Sartre's philosophy develops

From Bakewell:

Camus, he said, was too influenced by David Hume, who 'announced that all he could find in experience was isolated impressions’. Sartre thinks life only looks pomtillist like that when something has gone am

For Sartre. the awakened individual is neither Roquentin, fixating on objects in cafes and parks, nor Sisyphus, rolling a Stone up the mountainside with the bogus cheerfulness of Tom Sawyer whitewashing a fence. It is a person who is engaged in doing something purposeful, in the full confidence that it means something. It is the person who is truly free.

Freedom was the great subject of Sartre’s philosophy, above all-and this is no accident~during the period when France was not free. It is central to almost everything he wrote then: The Flies (the play that was in rehearsal when he met Camus), the Roads of Freedom novels, his many essays and lectures, and above all his masterwork Being and Nothingness, which he developed from his years of note-taking and published in June 1943. It seems extraordinary that a 665-page tome mainly about freedom could come out in the midst of an oppressive regime without raising an eyebrow among the censors, but that was what happened. Perhaps the title put them off closer inspection.

That title was, of course, a nod to Heidegger's Being and Time, which Being and Nothingness resembles in size and weight. (Its American reviewer William Barrett would describe the published version at nearly 700 pages as 'a first draft for a good book of 300 pages’.) Still, it is a rich and mostly stimulating work. It combines Sartre's readings of Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel and Kierkegaard with a wealth of anecdotes and examples, often based on real-life incidents involving Simone de Beauvoir, Olga Kosakiewicz and others. The mood of Paris in wartime haunts it, with mini-scenes set in bars and in cafes, as well as in Parisian squares and gardens, and on the staircases of sleazy hotels. The atmosphere is often one of tension, desire or mistrust between people. Many key incidents could be scenes from a noir or nouvelle vague film.

Being and Nothingness shares something else with Being and Time: it is unfinished. Both works end by dangling the prospect of a second part which will complete the argument of the book Heidegger promises to demonstrate his ultimate point: that the meaning of Being is Time. Sartre promises to provide a foundation for existentialist ethics. Neither keeps the promise. What we do get in Being and Nothingness is an extended examination of human freedom, precisely worked out on the basis of a simple vision. Sartre argues that freedom terrifies us, yet we cannot escape it, because we are it.

To make this point, he begins by dividing all of being into two realms. One is that of the pour-soi (‘for-itself’), defined only by the fact that it is nee. This is us: it is where we find human consciousness. The other realm, that of the en-soi (‘in-itself’), is where we find everything else: rocks, penknives, bullets, cars, tree roots. (Sartre does not say much about other animals, but they too, from sponges to chimpanzees, seem mostly to be in this group.) These entities have no decisions to make: all they have to do is to be themselves.

For Sartre, the in-itself and the for-itself are as opposed as matter and antimatter. Heidegger at least wrote about Dasein as a kind of being, but for Sartre the for-itself is not a being at all. It is a 'nothingness’, a vacuumlike hole in the world. Gabriel Marcel memorably described Sartre’s nothingness as an 'air-pocket’ in the midst of being. It is, however, an active and specific nothingness~ the sort of nothingness that goes out and plays soccer.

The notion of a specific nothingness sounds odd, but Sartre explains it with a story of Parisian café life. Let's imagine that I have an appointment with Pierre. I arrive fifteen minutes late and look around anxiously. Is Pierre still here? I perceive lots of other things: customers, tables, mirrors and lights, the café’s smoky atmosphere, the sound of rattling crockery and a general murmuring hubbub. But there is no Pierre. Those other things form a field against which one item blares out loud and clear: the Absence of Pierre. One thinks of those Czech women who disappeared from the Flore: their absence is much more eloquent and glaring than their habitual presence ever was.

Sartre also otters a more lightweight example: I look in my wallet and see 1,300 francs inside. That seems positive. But if 1 expected to find 1,500 francs, What looms up at me from the wallet is the non being of 200 francs. A nice joke, adapted from an old one told in the Ernst Lubitsch film Ninotchka, illustrates the point. (Apologies to the adaptor, Whom I haven’t been able to trace. Jean-Paul Sartre walks into a cafe, and the waiter asks what he’d like to order. Sartre replies, 'I’d like a cup of coffee with sugar, but no cream.’ The waiter goes off, but comes back apologising. 'I’m sorry, Monsieur Sartre, We are all out of cream. How about With no milk?’ The joke hinges on the notion that the Absence of Cream and the Absence of Milk are two definite negativities, just as Cream and Milk are two definite positivities.

It is peculiar idea-but what Sartre is trying to get at is the structure of Husserlian intentionality, which defines consciousness as only an insubstantial ‘aboutness’. My consciousness is specifically mine, yet it has no real being: it is nothing but its tendency to reach out or point to things. If I look into myself and seem to see a mass of solidified qualities, of personality traits, tendencies, limitations, relics of past hurts and so on, all pinning me down to an identity, I am forgetting that none of these things can define me at all. In a reversal of Descartes’ 'I think, therefore I am,’ Sartre argues, in effect, ‘I am nothing, therefore I am free.’

Not surprisingly, this radical freedom makes people nervous. It is difficult enough to think of oneself as free at all, but Sartre goes further by saying that I am literally nothing beyond what I decide to be. To realise the extent of my freedom is to be plunged into what both Heidegger and Kierkegaard called ‘anxiety’ -Angst or, in French, angoisse. This is not a fear of anything in particular, but a pervasive unease about oneself and one’s existence. Sartre borrows Kierkegaard’s image of dizziness: if I look over a cliff and feel vertigo, it tends to take the form of the sickening sensation that I might, compulsively and inexplicably, throw myself off the edge? The more freedom of movement I have, the worse this anxiety becomes. In theory. if someone tied me down securely near the edge, my
vertigo would disappear, for I would know that I could not throw myself off and could therefore relax. If we could try a similar trick with the anxiety of life in general, everything would seem a lot easier. But it is impossible: whatever resolutions I make, they can never tie me down like real ropes can. Sartre gives the example of a gambling addict who has long ago resolved never to yield to the addiction. But if this man finds himself near a casino and feels the pull of temptation, he has to renew his resolution all over again. He cannot just refer back to the original decision. I may choose to follow certain general directions in my life, but I can’t force myself to stick to them.

To avoid this problem, many of us try to convert our long-term decisions into real-world constraints of some kind. Sartre uses the example of an alarm clock: it goes off, and I roll out of bed as if I had no choice but to obey it, rather than freely considering whether I really want to get up or not. A similar idea lies behind more recent software applications that block you from helplessly watching videos of cats and puppies when you would rather be getting on with work. You can set it either to limit your time on particular sites, or to lock you out of the Internet altogether. With a nod to paradox, the most popular of these programs is called 'Freedom’.

All these devices work because they allow us to pretend that we are not free. We know very well that we can always reset the alarm clock or disable the software, but we arrange things so that this option does not seem readily available. If we didn’t resort to such tricks, we would have to deal with the whole vast scope of our freedom at every instant, and that would make life extremely difficult. Most of us therefore keep ourselves entangled in all kinds of subtle ways throughout the day. Sartre gives examples: ‘I have an appointment this evening with Pierre. I must not forget to reply to Simon. I do not have the right to conceal the truth any longer from Claude.’ Such phrases imply that we are boxed in, but for Sartre they are ‘projections’ of my choices. They are, in his great vertiginous turn of phrase, ‘so many guard rails against anguish’.
To show how deeply such pretences are woven into everyday life, Sartre describes a waiter- a skillful, supercilious Parisian waiter, weaving between tables, balancing his tray, ‘putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the arm and hand’. As a human being, he is a free ‘for-itself’ like me, but he moves as though he were a beautifully designed mechanism, enacting a predefined role of game. What game is he playing? 'We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café.’ He does this as efficiently as the thief in G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown story ‘The Queer Feet’, who slips by unnoticed in a gentleman’s club by moving like a waiter when the club members are around, and like a club member when the waiters are around. A waiter playing a waiter performs his actions so gracefully that the effect is like the sequence of musical notes in Nausea’s ragtime song: it seems absolutely necessary. He tries to be a work of art called Waiter, whereas in truth, like the rest of us, he is a free, fallible, contingent human being. In thus denying his freedom, he enters what Sartre calls mauvaise foi, or 'bad faith’. There is nothing exceptional about this: most of us are in bad faith most of the time, because that way life is liveable.

Most bad faith is harmless, but it can have darker consequences. In the short story ‘The Childhood of a Leader’, written in 1938, Sartre examined a character, Lucien, who shores up an identity for himself as an anti-Semite mainly in order to be something. He is pleased when he hears someone else say of him, 'Lucien can’t stand Jews.’ It gives him the illusion that he simply is the way he is. Bad faith here makes an entity out of a nonentity. Sartre developed this thought further in Reflexions sur la question juive (translated as Anti-Semite and jew), begun in 1944 and published in 1946. He does not argue that all anti-Semitism comes down to bad faith (that would be a hard thesis to defend), but he uses the notion of bad faith to make a connection between two things that no one had put together quite so nearly: the fear of freedom, and the tendency to blame and demonise others.

For Sartre, we show bad faith whenever we portray ourselves as passive creations of our race, class, job, history, nation, family, heredity, childhood influences, events, or even hidden drives in our subconscious which we claim are out of our control. It is not that such factors are unimportant: class and race, in particular, he acknowledged as powerful forces in people’s lives, and Simone de Beauvoir would soon add gender to that list. Nor did he mean that privileged groups have the right to pontificate to the poor and downtrodden about the need to ’take responsibility’ for themselves. That would be a grotesque misreading of Sartre’s point, since his sympathy in any encounter always lay with the more oppressed side. But for each of us-for me-to be in good faith means not making excuses for myself. We cannot say (to quote more examples from Sartre’s 1945 lecture) ‘I have never had a great love or a great friendship; but that is because I never met a man or a woman Who were worthy of it; if I have not written any very good books, it is because I had not the leisure to do so.’ We do say such things, all the time; but we are in bad faith when we do it.

None of this means that I make choices in a completely open field or void. I am always in some sort of pre-existing ‘situation’, out of which I must act. I actually need these ‘situations’, or what Sartre calls ’facticity’, in order to act meaningfully at all. Without it, my freedom would be only the unsatisfying freedom of someone floating in space- perhaps a high jumper who makes a great leap only to find herself drifting off in zero gravity, her jump counting for nothing. Freedom does not mean entirely unconstrained movement, and it certainly does not mean acting randomly. We often mistake the very things that enable us to be free- context, meaning, facticity, situation, a general direction in our lives »-for things that define us and take away our freedom. It is only with all of these that we can be free in a real sense.

Sartre takes his argument to an extreme point by asserting that even war, imprisonment or the prospect of imminent death cannot take away my existential freedom. They form part of my ‘situation’, and this may be an extreme and intolerable situation, but it Still provides only a context for whatever I choose to do next. If I am about to die, I can decide how to face that death. Sartre here resurrects the ancient Stoic idea that I may not choose what happens to me, but I can choose what to make of it, spiritually speaking. But the Stoics cultivated indifference in the face of terrible events, whereas Sartre thought we should remain passionately. even furiously engaged

The Stages of a Frenchwoman's LIfe

From Rousseau's Dog:

Her dealings with Hume went back to March 1761, when she had ken the initiative in writing to him. “I dare only add that in all the products of your pen, you show yourself a perfect philosopher, a statesman, an historian of genius, an enlightened political scientist, a true patriot.” Thus began a correspondence that lasted until his death. In letter eighteen months after opening communication, she offered a description of herself approaching forty.

A great part of my youth is over. Some delicacy in features, mildness and decency in countenance, are the only exterior advantages, I can boast of. And as for interior, common sense, improved a little, by early good reading, are all I possess. [My English is confined but] if I am intitled [sic] to some elegancy I owe it to the repeated readings of your admirable works.

Their correspondence took on a passionate note, though it is possible that Hume misread its significance for her. An editor of Walpole’s letters points out that in prerevolutionary Paris, a woman of fashion passed through well-delineated states. “When young she was galante; in becoming more mature, she became a bel esprit. These were as strictly defined and observed as changes of dress on a particular day of the different seasons. A woman endeavouring to attract lovers after she had
ceased to be a galante would have been not less ridiculous than her wearing velvet when all the rest of the world were in demi-saison.”

So. lively and romantic language, expressions of attachment, could be used in the epoch of bel esprit without any fear of misunderstanding by society or the “loving” partner. Did Hume recognize this where Mme de Boufflers was concerned? Did he imagine that there was more to her sentiments than the regard of an ardent spirit? Walpole appears to have been aware of the convention: in a letter of July 11, 1766, he describes her as “a savante, philosophe, author, bel esprit.” As for Hume’s own response, there is the curious episode of the encounter that did not take place during their burgeoning attachment.

Scribes from the Swerve

In charge of the scriptorium was the person on whom Poggio and the other book hunters would have focused their most seductive blandishments: the monastery’s librarian. This important figure would have been accustomed to extravagant courtship, for he was responsible for providing all of the equipment that was required for the copying of the manuscripts: pens, ink, and penknives whose precise merits or defects would become overwhelmingly obvious to the laboring scribe after a few hours at the day’s task. The librarian could, if he wished, make a scribe’s life miserable or, alternatively, provide a favorite with particularly fine tools. Those tools also included rulers, awls (to make tiny holes for ruling the lines evenly), fine-pointed metal pens for drawing the lines, reading frames to hold the book to be copied, weights to keep the pages from turning. For manuscripts that were to be illuminated, there were still other specialized tools and materials.

Most books in the ancient world took the form of scrolls~ like the Torah scrolls that Jews use in their services to this day-but by the fourth century Christians had almost completely opted for a different format, the codex, from which our familiar books derive. The codex has the huge advantage of being far easier for readers to find their way about in: the text can be conveniently paginated and indexed, and the pages can be turned quickly to the desired place. Not until the invention of the computer. with its superior search functions, could a serious challenge be mounted to the codex’s magnificently simple and flexible format. Only now have we begun once again to speak of “scrolling” through a text.

Since papyrus was no longer available and paper did not come into general use until the fourteenth century, for more than a thousand years the chief writing material used for books Was made from the skins of animals-cows, sheep, goats, and occasionally deer. These surfaces needed to be made smooth, and hence another tool that the monastic librarian distributed was pumice stone, to rub away the remaining animal hair along with any bumps or imperfections. The scribe to Whom a poor quality parchment had been given was in for a very disagreeable task. and in the margins of surviving monastic manuscripts there are occasional outbursts of distress: “The parchment is hairy” . . . "Thin ink, bad parchment, difficult text” . . . “Thank God, it will soon be dark.” “Let the copyist be permitted to put an end to his labor,” a weary monk wrote beneath his name, the date, and the place where he worked; “Now I’ve written the whole thing,” wrote another. “For Christ’s sake give me a drink.”

The finest parchment, the one that made life easier for scribes and must have figured in their sweetest dreams, was made of calfskin and called vellum. And the best of the lot was uterine vellum, from the skins of aborted calves. Brilliantly white, smooth, and durable, these skins were reserved for the most precious books, ones graced with elaborate, gemlike miniatures and occasionally encased in covers encrusted with actual gems. The libraries of the world still preserve a reasonable number of these remarkable objects, the achievement of scribes who lived seven or eight hundred years ago and labored for untold hours to create something beautiful.

Good scribes were exempted from certain times of collective prayer, in order to maximize the hours of daylight in the scriptorium. And they did not have to work at night: because of an entirely justifiable fear of fire, all candlelight was forbidden. But for the time-about six hours a day-that they actually spent at their desks, their lives belonged entirely to their books. It was possible, in certain monasteries at least, to hope that monks would understand what they were copying: “Vouchsafe, O Lord, to bless this workroom of Thy servants,” declared the dedication of one scriptorium, “that all which they write therein may be comprehended by their intelligence and realized in their works.” But the actual interest of the scribes in the books they copied (or their distaste for those books) was strictly irrelevant. Indeed, insofar as the copying was a form of discipline-an exercise in humility and a willing embrace of pain-distaste or simple incomprehension might be preferable to engagement. Curiosity was to be avoided at all costs.

The complete subordination of the monastic scribe to the text-the erasure, in the interest of crushing the monk’s spirit, of his intellect and sensibility-could not have been further from Poggio’s own avid curiosity and egotism. But he understood that his passionate hope of recovering reasonably accurate traces of the ancient past depended heavily on this subordination. An engaged reader, Poggio knew, was prone to alter his text in order to get it to make sense, but such alterations, over centuries, inevitably led to wholesale corruptions. It was better that monastic scribes had been forced to copy everything exactly at it appeared before their eyes, even those things that made no sense at all.

A sheet with a cutout window generally covered the page of the manuscript being copied, so that the monk had to focus on one line at a time. And monks were strictly forbidden to change What they thought were mistakes in the texts they were copying. They could correct only their own slips of the pen by care. fully scraping off the ink with a razor and repairing the spot With a mixture of milk, cheese, and lime, the medieval version of our own product for whiting out mistakes. There was no crumpling up the page and starting afresh. Though the skins of sheep and goats were plentiful, the process of producing parchment from them was laborious. Good parchment was far too Valuable and scarce to be discarded. This value helps to account for the fact that monasteries collected ancient manuscripts in the first place and did not consign them to the rubbish.

To be sure, there were a certain number of abbots and of monastic librarians who treasured not only the parchment but also the pagan works written on them. Steeped in classical literature, some believed that they could rifle its treasures Without contamination, the way the ancient Hebrews had been permitted by God to steal the riches of the Egyptians. But over the generations, as a substantial Christian literature was created, it became less easy to make such an argument. Fewer and fewer monks were inclined, in any case, to make it. Between the sixth century and the middle of the eighth century, Greek and Latin classics virtually ceased to be copied at all. What had begun as an active campaign to forget-~a pious attack on pagan ideas-had evolved into actual forgetting. The ancient poemi philosophical treatises, and political speeches, at one time so threatening and so alluring, were no longer in anyone's mind. let alone on anyone’s lips. They had been reduced to the condition of mute things, sheets of parchment, stitched together. covered with unread words.

Only the remarkable durability of the parchment used in these codices kept the ideas of the ancients alive at all.

The War, Internment and Occupation and Camus

From Bakewell's ATECafe:
She found the city uncannily normal-except that now there Were Germans strolling everywhere, some seeming arrogant, others perplexed or abashed. Even half a year later, in January 1941, the dia~ rist Jean Guéhenno was observing, ‘It seems to me I can read their embarrassment on the faces of the occupying forces. . .They don’t know what to do on the streets of Paris or whom to look at.’ Beauvoir resumed her habit of writing in cafes, but had to get used to the sight of groups of uniformed Nazis enjoying their coffees and cognacs at nearby tables.

She also set about adjusting to the small frustrations and compromises that became necessary for Parisians. To keep her teaching job at the school, she had to sign a document stating that she was neither a Jew nor a Freemason. It was ‘repugnant’, but she did it. Finding blackmarket produce or fuel for the coming winter became almost a fulltime occupation as supplies dwindled in the city. Anyone who had friends in the countryside as she did-would depend gratefully on their sending parcels of fresh food. Sometimes these took too long to arrive, however: the first package Beauvoir received contained a beautifully cooked joint of pork, crawling with maggots. She scraped them off and salvaged what she could. Later she devised ways of washing smelly meat in vinegar, then stewing it for hours with strong herbs. Her room had no heating, so she went to bed wearing ski trousers and a woolly sweater, and sometimes taught her classes in the same outfit. She took to wearing a turban, to save on hairdressers, and found that it suited her. ‘I aimed at simplification in every sphere,’ she wrote in her memoirs.

One necessary adjustment was learning to put up with the idiot1c and moralistic homilies emanating every day from the collaborationist government-reminders to respect God, to honour the principle of

the family, to follow traditional virtues. It took her back to the boutgeois’ talk she had so hated in her childhood, but this time backed by a threat of violence. Ah-but perhaps such talk was always backed by hidden threats of violence? She and Sartre later made this belief cen’ tral to their politics: fine-sounding bourgeois values, for them, were never to be trusted or taken at face value. They may have learned this attitude during the regime of humbug that was Occupied France.

Beauvoir still did not know whether Sartre was alive. To keep herself calm (and warm) she started going every afternoon, after a moming’s teaching or writing, to the Bibliotheque nationale or the library of the Sorbonne, where she read her way through Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The effort of sustained attention was comforting, and so was Hegel’s stately vision of human history progressing through inevitable sequences of thesis, antithesis and synthesis towards sublimation in Absolute Spirit. She would leave the library each afternoon feeling a radiant sense of the rightness of all things-a feeling that lasted for about five minutes before the city’s grubby reality brought it down. It was then that Kierkegaard had more to offer. She read him as well-that awkward, anguished, irreverent anti-Hegelian. Reading both at once must have been disorienting, yet somehow, like just the right combination of uppers and downers, it gave her what she needed. Both philosophies found their way into her gradually evolving novel L’invitée. They would become two key sources for her and for existentialism in general: Kierkegaard with his insistence on freedom and choice, and Hegel with his vision of how history plays out on an epic scale, swallowing up individuals.

Meanwhile, at Trier in the Rhineland near the Luxembourg border, Sartre was alive and well and imprisoned in a POW camp, Stalag 12D. He too was immersing himself in reading a difficult book: Being and Time. Heidegger’s work had already answered to his need for comfort in 1938. Now, as Sartre read him in a closer and more sustained Way, he found him to be the perfect inspiration for a nation in defeat. Heidegger’s philosophy had grown partly out of the humiliation of Germany in 1918; now it spoke to a humiliated France after june 1940. As Sartre read it, he also worked on his own philosophical notes, which

were growing into a book. In one of the many brief letters he tried to send Beauvoir, on 22 July 1940, he added as a postscript, ‘I’ve begun to write a metaphysical treatise.’ This would become his greatest work: L’étre et le néant (Being and Nothingness). The very day he mentioned this, to his relief, he received a backlog of seven letters from Beauvoir. His letters then began reaching her too, and they were back in contact at last. Then Sartre escaped.

It wasn’t a very swashbuckling escape, but it was simple and it worked. He had been suffering a great deal from his eye problems, thanks to all the reading and writing-which were mostly done one eyed. Sometimes both eyes were so sore that he tried to write with them closed, his handwriting wandering over the page. But his eyes gave him his escape route. Pleading the need for treatment, he procured a medical pass to visit an ophthalmologist outside the camp gates. Amazingly, he was then allowed to walk out, showing the pass, and he never went back.

Sartre’s eyes had in fact saved his life several times over. First they exempted him from front-line combat, then they saved him from forced Nazi labour; now they gave him his ticket out of the Stalag. This blessing came at a cost in the long term: exotropia can cause a degree of tiredness and difficulty in concentrating that may have contributed to his destructive tendency to self-medicate with stimulant drugs and alcohol in later times.

But now he was free. He headed for Paris, and arrived both pleased with himself and disoriented. For months, he had been stuck with other prisoners all day and all night, and had discovered to his surprise that it was comforting to be so merged in solidarity and sameness with his fellow men. There was no fighting for personal space in the camp. As he wrote later, his own skin was the boundary of the space he had, and even as he slept he could always feel someone’s arm or leg against his own. Yet it did not disturb him: those others were part of himself. He had never found physical proximity easy before, so this was a W elation. Now, coming back to Paris, he found himself putting off the moment of going back to his former haunts:

On my first night of freedom, a stranger in my native city, not

having yet reached my friends of former days, I pushed Open

the door of a café. Suddenly, I experienced a feeling of fear~or

something close to fear. I could not understand how these

squat: bulging buildings could conceal such deserts. I was lost;

the few drinkers seemed more distant than the stars. Each of them was entitled to a huge section of bench, to a Whole marble table. . .If these 111611, shimmering comfortably within their tubes of rarefied gas, seemed inaccessible to me, it Was because I no longer had the right to place my hand on their shoulder or thigh, or to call one of them ‘fat-head’. I had rejoined bourgeois society.

It seemed that Sartre would rarely be had been as a prisoner of war.

relaxed and happy again

Beauvoir was briefly jubilant at seeing Sartre, then frankly pissed off by the way he began passing judgement on everything she had been doing to survive. He interrogated her: did she buy things on the black market? ‘A little tea occasionally’, she said. And what of that paper certifying that she was not a jew or a Freemason? She should not have signed that. To Beauvoir, this only showed how sheltered Sartre’s life had become in the camp. He had enjoyed swearing undying fraternity with his comrades while rubbing up against their thighs and shoulders, but life in Paris was different-not as ‘bourgeois’ as he seemed to imagine, and more psychologically tough. Unusually, Beauvoir sounds critical of Sartre at this point in her memoirs. But he unbent quickly He proved happy to eat her black-market stews, and he too made the adjustments necessary to get on with life, and even to be published under Nazi censorship.

On the other hand, he was adamant that he had come back to do something. He assembled a dozen friends into a new Resistance group Under the name "Socialisme et liberté’ and wrote a manifesto for them. The group spent most of its time writing or discussing manifestos and polemical articles, but even this was dangerous enough. Thev had a

bad scare when one member, jean Pouillon, lost a briefcase filled with incriminating pamphlets together with the group members’ names and addresses. They all faced arrest, torture, death. Luckily, the person who found the briefcase turned it in to a lost-property office. The incongruity of this~the threat of Gestapo torture coexisting with the decent civic tradition of the lost-property oHicecaptures the strangeness of life under Occupation.

The group foundered eventually'of not knowing what to do’, wrote Sartre later. But being involved had a positive effect on their morale, as did other attempts at resistance, even those that seemed fey or futile. There was much encouragement to be found in miniature rebellions such as those of jean Paulhan-one of their group-who left small anti-collaborationist poems signed only with his initials lying around on café tables or post-office counters. Other Parisians made similar gestures: forbidden to fly tricolour flags on Bastille Day, for example, people would find ways of bringing red, white and blue together, perhaps on a colourful scarf, or by wearing a red jacket together with a blue purse and white gloves. It all mattered.

Merleau-Ponty was now back in Paris too, and he founded a Resistance group called ‘Sous la botte’ (Under the Boot), which then merged with Sartre’s. He married Suzanne Berthe Jolibois towards the end of 1940, and they had a daughter, to whom they gave the patriotic name Marianne-an Occupation baby who was also a sign of hope for the future. He taught at the Lycée Carnot, where, despite his own activities, he urged his students to be cautious. When he found, one day, that they had taken the obligatory portrait of Marshal Pétain down from the wall, he ordered them to put it back, not from any collaborationist sentiment but to protect their safety. Everyday life required constantly negotiating this balance between submission and resistance, as well as between ordinary activity and the extraordinary underlying reality.

It was even possible to have holidays from the Germans: Beauvoir and Sartre made several cycling trips in the 'free' zone of southern France, where the Vichy puppet government was in charge. They sent their bikes over in advance, then sneaked across the border through forests and fields at night with a guide, all clad in dark clothes. After spending a few weeks wheeling around the roads of Provence, and visiting other writers whom they vaguely hoped to coax into working for the Resistance (including André Gide and Andre Malraux), they crossed back again, refreshed by the taste of partial freedom. At least there was more food in the south, although they could not afford to buy much of it. Lack of good nutrition made them weak and accident’ prone. Sartre once somersaulted over his handlebars, and Beauvoir collided with another bike, falling hard on her face and sustaining a swollen eye and a lost tooth. Weeks later, back in Paris, she squeezed a boil on her chin and felt a hard white nubbin emerge. It was her tooth, which had buried itself in the flesh of her jaw.

Back in Paris, it was important to stay mindful of how dangerous the occupiers were-something easy to forget if you were not among their direct targets. Sartre wrote of how the Germans gave up their seats to old ladies in the Métro, they showed affection to children and stroked their cheeks’. What’s more, he added, 'do not go imagining that the French showed them a crushing air of contempt’-though they did venture small discourtesies when they could, as a way of preserving self-respect. Jean Guéhenno’s diary recorded times when he deliberately failed to give directions on the street to Germans, or gave them rudely, in a way he would never normally do. Merleau-Ponty noted the difficulty he had in overcoming the rules of good manners that he had learned in childhood, but he too forced himself to be rude as a patriotic duty. For someone as naturally affable and well brought up as he, it took a decided effort.

Jews, and anyone actively suspected of Resistance activity, had a grimmer sense of what the Occupation really meant-but they too could be blithe for too long. When the regulation came in on 29 May 1942 that jews must wear the yellow star, many of Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s Jewish friends ignored it. They also defied the bans on using restaurants, cinemas, libraries and other public places. As each new rule was announced, a few took it as their cue to flee if they could, usually via Spain to Britain or America, but others stayed. It seemed possible to live with the insults and threats-until it wasn’t.

At the most unexpected times, terrifying holes could open up in the fabric of things. Sartre described it cinematically:

You would phone a friend one day and the telephone would ring and ring in the empty apartment; you would ring his door bell and he wouldn't come to the door; if the concierge broke in, you would find two chairs drawn up together in the hallway with German cigarette ends between the legs.

It was as if the sidewalks of the city opened occasionally, he wrote and a tentacled monster reached up to drag someone down, The café: always filled with familiar faces, also became an index to disappearances. Beauvoir wrote of how two attractive Czech women, regulars at the Cafe Flore, were suddenly not there one day. They never came back. It was unbearable to see their empty places: ‘it was, precisely, a nothingness’.

Cafés such as the Flore continued to be a focus for Parisian life. For a start, they were the best places to keep warm, certainly better than the sparse, cheap hotels in which many lived without heating or proper cooking facilities. Even after the war, the American writer James Baldwin would observe in the 19505, ‘The moment I began living in French hotels I understood the necessity of French cafés.’ They also became places to talk, to conspire a little, to keep one’s mind alive. They certainly governed Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s social lives, being the places Where they saw ever-increasing circles of new acquaintances: poets, playwrights, journalists, artists like Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti, and avant-garde writers such as Michel Leiris, Raymond Queneau andjean Genet. The latter, a former thief and prostitute now gaining fame as a writer, simply marched up to Sartre one day in the Flore and said bonjour. This was one of many relationships forged at wartime café tables.

They met Albert Camus in a similarly abrupt way, but at the Theatre Sarah-Bernhardt, where he introduced himself one day in I943 while Sartre’s plav The Flies was in rehearsal. He and Sartre already knew a lot about each other: Camus had reviewed Nausea and Sartre had just been writing a piece on Camus' The Stranger. They immediately got on well. Beauvoir later said that she and Sartre found Camus ‘a simple, cheerful soul’, often funny and bawdy in conversation, and so emotional that he would sit down in the snow in the street at 2 am. and pour out his love troubles.

Since his lonely interlude in Paris in 1940, Camus had travelled to and from Algeria a few times. His Wife Francine was still there, having become stuck in the country when Allied forces captured it-Albert being near Lyons at the time, receiving treatment for a bout of the tuberculosis from which he suffered throughout life. He had now finished the 'absurds’ he had been working on three years earlier; these spoke above all of his dislocated experience as a French Algerian, caught between two countries and never fully at home in either. They also reflected his early experience of poverty: the Camus family had never been well off, but their situation had become dire after Camus’ father Lucien died in the first year of the First World War. (Being recruited into an Algerian regiment, he was sent into battle wearing a picturesque colonial uniform of red trousers and a bright blue waistcoat, fatally inappropriate for the grey mud of northern France.) Albert, born on 7 November 1913, was then less than a year old. He grew up in a sordid apartment in Algiers with his brother, his grieving illiterate and deaf mother, and his grandmother, who was both illiterate and Violent.

Thus, while the bourgeois young Sartre had his dreams of literary derring-do, and Merleau-Ponty had his happiness at being unconditionally loved, and Beauvoir had her books and sweet-shop Windows, Camus grew up into a world of silence and absences. His family had no electricity, no running water, no newspapers, no books, no radio, few visitors at home, and no sense of the wider ‘life-worlds’ of others. He did manage to escape, to a lycée in Algiers and then to a career as a journalist and writer, but his childhood marked him. The very first entry of his first diary, written when he was twenty-two, contains the remark, 'A certain number of years lived without money are enough to create a Whole sensibilitv.’

Husserl's papers

Van Breda persuaded Malvine Husserl that something must be done. Returning to Louvain, he had another persuasion job to do: he talked his colleagues into agreeing to transfer and house the collection there, rather than funding a project remotely. This done, he went back to Freiburg, where Ludwig Landgrebe had now also arrived, leaving an unnerving situation in Prague. It was mid-September: it seemed that war might start in weeks or even days.

The immediate question was how to move the stuff. The marine scripts were more portable than the books, and more of a priority. But it certainly was not safe to drive for the border with thousands of sheets of paper, all written in what looked like an unreadable secret code.

A better idea was to take them to a Belgian embassy office and thence out of the country in a diplomatic pouch, guaranteeing immunity from interference. But the nearest office with an immunity agreement was in Berlin, a long way off in the wrong direction. Van Breda asked monks at a Franciscan monastery near Freiburg if they could hide the manuscripts or help smuggle them out, but they were reluctant. Then a Benedictine nun stepped in: Sister Adelgundis Jagerschmidt, from a nearby Lioba Sisters convent. She was another former student of phenomenology who had Visited Husserl regularly in his last illness, in defiance of the rules against associating with Jews. She now volunteered to take the manuscripts herself to a small house owned by her fellow sisters in Konstanz, near the Swiss border. From there, she said, the nuns could carry the manuscripts bit by bit, in small packages, across to Switzerland;

It was a nerve-racking plan. If war broke out during the operation, the manuscripts could end up split between the two locations with the borders closed; some might be lost in the middle. The danger to the nuns was also obvious. It seemed the best option available, however, so on 19 September the heroic Sister Adelgundis loaded three heavy suitcases with 40,000 manuscript pages, and set off by train to Konstanz.

Unfortunately, although the sisters were willing to house the manuscripts temporarily, they considered smuggling them across the border too risky. Adelgundis left the suitcases with them and returned to give Van Breda the bad news.

He reverted to the idea of taking them to the Belgian embassy in Berlin. That now meant detouring Via Konstanz to get them, and this time he went himself. So, on 22 September the day Chamberlain met Hitler and learned that Hitler had upped his demands on Czech territory-Van Breda travelled to the convent. He collected the suitcases and continued to Berlin on a night train. One can imagine the ten sion: war looming, three heavy suitcases packed with what looked like coded secrets, a train rattling through a dark night. Arriving in the city on the morning of Friday 23 September, Van Breda entrusted the suitcases to a Franciscan monastery outside the centre, then went to the embassy-to learn that the ambassador was away and no decisions could be taken. The junior officials did agree, however, to look after the cases in the meantime.

So it was back to the Franciscans, and back to the embassy again with the suitcases. At last, on Saturday 24 September, Van Breda saw them locked away in the embassy safe. He travelled back to Freiburg, then out of Germany to Louvain. He kept with him just a handful of texts, so that the transcription project could start. To his relief, the border guards waved him through without looking at the incomprehensible handwriting.

A few days later, the European crisis was resolved-temporarily. Benito Mussolini brokered a meeting in Munich on 29 September, attended by Hitler, Daladier and Chamberlain. No one from Czechoslovakia was in the room when, in the early hours of 30 September, Daladier and Chamberlain caved in to Hitler’s increased demands. The next day, German forces entered the Sudetenland.

Chamberlain flew back to Britain triumphant; Daladier flew back to France ashamed and full of dread. Greeted by a cheering crowd as he got off the plane, he reportedly muttered, ‘Les cons!’-the idiotsl~at least that was the story Sartre seems to have heard. Once the initial relief passed, many in both France and Britain doubted that the agreement could last. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were pessimistic; Beauvoir preferred to hope that peace might prevail. The three of them debated the matter at length.

As a side effect, the peace deal reduced the urgency about getting Husserl’s papers out of Germany. It was not until November 1938 that the bulk of them were transported from Berlin to Louvain. When they arrived, they were installed in the university library, which proudly organised a display. No one could know that in two years’ time the German army would invade Belgium and the documents would be in danger again.

That November, Van Breda returned to Freiburg. Malvine Husserl had now decided to seek a visa so as to join her son and daughter in the US, but this took a long time, so in the meantime Van Breda arranged for her to move to Belgium. She arrived in Louvain injune I939, joining Fink and Landgrebe, who had moved there in the spring and were getting to work. With her came a huge cargo: a container of her furniture, the full Husserl library in sixty boxes, her husband’s ashes in an um, and a portrait of him, which Franz Brentano and his wife Ida von Lieben had jointly painted as an engagement present before the Husserls’ marriage.

Brentano’s papers-still stored in an archive office in Prague-had meanwhile been through their own adventure. When Hitler moved on from the Sudetenland to occupy the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, a group of archivists and scholars gathered most of them and spirited them out of the country on the very last civilian plane to leave. The papers ended up in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, and are still there today. The few files left behind were defenestrated through the ofiice window by German soldiers, and mostly lost.

The Husserl archives survived the war and are mostly still in Louvain, with his library. They have kept researchers busy for over seventy-five years, and have generated a collected edition under the title Husserliana. So far, this comprises forty-two volumes of collected works, nine volumes of extra ‘materials’, thirty-four volumes of miscellaneous documents and correspondence, and thirteen volumes of official English translations.

One of the first to travel to Louvain to see the archive was Maurice Merleau~Ponty, Who already knew Husserl’s earlier work well, and had read about the 1mPllbliShed manuscripts in an article in the Revue internationale de philosophie. In March I939, he wrote to arrange a visit to Father Van Breda so as to pursue ms special inter\ est in the phenomenology of perception. Van Breda welcomed him, and Merleau-Ponty spent a blissful first week of April in Louvain, absorbed in the unedited and unpublished sections which Husserl had intended to add to Ideas and to The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.

These late works of Husserl’s are different in spirit from the earlier ones. To Merleau~Ponty, they suggested that Husserl had begun m0V~ ing away from his inward, idealist interpretation of phenomenology in his last years, towards a less isolated picture of how one exists in a world alongside other people and immersed in sensory experience. Merleau-Ponty even wondered whether Husserl had absorbed some of this from Heideggeran interpretation with which not everyone agrees. Other influences might be seen too: from sociology, and perhaps from Jakob von Uexkiill’s studies of how different species experi~ ence their ‘environment’ or Umwelt. Whatever the source, Husserl’s new thinking included reflections on what he called the Lebenswelt, 0r rlife-world’-that barely noticed social, historical and physical context in which all our activities take place, and which we generally take for granted. Even our bodies rarely require conscious attention, yet a sense of being embodied is part of almost every experience we have. As I move around or reach out to grasp something, I sense my own limbs and the arrangement of my physical self in the world. I feel my hands and feet from within; 1 don’t have to look in a mirror to see how they are positioned. This is known as ‘proprioception’-the perception of self --and it is an important aspect of experience which I tend to notice only when something goes wrong with it. When I encounter others, says Husserl, I also recognise them implicitly as beings who have ‘their personal surrounding world, oriented around their living bodies’. Body, life-world, proprioception and social context are all integrated into the texture of worldly being.

One can see why Merleau-Ponty saw signs of Heidegger’s philosophy of Being-in-thehworld in this new interest of Husserl’s. There were other connections too: Husserl’s late works show him considering the long Drocesses of culture and history, just as Heidegger did. But here

there is a great difference between them. Heidegger’s writings on the history of Being are suffused with a longing for some home time, a lost age or place to which philosophy should be traced, and from which it should be renewed. Heidegger’s dream-home often calls to mind the forested Germanic world of his childhood, with its crafts; manship and silent wisdom. At other times, it evokes archaic Greek culture, which he considered the last period in which humanity had philosophised properly. Heidegger was not alone in being fascinated by Greece; it was a sort of mania among Germans at the time. But other German thinkers often focused on the flowering of philosophy and scholarship in the fourth century BC, the time of Socrates and Plato, whereas Heidegger saw that as the period in which everything had started going wrong. For him, the philosophers who truly connected with Being were pre-Socratics such as Heraclitus, Parmenides and Anaximander. In any case, what Heidegger’s writings on Germany and Greece share is the mood of someone yearning to go back into the deep forest, into childhood innocence and into the dark waters from which the first swirling chords of thought had stirred. Backback to a time when societies were simple, profound and poetic.

Husserl did not look for such a simple lost world. When he wrote about history, he was drawn to more sophisticated periods, especially those when cultures were encountering each other through travel, migration, exploration or trade. At such periods, he wrote, people living in one culture or "home-world’ (Heimwelt) meet people from an 'alien-world’ (Fremdwelt). To those others, theirs is the home-world and the other is the alien-world. The shock of encounter is mutual, and it wakes each culture up to an amazing discovery: that their world is not beyond question. A travelling Greek discovers that the Greek life-world is just a Greek world, and that there are Indian and African worlds too. In seeing this, members of each culture may come to understand that they are, in general, ‘worlded’ beings, who should not take anything for granted.

For Husserl, therefore, cross-cultural encounters are generally good, because they stimulate people to self-questioning. He suspected that philosophy started in ancient Greece not, as Heidegger would imagine,

Jane

From the Atlantic:
But before the selfie came “the self,” or the fairly modern concept of the independent “individual.” The now-ubiquitous selfie expresses in miniature the seismic conceptual shift that came about centuries ago, spurred in part by advances in printing technology and new ways of thinking in philosophy. It’s not that the self didn’t exist in pre-modern cultures: Rather, the emphasis the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century placed on personal will, conscience, and understanding—rather than tradition and authority—in matters of faith spilled over the bounds of religious experience into all of life. Perhaps the first novel to best express the modern idea of the self was Jane Eyre, written in 1847 by Charlotte Brontë, born 200 years ago this year.
The broader cultural implications of the story—its insistence on the value of conscience and will—were such that one critic fretted some years after its publication that the “most alarming revolution of modern times has followed the invasion of Jane Eyre.” Before the Reformation and the Enlightenment that followed, before Rene Descartes’s cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”), when the sources of authority were external and objective, the aspects of the self so central to today’s understanding mattered little because they didn’t really affect the course of an individual’s life. The Reformation empowered believers to read and interpret the scriptures for themselves, rather than relying on the help of clergy; by extension, this seemed to give people permission to read and interpret their own interior world.
To be sure, early novelists before Brontë such as Frances Burney, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Mary Shelley contributed to the form’s developing art of the first-person narrator. But these authors used the contrivances of edited letters or memoirs, devices that tended toward underdeveloped characters, episodic plots, and a general sense of artificiality—even when the stories were presented not as fiction but “histories.” No earlier novelist had provided a voice so seemingly pure, so fully belonging to the character, as Brontë. She developed her art alongside her sisters, the novelists Anne and Emily (all of them publishing under gender-neutral pseudonyms), but it was Charlotte whose work best captured the sense of the modern individual.
There is nothing of the book, Woolf declares, “except Jane Eyre.” Jane’s voice is the source of the power the book has to absorb the reader completely into her world. Woolf explains how Brontë depicts:

… an overpowering personality, so that, as we say in real life, they have only to open the door to make themselves felt. There is in them some untamed ferocity perpetually at war with the accepted order of things which makes them desire to create instantly rather than to observe patiently.

It is exactly this willingness—desire, even—to be “at war with the accepted order of things” that characterizes the modern self. While we now take such a sense for granted, it was, as Brontë’s contemporaries rightly understood, radical in her day. More disturbing to Brontë’s Victorian readers than the sheer sensuality of the story and Jane’s deep passion was “the heroine’s refusal to submit to her social destiny,” as the literary critic Sandra M. Gilbert explains. Indeed, one contemporary review complained, “It is true Jane does right, and exerts great moral strength,” but the critic continues that “it is the strength of a mere heathen mind which is a law unto itself.” In presenting such a character, the reviewer worries, Brontë has “overthrown authority” and cultivated “rebellion.” And in a way they were right: “I resisted all the way,” Jane says as she is dragged by her cruel aunt toward banishment in the bedroom where her late uncle died. This sentence, Joyce Carol Oates argues, serves as the theme of Jane’s whole story.

I love the opening passage and with true self-doubt find I wish the book were "Mrs. Reed":

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.

I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, and humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed.

The said Eliza, John, and Georgiana were now clustered round their mama in the drawing-room: she lay reclined on a sofa by the fireside, and with her darlings about her (for the time neither quarrelling nor crying) looked perfectly happy. Me, she had dispensed from joining the group; saying, "She regretted to be under the necessity of keeping me at a distance; but that until she heard from Bessie, and could discover by her own observation, that I was endeavouring in good earnest to acquire a more sociable and childlike disposition, a more attractive and sprightly manner—something lighter, franker, more natural, as it were—she really must exclude me from privileges intended only for contented, happy, little children."

"What does Bessie say I have done?" I asked.

"Jane, I don't like cavillers or questioners; besides, there is something truly forbidding in a child taking up her elders in that manner. Be seated somewhere; and until you can speak pleasantly, remain silent."

The Swerve

The prime hunting grounds for Poggio and his fellow book hunters were the libraries of old monasteries, and for good reason: for long centuries monasteries had been virtually the only institutions that cared about books. Even in the stable and prosperous times of the Roman Empire, literacy rates, by our standards at least, were not high. As the empire crumbled, as cities decayed, trade declined, and the increasingly anxious populace scanned the horizon for barbarian armies, the Whole Roman system of elementary and higher education fell apart. What began as downsizing went on to wholesale abandonment. Schools closed, libraries and academies shut their doors, profes~ sional grammarians and teachers of rhetoric found themselves out of work. There were more important things to worry about than the fate of books.

But all monks were expected to know how to read. In a world increasingly dominated by illiterate warlords, that expectation, formulated early in the history of monasticism, was of incalculable importance. Here is the Rule from the monasteries established in Egypt and throughout the Middle East by the late fourth-century Coptic saint Pachomius. When a candidate for admission to the monastery presents himself to the elders,

they shall give him twenty Psalms or two of the Apostles’ epistles or some other part of Scripture. And if he is illiterate he shall go at the first, third and sixth hours to someone who can teach and has been appointed for him. He shall stand before him and learn very studiously and with all gratitude. The fundamentals of a syllable, the verbs and nouns shall be written for him and even if he does not want to, he shall be compelled to read.

“He shall be compelled to read.” It was this compulsion that, through centuries of chaos, helped to salvage the achievements of ancient thought.

Though in the most influential of all the monastic rules, written in the sixth century, St. Benedict did not similarly specify an explicit literacy requirement, he provided the equivalent of one by including a period each day for reading-“prayerful reading,” as he put it-as well as manual labor. “Idleness is the enemy of the soul,” the saint wrote, and he made certain that the hours would be filled up. Monks would be permitted to read at certain other times as well, though such voluntary reading would have to be conducted in strict silence. (In Benedict’s time, as throughout antiquity, reading was ordinarily performed audibly.) But about the prescribed reading times there was nothing voluntary.

The monks were to read, whether they felt like it or not, and the Rule called for careful supervision:

Above all, one or two seniors must surely be deputed to make the rounds of the monastery While the brothers are reading. Their duty is to see that no brother is so acediosus as to waste time or engage in idle talk to the neglect of his reading, and so not only harm himself but also distract others.

Acediosus, sometimes translated as apathetic refers to an illness, specific to monastic communities, which had already been brilliantly diagnosed in the late fourth century by the Desert Father John Cassian. The monk in the grip of acedia would find it difficult or impossible to read. Looking away from his book, he might try to distract himself with gossip but would more likely glance in disgust at his surroundings and at his fellow monks. He would feel that things were better somewhere else, that he was wasting his life, that everything was stale and pointless, that he was suffocating.

He looks about anxiously this way and that, and signs that none of the brethren come to see him, and often goes in and out of his cell, and frequently gazes up at the sun, as if it was too slow in setting, and so a kind of unreasonable confusion of mind takes possession of him like some foul darkness.
Such a monk--and there were evidently many of them-had succumbed to what we would call a clinical state of depression.
Cassian called the disease “the noonday demon,” and the Benedictine Rule set a careful watch, especially at reading times, to detect anyone manifesting its symptoms.
If such a monk is found-God forbid-he should be reproved a first and a second time. If he does not amend, he must be subjected to the punishment of the rule so that the others may have fear.
A refusal to read at the prescribed time-whether because of distraction, boredom, or despair-would thus be Visited first by public criticism and then, if the refusal continued, by blows. The symptoms of psychic pain would be driven out by physical pain. And, suitably chastened, the distressed monk would return-in principle at least-to his “prayerful reading."

There was yet another time in which the Benedictine Rule called for reading: every day at meals one of the brothers was assigned, on a weekly basis, to read aloud. Benedict was well aware that for at least certain of the monks this assignment would occasion pride, and he therefore tried to suppress the sensation as best he could: “Let the incoming reader ask all to pray for him so that God may shield him from the feeling of elation.” He was aware too that for others the readings would be an occasion for mockery or simply for chat, and here too the Rule made careful provision: “Let there be complete silence. No whispering, no speaking-only the reader’s voice should be heard there.” But, above all, he wanted to prevent these readings from provoking discussion or debate: “No one should presume to ask a question about the reading or about anything else, lest occasion be given.”

“Lest occasion be given”: the phrase, in a text normally quite clear, is oddly vague. Occasion to whom or for what? Modern editors sometimes insert the phrase “to the devil” and that indeed may be what is implied here. But why should the Prince of Darkness be excited by a question about the reading? The answer must be that any question, however innocuous, could raise the prospect of a discussion, a discussion that would imply that religious doctrines were open to inquiry and argument.

Benedict did not absolutely prohibit commentary on the sacred texts that were read aloud, but he wanted to restrict its source: “The superior,” the Rule allows, “may wish to say a few words of instruction.” Those words were not to be questioned or contradicted, and indeed all contention was in principle to be suppressed. As the listing of punishments in the influential rule of the Irish monk Columbanus (born in the year Benedict died) makes clear, lively debate, intellectual or otherwise,
was forbidden. To the monk who has dared to contradict a fellow monk with such words as "It is not as you say,” there is a heavy penalty: “an imposition of silence or fifty blows.” The high walls that hedged about the mental life of the monks‘ the imposition of silence, the prohibition of questioning, the punishing of debate with slaps or blows of the whip-were all meant to affirm unambiguously that these pious communities were the opposite of the philosophical academies of Greece or Rome, places that had thrived upon the spirit of contradiction and cultivated a restless, wide-ranging curiosity.

All the same, monastic rules did require reading, and that was enough to set in motion an extraordinary chain of consequences. Reading was not optional or desirable or recommended; in a community that took its obligations with deadly seriousness, reading was obligatory. And reading required books. Books that were opened again and again eventually fell apart, however carefully they were handled. Therefore, almost inadvertently, monastic rules necessitated that monks repeatedly purchase or acquire books. In the course of the vicious Gothic Wars of the mid-sixth century and their still more miserable aftermath, the last commercial workshops of book production folded, and the vestiges of the book market fell apart. Therefore, again almost inadvertently, monastic rules necessitated that monks carefully preserve and copy those books that they already possessed. But all trade with the papyrus makers of Egypt had long vanished, and in the absence of a commercial book market, the commercial industry for converting animal skins to writing surfaces had fallen into abeyance. Therefore, once again almost inadvertently, monastic rules necessitated that monks learn the laborious art of making parchment and salvaging existing parchment. Without wishing to emulate the pagan elites by placing books or writing at the center of society, without affirming the importance of rhetoric or grammar, without prizing either learning or debate, monks nonetheless became the principal readers, librarians, book preservers, and hook producers of the Western world.

Poggio and the other humanists on the trail for lost classics knew all this. Having already sifted through many of the monastic libraries in Italy and having followed Petrarch’s lead in France, they also knew that the great, uncharted territories were Switzerland and Germany. But many of those monasteries were extremely difficult to reach-their founders had built them in deliberately remote places, in order to withdraw from the temptations, distractions, and dangers of the world And once an eager humanist, having endured the discomforts and risks of travel, managed to reach the distant monasteries, what then? The number of scholars who knew what to look for and who were competent to recognize what they had come to find, if they had the good fortune to stumble across it, was extremely small. There was, moreover, a problem of access: to get through the door a scholar would have to be able to persuade a skeptical abbot and a still more skeptical monastic librarian that he had a legitimate reason to be there. Access to the library was ordinarily denied to any outsider. Petrarch was a cleric; he could at least make his appeal from within the large institutional community of the Church. Many of the humanists by contrast were laymen and would have aroused immediate suspicion.

This daunting list did not exhaust the problems. For if a book hunter reached a monastery, got past the heavily barred door, entered the library, and actually found something interesting, he would still need to do something with the manuscript he had found.

Books were scarce and valuable.

The Last of Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

Hemingway fights, predictably poorly:

On the eleventh of August, days before sailing back to Spain, Hemingway dropped by Scribners without calling ahead, took the elevator to the fifth floor, and roamed back to his editor’s corner office. Sitting with Perkins, his back to the door, was Max Eastman. They were planning a new edition of his Enjoyment of Poetry. Ernest barged in and quickly realized who the other party was. Because Hemingway had often told Perkins what he would do if he ever met Eastman, because of that piece Eastman had written several years earlier, ”Bull in the Afternoon,” Perkins swallowed hard and thought fast. Hoping humor would work, Perkins said to Eastman, “Here’s a friend of yours, Max.”

Hemingway shook hands with Eastman and they swapped amenities. Then Ernest, with a broad smile, ripped open his shirt and exposed a chest which Perkins thought was hirsute enough to impress any man. Eastman laughed, and Ernest good-naturedly reached over and unbuttoned Eastman’s shirt, revealing a chest as bare as a bald man’s head. Everyone laughed at the contrast. Perkins got ready to expose his chest, sure that he could place second, when Hemingway truculently demanded of Eastman, "What do you mean [by] accusing me of impotence?”

Eastman denied that he had, and there were sharp words back and forth. Eastman said, "Ernest, you don’t know what you are talking about.
Here, read what I said.” He picked up a copy of Art and the Life Of Action on Perkins's desk, which the editor had there for some other reason, not even remembering that it contained ”Bull in the Afternoon,“ But instead of reading the passage Eastman pointed out, Ernest begin part of another paragraph, and trailed off into muttered profanity. "Read all of it, Ernest,” Eastman urged him. "You don't understand it. . . , Here, let Max read it.”

Perkins saw that things were getting serious. He started to read, thinking that would somehow calm things down. But Ernest snatched the book from him and said, ”No, I am going to do the reading." As he started again, his face flushed, and he turned and smacked Eastman with the open book. Eastman rushed at him. Perkins, fearful that Ernest would kill Eastman, ran around his desk to grab Hemingway from behind. As the two authors grappled, all the precariously balanced books and papers on Perkins’s desk toppled off, and both men fell to the floor. Thinking he was restraining Hemingway, Perkins grabbed the man on top. But when Max looked down, there was Ernest on his back, gazing up at him, his broken glasses dangling and a naughty grin from ear to ear. Apparently he had regained his composure instantly upon striking Eastman and put up no resistance whatever when Eastman landed on top of him.

After Hemingway and Eastman parted, Perkins spoke to the crowd of employees who had gathered. All agreed to say nothing. Max Eastman, however, wrote out an account of the incident, and the next night at a dinner where there were a number of newspaper people, he read it aloud, apparently at the urging of his wife. The next day Perkins’s office swarmed with journalists, and another group interviewed Ernest at the docks just before he sailed for Europe. According to the Times, ”Mr. Hemingway explained that. he had felt sorry for Mr. Eastman, for he knew he had seriously embarrassed him by slapping his face. ‘The man didn’t have a bit of fight. He just croaked, you know, at Max Perkins, “Who’s calling on you, Ernest or me?” ’ So I got out.”

Perkins maintained a public position of silent neutrality, but to spe’ cial friends such as Scott Fitderald and Elizabeth Lemmon he told all. He believed Hemingway could have annihilated Eastman if he had wanted to; but he noted that Eastman did have both Hemingway's shoulders pinned. Fitzgerald was grateful for the blow-by-blow account, because he had heard every possible version of the tussle "save that Eastman has fled to Shanghai with Pauline.”

and

Louise (Perkins) was back in the country for good, but again she found herself with an excess of energy, a surplus that city life had used to burn off. Her passion to perform on stage had eased, but a restlessness still flickered within her. She searched for a life of her own outside the house, and soon she found it.
Early in 1938 several nuns from the local Roman Catholic parish came to the Perkinses’ door to speak to their Catholic cook. Louise chatted with the sisters for a few minutes, then wrote their church a generous check. The nuns stayed to talk some more, and by the time they left, Louise had become impressed with Catholicism. She looked into it a bit further, and several weeks later she found herself in earnest conversation with the parish priest. ”What means the most to you apart from people?” he asked her. Her reply came without hesitation: ”Talent in the theater.” The priest told her to "take that and lay it on the altar of Jesus Christ.” At age fifty, Louise emerged from the wings into her new holy theater with all the vitality of an ingenue and the enthusiasm of a convert. As Elizabeth Lemmon noted, "Louise always had a passion for purple.” Whether or not her motivation was truly religious, it was strong. Friends and relatives indicated that Louise’s conversion had more than theatrical implications. Several people said it was her ”rebellion against the family.” One daughter suggested it was another stage in ”Mother’s lifelong struggle to be creative.”

Max was not convinced by Louise’s new devotion. Once, when she began one of her crusades, attempting to reform her entire household, he pointed out, ”Your voice takes on a phony tone whenever you talk about the Church.” When she asked for the umpteenth time, "Max, why won’t you try it once?”-as though it were some new headache remedy he responded, "And have you tried Buddha?” The harder she fought to save his soul, the harder Max resisted. It was a new version of their perennial battle-silent reserve versus unrestrained enthusiasm. Louise proselytized wherever she went, often to Max’s embarrassment. She sprinkled holy water all over the house, dousing Max’s pillow several times a week. With a sigh he would ask his daughters if they could not ”do something” about their mother. One evening, when she was running low on reasons why Max should convert, she told him if he did not start confessing his sins and taking Communion he would burn in hell. “Thank God I’m not going to heaven--” he came back, ”with all you Catholics.”

and

(Perkins gave contracts to people he) felt had lived interesting lives filled with colorful characters and dramatic events. But often, he eventually realized, these were the very people who lacked the perseverance or talent to write. Perkins gave a middling advance to one artist who was famous for his exploits and wanted to write his life story. The artist used the money to hire a succession of beautiful secretaries, "No matter what chapter from his life he set out to dictate,” Malcolm Cowley related in the N ew Yorker in the early forties, ”he found that the only words he could say were, ‘Miss Jones, did anyone ever tell you that you were beautiful?’ The book hasn’t been started, but Perkins thinks the artist still has it in him, and that someday, barring accidents, he will get it out.”

As did every publisher, Scribners gambled away thousands of dollars on books that never materialized, and the responsibility for every one of them weighed heavily on Max's conscience. When a manuscript came in and was unpublishable, Max felt even worse. "This is the way of it,” he explained to Elizabeth Lemmon. ”All my life, always, I’ve got myself into a jam and had to get out of it or die, all because of carelessness and folly. So I take on these books from something in the writer and my response to it. Then comes the ms. or the first part of it. I can’t give it to anyone else. They would say it was rotten, or not worth labor. I have to do the work, and I do it over and over in desperation. Sometimes I’d be ashamed to show it.”

and

William B. Wisdom had been gathering Wolfe’s writings for years.
He planned to establish a memorial at Harvard-a collection of all the Wolfe material he could get hold of, including, he hoped, the passionate love letters between Wolfe and Mrs. Bernstein. Their sweetest and ugliest sentiments were conveyed in those letters. One of the most memorable salutations, for example, read, ”My heavy-breasted, grey-haired Jewish bitch, I love the stench of your plum-colored arm-pits.” In June, 1943, Aline wrote Perkins,
I daresay I will get used to the idea of my letters to Tom being sold, but I’m not used to it yet in spite of the fact that it is legal. It is all a shock to me, but amounts to little in the scale of people’s sorrow now on earth. So this is the end of it from me to you. I carry with me always though, the pain of the fact that our relationship, Tom’s and mine, was never resolved during his life. Maybe it never could have been. It held so much, for so long a time, time that was magnificent, and even at the end he must have known in his heart’s core, how we were to each other.

In due course Perkins asked Mrs. Bernstein to surrender her own letters from Tom for the collection. She consented, but would not give them to Wisdom-whom she. suspected of profiting from the Wolfe material-for nothing. After several years of negotiating, Wisdom purchased the collection. Mrs. Bernstein demanded that every penny of the money due her go to the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. Writing to Max about this stipulation, she said: "It will be a retaliation for all the insults to the Jews that Tom hurled at me.”

and

That summer Perkins saw the film version of For Whom the Bell Tolls. He was delighted when he first heard that Gary Cooper was going to play the lead role. Perkins admired him so much that he had seen him in Sergeant York twice. After seeing the new film, though, Max realized the limitations of his favorite actor and the medium itself. He wrote Evan Shipman:

Of course Gary Cooper is just the way he always is-which is good, but is not Robert, nor anything like him. That is partly because all the subjective part of the story, or almost all, has got lost. Perhaps necessarily.

The only other motion picture that Perkins had ever shown any interest in was The Charge of the Light Brigade. He did not want to view the entire film, just the charge itself. Max made his middle daughter, Peggy, accompany him to the theater. He stationed her so that she could watch both the screen and her father, who stood in the lobby. They waited an hour and a half for the climactic moment. When she saw that Errol Flynn was about to lead the charge, Peggy signaled, Perkins advanced through the lobby, stood in the aisle, and observed the Brigade’s routing. Then Max and his daughter promptly retreated.
Ernest Hemingway had been in Cuba for the better part of the last year-~“doing whatever it is he is doing,” Max wrote Evan Shipman. Papa was busy patrolling in his boat, searching for German submarines. This was important work, he said, and he could not write while the war was going on. Perkins wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt but knew there was more to it than that.

and

There was no Gulf Stream for Perkins to glide off in, just a multiplying burden of anxieties. His authors’ plights, laid upon him, became more horrific, often macabre: One wanted Perkins’s counsel regarding her daughter who was having a breakdown; another sent him glimpses from her own traumatic childhood-true Gothic tales of being forced to dig up a dead sister’s corpse and dress her in doll’s clothes. There were distant relatives who had to borrow money or were seeking jobs, marriage problems of inlaws, women’s clubs campaigning against smut in literature, ethnic and political groups protesting certain characterizations, young people constantly seeking advice on becoming published writers, more family war casualties, authors whose books demonstrated that the earth was round but that we lived inside of it, or who had written five-volume novels entitled God. Through it all he kept his head while all about him were losing theirs.

The Duchess of Devonshire

From: Wait for Me!
Two things annoyed Farve in my mother's otherwise impeccably run house. If a housemaid was rash enough to remove the deepest ashes from the grate where a wood fire burned, she was in trouble. Farve was right: it is the ashes that hold the heat and ensure a quick start in the morning. He found a way of avoiding the second annoyance. After breakfast he refilled his coffee cup and took it to his study. He let it get cold and drank what he called his ‘suckments’ at intervals during the morning. A tidy, new-to-the-job maid took the cup back to the pantry, emptied and washed it. This enraged my father: ‘Some monkey’s orphan has taken my suckments.’ Thereafter he locked the cup in his safe.

Farve was impatient, intolerant, impulsive, loyal, courageous, loving, fastidious, unread and possessed of great charm, all underwritten with courtly good manners to most. Every now and then his short fuse made him lash out. He was profoundly irritated by some of the young men Nancy invited to the house and more than once lost his temper with her friend James Lees-Milne, the future author and diarist. On one occasion Jim leant down to pick something up and a comb fell out of his pocket: ‘A man carrying a comb well!' On another famous occasion, Jim advocated friendship with Germany and Farve turned him out of the house. Poor Jim went to his motorbike but it was raining hard and it would not start. In despair he found the back door and was rescued by Mabel who hustled him upstairs. As he was creeping out of the house the next morning he met Farve. ‘Good morning,’ said Farve. He had forgotten the whole episode and offered Jim our usual generous breakfast.

Farve either liked you or he did not, there was no middle way. My mother sometimes tried to reason with him, but reason was not part of his makeup and, unlike her, he had favourites. This was unfair but he never tried to hide or moderate his feelings, it was part of his honesty. There was often a ‘Rat Week’ when he would pick on one of us for some] times imaginary offences. Decca, who was able to twist him round her little finger and take liberties with him that none of the rest of us would have dared, fell out of favour for a while for no apparent reason. Unity became more silent and unresponsive in her teens because Farve was always watching her for some trifling misdemeanour.

It had been the same with his own brothers and sisters. He never liked his younger sister Joan but was fond of the man she married, Denis Farrer. ‘The very desiccated Old Dean’, he called him affectionately. Denis was not a dean, it was just a play on his name, but it was a spot-on description of that thin, sharp-featured fellow in middle age. Farve was once talking to an acquaintance about the Farrers and said, 'The only trouble with the Old Dean is that he married a ghastly woman.’ ‘Oh?’ said the acquaintance. ‘I thought she was your sister?’ Yes, she is. A poisonous creature.’

and

Muv told me that had she had to earn her living she would have been happy as the woman at the caisse in a Paris restaurant, usually a formidable female dressed in black who sat enclosed in a raised glass cage above the tables and collected the cash from the diners’ bills. The nearest Muv got to her ambition was to be County Treasurer of the Oxfordshire Federation‘of Women’s Institutes.

Alice Chapter 3

A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale

  They were indeed a queer-looking party that assembled on the bank--the birds with draggled feathers, the animals with their fur clinging close to them, and all dripping wet, cross, and uncomfortable.
  The first question of course was, how to get dry again: they had a consultation about this, and after a few minutes it seemed quite natural to Alice to find herself talking familiarly with them, as if she had known them all her life. Indeed, she had quite a long argument with the Lory, who at last turned sulky, and would only say, `I am older than you, and must know better'; and this Alice would not allow without knowing how old it was, and, as the Lory positively refused to tell its age, there was no more to be said.
  At last the Mouse, who seemed to be a person of authority among them, called out, `Sit down, all of you, and listen to me! I'LL soon make you dry enough!' They all sat down at once, in a large ring, with the Mouse in the middle. Alice kept her eyes anxiously fixed on it, for she felt sure she would catch a bad cold if she did not get dry very soon.
  `Ahem!' said the Mouse with an important air, `are you all ready? This is the driest thing I know. Silence all round, if you please! "William the Conqueror, whose cause was favoured by the pope, was soon submitted to by the English, who wanted leaders, and had been of late much accustomed to usurpation and conquest. Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria--"'
  `Ugh!' said the Lory, with a shiver.
  `I beg your pardon!' said the Mouse, frowning, but very politely: `Did you speak?'
  `Not I!' said the Lory hastily.
  `I thought you did,' said the Mouse. `--I proceed. "Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria, declared for him: and even Stigand, the patriotic archbishop of Canterbury, found it advisable--"'
  `Found WHAT?' said the Duck.
  `Found IT,' the Mouse replied rather crossly: `of course you know what "it" means.'
  `I know what "it" means well enough, when I find a thing,' said the Duck: `it's generally a frog or a worm. The question is, what did the archbishop find?'
  The Mouse did not notice this question, but hurriedly went on, `"--found it advisable to go with Edgar Atheling to meet William and offer him the crown. William's conduct at first was moderate. But the insolence of his Normans--" How are you getting on now, my dear?' it continued, turning to Alice as it spoke.
  `As wet as ever,' said Alice in a melancholy tone: `it doesn't seem to dry me at all.'
  `In that case,' said the Dodo solemnly, rising to its feet, `I move that the meeting adjourn, for the immediate adoption of more energetic remedies--'
  `Speak English!' said the Eaglet. `I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and, what's more, I don't believe you do either!' And the Eaglet bent down its head to hide a smile: some of the other birds tittered audibly.
  `What I was going to say,' said the Dodo in an offended tone, `was, that the best thing to get us dry would be a Caucus-race.'
  `What IS a Caucus-race?' said Alice; not that she wanted much to know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that SOMEBODY ought to speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything.
  `Why,' said the Dodo, `the best way to explain it is to do it.' (And, as you might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will tell you how the Dodo managed it.)
  First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle, (`the exact shape doesn't matter,' it said,) and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there. There was no `One, two, three, and away,' but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out `The race is over!' and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, `But who has won?'
  This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said, `EVERYBODY has won, and all must have prizes.'
  `But who is to give the prizes?' quite a chorus of voices asked.
  `Why, SHE, of course,' said the Dodo, pointing to Alice with one finger; and the whole party at once crowded round her, calling out in a confused way, `Prizes! Prizes!'
  Alice had no idea what to do, and in despair she put her hand in her pocket, and pulled out a box of comfits, (luckily the salt water had not got into it), and handed them round as prizes. There was exactly one a-piece all round.
  `But she must have a prize herself, you know,' said the Mouse.
  `Of course,' the Dodo replied very gravely. `What else have you got in your pocket?' he went on, turning to Alice.
  `Only a thimble,' said Alice sadly.
  `Hand it over here,' said the Dodo.
  Then they all crowded round her once more, while the Dodo solemnly presented the thimble, saying `We beg your acceptance of this elegant thimble'; and, when it had finished this short speech, they all cheered.
  Alice thought the whole thing very absurd, but they all looked so grave that she did not dare to laugh; and, as she could not think of anything to say, she simply bowed, and took the thimble, looking as solemn as she could.
  The next thing was to eat the comfits: this caused some noise and confusion, as the large birds complained that they could not taste theirs, and the small ones choked and had to be patted on the back. However, it was over at last, and they sat down again in a ring, and begged the Mouse to tell them something more.              

Churchill and Chamberlain

From The Dark Valley:
Churchill remained a compelling figure, for all his comic quirks, and a statesman of the front rank even though he had been for so long conlined to the back-benches. Phipps spared no pains to discredit him with the French, assuring Herriot and others that Churchill only spoke for a very small section of the British public and that his utterances should be taken with “liberal sprinklings of salt.”

It was not surprising that Churchill should have provoked mistrust. For although he was brave, eloquent, witty, industrious, dogged, versatile and supremely talented, with most great offices of state under his belt and many gorgeous feathers in his cap, Churchill had given more hostages to fortune than any other politician of his day. Britain’s leading parliamentarian had changed parties twice and policies so often that, Lord Beaverbrook declared, he had held every view on every question. Said to be a warlord at sea during Armageddon, Churchill had sired the Dardanelles disaster. He had treated strikers as the enemy within and earned a reputation as warmonger towards foreign foes. He had returned the pound to the gold standard at too high a rate. He had attacked progress towards Indian independence, branding himself as a blimpish reactionary. In a mood of cavalier romanticism during the abdication crisis he had championed Edward VIII. In short, Churchill seemed to be brilliant but unsound. It was an opinion to which most leading figures of the day subscribed. According to Asquith, Churchill thought with his mouth and had “genius without judgement.” He possessed a powerful brain, noted Lloyd George, but it was prevented from running true by “a tragic flaw in the metal.”‘ Baldwin repeated (and modified) a story told by an early biographer that at Churchill’s birth the good fairies came trooping in with their gifts-imagination, daring, energy, guts-and then a bad fairy arrived to deny him wisdom. It became a commonplace to depict Churchill as a buccaneer: picturesque certainly, but rash, ambitious, dangerous and volatile. R. A. Butler, Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office before the war, considered him “the greatest adventurer of modern political history”

Butler also cast aspersions on Churchill’s origins, calling him a “half breed American.” This was a typical instance of the character assassination by association to which he was subjected. Undoubtedly, though, Churchill’s stock was lowered as much by his rakish relations as by his disreputable friends. They all seemed to identify him as “a particularly way, Ward, rootless and anachronistic product of a decaying and increasingly discredited aristocratic order.”8 Churchill’s mother was not only the daughter of a notorious Wall Street speculator, she also acquired a train of unsuitable husbands and lovers. His father, the erratic and syphilitic Lord Randolph, was a striking example of ducal degeneracy. For “all his remark~ able cleverness” Lord Randolph was, in the estimation of the fifteenth earl of Derby, “thoroughly untrustworthy: scarcely a gentleman, and probably more or less mad.”Winston’s staunch belief in Churchills against the world seemed less like family loyalty than tribal chauvinism when other members of his clan were considered: vapid dilettantes such as Moreton Frewen, known as “Mortal Ruin”; blue-blooded boors such as “Sunny,” ninth Duke of Marlborough, whose wife Gladys said that he was ruled by “black, vicious personal pride like a disease”;‘° the unwelcome and nonpaying Guests; and, the greatest trial of all, Churchill’s spoiled son Randolph, who jovially acknowledged that he was not fit to be allowed out in private.

Churchill’s friends were cast in the same mould, with the partial exception of the vegetarian, non-smoking, teetotalitarian Professor Frederick Lindemann. (Even he was a social carnivore-he once took counsel’s opinion about what place he was entitled to occupy at high table in his Oxford college, Christ Church.) They were high-living and often hard-drinking freebooters who dwelt on the outer edge of respectability. F. E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead, was considered to be a “fluent and plausible bounder”II early in his career, while later, to his fury, he was represented as a “crapulous and corpulent buffoon.”“ Lord Beaverbrook was aptly nicknamed “Been-a-crook” and seemed to be “a kind of Dracula, Svengali, Iago and Mephistopheles rolled into one.” Brendan Bracken, the redhaired financial and political chancer who was (wrongly) rumoured to be Churchill’s illegitimate son, appeared to be a charlatan incarnate. “Everything about you is phoney,” said a journalist; “Even your hair, which looks like a wig, isn’t.”‘With friends and relations like these, Churchill understandably offended the bourgeoisie, though he did not let that worry him. He used “middle-class” as a term of abuse, shared his father’s disdain for suburban “lords of pineries and vineries” and despised “adjectival grocers”“-what he would have made of an adjectival grocer’s daughter can only be imagined.

Churchill’s extravagant style of life was also an affront to more modest folk, especially during the Depression: adopting F. E. Smith’s maxim, he professed to be easily satisfied with the very best. He behaved like a nabob, crowned with flamboyant hats out of doors and robed in garish dressing gowns at home. With the body of an unrepentant sybarite and “the face of a self-indulgent cherub,”‘he exuded an aura of cigar smoke, eau-de-Cologne and good liquor. (His wine merchant’s bills, which were large and paid slowly, as he had a lordly way with tradesmen, included many half bottles of champagne-not for sharing. But he was no alcoholic for, as C. P. Snow said, no alcoholic could drink that much.) Churchill’s appetite for food was gargantuan: he liked roast beef as well as white wine for breakfast, with other meals on an equally carnivorous scale. He made no secret of his patrician taste for gambling, polo and hunting (foxes not women). Servants were part of the tenure of his existence, running his life on oiled wheels. His country house, Chartwell Manor, near Westerham in Kent, was organised like a miniature Blenheim Palace.

Churchill adored Chartwell and spent huge sums on renovating and improving it, with mixed results. The dining-room, for example, scene of oratorical as well as gastronomic feasts, had to accommodate great girders which made it much too low for its length. It was like eating in a basement-except for the wonderful views over Churchill’s happy valley. This he cherished. He planted and dug, laid out a tennis court and excavated a swimming-pool which was heated so that it steamed. He built enormous walls, laying bricks with more energy than skill and often dictating letters as he went. He created lakes, dams, waterfalls, fish-ponds, treating his black swans, golden orfe and other creatures with anthropomorphic indulgence. He farmed in a lavish but inexpert fashion, telling Lloyd George that he was determined to make agriculture pay, “whatever it costs!”

Churchill often guyed himself thus, giving involuntary colour to hostile interpretations of his character and conduct. Equally provocative in deed, he was himself largely responsible for the fact that pre-war contemporaries saw him in caricature terms-as a fabulous soldier of fortune forever plotting some fantastic coup. That view of Churchill was almost entirely effaced by his great achievements during the Second World War and by his subsequent account of them. Since Churchill hung on to his prime-ministerial papers, this account was authoritatively documented as well as unashamedly partisan. History would be his judge, he liked to jest, and he would write the history. So for a generation Churchill remained a gleaming titan marching triumphantly to broad sunlit uplands through the pages of his own works-and those of his many admirers. His was the spirit that inspired the nation in its finest hour. His was the voice that gave the lion’s roar. He was the colossus who won victory over the forces. Churchill’s tragedy, and Britain’s, was that during the late 1930s he found himself cast in the role of Cassandra.

Churchill’s detractors, none of whom was more determined to keep him in the wilderness than Neville Chamberlain, would have been given pause for thought had they seen him reading and dictating with inexhaustible fecundity in his Chartwell bedroom. Surprisingly small and austere, with photographs of Lord Randolph and a wide bedside bookshelf crudely installed by the estate carpenter for his papers, it was not the boudoir of a hedonist but the billet of a campaigner. It plainly contradicted Chamberlain’s view of Churchill as a gaudy magnifico, improvising policies (some good, more bad) between drinks and sustaining them with nothing more than facile rhetoric. In fact Churchill did his homework quite as meticulously as Chamberlain himself, devoting particular attention to his parliamentary “impromptus.” Still, there is no denying that the two men were opposites without mutual attraction. Chamberlain, who succeeded Baldwin as Prime Minister in May 1937, might admire Churchill’s wit and brilliance, his courage and vitality, but he had always felt that there was an unbridgeable “gulf between him and me.” In his opinion Churchill was unstable and amoral. Taking issue with him was “like arguing with a brass band.“ He must at all costs be kept out of the cabinet, which he would dominate and even silence. When the War Minister, Leslie Hore-Belisha, Urged Churchill’s inclusion, Chamberlain replied: “I won’t have anyone who will rock the boat.” For his part, Churchill professed respect for the tough imperial pioneer who had struggled unsuccessfully for seven years to grow sisal on his father’s estate in the Bahamas. But he was essentially out of sympathy with Chamberlain, regarding him as narrow-minded,
cold-hearted and dusty-souled. Theirs was the perennial opposition of the Puritan and the Cavalier. It was the opposition, too, “between Birmingham Town Hall and Blenheim Palace.”

CHAMBERLAIN was often disparaged for being unable to see beyond the confines of local government and petty commerce. Lloyd George maintained that he would have made a good Lord Mayor of Birmingham in a lean year and that he had “a retail mind in a wholesale business.” Experienced diplomats such as Sir Alexander Cadogan said that Chamberlain equated the conduct of foreign affairs with the handling of trade disputes. With a prissy manner, a reedy voice and a smug expression habitually imprinted on his corvine features, Chamberlain seemed every inch the political haberdasher. His conventional clothes added to the impression: the old-fashioned starched wing-collars; the black jacket and striped trousers; the inevitable umbrella, sceptre of the bourgeoisie since the time of Louis-Philippe-almost the only time Chamberlain showed anger was when his umbrella got broken. Although he was quite a cultured man, his amusements were on a similarly modest scale: he liked Christmas cracker jokes and games of musical chairs-at Cliveden, the Astors’ country house, he was allowed to win because it meant so much to him. Chamberlain’s international outlook was equally naive: America was “a nation of cads”; Russia was “semi-Asiatic”; and the French could not “keep a secret for more than half an hour, nor a government for more than nine rnonths.”‘Obviously Neville was a mere shadow of Joseph Chamberlain, lacking his father’s Olympian manner, global vision and volcanic eloquence. Indeed, like his siblings, Neville was “dwarfed and scorched by the towering inferno of his father’s personality.” He once said that reading about his father reminded him of studying the planets: his “own significance diminished with every step.”

Determined to prove himself, though, Chamberlain grew in self-confidence, even arrogance, with every step he took up the political ladder. Having entered parliament in 1918, aged almost 50, he made his name as a reforming Minister of Health during the late 1920s and as a masterful Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1931 to 1937. Stiff, reserved, penny-pinching and self-righteous, he was not a popular figure. Even his half-brother Austen remarked on his killing coldness. But such was his dedication to business, so logical were his policies and so lucid his speeches that he dominated the National Government. Once in 10 Downing Street, Chamberlain became a democratic despot. He was as masterful as Sir Robert Walpole, a portrait of whom (by Vanloo) hung over the marble fireplace behind his leather-upholstered chair in the long, Corinthian columned cabinet room.

Furthermore Chamberlain drew around himself an inner circle of subservient mediocrities, most of them knights remote from the practice of chivalry. Sir John Simon, a serpentine lawyer described as a snake in snake’s clothing, was singularly lacking in resolution at the Treasury: he had sat on the fence so long, Lloyd George famously remarked, that the iron had entered into his soul. Sir Samuel Hoare, now at the Home Office, had learned no lessons from the dictators: he was later said to have “passed from experience to experience, like Boccaccio’s virgin, without discernible effect upon his condition.” Sir Thomas Inskip, Minister for Coordination of Defence, had little ability, less power and no perceptiveness: “He could look with frank and fearless gaze at any prospect, however appalling-and fail to see it.” Other acolytes, such as Sir Horace Wilson, with his “temporising, ‘play for safety,’ formula-evolving mind,” and Sir Kingsley Wood, who on the outbreak of war opposed the bombing of munition works in Germany because they were private property, were equally unable or unwilling to stand up to Chamberlain.

Compliance seemed to validate his growing assumption of infallibility, which was expressed with the jauntiness of a schoolboy and the primness of an old maid. Flattery fed Chamberlain’s vanity for, as one official noted, “he likes to be set on a pedestal and adored, with suitable humility, by unquestioning admirers.” There was “no surer way of gratifying him than to make some allusion to the exceptional importance of his position.” By the same token, criticism, mockery and disrespect infuriated him. Chamberlain became increasingly intolerant of disagreement, equating loyalty to himself with patriotism. He squashed or squared the press with unprecedented vigour, using lobby journalists to manipulate public opinion while contemptuously accusing the occasional dissenter of being duped by “Jewish-Communist propaganda.” Chamberlain deployed his own secret propaganda organ, the supposedly independent journal Truth, to discredit opponents. He tapped their telephones. He harried ministers and extended his control to every aspect of government. He crushed par~ liamentary debate, treating the Labour opposition with open contempt and imposing a ruthless discipline on his own rank and file. One Tory MP said that “they had now a Fuhrer in the Conservative Party.” Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, believed that Chamberlain “au fond had a certain sympathy for dictators, whose efficiency appealed to him.” Ironically, the champion of appeasement in Europe was not a weak Prime Minister but an exceptionally strong one. The would~be conciliator of the continent was a domestic autocrat.