claim on vengeance. As an adolescent, he had witnessed his father's beheading off the coast of Egypt.) The consul Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, having succeeded Antony as Caesar's sec-ond in command, having dined with Caesar the night before his murder, dreamed too of succeeding Caesar. He controlled a faction of Caesar's army. Additional legions reported to additional consuls. Brutus had unexpectedly raised his army in record time.* It seemed that
Octavian
alone was without a command.
The most influential man in Rome after the Ides, Cicero found himself in much the same bind as Cleopatra. Which side to join? He could see that neutrality would on this occasion—the fifth civil war of his lifetime—not be possible. At the same time, he knew all the
parties in question and was enchanted by none. In 44 Octavian struck him as a mere schoolboy, a nuisance rather than a prospect. "I don't trust his age and I don't know what he's after," Cicero carped. It was difficult to imagine Octavian— a pale-faced teenager in a city that preferred its complexions ruddy—as a commander in chief. He profferred himself as leader, and yet was so naïve as to believe that Rome could keep a secret! (It is interesting that few deigned to take Octavian seriously at eighteen, at which age Cleopatra already ruled Egypt.)
and
For Cleopatra's visit we have 'only one source, hostile to his native East, much taken with Rome, working at least partially from Herod's account. The Jewish historian Josephus obscures but cannot entirely camouflage what transpired: Herod and Cleopatra spent some inten-sive time in each other's company, part of it hammering out the details of his obligations. Antony had granted Cleopatra the exclusive right to the Dead Sea bitumen, or asphalt, glutinous lumps of which floated to the surface of the lake. Bitumen was essential to mortar, incense, and insecticide, to embalming and caulking. A reed basket, smeared with asphalt, could hold water. Plastered with it, a boat is waterproof The concession was a lucrative one. Also Cleopatra's were the proceeds of Jericho, the popular winter resort, lush with date-palm groves and bal-sam gardens. Very likely she rode out across a searing desert to inspect those two hundred acres in the Jordan River valley, where Herod had a secondary palace. All other scents paled in comparison to sweet balsam, which grew exclusively in Judaea. The fragrant shrub's oil, seed, and bark were precious. They constituted the region's most valuable export. As for Jericho's dates, they were the finest in the ancient world, the source of its most potent wine. In modern terms, it was as if Cleopatra had been granted no part of Kuwait, only the proceeds of its oil fields. Herod found the transaction particularly painful as Judaea was a poor country, parched and stony, with few fertile areas, no port, and a rapidly expanding population. His revenues were a risible fraction of Cleopatra's. At the same time his ambitions exceeded his territorY; he had no desire to be "King of a wilderness." There appears to have been some bickering over terms, in a negotiation that proved Cleopatra more intently focused on bitumen deliveries than seductions. She was relent-less and unsparing; the result was highly favorable to her. Herod agreed to lease the Jericho lands for zoo talents annually. He consented as well to guarantee and collect the rent on the bitumen monopoly from his neighbor, the Nabatean king. By agreeing to do so Herod spared him-self the company of any of Cleopatra's agents or soldiers. Otherwise the arrangement worked entirely to her benefit, all the more so as it made both men miserable. It left Herod to extract funds from a sovereign who had denied him refuge during the Parthian invasion, and who made his payments only under duress. Purposely and effectively, Cleo-patra set two men who disliked her, a Jew and an Arab, against each other. (Malthus, the Nabatean sovereign, would have his revenge later.) Herod nonetheless upheld his end of the agreement with Cleopatra. He felt that "it would be unsafe to give her any reason to hate him." The visit was by all other measures an unsuccessful one. The two inveterate charmers failed entirely to endear themselves to each other. Cleopatra may have patronized her fellow sovereign. As his royal mother-in-law tirelessly reminded him, Herod was a commoner. Nor was he exactly Jewish, given his mother's religion; in the eyes of the Jews Herod was a gentile, while in all other eyes he was a Jew. He was
as a consequence perennially insecure about his throne, a situation not unfamiliar to Cleopatra, who may have exacerbated it. Her Ara-maic may have been better than his Greek; several years her senior, D Herod was little educated, sorely deficient in history and culture, sen-sitive on both counts. (It says a good deal that when he decided to remedy the situation years later he hired the finest tutor in the busi ness, one who—in addition to his own literary and musical accom-plishrnent Cleopatra appeared , Wr graceless in Cleopatra's silken presence. heres had the best credential possible: he had been tutor to — 's children.) It could not have helped that Herod would have passions run high, the reverse of the great foreign policy
and
Also on Caesar's behalf, Antony proceeded to name his sons with Cleopatra as King of Kings. Producing the boys in turn, he assigned vast territories to each; the Eastern-inflected names came in handy now. At his cue, little Alexander Helios stepped forward, in the loose leggings and caped tunic of a Persian monarch. On his head he wore an upright, pointed turban topped with a peacock feather. His territories stretched to India; he was to rule over Armenia, Media, and—once his father had conquered it—Parthia. (He was again promised in marriage, this time to the daughter of the Median king, Artavasdes' traditional enemy.) Two-year-old Ptolemy Philadelphus, the fruit of Antony and Cleopatra's Antioch reunion, was an Alexander the Great in minia-ture. He wore the high boots, the short purple cloak, and the brimmed woolen hat—in this case wrapped with a diadem—of a Macedonian. To him went Phoenicia, Syria, and Cilicia, the lands west of the Euphrates. Cleopatra Selene was to preside over Cyrene, the Greek settlement in what is today eastern Libya, hundreds of miles across the desert. The distributions made, each of the two younger boys rose to kiss his parents. They were then surrounded by a colorful phalanx of bodyguards, Armenians in Alexander's case, Macedonians in PtolernY's. In such a way Antony parceled out the East, including lands not yet in his possession. For the young woman who fourteen years earlier had smuggled herself into Alexandria to plead for her diminished kingdom, it was a sensational reversal. Cleopatra stood divine and indomitable, less queen than empress, the supreme Roman air
mander at her side. Her rule extended over a vast swath of Asia, its frontiers established and now at peace. She was protected by Roman legions; with her children, she now reigned, at least nominally, over more land than had any Ptolemy in centuries. On coins minted for the occasion—with them she became the first foreigner to appear on a Roman coin—she appears majestic, authoritative. She has also aged. Her mouth is fuller, and she is noticeably fleshier, especially around the neck It is im. possible to say whose ambition had brought about the spar-kling ceremony, to be known later as the Donations of Alexandria. It is especially difficult to locate Cleopatra's fingerprints; the truth is smudged forever by Roman manhandling. At least in part the mes-sage of the day was clear. On their golden thrones sat what even a coolheaded modern historian has reasonably called "the two most magnificent people in the world." Together they seemed to resurrect if not expand upon the dream of Alexander the Great, promoting a universal empire, one that transcended national boundaries and announced embraced common culture, that reconciled Europe and Asia. They nn a new order. Cleopatra presided over the ceremony and the citywide banqueting that followed not only as a sovereign but as a deity after all, with the divine Caesar's son on one side, Dionysian Antony on the other. Old prophecies evidently resurfaced now. The Jews linked Cleopatra's rule with a golden age and with the coming of the Messiah. The queen of Egypt answered the call for an Eastern savior. She would rise above Rome for a better world. In conflating the Political and the religious, the imagery was all on Cleopatra's side. Mark Antony had a habit of jumping to conclusions, and in many ways the Donations were an exercise in wishful thinking. Certainly they made no difference to the administration of the lands in ques-tion, many of them governed by Roman proconsuls. The Armenian king was still very much alive. Parthia was not Antony's to distribute.
At best the celebrations were simply tone-deaf. At worst they were an insult to Octavian, a brazen power play. The intention hardly mattered given how the exercise looked in Rome, which wa how Octavian wanted it to: as an empty gesture, a farcical overreach ing by two slightly demented, power-drunk dissolutes, "a Dionysia, revel, led by an eastern harlot." With the Donations a munificent An tony handed out plenty of gifts, none more generous than that he set tied on Octavian.
Monday, April 13, 2015
Trafalgar
The invasion of Britain was abandoned because the element of surprise was lost, but mostly Napoleon's plans had to be set aside because he did not understand the problems of war at sea anywhere near as well as he did the deployment of armies on land. He was used to organising grand projects that relied on the fast and reliable transmission of orders to move large armies across the land-scape, and he wanted to use the same approach for the dispositions of his warships. It was a policy doomed to failure, because he did not allow for the vagaries of contacting fleets at sea. This was done through despatches carried by relatively small, lightly armed ships that relied on speed and manoeuvra-bility rather than firepower to elude capture. Speed of communication at sea seldom approached that on land, mainly because it was far more difficult to find a ship and deliver mes-sages than for a despatch rider on land to take orders to an army. Lines of communication at sea were also at the mercy of wind and weather, and it was common practice to send dupli-cate despatches in different ships to increase the chances of the information reaching its destination. In such circumstances, close central control of naval operations was impossible — a fact that Napoleon repeatedly failed to grasp. As on land, Napoleon also frequently countermanded his own orders by sending one messenger ship to follow another, without any thought that only one, or possibly none, might reach their destination in time. While trying to impose tight control on his ships at sea through a constant stream of orders, he produced more chaos than if he had left his admirals to their own devices. After so many abandoned invasion plans, he still failed to learn from his mistakes, blaming his subordinates instead. His latest plan was for Vice-Admiral Honore-Joseph-Antoine Ganteaume to lead his fleet from Brest on the north-west tip of France to Martinique in the 'West Indies. In the meantime Vice-Admiral Villeneuve was to take his fleet from Toulon on the south coast of France, collect the Spanish admiral Frederico
Carlos Gravina with five Spanish warships from Cadiz, and ren-dezvous with Ganteaume at Martinique. These combined forces would next attack British possessions in the West Indies, thereby drawing British ships away from Europe to deal with this threat. They would then return to take control of the English Channel so that the invasion of Britain could take place. Napoleon's whole strategy was based on deceiving the British; Ganteaume was to leave Brest unseen so that British ships would be occupied looking for him; a large enough fleet was to stay at Cadiz to ensure that the British maintained the blockade and so could not rapidly reinforce their fleet in the Channel; and Villeneuve was to sail for the West Indies in the hope of induc-ing a large part of the British Navy to give chase. It was a strategy that would work well enough with armies on land, but it was far too complicated and too precise to have much chance of working at sea. Because he did not trust his admirals, Napoleon also issued increasingly detailed and rigid orders in an attempt to force them to do exactly what he wanted. On 3o March 1805, Villeneuve's fleet had sailed from Toulon, setting in motion a train of events that would culminate in the Battle of Trafalgar nearly seven months later. The first part of Villeneuve's mission was successful; he avoided the British block-ade, and Nelson only found out that he had gone four days later.
and
It was this sudden leap in technology to specially designed warships that carried cannons from commandeered merchant ships as mere transport for soldiers that led to Trafalgar, warships became weapons in their own right, capable of destroying other ships or land-based fortifications without any troops leaving the ship. Naval strategy rapidly changed from an emphasis on ramming and boarding to the concerted use of artillery to disable an enemy before they were close enough to ram or board. In the two centuries leading up to Trafalgar, this was the situation that had prevailed. By trial and error, the design of ships and cannons gradually improved, as did the quality of gunpowder, and at the time of the battle, wooden sailing warships had reached the very peak of technical perfection, with the expertise of the best seamen leaving little room for more advances. Trafalgar was to be the last major pitched battle between two large fleets of sailing wooden war-ships. Within sixty years the first iron battleship was launched, causing a race between European navies for more powerful guns to destroy enemy battleships and ever-thicker armour to protect them. In the meantime the development of steam engines broke the reliance on wind power and changed naval tactics for ever. With the advent of iron and steam, the advantage lay firmly with the fleet that had the best technology; no longer could the sheer skill, professionalism and endurance of the ships' crews, as at Trafalgar, produce a decisive victory in the face of unfavourable odds. Although the ships were cleared for action in great haste, because this was how the crews had practised the manoeuvre in order to be ready for any emergency, with hindsight the sailors found they had plenty of time — perhaps too much time. William Robinson, a seaman on board the Revenge who had volunteered five months before the battle, later remembered:
As the enemy was thus driven to risk a battle, they exhibited a specimen of their naval tactics by forming themselves into a crescent, or half-moon, waiting for our approach; which did not take place until ten minute of twelve o'clock, so that there was nearly six hours to prepare
for the battle, while we glided down to them under the influence of a gentle breeze . . . During this time each ship was making the usual preparations, such as breaking away the captain and officers' cabins, and sending all the lumber below — the doctors, parson, purser and loblolly men were also busy, getting the medicine chests and bandages out; and sails prepared for the wounded to be placed on, that they might be dressed in rotation, as they were taken down to the after cockpit. In such a bustling, and it may be said, trying as well as serious time, it is curious to notice the different dispositions of the British sailor. Some would be offering a guinea for a glass of grog, whilst others were making a sort of mutual verbal will, such as, if one of Johnny Crapeau's [actually `Crapaud', the French word for 'toad' and the seamen's slang for a Frenchman] shots . . . knocks my head off, you will take all my effects; and if you are killed, and I am not, why, I will have yours, and this is generally agreed to. During this momentous preparation, the human mind had ample time for meditation and conjecture, for it was evident that the fate of England rested on this battle.
and
After his decisive victory and just days after occupying Vienna, the news of the French and Spanish defeat at Trafalgar reached Napoleon on 16 November, upon which 'he flew into one of those fits of passion which always disgrace a Hero more than an individual. Several couri-ers were immediately dispatched with orders, which . . . [were later] altered or changed. It is said that he sent commands to Ganteaume, instantly to revenge with the Brest Fleet the disas-ters of the Toulon [Villeneuve's] fleet.'20 Napoleon eventually took notice of his aides and countermanded these orders to the Brest fleet. Less than a month later, on 7 December, the allies of Britain suffered an even greater disaster than Ulm, when Napoleon crushed the Austro-Russian armies at Austerlitz — a defeat so decisive that it caused the British Prime Minister, William Pitt, to say of a map of Europe, 'Roll up that map; it will not be wanted these ten years.'21 At the end of i8o5, it was obvious that there was an uneasy stalemate; Britain had command of the sea, but Napoleon would shortly have control of Europe. It would be ten years before he was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo. For Britain's allies on the Continent, the immediate outlook was bleak, and from the French point of view,
He [Napoleon] desired that little should be said about Trafalgar in the French newspapers . . . [and] Europe itself was willing enough to observe that silence which he desired. The mighty resonance of his steps on the continent drowned the echoes of the cannon of Trafalgar. The powers who had the sword of Napoleon at their breast were but little cheered by a naval victory, profitable to England alone, without any other result than a new extension of her commercial domination, a domination which they disliked and tolerated only from jealousy of France. Besides, British glory did not console them for their own humiliation
and
at Tilsit, a small town on the Polish-Lithuanian border, Napoleon agreed a peace treaty after the French had decisively beaten the Russian Army at the Battle of Friedland. With Russia under the sway of Napoleon, the Continental System soon began to have a serious effect on Britain. Of more immediate concern was another part of the treaty that was meant to remain secret, which covered how France and Russia would divide up Europe between them with an aggressive appli-cation of the Continental System, amalgamate the French and Russian fleets, which were to be increased by more shipbuilding, and seize the fleets of Portugal and Denmark — both still neu-tral states. The secret treaty was known almost instantly in Britain, the information being carried by an English smuggler turned spy, and the government realised that it must act quickly to pre-empt Napoleon's plan. The Portuguese royal family and the Portuguese fleet were escorted to the safety of the colony of Brazil on the other side of the Atlantic. Meanwhile, a Russian fleet in the Tagus River in Portugal was blockaded by British ships, leaving a few Russian vessels isolated and relatively pow-erless in the Adriatic. A plan was then set in motion to deal with the Danish fleet at Copenhagen, which was important not so much for the ships there as the seamen, since the Danish Government required every seafarer to serve six years in the navy, if they were needed, with four thousand men always avail-able and a reserve of over twenty thousand. These were all skilled and experienced seamen — the essential element that the French Navy lacked. On 25 July 1807, the British Admiral Lord Gambier set sail with a strong force of battleships and transport ships to Copenhagen, on the correct assumption that the Crown Prince of Denmark would refuse to surrender his navy. After several days of bombardment, partially from ships, but mainly from artillery batteries that had been established ashore, the city surrendered on 7 September. British losses were minimal, but about 250 Danish soldiers were killed, and because General Peyman who commanded the Danish defence had earlier refused to take advantage of the British offer to evacuate the city, over two thousand civilians also died. Those Danish ships that were not considered worth taking to Britain were destroyed, and the operation effectively stopped Napoleon's revised plans for invasion. From now on Napoleon relied on the Continental System to bring Britain to its knees, and there appeared to be every possibility of doing so. Bad harvests in 1808, 1809 and 181o, as well as the continuing mechanisation of both agriculture and industry in Britain, caused widespread unrest and often violent opposition. Luddites smashed factory machines; turnpike cottages were burned in anger against road tolls; and serious rioting occurred in several places. If strictly enforced, the Continental System would have succeeded, since by 1811 English factories were being forced to close down because there was no market for their products and because warehouses were already choked with unsold goods. The problem for Napoleon was that the cutting of trade between the Continent and Britain hurt the Continental countries almost as much. The Continental System was everywhere subverted or only half-heartedly applied. Corruption and smuggling were rife, and even Napoleon him-self sanctioned the relaxation or circumvention of the rules when it suited him. In France, the bourgeoisie — Napoleon's most faithful supporters — were alienated by goods being unob-tainable or else scarce and overpriced. The end result was an even greater strain on his imperial economy that had already been suffering under the burden of financing his military cam-paigns. The final straw was his invasion of Russia in 1812. Not merely a military disaster, the campaign made an implacable enemy of the Tsar. One by one the allies of France switched their allegiance to Britain and Russia, until Napoleon was forced to abdicate two years later and was finally defeated at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.
Carlos Gravina with five Spanish warships from Cadiz, and ren-dezvous with Ganteaume at Martinique. These combined forces would next attack British possessions in the West Indies, thereby drawing British ships away from Europe to deal with this threat. They would then return to take control of the English Channel so that the invasion of Britain could take place. Napoleon's whole strategy was based on deceiving the British; Ganteaume was to leave Brest unseen so that British ships would be occupied looking for him; a large enough fleet was to stay at Cadiz to ensure that the British maintained the blockade and so could not rapidly reinforce their fleet in the Channel; and Villeneuve was to sail for the West Indies in the hope of induc-ing a large part of the British Navy to give chase. It was a strategy that would work well enough with armies on land, but it was far too complicated and too precise to have much chance of working at sea. Because he did not trust his admirals, Napoleon also issued increasingly detailed and rigid orders in an attempt to force them to do exactly what he wanted. On 3o March 1805, Villeneuve's fleet had sailed from Toulon, setting in motion a train of events that would culminate in the Battle of Trafalgar nearly seven months later. The first part of Villeneuve's mission was successful; he avoided the British block-ade, and Nelson only found out that he had gone four days later.
and
It was this sudden leap in technology to specially designed warships that carried cannons from commandeered merchant ships as mere transport for soldiers that led to Trafalgar, warships became weapons in their own right, capable of destroying other ships or land-based fortifications without any troops leaving the ship. Naval strategy rapidly changed from an emphasis on ramming and boarding to the concerted use of artillery to disable an enemy before they were close enough to ram or board. In the two centuries leading up to Trafalgar, this was the situation that had prevailed. By trial and error, the design of ships and cannons gradually improved, as did the quality of gunpowder, and at the time of the battle, wooden sailing warships had reached the very peak of technical perfection, with the expertise of the best seamen leaving little room for more advances. Trafalgar was to be the last major pitched battle between two large fleets of sailing wooden war-ships. Within sixty years the first iron battleship was launched, causing a race between European navies for more powerful guns to destroy enemy battleships and ever-thicker armour to protect them. In the meantime the development of steam engines broke the reliance on wind power and changed naval tactics for ever. With the advent of iron and steam, the advantage lay firmly with the fleet that had the best technology; no longer could the sheer skill, professionalism and endurance of the ships' crews, as at Trafalgar, produce a decisive victory in the face of unfavourable odds. Although the ships were cleared for action in great haste, because this was how the crews had practised the manoeuvre in order to be ready for any emergency, with hindsight the sailors found they had plenty of time — perhaps too much time. William Robinson, a seaman on board the Revenge who had volunteered five months before the battle, later remembered:
As the enemy was thus driven to risk a battle, they exhibited a specimen of their naval tactics by forming themselves into a crescent, or half-moon, waiting for our approach; which did not take place until ten minute of twelve o'clock, so that there was nearly six hours to prepare
for the battle, while we glided down to them under the influence of a gentle breeze . . . During this time each ship was making the usual preparations, such as breaking away the captain and officers' cabins, and sending all the lumber below — the doctors, parson, purser and loblolly men were also busy, getting the medicine chests and bandages out; and sails prepared for the wounded to be placed on, that they might be dressed in rotation, as they were taken down to the after cockpit. In such a bustling, and it may be said, trying as well as serious time, it is curious to notice the different dispositions of the British sailor. Some would be offering a guinea for a glass of grog, whilst others were making a sort of mutual verbal will, such as, if one of Johnny Crapeau's [actually `Crapaud', the French word for 'toad' and the seamen's slang for a Frenchman] shots . . . knocks my head off, you will take all my effects; and if you are killed, and I am not, why, I will have yours, and this is generally agreed to. During this momentous preparation, the human mind had ample time for meditation and conjecture, for it was evident that the fate of England rested on this battle.
and
After his decisive victory and just days after occupying Vienna, the news of the French and Spanish defeat at Trafalgar reached Napoleon on 16 November, upon which 'he flew into one of those fits of passion which always disgrace a Hero more than an individual. Several couri-ers were immediately dispatched with orders, which . . . [were later] altered or changed. It is said that he sent commands to Ganteaume, instantly to revenge with the Brest Fleet the disas-ters of the Toulon [Villeneuve's] fleet.'20 Napoleon eventually took notice of his aides and countermanded these orders to the Brest fleet. Less than a month later, on 7 December, the allies of Britain suffered an even greater disaster than Ulm, when Napoleon crushed the Austro-Russian armies at Austerlitz — a defeat so decisive that it caused the British Prime Minister, William Pitt, to say of a map of Europe, 'Roll up that map; it will not be wanted these ten years.'21 At the end of i8o5, it was obvious that there was an uneasy stalemate; Britain had command of the sea, but Napoleon would shortly have control of Europe. It would be ten years before he was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo. For Britain's allies on the Continent, the immediate outlook was bleak, and from the French point of view,
He [Napoleon] desired that little should be said about Trafalgar in the French newspapers . . . [and] Europe itself was willing enough to observe that silence which he desired. The mighty resonance of his steps on the continent drowned the echoes of the cannon of Trafalgar. The powers who had the sword of Napoleon at their breast were but little cheered by a naval victory, profitable to England alone, without any other result than a new extension of her commercial domination, a domination which they disliked and tolerated only from jealousy of France. Besides, British glory did not console them for their own humiliation
and
at Tilsit, a small town on the Polish-Lithuanian border, Napoleon agreed a peace treaty after the French had decisively beaten the Russian Army at the Battle of Friedland. With Russia under the sway of Napoleon, the Continental System soon began to have a serious effect on Britain. Of more immediate concern was another part of the treaty that was meant to remain secret, which covered how France and Russia would divide up Europe between them with an aggressive appli-cation of the Continental System, amalgamate the French and Russian fleets, which were to be increased by more shipbuilding, and seize the fleets of Portugal and Denmark — both still neu-tral states. The secret treaty was known almost instantly in Britain, the information being carried by an English smuggler turned spy, and the government realised that it must act quickly to pre-empt Napoleon's plan. The Portuguese royal family and the Portuguese fleet were escorted to the safety of the colony of Brazil on the other side of the Atlantic. Meanwhile, a Russian fleet in the Tagus River in Portugal was blockaded by British ships, leaving a few Russian vessels isolated and relatively pow-erless in the Adriatic. A plan was then set in motion to deal with the Danish fleet at Copenhagen, which was important not so much for the ships there as the seamen, since the Danish Government required every seafarer to serve six years in the navy, if they were needed, with four thousand men always avail-able and a reserve of over twenty thousand. These were all skilled and experienced seamen — the essential element that the French Navy lacked. On 25 July 1807, the British Admiral Lord Gambier set sail with a strong force of battleships and transport ships to Copenhagen, on the correct assumption that the Crown Prince of Denmark would refuse to surrender his navy. After several days of bombardment, partially from ships, but mainly from artillery batteries that had been established ashore, the city surrendered on 7 September. British losses were minimal, but about 250 Danish soldiers were killed, and because General Peyman who commanded the Danish defence had earlier refused to take advantage of the British offer to evacuate the city, over two thousand civilians also died. Those Danish ships that were not considered worth taking to Britain were destroyed, and the operation effectively stopped Napoleon's revised plans for invasion. From now on Napoleon relied on the Continental System to bring Britain to its knees, and there appeared to be every possibility of doing so. Bad harvests in 1808, 1809 and 181o, as well as the continuing mechanisation of both agriculture and industry in Britain, caused widespread unrest and often violent opposition. Luddites smashed factory machines; turnpike cottages were burned in anger against road tolls; and serious rioting occurred in several places. If strictly enforced, the Continental System would have succeeded, since by 1811 English factories were being forced to close down because there was no market for their products and because warehouses were already choked with unsold goods. The problem for Napoleon was that the cutting of trade between the Continent and Britain hurt the Continental countries almost as much. The Continental System was everywhere subverted or only half-heartedly applied. Corruption and smuggling were rife, and even Napoleon him-self sanctioned the relaxation or circumvention of the rules when it suited him. In France, the bourgeoisie — Napoleon's most faithful supporters — were alienated by goods being unob-tainable or else scarce and overpriced. The end result was an even greater strain on his imperial economy that had already been suffering under the burden of financing his military cam-paigns. The final straw was his invasion of Russia in 1812. Not merely a military disaster, the campaign made an implacable enemy of the Tsar. One by one the allies of France switched their allegiance to Britain and Russia, until Napoleon was forced to abdicate two years later and was finally defeated at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.
Saturday, April 11, 2015
DeMille
Mitch Leisen decorated a library with false bindings. DeMille pulled them all down onto the floor in a display worthy of Belasco, and demanded that Leisen put real books on the shelves. But authenticity went only so far. Since the film had an important courtroom scene, Joy attended some tri-als by way of research, and noted that there were few histrionics when someone was found guilty. During the scene in the film where she was to be found guilty, Joy stayed motionless, then closed her eyes and collapsed. DeMille called cut and said, "When are you going to start acting, Miss Joy?" "You don't appreciate what I gathered from my experience," said Joy, explain-ing that she was only doing what a woman she had observed at trial had done. "Well," said DeMille, "I'd like it a little bit more—portrayed is the word." Joy batted her eyes and gave a conventional representation of female grief. Manslaughter is heavy on production values and negligible in most other areas. Joy plays a willful, wild society girl, Thomas Meighan a handsome, stalwart, dull district attorney.
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In constructing the script, DeMille stayed close to the Gospels except for •ne particular. He never believed the biblical account of Judas's betrayal. "Why ould a man sell out someone for a mere 30 pieces of silver after he had seen him erform miracles?" he asked, not unreasonably. There had to be something else, omething like ... sex. What if Judas had had or wanted to have Mary Magdalene nd was frustrated by Jesus' conversion of her? That's motivation! DeMille knew this particular plot point might raise ecclesiastical eyebrows, so he had researchers scour the literature for ammunition. They found similar ideas in Mary Magdalene, a play by Maurice Maeterlinck, in a couple of obscure poems, and Judas Iscariot, a novel by Leonid Andreyev, who wrote He Who Gets Slapped. Good enough! Shortly before production began, he wrote Bruce Barton, one of the pro-duction's advisors, asking for suggestions about deletions. "It appears to me that we have 17 reels of picture . . . and I would like to get it as close to 12 reels as possible." Barton was clearly worried about the opening with Mary Magdalene: "Couldn't Mary's costume and her movements in the first scene be planned in such a way as to subordinate the sex suggestion as much as possible? Mary, if she was as successful at her trade as we show her, probably insisted on a good deal of respect from her admirers in public." More usefully, Barton suggested that .DeMille cast some of the disciples with younger actors: "This was largely a movement of young men. Jesus was only 29 or 30. . . . All the disciples were presumably under 50, and most of them probably in their thirties. Old men and middle aged men do not ordinarily go off after new teachers or ideas." The final script for The King of Kings was a Homeric 366 pages long. It was similar to most of Cecil's scripts from the mid-1920s in that it carried his hand-written notes and interpolations on nearly every page, usually specifics about per-formance rather than staging. DeMille also made a series of notes for shots, or dramatic moments that could be integrated into the movie:
The unforgettable introduction of Jesus as seen through the returning sight of a blind child was also outlined by DeMille: "Through the darkness comes great rays of light and in the light an indistinct figure of the CHRIST is seen, then the rays leave and as they do, the figure shapes itself into the face of CHRIST, looking with love and pity upon the blind girl. She SEES, falls at his feet, kissing the hem of his garment . . ." DeMille ties healing to the spiritual sight that characterizes faith; the audience sees Christ at the same time as the formerly blind girl. DeMille had a staff of twelve researchers plowing through documentation on the period, and the pressures of producing an accurate biblical production sometimes nudged people into violating biblical precepts. Head researcher Bessie McGaffey wrote DeMille on July 27, less than a month before the start of produc-tion, "According to the Catholic Encyclopedia Vol. 4 and Kitto's Encyclopedia Volume 1 the Crown of Thorns was a branch of the bush Zizyphus Spina Christi which is noted for its long thorns. Mr. Wright, the florist, obtained two branches which I am now giving to you. He obtained it from a bush growing on a vacant lot on the corner of Broadway and Sapphire Street, Redondo Beach. . . . Would suggest that we go down and steal this bush at once."
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Production of The King of Kings began on August 24, 1926, and continued until January 8, 1927, using over 3.4 million feet of film. The film was made on a six-days-a-week schedule, and shot in rough script continuity. The location for Galilee and the loaves and fishes sequence was Catalina Island, where an entire village was constructed. DeMille had the idea that the cast and crew should sleep in a little colony of cabins, combining his love of moviemaking with his love of the outdoors. After the first day of shooting, he turned to an assistant and said, "This has been the happiest day of my life." But not everybody was equally thrilled with the sleeping arrangements. One day they were shooting a scene on the Catalina shore when a luxurious yacht sailed into camera range. DeMille exploded, sending out an assistant to get rid of the yacht. The assistant reported that the yacht was for H. B. Warner; that he would be sleeping on it every night. "And with whom was this arrangement made?" DeMille inquired in that quiet, low voice that presaged real trouble. Told that the arrangement had been made directly with Warner, DeMille said, "I thought the idea was that we're all to live and eat and sleep here, to stay in the mood of this setting which we took so much time and care to create and to let this atmosphere soak into us. If I thought Mr- Warner needed a yacht, I'd have brought my own. Just who does he think he is?" "Jesus Christ, sir," piped up one very brave man. After a thoughtful moment, DeMille said, "That puts me at something of a disadvantage, doesn't it?" For the rest of the location shoot, DeMille managed to avoid looking at the arrival or departure of Warner's yacht because it spoiled his mood.
and
In constructing the script, DeMille stayed close to the Gospels except for •ne particular. He never believed the biblical account of Judas's betrayal. "Why ould a man sell out someone for a mere 30 pieces of silver after he had seen him erform miracles?" he asked, not unreasonably. There had to be something else, omething like ... sex. What if Judas had had or wanted to have Mary Magdalene nd was frustrated by Jesus' conversion of her? That's motivation! DeMille knew this particular plot point might raise ecclesiastical eyebrows, so he had researchers scour the literature for ammunition. They found similar ideas in Mary Magdalene, a play by Maurice Maeterlinck, in a couple of obscure poems, and Judas Iscariot, a novel by Leonid Andreyev, who wrote He Who Gets Slapped. Good enough! Shortly before production began, he wrote Bruce Barton, one of the pro-duction's advisors, asking for suggestions about deletions. "It appears to me that we have 17 reels of picture . . . and I would like to get it as close to 12 reels as possible." Barton was clearly worried about the opening with Mary Magdalene: "Couldn't Mary's costume and her movements in the first scene be planned in such a way as to subordinate the sex suggestion as much as possible? Mary, if she was as successful at her trade as we show her, probably insisted on a good deal of respect from her admirers in public." More usefully, Barton suggested that .DeMille cast some of the disciples with younger actors: "This was largely a movement of young men. Jesus was only 29 or 30. . . . All the disciples were presumably under 50, and most of them probably in their thirties. Old men and middle aged men do not ordinarily go off after new teachers or ideas." The final script for The King of Kings was a Homeric 366 pages long. It was similar to most of Cecil's scripts from the mid-1920s in that it carried his hand-written notes and interpolations on nearly every page, usually specifics about per-formance rather than staging. DeMille also made a series of notes for shots, or dramatic moments that could be integrated into the movie:
The unforgettable introduction of Jesus as seen through the returning sight of a blind child was also outlined by DeMille: "Through the darkness comes great rays of light and in the light an indistinct figure of the CHRIST is seen, then the rays leave and as they do, the figure shapes itself into the face of CHRIST, looking with love and pity upon the blind girl. She SEES, falls at his feet, kissing the hem of his garment . . ." DeMille ties healing to the spiritual sight that characterizes faith; the audience sees Christ at the same time as the formerly blind girl. DeMille had a staff of twelve researchers plowing through documentation on the period, and the pressures of producing an accurate biblical production sometimes nudged people into violating biblical precepts. Head researcher Bessie McGaffey wrote DeMille on July 27, less than a month before the start of produc-tion, "According to the Catholic Encyclopedia Vol. 4 and Kitto's Encyclopedia Volume 1 the Crown of Thorns was a branch of the bush Zizyphus Spina Christi which is noted for its long thorns. Mr. Wright, the florist, obtained two branches which I am now giving to you. He obtained it from a bush growing on a vacant lot on the corner of Broadway and Sapphire Street, Redondo Beach. . . . Would suggest that we go down and steal this bush at once."
and
Production of The King of Kings began on August 24, 1926, and continued until January 8, 1927, using over 3.4 million feet of film. The film was made on a six-days-a-week schedule, and shot in rough script continuity. The location for Galilee and the loaves and fishes sequence was Catalina Island, where an entire village was constructed. DeMille had the idea that the cast and crew should sleep in a little colony of cabins, combining his love of moviemaking with his love of the outdoors. After the first day of shooting, he turned to an assistant and said, "This has been the happiest day of my life." But not everybody was equally thrilled with the sleeping arrangements. One day they were shooting a scene on the Catalina shore when a luxurious yacht sailed into camera range. DeMille exploded, sending out an assistant to get rid of the yacht. The assistant reported that the yacht was for H. B. Warner; that he would be sleeping on it every night. "And with whom was this arrangement made?" DeMille inquired in that quiet, low voice that presaged real trouble. Told that the arrangement had been made directly with Warner, DeMille said, "I thought the idea was that we're all to live and eat and sleep here, to stay in the mood of this setting which we took so much time and care to create and to let this atmosphere soak into us. If I thought Mr- Warner needed a yacht, I'd have brought my own. Just who does he think he is?" "Jesus Christ, sir," piped up one very brave man. After a thoughtful moment, DeMille said, "That puts me at something of a disadvantage, doesn't it?" For the rest of the location shoot, DeMille managed to avoid looking at the arrival or departure of Warner's yacht because it spoiled his mood.
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