Henry Fonda again from McKinney

The Omaha Community Playhouse is only a year old when Fonda joins, but in its genome are decades of history, theory, aspiration. It grows out of the Progressive Era, a period of political reform and social experiment lasting from the 1890s to the 1920s. A group of Omaha benefactors joins in the Little Theatre movement—what Dorothy Chan-sky terms a concerted effort by "writers, various kinds of activists, uni-versity professors and other educators, clubwomen, settlement workers, artists, and social elites" to bolster local playhouses against the onslaught of Hollywood, whose growing popularity is transforming many stage theaters into movie houses. The Community Playhouse is founded in 1924, and its first president, Omaha architect Alan McDonald, avows its purpose: "To raise the drama from a purely amusement enterprise into an educational, cultural force." Little Theatre was a middle-class phenomenon with progressive in-tentions and a conservative agenda. "Like other reform activities in the era," Chansky writes, it "had contradictory strains; it included forward-looking activism and modernist aesthetics as well as skepticism, nativism, elitism, and nostalgia, sometimes within the same production company or publication." Certainly the movement took for granted the cultural supremacy of those who drove and financed it: "Most Little Theatre workers assumed that their middle-class, Protestant heritage was a standard by which all culture could be measured." But in the context of middle-class, suburban Omaha in the 1920s, the Community Playhouse does not do badly. Under Foley, it cops to light Broadway fare but also stages naturalism, futurism, high farce—Shaw, Wilde, Molnar, O'Neill, Capek. Audiences are kept alive to past classics and modern currents, and the ideological limitations of Little Theatre are perhaps pushed out a few inches. The contradictions noted by Chansky provide the ideal opening into acting for a young man whose exteriors and values are conventional but whose ambitions and perceptions are extraordinary.

and

There's another thing to be pointed out about Hollywood and Henry Fonda, the same thing that accounts for Ronald Reagan's entry into film: the sound of the voice. By 1935, the movies had talked for eight years, and it was accepted that voice as much as body defined the actor, that one could not become a star without distinctive tones. There is not an icon of the Hollywood 1930s whose voice is not central to his or her legend: Tracy's gruffness, Hepburn's clenched jaw, Grant's suave cadence, Cagney's bullet phrasing. Fonda and his contemporaries moved into the space left by the stars whose mystique was built solely on movement and expression, and who now found they were unable to seduce an audience with its ears wide open. David Thomson notes the paradox that the coming of sound placed an unprecedented emphasis on silence—that is, on the trade-off between a voice and the silence that might precede or follow it, or the silence sounded in the timbre of the voice itself. He writes of how "a generation of favorites slipped away because they did not have access to that emotional quietness, and the allure that attaches to any mystery or reticence in a medium that seems to be giving you all the visual evidence." Fonda has that access, that allure. It's partly the voice that leaves people at a loss for how to describe him. Here is a young man of uncom-mon reserve, so much of whom is implied in silence, lack of show. He seems smarter than Cooper, more virtuous than Gable, more melancholy than McCrea, more elusive than Tracy. Viewers who haven't seen any-thing quite like him before, who lack better words to describe it, call it "modest," "honest," "simple." But how do we describe simplicity in a way that does justice to its complexity? How do we prove the existence of the invisible, or translate a message in vanishing ink? Words like sim-ple fall short when applied to Fonda, because they are asked to describe something not at all obvious—something that is there to be felt, yet is not there to be seen.

and regarding the gruesome suicide of Frances:

Men commit actions, women commit gestures... Phyllis Chesler

and on her replacement:

Susan wants what most wives want- sustained intimacy- and Fonda has failed her as many husbands fail their wives.

and on Lee Strasberg's instruction of Jane:
He introduces her for instance to the idea of the counter-need, a secret desire contradicting each conscious motivation.

Jacobean Taste

Enter Hatfield and all the ingredients of Jacobean court mentality hit you like a wave. First, there is a certain anti-quarianism. Although the house is planned in a new way — no courtyards, a clustering of rooms into large and massy blocks, an open Italian loggia on the ground floor over which the Long Gallery runs — there is a recognisable medieval pattern in one's arrival into a screens passage, with the great hall on one side and the kitchens on the other. The great Marble Hall itself reproduces the heart of a medieval house, and the staircase beyond it leads to the richer and more private rooms of the Cecils themselves. This is a deeply traditional arrangement of a great man's house; no break here with the antiquity of England. But the place is dripping in Jacobean style, governed above all by the sheer love of stuff, the early modern lust for substance. Every element of the Marble Hall, with its screen at each end and its original tables and benches still in situ, is carved and enriched as no later taste would have contemplated. Bushy-bearded and vast-breasted hermaphrodites stare out from the hugely enriched screens. On the great staircase beyond it, every post is carved with intricate decoration, every pillar surmounted by a figure, heraldic lion or almost-classical, slightly disproportionate boy, playing the bagpipes or holding aloft not quite spherical spheres. In the seventeenth century both boys and lions were gilded, as was the huge carved pendant which hangs from the ceiling above them. Even the gates at the foot of the staircase, put there to prevent dogs from going upstairs, are pimpled and bobbled, no line left uncurled, no surface plain. In the long gallery on the floor above, to which the staircase gave access, yard after yard of decorated joinery extends in a long disappearing perspective in front of you, the ceiling patterned in interlocking arabesques, the painted fireplaces a display of the classical orders, many of the gilt and jewelled, rock crystal and pearl treasures on show collected by the Jacobean Cecils to decorate this place: it is the most beautiful surviving room of Jacobean England. Enrichment was all and that is one of the keys to Jacobean England: love of decorated stuff. In 1609 Cecil would set up England's first shopping mall on the Strand, called Britain's Burse, in tribute to his sovereign's dream of unification. The world of Britain's Burse was the world 'Cecil-Hatfield' (as its creator wanted it called) was intended to crown and was also the milieu from which the King James Bible would emerge. The country and the world were growing and bursting at the seams. The explorers of the previous century had 'so muche enlarged the boundes of the Worlde, that now we have twice and thrice so much scope for oure earthlie peregrination'. The globe had suddenly become elastic and from all the new corners came the delicious luxuries. Things had never been so rich. Goods were pouring into England: silks, lace, Venetian glass, tin-glazed cer-amics, fine thick Italian paper, German swords and armour, Turkish carpets and Venetian instruments, metal-threaded tex-tiles like the wonderful Italian silk worn by James's Queen Anne, in which the peacock eyes sparkle across its glimmered surface. They came from the other end of the earth. 'What doe you lacke?' one of Ben Jonson's sales boys asked, 'What is't you buy? Veary fine China stuffes, of all kindes and quallityes? China
140
We have twice and thrice so much scope for oure earthlie peregrination... chaynes, China braceletts, China scarfes, China fannes, China girdles, China knives, China boxes, China cabinetts.' At the grand opening of the Burse — with celebratory text by Ben Jonson — Cecil provided a special shop for the king and his wife and children over whose door was written: 'All other places give for money, here all is given for love.' Delicious and perfect presents were provided for the king and queen and princes. Throughout the little stalls of the Burse (no hammering of metals and no sale of vegetables, no dogs, no fighting and no whores allowed) all the most modern and glamorous objects of the mer-cantile world were on sale: eastern satins, golden bracelets, fans, umbrellas, sundials, silk-flowers, perspectives (precursors of the telescope), musical instruments, toy automata and singing birds were all on sale. Everything seemed to be from China or Virginia. For the true elite, England in the first decade of the seventeenth century was life on satin pillows. It was a culture of repetition, of piling richness on richness, in love with the exotic and with the exotic enriched. It wasn't enough to have a china bowl; it should be set in a gilded mount. It wasn't enough to have a wonderful dress; it should be slashed to show the more wonderful material beneath. Every surface was to be alive with decoration and illustration. Embroidery was to overlace richness. Plainness was poverty and unless courtiers looked glorious, they, or what they were seeking, could scarcely be considered. The Earl of Suffolk wrote to Sir John Harington with sage advice on coming to court: I would wish you to bee well trimmed; get a new jerkin well bordered, and not too short; the king saith, he liketh a flowing garment; be sure it not be all of one sort, but diversely coloured, the collar falling somewhat down, and your ruff well stiffened and brisky. We have lately had many gallants who failed in their suits for want of due observance of these matters. The King is nicely heedfull of such points, and dwelleth on good looks and handsome accoutrements.
This love of variegation, of the multiplicity of things, overlay something else: an appetite for the undeniably solid. The hunger for substance was Victorian in its intensity. There is no Augustan or eighteenth-century conception of fineness or slenderness. Chippendale would not have thrived in Jacobean England. What was valuable to a Jacobean was robust and huge. Tables and sideboards sprouted fat melons clamped to their legs. From the high, plain and virginal concealment of Elizabethan taste, women's necklines plunged through the first decade of the cen-tury to a deep, bosom-revealing immodesty. At court masques, the queen and her attendant ladies would appear dressed in noth-ing but the finest silk gauze. The two tastes lay within each other: a love of stuff, of the material thing, was wrapped in a baroque entrancement with the flickering, the dramatic, the elaborated and the enriched. The interplay of these two aesthetic principles, of show and, in Hamlet's famous phrase to his mother, of 'that within which passeth show', is one of the governing tensions of the great Jacobean translation of the Bible. Beauty was about firmness but it was also about brilliance; clarity vied with glitter; candour with bitter irony; simplicity with complexity; a vision of the pure with a relishing of the lush. In public the grandees who would have filled the rooms of Hatfield wore the strict and dignified blacks of the statesman (it was said to be a Spanish habit, a sober, imperial style). In private, all controls were off. The Earl of Northampton, the Henry Howard who had been Cecil's go-between with James before the accession, a complex, political self-promoter, retired from a day dressed in nothing but black to sleep in a bed of Chinese lacquer, overdecorated with silver branches and his own coat of arms on the headpiece, with 'the toppe and valance of purple velvett striped downe with silver laces and knottes of silver, the frindge blewe silke and silver with 8 cuppes and plumes spangled suteable, the 5 curtanes of purple taffeta with buttones and lace . . . of silver, the counterpoint of purple damaske suteable laced.' To wash, at night and in the morning, he had a generous silver basin, in the form of a shell, and a ewer in the shape of a mermaid. The rosewater sprang out into the bowl through the mermaid's large and protuberant nipples. At Hatfield, Cecil also had a sumptuous bed, with its tester, valance and headpiece of crimson velvet, embroidered with his arms. But that lushness and fullness of Jacobean decor, of the Jacobean sense of the beautiful, required one further element: illumination. No buildings in English history until the twentieth century had such enormous light-admitting windows as these great private prodigy houses. The rooms encrusted with the beloved substantiality were also flooded with the all-revealing light. 'Light', Thomas Fuller, the church historian, wrote, was `God's eldest daughter [and] a principal' beauty in a building'. All rooms were arranged with a thought to how the light from the windows would fall into them at different times of the day. Modern conservators, struggling to preserve the gorgeousness of fabrics in vastly overlit rooms, are grappling with precisely the combi-nation of qualities Jacobean taste required. Outside the walls of London, north of the Tower, enormous factories were set up to satisfy the demand for glass. Experts in glass were brought in from the Netherlands. And the grandees who commissioned the glass palaces had their portraits painted in the total, flattening light those windows provided. That depthlessness of Jacobean portraiture, in which there is no chiaroscuro, no moulding shadow, is often seen as a simple technical failure, the chasm between Holbein and Van Dyck. Cecil, like James, hated being painted, which is why nearly all images of him repeat the same, copied pose, in which his flat white face seems to lack definition, or even a third dimension. In portrait after portrait at Hatfield, as elsewhere, his face, with its unresponsive eyes, looks like an oval cut out of paper. But perhaps this two-dimensionality is a symptom of something else: the clarity of a pure unshadowed Protestant light.

from: God's Secretaries by Adam Nicolson

More Operation Shylock

"I was beginning to think Mr. Roth had taken a powder," he said. "And I was hoping the same about you." "Why," he asked, "would I want to do a thing like that?" "Because you're involved in a deceptive practice. Because you're breaking the law." "Which law? Israeli law, Connecticut state law, or international law?" "The law that sayS that a person's identity is his private property and can't be appropriated by somebody else." "All, so you've been studying your. Prosser." "Prosser?" "Professor Prosser's Handbook of the Law of Torts." "I haven't been studying anything. All I need to know about a case like this common sense can tell me." "Well, still, take a look at Prosser. In 1960, in the California Law Review, Prosser published a long article, a reconsideration of the original 1890 Warren and Brandeis Harvard Law Review article in which they'd borrowed Judge Cooley's phrase 'the general right to be let alone' and staked out the dimensions of the privacy interest. Prosser discusses privacy cases as having four separate branches and causes of action—one, intrusion upon seclusion; two, public disclosure of private facts; three, false light in the public eye; and four, appropriation of identity. The prima facie case is defined as follows: `One who appropriates to his own use or benefit the name or likeness of another is subject to liability to the other for invasion of his privacy.
and
 "I meant the way he's set out to change the world." "Well, he's come to the right place for that. Every year they treat dozens of tourists here who go around thinking themselves the Mes-siah and exhorting mankind to repent. It's a famous phenomenon at the mental-health center—local psychiatrists call it 'Jerusalem syn-drome.' Most of them think they're the Messiah or God, and the rest claim to be Satan. You got off easy with Philip." But nothing I said, however disdainful or outright contemptuous
of him, had any noticeable effect on the undampable conviction with which she continued extolling to me the achievements of this blatant fraud. Was it she suffering from that novel form of hysteria known as Jerusalem syndrome? The government psychiatrist who had enter-tained me with a witty exposition on the subject a few years back had told me that there are also Christians they find wandering out in the desert who believe themselves to be John the Baptist.
and
 I try to convince them that there are Jews in the world who are not in any way like these Jews we have here. But to them the Israeli Jcw is so evil they find it hard to believe. They look around and they think, What have they done? Name one single thing that Israeli society has done! And, Philip, my students are right—who are they? what have they done? The people are coarse and noisy and push you in the street. I've lived in Chicago, in New York, in Boston, I've lived in Paris, in London, and nowhere have I seen such people in the street. The arrogance! What have they created like you Jews out in the world? Absolutely nothing. Nothing but a state founded on force and the will to dominate. If you want to talk about culture, there is absolutely no comparison. Dismal painting and sculpture, no musical composition, and a very minor literature—that is what all their arrogance has produced. Compare this to American Jewish culture and it is pitiable, it is laughable. And yet they are not only arrogant about the Arab and his mentality, they are not only arrogant about the goyim and their mentality, they are arrogant about you and your mentality. These provincial nobodies look down on you. Can you imagine it? There is more Jewish spirit and Jewish laughter and Jewish intelligence on the Upper West Side of Manhattan than in this entire country—and as for Jewish con-science, as for a Jewish sense of justice, as for Jewish heart . . . there's more Jewish heart at the knish counter at Zabar's than in the whole of the Knesset!

More Broyard

At Brooklyn College, everyone had been a Communist but me. Modern painting was one more exclusion, one more mystery from which I was shut out. I used to feel this way when people talked about politics, but I didn't mind so much because I wasn't interested in politics. And besides, I secretly thought I was right. I thought that being a Communist was a penalty you had to pay for being interested in politics. It was the adolescence of politics, an awkward stage you had to pass through. But when it came to modern art, I was afraid that maybe the others were right, that I would never be hip or sophisticated, would never belong. I'd never know that smug sense of being of my time, being contemporary. Perhaps this sounds like a fuss over nothing, but when you're young, everything matters, everything is serious. And besides, I was living with a modern painter, I slept with modern painting. The life we led depended on modern art. Without that, all we had was a dirty apartment. There were all sorts of stories about Schapiro. It was rumored that the first time he went to Paris he never sat in a cafe or walked beside the Seine, but spent all his time in museums and libraries. It probably wasn't true, but it fitted him, this story. Reading had turned him into a saint or angel of scholarship, but in some ways I suspected that he was a martyr too, a Saint Se-bastian shot through with arrows of abstraction. A rival critic said that Schapiro loved not paintings but the ex-planations they made possible, and that he valued a painting in proportion to the ingenuity you needed to appreciate it.
Schapiro was about forty at the time. He was a slen-der, medium-sized man with a classically handsome Se-mitic face, bony and ascetic, but lit up like a saint's or a martyr's. He wore, as far as I can remember, the same suit all the time, a single-breasted gray herringbone, and he had two neckties. Like many educated New York City Jews of his generation, Schapiro dentalized his consonants—or per-haps he had a slight lisp that he tried to overcome—and this gave his speech a sibilance, as if he was whispering, or hissing, secrets. The impression of secrecy was in-creased by the fact that he didn't seem to be talking to us, but to the paintings themselves, like a man praising a woman's beauty to her. Sometimes he was so brilliant that he seemed almost insane to me; he seemed to see more than there actually was—he heard voices. His knowledge was so impres-sive as to appear occult. Because he chanted his lectures, he was like a medieval cantor or Gregorian monk. We were so awed by him that when he said some-thing witty, we were afraid to laugh. It was like the German translators taking the puns out of Shakespeare on the assumption that he had not written them, that they had been added by hacks. I wonder now whether Schapiro ever noticed how tense we were, how pious. Did he realize that students were dropping out all the time, to be replaced by other students? They didn't drop out because he was disappointing —in fact, it might have been better if he had disap-pointed us now and then. What drove even his admirers away was a certain remorselessness in his brilliance. It made some of us anxious to think that everything meant something; there was no escape. It was like a fate. Perhaps the things he said have now become commonplaces of art criticism, but at the time they were revelations to me. And of course he talked about paint-ers like van Gogh, Cezanne, and Picasso, who are old masters today. Then, only forty years ago, they were revolutionaries; we still believed in revolutions. I remember Schapiro telling us that before Cezanne, there had always been a place in landscape painting where the viewer could walk into the picture. There was an entrance; you could go there, like walking into a park. But this was not true of Cezanne's landscapes, which were cut off absolutely, abstracted from their context. You could not walk into them—you could enter them only through art, by leaping. Schapiro said that when van Gogh loaded his palette with pigment he couldn't afford, he was praying in color. He put his anxiety into pigment, slapped color into its cheeks. Color was salvation. It had to be thick, and tangible. One night I smuggled Sheri into the class. It was easy because of all the turnover and the flurry of enthu-siasm. The room sloped like a theater and we sat up in the back. Schapiro was going to talk about Picasso, and the place was jammed, with people crouching on the steps in the aisle. Picasso was a perfect subject because there was so much to explain. Schapiro spoke rapidly, rhythmically, hardly paus-ing for breath. When he said that with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon Picasso had fractured the picture plane, I could hear it crack, like a chiropractor cracking the bones at the base of your neck. As he went on, Scha-piro's sentences became staccato, cubistic, full of over-lapping planes. I was so excited that I took Sheri's hand in mine. I felt myself gaining confidence. It was such a relief to me to know that art could be explained. If I couldn't love art for itself, I could love it, like Schapiro, for the explanations. It was better than never to have loved at all.
He was discussing an early still life of Picasso's, an upended table covered with a white cloth, a bowl of flowers, and a bottle of wine, all paradoxically sus-pended in space. What we were seeing, Schapiro said, was the conversion of the horizontal plane—the plane of our ordinary daily traversal of life—into an intimate vertical surface of random manipulation. His voice rose to a cry. He honked like a wild goose. There was delirium in the room. The beam of the pro-jector was a searchlight on the world. The students shifted in their seats and moaned. Schapiro danced to the screen and flung up his arm in a Romanesque ges-ture. As he spoke, the elements of the picture reassem-bled themselves into an intelligible scheme. A thrill of gladness ran through me and my hand sweated in Sheri's.

The death of Proust

according to Ford Madox Ford:
I thought Evans had been killed the day after we had got back to the line—but he obviously hadn't. He had been farming in Canada after a very bad wound. He had had a hard time and that, as much as the war, had made him prematurely bald. Bald men are usually fat but he was thin as it was possible to be, and small, with ecclesiastical features and a rather mournful manner. He was not really mournful for he had done well in Alberta and had come to Paris to have some fun and to buy agricultural machinery. He went on talking and talking in his mournful voice—about putting in rail posts, I think, with the frost at 3o below zero. . . . He fortunately didn't want to do anything but talk and my panic grew and grew. . . . I sat there, watching the crowds of students that go ceaselessly by after the classes of the Sorbonne are over. I sat thinking and thinking till long after Evans had gone—trying to pluck up courage. It would not come.
At last I went to a cocktail party, given by a French writer with an American wife. That party was like death. People sat about with panic-stricken faces, silent. You would have thought that everyone there had lost all his relations and all their fortunes and a war. . . . Proust was dead. He had died that afternoon. My taxi-driver had said to me as I paid him: "Faith qu'il est mort! C'etait bien inattendu!" I had thought he had been speaking of Clemenceau who was sick at the time. Paris was a stricken city. In every house, in every cafe, on all the sidewalks people said continually: "It seems that he is dead. It was very unexpected." They knew that Proust had complained of his health for many years. The whole city knew that. He had adopted fan-tastic modes of life on account of his health. . . . But that had been taken to be merely hypochondria ex-pressed in the terms of a great, exotic novelist. . . . Now—it seemed that he was dead and Paris was a stricken city. I had seen something like it in London—when Marie Lloyd died. London traffic stopped for half a minute whilst the paper boys ran down the streets shouting: "Ma-rie dies! Ma-rie's dead!" But Paris was hushed for three days—and not for a music hall singer. . . . At that time if you said to a waiter: "Where's the funeral?" he told you or if, being in deep black you hailed a taxi, the man, without orders, drove you straight to where Proust lay in state. . . . At the same time Paris was preparing the paroxysm of hatred that attended the
hideously stage-managed last hours of Anatole France. . . . On the boulevards they hissed: "Ten thousand men of letters are starving whilst they walk the pave-ments of the city yet that irreverend dotard who be-trayed France has spent upon his prolonged death-rattle a fortune drawn from the pockets of a world that hates France!" . . . For indeed the fortunes spent on cabling the old man's last babblings to innumerable papers of a gaping world came from German and Anglo-Saxon coffers. Paris would have let him drift out of life quietly enough but for that. Proust represented France of that day with a singular intimacy that is not easy for the poor world-at-large to understand. He was the culmination of a school of writers that had been long in coming and, still more, he was the Unknown Soldier of the literature of that decade. Literature enters with an unparalleled intimacy into French life and the country had a sense of the subterranean and ignored strivings of that steadfast per-sonality—as if indeed he had been the personification of the obscure beings who, working subterraneously with small spades in hidden tunnels, had saved France for the world. I shared the feeling to the full. The death of Proust came to me like the dull blow of a softened club. That statement, I am aware, will read like hypocrisy when I go on to say that I had not read a word he had written. But it is not hypocrisy. I had not read him for a very definite professional reason but I had heard with avidity all that was to be heard of him. Thus for a long time I had had an extremely vivid sense of his personality and of his activities. .. . And indeed it added to the blow that I was to have met Proust himself on the very eve-ning of his death. Nevertheless it was his death that made it certain that I should again take up a serious pen. I think those that know my record will acquit me of the implication that might be read into that statement. I had no idea of occupying Proust's place and even at that date I still dreaded the weaknesses in myself that I knew I should find if I now made my prolonged effort. I was still tired and I have always been lazy. I think I am incapable of any thoughts of rivalry. There is certain literary work to be done. As long as it is done I don't care who does it. The work that at that time—and now—I wanted to see done was some-thing on an immense scale, a little cloudy in immediate attack but with the salient points and the final impres-sion extraordinarily clear. I wanted the Novelist in fact to appear in his really proud position as historian of his own time. Proust being dead I could see no one who was doing that. . . . I was at the time merely passing through darkly tumultuous and crowded Paris.
and also

 Here at the gate of the Cote d'Azur it does not get really warm till April is over and perhaps one should not come here till May. . . . But the greater truth is that one should not come here at all. One should live here all the year round and go away from the end of January till March. In the North, poor devils, they have to know how to heat houses. Here they build their houses against heat and it can be cold on occasion to people softened by living here. Once every ten years or so they even have frost and, in the winter when I was in hospital at Cap Martin, as I have said, the snow even lay and the cold cut down all the olive and lemon trees so that they have only this year begun to bear again. It completely killed the immense mimosa whose limbs, ered with roses and ivy, still tower over the tiny idon. But for the greater part of the year you can, here—and I am doing it today at noon on the feast of St. Servais—sit without clothes in the shade and be un-aware of your corporal existence. The air will be exactly flesh-heat so that you are at one with the universe. That is why I have said that all the calamities of our poor civilisation come from humanity's having left these shores. If you are conscious of either heat or cold you cannot think justly and it is the final carrying out of the curse of Adam that men should have to work at the pit-face or in an atmosphere of crude mineral oil in order to keep humanity overwarmed in regions that are not fitted to support human life. Outside a radius of a hundred miles from these shores —to North or South—barbarism is always creeping in with the North or South winds. Here those deities are the great Mistral and the horripilant Sirocco! Down in the town at the foot of my hill it can be hot enough. It can be so hot that you can hardly drag your feet along the blistered pavements, the very shade of the plane trees is an offense and the Negro troops in their scarlet fezzes stagger beneath their rifles, rivers of sweat coursing down their faces. You would say it was Africa—and indeed it is Africa for the dreaded Sirocco is the fetid breath of the Sahara. It is in short Africa come to take a look at us and to make us under-stand that, pink as we may be, it is but a few degrees of temperature and barometer that separate us from the most abhorred anthropophages of the central Congo.

and additionally...

With regard to methods of writing. . . . For myself I dislike writing with a pen. My writer's cramp has never completely left me and every word I write is accompanied by a little pain. Towards the end of my morning's work it will be a very severe pain running from the knuckle of my third finger to my elbow. But for me, it is worth while. . . . After the volume I began at St. Jean Cap Ferrat the cramp became so severe that I could not hold a pen at all. I took to writing with a machine and then, worst of all, to dictating! I am not to that extent machino-phobe—or even a hater of stenographers—that I consider the one or the other below my dignity. It is that the one—and still more the other! — make me become too fluid. It is as if they waited for me to write and write I do. Whereas if I have to go to a table and face pretty considerable pain I wait until I have something worth saying to say and say it in th fewest possible words. The very ease and speed of a typewriter makes tautology thus likely. And, in myself, there is something worse. On a machine corrections whilst you are writing are relatively difficult to make. You must rub out words and replace them and your rubber is somewhere else. . . Then, too, I detest a typewritten page showing any corrections. Horrible as it may seem, if I happen to type an entirely wrong word,—say "almanach" when I mean "autograph" I will go through the most excruciat-ing mental gymnastics sooner than erase the word and make the correction. I am quite capable, I mean, of writing, when I want to say: "He asked me for an autograph"—"he asked me for an almanach on which, with a red stone, he might mark the happy date of his re-ceiving a specimen of my handwriting." . . . I do not say that I do this very often. But I do do it. The patient and faithful secretary is even more fatal. With his or her services you become a perfect fountain of words. It is so easy to try on any effect that you try them on galore, hoping that, if they do not come off, you will have the strength of mind to correct or eliminate offending passages. But often you do not find the strength of mind to correct or eliminate. Then you will have a terrible page or two of longueurs. Or if you do correct, the passage will lose all spontaneity. . . . Elimination is always good. . . . Conrad and I used, in humorous moments, to shut our eyes—and, at random, scratch out passage after passage of our work in hand.—The result was always improvement. It was the Beau Christ d'Amiens who gave the casting vote for verse as against prose. Because there are fewer words to the page! Then too there is the personal element. The creature of doom rings your bell at ten. If you are in a base mood you say: "I pay this creature to write for me. . . . Quick then, let me give him or her something to do.  .. In better moments the mere aspect—the reproach-ful air—of that amanuensis makes you plunge into work. . . . I have even had secretaries who sighed when I did not keep them busy! And, worst of all, there is the almost irresistible temp-tation to write at the secretary—that, I am convinced, was responsible for the decadence of Henry James's prose in its latest and most faisande developments. . . . You have the silent back or the emotionless face of the doomful creature presented to you. You dictate for a little while and nothing happens. And nothing and nothing. It gets to be like being in the presence of a marble block. At last you say: "Damn it all I will make that creature smile. Or have a tear in its eye!" Then you are lost. . . . When I was dictating the most tragic portion of my most tragic book to an American poetess she fainted several times. One morning she fainted three times. So I had to call in her husband to finish the last pages of the book. He did not faint. But he has never forgiven me. Having since become an eminent English literary critic he attacks me with a hatred and acridity that surpass all those of my worst detractors—with or without occasion. I don't wonder. I should hate anyone whose secretary I was forced to become. I should think I could write so much better than that fellow. . . . So one day—it was on board the Berengarict—I was correcting the typescript of a book I had finished some months before. It was a horrible experience. Partly I had typed the book; partly I had dictated it to a sec-retary who wrote longhand, partly to another who used a machine, and partly to a third who was a re-markable stenographer. At the time of my final correc-tion the book was about six months old. It is six months after finishing a book that it becomes most like stale fish to you. In ten years' time you may be wondering how it was you used to be able to write so well!

Kafka Was The Rage

by Anatole Broyard.

If we stayed home nights I would sit with a book in my lap and watch her paint. But if she glanced around and saw me reading, she would put down her brush and come over and turn all her art on me. She distrusted books. I never saw her read one. I think she believed I might find something in them that would give me an advantage over her, or that I might use against her. I felt the same way about her painting. She was an abstract painter and I couldn't follow her there. She left me outside, like a dog that you tie to a parking meter when you go into a store. I had never been comfortable with abstract painting. I had no talent for abstraction, didn't see the need for it, or the beauty of it. Like liberal politics, it eliminated so many things I liked. Yet if I could understand her paintings, I thought, our sex would be better. We would exist in the same picture plane, pose for each other's portraits, mingle our forms and colors, make compositions. We would be like two people walking through a gallery or museum, exclaiming over the same things. I began to read up on abstract painting. In the li-brary in the Museum of Modern Art, I rummaged through the shelves, studying for my new life. I had come to think that modern art was an initiation into that life, like the hazing before you get into a fraternity. When I was at Brooklyn College, everyone urged me to join the Communist party, but I refused because I thought it was an uninteresting quarrel with the real. Modern art, though, was a quarrel that appealed to me more. Even if I never got to like it, I enjoyed the terms of the argument. I was impressed by the restless dissatis-faction, the aggressiveness, ingenuity, and pretension of all the theories.
I discovered that you could always find your own life reflected in art, even if it was distorted or discolored. There was a sentence, for example, in a book on Surre-alism that stuck in my mind: "Beauty is the chance meeting, on an operating table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella."

and

We admired the German professors. We had won the fight against fascism and now, with their help, we would defeat all the dark forces in the culture and the psyche. As a reaction to our victory, sensitive Ameri-cans had entered an apologetic phase in our national life and there was nothing the professors could say that was too much. We came out of class with dueling scars. I took a course in the'psychology of American cul-ture, given by Erich Fromm. Though he had just ar-rived, he knew America better than we did, because it impinged on him. His Escape from Freedom, which had recently been published, was one of those paeans of lyrical pessimism that Germans specialize in, like Scho-penhauer, Nietzsche, or Spengler. Sitting on a platform behind a desk, like a judge in criminal court, he passed his remorseless judgment on us. We were unwilling, he said, to accept the anguish of freedom. According to him, we feared freedom, saw it as madness, epistemol-ogy run amok. In the name of freedom, we accepted everything he said. We accepted it because we liked the sound of it—no one knew then that we would turn out to be right in trying to escape from freedom. Fromm was short and plump. His jaws were broader than his forehead and he reminded me of a brooding hen. Yet, like everyone else, I sat spellbound through his lectures. I'll never forget the night he de-scribed a typical American family going for a pointless drive on a Sunday afternoon, joylessly eating ice cream at a roadhouse on the highway and then driving heavily home. Fromm was one of the first—perhaps the very first--to come out against pointlessness. It was a his-toric moment, like Einstein discovering relativity or Heidegger coming up against nothingness.

I also studied Gestalt psychology with Rudolf Arn-heim, but here I confess I was disappointed. It seemed to me that Germans were sometimes stunned into a kind of stupor by an ordinary insight, which they would then try to elevate into a philosophy or a system. Colliding with a modest fact in the midst of their abstraction, they just couldn't get over it. The Gestalt psychologists had discovered that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts—something everybody already knew—and Arnheim spent most of the semester demonstrating this. I kept waiting for him to go on, but he just gave us more experiments, more evidence. It all depended on rats. We never talked about people—only rats. In the advanced courses, it was apes. Max Wertheimer, the father of Gestalt psychology, made a guest appearance in the class. He was a small man, dressed in a frock coat, and he wore his hair en brosse. The high point of his lecture was a demonstration of requiredness, a key term in Gestalt thinking. It meant, if I understood him, that each thing implied other things, or a context, something like a counter-point of structures. He showed us what he meant with a little experiment of his own. First he taught us a com-plicated African hand clap, and then when he had us clapping away, he himself set up a weird howling accompaniment. I attended a special lecture in the auditorium, given by Karen Homey, on the psychology of women. Like Fromm, Horney was a Freudian revisionist. In one of her books, she had said that, in a sense, the neurotic was healthier than the so-called normal person, because he "protested." Protesting was like testifying. Since every-one at the New School proudly considered him- or her-self neurotic, it wasn't respectable not to be- it was just what we wanted to hear.

and

I had two gangs unloading the forward hatches of a ship and I was leaning on the rail, under the yellowish overhead spots. It was about three o'clock in the morning and I felt a million miles from home, from anywhere. For something to do, I was thinking about books, trying to see if I could quote passages or whole poems the way some people can. Mostly it was only single lines I remembered, per-haps because I was tired. Wallace Stevens was my favor-ite poet and I murmured a few scraps from his books to myself: "Too many waltzes have ended." "Apostrophes are forbidden on the funicular." "The windy sky cries out a literate despair." "These days of disinheritance we feast on human heads." It was reassuring to think, in the middle of the night in this foreign place, that there were people in the world who would take the trouble to write things like that. This was another, wonderful kind of craziness, at the opposite end from the craziness of the army. We were unloading boxes of condensed milk and as I watched a pallet swing over the rail, I thought that when I got home I would open a bookshop in the Vil-lage. It would be a secondhand bookshop, specializing in twentieth-century literature'. I remember that the idea made me feel warm. I took my hands out of my pockets and squeezed them together. To open a bookshop is one of the persistent romances, like living off the land or sailing around the world. After a couple of months of looking, I bought out an old Italian junk dealer on Cornelia Street. I paid him three hundred dollars and agreed to move his stock to a new location. I hired a truck and we carried out old boilers, radiators, bathtubs, sinks, pipes of all sizes, and miscellaneous bits and pieces of metal. Nineteen forty-six was a good time for a second-hand bookshop, because everything was out of print and the paperback revolution had not yet arrived. People had missed books during the war, and there was a sense of reunion, like meeting old friends or lovers. Now there was time for everything, and buying books became a popular postwar thing to do. For young people who had just left home to go live in the Village, books were like dolls or teddy bears or family portraits. They populated a room. When I left Brooklyn to live in the Village, I felt as if I had acquired a new set of relatives, like a surprising number of uncles I had never met before, men who lived in odd places, sometimes abroad, who had shunned family life and been shunned in turn, who were somewhere between black sheep and prodigal sons of a paradoxical kind. An aura of scandal, or at least of ambiguity, hovered over these uncles, as if they had run away with someone's wife or daughter. There was a flaw in their past, some kind of unhealthiness, even a hint of insanity. These uncles were, of course, my favorite authors, the writers I most admired. I felt them waiting, almost calling out to me. They were more real than anything I had ever known, real as only imagined things can be, real as dreams that seem so unbearably actual because they are cleansed of all irrelevances. These uncles, these books, moved into the vacuum of my imagination. They were all the family I had now, all the family I wanted. With them, I could trade in my embarrassingly ordinary history for a choice of fictions. I could lead a hypothetical life, unencumbered by memory, loyalties, or resentments. The first impulse of adolescence is to wish to be an orphan or an amnesiac. Nobody in the Village had a family. We were all sprung from our own brows, spontaneously generated the way flies were once thought to have originated. I didn't yet see the tragedy of my family: I still thought of them as a farce, my laughable past. In my new incarnation, in books I could be halfway heroic, almost tragic. I could be happy, for the first time, in my tragedy.
I realize that people still read books now and some peo-ple actually love them, but in 1946 in the Village our feelings about books—I'm talking about my friends and myself—went beyond love. It was as if we didn't know where we ended and books began.
...
Seeing how young I was everybody gave me advice. Get Nathaniel West, Celine, Italo Svevo, Baron Corvo, Djuna Barnes- but avove all, at any cost I must get Kafka. Kafka was as popular in the vIllage at the that time as Dickens had been in London. But his books were very difficult to find- they must have been printed in very small editions- and people would rush in wild-eyed, almost foaming at the mouth, willing to pay anything for Kafka.
Literary criticism was enjoying a vogue. As Randall Jarrell said some people consulted their favorite critic about the conduct of their lives as they had once contacted their clergymen. The war had left a bitter taste and literary criticism is the art of bitter tastes.

Henry Fonda

You find Henry Fonda in every corner of the mythic history and imaginative geography mapped by the movies. Like any star of such duration, he puts his name to many bad movies along the way; the career in total recalls John Berryman's remark about the collected works of Stephen Crane: "majesty and trash scrambled together." But in the fullness of time, he creates an image of the national man that is kaleidoscopic, frightening, and wildly improbable. His best performances—You Only Live Once, Young Mr. Lincoln, The Grapes of Wrath, The Ox-Bow Incident, My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, The Wrong Man, Fail-Safe, Once Upon a Time in the West, even The Lady Eve—are animated by the dark energy of contradiction. Viewers sense a man living in public and private dimensions at once, and recognize a continuity of mysteries in the actor. Fonda becomes the body and voice of the satisfied man's paranoia, the good man's bad urge, the hero's despairing shade, and the patriot's doubting conscience. In him and through him, the hidden becomes visible, specters are raised, and shadows begin to move on their own.
"I suppose one human being never really knows much about another." Asked in 1966 to characterize Fonda, his friend of almost three decades, John Steinbeck offered this shrugging axiom. But read on: "My impressions of Hank are of a man reaching but unreachable, gentle but capable of sudden wild and dangerous violence, sharply critical of others but equally self-critical, caged and fighting the bars but timid of the light, viciously opposed to external restraint, imposing an iron slavery on himself. His face is a picture of opposites in conflict."
and
the enormous spaces and silences of the heartland offered hints of the unseen. People out there had a different way of seeing—both more practical and more mystical. Middle Western practicality was founded in the uncertainties of soil, weather, money, movement. But mysticism—as is often the case in unsettled cultures—was practicality's hopeful ghost: Faith in the un-seen meant life might not be reducible to the dirt in one's hand. Legends of the Pawnee, Otoe, Sioux, and the decimated Ponca Nation were still on the plains around Omaha, while white mysticism went back to the pioneer trails and something called "seeing the ele-phant." Diaries, letters, and other reports of the day include references to this apparition, a Great Plains Moby-Dick invented by folk talk and Journalese. "To have seen the elephant," explains an 1889 dictionary of slang is to have had a full experience of life or of a certain subject or object... the popular symbol of the Great Adventure, all the wonder and glory and shivering thrill of the plunge into the ocean of prairie and plains... this creature seldom appeared except on the fringes of danger and then it was only a fleeting glimpse.

Confessions of Felix Krull

I shall never forget the disgusting sight that met my boyish eyes. Muller-Rose was seated at a grubby dressing-table in front of a dusty, speckled mirror. He had nothing on but a pair of gray cotton drawers, and a man in shirt sleeves was massaging his back, the sweat running down his own face. Meanwhile the actor was busy wiping face and neck with a towel already stiff with rouge and greasepaint. Half of his countenance still had the rosy coating that had made him radiant on the stage but now looked merely pink and silly in contrast to the cheese-like pallor of his natural complexion. He had taken off the chestnut wig and I saw that his own hair was red. One of his eyes still had deep black shadows beneath it and metallic dust clung to the lashes; the other was inflamed and watery and squinted at us impudently. All this I might have borne. But not the pustules with which Muller-Rose's back, chest, shoul-ders, and upper arms were thickly covered. They were horri-ble pustules, red-rimmed, suppurating, some of them even bleeding; even today I cannot repress a shudder at the thought of them. Our capacity for disgust, let me observe, is in pro-portion to our desires; that is, in proportion to the intensity of our attachment to the things of this world. A cool indifferent nature would never have been shaken by disgust to the extent that I was then. As a final touch, the air in the room, which was overheated by an iron stove, was compounded of the smell of sweat and the exhalations from the pots and jars and sticks of greasepaint that littered the table, so that at first I thought I could not stand it for more than a minute without being sick. However, I did stand it and looked about—but I can add nothing to this description of Muller-Rose's dressing-room. Indeed, I should perhaps be ashamed at reporting so little and at such length about my first visit to a theatre, if I were not writing primarily for my own amusement and only second-arily for the public. It is not my intention to maintain dramatic suspense; I leave such effects to the writers of imaginative fictions, who are intent on giving their stories the beautiful and symmetrical proportions of works of art—whereas my material comes from my own experience alone and I feel I may make what use of it I think best. Thus I shall dwell on those experiences and encounters that brought me particular understanding and illumination about the world and myself, passing by more quickly what is less precious to me.

My first Roth

Israel was the hospital in which Jews could begin to recover from the devastation of that horror, from a dehumanization so terrible that it would not have been at all surprising had the Jewish spirit, had the Jews them-selves, succumbed entirely to that legacy of rage, humiliation and grief. But that is not what happened. Our recovery actually came to pass. In less than a century. Miraculous, more than miraculous—yet the recovery of the Jews is by now a fact, and the time has come to return to our real life and our real home, to our ancestral Jewish Europe." "Real home?" I replied, unable now to imagine how I ever could have considered not placing this call. "Some real home." "I am not making promiscuous conversation," he snapped back at me sharply. "The great mass of Jews have been in Europe since the Middle Ages. Virtually everything we identify culturally as Jewish has its origins in the life we led for centuries among European Christians. The Jews of Islam have their own, very different destiny. I am not proposing that Israeli Jews whose origins are in Islamic countries return to Europe, since for them this would constitute not a home-coming but a radical uprooting." "What do you do then with them? Ship them back for the Arabs to treat as befits their status as Jews?" "No. For those Jews, Israel must continue to be their country. Once the European Jews and their families have been resettled and the population has been halved, then the state can be reduced to its 1948 borders, the army can be demobilized, and those Jews who have lived in an Islamic cultural matrix for centuries can continue to do so, independently, autonomously, but in peace and harmony with their Arab neighbors. For these people to remain in this region is simply as it should be, their rightful habitat, while for the European Jews, Israel has been an exile and no more, a sojourn, a temporary interlude in the European saga that it is time to resume." "Sir, what makes you think that the Jews would have any more success in Europe in the future than they had there in the past?" "Do not confuse our long European history with the twelve years of Hitler's reign. If Hitler had not existed, if his twelve years of terror were erased from our past, then it would seem to you no more
unthinkable that Jews should also be Europeans than that they should also be Americans. There might even seem to you a much more necessary and profound connection between the Jew and Budapest, the Jew and Prague, than the one between the Jew and Cincinnati and the Jew and Dallas." Could it be, I asked myself while he pedantically continued on in this vein, that the history he's most intent on erasing happens to be his own? Is he mentally so damaged that he truly believes that my history is his; is he some psychotic, some amnesiac, who isn't pre-tending at all? If every word he speaks he means, if the only person pretending here is me. .. . But whether that made things better or worse I couldn't begin to know. Nor, when next I found myself arguing could I determine whether an outburst of sincerity from me made this conversation any more or less absurd, either. "But Hitler did exist," I heard Pierre Roget emotionally informing him. "Those twelve years cannot be expunged from history any more than they can be obliterated from memory, however mercifully for-getful one might prefer to be. The meaning of the destruction of European Jewry cannot be measured or interpreted by the brevity with which it was attained." "The meanings of the Holocaust," he replied gravely, "are for us to determine, but one thing is sure—its meaning will be no less tragic than it is now if there is a second Holocaust and the offspring of the European Jews who evacuated Europe for a seemingly safer haven should meet collective annihilation in the Middle East. A second Holocaust is not going to occur on the continent of Europe, because it was the site of the first. But a second Holocaust could happen here all too easily, and, if the conflict between Arab and Jew escalates much longer, it will—it must. The destruction of Israel in a nuclear exchange is a possibility much less farfetched today than was the Holocaust itself fifty years ago." "The resettlement in Europe of more than a million Jews. The demobilization of the Israeli army. A return to the borders of 1948. It sounds to me," I said, "that you are proposing the final solution of the Jewish problem for Yasir Arafat." "No. Arafat's final solution is the same as Hitler's: extermination. I am proposing the alternative to extermination, a solution not to Ara-fat's Jewish problem but to ours, one comparable in scope and mag-nitude to the defunct solution called Zionism. But I do not wish to be misunderstood, in France or anywhere else in the world. I repeat: In the immediate postwar era, when for obvious reasons Europe was uninhabitable by Jews, Zionism was the single greatest force contrib-uting to the recovery of Jewish hope and morale. But having suc-ceeded in restoring the Jews to health, Zionism has tragically mined its own health and must now accede to vigorous Diasporism." "Will you define Diasporism for my readers, please?" I asked, mean-while thinking, The starchy rhetoric, the professorial presentation, the historical perspective, the passionate commitment, the grave un-dertones . . . What sort of hoax is this hoax? "Diasporism seeks to promote the dispersion of the Jews in the West, particularly the resettlement of Israeli Jews of European back-ground in the European countries where there were sizable Jewish populations before World War II. Diasporism plans to rebuild every-thing not in an alien and menacing Middle East but in those very lands where everything once flourished, while, at the same time, it seeks to avert the catastrophe of a second Holocaust brought about by the exhaustion of Zionism as a political and ideological force. Zionism undertook to restore Jewish life and the Hebrew language to a place where neither had existed with any real vitality for nearly two millennia. Diasporism's dream is more modest: a mere half-century is all that separates us from what Hitler destroyed. If Jewish resources could realize the seemingly fantastic goals of Zionism in even less than fifty years, now that Zionism is counterproductive and itself the foremost Jewish problem, I have no doubt that the resources of world Jewry can realize the goals of Diasporism in half, if not even one tenth, the time." "You speak about resettling Jews in Poland, Romania, Germany? In Slovakia, the Ukraine, Yugoslavia, the Baltic states? And you realize, do you," I asked him, "how much hatred for Jews still exists in most of these countries?" "Whatever hatred for Jews may be present in Europe—and I don't
minimize its persistence—there are ranged against this residual anti-Semitism powerful currents of enlightenment and morality that are sustained by the memory of the Holocaust, a horror that operates now as a bulwark against European anti-Semitism, however virulent. No such bulwark exists in Islam. Exterminating a Jewish nation would ause Islam to lose not a single night's sleep, except for the great night of celebration. I think you would agree that a Jew is safer today walking aimlessly around Berlin than going unarmed into the streets of Ramallah." "What about the Jew walking around Tel Aviv?" "In Damascus missiles armed with chemical warheads are aimed not at downtown Warsaw but directly at Dizengoff Street." "So what Diasporism comes down to is fearful Jews in flight, terri-fied Jews once again running away." "To flee an imminent cataclysm is 'running away' only from extinc-ion. It is running toward life. Had thousands more of Germany's earful Jews fled in the 1930s—" "Thousands more would have fled," I said, "if there had been some-where for them to flee to. You may recall that they were no more welcome elsewhere than they would be now if they were to turn up n masse at the Warsaw train station in flight from an Arab attack."

from The Age of Wonder: Vitalism

The natural tendency of most English doctors and surgeons was to avoid too much theory and speculation. This evidently did not apply to Lawrence, or to his intellectual masters on the Continent. The great French naturalist Georges Cuvier approached all animal life as part of a continuous 'successive' development. The celebrated Parisian doctor Professor Xavier Bichat developed a fully materialist theory of the human body and mind in his lectures Physiological Researches on Life and Death, translated into English in 1816. Bichat defined life bleakly as 'the sum of the functions by which death is resisted: Even more radical were the 'Machine-Man' theories of the French physiologist Julien de la Mettrie. He argued that the theologian, with his `obscure studies, could say nothing intelligible about the soul, and that only physicians and surgeons were in a position to study the evidence. `They alone, calmly contemplating our soul, have caught it a thousand times unawares, in its misery and its grandeur, without either despising it in one state or admiring it in the other.' 16 William Lawrence was only waiting the opportunity to bring such radical ideas to bear. As part of his new professorship he was required to give the series of public lectures at the Royal College, starting in spring 1816. These immediately followed on the series given by Abernethy. It was the custom that one Hunterian Lecturer would preface his remarks with an appropriate salute to the endeavours of the previous incumbent. But on entering the lecture hall, after a few elegant throwaway compli-ments, Lawrence began roundly to attack Abernethy's theories. He stated bluntly that there was absolutely no such thing as a mysterious Life Principle, and that the human body is merely a complex physical organisation. In a phrase that became notorious, he claimed that the development of this physiological organisation could be observed unbroken, `from an oyster to a man'. Lawrence's references to Abernethy became steadily more aggressive and sardonic. 'To make the matter more intelligible, this vital principle is corn-pared to magnetism, to electricity, and to galvanism; or it is roundly stated to be oxygen. 'Tis like a camel, or like a whale, or like what you please ... This last was a contemptuous, and deliberately literary, allusion to Shakespeare's Hamlet mocking the foolish old Polonius. Other smart literary quotations came from the poems of Alexander Pope and John Milton. Lawrence eventually went on to broaden his attack. Science, he argued, had an autonomus right to express its views fearlessly and objectively, without interference from Church or state. It must avoid 'clouds of fears and hopes, desires and aversions'. It must 'discern objects clearly' and shun 'intellectual mist. It must dispel myth and dissipate 'absurd fables'. The world of scientific research was wholly independent. 'The theological doctrine of the soul, and its separate existence, has nothing to do with this physiological question ... An immaterial and spiritual being could not have been discovered amid the blood and filth of the dissecting room:  Finally he attacked the very nature of the religious, mystifying or unscientific philosophy which Abernethy appeared to be promulgating: 'It seems to me that this hypothesis or fiction of a subtle invisible matter, animating the visible textures of animal bodies, and directing their motions, is only an example of that propensity in the human mind, which had led men at all times to account for those phenomena, of which the causes are not obvious, by the mysterious aid of higher and imaginary beings: 214 As the controversy became more public, Lawrence was accused of personal betrayal, ingratitude and atheism. Between 1817 and 1819 he and Abernethy continued to exchange increasingly vitriolic views in their Royal College lectures, and student groups of supporters formed round each. Abernethy was the senior figure, but Lawrence would not back down, and published his lectures in a book that became notorious, his Natural History of Man (1819). It became clear that this was no ordinary academic wrangle, but that the subject in contention was the fundamental nature of human life. The larger implications were clearly social, political and even theological. There was also a strong overtone of imperial controversy: foreign versus British science. Thus Vitalism was the first great scientific issue that widely seized the public imagination in Britain, a premonition of the debate over Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, exactly forty years later.

Brunelleschi's Dome

 Yet in the early 1400s the Eternal City must have been, in most respects, a wretchedly uninspiring sight, a parent that the Florentines may well have wished to disown. A million people had dwelled in Rome during the height of the Empire, but now the city's population was less than that of Florence. The Black Death of 1348 had reduced numbers to 20,000, from which, over the next fifty years, they rose only slightly. Rome had shrunk into a tiny area inside its ancient walls, retreating from the seven hills to huddle among a few streets on the bank of the Tiber across from St. Peter's, whose walls were in danger of collapse. Foxes and beggars roamed the filthy streets. Livestock grazed in the Forum, now known as i1 Campo Vaccino, "the Field of Cows." Other monuments had suffered even worse fates. The Temple of Jupiter was a dunghill, and both the Theater of Pompey and the Mausoleum of Augustus had become quarries from which the ancient masonry was scavenged, some of it for buildings as far away as Westminster Abbey. Many ancient statues lay in shards, half buried, while others had been burned in kilns to make quicklime or else fertilizer for the feeble crops. Still others were mangers for asses and oxen. The funerary monument ofAgrippina the Elder, the mother of Caligula, had been turned into a measure for grain and salt. Rome was a dangerous and unappealing place. There were earthquakes, fevers, and endless wars, the latest of which, the War of the Eight Saints, witnessed English mercenaries laying waste to the city. There was no trade or industry apart from the pilgrims who arrived from all over Europe, clutching copies of Mirabilia urbis romae (The wonders of Rome), which told them which relics to see during their stay. This guidebook directed them to such holy sights as the finger bone of St. Thomas in Santa Croce
in Gerusalemme, the arm of St. Anne and the head of the Samaritan woman converted by Christ in San Paolo fuori le Mura, or the crib of the infant Savior in Santa Maria Maggiore. There was a hucksterish atmosphere to the city: pardoners sold indulgences from stalls in the street, and churches advertised confessions that were supposedly good for a remission of infernal torture for a grand total of 8,000 years. The Mirabilia urbis romae did not direct the attention of the pilgrims to the Roman remains that surrounded them. To such pious Christians these ancient ruins were so much heathen idolatry. Worse, they were stained with the blood of Christian martyrs. The Baths of Diocletian, for example, were built with the forced labor of early Christians, many of whom had died during the construction. Antique images that had survived a millennium of earthquakes, erosion, and neglect were therefore deliberately trampled underfoot, spat on, or thrown to the ground and smashed to pieces. Nevertheless, some of the old pagan glory of Rome persisted despite this new breed of Vandal. The high road from the south, the Via Appia, expertly paved with basalt blocks fitted together without mortar, was an architectural marvel in itself, cutting straight as an arrow through mountains, marshes, and valleys. Of still more interest were the 300,000 sepulchers that still lined the road for miles, the products of an ancient law that had prevented anyone except the vestal virgins and the emperors from being buried within the walls of Rome. Or one could see the broken arches of aqueducts such as the Acqua Claudia. At 43 miles long, and with arches ioo feet in height, this structure was a testament not only to the fresh drinking water enjoyed by the ancient Romans (in comparison with their descendants, who took their water from the tainted, foul-smelling Tiber) but also to their remarkable engineering skills. Some modern-day Romans were even ignorant of its purpose, believing it to have been used to import olive oil from Naples. Filippo arrived in this squalid, crumbling city soon after the conclusion of the competition for the Baptistery doors.
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these forces are separated into push and pull energies, known respectively as compression and tension. All elements in a building are subject to one or other of these actions: their stone or timber beams are compressed from above (which causes them to shorten) or pulled from the side (which causes them to stretch). An architect must design a structure that will counteract these pressures by playing them off against each other—a game of action and reaction—and channeling them safely to the ground. The first type of pressure does not create insurmountable problems for an architect. Stone, brick, and concrete all possess such enormous compressive strengths that buildings can be raised to colossal heights without the blocks of stone crushing at the base. The tallest spire in England, that of Salisbury Cathedral, stands 404 feet high, and the two towers of the cathedral in Cologne each rise to Sir feet, or the equivalent of a fifty-story building. At this height they are almost a dozen feet taller than the Great Pyramid at Giza, another edifice whose tremendous size is made possible by the strength of the stone blocks from which it was built. Yet not even these soaring structures come close to exhausting the compressive strength of stone: a column of limestone could be built to a height of 12,000 feet, or over two miles high, before starting to crush under its own weight. The stones in a dome, however, are not only crushed from above but also thrust outward by the pull energy known as "hoop stress," in the same way as the rubber of an inflated balloon will bulge outward if one compresses it from above. The problem for architects is that stone and brick do not respond nearly so well to this lateral thrust as they do to compression. The Romans seem to have possessed some understanding of the structural problems created by tension and compression, and they attempted to solve them by making extensive use of the new pozzolana concrete. Where the horizontal stress is greatest, at the base of the dome, the concrete wall of the Pantheon was built to a massive thickness of 23 feet. It then tapers to only two feet at the top, at which point a round window or "oculus" is left open. Five thousand tons of concrete were poured in horizontal layers on to wooden formwork, but at the top of the dome lightweight aggregates such as pumice and, more inventive still, empty amphorae (clay bottles used for shipping olive oil) were added to the concrete in place of stone in order to reduce the load. The inside of the dome was also coffered which lightenened the load and added a feature that has been extensively imitated.

Humphrey Davy and Nitrous from the Age of Wonder

 Yet there was one major scientific discovery which hovered tantalisingly close to Davy's grasp. Had he fully seized it, he would have made himself, Beddoes and the Pneumatic Institute famous forever. Though nitrous oxide could not cure physical disease, it could do something just as valuable: it could temporarily suspend physical pain, or at least the sensation of pain. The gas profirided the key to an entirely new science, that of anaesthetics: literally, 'the negation or blocking of feelings'. Characteristically, Davy pounced upon the new concept, asserting in his laboratory notebook that the gas could certainly be used for suppressing even 'intense physical pain'. He speculated on the physiological mechanism: 'Sensible pain is not perceived after the powerful action of nitrous oxide because it produces for the time a momentary condition of other parts of the nerve connected with pleasure.'  He successfully tried treating his own toothache from impacted wisdom teeth with nitrous oxide. 'The pain diminished after the first four or five inspirations.' But the effect did not last, and he did not take the next logical step of having the offending teeth removed while under the influence of nitrous oxide. The gas was seen as blotting out the consciousness of pain with pleasure, rather than suspending consciousness itself. Yet in many of his extreme experiments Davy had deliberately pushed himself into unconsciousness, and he knew this could be done without harm. Later, writing up his experiments for Researches, he more explicitly stated the gas's surgical potential: 'As nitrous oxide in its extensive oper-ation appears capable of destroying physical pain, it may probably be used with advantage during surgical operations in which no great effu-sion of blood takes place:131 He added the caution about bleeding not to limit the gravity of operations in which anaesthesia might be applied, but because he believed nitrous oxide was only absorbed through venous blood. It might therefore become ineffective during a major operation when extensive haemorrhaging took place. Part of Davy's originality was simply to conceive of the radical idea of pain-free surgery. He later had long discussions with Coleridge about the nature and significance of human pain. Coleridge wondered, for exam-ple, why God might have created a world in which human childbirth, one of the great productive aims of nature, was so painful as well as so dangerous for women.  This was a prophetic speculation, as it turned out, for nitrous oxide mixed with oxygen eventually became one of the standard anaesthetic procedures used during labour, especially if difficult or prolonged. When he read Researches in December 1800, sent to him by Longman with the new edition of Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge wrote to Davy wondering if he had had further communication with the leading London surgeon Sir Anthony Carlisle, 'concerning Pain, as they had all once discussed it during his London visit. 'It is a subject which exceedingly interests me — I want to read something by somebody expressly on Pain, if only to give arrangement to my own thoughts, though if it were well treated, I have little doubt it would revolutionise them.' He later urged Davy himself to write such a philosophical treatise on pain. Many standard operations in the early nineteenth century — being cut for kidney stone, having teeth removed, or a wounded limb amputated — were unimaginably painful. The pain also caused shock, which itself could kill. The only known form of painkiller — the soldier's use of alcohol — was largely a method of controlling terror and deadening shock, not true anaesthesia. But having made his momentous suggestion, Davy failed to pursue it. Characteristically, he rushed impetuously on to other discoveries. Although he published his conclusions, neither he nor Beddoes saw that the immense possibilities of anaesthesia were taken up. The loss to human well-being, in the alleviation of terror and suffering on the operating table for another two generations, was incalculable. Fanny Burney's account of her own mastectomy — having a breast removed, without anaesthetics, by a military surgeon in her Paris apartment in 1811 — is perhaps more shattering than any account of a limb amputated on the battlefield during the Napoleonic Wars. It would seem that Davy missed the greatest medical opportunity of his early career. As late as 1831, his polemical biographer J.A. Paris dis-missed the whole nitrous oxide experiment as absurd. 'It will be admit-ted that there must have been something singularly ludicrous in the whole exhibition. Imagine a party of grave philosophers, with bags of silk tied to their mouths, stamping, roaring and laughing about the apartment. ' Nitrous oxide only began to be tried again experimentally some forty years later. This was in America, when Dr Horace Wells had a tooth extracted under the gas during a demonstration lecture in Connecticut in December 1844. Wells awoke, announced that he had not felt `a pin-prick, and proclaimed 'a new era in tooth-pulling'. But it was quite another chemical, ether, that provided the first true anaesthesia for major operations. The American surgeon William Thomas Morton successfully amputated a man's leg under ether at the Massachusetts General Hospital on 16 October 1846. Two months later, on 31 December, a British surgeon, Mr Lansdowne, performed a similar amputation at the Bristol General Hospital. Thereafter anaesthesia by ether was used widely in both the Crimean and the American Civil War. But the final acceptance of anaesthesia in Britain did not really come until Queen Victoria admitted to having taken a whiff of chloroform during the birth of her son Prince Leopold in April 1853.

Mad Puppetstown

Brilliant title and brilliant prose from Molly Keane:
The days slipped past, bright ships, sailing out far beyond remembrance.  It was morning, a very faint young morning, cold and chaste past belief. The sky was as flat as wax and as green as a leaf. The day had only just forgotten its last pursuing star and the birds' July singing strained like tiny, creaking wheels in the stillness. Easter sat up in bed, waking immediately and unregretfully. The alarm clock on the chair by Nanny's bed could have told her that two hours must still go by before it was time to get up, but Easter could not quite read a clock and tell the time by it—an ignorance of which she felt ashamed and concealed with feverish duplicity. But it was light. Easter sat upon the edge of her bed swinging her bare shanks. Why at this enchant-ing hour was everything forbidden ? Books, pictures, toys, walks abroad, everything that failed to dis-tract or amuse in its proper hour would entrance at this live forbidden moment. Easter sighed. A waxy eye on the heap that was Nanny slumbering, and her foot reached down to the linoleum—colder than glass.
and some notable turns of phrase:
She might have known it would not come off. So few of the things she did with Evelyn were com-pletely successful, although she had known moments of vivid excitement with him. His mind never slurred back to discuss such times ; perhaps that was what lent them a sort of freak preciousness. He never tried, Evelyn, about anything. But when you were with him you were keyed up to an intense point of effort. In streaks you knew supreme enjoyment in his ,company. Yet, on the whole, for solid slumping comfort, Basil's companionship was difficult to better.
Aunt Dicksie did not see any reason to discuss unpleasant realities at meal-time. Polite conversation could quite well be sustained without touching on unnecessary topics.

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Colonel Tattingham liked to have them there—they came up to dinner on Sunday night (that was a permanent institution). He liked to see the children riding in the park. They were as incident to it as were the deer. He liked to pay for the twins' schooling ; he had put their names down for Eton when his nephew was killed, that gay young Harry who had made so little of a business about being his heir. He liked to go with Brenda and that funny little cousin to see the boys on the 4th of June, but not on St. Andrew's day now. (Shocking cold he caught last time he watched the game.) He was so fond of Easter too. Sometimes he gave her a throat lozenge and sometimes a sovereign. Alas, that vulgar paper money He would slip his forefinger and thumb into his waistcoat pocket before he remembered that sovereigns belonged to the older, more gentlemanly days, and dislike of the nasty fuss incident upon the extraction of a note from his case was responsible sometimes for the more easily produced cough lozenge. Easter could never quite tell which it was to be but was equally polite in her thanks for either.

John Adams and Extraterrestrial life

Sometime in the summer of 1786 the fifty-year-old John Adams, graduate of Harvard University, man of science and future second
166
HERSCHEL AMONG THE STARS
President of the United States, turned up one morning uninvited at The Grove. He was shown round all Herschel's new telescopes, and they embarked on an impassioned discussion of the possibility of extrater-restrial life, and the moral implications of there being a 'plurality of worlds. This was the sort of metaphysical debate that Herschel had once had with his brother Jacob, touching on the speculations of European authors like Fontenelle and Huygens, but which he tended to avoid with his English contemporaries. Neither Herschel nor Caroline recorded exactly what was said, but it is clear from his own diaries that Adams would have put lively and unorthodox views: 'Astronomers tell us that not only all the Planets and Satellites in our Solar system, but all the unnumbered Worlds that revolve round the fixt Stars are inhabited ... If this is the case all Mankind are no more in comparison [with] the whole rational Creation of God, than a point in the orbit of Saturn.' Like the poet Shelley a generation later, Adams liked to press this argument one stage further. If astronomy discovered extraterrestrial civilisations, then surely the earth-based doctrines of Christian redemption became absurd, or at least mighty inconvenient for the Lord. 'I ask a Calvinist, whether he will subscribe to this alternative: EITHER God Almighty must assume the respective shapes of all these different Species, and suffer the penalties of their Crimes, in their stead; OR ELSE all these Beings must be consigned to everlasting Perdition?
Adams never forgot this spirited meeting with Herschel. Years later, in 1825, he wrote to Thomas Jefferson, his successor as President, complaining of the orthodox Christian beliefs of most British scientists, and advising Jefferson not to hire them to teach at the University of Virginia, where he was Chancellor. Adams contrasted these scientists' attitudes with Herschel's untrammelled vision: 'They all believe that great Principle which has produced this boundless universe, Newton's universe and Herschel's universe, came down to this little ball [planet earth], to be spit upon by the Jews. And until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world.' This argument would presumably have been satisfactorily concluded the following year, when both Adams and Jefferson died and went to meet the Great Principle. 
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Over the next decade Herschel's work began to be widely known by the younger generation of Romantic writers. Byron visited him at Slough in 1811, and viewed the stars through his telescope, which gave him an alarmingly religious experience: 'The Night is also a religious concern; and even more so, when I viewed the Moon and Stars through Herschel's telescope, and saw that they were worlds: Later Byron defended him-self against accusations of atheism. 'I did not expect that, because I doubted the immortality of Man, I could be charged with denying the existence of a God. It was the comparative insignificance of ourselves and our world, when placed in competition with the mighty whole, of which it is an atom, that first led me to imagine that our pretensions to eternity might be ... over-rated.
Coleridge seized on this idea in a late essay: 'Kepler and Newton, by substituting the idea of the Infinite — for the idea of a finite and determined world assumed in the Ptolemaic Astronomy — superseded and drove out the notion of one central point or body of the Universe. Finding a centre in every point of matter and an absolute circumference no-where, they explained at once the unity and the distinction that co-exist throughout the Creation by focal instead of central bodies. The attractive and restraining power of the sun or focal orb, in each particular system, supposing and resulting from an actual power, present in all and over all, throughout an indeterminable multitude of systems. And this, demonstrated as it has been by science, and verified by observation, we rightly name the true system of the heavens' — Church and State (1830). Hubble put this simply and beautifully: 'Our stellar system is a swarm of stars isolated in space. It drifts through the universe as a swarm of bees drifts through the summer air' — Edwin Hubble, The Realm of the Nebulae (1936).
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With such images in his head, Keats left Clerkenwell at 6 a.m., shortly before autumn sunrise. The stars were still out as he crossed London Bridge making for his student lodgings at 8 Dean Street, Southwark, near Guy's. He noticed the planet Jupiter, very bright, setting over the Thames. The moment he got to his lodgings, he sat down and began to write, starting with the inspired line, 'Much have I travelled in the Realms of Gold ... This perfectly introduced two linked ideas, of thrilling exploration and gleaming brightness, which orchestrate the whole poem. Keats wrote so quickly that he was able to send a clean copy of the poem straight round to Cowden Clarke that same morning. Clarke remembered opening it at his breakfast table in Clerkenwell by 10 a.m. (a credit also to the postal system). He noticed the historical error — it was Balboa, not Cortez, who reached the Pacific but was thrilled by the beauty and originality of the sonnet. Among other things, Keats had combined science and poetry in a new and intensely exciting way. 127 Keats likens his own discovery of Homer's poetry to the experience of the great astronomer and the great explorer finding new worlds.
... Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with wond'ring eyes He stared at the Pacific — and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise —Silent upon a peak in Darien.
Both comparisons turn on moments of physical vision — watching, staring, looking with 'wondering eyes. (This was the original manuscript reading, although Keats later changed it to the more conventional 'eagle eyes'.) Physical vision — one might say scientific vision — brings about a metaphysical shift in the observer's view of reality as a whole. The geog-raphy of the earth, or the structure of the solar system, are in an instant utterly changed, and forever. The explorer, the scientific observer, the literary reader, experience the Sublime: a moment of revelation into the idea of the unbounded, the infinite. In the case of Herschel's sighting of Uranus, Keats's word 'swims' is brilliantly evocative, because of its sense of new life and movement.

From Nicholson's Making of the King James Bible

The place was a warren of concealment. Walls were false, every room had a trap door or access to secret stairs. Many of the chimneys had double flues, one for the smoke, the other in which a priest could hide. The place was betrayed, the house searched and then occupied by government agents, who waited for the priests they guessed were hidden within its walls. Only after eight days, on Monday 27 January i6o6, did Garnet and his companion Father Oldcorne emerge from their hiding place. They looked half-dead and their appearance terrified the men who were there to arrest them. The hole they had been crouching in was too small for either of them to stand up, and Garnet's legs in particular were horribly swollen. One of the women of the house had given them sweet hot liquids through a straw that perforated the walls of the hole and they had some marmalade they had taken in there with them. But there was no means of drainage in the tiny closet; it was the smell of their own accumulating faeces which had finally driven the men into the open air. Their only option now was to put themselves in the hands of the Jacobean state, which would humiliate, torture, try and then kill them. Mr Henry Garnet, as the officials of the English state insisted on calling him, was deemed guilty of knowing about the conspiracy beforehand without reporting the plotters to the authorities. Those authorities did not accept that the secrecy of the confessional could not be abused. The conflict between his du t\ as a Catholic priest and his duty as an English citizen they considered no conflict at all. His was a treacherous, unreliable, seditious and above all a lying heart. Among the papers and books of Francis Tresham, one of the plotters, had been a manuscript written by Garnet entitled A Treatise on Equivocation. In it Garnet had elaborated on the circumstances in which the Jesuits considered it lawful not to tell the whole truth. A priest, for example, could say, when asked, that he was not a priest because he was not a priest of Apollo; or that he had never been over the seas, because he had never been over the Indian seas. These desperate measures were the product of scruple: only because Roman Catholics considered it a sin to lie, and only because the intolerance of the English church and state made it necessary for them to lie were they forced to descend to this kind of Jesuitical equivocation.
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Christian IV King of Denmark and Norway was coming to visit his sister and her husband, newly elevated from the exigencies of Scotland- James himself was something of a drinker, but there was no keeping up with Christian and the Danes. They scandalized even the Jacobean court with the depth of unbuttoned drunkenness they unleashed on the capital.
Nothing was too much for the Danish revels. An artificial oak tree, full size, was bedecked with leaves made of taffeta on each of which was written the word 'WELCOME'. Drink flowed, men and women wallowed 'in beastly delights'. It was, according to Sir John Harington, a vision to match Wlahomets paradise'. But, for a measure of how far court life stood outside the sort of regulated strictness which Puritan and God-fearing Englishmen believed in, nothing can quite match the events of the evening at Theobalds on which the masque of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba was performed....
Faith, Hope and Charity then appeared one by one to make their speeches. Faith was so drunk she couldn't get a word out; Hope couldn't stand upright and had to withdraw; only Charity, clearly the greatest of these, could say what she had to say — that Christian IV already had all the gifts that heaven could bestow and so there was nothing more she could give him — before returning to the lower hall where she found both Hope and Faith 'sick and spewing.' It isn't difficult to share the reaction of Puritans to such a world, particularly when the costs are considered. The royal household in the last year of Elizabeth's reign had cost £47,000. By 1606, that had risen to over £100,000. Other costs were dropping: the end of the war in Ireland saved £300,000 a year, the Spanish peace still more on ships and men, but even those savings couldn't counteract the gush of Jacobean largesse. The royal debt had stood at £422,749 on the death of Queen Eliza-beth. By Michaelmas 1606, it had gone up by a third to £550,331. And still the fountain poured, £3,000 here, another £2,000 there. A handsome courtier called Sir Henry Rich, known as Harry, the younger son of the Earl of Warwick, was standing in White-hall and saw £3,000 in coins being carried past him to the office of the Keeper of the Privy Purse, the royal household's finance director. Harry Rich whistled at the sight and muttered half to himself that he wished he had that much money. The king over-heard him muttering, asked what he had said, and on hearing the reply, said 'Marry, shalt thou, Harry', and ordered the money to be taken to Rich's rooms. 'You think now you have a great Purchase,' the King said. 'But I am more delighted to think how much I have pleasured you in giving this money, than you can be in receiving it.' It was, as so often with James, a winning remark and betrays the instinct at the heart of all his extrava-gance: money was a love vehicle, a bond of patronage and grati-tude, part of the dream of one nation in which the glory of royal riches bound the people to the throne.
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 `Puritan': what did the word mean? It was of course an insult, a slur-word; no one would have claimed it for himself and its meaning was shifting, sometimes applied to extremists, some-times to what was clearly the moral majority of Jacobean Eng-land. Puritanism, in short, was in the eye of the beholder. `Concerning the name,' Giles Widdowes wrote in The schysnzati-call puritan, 'it is ambiguous and so it is fallacious.' The difficulty is made worse because 'Puritanism' spreads effortlessly into so many different areas of seventeenth-century life: it could be said to involve daily habits and styles of dress; attitudes to the place of ceremonial in worship, and the relation of word to ceremony; fiercely held beliefs about the constitution of the church, what it should be, what it must not be, and the relationship of church to state; the question of what were called 'things indifferent' —those parts of Christian practice, such, as the use of the surplice, which some might like and others abhor; and beliefs about the nature of God's universe, the place of man within it and, cru-cially, the role of pre-destination. Had God designated some people for heaven and some for hell from the beginning of time? Would their own behaviour on earth have any effect on that destiny? Surely not, it was suggested, if all was pre-ordained? Why then should anyone behave well? If our destiny was settled, and our destination neither a punishment nor a reward for hoW we had lived, then what should stop us behaving as wickedly as we liked? What purpose could there be in good works or a good life? The Bible itself was the answer to all those questions. It was the word of God, an enormous, direct, vastly complicated, infinitely interpretable account of what God meant by and for his creation. It was accessible to the people as a whole either through the lessons read to them every Sunday in church, or through ser-mons, or, to the literate minority, through reading the good book themselves. In the mid-sixteenth century, perhaps 3o per cent of the English gentry had been illiterate. By the 162os, that figure had dropped effectively to zero. Lower down in society, the figures were worse — 55 per cent were illiterate among small yeoman farmers in the 164os, and as much as 95 per cent among labourers at the same time — but at all social levels, the trend towards literacy was upwards, particularly among men and par-ticularly in London, soon stretching far ahead of the rest of Europe. This increasingly word-orientated section of the popu-lation was the seed-bed in which the highly intellectual, question-ing and quizzing form of religion we know as Puritanism had its beginnings. A puritan ate and drank the word of God. That word was his world. If the Bible authorised anything, by defi-nition that was in concordance with God's will and so by defi-nition should be followed. Anything explicitly denied or disapproved of by the Bible should not be indulged. So, for example, Samuel Hieron, the Puritan pamphleteer and one of the organisers of the Millenary Petition, maintained that the Bible provided for the head of each household, 'direction for his apparel, his speech, his diet, his company, his disports, his labour, his buying and selling, yea and for his very sleep'. Most people would have probably accepted that. The difficulty came in deciding on the lawfulness of religious behaviour and belief that were not mentioned in the Bible. If something wasn't mentioned, did that mean God had no view on it? Or if it wasn't mentioned, did that mean that God did not approve of it? That was certainly the understanding of the holy Separatist Henry Barrow, a view for which he died. Fasting in Lent, clergy appointed by the state, or by any grandee who held no place in the church, any ceremonies that were not explicitly authorised by scripture: all of these Barrow considered unlawful. Other Separatists and Presbyterians, or even reformists who wished to remain within an improved Church of England, considered fasting, holy days, kneeling at communion, most church officials (certainly bishops and archbishops), the baptising of infants who didn't know what was happening to them, the churching of women after childbirth, getting married with a ring, all unlawful. Bancroft had an answer for them. There were no Christian kings mentioned in the Bible. Did that mean that Christian kings were unlawful? Didn't religion have to change, at least in its relatively inessential practices, as the habits and practices of society changed? If the king, whose authority was essentially divine and who was God's agent on earth, required it, then was it not the duty of every good man to obey, whatever the Bible said? The surplice was not mentioned in the Bible but the king wanted surplices to be used. It was obvious to Bancroft and the king that every God-fearing minister should therefore wear them. This was the territory across which the insult 'Puritan' would fly. 'A puritan is such a one', the London lawyer John Man-ningham wrote in 1602, 'as loves God with all his soul, but hates his neighbour with all his heart.' Anyone who took a stricter line on the demands of scripture than the person speaking could be labelled a Puritan. The critical division between extreme and moderate was on the question of royal authority: moderate Puri-tans accepted the authority of the church, and of the king as its head, even if they cavilled over points of doctrine; radical Puritans denied the authority of that state and would in the end rather separate themselves from the royal church than accept doctrines which they loathed. It was not the conventional modern conflict of freedom against authority, nor even a struggle for freedom of conscience or belief. This was not the age of toleration: it was a conflict of different visions of authority. 'Let them chant what they will of prerogatives,' Milton would write much later, 'we shall tell them of Scripture; of custom, we of Scripture; of Acts and Statutes, still of Scripture, till . . . the mighty weakness of the Gospel throw down the weak mightiness of man's reasoning.' That was written in the heat of the Civil War, but if not so polarised, at least in embryo, that division between the rival claims of divine and worldly authority is appar-ent in the first decade of the century. It was a difference of emphasis that split the 'Puritans'. It was the very fissure which James and Bancroft quite deliberately and very adroitly managed to deepen in the first years of the reign, when they expelled those eighty or so Puritans from the church between 1604 and 1606. For James, it was effective and practical politics: a means of achieving unity and uniformity in the church by excluding a small proportion of extremists.
and
This extraordinary and passionate atmosphere is one of the governing qualities of the time. The age was at ease with un-bridled but apparently quite unsexual love between men. Even Cecil, discussing the intimate relationship between the king and his principal adviser, wrote to a friend: `As long as any matter of what weight soever, is handled only between the prince and the secretary, those counsels are compared to the mutual affection of two lovers, undiscovered to their friends.' That sense of closeness, of the possibility and richness of an unmediated intimacy, plays a shaping role in the translation. Among the many wonderful books of the Old Testament which Chaderton's company translated was the Song of Songs, or the Song of Solomon, the great love lyric of the Bible. Some six-teenth-century reformers had been keen to exclude it, on the grounds of its immodesty and its fleshliness, but others, drawing
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0 lett me bosome thee, lett me preserve thee next to my heart
on a long Jewish tradition, read it as an account of God's love for his people and his church. That is how the luscious verses of the song are annotated in the King James Version: `A bundle of myrrhe is my welbeloued vnto me,' the girl sings; `he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts.' And her lover replies, `Behold, thou art faire, my loue: behold, thou art faire, thou bast doues eyes.' Chaderton calmly annotates: 'The Church and Christ con-gratulate one another.' The lover continues: `Thy two breasts, are like two yong Roes, that are twinnes, which feed among the lillies.' (Chaderton: `Christ setteth forth the graces of the Church.') 'Thy lips, 0 my spouse! drop as the hony combe: hony and milke are vnder thy tongue, and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon. (Chaderton, inscrutable to the last: `Christ sheweth his loue to the Church.') That aching gap, between the ecstatic sexuality of the poem and of the rather helpful and interesting notes which the Trans-lators provide, might make us smile now, but it was clearly not a comic effect that the Jacobean Translators were after. The modern reaction to their binding of the religious and the erotic experience is a measure of what Eliot called the `dissociation of sensibility' that occurred to English consciousness at some time later in the seventeenth century. We can no longer imagine that erotic passion and religious intelligence can be bound together into one living fabric. All we see in the commentary of Chaderton's company is what looks like their prudishness, their refusal to see the erotic and the passionate for what it is. But in doing that, we patronise them, we assume they were trying to conceal what they were so clearly and so consciously mak-ing vital and present. The Sancroft—Bonnest correspondence, Andrewes's private prayers, Donne's sermons and sacred sonnets, the poetry of Herbert, Vaughan and Traherne, all show that a profoundly open `passionality' is completely and immediately available to these men. Their lives and works are largely moti-vated by a frame of mind in which emotion, intellect, spirituality and desire do not exist in isolated compartments but feed and nourish each other.