T.H. White

From The Elephant and the Kangaroo:

Before we deal with this, however, it seems necessary to make a few remarks about our hero’s character. He Was a childish man, in spite of his amoebae, and he was confiding, and he nearly always told the truth. This was out of laziness, as he had found that it was easier to be truthful and swindled, instead of going to the trouble of making up lies in order to swindle other people. Sometimes he grew ashamed of this laziness, about once a year, and tried to tell a few hard-working lies; but he told them so badly, with such a shifty look in his eye, that nobody believed them for a moment. This discouraged him. Fortunately, however, it did not matter how much he told the truth round Burkestown, because nobody in that locality ever told it, and consequently nobody believed it. Indeed, Mr. White’s truthfulness had the curious effect 'of making the aborigines consider that he was the most cunning liar they had ever met. Unaccustomed to hearing the truth in any form, they were baffled by his veracity, and came to fear him greatly in a bargain. For instance, if he were selling one of the pigs which he kept on the refuse of the garden, he might say to the buyer: “I am afraid that this pig is not so fat as he should be. You see, if you put your hand here between the shoulder blades, you can feel the backbone.” Far from lowering the price of the thin pig, this often had the effect of putting a couple of guineas on it: for the buyer immediately concluded that Mr. White had some intensely subtle reason for not selling, and became half mad to secure the prize. 

Another feature of his character was that he was generally pursuing some theory or other, often dealing with archaeology or biology or history. For instance, he had a theory about warfare. He said that there were some 275,000 separate species in the animal kingdom, but that out of this huge number there were only a dozen or so which indulged in true war, i.e., which would band together in order to attack bands of their own species. The guilty dozen included H. sapiens, one termite, several ants, and possibly, though Mr. White was unsure of this, the domestic bee. If, said he, only twelve or so out of 275,000 will go to war, then obviously we can discover the true cause of warfare by looking for some Highest Common Factor which is found among the twelve, but not found among the 274,988 others. Eventually he had discovered that the H.C.F. was not Property nor several of the other things which had been suggested, but the making of a territorial claim. All twelve made a claim to territory other than the nest itself, and he could discover no pacific species which made such a claim. Also the few varieties of H. sapiens which did not make a territorial claim-the Lapps, Eskimos, and other true nomads-remained at peace. Mr. White said that the only thing necessary to abolish warfare was to abolish territory, i.e., to do away with artificial boundaries, nationalism, tariffs, and so on. 

and

Brownie was sitting in a corner, eating the latest glue. She was an animal who suffered from crazes, like her master. They say that wise men grow to resemble the creatures they are interested in, and that Darwin ended by looking like an ape. This is true conversely, at any rate, for most animals grow to resemble the masters they are interested in, and Brownie was no exception. She had put up with so many snakes, falcons, goshawks, merlins, ravens, ants, goat meths, hedgehogs, and other assorted fauna collected by Mr. White that in the end she had taken to collecting herself. For instance, she was keen on week-old chickens. Every spring, when these came round, she attended all their meals. She also caught them in her month, without hurting them, and carried them into the dining room, where she liberated them under the table and watched them run. The hens, ever after, in adult life, fled upon the approach of Brownie. Another of her interests was the insect world. She spent a good deal of time catching flies, or taunting the bees in the hall. She was a student of wood-boring wasps, which she would watch on the workshop window sill all day long. She had been the proud owner of a wild baby rabbit, which she used to take to bed with her, in her master’s bed, and also of a young leveret. Neither of these had been much pleased at having to sleep with Brownie and Mr. White, and the rabbit particularly had often flown into a passion at the general perversity of the situation, and had bitten them both. People seem to think that wild rabbits are charming little balls of fluff, but [they are really very choleric animals, with no tolerance at all. Other pets kept by Brownie included ducks, turkeys, and an Orphan lamb. She was interested in the swallows on the tool cupboard, and devoted to hedgehogs, for which she had a special bark. She did not like puppies. 

The craze for Nature Study, however, was not the only one she had. Mr. White possessed varied interests, and So did she. There was carpentry, for instance, which was perhaps the latest of his digressions. Poor Brownie could hardly saw or hammer, but at least she collected the spare pieces of wood, and kept them under the dining-room table. So far as gardening was concerned, she collected most of the root crops and tubers, which she also stored under the table. She had, besides, a rubber ball. 

Her master was, a second-rate writer, and that was the way in which he earned such living as he had. It was the only occupation she was unable to share. When he sat at the typewriter, Brownie sat beside him and groaned continuously-perhaps she was doing her best to imitate the machine. When he wrote with a pencil, in an armchair, she sat on his lap and sighed, in order to be in it as much as possible. 

The glue must have been due to the Ark. It was used in construction. Mr. White had been trying to boil it in a soup tin, because he had no gluepot, and she had discovered it, in the solid state, at the bottom. This was what she was eating. Being at the bottom, it was almost out of reach of her tongue. However, she had bitten dents in the tin all round, and she could reach some of the glue, and it made her froth at the mouth. 

and

For that matter, what is the good of doing anything with the Irish, who won’t even try water divining? What are they? Just a rag bag of every defeated nation since the dawn of prehistory, driven into this accursed rain cloud of an island as the last refuge for incapacity; They think that the sunlight puts fires out and the moon changes the weather and God knows what else. I suppose they think that the moon is a kind of phosphorescent balloon which gets gradually blown up and deflated. They have no idea of the earth’s shadow or of geography or of anything else. The only good thing 15 that they murder one another at a great rate. How many murders did we have last month? There was the man who threw his wife into a well with a turkey, and the man who chopped up his brother and buried him in a bog, and the man who decapitated his grandmother with a hatchet, and... .and . . Always pointless, too, and so badly done. The whole island is strewn with blunt instruments which the murderer has forgotten to conceal. Professional assassins, all over the world, are Irishmen or Italians. Chicago, everywhere. I suppose they’ll murder me before they’ve finished. For the sake of a cigarette card or something. It’s lucky Mikey is timid. He’d be afraid to make a had shot the first time, and get hurt himself. Not that he dislikes me. It would be a sudden whim, as usual. . . . 

What’s the good of struggling with it all? It isn’t only the O’Callaghans, it’s the whole island. You might as well try to reform the Alps. And why reform them, anyway? Why transplant human life at all, in this ridiculous Ark? Why not leave it to be exterminated? 

Why live, thought Mr. White, for that matter; I’m sure‘ I don t know why we take such trouble to do so. It’s all rheumatism, and filling up forms.
Mikey was waiting for him, tongue-tied with longing, doubt, modesty or apprehension

and

...however, there came an alteration in the relations between the builders. 
The trouble between Mr. White and Pat Geraghty was that the one was of Alpine while the other was of Mediterranean race. Geraghty, although insane to a scarcely noticeable extent, was in other respects a normal aborigine of Cashelmor. He had spent‘his life in the environs of Burkestown. All his, neighbors had always been either thieves or Swindlers or assassins. He, and they, believed, ‘with the O’Callaghans, that the moon’s changes ‘changed the" weather; that sunlight extinguished fires; that' the best cure for whooping cough lay in passing the sufferer under the belly of a donkey; that there was a real and tangible fire in Hell, where Mr. White would be roasted, without being consumed. by a benevolent deity, for the rest of eternity; that it would rain if a curlew were heard; that Purgatory, where he himself would go, was also a place of actual fire, but not eternal; that “frost brings rain”---a not unnatural belief, when one reflects that, in winter, if it is not dry and 
frosty it is pretty well sure to be wet and rainy; that wag. tails were birds of death, like the chaladrius; that three candles in one room would bring a death before the end of the year; that women must not cut men’s hair; that there was a “stray sod” near Burkestown and that, if the traveler stepped on it, he would lose his way for the rest of the night unless he had the presence of mind to turn his waist coat back to front; that a weasel should be spat upon when met; that the banshee sounded a little like an amorous cat; and that Ireland was the land of Saints and Scholars, whose saintly and scholarly activities had only been handicapped by the barbarous interference of English cannibals like Mr. White. All these things, and a great many more, were believed by Pat as simply as it is believed in other places that the milkman will call in the morning. Since scarcely any of them were believed by his master, there was, of course, a barrier between them. 

It was not so. much what Geraghty believed, however, as what he was accustomed to understand by his environment, that caused the trouble. So far as his experience went, the main objective of human beings was to take advantage of one another. In recognizing this, indeed, he and his neighbors offered perhaps their best claim to possessing greater perspicuity than their oppressors across the water. 
He was now, for external reasons, beginning to worry bout being employed by a venomous Englishman. 

and

Mrs. O’Callaghan put on the clothes which she wore when she went to Dublin. These were not showy, owing to a habit which she had acquired of never putting on a new dress until two years after she had bought it. Horace recommends the author to wait seven years before publishing, and it seems an excellent rule for clothes as well as for books; but not so good a rule when extended to food and fresh vegetables, as it was, to some extent, by Mrs. O‘Callaghan. She would often purchase a pound ~of cheese Cashelmor, only to find that it had gone moldy before it 
reached the table six weeks later. She was a conservative. Mr. White reminded her to put on the fur coat, a wedding present from her father. Mikey polished his boots, as he was made to do on Saturday nights because of Mass on Sundays, and painfully put ‘ on one of the clean collars which were always dirty before they were fixed. He also shaved. 
and
Think of all those tricks of shabby gentility with which she used to madden me. When she was giving breakfast to Father Byrne, after a Station, she used to lean forward whenever the old lobster spoke, crooking her little finger as she held the teacup, and cry, “Is that a fac?” She thought _ it was genteel. In 1900 or so, when she was a girl, perhaps it was genteel. Think of that young virgin in her father’s boorish farm, uneducated, put upon, aflutter with dreams of dukes perhaps and of the wide world stretched before her; think of her simple arts, her hopes to better herself, her innocent and pondering attempts to learn gentility. Somebody in the hearing of that child, somebody who ' seemed to her to be the height of fashion, had crooked the 

finger, had said, “Is‘that a fac?” She had stored it up. She had given it, her little accomplishment, like a dog’s poor trick, to Father Byrne.‘ She had been proud of it, and a trifle nervous in case it might not quite be up to date. But of course she had been forced to put that fear away from her. She had had nothing else to substitute. 

How desperately cruel life is, thought Mr. White: Life and Time. They take everything, take the soft-petaled maiden and the fashions she pondered. Fashion and’ slang are awful in their pathos. There are spinsters knocking about nowadays, I suppose, who cry girlishly that such and such a thing is “some stunt” and who would like to describe themselves as 'flappers.” In twenty years the Wrens of today will be saying “browned off” with the same cracked ring. Human beings run about like sheep, copying one another, talking the latest idiom, wearing the latest hat. And Time comes stealthily to rob them, till idiom and hat are both ridiculous, leaving nothing in the little squirrel hoard of graces. 

It is not the Irish, he thought, it is the climate. It is not the fault of the race. The Irish are not lazy, not backward, not dirty, not superstitious, not cunning, not dishonest. They are as nice as anybody else. It is not them. It is the air. 

It is that bloody Atlantic, said Mr. White, looking angrily in the direction of Mullingar: that’s what does for us. It is those millions of square miles of water vapor pouring in from the southwest, supersaturated, bulging, colored, and weighted like lead. It is like living under a pile of wet cushions: They force us to our hands and knees. Between us and America there is nothing to discharge them. We have to bear the whole of it. We are the outpost, the bulwark which saves England from the like oppression. By the time the air reaches England, it has been sieved, milked, lightened, by the protecting highlands of the Gael. So of course they sit there, bright and breezy, and little wonder if they rule the world. But to talk about the Irish being oppressed by the Saxon in the east is nonsense-not at all, it is by the Atlantic in the west. Why, even champagne will hardly fizz here: one might as well be living down a coal mine. ‘ 

l believe, he continued doubtfully, that champagne does not fizz in coal mines; but, if you take it to the top of a mountain, where the air is lighter, it fizzes so much that the whole bottle turns to froth. That is what happens if you take an Irishman away from his native hell. Here, in the oppression of the clouds, he is just a flattened Hamilton, a squashed Wellesley, or a burdened Shaw. Drop him across the channel, and immediately he boils over like a firework display. He invents quaternions or conquers Napoleon or writes St. Joan. And the same thing happens the Other way round. Leave him in England, and Swift is the master of ministers, the friend of princes, the cynosure of wit. Drag him away to the atmospheric pressure of the County Meath, and he is only a nasty-minded, complaining parson at Laracor, and finally he goes dotty altogether, and no wonder. 

What a pity it is that people will go in for racial criticism. The whole thing is perfectly simple. All human beings everywhere are more or less horrible, but they have different fashions of being it, in different places. Consequently, one notices the horribleness of foreigners without noticing one’s own-which they notice-just because it is different. 

The Wapshot Chronicle

“Writer’s epistolary style (Leander wrote) formed in tradition of Lord Timothy Dexter, who put all punctuation marks, prepositions, adverts, articles, etc., at the end of communication and urged reader to distribute same as he saw fit. West Farm. Autumn day. 3 p.m. Nice sailing breeze from NW quarter. Golden light. Glittering riffle on water. Hornets on ceiling. An old house. Roofs of St. Botolphs in the distance. Old river-bottom burg today. Family prominent there once. Name memorialized in many things in vicinity; lakes, roads, hills even. Wapshot Avenue now back street in honkytonk beach resort further south. Smell of hot dogs, popcorn, also salt air and grinding music from old merry-go-round calliope. Matchwood cottages for rent by day, week or season. Such a street named after forebear who rode spar in Java sea for three days kicking at sharks with bare feet."

and 

"We're going to England in ten days," Pancras said.
   "I'll miss you," Coverly said.
   "You're coming," Pancras said. "I've arranged the whole thing."
   Coverly turned to his companion and they exchanged a look of such sorrow that he thought he might never recover. It was a look that he had recoiled from here and there—the doctor in Travertine, a bartender in Washington, a priest on a night boat, a clerk in a shop—that exacerbating look of sexual sorrow between men; sorrow and the perverse wish to flee—to piss in the Lowestoft soup tureen, write a vile word on the back of the barn and run away to sea with a dirty, dirty sailor—to flee, not from the laws and customs of the world but from its force and vitality.

Cheever

by Blake Bailey

The Depression came early to New England, and by the mid-twenties the shoe industry was all but dead. This, of course, was not openly discussed in the Cheever household, though John could tell his father was becoming dispirited. He overheard the man say to a neighbor, while raking the driveway, that he was prepared to die. As Cheever would later tell it, Frederick had sold out of the shoe business (whether that meant the manufacturing firm of “Whittredge and Cheever” or some lesser concern is, again, a mystery) and gone into an investment partnership with another fellow, alternately named “Mr. Forsyth” and “Harry Dobson” in Cheever’s journal. One day, while playing his four holes of morning golf, Frederick espied what appeared to be a coat hanging from a tree near the fairway; naturally, this proved to be none other than Forsyth or Dobson, hanged. After that, Frederick gave up golf and began crying at the breakfast table: “He’d say good morning to me and then look out the window and say something about the weather and then his face would break . . . and he’d start making noises like a winded runner. Fortunately, he was married to a resourceful woman, who saved the family from certain ruin by opening a gift shop in downtown Quincy. In fact, it was becoming more and more common at the time for middle-class women to go into business for themselves-what with 
canned foods and labor-saving devices that lessened the drudgery of housekeeping-~and certainly this came all the more easily to an Old feminist like Mary Liley Cheever. Indeed, one might even venture to say that as a gift-shop proprietress she’d found her niche: genial and motherly, she was able to strike an instant rapport with most customers, who came to regard the Mary Cheever Gift Shoppe as the place to go for something a little better than the usual dime-store bric-a-brac. It was true that Mrs. Cheever could be a bit pushy at times. As she herself confided, a little ruefully, the harder she tried to “match the purchase to the person,” the more determined the person became to buy what she or he had picked out in the first place. 

John was aghast that his mother had gone into trade: After this he was to think of her, not in any domestic or maternal role, but as a woman approaching a customer in a store and asking, bellicosely, ‘ls there something I can do for you?’ ” Nor was it simply the doorsteps and china dogs and doilies that she foisted on a public consisting mostly of her former peers, but the very furniture out from under her family’s backs. “You can’t sell this,” John would remonstrate, “it doesn’t belong to you.” To which the woman would sensibly reply, “Well, do you have $100?” She even sold his own bed (and decades later, at a Sutton Place party, Cheever bumped into an old Quincy acquaintance who informed him that she herself had bought one of the family beds). It wasn’t long before his mother’s almost demonic élan began to bear fruit. In 1929, she opened a second store, the Little Shop Around the Corner, purveying dresses and accessories reflecting “the same exclusiveness and beauty which is already evident in her gift shoppe,” as the Quincy Patriot Ledger reported. Mrs. Cheever relished her success, such as it was, and became every inch the plucky, hard’ boiled businesswoman: “She routed thieving gypsies,” her son recalled, “brained an armed robber with a candlestick and cracked jokes with the salesmen.” 

The vulgarity of it all was an “abysmal humiliation” to Cheever, whose innate sense of alienation was burden enough. Nor did he ever quite recover from “the trauma, the earthquake,” of his family’s awful decline. Anything smacking of gift-shop knickknackery would alway repulse him to the point of illness.

and

When Faulkner won the Nobel in 1949, Cheever showed he could still channel what Papa might say If he were to write a letter for the occasion to the New York Times: “I think it’s fine that Bill Faulkner got the Nobel Prize. . . . The Nobel Prize is like that purse they give in Verona for the shot who bags the most sitting ducks on a clear day. There are other kinds of shooting, bur they don’t give prizes for it. There is the kind of shooting that you get in the Abruzzi in the May snows and underwater shooting and the kind of lonely shooting that you have when you take your sights in a pocket-mirror and bring down a grizzley [sic] over your left shoulder but they don’t give prizes for that kind of shooting. Mr. Thomas Hardy and Mr. Herman Melville did that kind of shooting but they never got any prizes.” 

and

Mary didn't lose time flexing her linguistic muscles with Cheever. “The folly of a fool,” she once murmured-in French-when her impoverished boyfriend waxed ecstatic over a New Yorker sale. Both seemed a little ambivalent in the beginning. What Cheever remembered about their first date was that his future wife had arrived three hours late; what she remembered was the taste of Scotch (she’d never tried it before) and boredom. Cheever was holding forth about life at Yaddo, which might have struck the idealistic young woman as a bit frivolous, at least as Cheever told it. “I didn’t want to hear about the love affairs of Leonard Ehrlich and so on,” she later remarked. 

and

Cheever offered his services as reader and scribe to some of the illiterate Southerners, whose letters (both written and received) were a lifelong source of delight. One man solemnly dictated a request for special leave so he could witness his brother’s execution (“the first electrocution in the family”); a spurned young woman wrote-and Cheever read aloud-“ ‘Don’t you remember what you done to me on the floor? Didn’t you mean it?’ . . .” In general Cheever preferred the company of regular guys-illiterate, Southern, or otherwise-whose weekend high jinks in Augusta tended to attract the notice of military police. Every weekend the city swarmed with soldiers, and Cheever was loath to miss the whole Hogarthian spectacle-the teeming juke joints and even the relatively staid places where locals tried to show their GI guests some Southern hospitality: “[VVe] went to a dance at the Eagle Club, Eyrie number seven, believe it or not,” Cheever reported. “I danced for about one minute with a southern beauty of about eleven who was uneasy about dancing with a Yankee.” 

and

 “To the extent that in the writing world any material-sketch, article, newspaper report, fiction--is called a story, john Cheever’s book . . . may be called a collection of stories”; such stories, however, were little more than “moments or moods caught in the lives of his characters, pointed in quality, but inconclusive in effect.” Cheever’s tone of remote pessimism was also condemned, as if he were regarding his characters with the same haughty nonchalance that Eustace Tilley fixes on that butterfly. In the New York Times Book Review, VVilliam DuBois stressed the author’s connection with the magazine by way of explaining the “peculiar epicene detachment, and facile despair” of the stories. Such charges were not unwarranted: for the past eight years, ever since Cowley’s advice that he shorten his work, Cheever had been training himself to write the sort of muted, elliptical “casual” that went over at The New Yorker, rarely allowing himself the luxury of longer, more ambitious stories. Reviewer Weldon Kees emphasized the difference: though Cheever’s New Yorker stories (“among the best that have appeared there recently”) were similar to the point of tedium-at least when “read one after another”-the long, anomalous “Of Love: A Testimony” gave a glimpse of what Cheever was “capable of doing when he has room enough in which to work for something more than episodic notation and minor perceptive effects.” 

As for Struthers Burt, in hindsight he seems prophetic, though it’s hard to figure how he could have made such extravagant claims on the basis of The Way Some People Live. “Unless I am very much mistaken,” he declared, “when this war is over, John Cheever . . . will become one of the most distinguished writers, not only as a short story writer but as a novelist.” Far from finding the stories trivial, Burt applauded their revelation of the “universal importance of the outwardly unimportant,” and thought the author’s apparent pessimism was in fact a laud~ able grasp of human ambiguity (“a deep feeling for the perversities and contradictions, the worth and unexpected dignity of life”). Like other reviewers, Burt noted a certain monotony in Cheever’s New Yorker fiction and cautioned the author lest his “especial style” harden into an affectation: “Otherwise the world is his.” 
Cheever took both praise and blame with a grain of salt-remark ably so for a first-time author. He was amused by DuBois’s crack about his “facile despair,” seeing the justice of that and other complaints. As he wrote Mary, “[A]ll in all-even though they don’t like me-the reviewers seem to be very diligent and earnest people, anxious to help a gloomy young writer onto the right path, and to safeguard the investment of their readers.

and

By the end of 1947, Cheever still hadn’t produced a manuscript, though he claimed a longish one existed, and finally Linscott suggested he write an outline, at least, to give the salesmen something to Work with. Cheever reluctantly obliged, though he doubted he could convey what was best about the novel-the actual writing-and so took pains to play this up in the outline, which itself is quite cleverly written: 

The writing, or the surface of the book, which has concerned me a good deal, seems to me clear and reliable. I speak of the writing since it seems very important to me . . . that it should appear decorous and beautiful and I sometimes think of the story as having the polish, the sentimental charms of a greeting card with an obscene message. . . . 

The story centers on a family; the Fields. Aaron, Sarah and their two sons, Tom and Eben. There is much of a country that I love in this book-much scenery, much rain, many semi-colons-for these are bewildered children in a beautiful garden. 

The story begins in 1936 and has in it’s opening the appearance of something to be read in bed on a rainy night in an old house. . . . 

Sarah Field . . . is stout, she has yielded her beauty without a struggle, she has attended a White House reception, dreamt of carnal relations with Padarewski and two bibles have come apart in her hands. . . . 

and

. It might have seemed a good sign that he was inter« viewed for Harvey Breit’s column in the New York Times Book Review, but after their lunch together Cheever fretted in his journal that he’d behaved in an “unstable” and “indiscreet” manner. On the contrary, he’d come across as a “tough-minded short-story advocate” (so Breit wrote), who considered the novel an “artificial” and “anachronistic” form-mot an entirely disinterested apologia, under the circumstances, though actually Cheever’s aesthetic ideas had changed very little over the years, reflecting his View of modern life as fragmented and nomadic: “The short story is determined by moving around from place to place, by the interrupted event. The vigorous nineteenth-century novel is based on parish life and lack of communications. . . . I’ve always noticed that just as people are about to tell you the secret they’re transferred to another city. The way people drop out of sight. Really drop! ” 

In that same issue of the Book Review (May 10, 1953) was James Kelly’s critique of The Enormous Radio, which was everything Cheever might have hoped for (if he hadn’t been so morbidly insecure at the time). Kelly described the stories as “miraculous expressions of life among the middle-class have-not-enoughs,” though he added (as did other critics) that the stories were less impressive when read one after another, as the reader discovered a certain sameness of theme and setting. “But not one can be called insignificant or shoddy or inadequately observed,” Kelly concluded. “No American writer in business today is more on top of his genre than Mr. Cheever.” William Peden, writing in the Saturday Review, was also enthusiastic: “John Cheever shows an absolute genius for taking the usual and transforming it into the significant. . . . [He] is one of the most undervalued American short story Writers.” 

What Cheever was apt to notice most in Peden’s review, however, Was an incidental remark that his stories were “less spectacular” (albeit more likely to “improve with rereading”) than those of J. D. Salinger, Whose Nine Stories was published around the same time to ecstatic acclaim. Indeed, a comparison of the two books was the basis of one of the most wounding reviews of Cheever’s career-all the worse given that the reviewer, Arthur Mizener, had become one of the nation’s most prominent critics after the recent success of his pioneering Fitzgerald biography, The Far Side of Paradise. Appearing in The New Republic, Mizener's review was framed as an assessment of the New Yorker story. Salinger exemplified the good sort of NY writer, Cheever was the bad. An empty craftsman.

and

Cheever loved being a father in the abstract, but the everyday facts of the matter were often a letdown. He was dismayed by his oldest child, for one thing, as she continued to “overthrow his preconceptions” by remaining, as he put it, “a fat importunate girl.” Cheever was pitiless in judging female beauty--“You were either a dish or a drudge,’ his wife repeatedly insisted-and when the young Susan failed a measure up, he was bewildered and sorry for all concerned. He’d wanted a “frail daughter,” after all, a “wraith” with long blond hair who drove a sports car and went by the kicky name of Susie. In any event they did call her Susie, but to Cheever’s mind the name didn’t jibe with the hoyden who chewed with her mouth open and said all the wrong things (“How long does it take to hang a man?”): “The tragic instant’ -Cheever wrote, during a bad patch when his daughter was all of eight- “when a parent loses faith with his child.” 

“They were completely unable to cope with me,” said Susan Cheever, after some fifty years of blessed retrospect. The main issue, as her parents always saw it, was her weight-if only she looked right, everything else would follow-and in a way that was true, since they harassed her 
so relentlessly on the subject that her behavior was mostly a matter of reprisal. They put her on diets, made her eat Ayds candies to cut her appetite, and kept up a constant running commentary on what she ate at dinner. Every so often, too, they’d invite her grossly obese pediatrician to the house so he could deliver a stern lecture to the little girl on the evils of overeating. Deprived of snacks and the like, Susan took to stealing food (and therefore eating many times what she would have eaten normally): she hollowed out cakes they were saving for company (leaving a “veneer of icing on top”); she rooted around in drawers, closets, and desks, searching for hidden chocolate and whatever else he could find. “They had no privacy,” she said. “I read everything in the house, I was in every secret compartment of every desk, I became like a little criminal. I was lying, I was cheating, I was stealing. Their cruelty about my weight was not one-way. We were in a dance of death on that subject.” Many years later, after Cheever had stopped drinking, he often assuaged his melancholy by gorging on cheese and crackers: “And I remember, as a father, how ruefully I separated my daughter from her crackers and cheese when all she sought, by stuffing herself, was to understand her place in the world.” 

At the time he didn’t see it that way; rather he regarded himself as a loving, well-meaning, long-suffering father who was simply trying to talk his only daughter out of being fat, whereas she in turn responded with unsavory remarks and ties such as banging her head against the wall and constantly sucking her thumb. She wasn’t doing well in school either, and finally (at age eleven) they sent her to a psychiatrist in White Plains named Dr. Sobel. Apparently the man didn’t see what all the fuss was about-certainly the girl was intelligent enough (“She has a Cadillac motor in there,” he observed). The parents were another matter: Dr. Sobel remarked that Mary was a “passive” personality, which (he opined) was why Cheever had married her, whereupon the affronted husband rose from his chair and stood protectively beside his wife. In his own version of the meeting, however, Cheever tended to omit that detail, informing Susan that what Sobel had really said (furtively taking him aside) was: “Be careful. If anyone looked at me the way your Wife looked at your daughter, I’d suck my thumb too!” 
Then as later, Cheever had his own way of seeing things, or at least of telling them.

Burroughs by Miles

The Latin Quarter of Paris was named after the use of Latin by scholars attending the university of Paris, the Sorbonne, founded the in the twelfth century. The rue Git-le-Coeur was a narrow medial street running from the rue Saint-André-des-Arts down to the quai de Grands-Augustins where it met the Seine, overlooking the ile de la Cite and the Palais de Justice. This part of the city has been in continuous occupation for two thousand years. The ruins of the Gallo-Roman themes (baths) from the first to third centuries, when Paris was still Lutéce just a block away on boulevard Saint-Michel. The street dates from the end of the twelfth century when it was called rue de Gilles-le-Queux or Gui-le-Queux (Queux: cuisinier, or chef), which over the centuries corrupted into “Git-le-Coeur.” Number 9 was rebuilt on old foundations in 1671 and originally occupied by the duc de Nivernais. 

Number 9 was bought in 1933 by M. and Mme. M. L. Rachou who opened it as a class 13 residential hotel, the minimum standard.  They never did give it a name. Mme. Rachou had begun life serving tables at the age of twelve in a country inn at Giverny frequented by Claude Monet. She became one of his favorites and got to know many artists and writers who came to visit him. Her husband shared her enjoyment of the company of artists, and they encouraged them to stay at their“ All through the Occupation they managed to keep the hotel Wendi?“ the privations and shortages of food. All was well until September 3 when M. Rachou was killed in a car accident; Madame had no choice but to carry on. Mme. Rachou had curly blue-rinsed hair and round apple cheeks. 

Because she was so small she had to stand on an upturned wine case when serving behind the bar, her short arms folded over her pale blue housecoat with a smocked collar, engaging in conversation with residents but always with one ear listening for an unexpected creak of the floorboards of an unauthorized person entering the hotel door. Adjacent to the bistro was the small dining room, no longer used, which had a window onto the stairwell where she could literally reach out and grab someone by the ankle as they climbed the stairs. The hotel entrance was never locked, but the door made a terrible screeching sound when it closed. Someone attempting to close it quietly at night was regarded with great suspicion, and Madame would materialize in her white nightgown demanding, {‘b‘Monsieur? Que voulez-vous?” Easily visible from Madame’s position behind the bar was her switchboard, mounted on the wall across the hoom: forty-two small light bulbs, each with a ceramic label identifying a 00m number. If the bulb was dark, no power was being consumed; a dim light showed that the room’s 25-watt bulb was on. When a bulb flared, someone was exceeding their 40-watt power limit, and she headed for the stairs. Electricity in France was very expensive and she monitored its use carefully. The use of a tape recorder or other electric appliances inevitably blew the fuses and plunged the hotel into darkness. You could have your ower limit extended by a supplementary payment. 

There was a Turkish chiotte on each floor beneath the stairwell, two raised ceramic footprints to stand on while you squatted. Sheets of newspaper torn from France-soir were provided in lieu of toilet paper: most people bought their own and brought it from their room. Someone kept making off with the newspaper, leading Burroughs to leave a sign: “To the nameless asshole who rips off the paper---stop! ” The toilets were filthy and smelled appalling; most residents preferred to piss in the sink in their rooms, including many of the women, who used buckets. There was one bath, but advance warning had to be given to allow for the water to heat, ind naturally there was a small surcharge. There was radiator heat all week but the plumbing was decrepit, subject to loud clankings and vibrations, and hot water was only provided on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. 

Each room had a small gas stove for cooking, and Mme. Rachou inevitably arrived at an inconvenient time with the meter reader. If you didn’t Want M. Dupré to wander into your room pushing a broom, you could opt out as Burroughs did. Most of the beds had straw mattresses; there was a sink and a large armoire. The curtains and bedspreads were changed each spring and the bed linen once a week.

on Celine: 

The villa was set on a cliff, overlooking a great loop of the Seine and the dim spires of Paris. Bill and Allen were greeted at the gate by barking dogs Celine came out and locked the dogs up. “Are they dangerous?” asked Allen. “No,” Céline said, “I keep them for the noise,” but he did take them with him on a leash to the Village to protect him “from the Jews. The postmaster destroys my letters. The pharmacist won’t fill my prescription.” The dogs continued to bark and howl in their compound.  Burroughs could see that Céline was the sort of person you could put down anywhere and he would immediately be on bad terms with his neighbors. 

Although it was the middle of summer, Céline had several scarves wrapped around his neck and wore three unraveling, moth-eaten sweaters. He had long hair and there was brown mold under his fingernails. He was sixty-four years old, tall, thin, and very slight. Burroughs estimated he weighed only 125 pounds. He had gone to school in England and spoke perfectly accented English, but had not used the language for many years so they spoke in a broken mixture of French and English. Bed-springs stuck up from the overgrown grass near the gate and they sat outside on iron chairs at a rusty garden table. Madame Céline brought them glasses of beer. Céline was friendly and Allen and Bill were very respectful toward him. Céline clearly appreciated it, and the visit lasted for several hours; they got the impression that Céline did not get many Visitors even though his work was enjoying a critical revival at that time. 

Bill told him about his periods of addiction to morphine and Celine told the story of how a boat he was on was torpedoed. To calm the hysterical passengers he lined them up and gave them all a shot of morphine, but they all began vomiting because he’d given them too much. Céline and Bill discussed the various prisons they had been in, and Céline said that one could only truly know a country by seeing its prisons. Burroughs agreed. His outrage at the brutality of the American justice system was a subject that he often turned to in conversation in the sixties, in particular the fact that America was (is) the only country in the world, bar none, in which children are sentenced to die in prison with no hope of parole for homicides committed when they were thirteen or fourteen years old. ll was a subject he cared about passionately. 

They spoke about having a mother tongue. Celine said that it is very' different if you’re told you’re going to be shot in your own language than in another language. Hearing it in your mother tongue has more impact Bill was sure he was right about that. Naturally they discussed writing, but every writer they mentioned, Michaux, Beckett, Sartre, Celine would say “Oh, it is nothing, it is nothing, every year new little fish in the literary pond." 

 The Naked Lunch 

Though he periodically added new sections to The Naked Lunch, not a great deal had happened on the publishing front since Burroughs had arrived in Paris. The first thing Allen Ginsberg had done on arrival was to show it to Maurice Girodias, but Girodias had turned it down. He returned it to Ginsberg and recalled, “It was such a mess that manuscript. You couldn’t physically read the stuff. [. . .] The ends of the pages were all eaten away by rats or something.” Ginsberg was very angry with him. Over the months Burroughs had continued to tinker with it, adding some material he found in the medical library on the rue Dragon, and some new routines. Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg had tried to interest Girodias in it a second time, but still without success. Then on October 25, 1958, in the Saturday issue of the Chicago Daily News, columnist Jack Mabley, in a piece headed “Filthy Writing on the Midway,” fulminated against a magazine that he identified only as being published by the University of Chicago, calling it “one of the foulest collections of printed filth I’ve seen publicly circulated.” Mabley concluded, “But the University of Chicago publishes the magazine. The trustees should take a long hard belt at what is being circulated under its sponsorship.”

Peas and umbrellas

In the Middle Ages, vegetables were thought to be indigestible, coarse fare fit for peasants. As for fruit- well, it was only in 1683 that Dr. Nicolas Venette became the first medical authority to say that it was good for you. He thereby made official the message that food writers had begun to preach in midcentury. In companion volumes, the 1651 Le Jardinier francais (The French Gardener) and the 1654 Les Delices de la campagne (The Delights of the Countryside), Nicolas de Bonnefons became the spokesperson for a vision of food and its preparation at the same time completely unlike anything previously imagined and uncannily familiar to us today because of food gurus such as Alice Waters: the finest, freshest ingredients prepared in the simplest possible way. Bonnefons was the first to encourage aristocrats to cultivate their gardens. During the second half of the century, kitchen gardens and fruit orchards sprang up on great estates all over France (the most famous of which, Le Potager du Roi, the King’s vegetable garden, has recently been re-created at Versailles). He also encouraged his readers to savor the full flavor of the glorious primary ingredients that they could produce in this manner. All his recipes concentrated on bringing out “the authentic taste that must be given to each ingredient” and on rejecting the use of extraneous flavorings that “disguise the central taste.” He complained that other cooks give all their soups the same flavor, whereas “a cabbage soup must be completely infused with the essence of cabbage, a turnip soup with turnip.” 

The second half of the seventeenth century was a golden age for fruits and vegetables. Many more varieties than ever before began to be cultivated: sixty kinds of pears were available in France at the beginning of the seventeenth can my, but nearly four hundred in Bonnefon'’s day. Asparagus, artichokes, and spinach originally became important in French cuisine ; the strawberry was mentioned for the first time in a cookbook. Young, tender vegetables were the rage, which explains how the green pea became the superstar of them all. A crate of baby peas was formally presented to Louis XIV at Versailles in 1660; he adored them, and the royal craving set off a mania that lasted for half a century. Comedies lampooned the “madmen” willing to pay any price to get their hands on the first of the season; in May 1696, the King’s morganatic wife, the Marquise de Maintenon, portrayed the court as in a “frenzy": no one could talk about any. thing but the peas “already eaten, being eaten, and about to be eaten.” Better fruits and readily available sugar spelled jams and jellies. Today, French confitures are considered among the finest anywhere; their reputation began along with the craze for fine fruit, with the appearance of a number of books called confiturier: that described ways of drying and preserving-“en leur naturel,” in Bonnefons’ expression-all the newly abundant fruit. 

By the end of the Sun King’s reign, his countrymen were eating many of the dishes that are still featured on the menus of restaurants today. In this respect, no cookbook was more of a trendsetter than Frangois Massialot’s 1691 volume, Le Cuisinier royal et bourgeois (Cooking for Royalty and for the Bourgeoisie). This was the next culinary bestseller after The French Cook; it was constantly reedited until the mid-eighteenth century. Massialot’s immensely readable book breaks new ground in many ways. it marks the consecration of a preparation that has played ever since a starring role in French cuisine: the stew. A few stewlike recipes-called hachis or haricots-had appeared in the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century’s final decades, the modern word ragout began to be used, no longer as La Varenne still did to mean a sauce or a seasoning added to a preparation to give it what his English translator called a “haut gout," a taste that whet the appetite, but in its modern meaning, “a stew.” 

The new approach to cooking meat might well have helped along by what is surely the seventeenth century’s original culinary invention: the pressure cooker. 

and

At the end of the 17th century stylish Parisiennes were wearing increasingly elaborate and costly ensembles that made them ever more vulnerable to the vagaries of France's constantly changing climate. Marius' umbrellas gave women the chance to acquire a degree of independence they had not previously known. THey no longer needed to be accompanied by a servant holding something over their heads to protect them from the elements.
Little testimony has survived from three centuries ago concerning the ways in which newly created objects changed the daily lives of those who were the first to own them. In the case of the folding umbrella, we have letters from some of the female consumers who were its most enthusiastic proponents. Thus, in 1712, Louis XIV s Bavarian Sister-in-law, the Princesse Palatine, described for her relations in Germany the new umbrella their one can easily take everywhere, in case rain would happen to surprise you just as you are in the middle of a walk.” 

The princess’s letter shows us that the folding umbrella performed what may have been its most significant initial function outside the urban setting in which its creator had advertised it. The princess makes plain that she considered the umbrella news-worthy mainly because it gave women for the first time ever the chance to do something we now take for granted: to be, whenever they felt like it, on their own outdoors, alone with their thoughts While they explored the gardens and landscapes of their country estates. 

In France during the last decades of Louis XIV ’s reign, women writers were already promoting the idea that we come to know ourselves more fully as a result of an introspective communion with nature, a belief that much later became one of the founding tenets of Romanticism. Perhaps the earliest detailed evidence of the desire for a new way of being in nature is found in the correspondence of the Marquise de Sévigné. She complained bitterly about how often she risked “drowning” when she walked in unsettled weather with only a coat and hat for protection. On June 21, 1680, she described her plan to have little shelters, which she called "umbrellas” (this is one of the earliest uses of the word), put up in strategic spots on her estate. Thus protected, she would be free to spend time looking out “upon infinity.” Sévigne decided that her invention was so important that she should announce it to the relentlessly trendy readers of Le Mercare galam. Because of Marius’s invention, women of the next generation were able to walk about completely on their own in the country whenever and wherever they liked. They were able to gaze out “upon infinity” and then to record what they found there in their letters and their novels. 

Design is sometimes defined as the union of form and function. We know that Marius got the style right since, three centuries later, the folding umbrellas we own today are little changed from his creation. And if we stop to consider all the different functions performed by his pocket invention, we might be tempted to call the umbrellas branded with the name of Jean Marius the most significant design of his very design-conscious age. How many designs have an impact on the history of literature as well as the history of shopping? 

Gordon Wood on Conspiratorial mindsets

From: The Idea of America
Hofstadter said his use of “paranoid style” was not intended to suggest any medical or clinical significance; he meant only to use the term metaphorically to describe “a way of seeing the world and of expressing oneself.” Medically, as he pointed out, paranoia is defined as a chronic mental disorder characterized by systematized delusions of persecution. However overly suspicious and apocalyptical in expression American paranoid spokesmen may have been, said Hofstadter, they could not be described as “certifiable lunatics.” Yet-and it was a very big, drawn-out yet-this style was not quite normal; it was, Hofstadter wrote, “a distorted style” and thus “a possible signal that may alert us to a distorted judgment.” It indicated that some kind of “political pathology” was at work; it was a recurrent mode of expression in American public life “which has frequently been linked with movements of suspicious discontent.” Although believers in conspiracy may not have been crazy, they were persons, Hofstadter suggested, who had perverse and fanciful views of reality and were thus fit subjects for the application of some sort of “depth psychology.”

Other historians, sharing Hofstadter’s assumption that politics was often “a projective arena for feelings and impulses that are only marginally related to the manifest issues,” also sought to relate Americans. recurring fears of conspiracy to some underlying social or psychological process.‘ Some thought “that fear of conspiracy characterizes periods when traditional social and moral values are undergoing change” and therefore focused on the unusual fluidity of American society. People who were unsure of their identity and status, socially disrupted or alienated in some way, were, it seemed, especially susceptible to conspiratorial interpretations of events. Possibly, suggested David Brion Davis, who has most meticulously uncovered the conspiratorial fears of nineteenth” century Americans, various groups, from Anti-Masons to opponents of the Slave Power, found in the paranoid style a common means of expressing their different torments and troubles. Obviously, historians were careful to note, the great numbers of people who relied on such imagery of subversion--from Abraham Lincoln to Justice Robert H. Jackson-could not be dismissed as “Charlatans, crackpots, and the disaffected.” Davis in particular warned against any facile assumption “that the fear of subversion is always generated by internal, psychological needs." Despite such qualifications and cautions, however, the implications of these historical accounts of the paranoid style were clear: Americans seemed prone to fears of subversion, and these fears were symptomatic of severe social and psychological strains. 

Once America’s paranoid style was revealed to be so prevalent, its connection with the ideology of the Revolution became inevitable. Not only was Bailyn’s account of the colonists’ fears of conspiracy widely reprinted, but historians now suggested that the Revolution had set “the basic pattern” of the paranoid style. “Is it possible,” asked Davis, “that the circumstances of the Revolution conditioned Americans to think of resistance to a dark subversive force as the essential ingredient of their national identity. With the paranoid style associated with the ideology of the Revolution in this way, historians were quick to find traces of it everywhere in their sources. Although Bailyn had stressed in his Ideological Origins the rational basis of the colonists’ fears, the term “paranoia” soon proliferated in historical writings on the Revolution. “The insurgent Whig ideology,” it now seemed clear, “had a frenzied, even paranoid cast to it,” and leaders like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were even accused of suffering from some form of paranoia. The mounting evidence could lead to only one conclusion: “The era of the American Revolution was a period of political paranoia” in which “visions of conspiracy were endemic.”
In many cases these references to paranoia were clearly metaphorical, But given the current interest in psychohistory, it is not surprising that other references to paranoia have taken on an authentically psychological character, presuming a close connection between paranoid thinking and particular psychic sensibilities. Some historians, while acknowledging that the American Whigs’ belief in a ministerial design against their liberties may have had some rational and conscious sources, have emphasized that “the fear of conspiracy also had roots buried deeply in the innermost recesses of the psyches of numerous Americans.” Certain types of colonists unconsciously experienced tensions and anxieties over their personal autonomy and sexual identities that may very well have shaped their public fears and fostered their sense of conspiracies endangering them.

Other writers, taking Bailyn’s argument as a “point of departure,” have attempted a stark and quite literal “psychological interpretation of the coming of the Revolution,” even going so far as to suggest that the Revolutionary leaders were clinically paranoiac-that is, that they were suffering from actual delusions of persecution and were unable to assess reality in a rational fashion. Far from being profoundly reasonable men, they were “prone to emotional instability, predisposed to psychological problems, vulnerable to them under the goad of an appropriate precipitant,” like the Stamp Act, which left “in its wake the paranoid delusions that Britain was conspiring to enslave Americans.”

and

 Conspiracies like those of Charles II’s Cabal became less matters of fact and more matters of inference. Accounts of plots by court or government were no longer descriptions of actual events but interpretations of otherwise puzzling concatenations of events. By the eighteenth century conspiracy was not simply a means of explaining how rulers were deposed; it had become a common means of explaining how rulers and others directing political events really operated. It was a term used not so much by those intimate with the sources of political events as by those removed from the events and, like Farquhar’s Scrub, bewildered by them. 

Unlike the schemes of antiquity and the Renaissance, which flowed from the simplicity and limitedness of politics, the conspiratorial interpretations of the Augustan Age flowed from the expansion and increasing complexity of the political world. Unprecedented demographic and economic developments in early modern Europe were massively altering the nature of society and politics. There were more people more distanced from one another and from the apparent centers of political decision making. The conceptual worlds of many individuals were being broadened and transformed. The more people became strangers to one another and the less they knew of one another’s hearts, the more suspicious and mistrustful they became, ready as never before in Western history to see deceit and deception at work. Relationships between superiors and subordinates, rulers and ruled, formerly taken for granted, now became disturbingly problematical, and people became uncertain of who was who and who was doing what. Growing proportions of the population were more politically conscious and more concerned with what ‘seemed to be the abused power and privileges of ruling elites. Impassioned efforts were made everywhere to arouse “the vigilance of the public eye” against those few men “who cannot exist without a scheme in their heads,” those “turbulent, scheming, maliciously cunning, plotters of mischief.” The warnings against rulers grew more anxious and fearful, the expressions of suspicion more frenzied and strident, because assumptions about how public affairs operated became more and more separated from reality. It was easy for a fifteenth century nobleman, describing political events, to say that “it will be sufficient to speak of the high-ranking people, for it is through them that God’s power and justice are made known.” But by the eighteenth century this tracing of all events back to the ambitions and actions of only the high-ranking leaders was being stretched to the breaking point. Society was composed not simply of great men and their retainers but of numerous groups, interests, and “classes” whose actions could not be easily deciphered. Human affairs were more complicated, more interdependent, and more impersonal than they had ever been in Western history. 

Yet at this very moment when the world was outrunning man’s capacity to explain it in personal terms, in terms of the passions and schemes of individuals, the most enlightened of the age were priding themselves on their ability to do just that. The widespread resort to conspiratorial interpretations grew out of this contradiction. 

CONSPIRATORIAL INTERPRETATIONs- attributing events to the concerted designs of willful individuals-became a major means by which educated men in the early modern period ordered and gave meaning to their political world. Far from being symptomatic of irrationality, this conspiratorial mode of explanation represented an enlightened stage in Western man’s long struggle to comprehend his social reality. It flowed from the scientific promise of the Enlightenment and represented an effort, perhaps in retrospect a last desperate effort, to hold men personally and morally responsible for their actions. 

Personalistic explanations had, of course. long been characteristic of premodern European society and are still characteristic of primitive peoples. Premodern men lacked our modern repertory of explanations and could not rely on those impersonal forces such as industrialization, modernization, or the “stream of history’ that we so blithely invoke to account for complicated combinations of events. They were unable, as we say, to “rise to the conception of movements.” For that different, distant world the question asked of an event was not “How did it happen?” but “Who did it?” 
Yet despite this stress on persons rather than processes, premodern men always realized that much of what happened was beyond human agency and understanding. Even those classical and Renaissance writers who stressed that events were due to “the wisdoms and follies, the virtues and vices of individuals who made decisions” built their histories and tragic dramas around the extent to which such heroic individuals could prevail against unknown fortune. Ultimately the world seemed uncontrollable and unpredictable, ruled by mysterious forces of fate or chance foreshadowed in inscrutability. At the opening of the modern era, Protestant reformers invoked divine providence and the omnipotence of God in order to stamp out the traditional popular reliance on luck and magic and to renew a sense of design and moral purpose in the world. Life, they held, was not a lottery but the working out of God’s purpose and judgments, or “special providences.” Men were morally responsible for events; even natural catastrophes like earthquakes and floods were seen as divine punishments for human misbehavior. Still, it remained evident that life was uncertain and precarious and that God moved in very mysterious ways. As the Puritan Increase Mather observed as late as 1684, “Things many times come to pass contrary to humane probabilities and the rational Conjectures and expectations of men.” Nature itself was not always consistent, for things sometimes acted “otherwise than according to their natures and proper inclinations.” Humans might glimpse those parts of God’s design that he chose to reveal, but ultimately they could never “be able fullv to understand by what Rules the Holy and Wise God ordereth all events Prosperous and adverse which come to pass in the world.” If there was comfort in knowing that what seemed chaotic, fortuitous, or accidental was in reality directed by God, it nonetheless remained true that the “ways of Providence are unsearchable.” 

At the very time that Mather was writing, however, God was preparing to “let Newton be”: the treatise that was to be enlarged into the first book of the Princzpia was completed in 1684. Of course, the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century-or, more accurately, the new Western consciousness of which that revolution was the most important expression-did not make all immediately light. Yet many people now had less fear of chaos and contingency and greater confidence in their ability to understand events, so much so that sophisticates like George Savile, marquis of Halifax, could even warn against “that common error of applying God's judgments upon particular occasions." The world lost some of its mystery and became more manipulatable. Although the new science tended to remove man from the center of the physical universe at the same time it brought him to the center of human affairs in ways that even classical and Renaissance thinkers had scarcely conceived of. It promised him the capacity to predict and control not only nature but his own society, and it proceeded to make him directly and consciously responsible for the course of human events. Ultimately the implications of this momentous shift created the cultural matrix out of which eighteenth-century conspiratorial interpretations developed. 

The new science assumed a world of mechanistic cause and effect in which what happens does so only because something else happened before. Philosophers since Aristotle had talked of causes but never before in terms of such machine-like regularity, of such chains of consequences. “When the world became a machine,” writes Jacob Bronowski, “ [cause] became the god within the machine.” Mechanistic causality became the paradigm in which the enlightened analysis of all behavior and events now had to take place. Cause was something that produced an effect; every effect had a cause; the cause and its effect were integrally related. Such thinking created a new world of laws, measurements, predictions and constancies or regularities of behavior-all dependent on the same causes producing the same effects. “The knowledge of particular phe- nomena may gratify a barren curiosity,” Samuel Stanhope Smith told a generation of Princeton students, “but they are of little real use, except, as they tend to establish some general law, which will enable the accurate observer to predict similar effects in all time to come, in similar circum~ stances, and to depend upon the result. Such general laws alone deserve the name of science.” 

The change in consciousness came slowly, confusedly, and reluctantly. Few were immediately willing to abandon belief in the directing providence of God. Newton himself endeavored to preserve God’s autonomy. “A God without dominion, providence, and final causes,” he said, “is nothing but Fate and Nature.” In fact, the Christian belief that nature was ordered by God’s will was an essential presupposition of early modern science. Yet despite the continued stress by Newton’s followers on God’s control over the workings of nature, many eighteenth-century philosophers gradually came to picture the deity as a clockmaker, and some even went so far as to deny that God had anything at all to do with the physical movement of the universe. The logic of the new science implied a world that ran itself.

To posit the independence of the natural world was exciting enough; to conceive of a human world without God’s judgments and providences was simply breathtaking: it was in fact what centrally defined the Enlightenment. The work of John Locke and other philosophers opened reflective minds to the startling supposition that society, though no doubt ordained in principle by God, was man’s own creation-formed and sustained, and thus alterable, by human beings acting autonomously and purposefully. It came to seem that if men could understand the natural order that God had made, then perhaps they could eventually understand the social order that they themselves had made. From the successes of natural science, or what the eighteenth century termed natural philosophy, grew the conviction that moral laws-the chains of cause and effect in human behavior-could be discovered that would match those of the physical world. Thus was generated eighteenth-century moral philosophy-the search for the unifomities and regularities of man’s behavior that has proliferated into the various social sciences of our own time. Finding the laws of behavior became the consuming passion of the Enlightenment In such a liberal and learned world there could no longer be any place for miracles or the random happenings of chance. Chance, it was now said, was “only a name to cover our ignorance of the cause of any event.” God may have remained the primary cause of things, but in the minds of the enlightened he had left men to work out the causes and effects of their lives free from his special interventions. All that happened in society was to be reduced to the strictly human level of men’s motivations and goals. “Humanity,” said William Warburton in I727, “is the only cause of human vicissitudes.” The source of man’s calamities, wrote Constantin Francois de Chasseboeuf, comte de Volney, in I791, lay not in “the distant heavens . . . it resides in man himself, he carries it with him in the inward recesses of his own heart.”Such beliefs worked their way through every variety of intellectual endeavor in the age. They produced not only a new genre of literature-the novel with its authorial control and design-but also a new kind of man-centered causal history, one based on the same assumptions as the age’s conspiratorial interpretations.” English history since the Revolution of 1688, as Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, saw it from the vantage point of the 1730s, was “not the effect of ignorance, mistakes, or what we call chance, but of design and scheme in those who had the sway at that time.” This could be proved by seeing “events that stand recorded in history . . . as they followed one another, or as they produced one another, causes or effects, immediate or remote.” “History supplies the defects of our own experience” and demonstrates that there are really no such things as accidents; “it shows us causes as in fact they were laid, with their immediate effects: and it enables us to guess at future events.” “History,” said Edward Gibbon simply, “is the science of causes and effects.” Extending this concept from the realm of natural phenomena into the moral world of human affairs was not an easy matter. Natural philosophers like Newton had sought to stave off the numbing necessitarianism implied in a starkly mechanistic conception of cause and effect by positing various God-inspired “active principles” as the causal agents of motion, gravity, heat, and the like. Even those later eighteenth-century scientists who saw nature as self-contained and requiring no divine intervention whatsoever still presumed various energizing powers in matter itself.” The need for some sort of active principle in human affairs was felt even more acutely, for the new mechanistic philosophy posed a threat to what Arthur O. Lovejoy has called the “intense ethical inwardness” of Western Christendom. The belief “that whatever moves and acts does so mechanically and necessarily” was ultimately incompatible with personalistic thinking and cast doubt on man’s moral responsibility for his actions.38 If human affairs were really the consequence of one thing repeatedly and predictably following upon another, the social world would become as determined as the physical world seemed to be. Theologians like Jonathan Edwards welcomed this logic and subtly used the new cause-and-effect philosophy to justify God’s sovereignty. But other moral philosophers had no desire to create a secular version of divine providence or to destroy the voluntarism of either God or man, and thus sought to find a place for free will in the operations of the machine. They did so not by repudiating the paradigm of cause and effect but by trying to identify causes in human affairs with the motives, mind, or will of individuals. Just as natural scientists like Cadwallader Colden, believing that in a mechanistic physical world "there must be some power or force, or principle of Action,” groped toward a modern concept of energy, so too did moral philosophers seek to discover the powers or principles of action that lay behind the sequences of human affairs-in effect, looking within the minds and hearts of men for the moral counterpart of Colden’s physical energy. 

Such efforts to reconcile the search for laws of human behavior with the commitment to moral capability lay behind the numerous controversies over free will that bedeviled the eighteenth century. To be enlightened, it seemed, was to try one’s hand at writing an essay on what David Hume called “the most contentious question of metaphysics”--the question of liberty and necessity. Despite all the bitter polemics between the libertarians and the necessitarians, however, both sides were caught up in the new thinking about causality. Both assumed, as Hume pointed out, that “the conjunction between motives and voluntary actions is as regular and uniform, as that between the cause and effect in any part of nature.” Men’s motives or will thus became the starting point in the sequential chain of causes and effects in human affairs. All human actions and events could now be seen scientifically as the products of men’s intentions. If they were not, if men “are not necessarily determined by motives,” then, said the Scottish moralist Thomas Reid, “all their actions must be capricious.” Only by identifying causes with motives was any sort of human science and predictability possible, and only then could morality be preserved in the new, mechanistic causal world. 

Since it was “granted on all hands, that moral good and evil lie in the state of mind, or prevailing internal disposition of the agent,” searching out the causes of social events meant discovering in these agents the motives, the “voluntary choice and design,” that led them to act-the energizing principle, the inner springs of their behavior. “Every moral event must have an answerable cause. . . . Every such event must then have a moral cause?“ Moral deeds implied moral doers; when things happen in society, individuals with particular intentions, often called “designs,” must be at the bottom of them. All social processes could be reduced to specific individual passions and interests. “Ambition and avarice,” wrote the Revolutionary historian Mercy Otis Warren, “are the leading springs which generally actuate the restless mind. From these primary sources of corruption have arisen all the rapine and confusion, the depredation and ruin, that have spread distress over the face of the earth from the days of Nimrod to Cesar, and from Cesar to an arbitrary prince of the house of Brunswick.” This widespread belief that explanations of social phenomena must be sought in the moral nature of man himself ultimately reduced all eighteenth-century moral philosophy-its history and its social analysis-to what would come to be called psychology.

Once men’s designs were identified as the causes of human events, the new paradigm of causality worked to intensify and give a scientific gloss to the classic concern with the human heart and the ethical inwardness of Christian culture. Indeed, never before or since in Western history has man been held so directly and morally responsible for the events of his world. Because the new idea of causality presumed a homogeneous identity, an “indissoluble connection,” between causes and effects, it became difficult to think of social effects, however remote in time, that were not morally linked to particular causes-that is, to particular human designs. There could be no more in the effects than existed in the causes. “Outward actions being determined by the will,” they partook “of the nature of moral good or evil only with reference to their cause, viz. internal volition.”

It could now be taken for granted that the cause and the effect were so intimately related that they necessarily shared the same moral qualities. Whatever the particular moral character of the cause-that is, the motive or inclination of the actor-“the effect appears to be of the same kind.”44 Good intentions and beliefs would therefore result in good actions; evil motives caused evil actions. Of course, mistakes might happen, and occasionally actions “proceeded not from design.” But continued or regular moral actions could follow only from similar moral intentions. Only by assuming this close relationship between causes and effects-“this inference from motives to voluntary actions; from characters to conduct,” said Hume-was the eighteenth-century science of human behavior made possible.” 

This presumed moral identity between cause and effect, between motive and deed, accounts for the excited reaction of moralists to Bernard Mandeville’s satiric paradox of “private Vices, publick benefits.” MandeVille was unusual for his time in grasping the complexity of public events and the ways in which political effects could outrun and differ from their causes. “We ought,” he wrote, “to forebear judging rashly of ministers and their actions, especially when we are unacquainted with every circumstance of an affair. Measures may be rightly concerted, and such casualties intervene. as mav make the best design miscarry. . . . Humane Understanding is too shallow to foresee the result of what is subject to many variations.”“’ Such skepticism could not be easily tolerated by that enlightened and moral age. Mandeville and all those who would ignore private intentions in favor of public results threatened to unhinge both man’s moral responsibility for his actions and the homogeneous relation that presumably existed between cause and effect. To break the necessary moral connection between cause and effect, to make evil the author of good and Vice versa, would be, it was said, “to confound all differences of character, to destroy all distinction between right and wrong, and to make the most malicious and the most benevolent being of precisely the same temper and disposition.” 

Mandeville clearly perceived that much of human activity had become an “incomprehensible Chain of Causes.” But he, like others of his time, had no better way of describing the multitude of complicated and criss-crossing causal chains he saw than to invoke the traditional Protestant concept of “providence.” For those who would be enlightened and scientific, this resort to the mysterious hand of God was no explanation of human affairs at all but rather a step backward into darkness. Things happened, as John Adams noted, by human volition, either “by Accident or Design.” Some confusing event or effect might be passed off as an accident-the result of somebody’s mistaken intention-but a series of events that seemed to form a pattern could be no accident. Having only the alternative of “providence” as an impersonal abstraction to describe systematic linkages of human actions, the most enlightened of the age could only conclude that regular patterns of behavior were the consequences of concerted human intentions-that is, the result of a number of people coming together to promote a collective design or conspiracy. The human mind, it seemed to Jonathan Edwards, had a natural disposition, “when it sees a thing begin to be,” not only “to conclude certainly, that there is a Cause of it,” but also, “if it sees a thing to be in a very orderly, regular and exact manner to conclude that some Design regulated and disposed it.” Although Edwards was arguing here for God’s “exact regulation of a very great multitude of particulars,” a similar leap from a particular cause to a general design was made by eighteenth-century theists who sought to account for the regularity of human actions by the coincident purposes not of God but of human beings” 

Many enlightened thinkers of the eighteenth century could therefore no more accept the seeming chaos and contingency of events than could the Puritans. Like the Puritans, they presumed the existence of an ordering power lying beneath the apparently confused surface of events-not God’s concealed will, of course, but natural causes embodied in the bid den intentions and wills of men. Those who saw only random chance in events simply did not know enough about these hidden human wills. Just as devout Puritans believed that nothing occurred without God’s providence, so the liberal-minded believed that nothing occurred without some person willing it. Earlier, men had sought to decipher the concealed or partially revealed will of God; now they sought to understand the cone cealed or partially exposed wills of human beings. That, in a nutshell, was what being enlightened was all about. 

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Such were the presuppositions and circumstances that explain the propensity of Anglo-Americans and others in the eighteenth century to resort to conspiratorial interpretations of events. The belief in plots Was not a symptom of disturbed minds but a rational attempt to explain human phenomena in terms of human intentions and to maintain moral coherence in the affairs of men. This mode of thinking was neither pathological nor uniquely American. Certainly, the American Revolution cannot serve as an adequate context for comprehending the obsession with conspiratorial beliefs. Perhaps we can perceive better their larger place in Western history by examining, however briefly, the newer modes of causal explanation that gradually came to replace them. 

Well before the close of the eighteenth century, even while conspiratorial interpretations were flourishing under the aegis of enlightened science, alternative ways of explaining events were taking form, prompted by dynamic social changes that were stretching and contorting any simple linkage between human intentions and actions, causes and effects. The expanding, interdependent economic order obviously relied on the activity of thousands upon thousands of insignificant producers and traders whose various and conflicting motives could hardly be deciphered, let alone judged. The growing number of persons and interests participating in politics made causal evaluations ever more difficult. Causes seemed farther and farther removed from their consequences, sometimes disappearing altogether into a distant murkiness. As a result, the inferences of plots and deceptions used to close the widening gap between events and the presumed designs of particular individuals became even more elaborate and contrived. Many were still sure that every social effect, every political event, had to have a purposive human agent as a cause. But men now distinguished more frequently between “remote” and “proximate” causes and between “immediate” and “permanent” effects. Although many continued to assume that the relationship between causes and their effects was intrinsic and morally homogeneous, some moralists noted bewilderingly and sometimes cynically how personal vices like self-love and self-interest could have contrary, indeed beneficial, consequences for society. Men everywhere wrestled with the demands the changing social reality was placing on their thought. Some suggested that self-love might even be a virtue; others complained of “a kind of mandevillian chemistry” that converted avarice into benevolence; still others questioned the presumed identity between private motives and public consequences.” Little of this was followed out in any systematic way in the Anglo-American world until the appearance in the latter half of the eighteenth century of that remarkable group of Scottish intellectuals who worked out, in an extraordinary series of writings, a new understanding of the relationship between individuals and events. These Scottish “social scientists" did not and could not by themselves create a new way of conceiving of human affairs, but their writings were an especially clear crystallization of the changes gradually taking place in Western consciousness during the last third of the eighteenth century. Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and John Millar sought to undermine what Duncan Forbes has called “a dominant characteristic of the historical thought of the age”' the “tendency to explain events in terms of conscious action by individuals.” These Scottish moral philosophers had come to realize more clearly than most eighteenth-century thinkers that men pursuing their own particular aims were led by an “invisible hand” into promoting an end that was no part of their intentions. Traditional historians, complained Ferguson in his History of Civil Society, had seen all events as the “effect of design. An author and a work, like cause and effect, are perpetually coupled together.” But reality was not so simple. Men, “in striving to remove inconveniencies, or to gain apparent and contiguous advantages, arrive at ends which even their imagination could not anticipate, . .. and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result 0: human action. but not the execution of any human design.” 

Such momentous insights would in time help to transform all social and historical thinking in the Western world. But it took more than the writings of philosophers-it took the experiencing of tumultuous events-to shake most European intellectuals out of their accustomed ways of thinking. The French Revolution, more than any other single event, changed the consciousness of Europe. The Revolution was simply too convulsive and too sprawling, involving the participation of too man), masses of people, to be easily confined within conventional personals. tie and rationalistic modes of explanation. For the most sensitive European intellectuals, the Revolution became the cataclysm that shattered once and for all the traditional moral affinity between cause and effect, motives and behavior. That the actions of liberal, enlightened, and well-intentioned men could produce such horror, terror, and chaos, that so much promise could result in so much tragedy, became, said Shelley, “tbs master theme of the epoch in which we live.” What the French Revolution revealed, wrote Wordsworth, speaking for a generation of disillusioned intellectuals, was “this awful truth” that “sin and crime are apt to start from their very opposite qualities?” Many European thinkers continued of course, to describe what happened as the deliberate consequence of the desires and ambitions of individuals. But the scale and complexity of the Revolution now required conspiratorial interpretations of an unprecedented sort, No small group of particular plotters could account for its tumult and mass movements; only elaborately organized secret societies, like the Illuminati or the Freemasons, involving thousands of individuals linked by sinister designs, could be behind the Europe-wide upheaval.” 

Although such conspiratorial interpretations of the Revolution were everywhere, the best minds-Hegel’s in particular-now knew that the jumble of events that made up the Revolution were so complex and overwhelming that they could no longer be explained simply as the products of personal intention. For these thinkers, history could no longer be a combination of individual events managed by particular persons, but had to become a complicated flow or process, a “stream,” that swept men along. 

THe story of this vast transformation in the way men explain events is central to the history of modern Western thought. Indeed, so huge and complicated is it that our easy generalizations are apt to miss its confused and agonized significance for individuals and to neglect the piecemeal ways in which it was worked out in the minds of people--~not great philosophers like Hegel or Adam Smith, but more ordinary people, clergymen, writers, and politicians caught up in the problems and polemics of the moment. 

Certainly late eighteenth-century Americans did not experience this transformation in consciousness as rapidly and to the same extent as Europeans, but it is evident that some were coming to realize that the social and moral order was not as intelligible as it once had been. 

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Motives and intentions, Brown suggested, could no longer be crucial in judging moral responsibility, since “the causes that fashion men into instruments of happiness or misery, are numerous, complex, and operate upon a wide surface. . . . Every man is encompassed by numerous claims, and is the subject of intricate relations. . . . Human affairs are infinitely complicated.” 

These American explorations into the relationship between aims and consequences were only small and modest examples of what was taking place generally in Western thought during the late eighteenth century. Others elsewhere were also becoming more and more conscious of the 
complicatedness of human affairs. The growing awareness of the difficulty of delving into the human heart and the increasing unwillingness to esteem men simply for their aristocratic character were forcing moralists, sometimes imperceptibly, to shift the basis of judgment of human action from the motives and personal qualifications of the actors to the public consequences of their acts. The common practice of deducing motives from their effects in actions only furthered this transition and blurred what was happening. What counted now was less the beliefs and intentions or the “character,” of the actor and more the consequences of his actions or his contributions to human happiness. And any man, however much he lacked “character,” however ordinary and insignificant he may have been, could make such contributions. 

In just such shifts from motives to consequences was a democratic consciousness strengthened and what came to be called utilitarianism created. Naturally, for most people there remained no discrepancy between benevolent aims and good effects, and the familiar belief that private virtue was the obvious source of human happiness continued strong. But for Jeremy Bentham and other stark utilitarians, there could no longer be any such thing as good or bad motives: “If they are good or bad, it is only on account of their effects, good on account of their tendency to produce pleasure, or avert pain: bad, on account of their tendency to produce pain, or avert pleasure.” 

Many Americans were reluctant to separate motives from consequences, causes from effects, in this unequivocal utilitarian manner. But by the early nineteenth century there were some, usually those most eager to disparage “aristocratic” heroic individuals and to magnify the popular “masses,” who increasingly emphasized what Bishop had clumsily called the “system” of society. Now it was described as the “natural order” or the “aggregate result” of events formed out of the diverse and clashing motives of countless insignificant individuals. Men no doubt caused this "aggregate result,” but they did so in large numbers and unthinkingly by following their particular natural inclinations.