
<#FROWN:G01\>
Love and/or War
By W. D. Snodgrass
WHAT was our teacher crying for - unashamedly, in front of us all? What should she care if we finally were in the war? Nobody thought fighting would come to this country, much less this town. If it lasted, we might have to go to it; she never would. We were used to war talk: year after year, our home radios had talked about plebiscites, treaties, battles, countries fallen - other peoples' war. We had heard the voices of Mussolini and Hitler. That morning, we'd all been herded into the school auditorium where a huge radio console had been rolled out to carry the voice of Franklin Delano Roosevelt saying that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbour. Could she be crying for us?
Year by year, while I finished school and started college, that war became a little less of a rumor, more a living presence. We had blackouts, rationing, newsreels, patriotic songs on the radio. The war, like love, was on every public tongue; we were expected to have strong feelings - but what feelings? Men I knew got drafted; a neighbor who'd played in Uncle Stew's tennis club died in a training accident. A boy who had bullied me in the high school band dropped out of school to join the Marines; he was killed. I did not admit, even to myself, a feeling that this proved the world's, even God's, justice.
Our band director's name was Adolphe - Adolphe J. Pletincks, a drill-master worthy of SS sergeantry, who wore, moreover, a tiny mustache not unlike Hitler's. He, though, was Italian and wore it to look like a nobler despot, Toscanini. Unceasingly he exhorted us that, because of "our boys overseas," we must march better, play better, win more competitions. To botch a maneuver during the football half time would "let them down." Absurdly, this worked; we took every prize in the area.
I once knew a man who, during World War II in the Soviet Union, had served a sentence in Siberia - the best years of his life, since 'free' men were in the army. The time I served in the tiny hyper-Christian college a block from my home could have been as delightful if I'd had sense or nerve. We were strictly forbidden to smoke, drink, or dance, but a kindlier tolerance was turned toward couples who slipped off nightly to the 'Big Rock' or the woods behind the practice football field. I wrote a column in the campus paper, helped write a musical comedy, acted in plays and skits, was student conductor of the chorus. The older girls, who would normally have scorned freshmen, sought us out, praised our performances, took us to necking parties.
So love and war, or sex and war, arrived in tandem; at times they seemed equally daunting. When, at earlier parties, our high-school gang had played spin-the-bottle or post office, I abstained - though I had a heavy crush on one of the girls, a frill, willowy blonde (aptly named Willa), outside whose house I paced longingly late at night, whistling sad songs. Still earlier, I had taken another girl, as pretty but less fashionable, to a barn party. I think she liked me; in time she became a dancer, shared my love of music, and proved superbly sexual with one of my friends. Alas, while other couples kept disappearing into the hay mow, I not only failed to vanish with, I vanished from her, seeking noisier sports among the boys. Later, at school functions, I seldom danced with girls, getting instead into athletic jitterbug contests with other guys - much as young Hungarians and Romanians display for their girls rather than dance with them.
By the time I finished high school, though, the drives grew stronger, even if my nerves did not. The few times I'd tried to kiss a girl, I had shivered so heavily that I had to plea a sudden chill and hurry home. Once into college, I did manage to try a little petting with the older girls, though even then I was known to deliver to a partner impromptu sermonettes on the subject of French kissing.
Meantime, I'd been attracted to a girl in my freshman class, a minister's daughter whose name recalled the heroine of a then-scandalous novel. She agreed, after our first movie or pizza, to drive out somewhere and park; I tried not to betray that I had no idea where one could. As soon as I kissed her she began to moan and tremble, fumbling at my clothes. I backed out of our woodland cranny in such panic that I stuck the car in a ditch - embarrassing, but at least a crisis I could manage.
Another night, we went to lie in the tall grass behind the practice field; again I fled. My sermonettes could not even calm her enough so that passion might shake her less than fear shook me. One day, when she'd quite justly escaped to her room at the girls' dorm, I got the nerve to follow upstairs, risking expulsion. I dared climb or enter little else. Already weary, no doubt, of her father's sermons on love and sex, she had no need of mine and soon moved on to a college air cadet.
Still, the draft loomed larger, closer. I felt unable to face that war without someone to be in love with, someone to come back to - a feeling shared, oddly enough, by most young men. And I soon met another girl who fit, more or less, the romantic ideal of the moment: slender, blonde, and rather timid both sexually and personally. We started dating and quickly decided we were in the grip of a great passion. We did feel something powerful, wanted to call it love and to believe, since it would surely last forever, that one could mitigate one's death, or build a life around it.
Getting drafted must be much like what a frog feels, being taken into a larger organization - say, a heron. Instantly, you are one in a line of naked men, examined, poked at, numbered, rushed from place to place, questioned, insulted, shouted at, given indecipherable but inexorable commands. Then, strange clothes are hurled at you and you emerge, as from a new, more fearful birth trauma, into an area of barracks and asphalt-covered, phlegm-splattered drill yards. I have no way to convey how utterly you become nobody, vulnerable, almost transparent. Instantly, no world revolves around you, and there is no way to make one seem to do so again.
In school I had been one of the best students and also the class clown - a role self-deprecating enough to make me more or less acceptable to tougher, less studious classmates. In the Navy, nothing I did, said, or could think up was funny. Music was no help; after boot camp I kept a few scores with me, but how many sailors care about Palestrina? Actually, a man two bunks away did care, but he'd been second organist at St. Patrick's in New York and found my learning less than impressive. I joined the Bluejackets' Choir at each of several bases hoping to find a berth as music specialist, but found, instead, others better prepared, more experienced. I had no idea how to relate to the men around me or how to give what had seemed the fact of my existence any hint of significance.
Randall Jarrell ends a fine little poem, 'Mail Call,' by saying "the soldier simply wishes for his name," which, if called, will bring him a letter and prove the person he once was, possible - possibly even recoverable. The surest proof came in love letters. Mail call was the best, or worst, moment of each day; you approached carefully any man whose name had not been called. Only a 'Dear John' letter was worse - we felt, mawkishly no doubt, that with no one to come back to, a man was less likely to come back. As if wanting something more intensely could make it more likely to happen!
Evenings, when the others read, played cards, went to the canteen, I stayed in the barracks to write my family or my girl. I was determined to write her every night; once or twice, I refused to leave the base on liberty lest I miss a day. My friends - eventually I had some - were aghast. Though I had little to say beyond the tritest lovers' formulae from movies or the radio, my letters grew longer and longer. I cultivated enormous handwriting to eat up more space on the page, making it all seem weightier, bulkier.
No doubt I hoped - in vain - to coerce more and longer answers, more impassioned declarations. How else could I impress my less romantic, less sublimated mates? My best friend at several successive camps, known as 'J.C.,' got letters from his girl signed, "Again, Johnny! Again!" Chastity had to go far to match that! J.C.'s cynical cockiness often shocked me. When an older platoon member and former lay preacher, Charles Birdey, returned from liberty full of self-praise for his weekend spent comforting his impoverished grandmother, J.C. shouted across the barracks, "Hey, Birdey, did you get in her pants?"
I was shocked, too, when friends whose wives' or girl-friends' fidelity was so crucial to them felt no constancy incumbent on themselves. Of course, we demand more of the other's morals, especially of those we love, than of our own; then, too, men were expected to be sexually freer. And the fact of facing possible death or injury made many feel driven to, and justified in, sexual inconstancies. To me, all premarital sex was immoral; if I did not dare have sex with my own girl-friend, I could scarcely imagine it with anyone else. That seemed as preposterous to my friends as their attitudes seemed scandalous to me.
Still, some of my notions were changing. Home for ten days' leave after boot camp, I became more urgent and the love-play more intense. If she had been willing, I wonder what I'd have done. She wasn't. And partly because of that - what might now seem a strong deterrent - we got engaged.
At the same time I found myself, to my surprise, darkly resentful against my parents, as if they had somehow caused the war. It might have made some sense to feel our lifestyle had been one, at least, of the war's cause. Or that my upbringing had left me woefully ill-equipped for the world I faced. What I did feel was the spoiled child's sense that the parents, the gods of his tiny cosmos, were to blame for all trials or dangers. My feelings about God - the one in church - were as yet unchanged.
And another attitude changed: I was finding that, in real need or trouble, help seldom came from the appointed or promised channels. In boot camp my greatest fear had been of the swimming lessons; I could swim a little but had always dreaded the water. Those 'lessons' consisted of ordering a shivering clump of thirty or forty naked men to jump into the pool at once - then, arms thrashing, bodies thumping and jostling, strike out for the far end. As the last lesson, we had to step off a high wooden tower, falling feet first into the pool. In the chow hall, the night before that test, I went to pieces, hysterical.
A boy my own age - vulgar, irreverent, a loudmouth I'd never willingly have spoken to - took me in hand. "You come right beside me," he said. "We'll go off together; it's a snap." When we'd climbed the platform atop the tower, he stepped out, whooping, comically kicking and flailing; then I, too, stepped into the air. Falling for what seemed hours, I heard a small, regretful voice I've heard again several times when I thought my life about to end in a car crash or a fall, saying with stupid sincerity: "Oh. I wish I was back up there." Then I was in the water, splashing toward the edge.
<#FROWN:G02\>
Whither Europe?
By RICHARD N. COOPER
Europe of 1992 has arrived, almost. In 1985 the member nations of the European Community launched an ambitious program to eliminate intracommunity border delays for economic transactions, so that intra-European trade would become like trade within the United States. While tariffs and most quantitative restrictions had been eliminated as long ago as 1968, a truck carrying commercial goods still had to stop for an average of eighty minutes at intracommunity borders in the late 1980s. This delay results from the need both to ascertain whether the truck's goods violate the importing country's health or safety or environmental regulations and to complete the paperwork associated with adjusting for the different indirect tax rates prevalent among European countries, rebatable on exports and leviable on imports.
Border stops are to be eliminated by the end of 1992. By February 1992 all of the 282 directives required to achieve this result had been submitted by the European Commission, the community's executive arm, to the European Council of Ministers, its decision-making body. Of these, 194 had been adopted by the Council of Ministers, and thus formally became the law of the European Community, although in practice most required implementing legislation by national parliaments, and that process was much delayed.
Whatever happens in detail, however, the European Community will unquestionably have entered a new phase, completing the common market begun in 1958. Business firms have already anticipated the new arrangements; in the past few years there has been a spate of cross-border mergers, acquisitions, and weaker forms of association among firms to take advantage of the new possibilities and intensified competition, for example, with respect to government procurement. Cross-border investments within Europe formerly were mainly by non-European, and especially American, firms; now they also involve many European firms.
Ironically, Europe may not achieve the full benefits of 'Europe without borders' in the near future. These were estimated in 1988 at 4.5 percent of Europe's gross domestic product (GDP), to be achieved over the six years following 1992, roughly 0.7 percent a year, a significant addition to a region's growth rate. The reason for the delay is the European Council agreement in December 1991 at Maastricht to introduce a European Monetary Union (EMU) by 1999 and the conditions attendant to that aim.
A Europe without (commercial) borders will represent the attainment of one of the objectives laid down in the Spaak Report of 1955, whose adoption led to the Treaty of Rome in 1957, achieving a true common market among the (originally six, now twelve) members of the European Community. What was not agreed in the mid-1950s, but was foremost in the minds of some European statesmen, was the eventual creation of a United States of Europe, politically linking all member countries. (A minor achievement of the period pointing in this direction is that the Treaty of Rome, like a constitution but unlike most treaties, contains no provisions for withdrawal from or dismantling of the European Community.) That objective remains alive and controversial thirty-five years later.
Europe is once again at a crossroads, usually formulated as facing a strategic choice between 'widening' the community or 'deepening' it. Those who would deepen it want to extend the scope of the community to encompass a unified currency, a common foreign policy, and a common defense, leading eventually to a confederation or even a federation of European states, although that ultimate objective is rarely discussed explicitly. Many Europeans are not prepared to contemplate a federation yet, but they are willing to continue, gradually, down a path that may eventually lead to federation. Other Europeans see no reason for further change from existing arrangements, although that view, too, is rarely voiced explicitly, not being respectable in informed circles. Still other Europeans believe the community should be widened by taking in additional countries that are ready to join. Austria, Finland, Sweden, Cyprus, Malta, and Turkey have officially applied for membership, and others, including Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, have indicated their likely desire to apply in the future. The three Baltic states may not be far behind. The Swiss and Norwegian publics are debating the issue seriously. Under the Treaty of Rome, anyEuropean country can aspire to membership.
Political considerations reinforce the economic arguments for enlargement in the case of the three central European countries, and eventually also possibly for the Baltic states. The European Community is made up exclusively of democratic countries, a political if not a formal condition for membership. Some argue that membership in the community will in practice rule out a reversion to authoritarian government. This consideration played a role in the admission of Greece, Portugal, and Spain during the 1980s.
Although widening and deepening are not logically incompatible, in reality there is considerable tension between them, even though in the end they may actually reinforce each other. The admission of new members creates substantial problems of adjustment both for existing members and especially for new members, who may call for financial assistance and special transitional arrangements lasting for many years. The all-important details of entry preoccupy officials, diverting their attention from other tasks. Some prospective members would have great difficulty adhering comfortably to a common currency, thus either delaying that route to deepening or leading to two classes of membership. Close cooperation in foreign or defense policy is difficult enough among existing members, all of which (except Ireland) have much experience with both through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Admission of countries with traditions of neutrality would probably impede progress on those fronts.
New membership would also greatly complicate theprocess of decision-making within the European Community, and extensive widening would certainly require major revisions in the voting provisions of the European Council (which still requires unanimity on matters of tax, environment, and labor policies, and a heavy majority on other issues), and would probably lead to greater authority gravitating toward the Commission, thereby increasing the so- called democratic gap within the community, since the Commission is not politically responsible to electorates or, except very indirectly, to national governments. A natural solution to these problems would be to enlarge the powers of the directly elected European Parliament, a step toward deepening.
During the 1960s the members concentrated on completing the customs union and the common agricultural policy - a process of deepening. French President Charles de Gaulle vetoed additional members, notably Britain. During the 1970s Britain, Denmark, and Ireland joined the community, a process of widening. In the early and mid-1980s three additional members joined, and in the late 1980s the community passed the Single European Act, which embraced the objective of Europe-92 and streamlined the decision-making process - some widening and some deepening for the decade as a whole. In recent years the emphasis has been on deepening. Europe-92 in particular required joint decisions on thousands of details concerning regulation and taxation that are at the heart of domestic policy-making in every country.
What comes next? Extensive consultation on extra-European foreign policy questions has taken place for several years, but no one is yet prepared to embark on joint foreign policy-making on all issues. Sharp disagreements over how to handle a disintegrating Yugoslavia simply dramatized the difficulty.
That leaves money and defense. European defense for the past forty years has been closely associated through NATO with the Unites States and Canada and two nonmember nations on Europe's important flanks, Norway and Turkey. Although NATO needs to redefine its role in light of the demise of the Warsaw Pact and the dismantling of the Soviet Union, many Europeans do not yet want to abandon NATO, at least until it becomes clear how the dust settles. Former Soviet republics still have nuclear weapons capable of devastating Europe. Moreover, Russia will no doubt emerge with a powerful military capability and with intentions toward Europe that cannot now be foreseen. Thus a European-only defense policy is not widely desired. No method has yet been found to forge a common European defense policy that still permits close cooporation with NATO, and many Europeans fear opening that particular route because NATO, precarious since the disappearance of the Warsaw Pact, might unravel at the American end.
By elimination, that leaves monetary cooperation, which indeed has been on the European agenda since the late 1960s. The meeting at Maastricht took a major step toward the European Monetary Union, while advancing very little on the directly political front. The details of the EMU were agreed, and the timing and conditions of its introduction outlined. Specifically, some time after 1996 but no later than 1999, exchange rates of the participating countries (which may but need not be the same as members of the European Community) will be irrevocably fixed, a common currency in all but name. Such an arrangement requires a common monetary policy, and much of the Maastricht agreement is devoted to spelling out the institutional structure for determining that monetary policy and the powers and responsibilities of the institutions to be established.
Monetary policy under the EMU will be determined by a Eurofed, modeled in part on the Federal Open Market Committee of the U.S. Federal Reserve System. It is a council to consist of governors of the participating national central banks, who will vote as Europeans without government instruction, augmented by six individuals appointed for eight-year terms by the European Council, also to serve as Europeans rather than as national representatives. This body would determine the rate of monetary expansion in the EMU, and thus also short-term interest rates, with the primary but not exclusive objective of maintaining price stability.
The Eurofed would be obliged to report to the public but would act independently of governments. Governments would have no direct access to the money-creating powers of the EMU, and because national central banks would cease to create national money, governments would have to go to the capital market to finance any budget deficits, as governments in the United States do. These arrangements would mark a dramatic change from present arrangements.
A decision is to be made before 1997 whether to go ahead with the EMU in 1997, and if so with what membership. Four presumptive conditions for membership were established at Maastricht: (1) a country should have a rate of inflation that does not exceed by 1.5 percentage points the rate of inflation of the three community countries with the lowest rates of inflation; (2) government borrowing to cover deficits should not exceed 3 percent of GDP, and outstanding government debt should not exceed 60 percent of GDP, or at least should have declined substantially; (3) a country's currency should not have been devalued for at least two years; and (4) a country's long-term interest rates should not exceed by 2 percentage points the long-term interest rates of the three countries with the lowest rates of inflation.
These are stiff conditions. At the end if 1991 only France and Luxembourg among the twelve member countries could meet them. During the remainder of the 1990s countries that do not want to be left out of the EMU will strive to attain them, on the grounds that adequate striving may in the end be sufficient for admission. (The numerical target on outstanding debt, in particular, will be virtually impossible for several countries to meet without repudiation - notably Belgium, Greece, Ireland, and Italy.) The process of attempting to reduce inflation (which has come down substantially in many European countries during the past five years) and budget deficits will result in deflationary pressure being exerted by fiscal and monetary policy in the coming years. Moreover, it is widely recognized that currencies within Europe are out of line in 1992, and in particular that the German mark should be appreciated against several other currencies. The Maastricht agreement does not prevent currency realignments before the EMU. But under existing arrangements currency realignments involve a collective decision, and in their efforts to establish their anti-inflation credentials, most European countries will strive to avoid currency evaluation, as they have done since early 1987. A corollary is that monetary and fiscal policies will have to be relatively tight also to protect the balance of payments of these countries.
<#FROWN:G03\>
CANDICE BERGEN: SWEET SUCCESS
The nice girl who grew up with a piece of wood for a brother may not fit the character of Murphy Brown precisely but close enough to know that she is 'home at last.'
By Maynard Good Stoddard
What is a nice girl like Candice Bergen doing in the acerbic character of Murphy Brown, a 42-year-old television journalist who is single and pregnant and refuses to marry the father, her ex-husband?
An obvious answer is that she's enjoying the success of this popular CBS series, which has survived its fourth season in the sudden-death jungle of TV sitcoms. A look behind the scenes, however, reveals Candice Bergen as a most un-Murphy-like person who is happily married and loves living quietly.
The daughter of famous ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, Candice grew up in the Hollywood limelight contending not only with fame, but also with a unique sibling rivalry - her wooden 'brother,' Charlie McCarthy, got more attention than she did.
"Candy never knew a day without Charlie, which was a bizarre relationship for a little girl," Candice's mother, Frances Bergen, says. "How do you explain why this piece of wood was as important as a live, little girl? She was photographed with Charlie in her cradle when she was an infant."
In her teen years, Bergen rebelled. She went through some pretty colorful phases beginning at age 14 when her parents sent her to a school in Switzerland. They later yanked her out upon learning that she had bleached her hair and was majoring in Bloody Marys. "When Candy was 15, I was ready to give her away," Frances says. At 17 Candice enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, but spent so much time modeling that she flunked out.
Today, her mother can laugh when asked if Candy and Murphy are one and the same person. "They are not entirely different at all," she says. "That's one reason Candy is having so much fun doing the series." Bergen herself confesses it's the kind of "flat-out comedy I've been wanting to do in the movies for years and didn't get a chance to do.
"My father kept pushing me toward comedy," she says. "He would have loved this kind of show."
At 24 Bergen was referred to as the most beautiful woman on the screen. Her romances included affairs with a Brazilian radical and an Austrian count, a date with Henry Kissinger, and a more serious involvement with record producer Terry Melcher, son of Doris Day.
The real thing finally came along, however, after photographer Mary Allen Mark suggested that Candice and Louis Malle, known for directing Atlantic City and My Dinner with Andr might be a perfect match. He was 14 years her senior, divorced with two children, and Bergen at first looked the other way. But ten years later, in the summer of 1980, she and Malle married. Currently their home is Malle's 18th century chateau in Lagagnac, France, as well as a duplex in Paris and an apartment in New York. But nine months of the year Bergen resides in Los Angeles - home of her mother and brother - where 'Murphy Brown' is filmed.
Bergen is proud of her role as devoted stepmother to Malle's children - Cuote, 17, and Justine, 14 - and mother to Chloe, their 6-year-old daughter. When not on the set, Bergen is at home with Chloe playing games or watching 'Sesame Street.' Of course, on Monday nights they settle down to watch - what else - 'Murphy Brown.'
The 'Murphy Brown' role was not presented to Bergen on the proverbial silver platter; she lobbied hard to become this outspoken broadcast celebrity - said to look like Diane Sawyer and behave like Mike Wallace. After the first three years home with Chloe, Bergen decided she was not comfortable away from her work. And when she read the pilot script, she was hooked. Although not one of creator Diane English's original choices for the part, she arranged a dinner with English and emerged with the role. And two Emmys now prove that her talent has at last come home.
Although her father would have liked the show, complete with things like a whoopee cushion and 'kick me' sign on someone's back - how would he, and perhaps millions of faithful 'Murphy Brown' fans, embrace the character of a pregnant single woman who refuses to marry the baby's father? "Candice and I both went through a very long period in our early lives when we were just good girls," English says. "And this character has helped us to get to another level. We are not afraid for everyone not to like us, either."
A hard and fast rule among compositors is to 'follow the copy if it goes out the window.' An actor also follows the script even though it may occasionally conflict with his or her moral principles, trusting in the writer's judgement to present an entertaining version of real life that will reach the audience.
Script-writer English and actress Bergen agreed that having Murphy come down with a case of pregnancy while single was worth the risk. They felt the situation to be topical, pointing out the publicity given the babies of TV personalities such as Katie Couric, Deborah Norville, and Meredith Viera. And hadn't Connie Chung taken leave to try to get pregnant? All of this Candice Bergen leaves on the set when she comes home to play with her daughter, read, and spend a quiet evening with her husband. "I can't think of anything greater than that," she says.
Declared to be the least pretentious of Hollywood's celebrities, Candice Bergen is perhaps quietest when "giving something back."
"When I see people losing their families, their homes - even farmers - I have to find a way to do something more," she says. She is now working with the Starlight Foundation, involved in granting wishes to dying children. Her best friends all say that she cares very deeply. So exactly what is Candice Bergen doing in the role of Murphy Brown? She's having fun, speaking out, cashing in, bettering the lives of those around her, and finding joy in the work that makes life complete.
TIME TO PREVENT OSTEOPOROSIS
The best defense against bone loss is a good offense, so start by understanding these six principles of calcium absorption.
By Kenneth H. Cooper, M.D., M.P.H.
There's no question that calcium is absolutely necessary in building and maintaining a good, solid bone mass - or what I call 'tough bones.' Unfortunately, however, the average person consumes far less than needed in his or her daily diet.
Calcium by itself - especially in the form of certain supplements - won't necessarily help you develop the tough bones you need to fight osteoporosis. But in general, if you consume your calcium wisely, you'll most likely strengthen your defenses against bone loss. The following principles will help you get the calcium you need.
Principle 1. Each day's menus should contain 1,000 to 1,500 mg of calcium.
The U.S. Recommended Daily Allowance for calcium is 800 mg. But I prefer to go with the higher 1,000-to-1,500 range, which has been endorsed by the National Institutes of Health, as well as by my consultant Dr. Charles Pak and other osteoporosis experts.
The reason for choosing the higher amount is that it's important to be certain that you reach at least a 'zero calcium balance' in your body. That is, you should be retaining at least as much calcium as you're losing. If you're consuming only the average amounts of 450 to 550 mg a day that many Americans take in, you're in danger of losing bone mass. Furthermore, you are putting yourself at greater risk for osteoporosis.
In addition, recent studies have shown that under some circumstances, increasing your calcium consumption may lower your risk of hypertension. For example, one study of pregnant women suggested that high blood pressure was associated with low calcium intake. Also, nationwide surveys and clinical studies have indicated that as a group, those who have high blood pressure take in less calcium than do those who have normal blood pressure. Specifically, one study revealed that people who consume fewer than 300 mg of calcium daily have a two to three times greater risk of developing hypertension than do those consuming 1,500 mg a day.
Of course, hypertension is a complex disease, and there's no one solution to it for everybody. But the general trend of scientific investigation points toward a definite link between low calcium intake and the risk of high blood pressure.
Principle 2. It's best to take your calcium on an empty stomach.
Admittedly, there is some disagreement on this point. One group of researchers feels that calcium supplements - and, by implication, calcium contained in foods - should be taken with meals because they're absorbed better that way. This contention is based on the fact that certain foods, such as meats, will stimulate secretions such as hydrochloric acid, and thereby enhance the solubility of calcium salts. In this way, more calcium supposedly is absorbed into the system and becomes available for use in bone formation.
A second group, which includes Dr. Charles Pak, takes the opposite position. They feel that calcium is best consumed on an empty stomach because some other foods may interfere with its absorption. For example, the oxalates or organic salts in foods such as spinach may tie up the calcium so that it never gets into the bloodstream. A similar process may occur with certain types of fiber, which 'bind' the calcium and cause it to be excreted from the body before it can get to the bones. Also, these scientists fear that taking calcium with other foods may interfere with the body's absorption of certain minerals such as phosphate and iron. Remember: Phosphate, as well as calcium, is needed for hardening!
On balance, I believe that the arguments of this second group are the strongest. Obviously, however, for you to get the necessary amounts of calcium, often you must consume your calcium at mealtimes as well.
Principle 3. Divide your calcium consumption into at least two separate 'doses' each day.
It's a well-established fact that the more you can spread out your calcium intake over the day, the more likely it is that you'll absorb maximum amounts. Most people who take supplements find that it's most convenient to take a tablet or other form of calcium before breakfast and a second one at bedtime.
On the other hand, if you're including your calcium as snacks in the middle of the day or as part of your regular meals, you can spread it out into even more 'doses.' That approach will promote even better absorption by your body.
Principle 4. Limit the sodium in your diet - especially if you're a post-menopausal woman.
In general, it's best to limit your salt intake for your overall good health. But there's a particular reason for you to pay attention to this principle if you're a woman who has gone through menopause: You'll put yourself at greater risk for lower calcium absorption and the development of osteoporosis if you consume too much sodium.
Principle 5. Calcium from different sources is absorbed by the body with varying degrees of efficiency.
In other words, calcium may be more 'bioavailable' from one source than from another. In general calcium in certain supplements tends to be better absorbed or more bioavailable than in others.
The calcium contained in milk - calcium phosphate - isn't as well absorbed when it's given as a pure salt. It's much better absorbed in the form of milk. Furthermore, skim milk seems to be better than whole milk, probably because the fats in whole milk interfere with the absorption of calcium.
Spinach contains a great deal of calcium, but has very low bioavailabilty - only about 3 percent of its calcium gets absorbed into the body. This is because the oxalates or organic salts in spinach operate in the intestines to prevent absorption of calcium.
Other common calcium-containing foods include yogurt, canned sardines and salmon (eaten with bones still present), canned or fresh oysters, collard greens, dandelion greens, turnips, mustard greens, broccoli, and kale.
<#FROWN:G04\>
A LOADED QUESTION
What is it about Americans and guns?
By Leonard Kriegel
I have fired a gun only once in my life, hardly experience enough to qualify one as an expert on firearms. As limited as my exposure to guns has been, however, my failure to broaden that experience had nothing at all to do with moral disapproval or with the kind of righteous indignation that views an eight-year old boy playing cops and robbers with a cap pistol as a preview of the life of a serial killer. None of us can speak with surety about alternative lives, but had circumstances been different I suspect I not only would have hunted but very probably would have enjoyed it. I might even have gone in for target shooting, a 'sport' increasingly popular in New York City, where I live (like bowling, it is practised indoors in alleys). To be truthful, I have my doubts that target shooting would really have appealed to me. But in a country in which grown men feel passionately about a game as visibly ludicrous as golf, anything is possible.
The single shot I fired didn't leave me with a traumatic hatred of or distaste for guns. Quite the opposite. I liked not only the sense of incipient skill firing that shot gave me but also the knowledge that a true marksman, like a good hitter in baseball, had to practice - and practice with a real gun. Boys on the cusp of adolescence are not usually disciplined, but they do pay attention to the demands of skill. Because I immediately recognized how difficult it would be for me to practice marksmanship, I was brought face to face with the fact that my career as a hunter was over even before it had started.
Like my aborted prospects as a major league ballplayer, my short but happy life as a hunter could be laid at the metaphorical feet of the polio virus which left me crippled at the age of eleven. Yet the one thing that continues to amaze me as I look back to that gray February afternoon when I discovered the temptation of being shooter and hunter is that I did not shoot one or the other of the two most visible targets - myself or my friend Jackie, the boy who owned the .22.
Each of us managed to fire one shot that afternoon. And when we returned to the ward in which we lived along with twenty other crippled boys between the ages of nine and thirteen, we regaled our peers with a story unashamedly embellished in the telling. As the afternoon chill faded and the narrow winter light in which we had hunted drifted toward darkness, Jackie managed to hide the .22 from ward nurses and doctors on the prowl. What neither of us attempted to hide from the other boys was our brief baptism in the world of guns.
Like me, Jackie was a Bronx boy, as ignorant about guns as I was. Both of us had been taken down with polio in the summer of '44. We had each lost the use of our legs. We were currently in wheelchairs. And we had each already spent a year and a half in the aptly named New York State Reconstruction Home, a state hospital for long-term physical rehabilitation. Neither of us had ever fired anything more lethal than a Daisy air rifle, popularly known as a BB gun - and even that, in my case at least, had been fired under adult supervision. But Jackie and I were also American claimants, our imaginations molded as much by Hollywood westerns as by New York streets. At twelve, I was a true Jeffersonian who looked upon the ownership of a six-shooter as every American's 'natural' right.
To this day I don't know how Jackie got hold of that .22. He refused to tell me. And I still don't know how he got rid of it after our wheelchair hunt in the woods. For months afterward I would try to get him to promise that he and I would go hunting again, but, as if our afternoon hunt had enabled him to come to terms with his own illusions about the future (something that would take me many more years), Jackie simply shook his head and said, "That's over." I begged, wheedled, cajoled, threatened. Jackie remained obdurate. A single shot for a single hunt. It would have to be sufficient.
I never did find out whether or not I hit the raccoon. On the ride back to the ward, Jackie claimed I had. After he fired his shot, he dropped his wheelchair and slid backward on his rump to the abandoned water pipe off the side of the dirt road into which the raccoon had leaped at the slashing crack of the .22. His hand came down on something red - a blood-stain, he excitedly suggested, as he lifted himself into his wheelchair and we turned to push ourselves back to the ward. It looked like a rust stain to me, but I didn't protest. I was quite willing to take whatever credit I could. That was around an hour after the two of us, fresh from lunch, had pushed our wheelchairs across the hospital grounds, turning west at the old road that cut through the woods and led to another state home, this one ministering to the retarded. The .22, which lay on Jackie's lap, had bounced and jostled as we maneuvered our wheelchairs across that rutted road in search of an animal - any animal would do - to shoot. The early February sky hung above us like a charcoal drawing, striations of gray slate shadings feeding our nervous expectation.
It was Jackie who first spotted the raccoon. Excited, he handed the .22 to me, a gesture spurred, I then thought, by friendship. Now I wonder whether his generosity wasn't simply self-protection. Until that moment, the .22 lying across Jackie's dead legs had been an abstraction, as much an imitation gun as the 'weapons' boys in New York City construed out of the wood frames and wood slats of fruit and vegetable crates, nails, and rubber bands - cutting up pieces of discarded linoleum and stiff cardboard to use as ammunition. I remember the feel of the .22 across my own lifeless legs, the weight of it surprisingly light, as I stared at the raccoon who eyed us curiously from in front of the broken pipe. Then I picked up the gun, aimed, and squeezed the trigger, startled not so much by the noise nor by the slight pull, but by the fact that I had actually fired at something. The sound of the shot was crisp and clean. I felt as if I had done something significant.
Jackie took the gun from me. "Okay," he said eagerly. "My turn now." The raccoon was nowhere in sight, but he aimed in the direction of the water pipe into which it had disappeared and squeezed the trigger. I heard the crack again, a freedom of music now, perhaps because we two boys had suddenly been bound to each other and had escaped, for this single winter afternoon moment, the necessary but mundane courage which dominates the everyday lives of crippled children. "Okay," I heard him cry out happily, "we're goddamn killers now."
A formidable enough hail and farewell to shooting. And certainly better than being shot at. God knows what happened to that raccoon. Probably nothing; but for me, firing that single shot was both the beginning and the end of my life as a marksman. The raccoon may have been wounded, as Jackie claimed. Perhaps it had crawled away, bleeding, to die somewhere in the woods. I doubt it. And certainly I hope I didn't hit it, although in February 1946, six months before I returned to the city and to life among the 'normals,' I would have taken its death as a symbolic triumph. For that was a time I needed any triumph I could find, no matter how minor. Back then it seemed natural to begin an uncertain future with a kill - even if one sensed, as I did, that my career as a hunter was already over. The future was hinting at certain demands it would make. And I was just beginning to bend into myself, to protect my inner man from being crushed by the knowledge of all I would never be able to do. Hunting would be just another deferred dream.
But guns were not a dream. Guns were real, definitive, stamped on the imagination by their functional beauty. A gun was not a phallic symbol; a gun didn't offer me revenge on polio; a gun would not bring to life dead legs or endow deferred dreams with substance. I am as willing as the next man to quarantine reality within psychology. But if a rose is no more than a rose, then tell me why a gun can't simply be a gun? Guns are not monuments to fear and aspiration any more than flowers are.
I was already fascinated by the way guns looked. I was even more fascinated by what they did and by what made people use then. Six months after the end of the Second World War, boys in our ward were still engrossed by the way talking about guns entangled us in the dense underbrush of the national psyche. And no one in that ward was more immersed in weaponry than I. On the verge of adolescence, forced to seek and find adventure in my own imagination, I was captivated by guns.
It was a fascination that would never altogether die. A few weeks ago I found myself nostalgically drifting through the arms and armor galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Years ago I had often taken my young sons there. A good part of my pleasure now derived from memories pinned to the leisurely innocence of those earlier visits. As I wandered among those rich cabinets displaying ornate pistols and rifles whose carved wood stocks were embossed with gold and silver and ivory and brass, I was struck by how incredibly lovely many of these weapons were. It was almost impossible to conceive of them as serving the function they had been designed to serve. These were not machines designed to kill and maim. Created with an eye to beauty, their sense of decorative purpose was as singular as a well-designed eighteenth-century silver drinking cup. These guns in their solid display cases evoked a sense of the disciplined craftsmanship to which a man might dedicate his life.
Flintlocks, wheel locks, a magnificent pair of ivory pistols owned by Catherine the Great - all of them as beckoning to the touch of fingers, had they not been securely locked behind glass doors, as one of those small nineteenth-century engraved cameos that seem to force time itself to surrender its pleasures. I gazed longingly at a seventeenth-century wheel lock carbine, coveting it the way I might covet a drinking cup by Cellini or a small bronze horse and rider by Bologna. Its beautifully carved wooden stock had been inlaid with ivory, brass, silver, and mother-of-pearl, its pride of artisanship embossed with the name of its creator, Caspar Sp<*_>a-umlaut<*/>t. I smiled with pleasure. Then I wandered through the galleries until I found myself in front of a case displaying eighteenth-century American flintlock rifles, all expressing the democratic spirit one finds in Louis Sullivan's buildings or Whitman's poetry or New York City playgrounds built by the WPA during the Great Depression. Their polished woods were balanced by ornately carved stag-antler powder horns, which hung like Christmas decorations beneath them. To the right was another display case devoted to long-barreled Colt revolvers; beyond that, a splendidly engraved 1894 Winchester rifle and a series of Smith & Wesson revolvers, all of them decorated by Tiffany.
And yet they were weapons, designed ultimately to do what weapons have always done - destroy. Only in those childlike posters of the 1970s did flower stems grow out of the barrel of a gun.
<#FROWN:G05\>
A Moral Conscience
Hans Burkhardt at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts
BY MICHAEL ZAKIAN
Hans Burkhardt's Desert Storm II is a new installation of paintings first shown at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts in autumn 1991. He began this series the day after Iraq invaded Kuwait and continued it through various stages of American involvement in the Gulf, but it is nonspecific in its indictment of war. It does not take sides but condemns the rational greed and irrational hate that still brings countries together in bloody conflict.
At the heart of these paintings lies Burkhardt's deep ties to Abstract Expressionism. Born in 1904, the same year as Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, he worked with them in New York during the 1930s. After moving to Los Angeles in 1937 he painted in relative isolation, producing painterly abstractions that paralleled developments in New York in the forties and fifties. Never a natural abstract painter, Burkhardt always worked best when guided by a specific subject. In the Gulf War he found a passionate, emotionally charged theme well suited to his creative personality.
The compositions utilize one basic image - the American flag - sometimes accompanied by a cross or crucifix. The symbols of the Great Society and the Great Religion are drained of their proud aura, reduced to empty ciphers that underscore how shallow these institutions have become. The red stripes of the flag have been changed to black. Originally symbolizing the blood of American patriots, they now speak of nothing but despair for the human condition in general.
In many of the flags, the field of stars, symbols of our lofty aspirations, are represented by burlap. This cheap, coarse cloth, used primarily for sacks, reminds us that our values and principles have been cheapened. Some of the burlap is rotted and stained red, like the shrouds used to wrap the dead, and the harsh, scabby surfaces of these works look like burnt and mangled flesh.
The series could be criticized as too literal and repetitious. Social critique centered around the flag has become clich. But for Burkhardt, it gives tangible form to his feelings of outrage, and one cannot ignore comparisons with other works on the subject. Alfredo Jaar's recent Gulf War installation, for instance, surprised viewers with graphic photographs of war dead placed unexpectedly within a pleasing, minimal setting. In a typically postmodern fashion, these fragments of human sentiment were heightened by presentation through an impersonal medium. Burkhardt, on the other hand, gives you a full dose of sentiment, unembarrassed and unconcerned about correctness of expression. He acts not simply as a social critic but as a moral conscience.
In Catch-22, the protagonist Yossarian watched as a wounded friend's entrails spilled out onto the floor. He concluded that his friend was telling him, "Man was Matter.... Drop him out of a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn." Burkhardt has the same message. His Desert Storm paintings, in which the flag appears broken and burnt, declare that all peoples and nations are as mortal as any one of us.
Impossible Labors
Bernie Lubell at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery
BY JOHN RAPKO
Bernie Lubell's current installation, The Archaeology of Intention, presents art as the by-product of an impossible labor of self-understanding. Working with an overgrown urban lot next to the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Lubell has installed a faintly comic array of wooden machines which apparently were used to dig the scattered holes and trenches visible from the sidewalk. Tall poles, topped with identifying letters or the logical operators 'and,' 'or,' and 'not,' seem to indicated points of interest. In the front of the lot, a large wooden grid in the form of an archaeologist's diagram correlates shards and artifacts with particular strata. The overall effect is of an archaeological dig in progress; besides the title, however, Lubell indicates in two other ways that the dig is ultimately for the self and sources of action. The use of logical operators suggests that the signs are not just for identification but also indicate objects of inquiry: the sources of reason and language. Likewise, Lubell has put what looks like a painter's palette at the lowest level and two simple grids at the highest level of his archaeological diagram, thereby suggesting that the grid presents its own prehistory as an artist's tool. Yet the sense of incompleteness reigns. No order is apparent: arrows linking artifacts in lines of influence glide over the gaps in the grid. The effort of self-knowledge yields a grab bag of quaint machines and uncertain charts.
Like the conceptual artist Charles Gute, who recently worked with this site, Lubell draws upon the sense of an empty urban lot as a transitional place, one abandoned only momentarily. Gute turned the lot into a construction zone, transforming it into a barely noticeable and evanescent monument to its own demise, a work which threatened to disappear into its future. By contrast, Lubell wants to highlight the inevitable incompleteness of one's knowledge of one's past. The site itself has been both cleared and built upon; Lubell both excavates and constructs. What first appears as the urban rhythm of construction and demolition figures in art as two inseparable aspects of a necessarily endless process of understanding. In order to excavate self-knowledge, the artist must create the tools for the job. Yet in creating the tools he thereby changes who he is. What the archaeology of intention reveals is the transformation of self-discovery into self-creation, which in turn requires a new attempt at discovery.
Lubell clarifies this difficult sense of aesthetic self-discovery as an open-ended spiral through the title's allusion to Michael Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge. In that book, Foucault laid out his 'archaeological' method of historical research into the human sciences. In Foucault's equally difficult sense, archaeology does not search for origins but instead describes the "question of the already-said at the level of its existence"; like Lubell's machines and artifacts, Foucault's material "already-said" is the ultimate object of inquiry, and not some immaterial intention or disembodied principle. And again, like Lubell's art, what Foucault's inquiry reveals is "this dispersion that we are and make."
Lubell marks his distance from Foucault, though, in the shift from 'knowledge' to 'intention.' The distance of the archaeologist of knowledge's gaze from its objects allows a certain serenity which is impossible for Lubell. Because it searches for the sources of its own agency, Lubell's work is caught up in his own inquiry, like a painter painting herself painting herself. Perhaps the ultimate dilemma Lubell presents is of one digging to find where to dig.
A Perfection of Form
Ruth Duckworth at Dorothy Weiss Gallery
BY TERRI COHN
Consider a single perfect vessel form. Not a traditional vessel, but one delicately manipulated to include carefully incised edges, an exquisitely crafted oblong porcelain 'blade' that rests in its symmetrical crenulations, and exceedingly subtle variations in its pale, pearlescent glaze. Cool, minimal, meditative, the flawlessness of the vessel elevates it to a Zen garden-like focal point; an object of contemplation. Such is the potential experience of the work of Ruth Duckworth, at Dorothy Weiss Gallery.
When considered singularly, the detached elegance and quiet beauty of a Duckworth porcelain cup or bowl is compelling. The minimalist aesthetic embodied in her alabaster geometric forms, honed to an almost translucent perfection, inspires admiration and even awe: how did she do it? But, the problem with perfection is that it must remain separate and unique in order to retain its status; a gallery full of these subtly hued, slightly varied, untitled forms begins to neutralize itself. It becomes difficult to see the tree for the forest of them.
There are pieces that stand out. Duckworth's tall, cylindrical untitled cup with two blades has a regal presence. Interest is created by the incised edge of its foreground blade and the sculptural dynamic it creates in relation to its unmanipulated posterior twin. In another slender, untitled cup with blade, she has used a thin band of multi-hued glaze around the cylinder, echoed on the lower half of the blade, to allude quietly to landscape.
More dynamic and individualistic are the artist's abstract sculptures and wall maquettes. Although somewhat too closely allied with Barbara Hepworth's forms, the two standing constructions here have an impressive, lyrical fluidity. The ingenious assemblage of their carefully balanced free-form planes, fastened at one convergence with a porcelain pin, creates close visual and structural affinities with wood sculpture. Her most unique and 'contemporary' sculpture is part of a maquette of unrelated 'bandaged' shapes - an arc, a foot, a cornucopia - all with a verdigris surface glaze reminiscent of oxidized copper. The presence of the artist's hand in these pieces, as well as their more earthy surfaces, is like an open window in this hothouse of precious forms.
The competing sensibilities of Duckworth's diverse aesthetics raises existential questions pertinent to recent art: where is the validity of a perfectly crafted vessel form? While technical mastery remains admirable and Duckworth's handiwork is consummate, in the context of the current art world, her formalist focus and serial explorations seem anachronistic and redundant. Now that Duckworth has achieved a pinnacle of perfection with her more traditional works, this writer's hope is for her to pursue the more evocative, conceptual path suggested by her maquettes and freestanding sculptures, which perhaps will lead her to new definitions of consummate expression.
Facing Reality
Knowledge: Aspects of Conceptual Art at the Santa Monica Museum of Art
BY SUVAN GEER
There are times when nothing is more fascinating to me than to observe the workings of the human mind. I am drawn to art which toys with ideas and twists meaning. It's mesmerizing, this drive we have to order and reorder - imbedding or releasing a different rational with every turn. There are times when this kind of self-examination of the human capacity to think seems the most involving kind of art-making around. But in the wake of the fury that shook Los Angeles - as the fires cool and neighborhoods reel - now is not one of those times. After driving past gun-toting National Guardsmen on my way to the Santa Monica Museum of Art, I found it hard not to ask myself what the coolly intellectual conceptual art of the Knowledge show could possibly have to do with this reality. Perhaps the social upheaval has precipitated something of a forced reality check amounting to a crisis of faith in the importance of art - for me, and for other artists with whom I've spoken recently.
Still, co-curators Phyllis Plous and Frances Colpitt have put together a small but incisively well-defined exhibition that explores the growth of Conceptual Art's semiotic base. At any other moment it would be easy to wax enthusiastic over the work of these eighteen artists (slightly reduced for this venue) and the delightfully clear writing that accompanies such an intellectually stringent and historically coded exhibition. Together they make a strong argument for the powerful influence of Conceptual Art on postmodern considerations of cultural context, and the energy it has lent the politics of decentered pluralism. Alongside the current turmoil, however, much of the work (particularly the older pieces) seemed outrageously hermetic, taking great pains in the making of small and esoteric points. Standing before Thomas Locher's Cibachrome door of arbitrarily assigned numbers, I felt a little like a music critic listening for the nuances of Nero's fiddle amid Rome's cooling ashes.
Ironically, some of the latest work of the eighties and nineties seemed to share my distress. For a while I debated whether art in general couldn't be summed up adroitly by the title and washy vacuousness of Stephen Prina's Exquisite Corpse panels. I found a timely poignancy in Louise Lawler's photograph of a match-book that asked Why Pictures Now? and Clegg & Gutmann's incessant cataloging of information studiously detached from literature, culture and ultimately all connections to peoples' lives. After all, what is the profit of self-examination if the process leaves out the real world?
<#FROWN:G06\>
EL SALVADOR'S JESUIT MURDERS
Justice Is Still Undone
MARTHA DOGGETT
The peace settlement for El Salvador, signed in New York City on New Year's Day, sidesteps the question of amnesty, leaving the contentious matter to a multiparty peace commission and ultimately to the Legislative Assembly. With the details of an amnesty still to be worked out, concerns persist that the Salvadoran government might attempt to pardon those convicted of the 1989 murders of six Jesuit priests, their cook and her daughter. In a much-criticized verdict last September, a jury found a colonel and a lieutenant guilty of the killings.
Following the verdict, el caso Jesuita seemed to be settling into the judicial limbo that characterizes so many human rights crimes in El Salvador. Then U.S. Congressman Joe Moakley resurrected the case. Last November 18, Moakley, a street-smart South Boston politico who heads a special Congressional task force on the case, released a six-page statement outlining information he had received from confidential sources. Moakley charged that top Salvadoran officers decided to kill the Jesuits and the women at a meeting on the afternoon of November 15, 1989; that night the murders were committed. He reported that those who attended the meeting at the Military Academy were Gen. Ren Emilio Ponce, then army Chief of Staff and now Defense Minister; Orlando Zepeda (then a colonel, now a general), Deputy Minister of Defense; Col. Francisco Elena Fuentes, commander of the infamous First Brigade; and Gen. Juan Rafael Bustillo, long rumored to be a collaborator with the Central Intelligence Agency. As Air Force chief, Bustillo allowed Ilopango airfield to be used as a transfer point for Nicaraguan contra supply flights. Entrusted with carrying out the plan was the director of the Military Academy, Col. Guillermo Alfredo Benavides.
Moakley said the idea to kill the Jesuits came from Bustillo, who abruptly and unexpectedly resigned his command just six weeks after the crime. The general now divides his time between San Salvador and his home in Miami, and is said to have set his sights on El Salvador's Casa Presidencial.
According to Moakley's statement, the reactions of the other officers at the meeting "ranged from support to reluctant acceptance to silence." Moakley also charged that Colonel Benavides, who was convicted on eight counts of murder last September, told officers at the academy on the murder night that he had "received the green light" to move against the Jesuits, just meters down the highway at the Central American University. The army's enmity for the Jesuits was nothing new. Fr. Ignacio Ellacur<*_>i-acute<*/>a, the brilliant Basque theologian and philosopher who was probably the killers' primary target, had narrowly escaped a military plot on his life in 1980.
Moakley's revelation of the afternoon meeting is one of several accounts of gatherings of top officers in the hours preceding the crime. Other versions place the meeting at Joint Command headquarters, where many officers had virtually taken up residence during the most threatening urban guerilla offensive of the decade-long civil war. A May 1, 1990, communiqu issued by young army officers said two meetings at which the murders were plotted had been held on the afternoon of November 15, 1989, in the office of General Zepeda. The junior officers also gave credibility to the views of Col. Sigifredo Ochoa Prez, a retired field commander who is now an influential member of the ruling ARENA party. Ochoa told 60 Minutes in April 1990 that "Benavides obeyed; it wasn't his decision."
El Salvador's senior military officials reacted predictably to Moakley's allegations, declaring their innocence, demanding proof and decrying 'politicization' of the case. General Bustillo called Moakley a closet leftist and "a politician without scruples or professional ethics who respects neither individuals nor institutions."
First Brigade commander Elena Fuentes, whose troops have one of the army's worst human rights records, said Moakley has a notoriously close relationship to the F.M.L.N., "to the point that there is a suspicious coincidence between the declarations of the terrorist leader Joaqu<*_>i-acute<*/>n Villalobos and the honorable Mr. Moakley." (On the afternoon of the assassination, First Brigade sound trucks drove around San Salvador triumphantly announcing, "Ellacur<*_>i-acute<*/>a and Mart<*_>i-acute<*/>n-Bar<*_>o-acute<*/> [a Jesuit psychologist who was among those murdered] have fallen. We are going to continue killing communists!" Bustillo and Elena Fuentes (who was reassigned in mid-January) said they were considering a slander suit against Moakley. For his part, General Ponce, sweating profusely and visibly shaken, held a press conference last November 19 with General Zepeda. They released an army communiqu saying "It is totally illogical that persons who supposedly were inside the Military Academy on the afternoon of November 15 who are said to have verified that the meeting took place but who did not participate in the meeting could have knowledge of what the meeting was about and what was decided during the meeting." The wording is curious, especially in light of an exchange between General Ponce and a journalist at the press conference:
Q: You also deny that [the meeting] took place at the Military Academy?
A: I deny it categorically because I was not at the Military Academy. I was here at my command post at Joint Command headquarters.
Who came and went from the Military Academy is difficult to establish with any certainty at this point because high-ranking officers ordered that the logbooks kept by sentries at the main gate be burned in late December 1989. Having destroyed the evidence, those named by Moakley are confident that he cannot produce the smoking gun they demand.
Even the government of President Alfredo Cristiani felt compelled to defend the army, placing a paid advertisement in the Salvadoran press. Without naming Moakley, the government criticized "persons or groups" who have the "evident goal of manipulating politically and attacking personalities of the Armed Forces and the institution itself. This has been done with absolute irresponsibility, with no foundation and based on purely partisan speculation."
Congressman Moakley's charges provoked new complaints about foreign intervention into the case. This theme was part of the defense's appeal to the jury at the trial of nine soldiers last September. Attorneys for the defense harped on foreign imperialism, telling the jury that the trial was being held only to please "los cheles," as Salvadorans refer to light-skinned people. "He who pays the mariachis chooses the tune," one defense attorney said repeatedly.
A defense attorney said that "today we will show that we have no yoke around our necks by acquitting these men." Another defense attorney told the jury, "We are going to work as Salvadorans and not capitulate to foreign pressure."
At no time did the defense attempt to paint an alternative scenario for what happened on the campus of Central American University the night of the murders. The crime itself was hardly touched on by the defense. Members of the jury heard no oral testimony or cross-examination, and for security reasons were blocked from seeing the defendants. After five hours of deliberation, they delivered their verdict. Five enlisted men and two lieutenants, all of whom had initially confessed their roles in the murders to the police, were acquitted. Colonel Benavides, who, according to the military's version of events, ordered the killings, was convicted on all eight counts of murder. His deputy at the Military Academy, Lieut. Yusshy Ren Mendoza Vallecillos, was convicted solely of the murder of 15-year-old Celina Mariceth Ramos.
The verdict, which stunned defense and prosecution alike, defied logic. No witnesses suggested that Benavides ever went to the murder site; Lieutenant Mendoza, by all accounts, did not fire his weapon. There is no more reason to link Mendoza to the killing of Celina Ramos than to any other murder. Celina died embracing her mother, Julia Ramos, the Jesuits' cook, with whom she shared a sofabed that night, so whoever killed Celina also killed her mother. Argentine attorney Eduardo Luis Duhalde, who observed the trial for the American Association of Jurists, called Mendoza's conviction "totally incomprehensible factually and legally."
The jury's decision provoked speculation that it might have believed that the soldiers who originally confessed to committing the murders did so on the orders of their superiors and should not be held accountable, even though such a finding was in contravention of both Salvadoran law and the Nuremberg principles.
The illogical verdict inevitably led to speculation about jury tampering. A European law professor who observed the trial at his government's request said the most "credible hypothesis" concerning the verdict was that someone "influenced [the jury] in one form or another...to predetermine its decision. It is not easy to imagine that a [Salvadoran jury] would spontaneously come up with such a solution....The verdict fulfills all the conditions of a political decision."
In a Washington Post Op-Ed article last October, Moakley said he could not "rule out the possiblity that the military interfered with the outcome of the trial. The verdict is too inconsistent to be rationally explained and fuels suspicions that the jury may have been manipulated." In November, on the second anniversary of the killings, Central American University issued a statement saying that the jury's "strange" conclusions "leads us to consider that the verdict - like the entire judicial process - was the product of 'a deal.'" The communiqu continued, "This verdict was not the product of a judicial system which works, but something darker, more political, and not ruled by established institutional procedures."
"It was fixed," a retired Salvadoran politician told me in early December. "As an attorney I can tell you that it was fixed. It was a solution that was designed to do the least damage."
The verdict did have a certain utility from the military's point of view. The two convicted officers had been holding desk jobs at the Military Academy, without combat troops under them. Convicting them was less apt to stir up discontent among younger officers. The tandona, the clique that dominates the military today, knew it had to sacrifice something to keep the aid dollars flowing from Washington. Colonel Benavides, one of their own, who had already been kept under house arrest for nearly two years, surely understood that loyalty to his peers required that he serve as scapegoat for the grossest miscalculation the Salvadoran Armed Forces has ever made.
That the convictions did not touch the powerful Atlacatl Battalion, the U.S.-created and trained elite unit that carried out the murders, is noteworthy. Atlacatl Lieut. Jos Ricardo Espinoza Guerra, whose excellent English and extensive U.S. training made him a close collaborator of U.S. advisers, can presumably salvage his once-promising military career. Espinoza is said to have threatened to 'talk' had he been convicted. The peace treaty calls for a vast reduction in the size of the army, and the elite battalions are to be gradually disbanded. Yet the treaty leaves open the question of whether current members of the Atlacatl and other battalions are to be reassigned or discharged, and convictions of skilled commandos would no doubt have been a blow to the morale of the Atlacatl fighters, whose unit will not be demobilized until September.
Judge Ricardo Zamora still has not sentenced the two officers, nor has he ruled on charges related to terrorism and the cover-up, which were not heard by the jury. Defense attorneys, who repeatedly tried to have the case transferred out of Zamora's court in 1990, have asked the judge to recuse himself, citing the fact that he once taught law at Central American University. In a country where conflict of interest is seldom an issue, attempts to raise it at this late date have only provoked angry impatience from the appeals court, which has twice rejected the recusal petition.
Whether Congressman Moakley's statement will trigger an investigation by Salvadoran authorities into who acutally ordered the assassination depends largely on the State Department. Spokesman Richard Boucher's description of Moakley's charges as "accusations but not direct evidence" is consistent with State's pattern of sitting back and waiting for somebody else to come up with incontrovertible proof.
Central American Jesuits, meanwhile, asked the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly to form an investigative commission, as provided for by the Constitution, to examine the question of who ordered the murders and when.
<#FROWN:G07\>
TAKE A LITTLE DEADLY NIGHTSHADE AND YOU'LL FEEL BETTER
BY JAMES GORMAN
MY FRIEND THE MEDICAL SOCIOLOGIST WAS the one who shocked me. I had not been that surprised when some anthroposophical friends and others with interests in so-called alternative medicines had touted the virtues of homeopathy. But when my friend, Joan L., who works in the health-care industry - the high-tech, mainstream, regular-medicine health-care industry - told me that not only had she used homeopathic remedies for her allergies and colds, but also had given her daughter homeopathic medicine for a sore throat (It worked! Overnight!), I was shaken.
This was a woman with whom I had shared long hypochondriacal conversations about heart disease, brain tumors and food poisoning, all based on the best available scientific evidence. Yet here she was advocating a system of medicine - based on treatment with very dilute doses of natural materials, which in larger quantities would cause the same symptoms that ail you - that is inexplicable by modern science. "But it works," she said, and cited a paper in The British Journal of Medicine (we often trade citations in conversation).
Further investigation revealed that almost everyone I knew either had used a homeopathic remedy or knew someone who did. Drugstores that a few years ago were carrying only mainstream products like Nyquil and Sudafed were displaying homeopathic lines in their windows. And not in amber bottles, but in small, colorful cardboard containers with the pills comfortably ensconced in blister packs. There was Quitude - 'the homeopathic insomnia remedy in a white box with blue and pink pastel borders.' And Alpha CF, for colds and flu, in an icy-blue package with a snowflake design.
I was not the only one to notice that homeopathy was in vogue and visually more attractive than ever. A newspaper article about an up-and-coming bicoastal style monger named Andre Balazs noted that a feature planned for the ultra-chic Manhattan hotel he's building is a homeopathic pharmacy. If it does well, Balazs envisions a chain.
This would obviously please the homeopathic pharmaceutical companies, which are already undergoing a renaissance. Old companies are reviving, and new companies are getting into the field, which in the late 1970's and early 1980's made a miraculous recovery from near death. According to the Food and Drug Administration, sales of some homeopathic drug companies increased 1,000 percent. Growth has continued apace ever since, with the American market for homeopathic drugs now estimated at $100 million.
Europe's two biggest homeopathic pharmaceutical companies have moved into the United States, each acquiring a struggling old American firm. Boiron L.H.F., of France, a publicly held company, bought Borneman & Sons of Philadelphia in 1983. In 1987 the privately owned Dr. Willmar Schwabe GmbH & Company, of Germany, purchased Boericke & Tafel, another Philadelphia company, founded in 1825, and in 1990 moved it into a new, state-of-the-art production facility in Santa Rosa, Calif. Both companies report that gross sales have increased by more than 20 percent a year, a claim matched by Standard Homeopathic Company, an old-line California firm.
New to the homeopathic market is Nature's Way Products Inc., a manufacturer of food supplements, which describes itself as "America's Natural Health Care Company." The full-page magazine advertisements trumpeting its new line of homeopathic medicines assure consumers that they "work a lot like vaccines" and are easy to use. "If my back hurts, I get the remedy labeled for injury and back-ache, and there's one for arthritis, PMS, colds or whatever. It's simple." So simple, in fact, that there is a remedy labeled simply 'Allergy.'
Imagine - medicines that have no side effects, so safe that a child could swallow an entire bottle of pills, yet able to cure pesky ailments like fatigue, insomnia and allergy that have baffled modern medicine. How could such medicines be produced? What went into them? What was my friend Joan getting into?
Boericke & Tafel's brand-new headquarters seemed the best place to look on the new face of homeopathy, so I flew to San Francisco and then drove north to Santa Rosa. The plant was spanking clean, just the way you want a pharmaceutical plant to be. In the laboratorylike production rooms, everyone (including me) wore white coats, surgical masks and gloves and disposable caps. The workers also put on special white shoes, which they wore only while in these areas. Visitors and all other personnel were given covers for theirs. (The last time I had seen people dressed this way was at my son's birth.) In one area a tablet-making machine was busy making tablets. In another, the tincture storage room, there were scores of amber bottles on stainless-steel racks, all very pharmaceutical. But there was no amoxycillin or Prozac, no Xanax or AZT. Instead there were tinctures of Rhus radicans (poison ivy), Berberis vulgaris (barberry) and Calcarea silicata (silicate of lime). In another area, Calendula officinalis (marigold) was macerating in what seemed to be large stainless-steel stockpots.
Next we entered the 'single remedy room,' where medicines were actually being produced. First the technician weighted out a gram's worth of drops from one bottle of Natrum muriaticum 25X. Otherwise known as sodium chloride or table salt, the Natrum muriaticum had been diluted 25 times at a ratio of 1 to 10, leaving 1 part salt to 10 to the 25th power parts of alcohol and water (10 followed by 25 zeros, a number so high that the name used to describe it is a 'googol'). After each dilution the solution was shaken 10 times by hand and banged against a rubber pad, a process known in homeopathy as 'succussion.' In homeopathy this process of diluting, shaking and banging is known as 'potentizing.' In homeopathic speak the solution was at 25X potency.
To this already ethereal solution the technician added more liquid to dilute it 1 to 10 once again. She then succussed the solution by shaking it 10 times by hand (up and down) and banging it against a rubber pad on each down stroke. The solution was now Natrum muriaticum 26X. She repeated the same procedure again to produce a 27X solution. The final steps (done later) would be to repeat the dilution and succussion process three more times to achieve Natrum muriaticum 30X. Then drops of this solution of 1 part salt to 10 to the 30th power parts liquid would be added to sugar tablets, resulting in a product reputedly useful for allergy, anemia, cardiovascular problems and grieving states.
As I watched this process I heard within me the whimper of offended reason. By all known laws of physics and chemistry, the initial preparation had been diluted so many times that it was highly unlikely that a measurable trace of salt remained, not a molecule. And this was before the five succeeding dilutions, and the final dosing of the sugar pellets. What was being created, it seemed, was not a drug, but the idea of a drug, what an artist friend of mine calls "conceptual medicine." I thought, Welcome to homeopathy.
FEW PEOPLE WHO BUY the new over-the-counter homeopathic remedies realize that homeopathy is not herbal or Chinese medicine. It is not naturopathy, osteopathy or acupuncture, not bodywork, shiatsu or chiropractic. Homeopathy was developed by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843), and began to flourish in Europe, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. According to the National Center for Homeopathy, a promotional organization with 6,500 members, 32 percent of family physicians in France and 20 percent in Germany prescribe homeopathic medicines, while in Great Britain 42 percent sometimes refer patients to homeopaths. In France, where the best-selling flu remedy, Oscillococcinum, is homeopathic, the national health-care system covers homeopathic prescriptions from traditional physicians.
Homeopathy's popularity surged in this country after the Civil War, then faded early in this century. In this Pulitzer Prize-winning book, 'The Social Transformation of American Medicine,' Paul Starr says homeopaths "won a share in the legal privileges of the profession." He wrote: "Only afterward did they lose their popularity. When homeopathic and eclectic doctors were shunned and denounced by the regular profession, they thrived." Opinions differ as to its demise. Homeopaths say it was squeezed out by the American Medical Association, while others hold that its popularity waned because regular medicine worked better. In 1900, there were 22 homeopathic medical schools here; in 1918 there were 6, and now there are none, which makes homeopathy's revival all the more remarkable.
One reason for homeopathy's new-found popularity is its focus on the individual. Homeopathic physicians traditionally spend considerable time finding a unique cure for each person. This is in direct and appealing contrast to the medical assembly lines many patients find themselves going through nowadays. A visit to a homeopathic physician should involve not only the traditional physical exam (blood pressure, blood tests and so on) and the standard medical history, but also at least an hourlong consultation with very thorough questions about the patient's complaints and general health.
Even in the realm of self-help, the same attitude prevails. Boericke & Tafel's 'Family Guide to Self-Medication' has something of the appeal of a book of medical horoscopes. Deadly nightshade, for instance, is recommended for colds and flu, but look under the 'Comments' column: "Patient is overly excited and sensitive." Wild rosemary is good for a range of ills, including "rheumatism that starts in the feet," "black eyes" and "chronic bronchitis." It is particularly "suitable for pale, delicate persons who always feel cold and chilly." Naturally I went looking for what remedy would be good for me. There was no doubt: Nux vomica, otherwise known as poison nut, a plant from which strychnine can be extracted. "Preeminent for many conditions of modern life. Typical patient is thin, active, nervous, lives a sedentary life with much mental strain." Well, I used to be thin.
IN DESCRIBING THE early practitioners, Paul Starr says, "Hahnemann and his followers saw disease fundamentally as a matter of the spirit; what occurred inside the body did not follow physical laws." Today the emphasis is on the principles of medicine Hahnemann developed. Perhaps the most well known of these is the 'law of similars', or 'like cures like,' which holds that the same substance that in large doses causes the symptoms that plague you, in small doses will cure you. To prove this Hahnemann used cinchona, which was already a known treatment for malaria. Hoping to induce the symptomatic chills and fever of malaria, he took large doses of cinchona, which produced the desired results. Using that as evidence for the rule, he conducted other experimental 'provings' of different substances to identify other potential cures. He then instructed his followers to use the drug or treatment that 'in effect' matched the patient's symptoms.
Furthermore, Hahnemann said, and modern homeopaths have agreed, that the smaller the dose, the stronger the remedy, but only if the preparation is vigorously shaken after each dilution, the theory being that dilution plus succussion somehow 'potentizes' a remedy. A dilution of 1 part in 10 is 1X, 1 part in 100 is 1C. At roughly 12C or 24X, which is to say 1 part in 10 to the 24th, conventional chemistry holds that there is no measurable amount of the original substance left. But homeopaths do not stop at 24X; some go up to 1,000 or 50,000. The highest dilutions of homeopathic medicines - despite having the least amount of the active ingredient, or ingredients - are supposed to be the most potent and are commonly used for mental or emotional problems. Conversely, lower dilutions, like 1X or 6X, which characterize most over-the-counter medicines, contain much higher amounts of the active ingredient, but are considered less potent.
Most prepackaged remedies are for aches, pains, allergies and colds, but some promise more. Boericke & Tafel, for instance, markets something called Alfalco. An alfalfa tonic that comes in a four-ounce-bottle, it is recommended for temporary relief of tension, anxiety, sleeplessness, mental and physical fatigue, abnormal appetite and fatigue following illness. Alfalco has nine homeopathic ingredients, including cinchona 2X, sodium phosphate 6X and formic acid 3X, and one ingredient in a nonhomeopathic dose, alcohol.
<#FROWN:G08\>
Where Honor Is Due:
Frederick Douglass as Representative Black Man
WILSON J. MOSES
FREDERICK DOUGLASS may or may not have been the greatest African American abolitionist and orator of the 19th Century, but he was certainly the most accomplished master of self-projection. His autobiographical writings demonstrate the genius with which he seized and manipulated mainstream American symbols and values. By appropriating the Euro-American myth of the self-made man, Douglass guaranteed that his struggle would be canonized, not only within an African American tradition, but within the traditions of the mainstream as well. He manipulated the rhetoric of Anglo-Saxon manhood as skillfully as did any of his white contemporaries, including such master manipulators as Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Phineas T. Barnum. I mention Douglass along with these wily exemplars of American showmanship, not because I want to drag out embarrassing cliches about making heroes more human, but in order to address the truly monumental nature of Douglass's accomplishments. Douglass, like Lincoln, Emerson, and Barnum, was abundantly endowed with the spiderish craft and foxlike cunning that are often marks of self-made men.
Douglass, like his bluff contemporary Walt Whitman, made his living by the art of self-celebration, a skill that has always figured in the strategies of American literary figures. He sang his song of himself, through four main versions of his autobiography, creating himself as a mythic figure and racial icon. The result is that even scholars and historians who may be relatively unfamiliar with other black American personalities of the 19th Century are acquainted with the major events of Douglass's life, or at least with his version of them. He was born into slavery in 1818, escaped to the North in 1838 and, with amazing rapidity, by 1840 was well on the way to establishing himself as the principal black abolitionist in the United States. Among his other accomplishments, Douglass served as a newspaper editor, Civil War recruiter, president of the Freedman's Bank, minister to Haiti, recorder of deeds, and Marshall of the District of Columbia. In the final analysis, he was a man of great dignity, principle, and courage, but he was also a showman, and he made his living mainly by cultivating the myth of Frederick Douglass.
When he attempted to function as a businessman or politician, he sometimes waded in beyond his depth, and thus he was embarrassed by the failure of the Freedman's Bank, shortly after he assumed its presidency. His tenure as minister to Haiti was troubled from the beginning. As he made preparations to assume the post, he found that he could not get first-class accommodations by railroad or steamboat going south. Special arrangements were made for him to travel on a U.S. naval vessel, the Kearsarge, which moved some to comment that not every black American found it possible so to avoid the indignities of Jim Crow travel. Douglass was constantly pressured by the State Department and the American business community to deal with the Haitians in an imperious and insulting manner. This, to his credit, he would not do. Black people everywhere identified passionately with Haiti, the world's first sovereign black republic, and Douglass could not allow himself to be seen as a puppet for American racist expansionism. As part of his duties, he attempted to negotiate for a military base at M<*_>o-circ<*/>le St. Nicholas, but his respect for Haitian sovereignty led to his being accused of incompetency by those whose interests he refused to slavishly serve. When his efforts were unsuccessful, whites rebuked him as an inept representative of American interests.
But even Douglass's setbacks were somehow transmuted into victories by the alchemy of a brilliant personality and the fact that black America has always had a desperate need for heroes. Nonetheless, it must be admitted that many aspects of Douglass's life and writings are controversial. No serious historian can ignore the problem of self-serving selectivity that lies behind the veil of homely modesty that he assumes in his autobiographical writings. The task of every biographer of Frederick Douglass has been to fill in some of the discreet omissions in Douglass's skillful work of self-promotion. Historians and literary scholars are increasingly aware of the craft with which Douglass manipulated audiences and readers, and they have recently provided us with considerable information that Douglass did not see fit to reveal. Many of these matters were discussed in the first full-length biography of Douglass, published by Benjamin Quarles in 1948. More recent biographers have built on Quarles's work, giving us a portrait that is admirable and believable; nonetheless, in far too many instances, Douglass has been allowed to dictate the terms of his own biography.
Because even the best biographies of Douglass have been appendices to his own brilliant autobiographical writings, the point is often forgotten that Douglass was not a gigantic abnormality in black American history, but in many ways a typical black American man of the class and region he represented. In typical American fashion, Douglass sought in his writings to demonstrate his individuality, along with his individualism. The very self-reliance and independence that he stressed in his autobiographies represented conformity to the American type of the self-made man. Thus, Douglass was, to use Emerson's phrase, a representative man. Much of the present-day biographical and literary treatment of Douglass makes him appear to be exceptional. For his own part, Douglass at times stressed the Emersonian dictum that the great man is often great because he is representative, not because he is exceptional. Self-reliance, for him as for Emerson, often existed in the paradox of blending one's ego into larger 'transcendental' forces, of believing that what is true of one's self is true of others. Douglass's concept of self-reliance, like Emerson's, was grounded in the principle of universality rather than difference. Douglass was, as I hope to show presently, not only a representative man, but a representative black man.
On the other hand, there were ways in which he was not representative. Douglass seemed, at times, to be less attuned to the cultural sentiments of black Americans and to their political struggles than were some other black men among his contemporaries. Among black-power advocates, he is celebrated as a prophet of self-determination. They celebrate his founding of The North Star, an independent newspaper, and it is with relish that they recall his rallying cry "We must be our own representatives!" But Douglass could change positions dramatically on black-power-related issues. He did at times champion black institutions, and then on other occasions he denounced them as self-segregating. Douglass's ideology was thoroughly inconsistent, usually opportunistic, and always self-serving. I suspect that if Douglass were alive today, he would be as uncontrollable as ever, and that his often shifting ideology would be now, as it was then, often unacceptable to liberals and conservatives alike.
Douglass represented a class of free black males who were literate in English, influenced by Christianity, and afflicted with a sometimes unconscious Anglophilism. Mary Helen Washington and Valerie Smith remind us that he was obsessed with attempts to emulate and compete with white males in terms of the values of assertive masculinity. Nonetheless, the recent interpretation by James McFeely depicts Douglass in ways specifically adapted to liberal ideologies of the 1980s. A case in point is Douglass's relationship to the women's movement. He did indeed commendably support women's suffrage, but this support was at times less than lukewarm. Douglass gave black male suffrage a much higher priority than white female suffrage, even when his feminist friends became exasperated with him. While on the one hand he got along well with white liberal women, and even married one of them, he was not afraid to confront them when he felt their interests to be in conflict with his as a black male.
Today there is endless discussion of Douglass's private life and his friendships with women, both black and white, for we now know much more about his personal affairs than did his earlier biographers. Douglass had a commanding personality; he was strikingly handsome and stood over six feet tall; he was athletic and he possessed an intense sexual attractiveness. I believe that a great deal of what he accomplished was a result of his magnetic virility. As Mary Helen Washington has observed, he largely owed his escape from slavery to a black woman, Anna Murray, who became his first wife. One historian has speculated, probably accurately, that Anna was pregnant with their first child, Rosetta, before the couple left the South. It is impossible not to be curious about the early sexual development of Douglass, who later portrayed himself as a puritanical feminist, an image that was so useful to him in his dealing with his New England abolitionist contemporaries. Was it really possible for a heterosexual black male to grow up in a slave society without being affected by the earthly values of plantation sexuality? Douglass's autobiography is silent on such matters, unlike that of his 18th-Century predecessor, Benjamin Franklin, who admits to sexual adventurism during youth.
In recent years, black feminists have become increasingly critical of Douglass's treatment of his first wife. Anna Douglass was a dutiful helpmate to her husband; she was a hard worker and a thrifty housewife. A portion of Douglass's financial success has been attributed to her able administration of his domestic finances, but she was not up to the management of a newspaper and she apparently never learned to read. Furthermore, it does not seem that she provided Douglass with much in the way of intellectual companionship; for this, he often went outside his home. The women were usually white, and his friendship in later years with the young journalist Ida B. Wells is the best-known intellectual friendship he is known to have developed with a black woman. It is interesting to note in this regard that Wells frequently separated herself ideologically from other black women leaders. That uncompromising militancy that earned her the hostility of the leadership of the National Association of Colored Women apparently endeared her to Douglass, while isolating her from the likes of Mary Church Terrell and Margaret Murray Washington. Ida B. Wells was, significantly, one of the few black women who did not resent his second marriage at the age of sixty-six (after Anna's death) to Helen Pitts, a forty-six-year-old white woman.
Douglass's ambivalent feelings toward Sojourner Truth are seldom discussed. Sojourner was a dynamic black woman abolitionist who once caused him public annoyance by responding to his declamations with the question, "Frederick, is God dead?" This was a matter of some embarrassment, since Douglass was more than once plagued by charges of irreligiosity. Sojourner Truth, on the other hand, was closely associated with the strident religiosity of the day and was much more closely related to proletarian evangelical Christianity than was the transcendental Douglass, with his increasing pretensions to gentility. Late in life, Douglass dealt with Truth rather ungenerously, when he compared her speaking style to the ungainly dialect of a minstrel show, implying that her language was "grotesque" and only quoted in order to belittle and degrade black people generally.
Douglass's relationships with white women generated controversy as early as 1849, when he paraded down Broadway in New York with the two Englishwomen, Julia and Eliza Griffiths - one on each arm. Julia eventually moved in with the Douglass family to assist with the operation of The North Star, and within a year she had brought it from the brink of ruin to a sound financial footing. Rumor was rife in the abolitionist community that the relationship between Douglass and Miss Griffiths had led to difficulties in the Douglass household. Apparently the relationship was purely a matter of business and political sympathy. Douglass's relationship with Ottilla Assing, a German reformer, is still the subject of speculation. William McFeely is convinced that the friendship did indeed have a sexual dimension, although he cannot document his contention. It has, however, long been known that Assing left Douglass a substantial inheritance after her suicide in 1884. McFeely implies that the suicide was a result of hearing the news of Douglass's second marriage to Helen Pitts.<FROWN\:G09>
SHARON ACHINSTEIN
Plagues and Publication: Ballads and the Representation of Disease in the English Renaissance
The scope of devastation by bubonic plague in early modern Europe is hard for us to imagine today, even as some call AIDS a modern plague. The Black Death haunted Western Europe from its first great appearance in 1348 for over four hundred years. The initial catastrophe of plague in England in 1348-9 swept away one third of the population, at a minimum. Though this first outbreak was the most severe, the epidemic continued to threaten English society over the next four hundred years. Plague deaths were part of daily life in early modern England, with repeated outbreaks of the disease in almost every year between 1348 and 1665, not just in the landmark years of plague - 1603, 1625 and 1665. It is no wonder that the plague was a subject of much thought and writing, and that it even became a trope in English literature.
It may seem incongruous to write about the plague and ballads together, but the unlikely fact is that these two subjects were linked in the moral discourse of the period. Renaissance notions of contagion and transmission linked plagues and ballads; the evil in plagues and ballads was thought to disseminate in similar ways. Ballads, like the plague, were perceived to exert evil effects both morally and physically. William Prynne's now-famous criticism of the theatre inveighs against ballads, his language consistent with plague discourse: "Such songs, such poems as these [are] abundantly condemned, as filthy and unchristian defilements, which contaminate the souls, effeminate the minds, deprave the manners, of those that hear or sing them, exciting, enticing them to lust; to whoredom, adultery, prophaneness, wantonness, scurrility, luxury, drunkenness, excess; alienating their minds from God." Like the plague, the ballads were "filthy" and had their effects through "contamination"; their corruption worked on the spirit as well as on the body.
Ballad-sellers, and not just the corrupting ballads themselves, were frequently attacked as conveyors of plague. The 1636 Plague Orders, issued by the Royal College of Physicians in London, required not only that London citizens take specific health precautions and that those who were infected be submitted to quarantine and surveillance within their homes - the usual responses to plague epidemic - but also that "loose persons and idle assemblies" be regulated, that no "wandering beggar be suffered in the streets of this City." Along with restrictions on plays, bear-baitings and other games, the order specifically prohibited the singing of ballads. The offenders were to be severely punished. Since the ballad trade in the seventeenth century depended upon chapmen and wandering peddlers, who were often considered beggars, such orders effectively eliminated the sale of ballads during times of plague.
The case of the restrictions on ballads in the first half of the seventeenth century opens up new possibilities for understanding responses to plague and to the printing economy in early modern England. The association of plagues with ballads is an example of how disease was beginning to be perceived as a material phenomenon - and not solely as a providential one. The discourse on ballads presents this dual explanation of disease inhabiting the minds of seventeenth-century medical practitioners, lay and clerical.
Furthermore, the material explanation of disease by London health authorities was accompanied by a social commentary that articulated anxieties about urban disorder, poverty and vagrancy. As medical explanations offered a substantially modified view of the natural order of things in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, English society was also coping with the social upheavals of an urbanizing society. The analogy between disease and popular literature was used by civic authorities, in London especially, to control and suppress certain social groups that threatened civic order, and the association of plagues with ballads illustrates how rhetoric functioned by the use of this powerful analogy to control the popular force of printing. This essay is a chiastic attempt to consider the play between moral and material explanations in the medical discourse of Renaissance England, on the one hand, and, on the other, the articulation of fears about urban disorder as a function of a literary genre, ballads. Put simply, why were ballads blamed for England's literal and figurative ills?
1
Social and cultural norms always shape the ways disease is represented, interpreted, and treated, since ways of perceiving disease are historically constructed. This is as true for the AlDS epidemic today as it was for the plague of the early seventeenth century. Writing about AIDS in the 1980s, Douglas Crimp pursues the idea that disease does not exist apart from the "practices that conceptualize it, represent it, and respond to it .... We know AIDS only in and through those practices." Crimp is quick to add: "This notion does not contest the existence of viruses, antibodies, infections, or transmission routes. Least of all does it contest the reality of illness, suffering and death. What it does contest is the notion that there is an underlying reality of AIDS, upon which are constructed the representations - or the nature, or the politics of AIDS." There is of course a political interest in de-constructing myths of AlDS today at a time when AlDS is still treated not just as any health issue, but one charged with anxiety about alternate sexualities. Awareness of the politics of medical perception only sharpens the call for a cultural analysis of this, and other, diseases.
The aim here is not to dismiss studies in the history of medicine which concern the history of the plague, but to encourage a dialogical and discursive approach to that history, one which seeks to enliven the study of historical representations by invoking the contemporary cultural meanings against which those representations were posited. Historians of medicine might gain by looking into the associations between the plague and certain forms of literature, so as to see the ideas about transmission as a moral and as a physical matter, and those concerned with early printed literature might better understand how medical and philosophical discourses give us guides for interpreting the position of that literature in society. We need to expand the kinds of contexts and preconditions we might use to inform our studies of literary representations, as well as to encourage historians of ideas and of society to look to literature as a way to understand the diversity of cultural response that is offered by the archive.
What was the language of the plague in early modern England? Dating from its first appearances, the plague was coded by Christian theology, and instances of plague were likened to Biblical examples of divine punishment. As early as the sixteenth century, houses where infected people were found were marked with a red cross on the door as part of civic programs for monitoring and containing the illness. This red cross and its accompanying slogan, "Lord have mercy upon us," drew symbolic power from the Bible, and the use of the Biblical trope of marked doors coded the plague as divinely sent. City health officials used the Biblical story of the Passover, where the Angel of Death passed over the marked houses of the Israelites in Egypt (Exodus 12:13), with an inversion: they marked doors of those infected with the plague, as if to say the Angel of Death would visit there. These marks were, like the Passover tokens of blood, red. The sign and slogan reinforced theories that the infection had a divine source, that God had sent the plague to punish sin. By alluding to the Bible in this way, the English added their own history to a long series of divine punishments for sin.
Yet the health officials' placement of these marks upon the doors of contaminated households also promoted materialist explanations of the disease. The doors were marked so that other citizens would stay away; and in these acts of quarantine and segregation, city officials practiced a theory of disease closer to our modern treatments of infection and contagion. Their use of the Biblical trope accompanied reforms in sanitation and hygiene which promoted a radically different explanation of disease, one that was rooted in physiology, not in theology. If God sent the plague to punish those sinners who were spiritually unclean, then only spiritual reform would work; or could human physical hygiene contribute to disease conditions? This conflict in explanatory models was a source of debate between English civil and ecclesiastical authorities between 1590 and 1640. As Renaissance theorists of contagion, such as Fracastero (De Contagione [1546]), turned to physical causes to explain the transmission of disease, so civic authorities sought to control the spread of plague by material measures - quarantine, isolation of the sick, and hygienic reform. The very idea of a program for public health required that diseases be considered to be within the realm of human prevention.
This essay concerns ideas about the plague roughly between the years 1597 and 1630 in England, during which time there were significant outbreaks which destroyed between ten and thirty percent of the population of communities in a single year. The clash between Renaissance health authorities and the Church in their analyses of disease, and thus the ideological clash between providential and material understandings of the world, is evident in the representation of the plague and in its link to the attack on ballads.
2
Renaissance notions of contagion blurred the distinction between moral and physiological causes of disease. Thomas Lodge, a self-proclaimed "Doctor in Physicke," explained what contagion was in his A Treatise of the Plague (London, 1603). A contagion was: "An evil quality in a body, communicated unto another by touch, engendering one and the same disposition in him to whom it is communicated. So as he that is first of all attainted or ravished with such a quality, is called contagious and infected" (B2v). In Lodge's account, contagion was a process of "communication," but one with both physical and moral properties: it was an "evil quality" which performed an action from outside, a "ravishment" upon its victims. The plague made both men and women passive victims of a pollution. Yet the moral factor, the "evil quality," was transmissible via physical contact, touch. It had some material properties, which careful civic regulation might inhibit. Lodge's dedication of his tract to the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Sheriffs of London, the city's chief public health authorities, offered a 'scientific' approach to the pestilence, calling for practical responses to the disease, including street cleaning and fumigation.
Mary Douglas's analysis of the idea of pollution is helpful here. In her account, ideas of uncleanness and pollution reveal a society's concerns with the "relation of order to disorder." She writes: "Dirt ... is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements." The Renaissance conception of plague as a kind of pollution, an "evil quality," required that the stricken society do moral penance. That moral penance took diverse and ritualized forms: municipal cleanliness; the exclusion of unruly elements of society, beggers, the poor and vagrants; as well as suppression of some forms of popular literature. These measures reveal the multivalent understanding of pollution. For the municipal authorities, the evils of the city ranged from the physical aspects of dirt to the spiritual ideas of uncleanness, idleness, or unruliness.
For early seventeenth-century medical practitioners, purging was to be accomplished on the social, not only on the individual, level. One author presented this theory by speaking in the voice of a disconsolate London: "I hope it [the plague] will purge my body from bad humours, as vicious persons. Nay, I know it hath already of abundance." In a cruel conclusion, London concedes, "God hath swept my house, so desire to garnish it with virtue, and furnish it with graces." London in particular, and cities in general, were made to shoulder both the moral and physical burden of especially high mortality rates in times of plague.
<#FROWN:G10\>
Richard L. Trumka
ON BECOMING A MOVEMENT
Rethinking Labor's Strategy
Not long ago I was told about a debate raging among the top political organizers of one of the larger AFL-CIO affiliates, a union that traditionally sent sizable delegations to the Democratic National Convention and is easily capable of doing the same again. But now the question it was facing wasn't whether the union had the resources to get its members on delegate slates. Instead, the question was whether it was even worth the time and expense. "Every four years we dump who knows how much money into sending people to the Democratic convention," one of the union's seasoned political organizers observed, "but the only thing we ever seem to get out of it is the right to say, 'Look how many people we had there.'"
Though long characterized - even by some of its friends - as slow to accept change, labor is engaged in an almost unprecedented reexamination of its political strategies. And for good reason. For unions representing manufacturing workers, 1991 may be remembered as the year when many of labor's 'best friends' in Congress abandoned the cause of protecting American jobs to put negotiation of a U.S.-Mexico Free Trade Agreement on a fast track. In the public sector, state and local government employees have seen scores of Democratic officials - some whose very careers were financed through union campaigns - respond to budget shortfalls by scapegoating government workers rather than by challenging low corporate tax rates.
Ironically this is occurring at a time when organized labor is raising and contributing more money than ever before - one published estimate even says that eleven of the wealthiest union PACs (Political Action Committees) contributed between $2 million and $5 million each over the last ten years. However, despite this, our influence in Congress and in the state capitals continues to decline. Even on questions where Democratic support might have once been a given - banning the 'permanent replacements' of striking workers, for example - union lobbyists often find legislators they had endorsed nearly as intractable as those they'd opposed.
Today we long for the 'good old days' when Democrats took their leadership from veteran New Dealers and when the image of Bobby Kennedy marching shoulder to shoulder with Cesar Chavez convinced us that the coalition forged by John L. Lewis and Franklin D. Roosevelt had become a permanent fixture in American life. But on the eve of the 1992 campaign the Democratic party of the Humphreys and Kennedys - a party that could champion farm workers in Delano or sanitation workers in Memphis - is the stuff of 1960s nostalgia.
Today, organized labor faces an indifference bordering on contempt from a new generation of Democrats who grew up as children of the very middle class that young CIO organizers made possible a few decades before. Though their parents may have lived in the shadow of the Great Depression, these Democrats grew up in a time of relative prosperity. While touched by the struggle for civil rights, they were more deeply moved by the threat of the draft and a faraway war.
To many of this generation of Democrats, the labor movement was less a vehicle for economic security - let alone social justice - than it was Lyndon Johnson's silent partner. Just as surely as the Great Society died somewhere in the jungles of Vietnam, the possibility for igniting trade union passions among America's young was lost as images of prowar hardhats charging antiwar marchers filled television screens. Somewhat to the left on questions of civil liberties, defense, and the environment, but far closer to corporate America when it comes to economic policy, they are cultural liberals who offer a politics vaguely reminiscent of 1980 presidential candidate John Anderson.
For much of organized labor, rethinking the relationship between America's unions and these Democrats has meant adopting tough criteria for withholding unions support from politicians who refuse to back our agenda. At a time when many local Democratic party 'organizations' are barely able to mobilize a roomful of volunteers to mail out a list of endorsed candidates, the threat of withholding access to labor campaign dollars, union-operated phone banks, and other campaign services is hardly without its implications. However, while the radical right believes labor's political campaign dollars are vital to the survival of the Democratic party, fewer of those on the receiving end behave as if this were true. And for good reason. Last year alone labor's PAC contributions to U.S. House candidates totaled nearly $35 million, but those dollars become chump change compared to the $58 million dished out by corporate PACs and the additional $44 million from trade association and professional PACs. When the average U.S. Senate incumbent must raise $20,000 each week to wage a credible reelection bid, few candidates can be expected to turn their backs on corporate interests. Raising the political price for our support might be enough to corral wayward Democrats under a system where campaign expenditures were sharply limited, but not when corporate interests stand ready to replace the dollars we withhold. We could literally bankrupt the entire labor movement and still be unable to match the dollars available to corporate America.
Faced with the seemingly hopeless task of reviving the Democratic party's commitment to working people, a growing though still small number of union activists are calling for the creation of a labor party. Pointing to the successes of Canada's New Democrats, supporters say that America's 'old Democrats' can also be elbowed aside in favor of candidates who will stand up for our issues. Advocates for this approach make a compelling case, but there's another strategy that incorporates much of the vision of labor-party supporters. It's an approach the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) and a growing number of unions are putting to work today: it's called running our own as Democrats and, when necessary, as independents. That was the lesson UMWA members learned a couple of years ago when, in the midst of the union's strike at the Pittston Coal Group, union activists decided to take on Don McGlothin, Sr., heir to one of southwest Virginia's most distinguished political families and a twenty-year incumbent in the state's House of Delegates. But McGlothin, like many Democrats, was more than content to gamble that his incumbency and poor Republican organization would allow him to avoid the region's most controversial issue: Pittston's drive to deprive coal-mining families of their health benefits.
We launched a campaign for Jackie Stump - a coal miner and UMWA International Executive Board member. Though Stump's write-in campaign, begun a bare three weeks before the election, could have been one more doomed protest candidacy, it became something very different. Backed with the resources of the UMWA, Stump's campaign produced sophisticated television and radio spots hitting hard on the 'populist' themes of protecting workers rights and family health care. Meanwhile, rank-and-file union activists mounted an aggressive door-to-door canvassing drive and organized the same phone bank operations unions traditionally place at the disposal of Democratic candidates. The result was that Stump easily defeated McGlothin by a greater than two-to-one majority.
Stump's campaign demonstrated that labor can successfully employ the same techniques as any other campaign organization. It was a lesson reinforced last year by the election of UMWA members to state legislatures in Alabama, West Virginia, and Illinois, and by the remarkable gubernatorial campaign of Paul Hubbert, a leader of Alabama's largest teacher's union, who came within a hairbreadth of unseating Republican incumbent Guy Hunt.
But the experience of labor's candidates tells us something else, too. It's that our message - a hard-edged economic populism considered 'too strong' by most social liberals - can succeed among low- and middle-income white voters. Polling conducted by Garin-Hart Strategic Research in the wake of David Duke's chillingly strong 1990 Louisiana U.S. Senate race underscores why. According to the survey of 612 white Louisiana voters, racial issues consistently were of less concern to Duke supporters than their sense that government had abandoned them. By a 56 percent to 28 percent margin, pollsters found Duke supporters who are open to voting Democratic blame the wealthy and big business over minorities and welfare recipients for the squeeze on middle-class families. "As a matter of sheer political arithmetic," the pollsters conclude, "these results suggest there is substantially more advantage for Democrats in championing the middle-class interests than in seeking to capture the anti-welfare, anti-minority message from David Duke."
It should be little surprise that of the arguments used against Duke in the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial contest it was the threat of additional job loss that appears to have moved middle-class white voters to support Democrat Edwin Edwards. Ironically, the economic hardship that many of Duke's white middle-class backers finally led many to vote for Edwards.
However, the best example of the power of economic populism - and organized labor's role in advancing it - may be in the election of Harris Wofford of Pennsylvania to the U.S. Senate. Though today it's accepted as a given that Wofford successfully campaigned on a platform that could have been written at the convention of any U.S. industrial union, even more significant was the fact that long before Richard Thornburgh even entered the Senate race, Pennsylvania unions dug in their heels behind Harris Wofford and his populism when many party professionals advocated a far more cautious approach and, in some cases, even another candidate.
With its insistence that labor be more than loyal foot soldiers for party officials, the Wofford campaign stands as a rarity: an effort that successfully spoke to the problems affecting workers and accepted leadership from workers' unions. Living up to the challenge of making campaigns like Wofford's more than the exception to the rule involves making significant changes in how we view ourselves and labor's mission.
On paper the labor movement seems ideally suited to lead a populist insurgency in the Democratic party, but the reality is far less encouraging. On too many occasions organized labor, unable to reach any kind of consensus, comes down decisively on both sides of an issue. Though Connecticut labor leaders successfully pressed legislators to launch a state income tax, more than 45,000 residents denounced it at a rally financed in part by a key local of one of the state's largest private-sector unions. Similar conflicts occur routinely whenever teachers and construction unions battle over property tax abatements for local building projects or when a privatization proposal that would cost jobs for one union could just as easily create them for another. Though it obviously contradicts some of the AFL-CIO-bashing in vogue among organized labor's well-intentioned critics, the confusion that sometimes characterizes our political strategy isn't due to the AFL-CIO exercising too much authority as much as it is the result of the fact that, as a federation, it has too little.
Many union leaders have responded to our declining membership not by exploring our movement's ability to adapt and change but by invoking the image of a pendulum that's bound to come back our way. The chief challenge we face is to define ourselves as more than servicing institutions that negotiate contracts by becoming organizations that speak to a broader range of worker concerns, both on and off the job. Walter Reuther was prophetic when, in 1967, he observed that "a new concept of unionization" needed to take shape in the wake of the farm worker organizing campaigns in California. Calling the approach "community unionism," Reuther suggested that "properly nurtured and motivated, it can spread across the face of the nation, changing the social character of the inner city structure, providing the poor with their own self-sufficient economic organization."
Examples of this new kind of unionism remain few and far between, but its success may offer new hope for labor's resurgence. In the UMWA, it's meant helping to establish Miners For Democracy (MFD) as part of the union's Powder River Basin organizing drive in Wyoming. Through MFD, nonunion miners have an opportunity to join with the UMWA as associate members where they have both access to the union's resources and a vehicle to make their voices heard in local politics.
<#FROWN:G11\>
And yet, the major problem for a reading of the Holocaust comes not from this but from the problem of 'reading' itself. In their time, Adorno and Horkheimer could still appeal to absolutist notions such as truth, falsehood, and goodness. Having taken note of the problem of language, they could still brush it aside and reach out for the metaphysics of truth and justice. Thus, for example: "When language becomes apologetic it is already corrupted, and it can neither be neutral nor practical in its essence. Can you not show the good side of things and announce the principle of love instead of endless bitterness? There is only one expression for the truth: the thought which denies injustice." With the 'linguistic turn' in philosophy, however, it has become increasingly difficult to set aside the question of language and still conduct philosophically acceptable discussions. A postmodern philosopher like Lyotard would go to the extent of even denying the existence of an overriding metaconcept such as language; instead, what we have, according to him, is only a set of phrases, genres, and modes of linkage between phrases and genres. What or who does one appeal to in matters of dispute when there is no authority to appeal to? What tribunal can we trust when the tribunal itself cannot be 'neutral' and therefore impartial? Of course, it is not the case that no authority exists really; rather, the case is that the dispute arises specifically because authority really exists and the dispute is with that existing or emerging authority. In the absence of a metalanguage, how does one read the Holocaust?
The Holocaust is something that makes people speechless, and so it already prefigures the postmodernist dilemma of language in search of meaning. What then is the Holocaust? A signifier so vast and enormous that filling it with any conceivable meaning is simply futile or outright unjust? Or, is it in itself a signified for which we have not yet found a language, an interpretant? Or, leaving aside the linguistic paradigm for a moment, shall we say that it is an 'event' in the sense in which the Jewish theologian A.J. Heschel uses the term - something that cannot be analyzed and therefore cannot be rationalized in terms of analytic philosophy? The 'unspeakable' ties one in a double bind: it calls for speech and at the same time mocks it. Although it is true that the Holocaust archive is stupendously vast, all attempts at verbalizing the 'event' have always fallen short of its emotional storage. Right from the beginning, there have been varying reactions to the Holocaust from writers - ranging from silence to aggressive speech acts. Adorno said that poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric. A group of German writers, among the Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Martin Walser, and Peter Hamm, decided to stop writing poems, prose, or plays. There could be several reasons for this vow of silence. Adorno argues that the transfiguration of the event from the plane of reality to that of art alleviates some of its horror by rendering it an object of aesthetics. For others like Ezrahi, all art fails before the Holocaust because "there is no analogue in human experience." "The imagination," says Ezrahi, "loses credibility and resources where reality exceeds even the darkest Fantasies of the human mind: even realism flounders before such reality." According to Stephen Spender, the inability of the Western literature to come to terms with the Holocaust arises primarily from its preoccupation with the fate of the solitary sacrificial victim, Oedipus, Christ, or Lear; it does not yet know how to deal with disaster of such a scale.
There are others who have reacted differently. The Polish poet Tadeusz Rozewicz said that after the Holocaust he fashioned his poems "out of a remnant of words, salvaged words, out of uninteresting words, words from the great rubbish dump, the great cemetery." Paul Celan, a Rumanian-born poet who writes in German but spent the war years in a camp in his native land, pitched all his hopes in one thing: language. In spite of everything, language continued to live "through a dreadful silence, survive through a thousand nights of death-dealing speech. It went on living and gave birth to no words to describe what had happened; but it survived and came to light again, 'enriched by it all.'" Elie Wiesel, who began as a Yiddish writer but now writes in French, has devoted an entire novel called The Oath to one survivor's struggle against the vow of silence: "Words have been our weapon, our shield, the tale our lifeboat." Even Adorno's dictum of "no poetry after Auschwitz" is not to be taken literally. Adorno himself quotes the reply of Hans Magnus Enzensberger, a prominent German poet and critic, who said that surrender to silence would mean surrender to cynicism, surrender to the very forces that created Auschwitz in the first place. George Steiner's advocacy of silence after the Holocaust stems from his extreme agony and anger at what he describes as the falsification of language. For him, the violence done to the Jews during the Third Reich is inseparable from the violence done to the German language. In making sense of what is apparently senseless, the destruction of nearly six million Jews by the Nazis, will language offer itself as the only available archaeological arena?
Kren and Rappoport point out in their excellently written book The Holocaust and the Crisis of Human Behavior that, faced with the phenomenon of the Holocaust, we generally perceive two types of reactions. One is to say that the Holocaust is unique "but normal after all." According to this reaction, the Holocaust is one among the several such 'aberrations' of human behavior in history, and as such, albeit its enormity, is only comparable with the slaughter of the Albigensian heretics, the Turkish decimation of the Armenians, the British use of concentration camps during the Boer War, and so on. The killing of the Jews, supported by historical evidence of anti-Semitism, thus becomes "an ugly but familiar fact of historical life." The second reaction, coming mainly from the survivors of the death camps, is one of mysticism. According to this, the Holocaust and the experiences associated with it are beyond intelligent comprehension and "impossible to communicate." Both these reactions, argue Kren and Rappoport, make the historian's task simple: the unique-but-normal-after-all view obviates all challenges to critical inquiry and "historians may conduct business as usual, gathering facts and examining how they may be articulated as explanations for specific actions." On the other hand, if the Nazi genocide program is seen in terms of mystical revelations, "then it will appear to be manifestly beyond critical study." Kren and Rappoport take this as an explanation for why the essential human questions get lost in all discussions on the Holocaust. The situation thus constitutes a complex problem - a problematic - rather than a simple question like 'What does the Holocaust mean?'
Take as an example the word 'holocaust' itself. In common parlance it means great destruction or devastation. Although the definitized and capitalized Holocaust (the Holocaust) does partake of this meaning, it has come to be specifically associated with the Nazi genocide of Jews during the Second World War. Jews themselves have chosen it and are generally impatient with anyone who would settle for ordinary words like 'killing' to refer to the event. What is most striking in the word 'holocaust' is its etymological association: it derives from the Greek holokauston (or holokautoma) which was the Septuagint's translation for the Hebrew olah, literally 'what is brought up,' and can be rendered into English as 'an offering made by fire unto the Lord,' 'burnt offering,' or 'whole burnt offering.' Commenting on this etymological aspect, Dawidowicz says: "The implication is unmistakable: once again in their history the Jews are victims, sacrifices." If this implication is to be accepted, it can be accepted only in its ironical sense, however, since, as Ezrahi points out, the nomenclature adopted by the Jewish world "does not carry the same affirmative theological overtones, but rather, signifies the enormity of the rift in Jewish history and culture brought about by the destruction of the European Jewish community." Further, the uniquely Jewish reference of the word Holocaust has, over the years, given way to a more general sense: today it is being used with respect to any large-scale killing or uprooting of populations. Fidel Castro has even gone to the extent of using it to refer to Israel's treatment of Palestinians.
In understanding the Holocaust, then, we are faced with certain contradictions: to treat is as a unique or unrepeatable phenomenon is to set at naught all its significance for humanity; to treat it as a historical aberration is to trivialize tragedy. The ultimate meaning of the Holocaust is to be sought in the possibility of its repetition in forms and contexts yet unknown and unforeseen.
The Great Interdiction
The Holocaust created a world of its own, a linguistic world, factually as well as metaphorically. To David Rousset we owe the notion l'universe concentrationnaire, 'the concentrationary universe,' which Ezrahi describes as "a self-contained world which both generated its own vocabulary and invested common language with new, sinister meanings." Kapo, Appel and Einsatztruppen were not just words but constituted the vocabulary of the new language. An otherwise harmless word like 'selection' now assumes the terrifying meaning of choosing inmates for death, forced labor, or such other purposes. The worst example of euphemism was of course the phrase 'the Final Solution,' which actually referred to the annihilation of Jews from Europe and, if possible, from the face of the earth itself. What baffles the mind is the syllogistic nature of the argument: once the Jews were recognized as a 'question' or a 'problem', the problem needed a 'solution'. And what could be simpler than a permanent one, namely, the 'Final Solution'? As if to mimic this gradual but 'necessary' end, the Final Solution occurred not in the beginning years of Nazi Germany but sometime in the middle of the Second World War. First, there was the stripping of Jews of all their civil rights, followed by massive forced immigration. Then the immigration was stopped by law and the Final Solution was hatched. More specific was the euphemistic term 'bath' (or 'showerbath') which referred to death by gas in the gas chamber. The grammatical possibilities of the German language were fully exploited in what came to be known as the 'Nazi-Deutsch.' For example, the Nazi adjective for an area whose Jewish inhabitants were either deported, killed, or sent to death camps was Judenfrei (or Judenrein), which became a commonplace word. It was as if the very currency of the word made the condition it envisaged necessary and legitimate!
Euphemism, metaphor, and reality have a complex relationship. Euphemisms, generally drawn from metaphoric imagination, transfigure reality in strange ways. For the perpetrator of the crime, a work like 'bath,' a metaphor for death, has the effect of toning down the severity of his action on behalf of his own conscience. Elaine Scarry says in her book The Body in Pain that torturers all over the world take recourse to such 'softening' metaphors largely drawn from cultural spheres. In the case of the Holocaust, this side of the language was buttressed by another: the dehumanization of Jews. This was achieved by initiating a vicious circularity of thinking: the Jews were described in terms of animals, insects, sickness, madness, dirt, lust, and, in fact, in terms of everything evil. They were projected as a great danger to the purity of the Aryan race. In turn, Jews 'became' a danger because they were not human beings and so deserved to be eliminated. One official Nazi historian described the gas ovens used in the death camps to destroy Jews as anus mundi 'the anus of the world.' The Jews deserve to be eliminated because they are not human beings and so the logic eats its own tail. In Scarry's analysis, such a use of language amounts to what she calls a 'double negation': the users of the language refuse to break the circularity because they have an interest in its maintenance inasmuch as it throws a protective shield around them against the charge of active participation.
<#FROWN:G12\>In this dream, More does not see himself in the image of the aspiring courtier, trained in the Inns of Court for a career as a royal servant and adviser. The desire projected here, given free play in the utopian field wherein all things are possible, is one in which More can momentarily find a place for himself and his longing for the monastic life (symbolized by the Franciscan frock). This dream marks the autonomizing appeal Utopia had for More in its glorifying of the private individual. More's assurance to Erasmus that his fanciful rise from his "lowly estate to this soaring pinnacle" will not threaten their friendship indicates that his concerns about entering Henry's court and compromising his humanist principles are also scripted into this psychodrama. This vision suggests that elements of the historical More are incorporated in the text, that Raphael embodies impulses in More contradictory to the Morus persona.
What might make one a king in fiction would not necessarily serve to advance one in the more practical world of court politics. The limits to self-fashioning in fiction and imagination were indeed boundless, not so the limitations place upon self-fashioning in the very real and dangerous world presided over by Henry VIII. Even on its own terms, however, the created world of Utopia reflects the historically contingent circumstances surrounding its composition.
Those critics who see rifts between the created world of Utopia and the life More led fail to recognize that More's text is a more faithful mirror of his life and England's historical circumstances than a superficial investigation reveals. In seeking to situate Utopia in the discursive space between the concept and history, Marin asks a series of provocative questions: "To what reality or to what absent term does it ['utopia'] finally refer? What figure - fraught with incoherencies of its own -traverses it? What discursive conclusion opens up as soon as the thesis of historical truth, from whose posture it speaks, is lacking?" (xxi). In posing Morus against Raphael, the historical figure against the mythic figuration, More has hedged his bet. I use the term 'hedged' advisedly, for it is the figure of enclosure - "fraught with incoherencies of its own" - that traverses the text as a constant equation in the self-fashioning transaction. It mediates the conversion of values between the private and the public, between opposing class identities.
The bet that More is hedging is that involving his own self-fashioning, and its broadest values are those represented by the opposing figures of Morus and Raphael. The self-fashioning that must be worked out between the opposing terms of Morus and Raphael points towards class conflict, a conflict between an expropriating class and an expropriated class in which More represents the very middle class that was being defined in this conflict. Morus, the representative of the expropriators of land, and Raphael, representative of the dispossessed, cause this topographical discourse to be extended into the narrative structure of the text as their two voices bring the historical notions of improvement and impoverishment into that text.
If we reexamine the myth of Utopia's founding, for example, we find that in his conquering of the Abraxians, King Utopus acts out of a myth whose plot is very much grounded in a history vexed with the problems as well as the opportunities of enclosure. The 'incoherencies' of enclosure expose Eutopos as Outopos in demonstrating just how closely the created world of Utopia is linked to historical contingencies. The 'problem' that the text of Utopia seeks to solve is that of enclosure, particularly the large-scale pastoral enclosure occurring in More's day. Lying along a fault line that represents a break in historical continuity occasioned by the irreconcilable programs of large-scale enclosers, small-scale improvers, and subsistence-level farmers, Utopia must mediate the class conflicts that arise from shifts in agrarian values. The myth of Utopia's founding is not at all divorced from the problems of English history; in fact, the king's conquering of the Abraxians is simply the telling and enactment of that history over again, its characters disguised in myth.
The improver, Utopus, is not merely conducting a raid upon a fictional people; he is, in essence, raiding history, for his conquering of the Abraxians allows him to redefine and reshape English history for his own ends. This reworking of history begins with a forcible expropriation of people from their land. While we are not told specifically whether that part of the conquered Utopians who resist are killed or expelled, this initial expropriation of Abraxa sets an obvious precedent and model for the Utopians' spillover colonization of lands outside their territory. In these seizures of territory, those who refuse to be ordered by the Utopians' laws are driven "out of those bounds which they [the Utopians] have limited and defined for themselves" (<&_>beginning quotation marks missing<&/>Reneuntes ipsorum legibus uiuere, propellunt his finibus quos sibi ipsi describunt" [Campbell, 91]; note the initial surveying that has occurred before eviction, a surveying not unlike that preparatory to the evictions of historical enclosure). Like their historical counterparts, the enclosers, the Utopians justify their expropriation of others' lands by arguing their ability to improve them by a fuller utilization than that practiced by the natives. These vanquished people, their rights of landholding extinguished, are the fictional counterparts of England's squatter population evicted by enclosure. Those who do comply join with their conquerors in enclosing the peninsula of Utopia as an island. They, along with the conquering Utopians, become the class of improvers, their historical counterparts.
The plot of Book II thus offers a careful reenactment of English history in this conquering and evicting of one part of the Abraxians. This is the overt content of Book I, the historical injustice perpetrated against a displaced class. As the problem of Book I, it gets little play here, for the myth of Book II must work toward finding an intermediate term between the displaced yeomanry and the large-scale encloser. To insist too strongly upon the historical identity of any of the players in this mystic reenactment would undermine the myth of improvement so dear to Raphael. Obliquely, the text addresses the problems of vagrancy and idleness by enclosing the wastes of the 'New World.' As a means of implementing and expanding social control in More's England, enclosures of the unenclosed wastes were advocated, for these wastes were commonly characterized as "nurseries of beggars." Enclosed lands were reputed to breed a more prosperous, better quality citizenry; they also yielded a higher parliamentary subsidy. Those who block Utopus's 'improvement' are evicted, the counterparts of the historically dispossessed (and their voicelessness in Raphael's account of Utopia's founding corresponds to the voicelessness of their counterparts in history). If we consider the problem of history beyond the confines of Book I, we shall find that this glossing over the evicted Abraxians allows Book II to redefine history not as a conflict between the expropriated and the large-scale encloser but as a collusion between the small-scale improver and the large-scale encloser.
This collusion, constituting the myth of Book II, is essential if the text is to recapture the historical value of improvement for itself. As Rodney Hilton indicates, within the peasantry a split was developing as this peasantry began to separate into "elements with differing economic interests." Unlike the "poor and middling peasants" involved in subsistence farming, a wealthier class of entrepreneurial peasants had accumulated both movable and landed property and were increasingly the beneficiaries of any new economic ordering (the improvements which could be had through enclosure, for example). These were what Hilton labels the "upper stratum of the peasantry, benefiting from the crisis in the seigneurial economy" (127). With the impetus of the textile industry, these peasants would play an important role in constituting the class of capitalist farmers that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (127). Hilton closely links the growth of this class, which struck against all forms of seigneurial control, with the emergence of capitalism.
Historically within the English 'tribe,' a widening separation was occurring between the upper- and lower-strata peasantry, a division very much rooted in the political and economic shifts that occurred in sixteenth-century England. The 'wolves' - large-scale enclosers - not only expropriated the land of the poorer peasantry - the sheep - but they have also disrupted the orderly historical shift being brought on by the small-scale enclosers. The plans of the large-scale encloser and the small-scale improver are merged in Book II, as the remaining Abraxians are subsumed into one common identity with their conquerors, both henceforward known as Utopians. This merger runs counter to history, for Hilton has shown that the programs of these two groups ran directly counter to one another. In this respect, Utopus raids history twice over, for he both expropriates one element of the peasant class while co-opting the program of another. Most important, this conquering and transformation of the 'compliant' element of the Abraxians allow Utopus to wrest the historical value of improvement from the program of the small-scale enclosers and to reinvest it in the large-scale enclosing of Utopia.
Utopus and, by association, Raphael rework historical situations and identities in a fashion that does not bear close scrutiny; indeed, the myth of Utopia is undermined when one converts the values expressed in Book II into those more historically oriented ones of Book I. The myth of Utopia's founding by enclosure risks being exposed if it is not disguised. The expropriation of the Abraxians is thus muted, displaced, and 'alienated' in the example of Utopus's conquering of foreign lands. The historical expulsion of peasants from private land by members of the yeomanry and nobility might not seem to equate to the conquest of an alien territory and the expulsion of some part of its people by a king; however, the digging out of the land link, transforming the mythic Abraxian peninsula into a figuration of the English island, reminds us that there is a strong sense of the familiar in the alien. It also marks Book II as a prophetic text in a sense quite contrary to Kautsky's celebration of Utopia as a precursor to socialism. The text's transfer of the enclosing function from the levels of yeomanry and nobility to that of the state predicts the link between large-scale Acts of Enclosure and the growth of the modern state.
The charge of duplicity that Marius brings against More is offset and answered by the double text of Utopia, for Book I provides many keys for reading and deciphering the myth offered in Book II. Indeed, unwound from the historical materials of More's own embassy is another embassy, uniting history and myth, that brings Raphael forth. Raphael argues on behalf of the dispossessed yeoman who appeared many times before More in Chancery court; Hythloday sets forth - this time quite pointedly and eloquently - the rights of the expropriated. As Richard Sylvester points out in "Si Hythlodeao Credimus," Hythloday is "both uprooted himself and an uprooter of others. His most urgent pleas for reform bristle with metaphors of deracination and eradication." In service to the interests of royalty and the wool merchants, More is suddenly confronted in the Netherlands with the very spokesperson for those less powerful, competing interests: the dispossessed yeomanry. Contrary to Marius's and Marin's assertions, Thomas More provides a text entirely contingent to history and to his personal circumstances at the time of its composition. Utopia exemplifies Jean Howard's dictum that literary texts do not constitute "monologic, organically unified wholes" but "sites where many voices of culture and many systems of intelligibility interact." Raphael's curious - and untenable - position as a spokesperson for the expropriated and a representative of Utopus, a large-scale encloser, bears witness to the text's rootedness in the history it allegorizes. Morus himself, representing a collusion between monarchy and merchants in an embassy that sought to improve trade equally advantageous to both, offers yet another voice in the text's encoding of dissonant cultural interactions.
The historical contingency of Utopia, a text that uses enclosure both as a theme and as a principle of its own organization, provides a better sense of place for More in his text.
<#FROWN:G13\>He said that it was his lack of a formal education that kept him from setting down on paper his recollections of the Revolution. It was widely rumored that his aides composed his best letters as commander-in-chief. If so, it is not surprising that he was diffident in company. Some even called it 'shyness,' but whatever the source, this reticence was certainly not the usual characteristic of a great man. "His modesty is astonishing, particularly to a Frenchman," noted Brissot de Warville. "He speaks of the American War as if he had not been its leader." This modesty only added to his gravity and severity. "Most people say and do too much," one friend recalled. "Washington ... never fell into this common error."
III
Yet it was in the political world that Washington made his most theatrical gesture, his most moral mark, and there the results were monumental. The greatest act of his life, the one that made him famous, was his resignation as commander-in-chief of the American forces. This act, together with his 1783 circular letter to the states in which he promised to retire from public life, was his 'legacy' to his countrymen. No American leader has ever left a more important legacy.
Following the signing of the peace treaty and British recognition of American independence, Washington stunned the world when he surrendered his sword to the Congress on Dec. 23, 1783 and retired to his farm at Mount Vernon. This was a highly symbolic act, a very self-conscious and unconditional withdrawal from the world of politics. Here was the commander in chief of the victorious army putting down his sword and promising not to take "any share in public business hereafter." Washington even resigned from his local vestry in Virginia in order to make his separation from the political world complete.
His retirement from power had a profound effect everywhere in the Western world. It was extraordinary, it was unprecedented in modern times - a victorious general surrendering his arms and returning to his farm. Cromwell, William of Orange, Marlborough - all had sought political rewards commensurate with their military achievements. Though it was widely thought that Washington could have become king or dictator, he wanted nothing of the kind. He was sincere in his desire for all the soldiers "to return to our Private Stations in the bosom of a free, peaceful and happy Country," and everyone recognized his sincerity. It filled them with awe. Washington's retirement, said the painter John Trumbull writing from London in 1784, "excites the astonishment and admiration of this part of the world. 'Tis a Conduct so novel, so unconceivable to People, who, far from giving us powers they possess, are willing to convulse the empire to acquire more." King George III supposedly predicted that if Washington retired from public life and returned to his farm, "he will be the greatest man in the world."
Washington was not na<*_>i-trema<*/>ve. He was well aware of the effect his resignation would have. He was trying to live up to the age's image of a classical disinterested patriot who devotes his life to his country, and he knew at once that he had acquired instant fame as a modern Cincinnatus. His reputation in the 1780's as a great classical hero was international, and it was virtually unrivaled. Franklin was his only competitor, but Franklin's greatness still lay in his being a scientist, not a man of public affairs. Washington was a living embodiment of all that classical republican virtue the age was eagerly striving to recover.
Despite his outward modesty, Washington realized he was an extraordinary man, and he was not ashamed of it. He lived in an era where distinctions of rank and talent were not only accepted but celebrated. He took for granted the differences between himself and more ordinary men. And when he could not take those differences for granted he cultivated them. He used his natural reticence to reinforce the image of a stern and forbidding classical hero. His aloofness was notorious, and he worked at it. When the painter Gilbert Stuart had uncharacteristic difficulty in putting Washington at ease during a sitting for a portrait, Stuart in exasperation finally pleaded, "Now sir, you must let me forget that you are General Washington and that I am Stuart, the painter." Washington's reply chilled the air: "Mr. Stuart need never feel the need of forgetting who he is or who General Washington is." No wonder the portraits look stiff.
Washington had earned his reputation, his 'character,' as a moral hero, and he did not want to dissipate it. He spent the rest of his life guarding and protecting his reputation, and worrying about it. He believed Franklin made a mistake going back into public life in Pennsylvania in the 1780's. Such involvement in politics, he thought, could only endanger Franklin's already achieved international standing. In modern eyes Washington's concern for his reputation is embarrassing; it seems obsessive and egotistical. But his contemporaries understood. All gentlemen tried scrupulously to guard their reputations, which is what they meant by their honor. Honor was the esteem in which they were held, and they prized it. To have honor across space and time was to have fame, and fame, "the ruling passion of the noblest minds," was what the Founding Fathers were after, Washington above all. And he got it, sooner and in greater degree than any other of his contemporaries. And naturally, having achieved what his fellow Revolutionaries still anxiously sought, he was reluctant to risk it.
Many of his actions after 1783 can be understood only in terms of this deep concern for his reputation as a virtuous leader. He was constantly on guard and very sensitive to any criticism. Jefferson said no one was more sensitive. He judged all his actions by what people might think of them. This sometimes makes him seem silly to modern minds, but not to those of the 18th century. In that very suspicious age where people were acutely 'jealous' of what great men were up to, Washington thought it important that people understand his motives. The reality was not enough; he had to appear virtuous. He was obsessed that he not seem base, mean, avaricious, or unduly ambitious. No one, said Jefferson, worked harder than Washington in keeping "motives of interest or consanguinity, of friendship or hatred" from influencing him. He had a lifelong preoccupation with his reputation for 'disinterestedness' and how best to use that reputation for the good of his country. This preoccupation explains the seemingly odd fastidiousness and the caution of his behavior in the 1780's.
One of the most revealing incidents occurred in the winter of 1784-85. Washington was led into temptation, and it was agony. The Virginia General Assembly presented him with 150 shares in the James River and Potomac canal companies in recognition of his services to the state and the cause of canal-building. What should he do? He did not feel he could accept the shares. Acceptance might be "considered in the same light as a pension" and might compromise his reputation for virtue. Yet he believed passionately in what the canal companies were doing and had long dreamed of making a fortune from such canals. Moreover, he did not want to show "disrespect" to the Assembly or to appear "ostentatiously disinterested" by refusing this gift.
Few decisions in Washington's career caused more distress than this one. He wrote to everyone he knew - to Jefferson, to Governor Patrick Henry, to William Grayson, to Benjamin Harrison, to George William Fairfax, to Nathanael Greene, even to Lafayette - seeking "the best information and advice" on the disposition of the shares. "How would this matter be viewed by the eyes of the world?" he asked. Would not his reputation for virtue be harmed? Would not accepting the shares "deprive me of the principal thing which is laudable in my conduct?"
The situation is humorous today, but it was not to Washington. He suffered real anguish. Jefferson eventually found the key to Washington's anxieties and told him that declining to accept the shares would only add to his reputation for disinterestedness. So Washington gave them away to the college that eventually became Washington and Lee.
Washington suffered even more anguish over the decision to attend the Philadelphia Convention in 1787. Many believed that his presence was absolutely necessary for the effectiveness of the Convention, but the situation was tricky. He wrote to friends imploring them to tell him "confidentially what the public expectation is on this head, that is, whether I will or ought to be there?" How would his presence be seen, how would his motives be viewed? If he attended, would he be thought to have violated his pledge to withdraw from public life? But, if he did not attend, would his staying away be thought to be a "dereliction to Republicanism?" Should he squander his reputation on something that might not work?
What if the Convention should fail? The delegates would have to return home, he said, "chagrined at their ill success and disappointment. This would be a disagreeable circumstance for any one of them to be in; but more particularly so, for a person in my situation." Even James Madison had second thoughts about the possibility of misusing such a precious asset as Washington's reputation. What finally convinced Washington to attend the Convention was the fear that people might think he wanted the federal government to fail so that he could manage a military takeover. So in the end he decided, as Madison put it, "to forsake the honorable retreat to which he had retired, and risk the reputation he had so deservedly acquired." No action could be more virtuous. "Secure as he was in his fame," wrote Henry Knox with some awe, "he has again committed it to the mercy of events. Nothing but the critical situation of his country would have induced him to so hazardous a conduct."
IV
When the Convention met, Washington was at once elected its president. His presence and his leadership undoubtedly gave the Convention and the proposed Constitution a prestige that they otherwise could not have had. His backing of the Constitution was essential to its eventual ratification. "Be assured," James Monroe told Jefferson, "his influence carried this government." Washington, once committed to the Constitution, worked hard for its acceptance. He wrote letters to friends and let his enthusiasm for the new federal government be known. Once he had identified himself publicly with the new Constitution he became very anxious to have it accepted. Its ratification was a kind of ratification of himself.
After the Constitution was established, Washington still thought he could retire to the domestic tranquillity of Mount Vernon. But everyone else expected that he would become president of the new national government. He was already identified with the country. People said he was denied children in his private life so he could be the father of his country. He had to be the president. Indeed, the Convention had made the new chief executive so strong, so kinglike, precisely because the delegates expected Washington to be the first president.
Once again this widespread expectation aroused all his old anxieties about his reputation for disinterestedness and the proper role for a former military leader. Had he not promised the country that he would permanently retire from public life? How could he then now assume the presidency without being "chargeable with levity and inconsistency; if not with rashness and ambition?" His protests were sincere. He had so much to lose, yet he did not want to appear "too solicitous for my reputation."
Washington's apparent egotism and his excessive coyness, his extreme reluctance to get involved in public affairs and endanger his reputation, have not usually been well received by historians. Douglas Southall Freeman, his great biographer, thought that Washington in the late 1780's was "too zealously attentive to his prestige, his reputation and his popularity - too much the self-conscious national hero and too little the daring patriot."
<#FROWN:G14\>
Babette's Feast: Feasting with Lutherans
BY MARY ELIZABETH PODLES
At the time she wrote 'Babette's Feast,' Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) was in the latest stages of the syphilis she had contracted from her husband, and knew herself to be near death. Her digestive system had been destroyed by the disease, and, in intense pain and unable to eat, she dictated her story as she literally starved to death. Yet still she could write 'Babette,' a parable of a sumptuous superfluity of food and of the sacrifices an artist makes to give of herself and her art. Gabriel Axel's Babette's Feast (Babbette's Gastebud, 1987), an expansion of the story into film, partakes of the same artistry. Numerous critics compare the visual effects of Axel's film to painting in an attempt to capsulize its force and flavor. Typical are Tom O'Brien's observations in Commonweal: the Lutheran minister resembles "a dour portrait of John Calvin," his daughters are called "pre-Raphaelite-looking," and the cool bluish tone of Axel's color scheme "looks as if Vermeer had painted it." Frdric Strauss in Cahiers du Cinema refers to the film's "atmosph<*_>e-grave<*/>re pointilliste." Babette's Feast clearly suggests even to those who are not art historians a debt to painting. Indeed, the film recapitulates the main currents of Scandinavian painting, a recapitulation that is part of Gabriel Axel's synthesis of the deepest themes of Danish culture - folk, European, and Lutheran.
For a director to allude to painting in a film is not a new development. First, paintings are often 'quoted' in film for the sake of the power of the image borrowed. Whether the audience recognizes the image is almost irrelevant. Its form and composition carry their own force. But further, film, a younger child in the family of the visual arts, sometimes seeks to validate its own worth by using the techniques of its more respected elder siblings. Just as painters of the Renaissance self-consciously held themselves up for comparison to the art of the antique, so filmmakers frequently make reference to the older, comparable art of painting, hoping or assuming that an intelligent audience will see the superior advantages of the newer idiom. Thus the tableaux vivants of Carnival in Flanders (Jaques Feyder, 1935), while not the point of the film, add to the general drollery, tickle the knowledgeable viewer's appreciation of seventeenth-century painting, and make valid, if mocking, points of comparison concerning composition, framing, and their impact on narrative in the two media, film and painting. A Sunday in the Country (Bernard Travernier, 1984) pulls joke after in-joke on us, as the elderly painter-hero ruminates on his failure of courage in not pursuing the avant-garde avenues of nineteenth-century painting, while his life is shown as a series of visions of contemporary painting come alive. Frame after frame of Monet, Degas, Carri<*_>e-grave<*/>re, Van Gogh parade across the screen, to the delight of art historians in the audience. There is little in the way of plot to impede their enjoyment.
Babette's Feast continues this film tradition by referring to nineteenth-century Scandinavian painting to evoke and explain the complexity of Danish culture, to which the film is a conscious homage. Recent scholarship, notably Kirk Varnedoe's Northern Lights (1988) and the Kunstmuseum D<*_>u-umlaut<*/>sseldorf's Im Lichte des Nordens (1986), is working towards the establishment of a corpus and definition of nineteenth-century Scandinavian painting both as a facet of cosmopolitan European culture and as an indigenous phenomenon born of the distinctive and evocative Nordic light.
Babette's Feast is a sophisticated European film with a decided flavor of Denmark and a deceptive simplicity, an amalgam like the paintings it imitates. The evocation of Scandinavian painting throughout the film is more than a nod to art historians and more than a validation of the artistic importance of the film medium. It helps Axel to explore his own culture as an expression of the deepest levels of artistic and human yearnings. Axel invokes not only painting but also literature, music, humor, and Lutheran theology to make his statement about life, art, and the nature of grace.
Gabriel Axel's literacy connection is the most obvious. Babette's Feast closely follows Isak Dinesen's slight short story of the same name. The plot is simple. A Lutheran minister with two beautiful daughters has gathered a small, intensely pietist flock around him in a fishing village. Norre Vosseberg in Jutland in the film. A young army officer, in trouble for his loose living, is sent to rusticate with an elderly aunt. He visits the pietist community, to which his aunt is devoted, for prayer and proximity to the elder daughter Martine. He leaves her, however, without ever articulating his feelings, tells her only that he has realized that "in this world there are things which are impossible," and determines to cut a brilliant figure in the military and the world.
Subsequently, a French opera singer, Achille Papin, sunk in a profound Danish melancholy during a visit to the village, hears Philippa, the other daughter, singing in her father's congregation. Recognizing the quality of her voice, he gives her singing lessons and promises to make her a prima donna. Though she is attracted to the splendid, erotic world he represents (together they sing Mozart's 'Seduction Duet'), she rejects the proffered career - and him.
Years pass. The dean has died; his daughters head the dwindling community in prayer and ministry to the poor. Babette, a Frenchwoman and friend of Papin, is cast up into the village, fleeing from the violence of the Commune. The sisters, though they have little enough to spare, take her in and give her a position as a cook. Soon they find her indispensable: they, on whom she depended, have become dependent on her.
More years pass. Babette, whose sole remaining contact with France has been a lottery subscription, wins the grand prize of Fr. 10,000. All are saddened by the prospect of her leaving. She asks whether she may cook a real French meal for the community to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the founding dean. The sisters view such a wordly feast with trepidation, but, considering it to be Babette's last request before her departure, they consent. Privately, the brethren agree never to mention, not even to notice or taste the food as they eat.
The dinner convenes, and course after course of beautiful, sumptuous food and wine appears. Babette is a cook of consummate artistry. Under the influence of her art, old bitternesses and recriminations between the brethren are reconciled, old sorrows healed and loves restored, and all made whole again in a transcendent feast. Afterwards, the sisters express their thanks to Babette and their sorrow that she will soon be leaving them. She reveals that she will in fact not return to France, for she has spent all her winnings to provide the feast.
The film varies from Dinesen's story by omitting any reference to Babette as a petroleuse, an incendiary participant in the Communard up-rising. In the story, the sisters' suspicion of her role in the revolutionary violence increases Babette's depth and mystery. Furthermore, it adds a level of irony to Lowenhielm's climactic dinner speech, in which he recalls the sumptuous meal he had eaten with Gallifet, the general from whom Babette was fleeing, and a further level still when Babette lets it be known that she was indeed the cook of that legendary meal, and that, cruel and oppressive as Gallifet was, she grieves for him as one of the few who understood and appreciated her art. This change the film makes in the original story is an improvement, because, it distances Babette's story from the political and particular and gives it a greater universality by focusing it on the relation of art and grace in Babette's story.
Dinesen's story was originally written in English to reach a wider European audience. Axel translates it back into Danish (as Dinesen often did herself), for Danish is a more suitable language for so Danish a story. Dinesen set her story in Norway; Axel moves it back to Denmark. Dinesen's Norwegian setting may have been meant to distance the story a little from her immediate Danish audience, to give it a slight added flavor of the quaint; otherwise it is so distinctively Danish in its understatement, its irony, humor, and in the constructs of Lutheranism that shape its structure, that it is again an improvement to return it to a Danish setting in the film.
Just as Dinesen's writing is a mix of the cosmopolitan and the specifically Danish, so too are the Scandinavian paintings with which we began this essay, and which are, to an informed eye, so strikingly evoked by the visual imagery of Babette's Feast. For example, the close cultural and political ties between Germany and Denmark produced a close resemblance between German Romantic painting and Danish art of the late years of the century. Some of the most compelling images of Babette's Feast are pure German Romanticism: an isolated figure stands against a panoramic background, a solitary individual in the face of cosmic natural forces. Caspar David Friedrich's Traveller Looking over a Sea of Fog is a close parallel: it portrays a single figure seen from behind, atop a mountain spur looking down and outward over a rocky, mist-covered landscape; his face is averted, his response to the mysterious panorama concealed. The young Lowenhielm riding over the dunes, Achilles Papin sitting on the headlands, Babette gathering herbs in the meadow: each is framed as the elevated Romantic soul (the lover, the musician, the artist-cook) and, within the framework of the story, each one is alone, an outcast of one kind or another, thrown up into the village by apparent chance, there to find connections "in the hidden regions of the heart."
From the isolated figure in the landscape to the solitary figure in the domestic interior is a short step, and there the film reflects another theme of nineteenth-century Danish painting, the Realist study of the single, absorbed, unsentimentalized figure, often a peasant or a woman, painted in a subtle and limited range of color. Painters like the Danish Anna Ancher drew ultimately on the paintings of seventeenth-century Holland and Flanders to create their own versions of the genre painting, and to pay homage to the dignity and authentic quality of the simple rustic life they portrayed. Ancher's painting Lars Gaihede Carving a Stick, for instance, shows a real person known to the artist immersed in his work, oblivious to the artist for whom he sits. In Babette's Feast, the three scenes of the pauper with the soup bowl pay their own homage to Danish art, and at the same time comment with understated Danish humor on Axel's central themes. He is as rough-hewn as Ancher's model, and as absorbed in his food as Lars Gaihede is in carving his stick. First he receives soup from the minister's daughters, who have renounced love and art for good works, then from Babette, who transforms food into grace, and again from the sisters, who have come to recognize what life without Babette would be: his silent "Phooey," when he gets his ale bread soup instead of the French cooking to which he has become accustomed, speaks volumes. The recipient of the community's charity, with all its limitations, and of Babette's grace, he is both an exponent of and a humorous, unsentimental commentator on the unfolding themes of the film. At the same time, he represents in the film just what Varnedoe finds in Scandinavian genre paintings, a "rural folk ... as surviving examples of a primordial national soul."
Scenes of the sisters with their sewing and of Babette in her kitchen create a high-culture counterpart to these rustic genre 'paintings' within the film, and make reference to another strain of Scandinavian painting. Artists like Harriet Backer made a speciality of the single female figure engaged in some mundane task (sewing, for example) in a simple interior often bathed in transforming light effects (lamplight, sunlight diffused from a window in another room).
<#FROWN:G15\>
I am led to ask these questions about television's male viewers for a number of reasons which arise, for me at least, in a much earlier interpretive context - namely, whenever I encounter the scene very near the end of Dark Victory when Judith has begun to go blind. I am mystified, not sure of my knowledge or what I am supposed to see, yet quite 'moved.' That distanciation I am supposed to have, as a male confronted with melodrama, seems to fail me because of the ways in which I am implicated. Let me be explicit: Judith has revealed the fact of her impending blindness to her dearest female friend Anne but hides it from her husband, Frederick, because he has had important news about presenting his research in New York City. She does not want to keep him from going. Frederick, however, has suddenly become oblivious to Judith's condition and does not 'see' her current condition, whereas he had been solicitous and observant (as both doctor and husband) before. Why does this scene arouse my anger toward the marginalization of the doctor? How can he not recognize what Judith is concealing from him? Is he merely insensitive, or does he not have access to Judith's state of mind because she has concealed it (from him but not from me)? Is it that our optical point of view and its consequent knowledge is something we can share only with Judith and not with Frederick? Yet, why in what Frederick does not see and does not do, do I suffer the pain of visible and embodied recognition?
Why might this scene, however, appeal to spectators of both sexes, after so many years have passed? Of course, as Steve Neale recently argued about melodrama and tears, it has to do with the coincidence of character and spectator knowledge as well as with a sense of spectator powerlessness. That is, my knowledge is not restricted or withheld by the film, my point of view is always more complete than the diegetic character, and my sense of powerlessness comes about because of the delay in understanding and awareness. It is always too late in melodrama. Amidst this powerless feeling, there is, nonetheless, the power of the Dark Victory scene to be found in the 'feeling' that, one suspects for both male and female spectator, is quite contradictory and unpleasurable. When we move from the cinematic to the televisual, 'feelings,' intimate detail, and intense emotion in small but familiar spaces are the ways television resolves everything that is contradictory - consumer culture, gender and class relations - especially in what is recognized as 'melodramatic.' As more and more televisual genres become mixed modes of realism and melodrama, as fantasy and desire invade so-called gender-specific genres, and as television melodrama reveals more and more the strains of contradictory bourgeois culture, the interpretive moment becomes more complex.
Cinematic criticism of melodrama has not recovered enough from its Sirkian moment, apparently, to recognize that television has moved beyond simplistic notions of two textually defined audiences: the female one that is implicated in, identifies with, and weeps at melodrama, and the male one that sees through female involvement and distances itself from melodrama. Cinematic 'bachelor machines' regulate issues of knowledge and surveillance as they, and we male spectators, bind and constrain women. But those familiar assumptions are very prejudicial to, and presumptive about, males in the audience.
For example, one assumption in most cinematic theory is that the 'eyes' that see are exclusively male. The male 'gaze' at the female in melodrama is a concept which is usually ahistorical while being essential. But in Dark Victory, we see that the male and female characters do not see, and we know that they do not. We also know that Judith and Frederick see each other differently. I am quite sure, for example, that I will never be able to recognize (not just 'see') why Judith makes the choice she does. To assume that that lack of insight results only, or essentially, or ideologically, from the fact of my gender essentiallizes gender, excludes my experience, and assumes, I think, too much about gender, and too little about me. All males do not see the same things about that scene, feel the same way about those characters, when they are husband and wife, or act upon that sight and that knowledge in the same ways.
What part, then, might that scene from Dark Victory play in an explanation of how males view television melodrama? Thomas Elsaesser's recent review of Mary Ann Doane's book The Desire to Desire raises precisely these points. It is assumed that men did not, do not, like the melodramatic in any cultural form identified as 'feminine.' How, then, can men take pleasure in and acknowledge a desire for the melodramatic? Men, after all, have an historical complicity with (compounded by an institutional predilection for) the more rigid and fixated forms, Elsaesser says, of "imaginary investment" represented by the "object choices" of the so-called 'male' genres. How to explain this paradox? How, further, to discover any patriarchal consent for such a preference?
Might men view women's films, and melodrama generally, out of a desire to "see" the woman's desire "thematized" as Elsaesser suggests (p. 114), but also to see new forms of public desire worked out in admittedly non-utopian representations of heterosexual and family relations? Popular culture is not, Andrew Ross argues, "an expression of mass complicity with the status quo, but rather a medium in which ideological consent is either won or lost." But if the male viewer becomes "captivated" (Elsaesser's term; Neale's would be "moved" which has an older, Longinian sense to it), and he loses his sense of distance from the domestic melodrama, he is no longer ruled visually by the voyeuristic. Then desire for the male spectator is 'desire deferred,' which sounds very much like the sort of 'desire' that television's imaginative regime requires to function. Elsaesser notes that "'the desire to desire' is in fact a kind of double negative, and grants the female spectator, or for that matter any spectator caught up in the signifying process of the woman's film, a special sort of intensity, a radicalism of desire: it is not desire denied, but desire doubled" (p. 114). By positioning this notion of 'desire' outside of the ahistorical, class-less psychopathology of Elsaesser's theoretical formulation, we can escape from the narrow text-constructed aspects of his argument.
What draws men to melodrama, to the male in melodrama, and to male melodrama are issues larger than what draws men to the woman's films. While male desire might take the form of (misogynist or malevolent) curiosity, it might also take other forms, some of which Elsaesser recognizes. e.g., woman's film satisfies the males' "desire to see the woman's desire" (p. 114), which is very close to pornography; the melodramatic disposition recognizes (and misrecognizes) the sado-masochistic scenarios of desire; the melodramatic in both so-called 'male' genres and 'female' genres involves that push-me-pull-you of distance and captivation, the pleasure of the unpleasurable, the basic paradox of popular culture. Additionally, we might note a willing desire to see and to recognize, to know and to understand, that which is otherwise forbidden because of the power of patriarchy to repair and mend itself even when under tremendous siege, as it appears to have been in the United States since at least the Vietnam War.
Male desire to 'see' woman's desire may, also, emerge from areas of male sexuality that are by no means universal: that is, that some males actually fear and distrust women, starting with their mothers, as Dorothy Dinnerstein argues. Some males simply cannot distinguish between sex and love. Some males dislike the messiness of sex itself. Beneath the macho and bravado of male bonding might lurk not just a primal misogyny but a horrified awareness. There may, furthermore, be a blending of male desires evoked by viewing and recognizing the more traditional implications and identifications of melodrama as well as those desires evoked by male-genres that have always contained melodramatic elements presenting more suitable male desires: the fantasy of male achievement, the concern for manliness and the anti-feminine, masculine pride and ethos, and masculine nostalgia for its youth.
THE COMPLICITY OF THE MALE VIEWER
The project of this essay is to interrogate these aspects of masculine desire through an investigation of the relationship of male viewers to particular types of television programming because, following Tania Modleski's suggestion, I want to "complicate the question of male sexuality, and so move beyond the notion that masculinity is always about achieving a phallic identity." Perhaps, by deemphasizing the current psychopathology of gender-genre relations and emphasizing a textual-social dialectical epistemology, we can approach Elsaesser's more "heretical" (his term) definition of the television viewer as lacking lack and desire because s/he is already "part consumer, part social subject" (p. 115). For Elsaesser, this hybrid spectator is not positioned in a cinematic field of vision but in a "multiplicity of voices and modes of address" providing "intelligibility and interpretation, social preconstruction rather than textual construction and imaginary coherence" (p. 115). Clearly, Elsaesser's notion of the television viewer is undesirably 'social' and commodified rather than 'textual,' having or possessing a different subjectivity from that of the cinematic spectator.
But textually constructed male spectators and historically constructed male social subjects are tied to an anterior idea of my [our] self-nominated and self-identified complicity(ies) with a social representation of myself as 'male audience' for and within television. It follows that any 'male spectator' that I discuss here will have to be capable of dealing with conflicting cultural messages, with contradictory subject positions within 'masculinity,' and with competitive cultural interpellations. Since I've nominated myself for complicity with televisual texts, and with the rest of my 'world,' I must have some social history as 'audience' formed (some might say 'bought') as the audience of television programs addressed, I presume, to me as well as to others both like and unlike me (in gendered and other terms).
Stephen Heath says that as individual human subjects "we live our heterogeneity," but we also "live our positionings in the [gendered] social field." We have to assume (be complicit with) both sects of operations. Men are carriers of the patriarchal mode, of masculinity, and the masculine point of view. They can, also, sometimes engage in a practice of deconstruction. Within deconstructive practice, this would amount to the recognition of "provisional and intractable starting points" in the investigation of one's own masculine positioning in the social field. Such an investigation amounts to the disclosure of complicities, where the "critic-as-subject is her[him]self complicit with the objects of her [his] critique," emphasizing history and the "ethico-political as the 'trace' of that complicity."
This structure of complicity includes not just the disclosure of the subject as subjected, but genre complicity, textual complicity, viewing complicity, and commodity complicity. This complicity between social text and its viewer takes many, familiar forms: the way in which we are complicit in the concepts of modes of address and ideological problematic used by David Morley and John Fiske, the way in which we think the relationship of viewer interdiscourse and television's heterogeneity of discourse (Ien Ang), the way in which we think about ideologies contending with one another for our consent (in, among other places, Bill Nichols' essay 'Ideological and Marxist Criticism'), or the way in which television works to construct a complicity with the viewer around the construction of the ideal family (in John Ellis and Jane Feuer). None of these discursively constructed complicities assumes a complete reciprocity in terms of encoder/decoder understanding, nor a complete disjuncture either. Whenever, then, we discuss the means by which genre is currently thought, or the nature of audience complicity with star discourses, we are, implicitly, investigating the complicity of texts-viewers encounters. Even in commodity theory, we recognize that the audience, which is sold by networks to advertisers, is also a commodity for itself, involving kinds of cognitive and emotional work that is sold.
Complicity, then, involves processes of consent, sometimes collusion, but never bad faith or guilt.
<#FROWN:G16\>
William Olsen
Lyric Detachment: Two New Books of Poetry
Jorie Graham, Region of Unlikeness. New York: Ecco, 1991.
Chase Twichell. Perdido. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1991.
As artists, poets should naturally want to distance themselves from what they regard as mere fashion - which is to say that fashion influences those who would shed it almost as deeply as those who would cling to it. At present it seems fashionable to deride the personal in poetry. We have approached a juncture where contemporary American poetry is collectively congratulating itself for having escaped the malignant confines of a personal poetry, especially as practiced by the so-called confessional poets - currently, our most widely spanning and therefore most meaningless pejorative. A poetry of self-confrontation is seen to be a product, if not the cause, of the excesses of a narcissistic culture. Further, a strictly personal poetry is seen to be aesthetically incorrect: if the Marxists are right and our consumer society created an ethos of the self out of a need for ever more selfish consumers, then any poetry dealing with the personal only strengthens the stranglehold our greed has on us. Our newest truism is that a less private, more public poetry is less apt to be given to narcissism, sentimentalism, self-promoting, etc. A more public poetry will lead us away from all of these things. In the meantime the introspective had better watch their step.
No doubt genuine change in the arts occurs slowly, maybe too slowly for those of us mired in the present moment to comprehend. That so many voices are clamoring against the personal suggests, among other things, how strong a pull the personal still has on poetry. And arguably, of the various kinds of discourse, poetry is actually blessed, not cursed, with a small (the sophists would say elite) audience; for if poetry has one custodial function in our culture right now, it may be to preserve the potential for genuine community that eludes more massive forms of communication. You can't talk back to a TV, a poet-friend once said to me. True, you can't talk back to a poem either. But when you listen to a poem or read a poem, you listen as part of a small group or you read by yourself and not as an indistinguishable member of a tyrannical majority. The individual called the poet depends on the fact that other individuals called readers are out there. However, even in our most revolutionary poetry, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, what we have (arguably) instead of a public poetry is a poetry that could not possibly be more subjective, a poetry that chooses the most private of all aesthetic paths, absolute stylism.
What really has changed in American poetry in the last thirty years or so is not so easy to talk about. It may have less to do with poetry eschewing the subjective than with its tiring of postured ways of behaving subjectively in poems and its rejecting specious alchemical formulas for the private life. In reading new books by Jorie Graham and Chase Twichell, it becomes clear to me that the dynamics between poetry and personality have changed somewhat. Both poets use post-modernist strategies of artistic self-consciousness - like David Letterman knocking on the camera lens to see if anyone at home is really at home - but they do so only out of the hyper-earnest desire to be more honest about poetry's status as artifice. Though both poets aspire to a more public role for the poetry, by and large they are still cartographers of the interior. Their poetry is characteristic of one current branch of mainstream poetry, a poetry of lyric detachment.
These poets view human experience less as dramatic participants or as agonized soliloquists and more as detached observers. It is poetry's very capacity to distance us from experience that attracts - and frustrates - these poets and paradoxically impassions them with responsibility. There is a suprapersonal, yet pained restraint in their treatment of the qualms of the inner life and the unpredictabilities of a deterministic world. On the one hand, detachment becomes a necessary evil. On the other hand, as the essential flipside of involvement, it actually facilitates worldly engagement. For Chase Twichell, 'music'-poetry - becomes a protective agent, or "a chord, like the membrane, broken only once, that keeps the world away." More than her first two books, Perdido admits moments of devastating personal revelation, but only because a dispassionate overtone makes these moments possible. Jorie Graham adheres to a camera-like point of view so as to tease herself and her reader into sympathy for a living world abandoned to lifeless analysis. Graham has at once a great distrust for language and an equal fascination with its powers of abstraction. In Region of Unlikeness language is almost personified into an interrogator of experience and a perpetrator of our omnicidal history.
Chase Twichell aspires to a poetry of lyric detachment because the world of her poetry is too cruel for any other response. Her goal is imaginative sympathy, but for her such sympathy is conceivable only after scrupulous investigation of the darker motives alive and brooding somewhere just behind craft. The speaker in Perdido seems to report her discoveries from behind a plexiglass surface of memory. Her strategies are mock-inductive: however quirky and ungrounded and unscientific her conclusions are, she arrives at those conclusions only after compiling the requisite perceptual data, descriptions that shimmer in the phenomenological no-man's land between the subjective and the objective. Her imagery, usually pleasing enough in itself, is never just flashy: it urges the speaker toward statement, personal disclosure, and intimations of vulnerability. Unlike so much bad magazine verse that bulldozes piles of observant description as proof of a sometimes missing intelligence, Twichell is just as engaged by speculation as by observation. In good keeping with post-Heisenberg metaphysics, she constantly makes the point that speculation alters our methods of observation and transforms and even mutates whatever it is we observe. Her first-person speaker is ideational: a speculative witness that consistently laments her abstraction from the physical world. Yet in her own words, the disclosures are "unrepentant."
Oddly, the exploration of consciousness Twichell's poetry documents is something like a descent into an underworld, a Darwinian, subterranean world plainly visible to the powers of intellection if somewhere just beyond full comprehension. The one domain of her poetry encompasses the twin zones of memory and desire, and her journey therein open out into pre-human worlds teeming with creaturely presences. From a biological perspective, these poems assert a continuity of being among the lower and higher life forms. From a psychological perspective, her poetry aims to achieve self-realization only upon something akin to regression, some slippage into the depths of the psyche, that murky place where all at once the libido takes hold and consciousness begins. Yet Twichell is never guilty of species-ism, and I'm guessing she would hesitate to accept Roethke's idea of a poem as "in a sense ... a kind of struggle out of the slime." If anything, the pre-human realms of Perdido comprise a world of sometimes remarkably clear actualities, a world neither more nor less than our world of brutal intelligences. In Spanish, perdido means 'lost,' 'strayed,' 'ruined,' 'mislaid.' In these poems 'Perdido' is the name both of the Alabaman river that empties into the Gulf and of some seemingly pre-lapsarian city of light. Between the subhuman and human realms there are endless border crossings.
So far all I have done is to scratch the surface of a world view. Consider how rich the opening poem 'Why All Good Music Is Sad,' is, how hypnotically its rhythms unfold, how much the poem is about the pull of its own musical seduction, how the cadences hover between free verse and metered verse, how the images hover between loveliness and venom; and how, more than the poem's candid statements, even more than the rich mystique of its conceit that produces the final equation between fish and speaker, the rhythms themselves embody the unending struggles between body and spirit, desire and memory, insentience and sentience:<O_>poem<O/>
However metaphorical this poem is, it never cloys into allegory. From the strangely icy and matter-of-fact first line that provides the poem's personal frame, we move through flashing schools of fish and the undulating lacy fans to the poem's crux, the sight of a fish impaled on a spear, "abandoned to its one desire." It is not death that the fish seems to be suffering so much as bodily isolation. The paradox is that desire, normally a vehicle for escaping isolation, is the cause of isolation. At this ironic "apex of its fear" Perdido filters from the world above to the "half-lit world" below, until words subhuman and human, preverbal and verbal, presexual and sexual, unfold the same problems, are prone to the same violence. Twichell captures whatever it is about human apperception that makes it easier to lounge on the surface and enjoy the freakshow below. Yet at the same time her speaker's observation grows out of such dark instincts as can only be appeased - if that - when they are comprehended. The ending is fairly easy to anticipate (that the sea has been a metaphor for the bed hardly surprises us), yet this unsurprising closure, or the sorrowful ease of it, strikes a common nerve with the stunned awareness that the speaker is unfathomably alone, yet ever just able to say so.
It is characteristic of Twichell's poems to flatten out their own worst foreboding news. If Twichell means to be moving away from an art which is no more than "cold solace," her poems now reach new emotional depths as a result of the dramatic distancing of the speaker from her experience - this because deep feeling shows up most clearly against a backdrop of reserve. The problems these poems occasionally run into have to do with one of Twichell's strong suits as a poet, metaphor-making. Sometimes she seems too willing to reduce unstated psychic dilemmas into fairly formulaic images, worldly and pathetic and terrible for being put so flatly, yet still reductive. In a poem ironically titled 'A Whole Year of Love' (it turns out that a whole year of love doesn't amount to a can of minnows!), we get a glib equation like this: "just as a whole year of love, for example,/ might shrink to a stack of pale-colored,/ just laundered shirts. An image." Here Twichell's usually hard-won flatness of voice lapses to mere posturing, and tonal effect becomes a shortcut to substance. These poems also sometimes go wrong when they provide pat emblems of their own emotional inaccessibility, as at the end of 'Window in the Shape of a Diamond':<O_>poem<O/>
This gesture of unsaying the sublime, meant to be sublime in itself, does not produce much more than mute pathos. Thus the poem speaks no more accurately of the poet's inner life than it does of the world outside the window.
But the truth is that Perdido gains emotional and intellectual ground because of its willingness to overreach. It may have been more difficult to tell the good poems from the weak poems in Twichell's first two promising collections, Northern Spy and The Odds. Perdido is a stronger collection. It has Twichell's penchant for images as smart as they are dazzling, but it also allows her imagination more auditory depths. Though this isn't true for the poetry of every poet, Twichell's poetry has gained in passion and meaning as her syntax has relaxed and as her ear has joined her eye in writing the poem. I quoted 'Why All Good Music Is Sad' because it best illustrates the vision of Perdido. I can't leave unmentioned other equally strong poems like 'Dream of the Interior,' 'The Shades of Grand Central,' 'One Physics,' 'Useless Islands,' 'Revenges,' and the remarkable closing poem, 'The Stolen Emblem.' In this tour de force poem Twichell has made the dream of her interior ours, its language our language. She does so by playing endless riffs on the book's by-now recognizable discovery that our perceptions cloud the world, but with twists that take the poem beyond the common bounds of pop-quantum physics:<O_>poem<O/>
<#FROWN:G17\>
Michael Dorris
Beyond Clich, Beyond Politics:
Multiculturalism and the Fact of America
HALF a millennium ago, my Modoc paternal ancestors lived near the lava flats of northern California. They went about their lives - hunting, fishing, falling in love, mourning their dead - completely unaware of an Atlantic Ocean, much less of any human beings on the other side of it. Meanwhile, Irish peasants - my mother's people - toiled in the rocky fields of the western county of Roscommon, spoke Gaelic, and worried when the next attack from the sea might come. Unschooled in geography, they possessed little notion of Spain, much less the possibility of a New World. Somewhere in the tree of my particular lineage were also French farmers, Swiss shepherds, German professors, Coeur d'Alene salmon fishermen - all innocent of the complications of contact, oblivious of each other's priorities and concerns, insular, ethnocentric, proud ... and unfathomable to a contemporary person.
These were men and women whose world was infinitely smaller, arguably easier, but ultimately less interesting than our own. When the lines of their consciousnesses inadvertently collided - well into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - they were at least as confused as they were enlightened, as terrified by newness as they were fascinated by it. No doubt they mistrusted the strange, yearned for the security of the 'old days,' often wished each other gone. But there were also among them people who dared to look beyond the boundaries of their own birthplaces, who not only accepted but embraced the possibilities of difference, who joined together to forge something new.
This was not, in most cases, a matter of choice but rather a practical, creative, and available necessity. Our dynamic American landscape of fabulously interwoven ethnicities has struggled for generations to devise a workable definition of itself - a challenge and debate at the heart of the quincentennial anniversary of Christopher Columbus' first voyage to this hemisphere. The task has consistently proven to be neither simple nor uncontroversial. 'Multiculturalism,' though the only catchall that accurately reflects this nation's history of free-for-all migration and slippery assimilation, has become almost a clich in political discourse - a bow to each federally recognized ethnic population, a dutiful list of its accomplishments and contributions to the modern world. As a concept, multiculturalism is amorphism without the sharp edges that traditionally mark boundaries, and it rarely pleases anyone.
Among the Native American people I know and respect, there are many who are angry at the attention lavished on the 1992 continental birthday party. These individuals are the embittered descendants of tribes whose lands were stolen, whose populations were decimated, whose religions were outlawed and held in contempt, whose books were burned, whose skin color was reviled. They have ample reason to profess an aversion to Columbus and all he stands for. Mythologizing and glorifying - or denigrating - a complicated past does no justice to anyone. It over-simplifies, and it buries hard facts and sad realities. It absolves without any confession of guilt, and it does not heal.
There are, among my non-Indian friends, those who resent any cloud cast over the international orgy of self-aggrandizement, and who blissfully dismiss as 'revisionary' every history save that of the conquerors. "To the victors belong the spoils," they crow. But they are wrong - wrong as the extollers of Manifest Destiny were in the last century, wrong as those who would remake the world in the image of a single culture or society or faith - and they must be challenged. Our diversity, as a species, has always been our salvation. Why do we struggle so to deny and suppress it?<*_>star<*/>
Who, after all, were those societies that greeted Europeans five, four, three hundred years ago? What were their motives, their important elements, their contrasts with the Old World norms that attempted to dominate and destroy them?
Imagine the scene: it is an autumn day in the late fifteenth century. On a beach with rose-colored sand, somewhere in the Caribbean, two groups of people are about to meet for the first time. The world will never again be the same.
Emerging from a small landing boat are a group of men exhausted from a long and frightening ocean voyage. They didn't trust where they were going and now they don't know where they've arrived - but it doesn't look at all like the India described by Marco Polo. They come from Spain and Portugal and Genoa, are Christian and Jewish. The more superstitious and uneducated among them feared that, by sailing west across the Atlantic, they would fall off the edge of the planet.
The men seek treasure and adventure, fame and glory, but the people who greet them seem quite poor. They are not dressed in fine brocade encrusted with precious jewels, as one would expect of subjects of the great Khan. They are, in fact, not dressed at all, except for a few woven skirts and dabs of paint. Are they demons? Are they dangerous? Do they know where the gold is hidden?
Watching the boat draw near are a cluster of men, women, and children. They speak a dialect of the Arawak language and are delighted to receive new guests, especially ones who aren't painted white - signifying death. Strangers arrive often, anxious to barter parrot feathers or new foods or useful objects made of stone or shell. These particular visitors look rather strange, it's true: their bodies are covered with odd materials, not at all suited for the warm climate, and they communicate with each other in a tongue as indecipherable as Carib or Nahuatl.
Up close there are more surprises. There are no women in the group, and some of the hosts speculate on why this may be the case. Have their clan mothers expelled these men, banished them to wander alone and orphaned? Has their tribe suffered some disaster? And another thing: they have the strong odor of people who have not had their daily bath. Are they from some simple and rude society that doesn't know how to comport itself?
But all this notwithstanding, guests are guests and should be treated with hospitality. They must be offered food and shelter, must be entertained with stories and music, before the serious business of trade begins.<*_>star<*/>
The earth was much larger than Christopher Columbus imagined, and its human population was far more diverse. The land mass he encountered on his transatlantic voyages was thoroughly inhabited by more than one hundred million people, from the frigid steppes of Patagonia at the furthest extremity of South America to the dark arboreal forests of Newfoundland. In the inhospitable Arctic, Inuits foraged for much of the year in small nuclear or extended family groups, assembling only sporadically to carry on the necessary business of marriage, remembrance, or collective action, and only when the availability of food was at its peak. In the lush and verdant jungles of Yucat<*_>a-grave<*/>n and Guatemala, Mayas had invented agriculture, writing, and an accurate calendar fifteen hundred years before the birth of Christ, and they had gone on to become populous in complex, class-oriented societies supported by a nutritionally balanced diet based on maize, squashes, and beans. In the Andes of north-western South America, early Quechuas domesticated the potato, engineered an intricate system of roads and bridges, formed a nation in which the state owned all property except houses and movable household goods, and collected taxes in labor.
The Western Hemisphere was home to literally hundreds of cultures whose people spoke a multiplicity of languages and dialects derived from at least ten mutually exclusive linguistic families. Many societies had well-developed traditions of science and medicine - some forty percent of the modern world's pharmacopeia were utilized in America before 1492 - and literature, visual art, and philosophy flourished in a variety of contexts. Yet beyond a shared geography, there were few common denominators; due to the haphazard and long process by which in-migrating peoples had distributed themselves throughout the continents, the Western Hemisphere thrived as a living laboratory of disparate life-styles, linguistic variety, and cultural pluralism.
The Karok in California were no more likely to share mores with the Anishinabe of Wisconsin or the Yanomamo of Venezuela than they were with groups in Polynesia or Persia. Every type of social organization existed: theocracies among the Natchez, matrilineal clan descent among the Delaware, incipient forms of representative government among the Iroquois, chiefdoms among the Arawak, confederacies among the Huron, loosely knit bands among the peoples of the Amazon. The Zunis maintained stable towns and the Toltecs dwelled in cosmopolitan cities. Vast trading networks linked the so-called Mound Builders of central North America with the tribes living along the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, as well as with peoples on the North Atlantic seaboard.
Obviously, no single group was directly aware of more than a fraction of the other extant societies - and there was no conception of an overarching group identity. 'We' was the family, the community, the tribe, and 'they' were everyone else, known and unknown. The fact of cultural diversity, however, was manifest. Within a day's walk of virtually every indigenous population could be found at least one and probably more than one unrelated community whose inhabitants, relative to the visitor, spoke a totally foreign and incomprehensible language, adhered to a unique cosmology, dressed in unusual clothing, ate exotic foods, and had a dissimilar political organization with peculiar variations on age and gender roles.
Native persons in most regions of precontact America could and undoubtedly did believe that they belonged to the smartest, most tasteful, most accomplished, and most handsome human constellation in the universe, but clearly they knew that their particular culture was not the only one. Variety, in whichever way it was construed and explained, was inescapably the human norm.
It is little wonder, therefore, that for Europeans of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, America proved to be much more than a single new world: it was an unimagined universe. The sheer heterogeneity of Western Hemisphere societies challenged every cherished medieval assumption about the uniform and orderly nature of human origin and destiny. It was as if the cultural hodgepodge of America revealed a whole new set of potential operating rules - or, even more disconcerting, served as an ego-threatening intimation that there were no dependable rules at all. Imagine the shock! To have believed for a thousand years that everything and everybody of consequence was known and neatly categorized, and then suddenly to open a window and learn that, all along, one had been dwelling in a small house with no perspective on the teeming and chaotic city that surrounded one's accustomed neighborhood - with no map or dictionary provided. How did Cain and Abel fit into this new, complicated schema? Which Old Testament patriarch begat the Lakota or the Chibcha? How did the Comanche get from the Tower of Babel to Oklahoma?
The contrasts between the Old World and the Americas were staggering. With only a few minor exceptions, virtually all Europeans spoke languages that sprang from a single linguistic family. Moreover, in the larger perspective, Europe's vaunted religious and philosophical divisions were basically variations on a concordant theme. Everyone from the Baltic to the Balkans and on west to the British Isles professed belief in the same male divinity, and - except for European Jewry - worshiped His Son as well.
As side effects of this theological unity, Latin became a lingua franca for intellectuals from all sectors, and the Mosaic code formed the basis for practically every ethical or legal philosophy. The broad assumption of male dominance reigned uncontested, from individual marriage contracts to the leadership hierarchy of emergent nation-states. And the Bible - especially the Book of Genesis - was regarded as a literally true and factually accurate accounting of origin itself.
Significantly, in the Adam and Eve story creation is intentional: a personalized, antropomorphic, male divinity formed a man in His image and then threw in a woman, made out of a nonessential rib, for man's company and pleasure. God's word was law, and the only token competition came from a fallen angel, also of His manufacture.
<#FROWN:G18\>
THE POLITICS OF RACE
THE MEANING OF EQUALITY
SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET
No achievement of 20th-century American politics surpasses the creation of an enduring national consensus on civil rights. This consensus was forged during the past quarter century by a civil-rights movement that compelled Americans finally to confront the wide gap between their treatment of blacks and the egalitarian values of their own cherished national creed.
In recent years, however, the leaders of the civil-rights movement have shifted the focus from the pursuit of equal opportunity to the pursuit of substantive equality through policies of preferential treatment. This has brought matters to a difficult pass, because most Americans, including many blacks, have not shifted with the leaders of the movement. The reason is not hard to find. While the civil-rights movement of the 1960s asked Americans to live up to a single un-assailable ideal, today it sets up a conflict between two core American values: egalitarianism and individualism.
Affirmative action was born in 1965 in the spirit of the first civil-rights revolution. Soon thereafter it was transformed into a system of racial preferences, and today affirmative action is rapidly polarizing the politics of race in America. The editorial and op-ed pages bristle with affirmative action polemics and analyses. In the 1990 contest for the governorship of California, Republican Pete Wilson focused on the 'quota' issue in defeating Diane Feinstein. In the same year, Senator Jesse Helms won reelection in North Carolina with the help of the quota issue, and in Louisiana ex-Klansman David Duke exploited it to gain a majority of white votes while losing his bid for a Senate seat. His failed campaign for the governorship last fall became a national drama. When Congress began its 1991 session, the first bill introduced by the Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives was a civil-rights bill described by its opponents as 'quota' legislation. Even after a version of that bill became law in November, controversy over its meaning and import continued. ...
In many ways, of course, the United States has never been a perfect meritocracy. In the job market and other fields, people tend to favor relatives, friends, and members of their own ethnic, religious, communal, or cultural groups. And universities, though meritocratic and universalistic in their explicit values, have always favored the children of alumni and faculty, not to mention athletes, in their admissions policies. They also award special scholarships and fellowships limited to applicants from particular regional, gender, ethnic, or religious backgrounds - though some of these practices are now outlawed. To a large extent, blacks have been excluded from these networks of privilege.
Women and most other minorities have required only genuine equality of opportunity, not special help, in order to make a place for themselves in American society. Indeed, the Jews, the 'Confucian' Asians, and the East Indians have done better on average than old-stock white Americans with similar skills and education. Roughly 40 percent of Mexican-Americans hold white-collar or other high-level positions today, even though most of them were not born in the United States. In any case, immigrants generally have no claim on American society. Whatever handicaps they have - inadequate education, lack of skills, inexperience with the ways of the cities - are not the fault of American society.
Blacks clearly do have a claim on this society. As I wrote in 1963 in The First New Nation: "Perhaps the most important fact to recognize about the current situation of the American Negro is that equality is not enough to assure his movement into the larger society." The question is, what will?
One of the more novel proposals is advanced by Brandeis University's Lawrence Fuchs in The American Kaleidoscope (1990). He argues for a system of preferential treatment in employment that varies according to the type of job. Fuchs points out that in many, if not most, occupations employers chiefly require competence, not superior performance. Seniority rights, legislation outlawing compulsory retirement ages, and tenure for school teachers are all justified by the assumption that general competence is a sufficient qualification for employment. Thus, Fuchs contends, efforts to increase the number of minority workers among the less-skilled - "fire fighters, machinists, computer operators, and candidates for dental school" - can reasonably include numerical goals, permitting "race to be counted as one of many factors. ..." in filling jobs. But he argues that fields in which high achievement matters a great deal - scholarship, medicine, sports, airline pilots, and management - should not be subject to quotas and special preference policies, apart from special recruitment and training efforts.
Whatever the merits of Fuchs' distinction, people who work in these less-exalted fields do not accept such disparaging estimates of their worth. Poll after poll finds that white workers see no reason that meritocratic standards and universalistic rules should not apply to them. In fact, more support (or at least acceptance) of special preferences is found among elite whites, who begin with much more economic and status security.
Mass opinion remains invariably opposed to preferential treatment for deprived groups. The Gallup Organization repeated the same question five times between 1977 and 1989:
Some people say that to make up for past discrimination, women and minorities should be given preferential treatment in getting jobs and places in college. Others say that ability, as determined by test scores, should be in the main consideration. Which point of view comes close to how you feel on the subject?
In each survey, 10 or 11 percent said that minorities should be given preferential treatment, while 81, 83, or 84 percent replied that ability should be the determining factor. When the 1989 answers were broken down by the respondents' race, blacks were only somewhat more supportive of preferential treatment than whites (14 percent to 7 percent); a majority of the blacks (56 percent) favored "ability, as determined in test scores." Women, it should be noted, had the same response as men; 10 percent supported preferential treatment, and 85 percent ability.
Gallup, working for the Times Mirror Corporation, presented the issue somewhat differently in 1987 and 1990: "We should make every effort to improve the position of blacks and other minorities even if it means giving them preferential treatment." This formulation was supported more strongly. Twenty-four percent agreed in both years, while 71 to 72 percent disagreed. Blacks were more favorable than whites by 32 to 18 percent, but again it is notable that over two-thirds of the blacks rejected preferential treatment. And while over four-fifth of the Republicans surveyed were against preferences, so were two-thirds of the Democrats. A relatively high proportion of those who identified themselves as "strong liberals," 43 percent, endorse preferential treatment, but they constituted only 10 percent of the total sample.
Last spring, a Newsweek-Gallup poll posed the issue in terms of persons of equal qualifications: "Do you believe that because of past discrimination against black people, qualified blacks should receive preference over equally qualified whites in such matters as getting into college or getting jobs?" Only 19 percent of whites responded positively, 72 percent said no. But preferences secured a plurality of 48 percent among blacks, with 42 percent opposed.
Preferential treatment does somewhat better when it is justified as making up for specific past discrimination, when ability is not posed as an alternative, and when it is limited to blacks and applies only to employers that have actually discriminated. The New York Times national poll asked in May and December of 1990: "Do you believe that where there has been job dis-crimination against blacks in the past, preference in hiring or promotion should be given to blacks today?" Both times, roughly one-third of those polled said yes. But small majorities, 51-52 percent, rejected preferential treatment even under these conditions.
By June 1991, during the debate on the new civil-rights bill that Republicans attacked as quota legislation, support for preferences dropped to 24 percent, while opposition rose to 61 percent. One month later, a poll of blacks taken by USA Today to test their reaction to Clarence Thomas's nomination to the Supreme Court found that they rejected quotas. They were asked, "Thomas has said that racial hiring quotas and other race-conscious legal measures damage blacks' efforts to advance. He emphasizes self-help instead. Agree or disagree?" More blacks agreed with Thomas, 47 percent, than disagreed, 39 percent, while 14 percent replied "don't know."
Both whites and blacks, however, will support a policy described as "affirmative action" if it explicitly does not involve quotas, as an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll found in July 1990. Two-thirds of whites (66 percent) and 84 percent of blacks responded favorably to the question: "All in all, do you favor or oppose affirmative action programs in business for blacks, provided there are no rigid quotas?"
A LEADER-FOLLOWER SPLIT
Americans make a critical distinction between compensatory action and preferential treatment. To return to Lyndon Johnson's image of the shackled runner, they are willing to do more than remove the chains. They will go along with special training programs and financial assistance, enabling the previously shackled to catch up with those who are ahead because of earlier unfair advantages. But they draw the line at predetermining the results of the competition.
In some measure, the distinction between 'compensatory action' and 'preferential treatment' parallels the distinction drawn between 'equality of opportunity' and 'equality of results.' Compensatory action is probably seen as a way to enhance equality of opportunity. Because blacks have been discriminated against in the past, it is fair to give them special consideration so that they will have a better chance in the future. Preferential treatment, on the other hand, probably sounds to most whites like an effort to predetermine the outcome of the competitive process.
The heaviest support for preferential treatment seems to come from the liberal intelligentsia, the well-educated, the five to six percent of the population who have gone to graduate schools, plus those who have majored in the liberal arts in college. Support is also strong among the political elite, particularly Democrats but including many Republicans (though not many prominent officeholders). The Democrats in Congress increasingly support these policies, a change which may flow from the fact that the proportion of Democratic members who can be classified as liberal on the basis of their voting record has increased steadily since the 1960s.
Democratic leaders are increasingly out of step with public opinion, and it is hurting them. The Republicans, their creation of quotas long forgotten, now vigorously emphasize meritocratic standards. Democrats are faced with a dilemma: how to respond to pressure from civil-rights groups and the intelligentsia on the one hand, and on the other, how to prevent the party's identification with quotas from alienating its traditional base of support among whites in the working class and the South. Lyndon Johnson anticipated the problem in 1965, when he said in private White House discussions about civil rights, "We have to press for them as a matter of right, but we also have to recognize that by doing so we will destroy the Democratic Party."
This is precisely what is happening. A New York Times-CBS News poll conducted in mid-year 1991 found that 56 percent of Americans said the Democratic Party "cares more about the needs and problems of blacks," while only 15 percent believed the Republicans do. More significant may be the finding that, when asked the same question about "the needs and problems of whites," 45 percent answered that the GOP cares more, only 19 percent said the Democrats do, and 14 percent said both parties care equally about both races.
Affirmative action is widely seen as reverse discrimination. Many less-affluent whites believe that the number of jobs available for them had declined as a result of preferences for blacks. Two studies undertaken in 1985 and 1987 by Stanley Greenberg of the Analysis Group for the Michigan Democratic Party indicate that negative reaction to affirmative action has played a major role in the defection of white male blue-collar voters from the party.
<#FROWN:G19\>
RICHARD LIND
The Aesthetic Essence of Art
Anyone familiar with the parallel evolution of aesthetics and Western art knows how new art-forms, in a kind of punctuated equilibrium, have regularly dislodged each new art theory. In a strategy designed to avoid any new embarrassments, some contemporary writers have sought to define 'art' in terms of a complex relationship within the so-called 'artworld' between artists, their products and the traditional community for whom those products are made. One of these writers, Arthur Danto, has plausibly argued that all art makes some sort of 'statement' interpretable only by artworld participants familiar with an appropriate art theory. Nothing can be an artwork until an artworld theory emerges by which it can be understood.
There are good reasons to believe that 'making a statement,' in the broadest possible sense, is a necessary condition of art. But it is not sufficient. Phenomenological analysis tends to show that an artwork must be aesthetic as well as meaningful. Without this further specification, what the artist has to say could not be distinguished from many nonartistic forms of communication. Indeed, for anything to be art, its meaning must subserve the aesthetic function of the artwork, in a role I shall call 'significance.' Our counter thesis, then, will be that the concepts of 'art' and 'artwork' must be defined in terms of the creation of significant aesthetic objects.
I
Danto doesn't offer a readily accessible formulation of his definition of 'art,' but it is possible to piece one together from his various pronouncements. At the heart of his theory is a concern about the basic difference between such everyday objects as clusters of real Brillo boxes and putative artworks like Warhol's Brillo Boxes, the respective physical features of which are virtually identical. If they are alike in every physical detail, yet one is art and the other not, something must make for the distinction. Danto points out that, of the two, only Brillo Boxes is subject to 'interpretation' by an artistic community, the 'artworld.'
Consider, he says, a pair of hypothetical neckties painted all-over blue, respectively, by Czanne and Picasso. Only Picasso's would have qualified as art:
For one thing, there would have been no room in the artworld of Czanne's time for a painted necktie. Not everything can be an artwork at every time: the artworld must be ready for it. ... But Picasso's artworld was ready to receive, at Picasso's hand, a necktie: for he had made a chimpanzee out of a toy, a bull out of a bicycle seat ...: so why not a tie out of a tie?
On the basis of such observations Danto seems to offer a set of necessary, if not sufficient, conditions for 'art': a) the use of some object b) to make an original statement c) interpretable within an artworld context. Conditions a) and b) are suggested in the explanation of Picasso's tie as art: "Picasso used the necktie to make a statement." Danto points out that the statement must be original since a fake does not qualify as art. Condition c) is an explicit part of Danto's conditions:
The moment something is considered an artwork, it becomes subject to an interpretation. It owes its existence as an artwork to this, and when its claim to art is defeated, it loses its interpretation and becomes a mere thing.
To see something as art demands nothing less than this, an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art.
Danto is often accused of failing to specify what makes a community an artworld community. But in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace he tells us that by means of artistic theory the artist enables us "to see his way of seeing the world." For instance, within the tradition of art as self-commentary, Warhol's Brillo Boxes, can be interpreted as propounding "a brash metaphor: the brillo-box-as-work-of-art." Danto can thus claim that the artworld is a community of individuals prepared to see the world as the artist does through his statement.
Though this sketch may not do Danto full justice, it at least enables us to see the beauty of his main thesis that the function of art is to convey meanings decipherable by an appropriate artworld audience. The idea that anything requires an interpretive understanding before it can be experienced as a work of art seems the only plausible explanation for the fact that what counts as art in one age would not have counted as art in an earlier one. We might question Danto's claim that if Czanne had painted his tie blue it would not have been art; had he actually produced one, we should now say it always had been art - unappreciated art. But a principle has still been demonstrated: if such an artifact did not even have the potential to be interpreted by any artworld community, it would never be deemed 'art.' The potential for 'interpretation' therefore has to be an integral part of anything's being an artwork.
But Danto's subsidiary thesis, that the statement of the artist consists of enabling us to see the artist's 'way of seeing the world,' makes his artworld-interpretation condition too narrow. This condition implies that art must always be about something in the world. George Dickie has challenged this 'aboutness' requirement:
Consider a design which consists of a number of interpenetrating triangular-shaped areas and entitled #23. Is it about triangles? About art? Nothing in the painting or its title gives one any reason to think that it is about anything at all in any ordinary sense of 'about.'
Nonobjective art is by definition about nothing at all. And obvious examples of music - Schoenberg's serial pieces for instance - qualify as art, even though they fail to 'say' anything about the world. So Danto's 'aboutness' thesis leaves out a significant segment of what the artworld embraces as art.
II
That art makes statements is justifiable, however, so long as we view 'making statements' metaphorically - as a way of communicating meanings that are understood by an audience. I am using the word 'meanings' in the broad phenomenological sense to signify whatever is brought to mind in accordance with the principle of association. Distant thunder thus 'means' an impending rainstorm in the same general sense that the word 'dog' means a certain species of four-legged animal: both are signs that regularly remind us of something. Words have conventional meanings, being based on agreed-upon associations, but there are other sorts of conventional meanings as well. Clearly, art is able to communicate a wide variety of nonverbal meanings that become intersubjectively 'interpretable' in virtue of the shared associations of a knowledgeable art community. Such meanings are 'interpreted' by those familiar with the particular style, school, or tradition of the work.
Danto regards artworld meanings as limited to whatever is specified by particular art theories. In doing so, he seems to have overlooked one basic meaning that appears to be universal, present even where the work is nonobjective. That meaning is authorship, by which we recognize that what has been presented to us is the product of a certain special activity on the part of its creator.
After all, nothing is identified as an artwork if it does not cause us to associate with it the idea that it was specifically created by someone to be appreciated in the appropriate way. For instance, the very fact that Dickie's counter example has a title ('#23') is a sufficient clue to its artistic intentions. Lacking any such sign, an absent-minded doodle of a similar set of intersecting triangles would not be considered an artwork. Unframed, untitled, unsigned, and unexhibited, enterprises like whistling while you work, free-associating in your diary, or absentmindedly torturing tinfoil into quirky figures lack only the standard signs of authorship to qualify as art. Art is always at least about itself; it conveys by certain mutually understood clues the idea that it is the sort of thing created for a specific kind of appreciation by a certain kind of audience. The fact that authorship is at least one conventional meaning required of all art would seem to render Danto's thesis, that art makes statements interpretable by an artworld community, a viable definitional condition, so long as we construe 'making statements' as conveying inter-subjective meanings in the broadest possible sense.
III
By itself, however, our modification of Danto's condition is now too broad to catch only 'artworks' in its net. Without any specification as to what makes any community an artworld community, our requirement would seem to include any kind of artifact that conveys meanings interpretable by a community - for instance, the products of journalism, history, science, and philosophy. If 'art' does have a set of sufficient conditions, we need to find at least one more ingredient. I shall contend that the key condition that Danto's theory lacks - and even eschews - is the requirement that the main function of art is to produce aesthetic objects. The idea that art must be aesthetic is not exactly new; its most prominent proponent was Monroe Beardsley. But the difficulty with this particular condition has always been to give a proper account of what makes anything aesthetic.
I propose to spell out the aesthetic requirement of art by means of an analysis of 'aesthetic object' worked out in earlier essays. The theory was proposed as a corrective to the once-popular thesis that an object becomes aesthetic simply if one addresses it with a certain 'aesthetic attitude.' The attitude theory fails to distinguish taking an interest in something (giving it a 'chance' to be interesting) from finding it interesting (being interested by or attracted to it). The described attitude does only the former; it is a special way of taking an interest in the appearance of things. The problem is that such an attitude is not always rewarded: 'I am paying full attention to x and x is not aesthetic,' is clearly not self-contradictory.
It would seem that only when something holds our interest in a certain way do we want to call it 'aesthetic.' My thesis, then, is that to be aesthetic something must be attractive to attention in a spectrum of ways one might variously describe as 'intriguing,' 'fascinating,' 'beautiful' or 'gorgeous,' depending on the degree and kind of perceptual interest taken. The term no longer refers merely to the beautiful. Even objects we would ordinarily regard as 'ugly' - withered old hags, for instance - can count as 'aesthetic' if they grab and hold our attention in a certain way. I shall try to demonstrate that all aesthetic objects are necessarily interesting, but in a way that distinguishes them from other interesting objects.
Are aesthetic objects necessarily interesting? If we single out any natural, manufactured or artistic item as aesthetic, intuitively it is only after having contemplated it. No other use seems relevant. But why, out of all the phenomena continuously swimming through experience, should we contemplate just these items? Clearly it is only because they somehow reward that contemplation by 'holding' our attention and motivating us to continue to engage in their contemplation. Indeed, it seems a contradiction to say a sunset or piece of driftwood is aesthetic but totally uninteresting. True, someone could consistently say, "I'm bored with beautiful sunsets." But consider what such a statement actually means: the sunset remains interesting to the eye ('beautiful') but the speaker is no longer interested in that sort of experience.
The fact that we speak of being aesthetic as a matter of degree supports our claim. It is lexically and syntactically correct to say that one work is 'more aesthetic' than another, or that a particular arrangement is 'not very aesthetic.' We could not mean simply that we are deliberately paying more attention to one than the other; intense scrutiny is often disappointed by admittedly unaesthetic objects. Intuitively, we see that the more an item spontaneously elicits discrimination the more aesthetic we say it is. Being contemplatively interesting thus seems the only possible reason to bother to call anything 'aesthetic.'
IV
So there are good reasons for claiming that all aesthetic objects are interesting.
<#FROWN:G20\>By and large, this work has suggested that although scientifically demonstrated routes of HIV transmission (through intimate sexual contact, sharing needles, and blood transfusions) are well understood by the public, there is nonetheless a persistent belief among substantial portions of the public that AIDS can also be transmitted through a variety of casual routes (e.g., by working alongside HIV-infected persons, shaking hands, being sneezed on, etc.). Recently, for example, the National Center for Health Statistics estimated from their September 1990 National Health Interview Survey that 24 percent of the public thinks it is "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that someone would contract AIDS from eating in a restaurant where the cook has the AIDS virus, while 19 percent believes it is "very" or "somewhat likely" that they would contract AIDS from using public toilets (Adams and Hardy 1991).
These findings are of concern to public health policy officials for at least two important reasons. First, basic knowledge about HIV and how it is transmitted is an essential precursor to reasonable and safe personal health practices, which are necessary for preventing further spread of AIDS. Second - and more to the point of the present research - levels of public knowledge have considerable consequences for the structuring of public policy health debates and the long-term social outcomes for the AIDS epidemic. Public support or opposition will undoubtedly help determine the eventual success or failure of various health policies. And some research has already found that beliefs in the casual transmission of HIV are indeed predictive of increased levels of public support for certain restrictive and even discriminatory policies aimed at infected persons (Sniderman et al. 1987). Given that public health officials currently desire policies that are not heavily restrictive of HIV-infected persons (e.g., the President's Commission on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Epidemic [Watkins 1988]) such findings certainly deserve attention.
Correct information - or misinformation - about the ways in which AIDS is contracted is certainly not the only factor underlying public opinion on AIDS-related issues. Long-standing public attitudes, in particular, attitudes toward the clearly defined social groups that have so far been most affected by AIDS, will also presumably play a large role. Some evidence bearing on this issue has also been uncovered: recent work has suggested that antihomosexual or homophobic attitudes may directly affect public policy preferences (Ostrow and Traugott 1988; Sniderman et al. 1987) and perhaps interfere with receptivity to publicized information about AIDS transmission (Stipp and Kerr 1989).
Previous research, then, although limited, has identified at least two variables that appear to be important predictors of public opinion concerning AIDS-related health policies: levels of misinformation about the transmissibility of AIDS and levels of antigay sentiment. But if these variables are to be dealt with effectively in the formulation of public health policy, and in the planning and implementation of health information campaigns, a better understanding of their origins is needed. What factors, in other words, contribute to AIDS knowledge and to antigay attitudes?
It seems reasonable to postulate that exposure to mass media messages about AIDS is the principal determinant of levels of AIDS knowledge, since the mass media have, to date, been the principal conduits for public information about the disease. The American public, at least, seems to credit the mass media as being a principal source of AIDS information (Singer, Rogers, and Corcoran 1987). Exposure to media messages is not, however, in and of itself sufficient to produce changes in knowledge - and certainly not changes in attitude or opinion. Decades of research on communication and attitude change have demonstrated that media audiences may, due to a variety of psychological factors, selectively attend to messages, distort or alter their meaning, and thus 'resist' them (see, e.g., McGuire 1981). Recently Stipp and Kerr (1989) have argued that negative attitudes toward homosexuals can interfere with the acceptance of information from the mass media about AIDS.
Against this backdrop of limited prior research and findings, then, we propose the following set of propositions concerning the determinants of public opinion on AIDS-related policies:
1. The misunderstanding that AIDS can be easily contracted through casual contact with HIV-infected persons is a primary contributor to higher levels of support for more restrictive public policies aimed at people with AIDS.
2. Principal factors contributing to misunderstanding about AIDS transmission include (a) limited exposure to mass media messages about AIDS, (b) restricted ability to comprehend information that is received, and (c) attitudinal resistance to mass media messages due to various long-standing values and predispositions.
3. Consequently, variables that affect exposure and comprehension (e.g., socioeconomic background, age, education) or that may engender resistance to AIDS information (namely, elevated feelings of threat or fear, religious and moral beliefs, and attitudes toward sexual behavior) are thus expected to be principal predictors of misunderstanding.
4. Principal predictors of support for restrictive public policies toward people with AIDS are expected to include - in addition to misunderstanding about casual transmission - general attitudes toward individual freedoms and civil rights and political liberalism/conservatism and negative attitudes toward affected groups (e.g., toward homosexuals).
These four propositions are necessarily general, given the somewhat underdeveloped state of research in this area. Although the research literature on public opinion concerning AIDS is steadily expanding, it remains in relatively short supply. Furthermore, studies to date suffer from several important limitations. First, much of the research drawn from nationally representative surveys has been confined to aggregate-level data analysis, most of it descriptive or limited to bivariate cross-tabulations (e.g., Blake and Arkin 1988; Singer, Rogers, and Corcoran 1987). More recent efforts to extend this important work by pursuing multivariate analyses (e.g., Singer 1989) have still relied primarily upon demographic analyses. Meanwhile, more in-depth studies of determinants of knowledge, attitudes, or opinions using multivariate techniques at the individual level of analysis have generally been confined to regional rather than national surveys (e.g., Ostrow and Traugott 1988; Sniderman et al. 1987) or have investigated only a very small subset of variables (e.g., Stipp and Kerr 1989).
Unfortunately, then, we still lack a systematic understanding of even the most basic demographic and attitudinal determinants of public levels of knowledge about AIDS, or the ways in which AIDS knowledge and longer-standing attitudinal and social-structural variables operate together in shaping public opinions on potential AIDS policies. The present research aims at addressing these problems, by taking advantage of two extant survey data sets to pursue systematic, individual-level analyses of these issues. In line with the proportions outlined above, we propose and test a theoretical model of the relationships between a variety of social-structural background variables, knowledge of HIV transmission, attitudes toward homosexuals, and support for restrictive policies aimed at HIV-infected persons.
Method
Data used in the present study were taken from two Los Angeles Times polls, conducted in December 1985 and July 1987, which focused on AIDS. Both surveys involved telephone interviews with national samples of men and women age 18 and older (N =2,308 in 1985; N =2,095 in 1987). Responses were weighted to take account of household size, times at home, and variations in the sample relating to geographic region, age, gender, employment, race, and education. Telephone numbers for the samples were generated by computer randomly within strata to insure that both listed and unlisted households were included. Five standard metropolitan statistical areas (SMSAs), which together account for nearly half of the AIDS cases in the United States, were oversampled (Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Miami, and Newark, NJ). Data from the national sample and the oversampled SMSAs were weighted in the analyses according to the probability of selection.
MEASURES
Knowledge of AIDS transmission. The present study focuses on misinformation about the transmissibility of AIDS rather than correct information about ways in which AIDS can be contracted. By 1985, when the first of the two Los Angeles Times polls was conducted, well over 90 percent of the general population already understood that AIDS could be transmitted through intimate sexual contact, the sharing of hypodermic needles, and blood transfusions. But the incorrect impression that AIDS can also be transmitted through a variety of far more casual forms of contact with infected persons clearly persisted.
Four questions included in the 1985 survey were used to assess respondents' level of misinformation concerning AIDS transmission: people were asked whether they thought someone could contract AIDS in four different ways: (1) from eating food that had been handled by a person with AIDS (19 percent replied "yes"); (2) from a toilet seat (24 percent "yes"); (3) from trying on clothes in a department store (14 percent "yes"); and (4) from handling money (10 percent "yes"). The four questions were recoded to take the values 0 = no, and 1 = yes or not sure. The exact wording of each question, including item means and standard deviations, are presented in table A1.
Only two of these questions were repeated on the 1987 survey (see table A2). In the 2 years intervening between the surveys, levels of misinformation about the transmissibility of AIDS declined only slightly. A sizable number of respondents still believed that AIDS could be contracted through food (14 percent indicated they thought so) or from a toiled (20 percent said "yes").
Attitudes toward homosexuals. Four questions included in the 1985 survey were used to measure attitudes toward homosexuals. These questions asked respondents (1) whether they thought that homosexuals have too little or too much political power (8 percent said "too little," 39 percent said "about right," and 34 percent said "too much"); (2) whether their views about homosexuality were liberal or conservative (29 percent were "very" or "somewhat" liberal toward homosexuality, 44 percent were "very" or "somewhat" conservative); (3) to what degree they considered sexual relations between adults of the same sex to be wrong (73 percent felt it that it was "always" or "almost always" wrong); and (4) what their personal attitude was toward homosexuality (50 percent were personally opposed to homosexual relations). Responses to all four questions were recoded such that 1 = the response most supportive of homosexuals and 5 = the least supportive response. Again, the exact wording of each question and descriptive statistics are provided in table A1.
Only two of these four questions were repeated in the 1987 survey, and responses to these questions were overall quite similar to the data from the earlier survey. When asked their overall views of homosexuality, 23 percent said they were "very" or "somewhat" liberal, while 42 percent said they were "very" or "somewhat" conservative. On the matter of gay political power, 13 percent of 1987 respondents felt that homosexuals had "too little" power, 32 percent said that gay political clout was "about right", and 34 percent indicated that homosexuals had "too much" political power. Once again the items were recoded to a 1-5 interval (see table A2).
Opinions concerning restriction of HIV-infected people. The 1985 survey also carried three questions that assessed the level of support for policies aimed at restricting people with AIDS as a means of combating the disease. These restrictions included: (1) requiring persons exposed to AIDS to carry identification (ID) cards (48 percent in favor, 43 percent opposed, 9 percent not sure); (2) quarantining AIDS patients (51 percent in favor, 40 percent opposed, 9 percent not sure); and even (3) tattooing people exposed to AIDS (15 percent in favor, 78 percent opposed, 6 percent not sure). The three items were coded with values 1 = opposed, 2 = not sure, and 3 = in favor (wording and descriptive statistics for each item can be found in table A1).
It is surprising that such sizable minority within the general population - here estimated at about 15 percent - would support a measure as extreme as tattooing persons with AIDS. Yet support for such restrictions, as with the aforementioned persistance of AIDS misinformation and antigay sentiment, apparently remained constant or increased slightly from 1985 to 1987. The two restriction measure repeated in 1987 produced a pattern of response similar to that found 2 years earlier. On the matter of quarantining AIDS patients, 52 percent favored such a measure, while 41 percent opposed it and 7 percent were unsure.
<#FROWN:G21\>Strachey and Woolf knew those roles well, and Freud, it is rather surprising, seems to have known them well too. At any rate each of them became busy combating Victorian ways of enacting, serving those roles.
In introducing Eminent Victorians Lytton Strachey writes of the genre: "With us, the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing has been relegated to the journeymen of letters." He then damns the journeymen for their "ill-digested masses of matter, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric [and] their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design." He goes on to summarize and complain about his four biographies in his own terse, ironic, thoroughly selective manner. He might well have come out and talked of journeymen biographers as Victorians straightway, and named names, for, as a dedicated anti-Victorian near the end of World War I, he was writing deliberately to annoy historians as well as biographers of the Victorian establishment, knowing that they would think him an enemy to scholarship, thoroughness, objectivity, and, as if incidentally, the values of Victorianism itself.
The journeymen's arguments against him may now be construed roughly like this. The agnostic polemicist Strachey chose Cardinal Manning as a subject because Manning seemed a representative worldly politician of religion, a clergyman whose wheeling and dealing reflected darkly on both the Romans he espoused and the Anglicans he abandoned. Strachey, a pacifist, chose General (Chinese) Gordon as a representative chauvinist of the Victorian imperialist war machine. The liberal Strachey chose Thomas Arnold as an instance of the pompous piety running the English anti-Semitic, law-and-order, school-tie education system. The Freudian Strachey chose Florence Nightingale because the legend about her as a "saintly, self-sacrificing woman," a "delicate maiden," seemed a representative piece of hypocrisy (about females generally) to be found in Victorian households. In short Bloomsbury Strachey had - for such critics - an inflexible, four-victim agenda for misrepresenting the whole culture. He did not just use his subjects: he abused them.
In defense of Strachey I would say that the book stands up well after seventy-five years. Its poorly documented scholarship (no notes - and only a brief bibliography for each life) has not to my knowledge been found to be seriously defective scholarship, and its agenda is more complicated and even considerate than critics allow. It remains a model for any group biographer, and it is as group biography that it asks to be considered. With his four interestingly diverse upper-class individuals he was able to construct at least the scaffolding of the larger entity behind and around them, and do so while minding his p's and q's as a biographer, not as a sociologist.
Of course there was less sociology in the air in 1918, and he was English; but even then there were scholars, such as Edmund Gosse, alarmed and up in arms about the new scientism. Thus Gosse defined biography - for the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1910) - in such a prescriptive way as to exclude "broad views" entirely. He declared "the true conception of biography" to be that of "the faithful portrait of a soul [note the singular] in its adventures through life," with those adventures being "sharply defined by two definite events, birth and death." Strachey was no social scientist, but he came at biography as an art that had a necessary social-historical dimension.
My second revolutionary, Sigmund Freud, was an alien among Victorians, but he needs to be looked at as a vital contributor to Bloomsbury thought - for a time he even had Leonard Woolf as his publisher - about biography. But was he a biographer at all? He kept saying no, and his disclaimer is implicit in his title: Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of Childhood. Yet that work as well as his even briefer comments about Michelangelo and Shakespeare, had the broadest of views lurking inside, as this quotation from chapter 6 of the Leonardo reveals:
Biographers are fixated on their heroes in a quite special way. In many cases they have chosen their hero as the subject of their studies because - for reasons of their personal emotional life - they have felt a special affection to the task of idealization, aimed at enrolling the great man among the class of their infantile models - at reviving in him, perhaps, the child's idea of the father. To gratify this wish they obliterate the individual features of their subject's physiognomy; they smooth over the traces of his life's struggles with internal and external resistances, and they tolerate in him no vestige of human weakness or imperfection. They thus present us with what is in fact a cold, strange, ideal figure, instead of a human being to whom we might feel ourselves distantly related. That they should do this is regrettable, for they thereby sacrifice truth to an illusion.
Freud's contribution to the biographical revolution was of course that of the psychoanalyst, as Strachey's was that of the social historian, and Woolf's that of the novelist and satirist. Each set up shop as if in an appropriate building on a university campus (Freud in absentia), and all proceeded to use biography as a serviceable adjunct-genre for their professional activities. But their activities were never just created for their professions. To revise Frost's lines:
They couldn't be called ungentle,
But neither were they departmental.
Now we return to Orlando. In Woolf's diary at the time of her dream of revolution she wrote that she had had the first glimmerings of Orlando after finishing To The Lighthouse, a novel with her own hero-villain father at its center, Leslie Stephen, a biographer who was the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. She had just agreed to do several reviews and was gloomy at the prospect. She was feeling empty. She was wondering if she shouldn't do something "wild and satirical," and she concocted a fuzzy plot with two women wandering about Constantinople (Vita had recently returned from a long tour of the Middle East with her husband, the diplomat Harold Nicolson). She was also being reflectively critical of her own prose, and of Vita's. More important, she had been visiting, with Vita, the great Sackville country house Knole:
Vita took me over the 4 acres of buildings, which she loves: too little conscious beauty for my taste: smallish rooms looking onto buildings: no views: yet one or two things remain: Vita stalking in her Turkish dress, attended by small boys, down the gallery, wafting them on like some tall sailing ship - a sort of covey of noble English life. ... How do you see that I asked Vita. She said she saw it as something that had gone on for hundreds of years. ... All the centuries seemed lit up, the past expressive, articulate; not dumb and forgotten; but a crowd of people stood behind, not dead at all; not remarkable; fair faced, long limbed, affable; & so we reach the days of Elizabeth quite easily. After tea, looking for letters of Dryden's to show me, she tumbled out a (17th century) love letter with a lock of soft gold tinted hair which I held in my hand for a moment. One had a sense of links fished up into the light which are usually submerged.
(January 23, 1927)
So Orlando begins to take shape, wild and satirical but also, in a Woolfian way, historical. Saturated with Knole's history. And scented biographically with Vita, Vita, Vita. Centuries of Vita. Plus of course father Stephen.
Nothing gelled for several months. Virginia Woolf took a holiday on the continent with her husband, Leonard, progressing no further with the wildness except to think "it" might be "fun to write." Coming back home, she found Vita in her life again for having won a literary prize (for a poem). The prize and the poem managed to depress them both, and Woolf wrote snobbishly: "[At the ceremony] I felt there was not one full grown mind among us. In truth it was the thick dull middle class of letters that met; not the aristocracy. Vita cried at night."
Shades of Strachey's 'journeymen' thesis (she had admired Eminent Victorians greatly, almost ten years before). Then suddenly, after a seemingly idle, society-ridden summer, Orlando comes clear: she finds herself "writing at great speed, engulfed." It is indeed to be a biography of Vita, but three hundred years' worth, with Vita as both male and female (she switches sex in the eighteenth century), and activated, enlivened right back to the Elizabethans by her Knole lineage, an individual rendered as a national composite. Don't forget that the DNB is also, in its way, a national composite. So Vita would arrive, after the centuries, at the present: age thirty-six in 1927. The result would be a formally (and biologically) revolutionary group biography - the group being the English upper class - but it would still be about Vita Sackville-West, the living, singular Vita known intimately to Woolf.
Would this be a serious undertaking? As with all satire it could only be partly serious. And as with all human biography - there are other kinds - of the living, it had to be moderate in its mockery. Vita was going to read it (and did, though not until it actually appeared) so Woolf could chide her for her minor frailties, especially as a young romantic with instant changes of mood; but she could not sneer at her, scorn her. Her biographical aim with Vita had to be in the old tradition of commemorative biography.
Therefore her serious satirical aim had to be elsewhere, at her surrounding cast in the various centuries, at the sycophants and hypocritical literary critics and male belittlers of females, at the faithless, the arrogant, the ruthless, the stupid. And at biography itself, as practiced by journeymen.
Orlando is full of potshots at all these, with the aim often straight at father Stephen, though a much better target might have been his journeyman successor on the DNB, Sidney Lee, for whom she expressed contempt in a review written at about the time of Orlando. Clearly it is with these potshots that Orlando emerges as what she announced it to be, originally, in the title - Orlando: A Biography. At least it emerges as a kind, though an odd kind, of biography, and certainly as a book about biography, not just about a somewhat fictionalized Vita. In the potshots is the revolution, and it failed. The work was instantly rejected as biography by critics even as they praised the book, rejected by the simple device of denying that it was biography at all. Most of them called it a novel (and Woolf's own publisher came to call it a novel), and one reader - who is quoted on the current paperback edition - called it a lover letter.
Father Stephen would presumably have denied it as biography also, though his views were more complicated than the satirical strain in Orlando would allow. At heart he was a company man, a professional scrivener in biography's long tradition of establishment service. Victorian England was an extremely large establishment requiring professional, businesslike, and conventional values; and obviously it needed a dictionary of national biography to consolidate and regularize those values, edited by someone who would not oppose them. Father Stephen didn't. His daughter Virginia Woolf, sitting in nearby Bloomsbury and spiritually allied to Strachey and Freud, did.
Several lessons in biography, with attendant questions, hover about this small, triadic revolution, especially when it is viewed from another country decades later. The ambiguity in Strachey's long-term success appears oddly as a lesson against group biography from contemporary departments of history, though that lesson is undercut by many postmodern (I think the word is applicable here) group biographies of and by women - a point to which I'll return. The lesson is reinforced, however, by a curious recent counterrevolutionary move by historians (whom I would label scientific historians) against the greatest group biographer of classical times, Plutarch. In the latest Penguin paperbacks of his Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans the lives of the Grecians are separated from the lives of the Romans by being placed in separate volumes, and the comparisons he conducted of each pair following the scheme of parallel biographies are simply omitted.
<#FROWN:G22\>
Superseding Historic Injustice
Jeremy Waldron
I. INJUSTICE AND HISTORY
The history of white settlers' dealings with the aboriginal peoples of Australia, New Zealand, and North America is largely a history of injustice. People, or whole peoples, were attacked, defrauded, and expropriated; their lands were stolen and their lives were ruined. What are we to do about these injustices? We know what we should think about them: they are to be studied and condemned, remembered and lamented. But morality is a practical matter, and judgments of 'just' and 'unjust' like all moral judgments have implications for action. To say that a future act open to us now would be unjust is to commit ourselves to avoiding it. But what of past injustice? What is the practical importance now of a judgment that injustice occurred in the past?
In the first instance the question is one of metaethics. Moral judgments are prescriptive in their illocutionary force; they purport to guide choices. But since the only choices we can guide are choices in front of us, judgments about the past must look beyond the particular events that are their ostensible subject matter. The best explanation of this relies on universalizability. When I make a moral judgment about an event E, I do so not in terms of the irreducible particularity of E but on the basis of some feature of E that other events might share. In saying, for example, "E was unjust," I am saying, "There is something about E and the circumstances in which it is performed, such that any act of that kind performed in such circumstances would be unjust." I am not so much prescribing the avoidance of E itself (a prescription that makes no sense if E is in the past), but prescribing the avoidance of E-type events. If E involved breaking a promise, or taking advantage of someone's credulity, then our condemnation of it commits us to a similar condemnation of breaches of faith or exploitation in the present. Though E occurred 150 years ago, to condemn it is to express a determination now that in the choices we face, we will avoid actions of this kind.
The point of doing this is not that we learn new and better standards for our lives from the judgments we make about the past. Unless we had those standards already, we would not make those judgments. But our moral understanding of the past is often a way of bringing to imaginative life the full implications of principles to which we are already in theory committed. To be disposed to act morally, it is not enough to be equipped with a list of appropriate principles. One also needs a sense of the type of situation in which these things may suddenly be at stake, the temptations that might lead one to betray them, and the circumstances and entanglements that make otherwise virtuous people start acting viciously. That is what history provides: a lesson about what it is like for people just like us - human, all too human - to face real moral danger.
Beyond that, there is an importance to the historical recollection of injustice that has to do with identity and contingency. It is a well-known characteristic of great injustice that those who suffer it go to their deaths with the conviction that these things must not be forgotten. It is easy to misread that as vain desire for vindication, a futile threat of infamy upon the perpetrators of an atrocity. But perhaps the determination to remember is bound up with the desire to sustain a specific character as a person or community against a background of infinite possibility. That this happened rather than that - that people were massacred (though they need not have been), that lands were taken (though they might have been bought fairly), that promises were broken (though they might have been kept) - the historic record has a fragility that consists, for large part, in the sheer contingency of what happened in the past. What happened might have been otherwise, and, just because of that, it is not something one can reason back to if what actually took place has been forgotten or concealed.
Each person establishes a sense of herself in terms of her ability to identify the subject or agency of her present thinking with that of certain acts and events that took place in the past, and in terms or her ability to hold fast to a distinction between memory so understood and wishes, fantasies, or various other ideas of things that might have happened but did not. But remembrance in this sense is equally important to communities - families, tribes, nations, parties - that is, to human entities that exist often for much longer than individual men and women. To neglect the historical record is to do violence to this identity and thus to the community that it sustains. And since communities help generate a deeper sense of identity for the individuals they comprise, neglecting or expunging the historical record is a way of undermining and insulting individuals as well.
When we are told to let bygones be bygones, we need to bear in mind also that the forgetfulness being urged on us is seldom the blank slate of historical oblivion. Thinking quickly fills up the vacuum with plausible tales of self-satisfaction, on the one side, and self-deprecation on the other. Those who as a matter of fact benefited from their ancestors' injustice will persuade themselves readily enough that their good fortune is due to the virtue of their race, while the descendants of their victims may too easily accept the story that they and their kind were always good for nothing. In the face of all this, only the deliberate enterprise of recollection (the enterprise we call 'history'), coupled with the most determined sense that there is a difference between what happened and what we would like to think happened, can sustain the moral and cultural reality of self and community.
The topic of this article is reparation. But before I embark on my main discussion, I want to mention the role that payment of money (or the return of lands or artifacts) may play in the embodiment of communal remembrance. Quite apart from any attempt genuinely to compensate victims or offset their losses, reparations may symbolize a society's undertaking not to forget or deny that a particular injustice took place, and to respect and help sustain a dignified sense of identity-in-memory for the people affected. A prominent recent example of this is the payment of token sums of compensation by the American government to the survivors of Japanese-American families uprooted, interned, and concentrated in 1942. The point of these payments was not to make up for the loss of home, business, opportunity, and standing in the community which these people suffered at the hands of their fellow citizens, nor was it to make up for the discomfort and degradation of their internment. If that were the aim, much more would be necessary. The point was to mark - with something that counts in the United States - a clear public recognition that this injustice did happen, that it was the American people and their government that inflicted it, and that these people were among its victims. The payments give an earnest of good faith and sincerity to that acknowledgment. Like the gift I buy for someone I have stood up, the payment is a method of putting oneself out, or going out of one's way, to apologize. It is no objection to this that the payments are purely symbolic. Since identity is bound up with symbolism, a symbolic gesture may be as important to people as any material compensation.
II. THE COUNTERFACTUAL APPROACH TO REPARATION
I turn now to the view that a judgment about past injustice generates a demand for full and not merely symbolic reparation - a demand not just for remembrance but for substantial transfers of land, wealth, and resources in an effort actually to rectify past wrongs. I want to examine the difficulties that these demands give rise to, particularly when they conflict with other claims that may be made in the name of justice on the land, wealth, and resources in question.
It may seem as though the demand is hopeless from the start. What is it to correct an injustice? How can we reverse the past? If we are talking about injustice that took place several generations ago, surely there is nothing we can do now to heal the lives of the actual victims, to make them less miserable or to reduce their suffering. The only experiences we can affect are those of people living now and those who will live in the future.
But though these are obvious truths, we may miss something if we repeat them too often. To stand on the premise that the past cannot be changed is to ignore the fact that people and communities live whole lives, not just series of momentary events, and that an injustice may blight, not just hurt, such a life. Individuals make plans and they see themselves as living partly for the sake of their posterity; they build not only for themselves but for future generations. Whole communities may subsist for periods much longer than individual lifetimes. How they fare at a given stage and what they can offer in the way of culture, aspiration, and morale may depend very much on the present effect of events that took place several generations ealierearlier. Thus, part of the moral significance of a past event has to do with the difference it makes to the present.
But then there is a sense in which we can affect the moral significance of past action. Even if we cannot alter the action itself we may be able to interfere with the normal course of its consequences. The present surely looks different now from the way the present would look if a given injustice of the past had not occurred. Why not therefore change the present so that it looks more like the present that would have obtained in the absence of the injustice? Why not make it now as though the injustice had not happened, for all that its occurrence in the past is immutable and undeniable?
This is the approach taken by Robert Nozick in his account of the role played by a principle of rectification in a theory of historic entitlement:
This principle uses historical information about previous situations and injustices done in them (as defined by the first two principles of justice [namely, justice in acquisition and justice in transfer] and rights against interference), and information about the actual course of events that flowed from these injustices, until the present, and it yields a description (or descriptions) of holdings in the society. The principle of rectification presumably will make use of its best estimate of subjunctive information about what would have occurred (or a probability distribution over what might have occurred, using the expected value) if the injustice had not taken place. If the actual description of holdings turns out to be one of the descriptions yielded by the principle, then one of the descriptions yielded must be realized.
The trouble with this approach is the difficulty we have in saying what would have happened if some event (which did occur) had not taken place. To a certain extent we can appeal to causal laws or, more crudely, the normal course of events. We take a description of the actual world, with its history and natural laws intact, up until the problematic event of injustice (which we shall call event 'E'). In the actual course of events, what followed E (events F, G, and H) is simply what results from applying natural laws to E as an initial condition. For example, if E was your seizure of the only water hole in the desert just as I was about to slake my thirst, then F - the event that follows E - would be what happens normally when one person is deprived of water and another is not: you live and I die.
<#FROWN:G23\>
The Culture of Cruelty
BY RUTH CONNIFF
Not long ago I was on a morning radio show talking about welfare, when an irate caller from Milwaukee got on the line and introduced himself as "that most hated and reviled creature, the American tax-payer." He went on to vent his spleen, complaining about freeloading welfare mothers living high on the hog while he goes to work each day. "A whiff of starvation is what they need," he said.
I was chilled by the hatred in his voice, thinking about the mothers I know on welfare, imagining what it would be like for them to hear this.
One young woman I've met, Karetha Mims, recently moved to Wisconsin, fleeing the projects in Chicago after her little boy saw a seven-year-old playmate shot in the head. Mims is doing her best to make a better life for her son, a shy third-grader named Jermain. She volunteers at his elementary school, and worries about how he will fit in. The Mimses have received a cold welcome in Wisconsin, where the governor warns citizens that welfare families spilling across the border from Illinois will erode the tax base and ruin the "quality of life."
Of course, even in Wisconsin, life on welfare is no free ride. The average family of three receives about $500 a month in Aid to Families with Dependent Children - barely enough to pay the rent. Such figures are widely known. So is the fact that each state spends a small amount - about 3.4 per cent of our taxes, or a national total of $22.9 billion annually - on welfare. In contrast, we have now spent $87 billion - about $1,000 per taxpaying family - to bail out bank presidents at failed savings-and-loans.
But neither the enraged taxpayer nor my host on the radio program wanted to hear these dry facts. "What ever happened to the work ethic in this country?" the host demanded. "What about the immigrants who came over and worked their way up?"
I had the feeling I was losing my grasp on the conversation. I could see my host getting impatient, and the more I said the more I failed to answer her central question: What's wrong with those people on welfare?
The people on welfare whom I know have nothing wrong with them. They live in bad neighborhoods; they can't find safe, affordable child care; often, they are caught in an endless cycle of unemployment and low-wage work - quitting their jobs when a child gets sick, losing medical insurance when they go back to their minimum-wage jobs. They don't have enough money to cover such emergencies as dental work or car repairs. In short, they are poor. They are struggling hard just to make it, in the face of extreme hardship and in an increasingly hostile environment.
Meanwhile, rhetoric about lazy welfare bums is taking the country by storm. Policy experts keep coming up with new theories on the 'culture of poverty' and its nameless perpetrators, members of a socially and morally deformed 'underclass.' "Street hustlers, welfare families, drug addicts, and former mental patients," political scientist Lawrence Mead calls them.
"It's simply stupid to pretend the underclass is not mainly black," adds Mickey Kaus in his much-acclaimed new book The End of Equality. Kaus and fellow pundit Christopher Jencks, who wrote his own book this year - Rethinking Social Policy: Race, Poverty, and the Underclass - are two of the most recent riders on the underclass bandwagon. But the essence of their work is uncomfortably familiar. Both writers start by asking the question: What's wrong with the underclass?, and both proceed to talk about the depravity of poor black people, devoting large though inconclusive sections to such ideas as genetic inferiority and "Heredity, Inequality, and Crime."
Kaus paints a lurid picture of young black men who sneer at the idea of working for the minimum wage, which he says they deride as "chump change." (It's not clear where Kaus gets this information, since he doesn't cite any interviews with actual poor blacks.)
Why don't poor black people just get jobs and join the mainstream of society? Kaus asks rhetorically. While many African-Americans have moved up to the middle class, he writes, the important question is "what enabled some of them, a lower-class remnant, to stay behind in the ghetto? And what then allowed them to survive in the absence of legitimate sources of income?"
The answer, of course, is welfare. Kaus compares black people's attachment to poverty with a junkie's addiction to a drug. Welfare is the "enabling" force that indulges ghetto residents' propensity for living in squalor. When they stopped working hard and learned they could collect welfare while living in the ghetto, Kaus theorizes, poor black people's values eroded and they became a blight on society.
Kaus's solution to the "underclass problem," then, relies largely on such motivational initiatives as instilling a work ethic in lazy black youth through hard labor and "military-style discipline." Likewise, he proposes cutting benefits to mothers who have more than one child, creating an example for their neighbors, who, he says, would "think twice" before becoming pregnant.
To his credit, J. Anthony Lukas, the writer who reviewed The End of Equality for The New York Times, noted near the end of his essay that Kaus had forgotten to talk to anyone on welfare in the course of writing his book. But Lukas detected no prejudice in Kaus's prescriptions for an overhaul of the underclass, and he found a touching note of "compassion" in Kaus's assurance that under his plan, "no one would starve."
What I want to know is how Kaus came to be considered even remotely qualified to analyze the psychology and motivations of poor black mothers and their sons. Kaus's whole program rests on a faith in his own ability to do exactly that: to surmise what ghetto residents are thinking and why they behave the way they do.
Kaus and Jencks show little interest in learning about the real lives or day-to-day difficulties of people who are poor. Rather, in the grand tradition of underclass theory, they invent hypothetical characters with demeaning little names.
"Phyllis may not be very smart," writes Jencks, in a revised version of underclass theorist Charles Murray's famous 'Harold and Phyllis' scenario. "But if she chooses AFDC over Harold, surely that is because she expects the choice to improve the quality of her family life. ..." Furthermore, says Jencks, "If Phyllis does not work, many - including Sharon - will feel that Phyllis should be substantially worse off, so that there will be no ambiguity about Sharon's virtue being rewarded."
On the strength of the projected feelings of the fictitious Sharon, Jencks goes on to recommend a welfare system in which single mothers don't get too much money.
Incredibly, this sort of work then gets translated into concrete public policy.
Under the Family Support Act, states are now running a number of experiments designed to tinker with the motivations and attitudes of poor people - despite data that demonstrate such tinkering will have no positive effect. There is no evidence, for example, to back up one of the popular notions Kaus subscribes to - that "most" poor women would stop having babies if benefits were cut. Women who live in states with higher benefits do not have more babies. They do not have fewer babies in Alabama or Mississippi (or Bangladesh, for that matter), where benefits are shockingly low. Yet Wisconsin, California, and New Jersey are now cutting AFDC payments to women who have more than one child. Likewise, theories about the underclass have inspired initiatives to teach poor people job skills and "self-esteem" - despite the fact that in many of the areas where the training is done, no jobs are available.
The results of these policies are often disastrous for the poor. As more and more states treat poverty as an attitude problem, legislatures justify slashing the safety net and cutting back social programs that help poor people survive. The situation is particularly dire for the 'extra' children of women on welfare, who are punished just for being born.
But in Kaus's estimation, the suffering of children is nothing next to the social benefits he thinks will accrue from causing pain to their mothers. "If we want to end the underclass, remember, the issue is not so much whether working or getting two years of cash will best help Betsy Smith, teenage high-school dropout, acquire the skills to get a good private sector job after she's become a single mother. It is whether the prospect of having to work will deter Betsy Smith from having an out-of-wedlock child in the first place. ... The way to make the true costs of bearing a child out of wedlock clear is to let them be felt when they are incurred - namely, at the child's birth."
The callousness and immorality of such thinking, I believe, are part of a pathology that is spreading throughout our society. We might call it a "culture of cruelty.
Such theorists as Kaus and Jencks build the rational foundation beneath our national contempt for the poor. They lend legitimacy to the racist and misogynist stereotypes so popular with conservative politicians and disgruntled taxpayers who feel an economic crunch and are looking for someone to blame. Understanding the roots of the culture of cruelty, and trying to determine how, through the adoption of decent social values, we might overcome it, would be far more useful than any number of volumes of speculation by upper-class white experts on the attitudes and pathologies of the "underclass."
Underclass theory as promoted by Kaus and Jencks has four main characteristics:
<*_>paragraph-sign<*/>It is extremely punitive, appealing to a desire to put poor black people, especially women, in their place.
<*_>paragraph-sign<*/>It is based on prejudice rather than fact, full of stereotypical characters and flippant, unsupported assertions about their motivations and psychology.
<*_>paragraph-sign<*/>It is inconsistent in its treatment of rich and poor. While poor people need sternness and "military-style discipline," to use Kaus's words, the rich are coddled and protected. This third characteristic is particularly important, since treating the "underclass" as alien and inhuman permits the prescription of draconian belt-tightening that one would never impose on one's own family or friends.
<*_>paragraph-sign<*/>Finally, there is the persistent, faulty logic involved in claims that we can "end the cycle of poverty" by refusing aid to an entire generation of children. These children are thus punished for their mothers' sins in producing them, and, if such programs persist, they will soon have no hope of getting out from under the weight of belonging to a despised lower caste.
In his book Savage Inequalities, Jonathan Kozol describes visiting a wealthy public school, where he talks to some students who argue that giving equal funding to the schools in poorer districts wouldn't make a difference. Poor children "still would lack the motivation," they say, and "would probably fail in any case because of other problems." Racial integration would cause too many problems in their own school, they say. "How could it be of benefit to us?"
"There is a degree of unreality about the whole exchange," Kozol writes. "The children are lucid and their language is well chosen and their arguments well made, but there is a sense that they are dealing with an issue that does not feel very vivid, and that nothing that we say about it to each other really matters since it's 'just a theoretical discussion.' To a certain degree, the skillfulness and cleverness that they display seem to derive precisely from this sense of unreality. Questions of unfairness feel more like a geometric problem than a matter of humanity or conscience. A few of the students do break through the note of unreality, but, when they do, they cease to be so agile in their use of words and speak more awkwardly. Ethical challenges seem to threaten their effectiveness. There is the sense that they were skating over ice and that the issues we addressed were safely frozen underneath.
<#FROWN:G24\>
Edinburgh and the Idea of a Festival
Robert L. King
THE PUBLICITY GENERATED BY Tango at the End of Winter at the Edinburgh Festival last summer centered around the director, Yukio Ninagawa, and the lead actor, Alan Rickman. Ninagawa's reputation in the West for visual and visceral appeals was earned first at Edinburgh; Tango was his first English language production. Rickman interrupted a movie career on the rise for a chance to work under Ninagawa in a play set in a run-down cinema and featuring a film actor of his own age, one locked in a world of illusions, his chosen retreat from a Japanese society that banishes male actors from the stage before they reach their forties. Neither man speaks the other's language; Ninagawa reached the English company through an interpreter and screened actors mostly for their facial expressiveness. In the understandable excitement over this collaboration, the playwright, Kunio Shimizu, and the adapter of his text, Peter Barnes (The Ruling Class and Red Noses) were relatively unnoticed. Their text derives from the now dominant forces in the creative tradition of modern drama, notably a self-consciousness that monitors and corrects any tendencies that would seduce an audience into accepting dramatic illusion as a value in itself. In Tango, Shimizu borrows directly from the action of Pirandello's Henry IV, a play that resolutely breaks down boundaries between theatrical and ordinary reality. Like Henry, Sei lives an imaginary life: he calls his wife his sister, hears a telephone that does not ring, sees a peacock that "nobody else sees" and "plays to an imaginary audience." Like Henry's visitors, Sei's wife, Gin, tries to shock him out of his escapist state; her forged letter to Mizuo, an actress who may have been his lover, brings her to the theatre where she enters as a kind of apparition in white.
Her entrance displays Shimizu's inventive use of the dramatic tradition. Shigeo, Sei's brother and projectionist if the theatre had any films, is explaining his fondness for heroines in Hollywood Westerns. He recites 'the fixed unchanging pattern' and pushes up an imaginary Stetson with one finger as the 'baddies' would. He rounds off his summary of the pattern with "as if in a dream there in the entrance stands a woman in white." The stage direction repeats this line: Mizuo appears "upstage centre ... a woman dressed in white." She appears on cue and as if on cue but surprises Shigeo, the story-teller; through the actress/performer, Mizuo appears as 'herself' and as the heroine in Sigeo'sShigeo's imagined scene. In this moment, Shimizu complicates the question of theatrical illusion behind the simplicity of the Western stereotype and the clarity of the pure white costume. Such complicated simplicity - its significance obscured beneath striking details of performance - lies at the heart of the theatricality which gives Tango at the End of Winter its artistic life.
Turning lights on the audience has long since lost any element of surprise, but the opening of Tango works a disorienting variation on the device. The powerful light from a projectionist's booth is aimed out at the audience from deep and high on the stage; images of student riots appear as if on a screen before us, and the violent scene is brought to an end when Sei mounts toward the projector and relieves our pained squinting with his covering hand. When lights come up on the stage, we are facing the steep rows of the seats of the cinema; Sei and cardboard cut-outs occupy them. Gin comes forward to address the audience directly, explaining that Sei had left the stage three years before to "shut himself away" in this place. These opening minutes contain other major components of Tango's art. Besides the lighting and the striking dramatic images that can occupy the entire stage, the author plays variations on techniques of audience involvement. He 'mirrors' the audience in the theatre with a cardboard one on stage; it is fully visible in a sharply raked but naturalistic cinema auditorium. Shimizu's subtle text presents a Sei who has escaped from live theatre to watch the fixed art of film, but images of political turmoil and involvement introduce him as spectator in a stage without films or living customers.
In another paradox, Sei re-enacts his final curtain speech several times, but near the play's end he confuses it with "lines from a bad play I did twenty years ago." Shigeo works up a Chaplin scene for his aunt (who would raze the cinema for a supermarket) only to undercut it and his own apparent emotional commitment: "Actually, I don't really like Chaplin. Too sentimental for me." Similarly, Sei dismisses as "drivel" his earlier advice to Mizuo to "have an all-consuming love affair" if she "wanted to be a good actress." "Drivel" ironically comments on Sei himself, however, for he acted out a part even in his desire for Mizuo. Despite its great potential for personal fulfillment, acting has never truly liberated Sei. It allows him a measure of third-person objectivity when he speaks of his past ("He was an actor ... He always made sure to choose the right setting"), but it traps him in the artistic moment, fusing a present that demands he be young with a living past that imposes former roles on him. Among his persistent memories is an association of tango music with one of his more principled stage speeches. The stylized movements and familiar rhythms of the dance have a formal kinship with Sei's self-awareness as an actor: practiced but assertive, sensual but directed. Late in the play, Sei dances the tango with Mizuo and, having returned her to her husband, sinks into his wife's arms, but in the next scene "ten minutes later," he kills Mizuo when she questions his imaginative power, his actor's improvisational skill, to transform a seat cushion into a peacock representing his youth. As he strangles her, she is Desdemona; he calls her lifeless body Mizuo. At this crucial point, Tango once again recalls Pirandello:
REN: You maniac! You've killed her!
SEI: No ... no ... keep calm ... It was only a play.
To Western audiences accustomed to the spare theatricality of much modern theatre, Tango has been far more than a play. Its fully furnished stage, its music and movement, and its range of lighting strategies engage our senses and perhaps lull our intellects. As he continues, Sei's long speech is filled with snatches of earlier ones; finally he succumbs to the strains of a tango that he dances with an imaginary partner. The stairs of the cinema set provide a full view of Alan Rickman rapt in his performance; he is stabbed by the avenging husband and, while still dancing, collapses. The boundaries of time and of the set, our focal point for theatrical reality, are destroyed. An upper portion of the rear wall breaks away to reveal cherry blossoms which mix with paper snow and blow over the stage. Richly colored peacock patterns cover the side walls of the set; the music stops at Sei's death, and the lights go down. The audience, in the natural course of theatrical things, sees a culmination in the partial loss of set, in the end of music and light, in the transforming peacock colors and in the death of Sei. We applaud. But Shimizu and Ninagawa are not through with us. The lights come up on Gin; she is wearing a coat, ready to move on. She tells us that the cinema will be "pulled down in May as planned" and asks us to agree that it is a "beautiful and sad" place. The stage audience re-enters in slow, dance-like movements; they applaud as at the end of a film. We applaud - this time for 'real.' The double ending of the play is not designed to trick the audience into sudden awareness of its naivete; rather, Tango assumes our intelligence and good will. We truly participate in the experience with all those responsible for the production's success, director, cast, playwright and fellow members of the audience.
George Tabori's Wiseman & Copperface, sub-titled A Jewish Western, seemed the ideal play for an international festival; it won a best play award in Vienna where its author is an artistic director. Tabori's career gives him overwhelming moral and aesthetic authority for writing on political subjects. He lost his father and other family members at Auschwitz, was blacklisted here in the McCarthy years, directed a revisionist Merchant of Venice at Stockbridge and has confronted the Holocaust and MyLai massacre in his plays. A person of such experience - and my list is severely condensed - could well claim to be his own arbiter of taste in approaching the great questions of our time. And, since a reasonable person can read twentieth-century history as farce, Tabori can hardly be faulted for combining farcical elements with weighty subjects in a fiction. In his latest effort, Weisman and his daughter, Ruth, have their car stolen as they drive from New York to Los Angeles with an urn holding the ashes of Weisman's wife. They are mugged by The Hunter, who wears mirror sunglasses, drinks Budweiser from a can and smokes Marlboros. This sort of push-button symbolism runs through the play - Woodstock, McCarthy, John Wayne - until everything is on the same indiscriminate level. Perhaps on the continent, Tabori's audience was flattered by such references, but Wounded Knee, never mind the Holocaust itself, is reduced by the other stark cultural signs to the level of a catalogue listing. Ruth is retarded; her father fails in an attempt to drown her, but the flawed ritual results in a kind of rebirth. She plays scorekeeper in a verbal tennis match between her father and Copperface, their Indian savior. In an unconsciously ironic critique of his entire method, Tabori has the two men lob words like "Dachau" at each other in a competition over which race has suffered more. Surely our politics have debased language, but wrenching painful words out of historical contexts to use them as markers in a game contributes to the lowering without enlightening us. At the end, Ruth and the Indian have exchanged cultural identities, she with an Indian name and he, a Jewish one. They walk erect, to a new life; they turn away from her dead father, his body covered with an Indian blanket and her mother's ashes encircled with Indian rocks. This clumsy allegory did not succeed with the audience the night I saw it. If someone does stage it here, conservative columnists will be delighted to have a broad target for attacks on their version of the politically correct.
To create a trilogy around the Guy Burgess spy story, The Performance Theatre Company sandwiched a new play, A Secret Country by Anthony Peters, between two established ones, Julian Mitchell's Another Country and Alan Bennett's brief An Englishman Abroad. About twenty people attended the world premiere of the Peters play in Edinburgh at a venue that had once been a church. About the only remaining religious property, the pulpit, was used resourcefully for direct address to the audience. A Grand Inquisitor begins and ends the play with statements that the events are real but that the stage places with their abstracted props have not been the places that Burgess, Maclean and Philby actually inhabited. The play is, in other words, framed by notices of its deliberate artificiality and includes many others, among them the curtain line before the interval ("What a way to end an act"), references like "Russian stereotype," and paper 'snow' thrown from the pulpit. These deliberate dramatic procedures ideally complement the proudly duplicitous lives of its homosexual heroes. As acted by Paul Aves, the Burgess character revels in a theatricality which makes sexual and political identities one. At one point Burgess tells his Russian contact, Aleksei, that he himself can never be sure which mask he is wearing. This willed self-deception, made entirely credible by Aves, makes the performance intriguing where an emphasis on the intrigue of the factual espionage would have resulted in a predictable melodrama.
<#FROWN:G25>
Do We Have a Judeo-Christian Heritage?
Vern L. Bullough
Recently Irving Kristol, a prominent Jewish author and editor of Commentary, editorialized that the United States was a Christian nation and that Jews should recognize this and work within that framework. Similarly, Richard John Neuhaus, a Protestant theological convert to Catholicism, has claimed that atheists cannot make good citizens in a Christian country like the United States. Both statements represent a new onslaught on secular humanism and mark a shift in attacks from right-wing fringe fundamentalists. Key to all the attacks is the belief that our "common" Judeo-Christian tradition is threatened by modern secularism.
Both the fringe groups and the neo-fundamentalists share a kind of deconstructionist belief that history is what we say it is, and they ignore everything that seems to be contrary to their own beliefs. They create a history that they want to believe in order to establish a new faith as a basis to attack anyone with whom they disagree. All ills of the modern world are blamed on secularism, and a past that never existed is looked back to for answers. In the true sense of the word these people are not really conservatives, or neo-conservatives as they prefer to call themselves, but radicals intent on establishing a new mythology under the banner of conservatism.
Though there is undoubtedly a Western tradition loosely called the Judeo-Christian tradition during the twentieth century, it has never been restricted to such. Many of our assumptions are based upon those of the pagan Greeks and Romans. In turn their beliefs were influenced by astrological, mathematical, and other discoveries of the ancient Egyptians, Sumerians, Persians, Hindus, Chinese, and others. We all are a product of our past, and in some areas this past was Christianized in the Middle Ages, but mostly it was not. We have twelve months of the year because the Romans did, and the months still bear Roman names. We have seven days of the week not because of the Bible, but because the ancients believed there were seven heavenly spheres circling the earth: the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Part of the names of our days still keep this belief alive, while others are named after German gods in which we no longer believe.
With only a thin veneer of Christianity, we still manage to celebrate and observe ancient festivals such as the Winter Solstice, which we call Christmas, or the coming of spring, which we call Easter. About the only thing Christian about Christmas is the name, since all other aspects, from Christmas trees to cr<*_>e-grave<*/>ches, are pre-Christian customs. Easter, the spring celebration, is named after a German goddess, and traditions ranging from the basket of eggs to the bunny have nothing at all to do with Christianity.
We believe a circle has 360 degrees because the ancient residents of Mesopotamia said so, although we have abandoned 12 as a base number and replaced it by 10. We got 0 and our decimal system from the Muslims, who took it from India. Much of our Hebrew scriptures are based on beliefs common in the Babylonia, while the Christian scriptures themselves picked up not only from Judaism but from Zoroastrianism, from the religion of Isis and Osiris, and from the pagan Greek philosophical tradition. Stoicism and neo-Platonism both exerted tremendous influence upon the Church fathers, as did other aspects of Greek and Roman belief patterns. Augustine, probably the most influential of the early Christian thinkers, was a Manichean before he converted to Christianity, bringing over with him many of the ideas that came from that offshoot of the Persian Zoroastrianism, as well as the Stoic and neo-Platonic views he had learned in school. Later, in the Middle Ages, as the Islamic version of Aristotle reached Christian Western Europe, Aristotle became more a part of the Christian tradition. In popular texts his scholastic movement is sometimes called the Aristotelianization of Christianity.
Monasticism, which was so much a part of the Western Christian tradition, seemed to have been influenced by Buddhism, and a series of Chinese discoveries from paper-making to silk manufacturing to gun powder eventually made their way west, changing the nature of Western culture. The list could go on, but the point to emphasize is that our Western tradition is a mixture of what has gone before with a thin veneer of Christianity overlaid on it. Just how thin the veneer is, is emphasized by the diversity of the 'Christian' religions. From the very beginning there were hundreds of interpretations, and the Emperor Constantine, after formally incorporating Christianity into the Roman pantheon of religions, found he had to call a council to decide what it was. Though officially the Council of Nicaea established a version of trinitarian Christianity, most Christians never formally adopted it, and Constantine himself later refused to accept it. Hundreds of 'heresies' developed, and many of them still survive today in various parts of the world. In the West, Catholicism for a time was dominant, but only for a brief period, as it was soon challenged by a number of different interpretations. Two of these interpretations, Calvinism and Angelicanism, were particularly influential in establishing colonies in the United States, but dissenters such as the Society of Friends and the Baptists did the same, as did traditional Catholics.
When our Founding Fathers were hunting for a basis for their new country, they did not turn to the Christian church for examples but to ancient Rome and Greece. They named one of their legislative bodies after the Roman senate, and were influenced by the Greek leagues to come up with a second house. Even our law is based upon Roman law, although it was more modified than continental law by the influence of English common law. Undoubtedly our Founding Fathers were religious, but a good many of them were influenced by the deism of the day, and they certainly were determined to avoid the rampant sectarianism of the time. Many of our early leaders were Unitarians who denied the divinity of Jesus. Agnostics and freethinkers from Thomas Paine to Robert Ingersoll also played significant roles in the development of the United States.
In recent years we have had a growing variety of non-Western traditions, from Sikhism to Hinduism to Islam to Buddhism, gain and establish strongholds in the United States. We have spawned or tolerated new religions such as Bahaism and a variety of Hare Krishna not usually found in India. We even have followers of L. Ron Hubbard. Many traditional churches deny that the Mormons are Christians, although in recent years the Mormons have tended to emphasize a more Christian aspect of their tradition. Judaism has also made a strong impact in the United States if only because it stood outside the Christian belief system.
Even our Christianity as such is radically different from the Christianity of the past. Capitalism would have been condemned by the medieval Church, and it was by modern popes. Usury and interest-taking was regarded as a sin until the fourteenth century. The early Church was pacifistic, and early Christians refused military service, a far cry from the militant Christianity of the Crusades or of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for that matter. In spite of the example of the two Marys in Christian stories, women were given short shrift by Christian churches, and their attempts to speak out and better their position have traditionally been opposed. Christianity was interpreted to condone slavery. In fact many religious conservative radical movements such as the Southern Baptists are fueled by Bible-believing literalist Christians determined to keep women and minorities in their place. Many of them also oppose all of the theories behind modern science.
This is not to deny that Christianity (as have other religions) often expressed high ideals and helped motivate large numbers of people to aspire to look outside themselves and to help others, but so have all kinds of non-believing traditions, going back at least to Stoicism. Undoubtedly, also, people who called themselves Christians have been a majority in the United States for much of its history, but the various sects and denominations could not agree among themselves (nor should they) about what that meant, and often those in disagreement have been extremely intolerant of others who believed differently.
In short, we have an eclectic tradition in the United States, one that generally has been tolerant and nondogmatic. Christians of various stripes are part of this, as are humanists and agnostics, but this does not make the United States a Christian nation or even a Judeo-Christian one. We are a mixed accumulation of our past, and it is the Christian dogmatists, not the secularists, who are the major threat to our pluralistic democratic tradition.
The Vatican's Alliance with Reagan
Tom Flynn
We note with concern recent media allegations that former President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II formed a secret alliance to help topple communist rule in Poland. If true, the stories help to explain certain elements of the Solidarity saga that always seemed incredibly fortuitous. But they also mark a papal return to geopolitics on a scale unmatched in more than a century. And they raise serious questions about church-state separation: How can a secular democracy order its relations with an entity that is both a sovereign foreign power and a religious community? And what is implied when the Vatican makes United States compliance with its moral program a quid pro quo to secure the church's political cooperation?
Writing in Time, Carl Bernstein reported that Reagan and the pope forged a secret alliance to preserve Solidarity, whose leaders had gone underground in Poland after General Wolciech Jaruzelski imposed martial law on December 13, 1981. They acted swiftly: United States' sanctions were imposed upon Poland and the then U.S.S.R. Top-security intelligence data was funnelled to the pope on the authority of Reagan and then-CIA Director William Casey. If the United States enjoyed superior military intelligence, the Vatican had more timely, better-quality intelligence regarding social and political matters as the crisis unfolded. On at least one occasion in 1984, Reagan relaxed certain sanctions against Poland when Archbishop (now Cardinal) Pio Laghi flew to the western White House to warn that the pope felt the sanctions had grown counterproductive. At other times, Philadelphia's John Cardinal Krol is said to have served as a papal intermediary to Reagan.
Within Poland, American spies and Catholic priests worked hand in hand to distribute millions of dollars worth of fax machines, video recorders, two-way radios, mimeographs, cash, and more - all the accoutrements of a propaganda 'war from below' against a repressive communist regime. We read that Casey himself coordinated efforts to build the remnants of the Socialist International within Poland into a force like the Christian Democratic parties in many Western European countries.
All of this reflected a vision that Reagan and the pope shared: a vision that the post-World War II division of Europe, ceding Eastern Europe to the Soviets, could be overturned. In the fifteenth century, the Borgia pope Alexander VI had imposed a similar partition, dividing the known world between Spain and Portugal. With little less audacity a twentieth-century pope joined forces with the president of United States to dissolve the partition of Yalta. "This," said Reagan national security adviser Richard Allen without a trace of irony, "was one of the greatest secret alliances of all time."
But the alliance was not without its cost to the United States. Secularists cannot help but be concerned at the spectacle of an American spymaster laying clandestine foundations for a "Christian Democratic" anything in a foreign land. Equally dubious, in our view, was the Administration decision to grant the Vatican full diplomatic recognition as a sovereign state. Perhaps most disturbing was the quid pro quo on birth control policy that Rome is said to have exacted from Washington as the price of alliance. William Wilson, Reagan's first ambassador to the Vatican, told Time that the Vatican demanded an outright ban on the use of American funds for the promotion of birth control or abortion, whether by foreign countries or international health organizations.
<#FROWN:G26\>
ALFRED KAZIN
Howards End Revisited
Howards End appeared in 1910, a date that explains an idealism important to our understanding of the book. It was E.M. Forster's fourth novel. He had written in rapid succession Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), and A Room with a View (1908). Howards End was the last novel he was to publish for fourteen years. The next, A Passage to India (1924), was certainly worth waiting for, but it is not as serene and hopeful as Howards End. The 'Great War,' the most influential event of the twentieth century and the onset of all our political woe, had intervened between Forster's two major novels and certainly darkened the second. The reality of British imperialism, bringing the threat of racial politics to Forster's belief in personal relationships as the supreme good, was something unsuspected in Howards End.
In 1910 Forster was thirty-one. In the next sixty years he was to publish only one novel more. Maurice, a novel about homosexual love that had been circulating privately for years, was published soon after Forster's death in 1970. All these dates and gaps in Forster's record as a novelist have their significance. He was a wonderfully supple and intelligent writer for whom the outside world was a hindrance and even a threat to his identification of himself and his art with 'relationships.' Everyone knows that he wrote in Two Cheers for Democracy, "I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." But what - as happened so often in World War Two - if my friend betrayed me for an ideology he considered his only 'country'?
So the date of Howards End has a certain poignancy now. The most famous idea in it is "Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die." No one with the slightest sense of twentieth-century history can read that in the 1990s without thinking (not for the first time) how far we have traveled, in liberal, generous, above all religious instinct, from 1910. Howards End is a shapely and beautiful novel, extremely well thought out. One has to read it now as a fable about England at the highest point of its hopes in 1910, while at its center rises up before us, as always, England's eternal Chinese wall of class distinctions, class war, class hatred - a world in which people stink in each other's nostrils because of their social origins or pretensions: in which a poor young man, who has lost his job and is in the depths of despair because of his home life, encounters hostility because he walks down Regent Street without a hat. But Howards End resolves this war between the English, tries to lift away this winding-sheet of snobberies and taboos, in the only way it has ever been resolved - in a beautiful theory of love between persons. This extends just as far as love ever extends. Meanwhile social rage keeps howling outside the bedroom.
Howards End is a novel of ideas, not brute facts; in many respects it is an old kind of novel, playful in the eighteenth-century sense, full of tenderness toward favorite characters in the Dickens style, inventive in every structural touch but not a modernist work. A modernist work - Ulysses will always be the grand, cold monument - is one that supplants and subsumes the subject entirely in favor of the author as performer and total original. This is hardly the case in Howards End. Forster cares; he cares so much about the state of England and the possibility of deliverance that what occupies him most in working out the book is a dream of a strife-torn modern England returning to the myth of its ancient beginnings as a rural, self-dependent society. It is typical of an undefeatable tenderness (almost softness) in Forster's makeup that the book ends in a vision of perfect peace right at the old house in Hertfordshire, Howards End, that is the great symbol throughout the book of stability in ancestral, unconscious wisdom. Even in 1910 this was absurd - hardly an answer to the class war. But fairy tales thrive on being of another world.
The class war is hardly an English prerogative, but the English have been so good at picturing it that it is no wonder they cannot do without it. Where but in England would that quirky refugee Karl Marx have found so perfect a ground, a text, for his belief in the long-established war between the classes? As I write, I notice in a review by Sir Frank Kermode of Sir V.S. Pritchett's Collected Stories, that Pritchett once had a conversation with H.G. Wells "in which they considered the question of whether lower-class characters could ever be treated in other than comic terms." It is noteworthy that Kermode finds it entirely natural to write of "lower-class characters" and "suburban little people." These are phrases that seem comic to an American - not because America is less divided than England but because, torn apart as it is by race, fear, and hatred, its gods are equality and social mobility.
How different the case in England. Dickens, though he lent pathos and occasionally even dignity (if not heroism) to his lower-class characters, certainly delighted in 'treating' them in comic terms just as much as Shakespeare did. It is hard to think of any first-class English novelist before Thomas Hardy who identifies so much with the 'lowly' and who gave characters at the bottom like Jude and Tess so much love and respect.
George Orwell in 1937: "Whichever way you turn, this curse of class differences confronts you like a wall of stone. Or rather is it not so much like a wall of stone as the plate glass pane of an aquarium." This American was for some months near the end of World War II in close contact with 'other ranks' in the British army. Even when lecturing at Cambridge after the war, he came to see how the college servants lived, as well as the incomparable beauty of the public surface. These experiences gave glimpses of a side of life in England that explained the rancor and frustration of postwar English writing - but also its violent humor. As Edmund Wilson said, the English Revolution was made in America.
I hasten to add - and Howards End is in many respects specifically about England - that as a subject single and entire of itself, blissful to the literary imagination, England -
This royal throne of kings, this scept'red isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea
awakens an honest glow in its writers. America is too vast, heterogeneous, and spiritually mixed up to appear before its writers as a believable single image. F. Scott Fitzgerald in his notebooks: "France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter - it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart."
America certainly has been harder to utter - except in the most grandiose and boastful terms. By contrast, here is Forster in Chapter Nineteen of Howards End. The Schlegel sisters' German cousin is with them on a tour of the countryside, and because one of the signal points of this novel is that the characters are all representative - the English of conflicting attitudes and cultures, the Germans of different sides of Germany - Forster here 'interrupts' himself to speak with felt emotion about England, his England, everyone's England, summed up as "our island":
If one wanted to show a foreigner England, perhaps the wisest course would be to take him to the final section of the Purbeck Hills, and stand him on their summit, a few miles to the east of Corfe. Then system after system of our island would roll together under his feet ...How many villages appear in this view! How many castles! How many churches, vanished or triumphant! How many ships, railways, and roads! What incredible variety of men working beneath that lucent sky to what final end! The reason fails, like a wave on the Swanage beach; the imagination swells, spreads, and deepens, until it becomes geographic and encircles England.
A few pages on, he inserts into a scene of conflict between the Schlegel sisters on the incredible thought (to Helen) that Margaret could even consider marrying the overbearing businessman Henry Wilcox:
England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of her gulls, and the north wind, with contrary emotion, blew stronger against her rising seas. What did it mean? For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast? Does she belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or those who had added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing in a ship of souls, with all the brave world's fleet accompanying her towards eternity?
Earlier, Forster had written of "our race," and later he was to write of his countrymen and women as "comrades." So the attentive reader comes to see that behind the rivalry and final, ironic conjunction of Schlegels and Wilcoxes (meaning Margaret and her defeated husband Henry Wilcox) is Forster's yearning hope (as of 1910) that this grievously class-proud, class-protecting, class-embittered society may yet come to think of some deeper, more ancient 'comradeship' as one of its distinguishing marks. Where Forster's belief in "personal relationships" was founded on Bloomsbury and the Principia Ethica (1903) of its Cambridge sage G.E. Moore, Forster's invocation of 'comradeship' no doubt owes much to Edward Carpenter, a strong defender of homosexuality who was one of the first English disciples of Walt Whitman.
But 'comradeship' aside for the moment, English literature's advantage over American literature, so it appeared to the American critic who helped to make Forster famous in America, Lionel Trilling, is that the class war, class distinctions of every kind, social rivalries of the most minute (and even nastiest) kind, are great for literature. As conflict seems to be the first rule in life, so conflict taken seriously enough, without sentimental hopes of easy deliverance, is comedy, is tragedy, is dialogue, is history, is FORCE. Only an Englishman would have opened Chapter Six of Howards End with:
We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. This story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk.
The boy, Leonard Bast, stood at the extreme verge of gentility. He was not in the abyss, but he could see it.
This would have enraged the California novelist and pioneer socialist, Jack London, who in 1902 went down into the "horror" of London's poor to write The People of the Abyss, a powerful document not likely to interest anyone in England but the Salvation Army. Because Howards End is rooted not even in Fabian socialism but in the dream of "personal relationships," one of the felt tensions in the book is the fear of war between England and Germany. The Schlegels' father (now dead) was a German idealist who fought for Prussia before it took Germany over, and in disgust left for England and married an Englishwoman.
<#FROWN:G27\>
Barry Maxwell
Whitman: Acceptance, Appropriation, Investment
In a half-line from 'To Thee Old Cause,' one of the inscriptions to the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman's formulation of the relation between his poem and the American Civil War is prima facie a direct and untroubled statement of identity: "my book and the war are one." On the whole, 'To Thee Old Cause' sets out a relationship between "my book," the war ("all war," in fact), and the "peerless, passionate, good cause" the short poem apostrophizes. In one of his characteristic parenthetical hushes, Whitman speaks to the combatants, saying that the unitary war he has set forth in the first stanza - "all war through time was really fought, and ever will be really fought, for thee" - is "(A war O soldiers not for itself alone, /Far, far more stood silently waiting behind, now to advance in this book.)"
Far, far more what? Wars? Or something less readily given in this immediate context? Like much of Whitman's poetry, the 1881 inscription functions as pseudo-clarification. The mode of ringing declamation and orbic utterance can easily carry the auditor beyond such small, troublesome words as 'one' ("my book and the war are one") and 'for' ("really fought, for thee"). Like a Brechtian drinking song, the Whitmanic statement goes down easily, but is barbed, gentle reader. 'One' is complicated, through a characteristic Whitmanic punning method which I shall discuss, by the aural shadow of 'won'; 'for' is innocuous only until we ask what precisely it means here. Beyond these cruces, the word 'cause' itself looms up problematic. Exemplified, but undefined, it stands as the sign of a cultural motive shared by the poem and its readers. The word would goad us, though, to specify our methods for assigning meaning to it.
Altogether, the affective situation is something like what the jazz musician Rahsaan Roland Kirk told an audience they might undergo when he simultaneously played the melodies of 'Sentimental Journey' and Dvorak's 'New World Symphony': "It's like makin' one part of your mind say, 'Oo-blah-dee,' and makin' the other part of your mind say, 'What does he mean?'" Partaking of both the sentimental journey and new world symphony modes, Whitman's work, not wholly without the Master's collusion, has a long history of befogged reception on the 'oo-blah-dee' level; our concern now might rather be with what he means. But if interpretive precision is difficult here, it may be because Whitman and his readers are in close quarters with a paradox of the sort James Baldwin characterized when he spoke of a writer finding "that the things which hurt him and the things which helped him cannot be divorced from each other; he could be helped in a certain way only because he was hurt in a certain way; and his help is simply to be enabled to move from one conundrum to the next." Precisely conundrum, a riddle to which the answer is a pun, turns out to be a valuable heuristic notion in Whitman's case. In the following, I want to point to some of the implications for Whitman's work of the riddle of war and book-making, and of the uneasy light the pun one/won admits to a dark nexus ("All of those athletes had to die young so that we might have this magnificent poem?"). In doing so, I hope that my debt to Kenneth Burke's labyrinthine address to these matters will be recognized and received critically, but in any case here stands acknowledged. I have not so much stood on Burke's shoulders to look at Whitman, though, as tried to attend to what each man has to say about, as a Burkean title has it, "The Nature of Art Under Capitalism." In addition, the specifically capitalist character of Whitman's production will be discussed in the light of certain of the German literary theorist Robert Weimann's extensions of Marx's thought.
"My book and the war are one"; my book and the war are won: Whitman's puns, rare as they are, follow the pattern of compounding the initial, orthographically determined meaning rather than exploiting, for ironic, humorous, or critical motives, a semantic disjunction between manifest and latent meanings. When the poet presents to us, for example, his profession of the self-revealing nature of his work, titling it "Here the Frailest Leaves of Me," coupled to the presentative adverb 'here' is the urgent injunctive verb 'hear.' Of course 'leaves' itself carries several meanings, as has been frequently pointed out. Homophony works additively in this poetry, not dissonantly. In the one/won play, we confront an assertion not only of an identity, but also of a consubstantial achievement and indeed victory. That Whitman's is in one sense not a true statement, given the pre-war editions of Leaves of Grass, is not the issue here. I am asking rather about the power that the war had to change Whitman's sense of what he had made.
In seeking to understand the textual-historical relationship Whitman is propounding, we may recur to Robert Weimann's term Aneignung. Weimann has demonstrated on several occasions and in relation to diverse literatures the specific usefulness of this concept, which may - with qualification - be translated as 'appropriation.' For the sake of clarity, we ought to give a moment here to a terminological summary.
One way of apprehending Aneignung is to see it as a critique of Foucault's 'What is an Author?' In that essay, discourses are held to be only "objects of appropriation," a function of which Weimann concedes the importance. However, Weimann further insists that discourses are also "subjekte of appropriation, that is ... historical agencies of knowledge, pleasure, energy and power" (433). Linking discourse-as-object to the property status of an author's works (in other words, to their exchange value), Weimann then argues that the use value of one's cultural work (as labor) derives from and depends upon "literary production as an appropriating agency" (433). The basic move of Aneignung, making things one's own, is also making one's own things. We should bear in mind, though, that in the German, the term has "the advantage of not necessarily involving an ideologically preconceived idea of (private) ownership or (physical) property; instead it allows for acquisitive behavior as well as for non-acquisitive acts of intellectual energy and assimilation"(433).
The crucial historical shift in the situation of Aneignung as a representational method is from a state first of the relative paucity of material that an author in a pre-modern society can make his or her own, because intellectual production is largely conceived of there as a communal activity carried out under "previously inscribed authority" (434), to one of a burdensome plentitude of material that the breakdown of "presupposed relations" (Marx) offers - or imposes - through dynamic contradictions to a newly-constituted world of individuals. In the later situation, the representational function of verbal art is, obviously, problematized, but it is also, at the same moment, fixed on by bourgeois culture as the necessary healing agency. As Weimann says:
What representational art presupposes and what it thrives on is more than anything else the loss, the undoing of the plenitude of that property in which the self and the social are mutually engaged and in which their engagement is unquestionably given and taken for granted (436; emphasis added).
One further aspect of Aneignung must be mentioned, because without noting it we are hard put to understand Whitman's aesthetic and poetic appropriation of the war as anything other than heroizing and apologetic. The necessary companion gesture of Aneignung is, according to Weimann, a putting-apart from oneself, an expropriation in its etymological sense. "The process of making other things one's own becomes inseparable from making other things (and persons) alien, so that the act of appropriation must be seen always to involve not only self-projection and assimilation but also alienation through expropriation"(434). The taking-to and the putting-apart from one's self and one's poetry are forms of work that so mutually imply one another that, in fact, Weimann subsumes performance of the latter under the term for the former.
If we provisionally concede that the primary task of Whitman's writing is appropriation, particularly so in relation to the Civil War, that concession need not pledge us to a simplistic view of Whitman's work as an endorsement of the war, or of war in general. An analogy may help here. Does a thief endorse, through the act of theft, the ethical status of the goods he or she steals? Do the processes of materials acquisition, production, distribution, and 'legal' exchange that account for the presence of such goods gain from the act of theft a concurring voice or stamp of approval? Is the thief's a symbolic action that encourages submission to and cooperation with the manifold circumstances, historical and political and economic, that placed the goods within reach? Does the thief's act certify the quality of the thing stolen? Does theft undermine or does it shore up dominant cultural forms (again, Marx's "presupposed relations")? As Jean Genet and others have pointed out, theft in a bourgeois society poses more interesting questions about the thief and the thing stolen than it does about the victim of the theft. If stealing is an act with dimensions both acquisitive and non-acquisitive, and an act of appropriation with attendant motives of expropriation, it may be compared with Whitman's poetic acts in that both make yes or no answers to the questions I have just posed dangerously naive.
Aneignung, then, names what Walter Benjamin would call the "decisive gestus" of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, specifically with respect to the status of the war in the poem, and the poem in the war. Benjamin has in fact provided us with a meditation on war and the enrichment or depletion of symbolic reserves, and we might note that without using the term Aneignung, he here instances the clearest kind of thinking on the subject. The apposite passage, which deserves quotation in full, not only problematizes juridical concepts of 'winning' and 'losing' wars, but also prods us to think of making war and multiplying cultural capital as intimately, even causally related. It is this latter point, as I have suggested, that is crucially at issue in Whitman's work.
What does it mean to win or lose a war? How striking the double meaning is in both words! The first, manifest meaning, certainly refers to the outcome of the war, but the second meaning - which creates that peculiar hollow space, the sounding board in these words - refers to the totality of the war and suggests how the war's outcome also alters the enduring significance it holds for us. This meaning says, so to speak, the winner keeps the war in hand, it leaves the hands of the loser; it says, the winner conquers the war for himself, makes it his own property, the loser no longer possesses it and must live without it. And he must live not only without the war per se but without every one of its slightest ups and downs, every subtlest one of its chess moves, every one of its remotest actions. To win or lose a war reaches so deeply, if we follow the language, into the fabric of our existence that our whole lives become that much richer or poorer in symbols, images and sources.
In Whitman's poetry, we study a victor's disposition of what the war gained for him and for his culture. That Whitman himself could consider this 'disposition' in its fiduciary sense is made clear by an undatable fragment with a most comprehensive title:
My Own Poems
Aye, merchant, thou hast drawn a haughty draft
Upon the centuries yet to come
Yet hitherto unborn - the Americas of the future:
The trick is ...Will they pay?
I think we can see this promissory relation to the future of the United States as determined - in fact, overdetermined - by the victory of the Union. Without that victory, Whitman may well have found himself in the situation of Benjamin's German veterans of the First World War: "grown silent - not richer, but poorer in communicable experience."
<#FROWN:G28\>
AMY THOMPSON MCCANDLESS
College of Charleston
The Higher Education of Black Women in the Contemporary South
THE COLLEGIATE EXPERIENCE OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN women in the contemporary South can be understood only in the context of regional history. Educational statistics and surveys of Southerners reveal the persistence of racial, regional, and gender differences in student attitudes and behaviors. Southern black women's choices of academic fields and educational institutions, their relationships with their professors and classmates, and their goals and achievements inside and outside the academy continue to be shaped by conceptions of gender and race derived from the ideology of the antebellum plantation. Because slave-holders believed that the education of blacks would foment rebellion, free persons of color had to leave the region to attend college. The end of slavery created new educational opportunities for black youth, but there was considerable debate among educators about the nature and purpose of black higher education. Few thought that blacks and whites should be educated together, and many wanted blacks to receive an industrial rather than a liberal education.
For African-American women, antebellum gender stereotypes compounded postbellum racial biases. Many of the personality traits ascribed to black women in the early twentieth century originated in the complex relationships of the nineteenth-century plantation. Black women - like black men - were considered docile, indolent, and ignorant. Like white women, they were supposed to sublimate their needs and wants to those of men. Like white women and black men, they were expected to serve their lord and master. Unlike white women, black women did not receive the protection of the pedestal; instead they were blamed for the sexual liaisons of the slave quarters. The consequence of such antebellum stereotyping was a denigration of black women's intellectual and moral faculties.
The academic offerings provided black women in the postbellum South reflected these gender and racial prejudices. Black women were given a 'moral' and 'vocational' education designed to develop 'virtuous women' who would as mothers and teachers 'uplift' the race. Although this racial and gender stereotyping limited the educational opportunities and professional horizons of black women, it also inspired them to become teachers and social workers. As historian Jeanne Noble concluded in her study of 'The Higher Education of Black Women in the Twentieth Century,' black women students consistently exhibited a greater "sense of mission" and a greater concern for the well-being of society than either black men or white women.
In the last two decades, gender, racial, and regional differences in higher education seem to have lessened considerably. Today, Southern women, black and white, earn more associate, bachelor's, and master's degrees than do men, the proportion of women in the college population having increased significantly since 1960. (In 1959 Southern women comprised only 38.0 percent of the college/university population in the region; in 1987, 54 percent. Only two public military schools, Virginia Military Institute and The Citadel, and a handful of private colleges in the region do not grant women undergraduate degrees.) Black women now outnumber black men in all but first professional degree programs. Today also no woman can be barred from admission to a Southern college or university because of her race. Whereas African-American women at the beginning of the twentieth-century were limited by law to all-black institutions, over two-thirds of black women currently attending college are enrolled in previously all-white institutions. On a regional level, educational opportunity grants and guaranteed student loan programs have made it possible for more Southerners to attend college, and standards at Southern institutions of higher education have equalled and, in some instances, surpassed those at institutions in other parts of the nation.
Few black women were provided a liberal arts education at the public expense at the beginning of the twentieth century; only in recent years have Southern states assumed a greater share of fiscal responsibility for the higher education of blacks and women. In 1968, 28.0 percent of all Southern women were enrolled in private institutions; in 1987, 17.1 percent. The percentages for white and black women were almost identical. Although black Southerners today are slightly less likely to matriculate at public institutions than white Southerners (82.3 percent versus 84.0 percent), they are still more likely to attend public colleges and universities than youth in the United States as a whole (82.3 percent and 77.0 percent respectively).
Southern higher education, like Southern culture, has retained many unique characteristics, however, and these continue to affect the educational experiences of black women in the region. The South still spends less on education than the nation as a whole. Even though 16.0 percent of state taxes in the South in 1986 went to finance higher education as opposed to 13.4 percent in the country as a whole, the region lags behind in per capita expenditure on higher education ($135 in the South compared to $140 in the United States). Because the economic pie remains smaller in the South - per capita personal income is only 89.0 percent of the national average - Southerners must spend proportionately more on higher education to close the gap.
The educational attainment of Southern adults also trails that of other Americans. A 1991 survey by the U.S. Census Bureau revealed that the Southeast has the lowest proportion of high school and college graduates of any area of the country. Robert Cominsky, director of the Census Bureau's education branch, attributed the low Southern rankings to the region's historic inability or unwillingness to invest in education.
Educational issues continue to be intricately interwoven with matters of race. Desegregation has not resulted in racial integration; most institutions of higher education in the South are nominally integrated. Minority students remain under represented in the collegiate population at large and at major public and private institutions in the region.
Enrollments in South Carolina's colleges and universities are indicative of enrollment patterns throughout the South. Although African-Americans comprise 18.5 percent of students in all South Carolina institutions of higher education, they represent only 12.1 percent of the students at the University of South Carolina and only 6.2 percent at Clemson University. South Carolina State College, on the other hand, is 92.3 percent black. Discrepancies at four-year private institutions in the state are even greater. Bob Jones University has no black students, while Morris College has only one white student. The editors of the Chronicle of Higher Education note significantly that South Carolina's educators "are still struggling with ways to improve the college-going rate of black citizens, which substantially trails that of whites. The issue is viewed as crucial to the state's economic health in the future because about one-third of the South Carolina population is black."
Historically black colleges remain an important component of the Southern educational scene. All but two of the historically black institutions are located in the South, and they enroll over eighty-eight percent of the students who attend black colleges. The graduation rates of black Southerners are consistently higher at black institutions. Although approximately sixty-six percent of African-Americans in the region attend predominantly white institutions, fifty-one percent of all bachelor's degrees awarded to Southern blacks are from predominantly or historically black institutions.
A 1992 report for Black Issues in Higher Education found that "black colleges are still producing and carrying a disproportionate share of the load" of educating black students. The twelve schools in the nation which awarded the largest number of bachelor's degrees to African-American students in 1988-89 were all historically black, Southern colleges. Howard University in Washington, D.C., led the list with 744 graduates, followed by Southern University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in Louisiana with 575, Hampton University in Virginia with 539, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University with 509, and Jackson State University in Mississippi with 463.
Gender restraints continue to circumscribe the academic horizons of white and black women alike. Faculty often take the comments and concerns of women students less seriously than those of men. Men are still more likely than women to hold campus leadership positions, to dominate classroom discussions, and to major in mathematics and science at coeducational institutions. Women have fewer opportunities to work as lab or field assistants or as interns. Social activities continue to reinforce traditional gender roles and to separate students along racial and sexual lines.
Southern women, as women elsewhere in the nation, choose institutions with programs which they consider appropriate for their sex. Technical and military colleges and public universities with strong engineering programs attract far fewer women than men. Fewer than a quarter of the students at Florida Institute of Technology and Georgia Institute of Technology, for instance, are women. Men also outnumber women at technically oriented state universities such as Auburn, Clemson, Louisiana Tech, Mississippi State, North Carolina State, Oklahoma, Tennessee Tech, Texas A & M, Arkansas, and Virginia Polytechnic Institute.
Gender stereotypes also influence women's choices of majors. Business is the most common major among students at coeducational institutions in the South, but women dominate in traditional 'female' fields such as education, health care, and home economics. Although the number of women in such 'male' fields as engineering, mathematics, and the physical sciences has increased significantly in the last decade, most black women prefer concentrations in the humanities and the social sciences.
Higher education in the South is still perceived as 'different' by many Americans. Guides to the nation's colleges and universities, such as that written by Edward B. Fiske of the New York Times, characterize institutions in the region as "distinctly Southern" or "steeped in Southern traditionalism" but have no category of 'distinctly Northern' or reference to 'Northern traditionalism.'
The connotation of 'Southern' in such educational commentaries is even more revealing. Fiske describes Davidson College as "a top-notch regional college for Southern WASPs ... [It] is distinctly Southern and socially traditional." He thinks that Duke University's unique blend of North and South explains how the institution "can be laid-back and high-powered at the same time." Georgia Tech, he notes, "isn't your typical laid-back Southern State U." On the other hand, he claims that the University of Virginia's "Southern, slightly aristocratic ambiance gives it a homey charm, but also a streak of anti-intellectualism and apathy." He finds students at Wofford College "conventional South Carolina types with conventional aspirations," while students at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, "can take on the best of any Yankee student body." For Fiske - and other educational commentators like him - most Southern students and most Southern colleges are narrowly provincial, academically inferior, and politically and socially conservative.
Many of the students Fiske interviewed for his guide also employed regional terminology in describing their institutions, albeit more positively. One student who labeled the University of Arkansas "truly a Southern school" referred to the fact that "People smile and speak to other people whether they know them or not." Students at Furman University perceived their classmates as "an enlarged, close Southern family." To these individuals, 'Southern' meant a student body which was friendly, a faculty which was approachable, and a campus that was hospitable.
African-American students and traditionally black colleges are noticeably absent from descriptions of typically 'Southern' schools in Fiske's guide, even though all but two of the historically black institutions are South of the Mason-Dixon Line. Promotional materials from predominantly black colleges use many of the same 'Southern' descriptors as predominantly white colleges in the region, proudly pointing to the "warm, friendly atmosphere" of their campuses.
The Southern woman student still tends to be characterized as white and rich. Images of the 'lady' remain strong: Fiske notes that Randolph-Macon Woman's College always has "enough Southern prep school graduates to give the college what some call a 'Southern-bellish' tone." He describes the "typical" Hollins College student as "white, traditional, Southern, preppie." Southern women at Duke, according to Fiske, are "very conscious of clothes and looks," while "relations between the sexes are still somewhat formal."
Other remnants of the 'Old South' are even less attractive. Beauty contests and other activities which treat women students as sex objects have not disappeared from the Southern college scene. The 'Miss T.U. Pageant' at Tulane University in New Orleans, for example, asks contestants to provide their bust, waist, and hip measurements and to appear in swimsuit and evening gown competitions.
<#FROWN:G29\>Discussions of David Lynch's films or those of Brian de Palma, for example, often depend on intricate aesthetic descriptions of the way each director foregrounds the devices and strategems of representation. The films themselves eerily mirror representations that are much too familiar from their regular occurrence in far less experimental films and life, generally depending on violence against women. But there is a presumption that pointing out constructedness by repeating the constructions at an ironic remove is somehow enough. The response to criticism of that irony, however, is that representation, like gender, is constructed. Strangely, once we've all stopped believing in the biological truth of gender, its effects in terms of constructing the site of knowledge production are presumed to have gone away. It is here that a curious 'blurring,' a strange effacement of the theorist's subject-position, links back up with Bourdieu's description of the main characteristics of the aesthetic disposition, its "privilege of indifference" to legitimacy (95).
Adrienne Kennedy disrupts this legitimacy by her insistence on the female specificity of birth, but in order to situate her play, A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, in relation to a cultural refusal of female specificity, I first want to make a provisional horizontal comparison among several cultural discourses where that specificity is, at the moment, being refused, as we find ourselves in a continuation of what Susan Jeffords calls "the remasculinization of America." This comparison might help foreground a broad structural feature that still constrains the poststructuralist study of differences. The elements of these discourses include: 1) the fact that on cable tv, there is a channel called the Family Channel, where the shows one can watch on weekends are those old 'family' standbys: 'Bonanza,' 'Wagon Train,' 'The Rifleman,' 'Gunsmoke,' and the 'Big Valley.' The most striking thing about the Family Channel is that these families, for the most part, have been cleaned up of women. These are basically families made up of white men who are busy taming the West - cleaning it up in the interests of the middle-class white, Christian, decent Body; 2) the fact that the Gulf War, the supposed origin of a New World Order planned and executed by men, was billed as the Mother of all Wars, and the spectacular celebration of it, the Mother of all parades; and 3) the way deconstructive or Foucauldian arguments show how the constructedness of masculine identity is destabilized by a reliance on a form of femininity that generally does not require women, a structure which in many ways appropriates femininity for its own project.
I will return to the first two of these issues later, but it seems especially important to address feminism's allies in poststructuralism in order to make more obvious some of the dangers of overlooking the specificity of the female body. There seems to be a troubling risk of remasculinization in an increasingly overt but paradoxically invisible reliance on the specificity of the masculine body. As one example, the latest star on the poststructuralist horizon, Slavoj <*_>Z-hacek<*/>i<*_>z-hacek<*/>ek, offers as his figurative model of interpretation a 'phallus' experience in which the radical exteriority of the body is figured by a phallus, the transcendental signifier with its "pulsation between 'all' and 'nothing'..." To explain the paradox of interpretation, <*_>Z-hacek<*/>i<*_>z-hacek<*/>ek gives two examples. One has to do with the impossibility of control. That is, he says, referring to Saint Augustine, "Someone with a strong enough will can starve to death in the middle of a room full of delicious food, but if a naked virgin passes his way, the erection of his phallus is in no way dependent on the strength of his will ..." And to show the opposite side of this riddle, he tells this joke: "What is the lightest object on earth? - The phallus, because it is the only one that can be elevated by mere thought." There is here a striking instance of theoretical amnesia. No longer is any attempt made to distinguish between organ and figuration, even though, in the earlier days of Lacanian theory, much ink was spilled attempting to do just that, to show that men really don't have 'it' either. Now it looks like they do. This overtly masculine figuration whose partiality founds the oxymoronic irony of poststructuralism (the point of coincidence between omnipotence and total impotence) serves, as did the earlier aesthetic model, as a universal model for interpretation and guarantees an indifference to legitimacy. But its partiality can be foregrounded by looking at the figuration of birth, for it is in and around discussions of birth and the maternal body, those places where the label of essentialism is most often pinned, that the most intense resistance to female specificity can be found.
Though this study of Kennedy and birth will depend, in part, on a revisionary reading of psychoanalysis, Wayne Koestenbaum warns in Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration that the origins of psychoanalysis, the discourse within which the paradoxical invisible but obvious relationship between phallus and penis gets organized, circle around an appropriation of femininity, and in particular, of birth by men: "[B]y collaborating with Breuer, Freud sought to fuse male bonding and scientific labor, and to appropriate the power of female reproduction" by way of a woman's hysterical birth-giving, that of Anna O., or Bertha Pappenheim, who was to become a feminist activist. In that collaboration, argues Koestenbaum, the fantasized, or hysterical childbirth experienced by Anna O. and interpreted by Freud "loses texture as a woman's experience, and becomes, within the history of psychoanalysis, a possession prized by a chain of male mentors and their disciples." Thus Anna O.'s uterus figuratively becomes and anus, as Freud "erases the maternal and feminine origin of his science at the same moment he stresses it." Anna O. is thus passed on as "male property, a representation of male intercourse" and of the "pleasure-giving, child-delivering hole in men."
The abstraction and circulation of metaphors of birth here organizes a crucial intersection between symbolicity and bodies, and it is in the textualization and appropriations of birth where aesthetics and politics meet. "For," says Julia Kristeva, "where life and discourse come together, that is where the destiny of subjectivity is caught up in the claims of civilization. Today the pill and the Pope know that indeed." The risks for feminism of talking about birth may, at this historical moment, have to be taken, in order to dissect the masculinist appropriations of birth which accompany what is too often unambiguously called femininity.
These 'femininities,' like these 'births,' are still to be disentangled.
The Political Economy of Spectacle: Hiding the Mess from View
Life and discourse, or the density of subjectivity caught up in the claims of civilization, are at the moment intensely focused on race and the intimate control of women's sexuality. Adrienne Kennedy commented almost twenty years ago on these intersections in A Movie Star in Black and White, first performed at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1976, directed by Joseph Chaikin. Like the plays of Lorraine Hansberry, it long ago raised the kinds of questions about middle-class African Americans that Spike Lee's movies are only now addressing twenty years later. Kennedy was raised in a middle-class family in Cleveland at a time when the schools were racially and ethnically mixed; she encountered a more overt and damaging racism when she went to Ohio State University, then dropped out. Her parents were prominent members of the African-American community; their friends were civic workers, teachers, social workers, doctors, and lawyers active in the NAACP and the Urban League. But the questions she raises, unlike Lee's, come from the perspective of a woman who must deal not only with racism but with pregnancy, miscarriage, and the experience of being an intellectual whose academic husband was able to do the things her pregnancies prevented her from doing. A feminist in a period of masculinist Black nationalism, she was also a postmodern experimentalist in a period of realistic political drama and a woman writing very specifically about the consequences of the physicality of blackness and the bleeding, pregnant female body when theoretical discourse could not account for those differences; it still cannot. In this play, what is available is, on the other hand, bloody miscarriage and the complete responsibility for pregnancy and blood on the part of the woman, even if she is a middle-class, African-American intellectual who possesses some measure of cultural capital; and, on the other hand, brain-damaged, military-related paralysis for her brother in a white supremacist cultural logic.
The play stages the way photography and film insist on constructing a Family, within a site organized and coded by public culture within what might now be described as the mode of information. That is, as Ian Angus and Sut Jhally argue, we are currently within a third stage of capitalist formation in which the economic and the cultural are indistinguishable, the result of two earlier stages: 1) class culture, from the beginning of industrial capitalist society in the seventeenth century, divided into high culture and popular culture; 2) from the turn of the century to the 1960s, mass culture, with homogeneous cultural products for mass consumption; and 3) since the 1960s mass-mediated culture of the mode of information, accompanying "the explosion of electronic media, the shift from print literacy to images, and the penetration of the commodity from throughout all cultural production." In this latest period of postmodernity, they argue, the construction of social identity is centered on a politics of images which produces "staged differences," differences that are overlaid on the homogenized culture produced in the earlier cultural formation. These "staged differences" are, in some measure, differences without much difference as their real inequalities lie hidden behind a screen of consumer goods. It is the implications of these differences without much difference, the way they show up in discourses which would ostensibly seem to be quite different, that need to be considered.
Within this mode of information, spectacle determines possibilities for representation and performs the move of abstraction away from materiality, where, as Guy Debord argues:
the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible [itself] ... The spectacle consists in taking up all that existed in human activity [in order to] possess it in a congealed state as things which have become the exclusive value by their formulation in negative of lived value ... [Here] we recognize our old enemy, the commodity, who knows so well how to seem at first glance something trivial and obvious, while on the contrary it is so complex and so full of metaphysical subtleties.
As political economy circles back around to postmodern possibilities of representation, we find that this abstract spectacle, with its differences without much difference that unite the economic and the cultural to produce what Frederic Jameson calls the "omnipresence of culture," increasingly rests on a global opposition between an active, masculinized North, and a feminized South, whose resource often is the cheap labor of non-white, female workers. The majority of female workers who work to produce the chips for the mode of information are young women who must retire by the time they are twenty-five, after their eyesight has been ruined by the close work. They leave the work force, according to what Jennifer Wicke calls the employers' "beneficient fiction" that they will marry, a fiction which provides a justification for using them up and discarding them.
The mode of information makes possible a new elite, not of manufacturers or those who invest in production as much as those who invest in and work with information, what Robert Reich calls symbolic analysts: management consultants, lawyers, software and design engineers, research scientists, corporate executives, financial advisers, advertising executives, television and movie producers -and academics, poststructuralist critics as well as nuclear physicists or professors of finance. Within this cultural formation, the mode of information's symbolic common denominator is its feminized debris.
Interrupting the Sanitized Spectacle/Disgusting Bodies

<#FROWN:G30\>
The Idea of Teleology
Ernst Mayr
1. Philosophical Background
Perhaps no other ideology has influenced biology more profoundly than teleological thinking. In one form or another it was the prevailing world view prior to Darwin. (Indeed it is one of the relatively few world views seriously considered by western man.) Appropriately, the discussion of teleology occupies considerable space (10-14%) in several recent philosophies of biology. Such a finalistic world view had many roots. It is reflected by the millenarian beliefs of many Christians, by the enthusiasm for progress promoted by the Enlightenment, by transformationist evolutionism, and by everybody's hope for a better future. However, such a finalistic world view was only one of several widely adopted Weltanschauungen.
Grossly simplifying a far more complex picture, one can perhaps distinguish, in the period prior to Darwin, three ways of looking at the world:
1. A recently created and constant world. This was the orthodox Christian dogma, which, however, by 1859 had largely lost its credibility, at least among philosophers and scientists.
2. An eternal and either constant or cycling world, exhibiting no constant direction or goal. Everything in such a world, as asserted by Democritus and his followers, is due to chance or necessity, with chance by far the more important factor. There is no room for teleology in this world view, everything being due to chance or causal mechanisms. It allows for change, but such change is not directional; it is not an evolution. This view gained some support during the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, but remained very much a minority view until the nineteenth century. A rather pronounced polarization developed from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, between the strict mechanists, who explained everything purely in terms of movements and forces and who denied any validity whatsoever of the use of teleological language; and their opponents - deists, natural theologians, and vitalists - who all believed in teleology to a lesser or greater extent.
3. The third view of the world was that of a world of long duration (or being eternal) but with a tendency toward improvement or perfection. Such a view existed in many religions, it was widespread in the beliefs of primitive people (e.g., the Valhalla of the old Germans), and it was represented in Christianity by ideas of a millennium or resurrection. During the rise of deism, after the Scientific Revolution and during the era of Enlightenment, there was a widespread belief in the development of ever greater perfection in the world through the exercise of God's laws. There was a trust in an intrinsic tendency of Nature toward progress or an ultimate goal. Such beliefs were shared even by those who did not believe in the hand of God but who nevertheless believed in a progressive tendency of the world toward ever-greater perfection.
Although Christianity was its major source of support, teleological thinking gained increasing strength also in philosophy, from its beginning with the Greeks and Cicero up to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The concept of the Scala Naturae, the scale of perfection, reflected a belief in upward or forward progression in the arrangement of natural objects. Few were the philosophers who did not express a belief in progress and improvement. It also fitted quite well with Lamarck's transformationist theory of evolution, and it is probably correct to say that most Lamarckians were also teleologists. The concept of progress was particularly strong in the philosophies of Leibniz, Herder, their followers and of course among the French philosophesphilosophers of the Enlightenment.
What struck T.H. Huxley "most forcibly on his first perusal of the Origin of Species was the conviction that teleology, as commonly understood, had received its deathblow at Mr. Darwin's hands." However, Huxley's prophecy did not come true. Perhaps the most popular among the anti-Darwinian evolutionary theories was that of orthogenesis, which postulated that evolutionary trends, even nonadaptive ones, were due to an intrinsic drive. Even though the arguments of the orthogenesists were effectively refuted by Weismann, orthogenesis continued to be highly popular not only in Germany but also in France, the United States, and Russia. The reason was that even though Darwin's demonstration of the non-constancy of species and of the common descent of all organisms made the acceptance of evolution inevitable, natural selection, the mechanism proposed by Darwin, was so unpalatable to his opponents that they grasped at any other conceivable mechanism as an anti-Darwinian strategy. One of these was orthogenesis, a strictly finalistic principle, which did not really collapse until the Evolutionary Synthesis. Simpson, Rensch, and J. Huxley, in particular, showed that perfect orthogenetic series as claimed by the orthogenesists, simply did not exist when the fossil record was studied more carefully, that allometric growth could explain certain seemingly excessive structures, and finally, that the assertion of deleteriousness of certain characters, supposedly due to some orthogenetic force, was not valid. These authors showed, furthermore, that there was no genetic mechanism that could account for orthogenesis.
Both friends and opponents of Darwin occasionally classified him as a teleologist. It is true that this is what he was early in his career, but he gave up teleology soon after he had adopted natural selection as the mechanism of evolutionary change. Whether this was as late as the 1850s, as claimed by some authors, or already in the early 1840s, as indicated by the researches of R. Eisert, is unimportant. There is certainly no support for teleology in the Origin of Species, even though, particularly in his later years and in correspondence, Darwin was sometimes somewhat careless in his language. I have previously presented a rather full history of the rise and fall of teleology in evolutionary biology, particularly in Darwin's writings.
All endeavors to find evidence for a mechanism that would explain a general finalism in nature were unsuccessful or, where it occurs in organisms, it was explained strictly casually (see below). As a result, by the time of the Evolutionary Synthesis of the 1940s, no competent biologist was left who still believed in any final causation of evolution or of the world as a whole.
Final causes, however, are far more plausible and pleasing to a layperson than the haphazard and opportunistic process of natural selection. For this reason, a belief in final causes had a far greater hold outside of biology than within. Almost all philosophers, for instance, who wrote on evolutionary change in the one hundred years after 1859, were confirmed finalists. All three philosophers closest to Darwin - Whewell, Herschel, and Mill - believed in final causes. The German philosopher E. von Hartmann was a strong defender of finalism, stimulating Weismann to a spirited reply. In France, Bergson postulated a metaphysical force, lan vital, which, even though Bergson disclaimed its finalistic nature, could not have been anything else, considering its effects. There is room for a good history of finalism in the post-Darwinian philosophy, although Collingwood has made a beginning. Whitehead, Polanyi, and many lesser philosophers, were also finalistic.
Refutation of a finalistic interpretation of evolution or of nature as a whole, however, did not eliminate teleology as a problem of philosophy. For the Cartesians any invoking of teleological processes was utterly unthinkable. Coming from mathematics and physics, they had nothing in their conceptual repertory that would permit them to distinguish between seemingly end-directed processes in inorganic nature, and seemingly goal-directed processes in living nature. They feared, as shown particularly clearly by Nagel, that making such a distinction would open the door to metaphysical, nonempirical considerations. All their arguments, based on the study of inanimate objects, ignored the common view, derived from Aristotle and strongly confirmed by Kant, that truly goal-directed and seemingly purposive processes occur only in living nature. Yet the (physicalist) philosophers ignored the study of living nature and the findings of the biologists. Instead they used teleology in order to exercise their logical prowess. Why this was so has been explained by Ruse: "What draws philosophers toward teleology is that one has to know, or at least it is generally thought that one has to know, absolutely no biology at all! ... philosophers want no empirical factors deflecting them in their neo-Scholastic pursuits." The irony of this jibe against his fellow philosophers is that, having said this, Ruse himself promptly ignored the literature on teleology written by biologists and concentrated on reviewing the books of three philosophers known for their neglect of biology. Yet Ruse is not alone. One paper or book after the other dealing with teleology continues to be published in the philosophical literature in which the author attempts to solve the problem of teleology with the sharpest weapons of logic, while utterly ignoring the diversity of the phenomena to which the word teleology has been attached, and of course ignoring the literature in which biologists have pointed this out.
Some of the difficulties of the philosophers are due to their misinterpretation of the writings of the great philosophers of the past. Aristotle, for instance, has often been recorded as a finalist, and cosmic teleology had been called an Aristotelian view. Grene is entirely correct when pointing out that Aristotle's telos has nothing to do with purpose "either Man's or God's. It was the Judaeo-Christian God who (with the help of neo-Platonism) imposed the dominance of a cosmic teleology upon Aristotelian nature. Such sweeping purpose is the very opposite of Aristotelian [philosophy]." Modern Aristotle specialists (Balme, Gotthelf, Lennox, and Nussbaum) are unanimous in showing that Aristotle's seeming teleology deals with problems of ontogeny and adaptation in living organisms, where his views are remarkably modern. Kant was a strict mechanist as far as the inanimate universe is concerned, but provisionally adopted teleology for certain phenomena of living nature, which (in the 1790s) were inexplicable owing to the primitive condition of contemporary biology. It would be absurd, however, to use Kant's tentative comments two hundred years later as evidence for the validity of finalism.
The reasons for the unsatisfactory state of teleology analyses in the philosophical literature are now evident. Indeed, one can go so far as to say that the treatment of the problems of teleology in this literature shows how not to do the philosophy of science. For at least fifty years a considerable number of philosophers have written on teleology basing their analyses on the methods of logic and physicalism, "known to be the best" or at least the only reliable methods for such analyses. These philosophers have ignored the findings of the biologists, even though teleology concerns mostly or entirely the world of life.
They ignored that the word function refers to two very different sets of phenomena; and that the concept of program gives a new complexion to the problem of goal-directedness; they confounded the distinction between proximate and evolutionary causations, and between static (adapted) systems and goal-directed activities. Even though there is an enormous philosophical literature on the problems of teleology, those recent books and papers are quite useless which still treat teleology as a unitary phenomenon. No author who had not tried to articulate the differences between the significance of cosmic teleology, adaptedness, programmed goal-directedness, and deterministic natural laws, has made any worthwhile contribution to the solution of the problems of teleology.
The principal endeavor of the traditional philosopher was to eliminate teleological language from all descriptions and analyses. They objected to such sentences as "the turtle swims to the shore in order to lay her eggs," or "the wood thrush migrates to warmer climates in order to escape the winter." To be sure, questions that begin with "what?" and "how?" are sufficient for explanation in the physical sciences. However, since 1859 no explanation in the biological sciences has been complete until a third kind of question was asked and answered: "why?" It is the evolutionary causation and its explanation that is asked for in this question. Anyone who eliminates evolutionary "why?" questions, closes the door on a large area of biological research. It is therefore important for the evolutionary biologist to demonstrate that "why?" questions do not introduce a meta-physical element into the analysis, and that there is no conflict between causal and teleological analysis, provided it is precisely specified what is meant by 'teleological.'
<#FROWN:G31\>
CHAPTER 3
Schoolmaster: Manchester, Guernsey, and Elgin
Saintsbury spent March 2, 1868, visiting his fiancee, Emily King, at Southampton. He came back to Oxford to find the offer of a teaching appointment in the upper forms of the Manchester Grammar School, then headed by Frederick William Walker. He left Oxford the next day for this his first six months' experience of teaching and his first acquaintance with Manchester, a history of which he was to write two decades later. He found lodgings somewhat out of the city and a few days later joined the Manchester Athenaeum where, as the ticket (made out erroneously to a "Mr. Santzburg") promised, one could "'advance and instruct in knowledge' ... read the papers, smoke, play billiards, and ... lunch lightly." At this time, the school's quarters were so severely crammed as to make some such refuge necessary. There were no Common Rooms and "the very classes were held in soon-to-be-pulled-down tenement houses."
The spring saw Saintsbury settled into teaching while planning and preparing for his marriage, which took place on June 2d - presumably at Southampton. By the summer solstice, the couple had set up housekeeping in the rooms "somewhat out of the centre" where he had already settled. His account book tells of moving and household expenses and of a silk dress and a chain and cross for Emily. With characteristic reticence, Saintsbury tells us nothing more of the wedding or about his bride or those early days of marriage.
In Manchester, the young scholar was trying his hand at school-mastering where he was soon to feel a glimmer of the distaste that made him later confess, "I never liked schoolmastering." Yet he must have felt the challenge of the new situation, in a good school where English and the classical languages were his lot. He had begun in debt and on a low salary with "neither time nor means to invest in the gifts of Bacchus." But he and Emily were in love and eager for marriage. There was leisure for each other and for reading, and for Saintsbury's favorite physical pastime - solitary walking and exploring the countryside. A map of Lancashire was one of the first of his purchases. Here, he first saw some of Rossetti's writing while he continued his interest in French literature.
A cryptic credit entry in Saintsbury's accounts for July 26, 1868 - "Cub (M.G.) 12.12" - suggests that he made his first contact with the Manchester Guardian in his early months in Manchester. Though C.P. Scott was not editor until 1872, Saintsbury mentions only that, in 1877, Scott gave him his "valuable apprenticeship to journalism" and "much hospitality to boot." Scott, who had been a contemporary of his at Oxford, was a good friend of the Creightons and was frequently their guest in the 1870s. The Guardian obituary of Saintsbury assumed the earlier date, but since Guardian records for those years have vanished, the mystery remains.
Of the city itself as he knew it at firsthand, Saintsbury says little except in the brief popular history of it he wrote in 1887. Written for the series Historic Towns, edited by E.A. Freeman and William Hunt, it was published independently. Saintsbury tried to view the city's history from a less provincial vantage point than earlier writers had done. It is no local glorification, but the Academy reviewer thought it vindicated the City from the "gross caricature" it suffered in Dickens's Hard Times. Its origins and its four centuries of "barren history" are given with a touch of irony, but the rise of the cotton trade gets a straightforward account. Saintsbury warns the reader against the "element of the fantastic" in Disrael's Sybil, but finds "the reality and power of his drawing" superior to that of Mrs. Gaskell in Mary Barton. He recalls walks in the city's "sober streets" but inexplicably omits mention of the Grammar School and the Guardian, the two institutions he worked for and of which the city could be most rightly proud. Members of the Manchester School of Economics he saw as "totally cramped by education and inherited sympathies." He later recalled the city as "the foggiest and rainiest of all our industrial hells, except Sheffield ... a half Rembrandt, half Caillot picture." He had found it sociable, and he enjoyed the Rossettis, Turners, and Coxes in the museum. The book was the honest, competent product of the discipline journalism gave its author, and no more.
Whatever those few crowded months in Manchester offered the newlyweds, by September, 1868, the Saintsburys were settled in Guernsey where he was to serve as senior classical master at Elizabeth College for six years. This "Charmed Isle," one of the "Isles Fortunes," he knew from his 1867 tour. The islanders, he tells us, "included an unusually large proportion of persons of fair income, ancestral houses, and gentle blood; hospitality was abundant and the means of exercising it excellent. Liquor was cheap and "... for a miniature and manageable assemblage of amenities I do not think you can easily beat Guernsey." So he saw his life:
... teaching the classics and other things to decently bred youth for hours at which even a trade union leader could hardly grumble; enjoying the bounties of King Bacchus and my Lady Venus ... walking, whisting, waltzing; reading immense quantities of French and other literature; writing my first reviews for the Academy ... 'regarding the ocean' like my august neighbor and fellow incola M. Victor Hugo - in short, possessing almost all desirable possessions save one - to wit, money. And it was rather a comfort not to have that lest one should be in hopeless danger of Nemesis again.
Given this happy capsule memoir, the picture can be filled out. Paul Stapfer, the French master at Elizabeth College during Saintsbury's first years (1866-68), in his Victor Hugo <*_>a-grave<*/> Guernsey defines the society - from a French vantage point - as four very distinct classes, "les sixty, les forty, les twenty, et les ... rien du tout." The first of these, the nobility and the gentry, the officers of Fort George, and the "hauts fonctionnaires," admitted to their number the college masters who were Oxford to Cambridge men and foreigners of distinction. No class, Stapfer notes with amusement, acknowledged acquaintance with those below it, though even the lowest found someone to look down upon. For the college masters, acceptance afforded a pleasant social life at the top level, including that of the barracks, which Saintsbury recalled as "distinctly good" - perhaps because, to him, it seemed "college life over again" with some gambling (shillling whist and shilling loo), "plenty of fun and good fellowship." Guernsey, somewhat a world apart during the period of great social and political changes in England following on the Second Reform Bill, gave a detachment that Saintsbury, in later years, regarded as both good and bad: "The looker-on sees the drift of the game more clearly, but he appreciates the motives and aims of those who take part in its less fully than the players."
Saintsbury did not have the good luck to know Guernsey's most distinguished resident of this period, Victor Hugo, though on one occasion he "saw him plain" at a shop in French-speaking Saint Pierre when that eminent self-exile ejaculated to a shopkeeper who spoke French as well as he did, "Ah, Monsieur, je vien chercher des books, des vieux books." Saintsbury's great admiration for the poet Hugo, which had come earlier and was permanent, he shared with Stapfer for whom Hugo was always first among French writers. Stapfer took many walks with Hugo. During the few months that his career on Guernsey overlapped that of Saintsbury, this strong bond and their talk about things French must have given fresh impetus to the young Englishman's already developed French literary interest. He was reading "more French than any other literature and more novels than anything else in French." By the end of the 1860s he was accustomed to read for style in French as in other languages, though he never spoke French to his own satisfaction.
Stapfer, a good French scholar who was also interested in English literature, had taken his post to learn English, to be near Hugo, and to devote most of his time to his own writing. He was later professor at Grenoble and Bordeaux. At Guernsey, he relieved the boredom of teaching French grammar by producing Hernani with his older students in January, 1868, and by offering a series of outside literary lectures for young ladies. Although these met with minimal success, Saintsbury followed Stapfer's lead and the recommendation of John Oates, the headmaster, and in succeeding years at Guernsey was kept very busy (he notes eleven hours' work in one day) "with outside lectures and private coaching, not to mention reviewing." Saintsbury's lectures to a Young Ladies' Educational Association were on history and logic. Some time also had to be given by a confessed nonathlete to assisting with the college sports program.
Elizabeth College, founded in 1563, had been rechartered and reopened in 1824. Its course of study stipulated "Latin and Greek in all classes ... and English Classics in all classes ... to include history (general and scriptural), rhetoric, elocution and the belles lettres. All other subjects optional ...." The absence of science is shocking to a modern reader.
The Reverend John Oates, who had been vice principal for eight years, became principal in 1868. A scholar of Lincoln College and an intimate friend of Mark Pattison, Oates was genial and very hospitable. Saintsbury noted his "unscholarly indolence of temper, Pattisonian flour made up into dough with milk instead of gall, its yeast unsoured by any religious conversion and soft instead of hard baked." Oates presided over a relaxed and casual world, "une anarchie aimable, celle de l'age d'or ... un beau dsordre et une confusion pleine de vie," according to Stapfer. Some of the confusion was due to thin walls through which the noises of all classes mingled as one, a confusion enhanced by the boys' trick of releasing live crabs into the classrooms, thus producing a merry chase and a resultant caning. Despite such disorder, the school's work was of a quality that won it three scholarships in 1870, on of these at Oxford. The student group then numbered more than a hundred.
Stapfer remarks in some surprise that these boys, unlike French boys, made a "progres en sagesse"; their growth in wisdom and "la raison" corresponded to their development from children into responsible young men. He deplores the use of the cane as peculiarly English - acceptable to parents and largely a matter of indifference to the victims. Saintsbury, less responsive to growing boys and more inured to the practice, says of his local military exemption (for which he paid 12s. 6d.): "One could not serve that State by caning small boys and loading and firing guns with blank cartridges at the same time."
Appointed on the recommendation of a native of Guernsey, Dr. McGrath, then Fellow and later President of Magdalen College, Oxford, Saintsbury found his teaching experience there more agreeable than that later at Elgin. Always strongly in favor of the discipline of classical languages, he once offered his own scheme for that ideal "State Education in Humane Letters" which Arnold sighed for: "... the classical languages, elementary mathematics, history and geography taught in the older fashion, and modern languages within reason, but all thoroughly drummed and rubbed in from the formal point of view."
As senior classical master, Saintsbury had his first opportunity to develop methods and see results. The fruit of these he presented to the Classical Association of Scotland in 1905. Giving high praise to his own Kings College School training, he specified that schoolboys should memorize large quantities of classical poetry, translate classical verse into English verse, and translate English and indeed all modern languages into Latin or Greek as well. That all such language teaching should be thoroughly 'literary' was his main theme - with a placing of the authors in the history of their own literature, and with literary comparisons. Elsewhere he cites specific methods, comparisons most specifically.
<#FROWN:G32\>
Men Do, Women Are
The characteristics Gaskell designates as especially male or female are for her not necessarily embodied in a man or a woman. There is a prima facie connection between a person's sex and gender -and I use this latter term, although it is strictly a term in grammar, simply because it serves to distinguish between psychological and physical sex and has recently gained some currency -but the connection is not invariable or insoluble in Gaskell. It can be loosened. It often is. In many of her characters, therefore, sex and gender are dissociated, and we have to examine the circumstances in the individual instance before we can be sure who is which. The point, however, is not androgyny. Male and female are, for Gaskell, entirely different from one another. In her stereotypical way, Gaskell always assigns her characters, of whatever sex they are, characteristics that belong to one or to the other gender. And her distinctions are not limited by any means to people alone. Places, feelings, ideas, conditions, and a good many other things also have genders in her fiction. To an extent this is not unusual. Most societies, making divisions between what men and women do, distinguish their activities also, and many of Gaskell's associations are those common in her day. Courage, for example, is male. Charity, however, is female. Men have the right to express their feelings; women, by implication, do not (4:253).
Most of the metaphors Gaskell uses have genders in a similar manner. The demon is unequivocally male. Made of the passions she denied in creating 'Mrs. Gaskell,' the demon is 'Mrs. Gaskell's' antithesis. As she is the ideal woman, the demon is the unideal man. It is significant that Gaskell -clustering metaphors, as she does -thinks of France, the land of passion and in consequence of the demon, always as a male domain just as she thinks of England as female. It is common in her fiction for male characters to be French and for female to be English. The narrator's parents in 'My French Master' are divided in this way. In 'the Grey Woman,' there is again a man who, being daemonic, is French and a woman who is German, Germany being another country that is for Gaskell female like England.
The most important distinction for Gaskell between the female and the male is to be found in her description, in The Life of Charlotte Bront<*_>e-umlaut<*/>, of the different lots awaiting Branwell and the Bront<*_>e-umlaut<*/> girls. "There are always," Gaskell writes, "peculiar trials in the life of an only boy in a family of girls. He is expected to act a part in life; to do, while they are only to be" (LCB, p. 153). Gaskell had used these very words, also italicized, years earlier, in her conclusion to 'The Moorland Cottage,' in which she had eulogized Mrs. Buxton, a woman who would be, she wrote, remembered as one "who could do but little during her lifetime; who was doomed only to 'stand and wait'; who was meekly content to be gentle, holy, patient, and undefiled" (2:383). Men do, women are.
'The Moorland Cottage' develops this notion further when Mrs. Buxton attempts, being herself ideally feminine, to teach Maggie to become heroic in a female way. Maggie, like most of Gaskell's girls, begins with daemonic characteristics. She wants to play a heroic part, but she envisions herself in the role of someone who acts like Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc was, of course, a woman, but not to Gaskell a female type. Mrs. Buxton tries, instead, to teach Maggie what she calls 'noiseless' heroism by reminding her of women who have gone "through life quietly, with holy purposes in their hearts, to which they gave up pleasure and ease, in a soft, still succession of resolute days" (2:296). "Mrs. Gaskell suggests that Maggie, nagged and mistreated by her mother, "showed no little heroism" herself "in bearing meekly what she did every day" (2:296). A woman, thus, it is implied here, should not seek to act heroically. She must teach herself to endure, to invest her heroism in being.
Even a man, if he is female, must learn to realize his heroism, not in doing, but in being. This is the lesson Gaskell seeks to teach in her story 'The Sexton's Hero,' a tale she published in Howitt's Journal in September of 1847. The story concerns a man named Dawson who, being extremely religious, refuses to fight for the woman he loves when he is challenged by the sexton. The woman marries the sexton instead, and Dawson is branded a coward by everyone. He proves, however, he is not when, at the cost of his own life, he saves the sexton and his wife, who are about to drown in a flood. Leaping into the water, of course, Dawson is engaged in doing, but this is not his heroic moment. It is the moment only in which the sexton suddenly comes to realize that what was really heroic in Dawson was his initial refusal to fight and, even more, his quiet endurance of the contempt in which he was held all those years he was thought a coward. Having been feminized by religion, Dawson must for Gaskell become heroic in a female way. The sexton who, on Dawson's death, acquires his copy of the Bible and is converted to its ways, is feminized himself in turn. It is to preach this female heroism that he writes the story, in fact.
Nowhere in all of Gaskell's fiction is the idea that women are embodied as fully as in Cranford, a work that began as a single short story entitled 'The Last Generation in England' and appearing in Sartain's Union Magazine in July of 1849, but that, growing by installments published irregularly in Household Words between December of 1851 and May of 1853, reached the length of a short novel. The work is unusual in many ways, not in the pattern it reveals, but in the forms the patterns take. Generally, Gaskell does not, for instance, physically isolate what she sees as the male and female worlds. Most of her settings mix the two. But in Cranford she creates a place that is entirely female. There is, as well, a male place in the neighboring town of Drumble, but neither she nor we go there. We only hear of it now and then. To the extent that events in Drumble have an effect on events in Cranford, Drumble is important in the narrative. It is important too as a guide to the genders Gaskell assigns to a variety of doings, since she considers exclusively male all the activities of Drumble. Drumble is a large manufacturing town, concerned with business and with money, both of which are here defined as exclusively male domains. We know that money in Gaskell's mind is associated with love. Here we learn that men and women have different relationships to the image. Women need love. Men have it to give. And since the possession of love is male, so is the possession of money. The Cranford ladies know nothing of money. They never mention it, in fact (2:3). They know nothing of business either. The "most earnest and serious business" for the ladies of Cranford are card games, of which they are, in fact, very fond (2:80). Whenever a woman attempts to deal with money or business in Cranford, she fails. Thus, the heroine, Miss Matty, loses her money because her sister, rejecting advice from a Drumble businessman, invested their inheritance herself. Inevitably, the bank she chose for their investment goes bankrupt.
The man whose advice Miss Matty's sister would not take is the narrator's father. Gaskell must have begun the story not intending to make the narrator more than a formal figure through whom she would be able to tell her tale. At the beginning she is peripheral, mostly a witness to the events and only minimally a participant. She does not even acquire a name until we are halfway through the book, at which time she is called Mary Smith (2:164). But, as she kept on adding installments, Gaskell must have come to see her as an individual character. Little by little she gains a voice, then an actual personality, and eventually even a history. And it is obvious, as she develops, that Gaskell projects in Mary Smith her recollection of herself when she was about eighteen. The focus is on the usual details. Her mother is dead, her father is living, as Gaskell's was when she was eighteen. And her manner, which is kindly, gentle, funny, charming, sweet, yet incisive, shrewd, and impish, is exactly Gaskell's own.
Mary is a Drumble resident. Every so often, however, she feels the need to get away to Cranford. And this is the very need that drives Gaskell herself to write the tale. Since Drumble is male, it is the place in which, for Gaskell, the demon lives. There, she must always face confrontation, an endless struggle against her self. Therefore, like Mary Smith, she needs every so often to escape. She needs to get away from her demon to a completely female world, a world that does not threaten, that is, the composure of 'Mrs. Gaskell.' Gaskell created such a world for herself in her actual life. As Haldane has rightly pointed out, within her large circle of friends there was a very special group -Eliza Fox, the Winkworth sisters, Parthenope Nightingale, Mary Mohl, and a number of others as well -that consisted wholly of women. A similar circle exists in Cranford, some of the characters being modeled perhaps on people she knew in Manchester, others undoubtedly recreated out of the elderly ladies of Knutsford.
The town itself, whatever the source of the individual characters, is, as a fictional setting, a metaphor for the female place in the mind. That is why it is literally female. As Mary observes in her opening sentence, "In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses above a certain rent are women. If a married couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears; he is either fairly frightened to death by being the only man in the Cranford evening parties, or he is accounted for by being with his regiment, his ship, or closely engaged in business all the week in the great neighbouring commercial town of Drumble" (2:1). Nothing seems less Amazonian than the little old ladies of Cranford, but Gaskell knows what she wants to say. The ladies of Cranford are Amazonian, not because they are large or powerful, but because they have banished men, because they have exiled the male principle.
The making of this female place is the central point of the story. If the incremental installments have a unifying theme, it is the freeing of Miss Matty, who embodies the female spirit, from the domination of men. Miss Matty is Gaskell's ideal woman. She has a fairly limited intellect. "'I never,'" she says, "'feel as if my mind was what people call very strong'" (2:151). But she has "patience," "humility," "sweetness" (2:158). She is the stuff of which, in Gaskell, is made the angel in the house. Her sister, Deborah, a different type, to whom I shall return in a moment, had dreamed as a girl of marrying an archdeacon so that she could write his charges, but Matty had had a different wish. "'I was never ambitious,'" she says, "'nor could I have written charges, but I thought I could manage a house (my mother used to call me her right hand), and I was always so fond of little children'" (2:128-29). In time she does in fact become -although she does not ever marry -an angel to those who live in her house: her servant, her servant's husband, and their child. And, like Ruth, she even extends her role as an angel to the community.
<#FROWN:G33\>
SIX
For a World "Minute and vast and clear"
ELIZABETH BISHOP'S work demands that we look at how representation of the people and places of her life were part of her intense concern with representation itself: with drawing correspondences between word and experience, with the curious thingness of language, and with the question of accurate likeness-taking. Bishop's pragmatism, her gifts as an anatomist of appearance and sensation, as well as her treatment of her life as subject, should be firmly linked to the characterization of her work by Jarrell and others as a pursuit of the exact and the descriptive. Such a pursuit led Bishop to a special relation to the visual arts, manifested first as an intense curiosity about surrealism, and then, that interest fading, as an enduring concern with paintings and art objects as paradigmatic of her own relation to poetry.
Quite apart from any role that any single painter can be said to have played in her poetry, her connection to picture-making was direct, intense, and prolonged; she was both a maker and collector of pictures and objects throughout the whole of her life. We can catch glimpses of this involvement through her letters, from the frottages in the manner of Max Ernst that she reports sending to Marianne Moore, to the comic descriptions of herself as a painter in competition with her Brazilian cook, on down to the older self that made a box in homage to Joseph Cornell. Various examples of her painting also survive in possession of her heirs, and as covers for her books. Interviews early and late also stress the pleasure she took in finding and acquiring pieces of folk art. Miss Bishop in the world of her hand-worked birdcages, heirloom paintings, antique Bahian gilt mirrors, and beside the carved wood of large ship's figurehead, was clearly a find for those who believe in the extension of the mental through the material and visible.
The poems are full of movement. Still, there are moments, when through the art of her description, the poems themselves function almost as objects. Set firmly in their spaces, with very few poems attempting to use flashback or sharp breaks in time, they unroll across the unified surface of a map, follow the trajectory of a storm, or curve around a seashore, their canvas of expression unfolding with a strong directional sense, across a landscape or the surface of an object or animal from top to bottom by means of long, steady tracking shots. Bishop relies on enumeration, on stationing her redbud beside her dogwood, her deer beside a fence, or on counting and turning over her successive tropical leaves; she paints with color, indicates size and scale, illumination, and shadow, and depends on a strongly developed sense of the tactile. All of her observations appear in a logical and usually unbroken traverse of the poem's field. While the speakers of poems form 'The Man-Moth' on through to 'In the Waiting Room' may pause in vertigo, their dizzying homelessness is always at variance with the relatively stable spatial envelope of the poem.
Why this should be so seems a consequence of Bishop's determination to build substance from within the perpetually elusive and insubstantial sign. The ultimate realist, she aims to load and counterweight the always unsatisfactory immateriality of the poem and its inevitably symbolic nature with a vigorous spread of the sensory and immediate: with the goods of observation. Like the painter she occasionally became, Bishop as poet dealt with the problem of illusionism created by the act of reading common to both poetry and painting. The page is a way station, a port. Reading, one wants to fall through the print on the paper, to penetrate its light scrim, behind whose features through some peculiar method of evocation are suddenly located an interior body state, which is literally neither here nor there, but in some spaceless energy of mind, created by mind, off page. Bishop's fascination with objects, with the visual look and feel of existence, again and again calls up this questionable relation between internal and external, between depth and surface authenticity.
A poet generally compelled by mutability, by changing weathers, dissolving landscapes, and flooding memory, her skills are most often revealed in the difficult marriage of physically dimensionless language to a shifting, dimensional world. Like the Man-Moth seeking the moon in Bishop's poem of the same name, writing is a broad investigation of surface to which the poet is helplessly but quite heroically committed:<O_>poem<O/>
The Man-Moth fails, but the black scrolls of the poet are the record of his partial success. As Bishop saw it in 'Objects & Apparitions,' her translation of Octavio Paz's tribute to Joseph Cornell, both language and object meet in a glancing state of equality in their reflection of the enduring inner world:<O_>poem<O/>
Symbol-making, for Bishop, was always both verbal and pictorial.
The firm connection to the visual arts engages more than a single question of influence, a question, for instance, of how she may have dealt at the outset of her career with the surrealist Max Ernst or later with the box-maker Joseph Cornell. Rather, we need to ask first how Bishop treated vision itself. In her work, against what her sharp eyes see, she holds in disturbing and provocative tension what the body feels and what the mind knows and remembers. Two interrelated concerns, the problematic shifts between external and internal realities, and the problem of illusionism, of the relevance of representations of space in the largely nonspatial, nonphysical medium of the lyric poem, haunt her. In her strange man-moths, pulsating weeds, and in the feral activity of her maps, lighthouses, monuments, snails, sandpipers, and paper balloons, she makes stubbornly visible the elusive and strange richness in much of what we blindly label the ordinary and the plainly domestic. In that estrangement of the familiar she invites comparison with the surrealists.
In 'Elizabeth Bishop's Surrealist Inheritance,' Richard Mullen offered the first, and to date most extensive, treatment of Bishop and the visual arts. Mullen focuses at least as much on Bishop's divergence from surrealist practice as on her apparent submissions to its directives. The most important difference he identifies as Bishop's focus on objects; for Breton and other surrealists, "there were no objects, only subjects. They had no interest in the natural world per se." For Bishop, says Mullen, the "strangeness of our subjective selves, the queer struggle between conscious and unconscious, is projected outward into a world where the 'thingness of things' dominates."
In persuasive detail Mullen shows how Bishop shared with the surrealists a conviction about the importance of the disjunctive relations between our sleeping and waking minds, and a copious use of techniques of dissociation and displacement in description. Inversions and enlargements of scale, sudden and surprising shifts in point of view through personification, and an always subtle, but pervasive emphasis on dreamscape, mark her work from first to last. "I use dream material whenever I am lucky enough to have any," she wrote to Anne Stevenson in March 1963.
Mullen demonstrates at length how two poems drew directly and substantially from surrealist sources. In his correspondence with Bishop, she acknowledged, if a little dismissively, her wide reading of surrealist poetry and prose, including Francis Ponge. In comparing her prose poem, 'Giant Snail' with Ponge's 'Snails' from Le Parti Pris des Choses, Mullen flags some striking parallels in language and imagery between the two texts. Of her acquaintance with surrealist graphic art, Bishop writes: "I didn't know any of the surrealist writers or painters - I just met 2 or 3 painters, that's all." Mullen points out that she owned an early edition of Max Ernst's Histoire Naturelle; Bishop also acknowledges that the technique of frottage that Ernst illustrates therein produced her poem, 'The Monument.'
In the process of frottage, or rubbing, which Ernst described as an "optical excitant of somnolent vision," the artist placed paper across wood or other surfaces and objects, and then rubbed away at the paper with blacklead. The subsequent drawing produced the "optical excitant," or object of meditation, which produced further drawings: "the drawings thus obtained steadily lose, thanks to a series of suggestions and transmutations occurring to one spontaneously - the character of the material being studied - wood - and assume the aspect of unbelievably clear images of a nature probably able to reveal the first cause of the obsession or to produce a simulacrum thereof." Ernst invented frottage after a revery into the hours of childhood, when he remembered staring at an imitation mahogany panel across from his bed at naptime.
Bishop, who may have been sympathetically drawn not only by the technique but by the childhood source of it, was soon manufacturing frottages at a great rate, and as she wrote to Marianne Moore rather mockingly, "I can turn them out by the dozen now and shall send you one." But her poem 'The Monument' offers more direct evidence of this new pastime. Like Ernst's frottages, Bishop's verbal exercise uses its wooden sea-surface as springboard into a meditation on the strange space of art's reality, both within and without, penetrable and impenetrable, curiously living and dead, material and immaterial. The poem describes an allegorized object standing in for the artist's relation to the world:<O_>poem<O/>
In the play of its altering pronouns, moving freely between singular and plural, and in working out the drama of its dialectal voices, the poem exploits the work of art's peek-a-boo vantages vis-<*_>a-grave<*/>-vis perceiver, perceived, and the idea of perception itself. Past her twenties, Bishop never did anything quite so programmatically allegorical again.
Mullen puts his finger decisively on the growing causes for Bishop's dissatisfaction with surrealism. There are generally four reasons: first, the surrealist lack of interest in the natural object; second, the surrealist privileging of the realm of the unconscious over the conscious (Bishop records them as fluctuating in dominance but equal in importance); third, their emphasis on the revolutionary impact of disintegrating orders of perception (Bishop concerned herself with a balanced dialectic between associative and dissociative powers of perception); and fourth, the surrealist lack of faith in conventional language and logic.
But we ought not overlook the generally youthful character of Bishop's experiments with surrealism. While her preoccupation with oneiric imagery only deepened throughout a working life in poetry, her eventual resistance to surrealist practice came openly to the surface in several ways. In 1946, in a letter to Ferris Greenslet, her editor at Houghton Mifflin, she rushes in to avert a public association with Max Ernst by way of jacket copy. In some obvious distress she writes: "In the letter that Marianne Moore wrote for me she commented on some likeness to the painter Max Ernst. Although many years ago I once admired one of Ernst's albums I believe that Miss Moore is mistaken about his ever having been an influence, and since I have disliked all of his painting intensely and am not a surrealist I think it would be misleading to mention my name in connection with his."
By the early 1960s, after acknowledging Ernst's role in the composition of 'The Monument,' Bishop was still busy trying to stamp out all talk of influence. In January 1964 she writes to Anne Stevenson: "You mention Ernst again. Oh dear - I wish I'd never mentioned him at all, because I think he's a dreadful painter." But her general antagonism was already visible in unpublished notebooks of the thirties and forties. In one jotting she writes: "Semi-surrealist poetry terrifies me because of the sense of irresponsibility & [indecipherable] [wild?] danger it gives of the mind being 'broken down' - I want to produce the opposite effect." Somewhat later, in notes about her reading of an episode from Crevecoeur, she says, under the heading of 'Tact & Embarrassment': "Why in 'Letters From an American Farmer' does it embarrass one when he speaks of the wasp on the child's eyelid, etc.? The whole story of the wasp-nest is fantastic, surrealistic, we'd say now. Is surrealism just a new method of dealing bold-facedly with what is embarrassing?
<#FROWN:G34\>
CHAPTER 5
Pathfinding
It must have been in the spring of 1920. The end of the First World War had thrown Germany's youth into great turmoil. The reins of power had fallen from the hands of a deeply disillusioned older generation, and the younger one drew together in larger and smaller groups in an attempt to blaze new paths, or at least to discover a new star to steer by."
With these opening words Heisenberg set the stage for his 1969 reminiscences, Der Teil und das Ganze (English title: Physics and Beyond). He began not with childhood or adolescence but with the period that most profoundly influenced him as both scientist and citizen - the chaotic years immediately following World War I. And he focused neither on family nor on formal education but rather on his participation in the postwar German youth movement, the experience that most directly affected the formation of his adult values.
The first chapter of Physics and Beyond refers to Werner's diverse, often difficult and confusing experiences during the early postwar years. Between neo-Socratic dialogues on the nature of atoms, Heisenberg discusses his assistance in suppressing the Bavarian soviet republic, his remembered reading of Plato, and his study of textbook atoms. He also recalls debates with his comrades about the lost war, the meaning of social order, the search for order within their own lives, and their developing notions of nature and homeland. One theme emerges clearly from this rather muddled account: the desire for order in all aspects of thought and life. Heisenberg and his friends longed to regain a sense of purpose and belonging - and they found it with each other in the youth movement.
For Heisenberg himself, there were added benefits. The youth movement became a vehicle for his adolescent rebellion, adventurous impulses, and budding leadership qualities. It spurred his intellectual independence, taught him how his primary interests - science and music - could transcend the chaos of daily life, and gave him close and secure friendships with his comrades, with whom he formed valuable lifelong relationships.
As Heisenberg wrote in the opening lines of Physics and Beyond, the postwar youth movement grew out of a profound sense of crisis that engendered a spirit of rebellion among bourgeois German youth after the collapse of the old order at the close of the world war. But the roots of rebellion reached back into the prewar decades. Young people increasingly detested the charades of bourgeois propriety and nationalistic sabre rattling and felt no desire to pattern their lives on them. By the same token, middle-class society throughout Europe provided little place at that time for adolescence, the crucial transition from childhood to adult roles. Bourgeois youth, like the children seen in Renaissance paintings, were expected to behave like miniature adults, to prepare for their adult careers and future station in life, and to accept without question the values and ideals handed to them.
The rapid urbanization of Germany at the end of the nineteenth century brought with it the problem of what to do with young people in large cities. Where could they come together outside school? Where could they find the adventure, romance, and excitement of youth? Before the war, some urban youngsters literally headed for the hills, seeking to rediscover basic values in the romance of nature, music, dance, and Germanic ritual. Groups like the Wanderv<*_>o-umlaut<*/>gel (Migratory Birds) and the Freideutsche Jugend (Free German Youth) embodied the spirit of prewar youthful rebellion in northern Germany, but neither survived the war intact. Of the 11,000 members of the Wanderv<*_>o-umlaut<*/>gel, 7000 perished in the war; the Freideutsche Jugend fragmented into factions.
For those too young to fight, the state provided youth organizations, paramilitary training, and agricultural assistance work. Youngsters were aggressively indoctrinated with nationalistic values to prepare them for the task their elders set them: to fight and die in a brutal war. Those not battling at the front struggled at home with bitter cold, desperate privations, and near starvation. How carefree can a teenager be when he grows so weak from hunger that he falls off his bicycle into a ditch?
The sudden, humiliating defeat of Germany, the loss of friends and relatives, the collapse of the old regime, the political chaos that ensued, and the forced democratization of their schools traumatized middle-class youngsters, leaving them angry and mistrustful. "A gaping hole opened up for us young people," recalls Wolfgang R<*_>u-umlaut<*/>del, one of Heisenberg's comrades. Their response: "We're going to make something for ourselves instead, without an organization from above."
The situation was particularly acute for bourgeois Bavarian youngsters, many of whom belonged to the only existing youth organization, the gymnasium's Military Preparedness Association. Few had any use for the North German, 'Prussian' youth groups, including the tradition-minded Boy Scouts. The Boy Scouts had originated in England and had spread to Germany in 1909, where they were called Pfadfinder (Pathfinders). Like their English counterparts, German Pathfinders were paramilitary and puritanical, but unlike the English Scouts they focused less on international ideals and more on preparing their young members to fit into existing German adult social structure. Two years after the First Munich Pathfinder Troop was founded in 1909, it joined the state-supported Military Preparedness Association.
At war's end, the adult-led Preparedness Association lost any raison d'<*_>e-circ<*/>tre, and Pathfinder units began dropping out. In January 1919, a Pathfinder troop in Regensburg rebelled against the 'decadent' adult values that, in their view, had failed to preserve the monarchy. At the same time, they rejected socialist attempts to dilute the cultural elite by democratizing their schools. The Regensburg troop quit the state's Preparedness Association and pushed for a renewal of all German Pathfinders, and ultimately society itself, through the ideals of the Wanderv<*_>o-umlaut<*/>gel - a genuine Jugendbewegung (youth movement) that would replace adult Jugendpflege (youth care).
On Easter Sunday 1919, at the height of the soviet republic's power, the equally traumatized Munich troop followed Regensburg's example. A month later, during Hoffman's socialist restoration, the Preparedness Association changed its name to the more youthful-sounding Jungbayernbund (Young Bavaria League), and in the last months of the school year, during the bloody mopping-up operations in Munich, a group of Preparedness boys at the Max-Gymnasium debated their future.
Wolfgang (Wolfi) R<*_>u-umlaut<*/>del, then 13 years old, had belonged only briefly to the Max-Gymnasium's Preparedness unit before it changed its name and some of its activities. Under intense pressure from their elders to support the socialist restoration, he and his friends now resisted 'youth care' under any name. Wolfi, his older brother Eberhard, and several other boys from their Preparedness unit gathered one day during recess at the old fountain in the courtyard of the Max-Gymnasium. They agreed to reject adult youth care but still wanted the guidance of an elder. They decided to seek an older boy of suitable character to replace teachers and adults as their leader. At Wolfi's suggestion they turned to a well-respected older group leader in the Young Bavaria League - Werner Heisenberg.
Werner satisfied every prerequisite: he was an older student, disillusioned with youth care, well liked and well regarded at the school for his mathematical and musical talents, and endowed with intellectual self-confidence, good looks, and leadership qualities. He was also known as "a very great friend of nature," familiar with the mountains and countryside - a perfect choice. Werner, then 17, in the eighth gymnasium grade, and just finishing his military duties following the suppression of the soviet republic, readily accepted the boys' invitation. By the summer of 1919 he was guiding Wolfi and eight or nine of Wolfi's friends into the postwar world.
Gruppe Heisenberg, as it was known, belonged at first to the Regensburg reform movement within the Young Bavaria League, then became independent in 1921. It remained closely associated with the independent Regensburg faction and officially rejoined it in 1922. According to Gottfried Simmerding, one of Wolfi R<*_>u-umlaut<*/>del's classmates who joined Gruppe Heisenberg in the fall of 1919, the group was then part of Troop B18 of the Young Bavaria League, then headed by Dr. Kemmer, the gymnasium's former Preparedness commander and one of Werner's former teachers. The troop consisted at the time of six or seven groups led by Hans Schlenk, Heisenberg's friend in grade 9B and a war veteran who later became a well-known actor. Most of the troop members had previously served in the agricultural assistance service and in Major Pfl<*_>u-umlaut<*/>gel's schoolboy unit during the suppression of the soviet republic.
Besides Werner, the group leaders in Troop B18 included Heisenberg's comrades Kurt Pfl<*_>u-umlaut<*/>gel and Werner Marwede. Marwede's younger brother Heini (Heinrich) helped found Gruppe Heisenberg. Werner's group met regularly with the other boys in Troop B18 in several basement rooms provided by the Max-Gymnasium; after breaking with the Young Bavaria League, they met in the Heisenberg home.
Just days after the formation of Gruppe Heisenberg, the Regensburg reformers, led by Franz Ludwig Habbel, a wounded war veteran, and Ludwig Voggenreiter, a publisher's son, called a meeting of all Pathfinder leaders interested in reform. Held on the weekend of August 1-3, 1919, the meeting took place in a medieval castle, Schloss Prunn, in the Altm<*_>u-umlaut<*/>hl River valley near Regensburg. Group leader Heisenberg was still in the throes of his own postwar and postsoviet confusion when he encountered a young man his age on Leopoldstrasse near the university who, as he recalled it, told him of the Schloss Prunn meeting in the passionate words of an inspired youth: "'All of us intend to be there, and we want you to come. Everyone should come. We want to find out for ourselves what sort of future we should build.' His voice had the kind of edge I had not heard before. So I decided to go to Schloss Prunn, and Kurt wanted to join me."
On Friday, August 1, young Werner, with his knapsack and a guitar, took the train with Kurt to Kelheim at the end of the Altm<*_>u-umlaut<*/>hl Valley. There they joined a stream of boys hiking the remaining several kilometers to the castle. The valley and castle made an ideal romantic setting for the adolescent adventure. The narrow valley, a prehistoric Danube River bed, is lined by steep cliffs and jutting rocks. The castle, still in existence, perches precariously at the top of one of the cliffs, and above it lies a large wood where the boys pitched their tents.
About 250 Pathfinders found their way from all over Germany and from Vienna, Austria, to the meeting. Gathered in their castle in the sky, the boys were alone at last to debate the questions of the day that concerned them most: Had the German soldiers fallen in vain, now that the war was lost? How should young people respond to the new political situation? How should they interpret Boy Scout ideals of internationalism, self-sacrifice, and tradition? But the crucial questions were those of any reform movement: How was the movement to define itself, and how was it to address the decadent mass society in which it existed? The answers were vital to Werner, who had hoped to discover his own order at the castle - a philosophical, social, even personal harmony. "I myself was much too unsure," he recalled, "to join in the debates, but I listened to them and thought about the concept of order myself."
Incredibly, their discussions were recorded and a transcript later published in Der Weisse Ritter (The White Knight), the periodical of reform-movement leaders. The meeting was intended to be of lasting significance. The transcript and related writings vividly display the German youth rebellion - indeed, the rebellion of German society at large - against the modernity of urban, industrial 'civilization' and the bitter sense of loss of common purpose, of meaningful traditions, of well-grounded values with the passing of a seemingly simpler age. According to the transcript, the young men agreed that their society had declined into lifeless mechanism, capitalistic greed, urban anonymity, and personal hypocrisy. Young people had to cut the chains of material and moral decadence. A year earlier, Regensburg reformer Franz Ludwig Habbel had declared: "The first demand of our conviction is for truth and uprightness.
<#FROWN:G35\>
CHAPTER 5
Boston
LOOKING BACK over his own literary apprenticeship, Robert Lowell dated a turning point from the day in the spring of 1937 when he drove into the "frail agrarian mailbox post" of Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon's house in Tennessee. "I had crashed the civilization of the South," was the droll, supercilious way he put it two decades later. He got out of his car to disguise the damage to the rickety post and was promptly welcomed by the southern literary elite as a valuable rebel from New England: a renegade from the Lowell clan was a real coup for the Fugitives. The mythic status they conferred upon him - "I too was part of a legend. I was Northern, disembodied, a Platonist, a Puritan, an abolitionist" - gave him one of the literary themes that dominated his early writing and underlay all his work.
Jean Stafford's own story of arrival was a nightmarishly distorted echo. A year and a half later, home from Kenyon on Christmas vacation in 1938, Lowell smashed his parents' car, with Stafford in the passenger seat, into a wall in a dead-end Cambridge street. She was rushed to the hospital with "massive head injuries," as a friend described it, "everything fractured, skull, nose, jaw, everything." The damage would never be entirely disguised, and Stafford was soon made to feel she had 'crashed' the civilization of Boston - rudely, not heroically. Lowell's parents adopted an attitude of chilling detachment from the unpedigreed interloper. Yet for Stafford the collision took on symbolic dimensions that helped give her the themes around which her emerging style matured. Inspiration did not come immediately; her head needed mending, and the symbols required time to take shape. In fact, Stafford had another unsuccessful novel to go before she found the frame and images, and the distance, to sustain a narrative.
The disastrous car ride with Lowell, a notoriously bad driver who had probably been drinking that evening, was the climax of the high drama that had begun two months earlier when Stafford escaped from Iowa in the middle of the night. Soon after she finally surfaced in Cambridge in November, she had confessed to Hightower the cause of her delay in arriving - the rendevousrendezvous with Lowell in Cleveland. Having rearranged his life and rented more spacious rooms to welcome Stafford, Hightower understandably felt betrayed. But he trusted her claim that she was afraid of Cal, and made clear that he was still ready to try living with her.
Lowell certainly was far from the low-key suitor she was used to from her years with Hightower. Cal's romantic history before Stafford had consisted of a swift, fierce, finally aborted campaign two years earlier to marry a twenty-four-year-old Boston debutante, Anne Dick, an unlikely match opposed by his parents - which had only spurred Lowell on. His father had been the victim of his violent zeal on that occasion: protesting his parents' meddling disapproval, Cal appeared on their doorstep and knocked his father down in the front hallway while his mother watched.
Stafford had a taste of Lowell's wild determination during a visit from him in Cambridge over Thanksgiving when, she wrote to her friend Mock, "he got savage and I got scared." The issue was marriage, she said, which he insisted on and she resisted. "A friend of his, a young man from Harvard College," she went on, "told me in a private interview that Mr. L. wanted me more than anything else in his life and that I wd. never be free of him, that he will continue to track me down as long as I live, a very pleasant thought. It makes me perfectly sick because he is an uncouth, neurotic, psychopathic murderer-poet."
How much of the account reflected her typical dramatizing is hard to say, but she was evidently unnerved. Hightower's apartment was not a workable haven, and she soon told him that she had better move out to Concord to be safe. Stafford clearly wanted distance from Hightower too, or at least couldn't manage in the flesh the intimacy she had described in her letters from Iowa. "The full articulation of passionate love" didn't happen with the fevered eagerness she had conjured in words; living together faltered from the start, when Stafford told Hightower she was frigid. Whatever she meant by it, and whether or not it was true, he understood the message. It was one more stunning reversal, but the friendship didn't collapse.
They continued to see each other after she moved to Concord, and Hightower planned a modest Christmas celebration. But on December 21 he received an urgent message to call Mount Auburn Hospital. He found Stafford swaddled in bandages and, learning of the accident, discovered that she hadn't kept Lowell at a safe distance after all. A loyal bedside visitor for several weeks, Hightower finally sent a letter announcing the end of their relationship, to which Stafford replied with an atypically unadorned indictment of herself: "I will say nothing, only this: I love you, but my selfishness is so all consuming that I can't help hurting you." Two weeks alter, she adorned it somewhat: "I want children, I want a house. I want to be a faithful woman. I want those things more than I want my present life of a writer, but I shall have none because my fear will make me unfaithful and desire cannot now be hoped for, it is too late and I have been too much revolted." It was an echo of her declarations of frigidity and of the journal entry about her profound loneliness that she had sent him over the summer: here too she viewed herself tragically, as both victim and victimizer, maintaining that her "life of a writer" was no compensation for the emotional commitment and sexual fulfillment that eluded her.
Once Hightower had retreated, Stafford had few other places to turn during a very painful convalescence. Neither Lowell nor the Atlantic Monthly Press - the other Boston attractions that had drawn her - proved a source of much support. Lowell was not even at hand. He returned to Kenyon for the spring term of his junior year, leaving Blair Clark, a friend from his prep school days at St. Mark's, to help Stafford deal with the lawsuit it had been agreed she would file against Lowell to pay for her hospitalization. Clark was also supposed to protect her from Lowell's parents, which was a full-time job, if the rumors that reached Cal in Ohio about the Lowell's bullying conduct toward her were to be believed. "About Boston," Lowell chided his parents in the summer, "I gather many people think you have behaved shabbily about Jean's accident. Such opinion is not my concern yet I cannot feel the action of my family has in all cases been ethicilly [sic] ideal."
Stafford hadn't managed to establish a literary life in Boston that offered much relief or gratification either, though she had been busy making herself known at the Atlantic Monthly Press from the moment she arrived. Her Neville manuscript, based on her Stephens experience, earned her praise from the editors there, whose report judged that "she can handle the English language as a skilled carpenter handles a chisel - with ease, deftness, accuracy, and rhythm," but they indicated that she would have to rework it completely before they would consider a contract. In fact, Edward Weeks, the editor in chief, went so far as to suggest a rough outline for a fundamental overhaul of her "ironic, heartless story of a small college community" in a memo to another editor:
It seems to me that if the girl can link together the three points of interest now visible in her work (1) Gretchen's affection for her German professor father and her revolt form the ranch (2) college life with its stimulus and dissatisfaction (3) and her experiences in Germany where presumably she finds that there are worse things than the life she has run away from in the United States, she would have a good book. I should presume that if parts 2 and 3 were bound together with a love story, the book would have a rising interest which it at present seems to lack.
Stafford was prepared to be a docile, and speedy, student. Eight days later, on December 9, Archie Ogden sent her a check for two hundred and fifty dollars as an option on the book and said they looked forward to a "sizable portion" of the manuscript six months later, on June 1, 1939.
The guidance Stafford received didn't sound very promising. What Weeks had extracted from Stafford's ungainly Neville undertaking - a jumbled gallery of satiric portraits hung on a plot line too arbitrary and ludicrous to be compelling - was a broad (and banal) outline of her autobiography. That was exactly what she had been trying to bury beneath the more objective enterprise of a larger social satire, at the advice of the readers of her first solipsistic venture, Which No Vicissitude. Not that Weeks had any reason to know the creative history of this fledgling writer, but even by his own standards, which were apparently mainly commercial, his advice was dubious. After all, he and his staff had just told her that the college theme was rather narrow and overdone, and a year earlier she had sent sections of her Germany diary to the Atlantic Monthly at the suggestion of Howard Mumford Jones, only to meet the objection that "there is too much about Germany on the market at present."
The prospects for the book looked even less promising two weeks later, when Stafford found herself in the hospital, with a crushed nose, a broken cheekbone, and a skull fractured in several places. Ogden urged her to give "no further thought to that novel of yours until relaxation has taken every last kink out of your cranium," but relaxation didn't seem to be what Stafford wanted - and it certainly wasn't what she got. After spending roughly a month in the hospital, she had to return twice in the spring for harrowing surgery on her nose. Her convalesence convalescence was extremely uncomfortable (along with nose troubles and difficulty breathing, she was plagued by headaches). And it was lonely, though she didn't go straight back to her Concord room. She was welcomed first by the Ogdens, with whom she had become friendly; then an acquaintance put her in touch with a wealthy Milton, Massachusetts, family, who took her in. Still, she felt bereft of close companions and was apparently finding solace in solitary drinking. By the summer, she admitted, however jokingly, to some concern: "I have taken the veil and at the moment do not think I will become alchoholic [sic]," she wrote to Hightower.
Meanwhile, the negotiations with Lowell, not to speak of those with his parents, were far from smooth. Once again, Stafford's relationship with a man was radically unstable. His pursuit apparently continued to be unnervingly intense; he tracked her down at a friend's apartment near dawn during a visit she made to New York that spring. She in turn continued to be thoroughly unpredictable, now eager to see him, now ready to denounce him. After welcoming Lowell's company in New York, she anticipated his return to Boston for Easter vacation with trepidation. It seems that another trip to New York, during which she had seen Ford Madox Ford and his wife, had revived her fears. In a note to the Ogdens, she reported only half facetiously that the Fords, "convinced that Cal Lowell is really pathological and capable of murder, told me such horrible things about him that I am thinking of pressing Stitch [Evarts, her lawyer] into service to get out an injunction against him. He is due to arrive next week. I may have to find a hiding place." but she didn't, and when he arrived Lowell seemed "completely metamorphosed," she said later. They enjoyed a genteel time visiting his elegant relatives, and by the time Lowell returned to Kenyon to finish the spring term, they were engaged, though Stafford kept the betrothal a secret.
<#FROWN:G36\>
MIDDLE OF THE JOURNEY
On Trial with Ernest
THROUGHOUT THE MID-1930s, Archibald MacLeish continued to produce quantities of copy for the columns of Fortune. As a result of his eminence and his sympathy with the New Deal, he covered the government beat in Washington, turning out stories on inflation, taxation, the NRA (National Recovery Act), and social security. But he was also dispatched on special assignment to destinations far more distant than Washington, D.C. He did farming stories in Iowa and Montana, and he journeyed to three different continents - Europe, Asia, and South America - for Luce's magazine. Despite these frequent trips, during this period MacLeish solidified his family relationships and reached new, and sometimes bitter, levels of understanding about his friendships.
On a trip to England and France in the spring of 1933, he combined his journalistic duties for Fortune with a voyage around the Mediterranean on the Murphys' new hundred-foot schooner, Weatherbird. In England he was doing research for a story on Harry Selfridge, the American-born "merchant prince of Oxford Street." One Sunday he saw much of the English isle when "young bucko Selfridge" hoisted him into the sky in the rumble seat of his Puss Moth for a morning trip to Cambridge, a teatime visit in the west counties, and back to London for the evening. "Imagine any other country calling a [flying] machine a Puss Moth," he wrote Hemingway. He escaped to Paris on the day before Good Friday, accompanied by a mob of English tourists munching on buns "so as not to have to eat that horrible French food." Aboard the Weatherbird there wasn't much to do, but the company and the food were fine, and he and Ada came back rested.
No sooner had they returned to the States than a wire arrived from Hemingway, who was outraged by Max Eastman's New Republic review of his book on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon. "Bull in the Afternoon," the review was called, and that was bad enough. What most troubled Hemingway, though, were Eastman's slurs against his manhood. Hemingway wore "false hair" on his literary chest, Eastman wrote. "It is of course a commonplace that Hemingway lacks the serene confidence that he is a full-sized man," he added. Delighted to serve as his friend's paladin, Archie immediately wrote Bruce Bliven, editor of the New Republic, objecting to the scurrilous remarks. In fact it was "a commonplace" among "the young sensitives" who envied Hemingway his accomplishment to impugn his masculinity, MacLeish pointed out. His letter set out to correct this slander. He had thrice seen Hemingway in danger, Archie wrote, "once at sea, once in the mountains and once on a Spanish street." He had also seen others in similar positions during the war. But no one had ever impressed him "as strongly as has Mr. Hemingway with his complete confidence in his own courage, nor has any other man more completely justified that confidence in the event." As for the issue of virility, he could only refer Mr. Eastman to the birth records of Paris and Kansas City.
Bliven declined to print the letter. Instead he showed it to Eastman, who wrote Archie in return that he had intended nothing of the sort, please believe him. Nor would Bliven publish a three-sentence counter-attack from Hemingway himself. He was "through with politeness in letters," a frustrated Archie wrote John Bishop. "Hereafter I am going to hit where and when I can and take whatever they have to send back." At the same time, he assured Hemingway that no one but Ada knew of Ernest's cable and no one ever would as far as he was concerned. Besides, he would have written to object to Eastman's foul, filthy article without Hemingway's wire. There the matter rested until, four years later, Hemingway and Eastman met unexpectedly in Max Perkin's office at Scribners and engaged in a brief, inconsequential wrestling match.
Although his attempt at championing Ernest's cause hadn't worked out, Hemingway was moved to remember Archie's kindness to him over the years: coming out to Billings to visit him after he'd broken his arm, for example, and keeping his "god damned head working" during the Paris winter of 1926-27, when he was leaving Hadley for Pauline. Winner Take Nothing, his next book of stories, published in October, was dedicated to "A. MacLeish." The ambiguity was deliberate. When Archie thanked him for the dedication, Ernest said, "What makes you think you're A. MacLeish?" By not spelling it out, Hemingway managed to acknowledge a debt to Ada as well as to Archie.
Besides inviting a response to the Eastman 'false hair' review, Ernest asked another favor of Archie in the summer of 1933. Jane Mason, the beautiful and sexually adventurous young wife of Grant Mason, Pan Am's man in Havana, landed in Doctors Hospital, New York, and Ernest - who was almost certainly her lover - asked MacLeish to visit her there. Jane's hospitalization was a consequence of not one but two accidents. In the first of these, she drove her Packard down a forty-foot embankment to avoid an oncoming bus. A few days later, she jumped off the second-story balcony of her home in Cuba and broke her back. Her husband chose to regard this as a grandstand play for sympathy, and shipped her off alone for recuperation and psychiatric treatment in New York. Hemingway, who regarded Grant Mason as "Husbandus Americanus Yalemaniensus Twirpi Ciego," was more sympathetic to Jane's plight. She had had the bad luck to marry the wrong husband, he wrote Archie, and it was "no fun to break your bloody back at 25." At the same time, characteristically, Ernest could be cruel about her situation. He'd tried to write a story, he said, that began, "Every spring Mrs. M. wanted to marry someone else but in the spring of 1933 she broke her back." She had done herself this injury, it was widely thought in Havana, out of her despairing love for Ernest. How much of this Archie knew is unclear, but he had already visited Jane in the hospital at Ernest's request once before, when she came to New York for a minor operation in May 1932. So he of course went to see her again in 1933, and this time stayed long enough to become friends. Or at least they were on good enough terms so that when they met in London two years later, she tried to arrange a private interview for Archie, who was writing a Fortune article on King George V, with the Prince of Wales. She was by this time something of a celebrated international beauty, one who had just been on safari in Africa "with 14 men" and in England was bidden to dine with the prince (who would before long give up his claim to the throne by marrying another previously wed American woman).
Apparently, when she got back to Cuba from these adventures, Jane told Hemingway that his friend MacLeish had made a pass at her, though she had only "sisterly feelings" toward him. Those were the only kind of feelings she was invited to have, Archie wrote Ernest early in 1936. Her remark had "a damned unpleasant connotation," and Archie "resented the hell out of it." Jane Mason, he said by way of summing up, "was the only person that I can think of offhand who does what she does, and the only one who has done what is to date the most considerable injury anyone has done me: the effective destruction of one of the few human relationships I ever gave a deep damn about." Hemingway was now disillusioned about Jane also. "As for your sisterhood pal she is a bitch say i and am documented," he replied. It seems clear that Jane Mason's physical attractions and fickle ways helped to break down the Hemingway-MacLeish friendship.
This relationship followed a pattern in the 1930s. Ernest would eagerly encourage Archie to join him at Key West. Usually Archie could not take the time, and when he did, he wished he hadn't. This was the case during their Dry Tortugas journey in 1932, and again in May 1934. On the latter occasion they were fishing on the Gulf Stream, and MacLeish hooked a sailfish. Hemingway had warned him in advance to give the sailfish plenty of slack, since striking too soon might jerk the bait out of his jaws. But Archie, seasick in the rough weather and excited at the sight of the sailfish leaping, could not resist the temptation to strike. According to Arnold Samuelson, a young would-be writer who went along on that trip, Ernest shouted a series of commands to accompany this episode. "Don't strike until I tell you. There! He hit it! Slack to him! Slack to him!!! Shit! Why the hell didn't you slack to him?" Once again, as during the episode of the fire in 1932, Archie had not lived up to Ernest's expectations under the pressure of action. In the aftermath of this visit, Hemingway wrote Waldo Peirce that from this point on he was only going to like the people he liked, not the bastards who liked him.
Archie went away stung by Ernest's criticism, yet soon was prepared, "sullen resentful Scot" though he was, to forget the insult and resume the friendship. In July 1934 he wrote Ernest that he'd been asked to do an article on him by Henry Seidel Canby at the Saturday Review. Go ahead, Ernest wrote back. "If you don't he will get somebody that no likum dog." But stick to the work and lay off his person, Hemingway advised. He wasn't interested in reading about his family or his religion, his war experiences or his high school sports career. In the end MacLeish decided not to do the article. "I knew Ernest well enough to know that anything I wrote about him would be wrong." The aborted connection with the Saturday Review proved to be fortunate, however. In June 1935 the magazine was considering an article on Hemingway by the psychiatrist who had treated Jane Mason. MacLeish heard about this, got hold of a copy, found it to be "just shit," and persuaded the editors not to run it. Alerting Hemingway to these events, Archie added that he hoped Ernest wouldn't think he'd been "interfering again," as in the New Republic fiasco. By now Hemingway was again urging MacLeish to join him on the Gulf Stream, this time at Bimini, where beautiful women, exotic food and drink, and gigantic fish awaited him. Then he inserted a jocular dig at Archie's recent contacts with the left. "Shit Mac you must come down and get to know the individual as well as the Masses and the Classes."
In the course of their friendship, Hemingway repeatedly found MacLeish unworthy in one way or another, and lashed out at him as a consequence. Wounded by these outbursts, Archie was still inclined to forgive them, especially since Ernest himself usually felt contrite before long. But it was an uncomfortable role Archie was asked to play - that of a man seven years Hemingway's senior constantly in the dock as the younger man passed judgment - and eventually he declined the part. Another complication was that the two were forever engaged in a competitive contest of one sort or another, physical or mental or artistic. On one of Ernest's visits to New York, Bob and Adele Lovett took him and Archie to the recently opened Radio City Music Hall. Before the show, Ernest pulled up his shirt, displayed his stomach muscles, and dared Archie to punch him in the stomach. Archie did so, not terribly hard. Then MacLeish said, "Well, that's not so good. Look at my stomach," which was always very flat and hard. There they were, two of the prominent American writers of the century, competitively displaying their abdominal musculature in the lobby of Radio City Music Hall.
Adele Lovett's interest in literature led her to a close friendship with yet another American writer.
<#FROWN:G37\>Morrison may well have struck her as the ultimate catch. Writers of the sixties outdid themselves attempting to capture his sensuality. Biographers noted that in black leather he "looked like a naked body dipped in India ink." Journalists referred to him as a "surf-born Dionysus" and a "hippie Adonis." Rock critic Lillian Roxon wrote adulatingly, "The Doors are unendurable pleasure prolonged." Richard Goldstein lionized him as "a sexual shaman" and a "street punk gone to heaven and reincarnated as a choir boy."
Describing a typical Jim Morrison sexual encounter - this one at the Alta Cienega Motel in West Hollywood - his biographers Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman revealed that he first elicited the girl's life story and then "butt-fucked" her. If Morrison got as far as Janis's life story that night in her bedroom, he learned that they had much in common. Jim wanted to be a writer, and Janis, too, intended to write a book, according to Sam. They were both avid readers and both had been Venice, California, beatniks because of On the Road. Both read Nietzsche, Ferlinghetti, McClure, and Corso, and if Janis wasn't an expert on Plutarch, Baudelaire, and Norman O. Brown that Jim was, she could readily discuss Gurdjieff, Wilfried Owen, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, not to mention The Sensuous Woman.
Jim and Janis remained cloistered in her room for hours, while Sam, Dave Richards, and Pam waited just outside the door. Says Dave, "Finally, I said to Pam, 'You know, if you're waiting for him to come out of there, he's probably not going to be out of there until tomorrow. He's not coming out.'
"'Oh, yes he will!' she said.
"She was pretty young. 'No,' I said. 'He's not coming out.' Sam and I had ulterior motives, anyway. Finally, she got really mad, and she said, 'Call a cab.' I called a cab and later, as I was walking her down to the street, I opened the door of the cab for her and she got in and Sam went in right past me, pulled the door shut, and the cab went off with both of them in it. I told Sam later, 'You son of a bitch!' He said, 'You got to be quick.' Sam slithered right in there. Sam had this myth in his mind about the equipment men: 'Goddamn, you guys get all the women because you always get to town first.' Since he was a star and making more money than us, he'd invested the oppressed workers with great sexual prowess. That's what was in his head."
Sam confirms Dave's account, saying, "Yes, it's true. The equipment men arrive first at a gig and get all the girls. At last, with Pam, I could challenge the typical proletarian myth about the potency of the working class."
Sometime after Janis's night with Morrison, she told her friend Henry Carr, "I don't like Jim Morrison. He was okay in bed, but when we got up the next morning, he asked for a shot of sloe gin." By Janis's standards, sloe gin was a sissy drink.
Pamela Courson, though hurt when Jim slept around, went along with the Lizard King's peccadillos. Given her choice, Pam would have preferred a 'more traditional' relationship. She was living with Jim at this time at 1812 Rothdell Trail in LA's Laurel Canyon and they were already playing the dangerous games that would eventually kill them both, drugging, scaring each other with spiders and black magic, getting high on acid, and driving down Mulholland with their eyes closed.
Around the time that Jim was sleeping with Janis, Pamela got even by making it with handsome young actors such as John Phillip Law and Tom Baker. Later, Tom Baker fell in with Andy Warhol's crowd in New York and starred in I, a Man, one of Warhol's pornographic epics. Ironically, when Pam broke off with Baker and went back to Morrison, the two men became close friends and drinking buddies, and Baker became one of Janis's lovers. He lived at the Casa Real near the Chateau Marmont with two other young men, and the three of them became known as "the boys who fuck famous women."
Baker, who'd appeared nude in the Warhol film, told Morrison he was nothing but a "prick tease" and challenged him to "let it all hand out" at a rock concert. Eventually, Morrison did exactly that, in Miami, and the resultant legal complications drove him to a nervous breakdown. Baker perhaps also goaded Janis to some of the extremes, including exposure, that came to typify her later concerts.
One day in late June, shortly after Monterey Pop, Janis was scheduled to sing in Golden Gate Park as part of the summer solstice be-in. It was a perfect San Francisco day, mild and sunny, and she decided to take her dog George out walking before the concert. Janis and Sunshine were very close at this time, so she picked up Sunshine and 'sashayed' through Haight-Ashbury, stopping at a liquor store to buy some Ripple. They ran into Freewheelin' Frank and he joined them on their stroll to the park.
At the end of Haight, they crossed Stanyan and entered the cavernous, shadowy park. At Hippie Hill, they came out into the sunshine again and then headed on into the deeper recesses of the park. Janis and Big Brother performed that day from the back of a flatbed truck, and Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Grateful Dead also played, using equipment that had been borrowed from Monterey Pop. Nimble as a panther, Jimi Hendrix scrambled up on the back of Big Brother's sound truck and started snapping pictures with his Instamatic camera. As Janis sang from the flatbed, someone leaned over the edge of the platform and passed out marijaunamarijuana joints to everybody present.
At these great 1960s celebrations of life and love, she was as close as she'd ever be to perfect happiness. After the performance, she was too elated to go home and spent the rest of the day loitering in front of a big 1940s car, smoking a fat cigar and taking swigs of booze straight from the bottle. The next day, she was exhausted, confused, and drinking more than ever. Her friends feared the excitement of her career breakthrough at Monterey would prove to be more than she could handle. When Peggy offered her the use of her house in Stinson Beach, Janis left for a few days' rest.
She went barhopping around Marin County the first day of her vacation and well into the evening. Coming home drunk that night, she nearly crashed her car through the front gate. The next day, she was sunbathing nude on the deck when Peggy arrived unexpectedly. Undressing, Peggy joined her, and soon they were massaging each other's breasts with suntan oil. Janis commented on the stupendous proportions of Peggy's breasts, revealing an insecurity about the size of her own. She very likely found the reassurance she needed in the passionate love they made that day in the open air, completely indifferent to gawking neighbors. Kim somehow learned of their escapade and, on the following weekend, she confronted Peggy, asking her point-blank whether she was sleeping with Janis. Peggy admitted she was.
Although Kim denies being jealous, she says that she assaulted Peggy, breaking her nose. "Peggy and I used to fight like cats and dogs," she says. "I took the aerial off the Shelby on Van Ness Street one time and ran after her with it, beating on her car. She made me mad many times. I put my fist through many windows. I threw stereo stuff out of second-story apartment windows."
"Was it over her running around with Janis?" I ask.
"No, no. I was never jealous of Janis. I was tired of Peggy's obsessive ways, but there wasn't much I could do about it. I was strung out and we had everything together and I didn't know any other life or business. We had our home, our business, our dogs, our people, everything.
"We were out at Stinson one night, and I guess we didn't have enough dope, or she wouldn't have been on the rag. We had a little bit, but she started nagging one afternoon." Tired of fighting with Peggy, Kim tried to make peace by keeping the conversation positive and pleasant. She was determined that nothing Peggy said would "push her buttons" and make her react. Peggy "ranted and raved, picked, and bitched for fourteen hours," Kim says, but Kim maintained total silence, refraining even from facial expressions. They fell asleep for a while and when they woke up, Kim said it was time to return to the city. On the way back in the Porsche, they took the winding, narrow road over Mt. Tamalpais. Kim admits, "I'm not a slow driver," and when they got to a curve and Peggy told her to slow down, Kim "Just kind of snapped."
"I had my right hand on the wheel," she recalls, "and I reached over with my left and went Thunk! Pow! right into her cheek and it broke her nose. She was so mad. I didn't say anything. I drove her directly fifteen minutes from there to the Marin General Hospital and waited for her, and she was still ranting and raving to the doctor. She was just on a trip, but she really had a case now because she had to wear this great big X on her face, a big adhesive white X right across her nose up to her forehead and down her cheek, and if she didn't look a sight!
Peggy took revenge by carrying on her affair with Janis more brazenly than ever. Lying to Kim, Peggy would tell her she was going on a buying trip for the boutique, but she and Janis would meet at a hotel or Janis's apartment. They made love so feverishly that they forgot to take breaks for meals or sleep and became dizzy. Some of these sessions took place in dirty hotel rooms they rented for as little as ten dollars a night.
Peggy stated in her book that when she and Kim made love, the experience was somehow more definite - akin to a man-woman relationship. With Janis, it was more like the secret lesbian garden that Joan Baez described, something only two women could know. Though there was more physical attraction with Kim, Janis was just as essential in Peggy's emotional life.
Though Janis put considerable pressure on Peggy to leave Kim and move in with her, Peggy declined, fearing that she'd become another sycophant in Janis's entourage.
One result of Janis's growing national fame was the reversal of the Fillmore auditorium's long-standing policy against her. Suddenly, after Monterey Pop, she was welcome in Bill Graham's legendary rock palace. As a rule, Chet Helms discovered the talent and Bill Graham exploited it, or, as Janis herself put it, Graham sucked up to anyone who'd "made it." Her relationship with Graham, a hotheaded ego-maniac, had always been tempestuous. From the start, Graham had resented her association with Chet, his archrival at the Avalon Ballroom. Chet and Bill had started out together, producing dances at the Fillmore on alternate weekends. The partnership flourished, giving San Francisco good live entertainment for the first time since the fifties heyday of the jazz and folk clubs.
Graham had never heard of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, who were playing to empty clubs in Southern California when Chet and his partner, John Carpenter, discovered them. They had to fight with Bill to get Butterfield into the Fillmore, finally issuing an ultimatum: "It's our show. Let us do it." Chet and John then got on the phone to everyone they knew and hounded them into coming to the Fillmore that weekend. Butterfield was a smashing success, playing to some 7,500 people. When Graham saw the record crowd, he woke up early the next morning and called Albert Grossman in New York, buying all the potential bookings for the next two years for the Butterfield Blues Band in California and paying Albert a large lump sum.
<#FROWN:G38\>
GSTAAD: LATE JANUARY 1927
It was the year of the avalanches in the Arlberg and Voralberg, but not at Gstaad where the slopes were more gentle and the clientele more genteel. At Gstaad, Count Rupert and Princess Estelle could enjoy the curling matches or cheer the slalom racers. At Schruns there were no Counts or Princesses that year or before, no tea dances, no horse shows on ice. In previous winters Schruns was never news in the Paris papers. Now the reports were about nameless Englishmen, dying under tons of loose snow. "The features of the victims are not distorted and therefore it is supposed that they were soon suffocated without pain." No one was suffocating at Gstaad except from being overly polite to strangers.
First at the Alpine with Archie and Ada, now at the Hotel Rossli with Pauline and Jinny, he was trying to make it work as it did before. In winter they always went to the mountains, skiing by day and reading books at night under goose-down comforters. In the mountains of 1922, '25, and '26 he did not need to shave, and his hair was long, almost down to his unstarched collar. This year his hair was trimmed; his winter beard reduced to a stylish mustache. In newly tailored trousers with a white sweater that matched Pauline's, he looked lean and handsome among the winter trade. The hundred days of erratic meals and insomniac nights had trimmed his weight and deepened his eye sockets. No longer did he have that "fat, married look" he once wrote about. In all the pictures he is smiling broadly, sometimes with Pauline, sometimes with Jinny. They are all smiling.
During the separation, he was frequently with Jinny at her Paris apartment or in a night caf where no one knew them or dining with close friends who did. It was Jinny who sent Pauline his telegrams in French, and Jinny who interpreted Pauline's replies. Younger than Pauline, Jinny was attractive without being beautiful, quick-witted, sensitive in her observations, and drawn by preference to women. Ernest, for whom lesbians were a dark attraction, felt comfortable with Jinny's presence and appreciated her wry humor. Living with two women and sleeping with one was like old times in the mountains. At the same time, less than 300 kilometers away in the snows of Savoie, Hadley was sharing Paul Mowrer with his wife, Winifred. Her New Year's greetings enclosed an ancient, uncashed five-dollar check sent by Ernest's parents at Bumby's birth, which Hadley discovered in the back of her trust account book. Now that the divorce mill was grinding out their severance, Hadley in her letters was once again his Cat, his Catherine, who did not let him forget their once shared life.
But Gstaad was not Schruns, and the old life was disappearing quickly. Ernest and Pauline were no longer conspirators hiding their passion. Now they were merely two lovers with a sister on their way to a marriage as soon as his divorce was final. It was also clear that Pauline was a good deal more organized and less dependent than Hadley on Ernest's lead. Whereas Ernest tended towards tactics, Pauline relied on strategy. He was at his best in an emergency, quick to read the situation and respond; she was better at anticipating the crisis and at long-range planning. With no way to know it in advance, Ernest Hemingway had found, among all the available women in Paris, not the prettiest nor the richest, but the one best suited to his situation. With his career about to burgeon, he no longer needed a devoted Hadley leaning heavily upon his lead. What he needed now was a wife to help manage his career, a woman who could make decisions and take care of herself; a woman like Pauline Pfeiffer, who was already thinking about where they would live in Paris and how they would get married. At twenty-seven, Hemingway was about to wed a woman with an adequate trust fund and access to more money when needed, an independent, older woman who, after living eleven years on her own, was willing to quit her career to be his wife.
Pauline, better schooled than Hadley and a more critical reader, was to become a silent partner in Hemingway's literary career, the possibilities for which were multiplying daily. He had three stories soon to appear in Scribner's Magazine and what was quickly becoming a best-selling novel in the bookstores. The publicity generated by The Sun Also Rises was bringing him new offers with almost every mail delivery. There were foreign rights to be negotiated and translators to be selected. James Joyce recommended Hemingway to his German publishers and two French firms were also interested. Eugne Jolas wanted him to do an essay on Gertrude Stein for the first issue of Transition, and Ezra was still harassing him to revise 'An Alpine Idyll' for Exile. The New Yorker accepted his humorous 'How I Broke With John Wilkes Booth,' and wanted more material. Even Vanity Fair, after turning down one of his early stories, was now asking for his work. Sure that Hemingway would "get so rich in a year or two that you will look like Henry Mencken," the magazine wanted to help him reach that pinnacle if he would only send them two or three stories about anything "except abortion and allied subjects." Hemingway wrote his next three stories about alcoholism, homosexuality, and abortion.
In New York, sales of The Sun Also Rises were exceeding Scribner's expectations for a first novel and making Max Perkins look very good around the office. Already he was asking Hemingway about his next book of stories, a book that Pound strongly advised against. "You will do no such GOD DAMND thing. You will publish ANOTHER NOVEL next, and after, and NOT UNTIL THAT you will make them pub. sht. stories. Wotter yer think yer are, a bloomink DILLYtanty?" Whatever currency Ezra's advice once held for Hemingway it had lost through distance and lack of perspective. Having marked and remarked on almost every writer in Hemingway's generation, Ezra was growing gradually out of touch in fascist Italy. Hemingway, who grew up respecting middle-American hard-earned money and who never in his life intended to be poor, was trying to perfect a style that satisfied both his artistry and the general public.
He still enjoyed Ezra's strange letters filled with curious diction, but he no longer took his literary advice seriously or made any concessions to Pound's new magazine. The more Ezra advised him on the revision of 'An Alpine Idyll,' the more Hemingway tried to sell it unrevised to another American magazine. In late January, he instructed Max Perkins to send the much-traveled story to Alfred Kreymbourg for his American Caravan. When Ezra asked for a story that would not sell in America, Hemingway, who could have given him the much-rejected 'Fifty Grand,' put him off, for Ezra was his past, not his future. Pound thought that 'Alpine Idyll' was wasted on Caravan, "but yr manipulation of the external woild is so much superior to mine, that I hezzytate to comment," he added. "I trust yr contract dont include turning over proceeds of ALL best sellers to your late consort."
Hadley, who was back in Paris tending to their divorce, was about to become a modestly affluent woman from The Sun Also Rises, which by the end of January was in its fourth printing, having sold almost eleven thousand copies. "It's perfectly great...how that book of yours is going," Hadley told him, "and yours truly is prostrate with joy at the prospect of such grand riches. Paul says he will let me know at what moment to invest, which will not be the present sez he." In Hadley's world, Ernest had clearly been replaced by Paul Mowrer, which relieved some of Pauline's guilt while secretly galling him. He was now dependent upon Pauline's money, while his own earned royalties would be invested by the man who was apparently in love with his not yet ex-wife.
But, as Hadley made clear to Ernest, future royalties were not going to pay for their present divorce. Upon her return from Savoie with the Mowrers, she wrote Ernest that her lawyer, Burkhardt, wanted the rest of his fee up front before the first stage of the divorce was reached. Because the wife's lawyer should not receive money directly from her husband, Hadley asked Ernest to send the check to her to make the payment. She enclosed triplicate copies of official papers for Hemingway to sign and return, which he promptly did, enclosing a draft on his Paris account for 5,100 francs. On 27 January, Hadley received her official judgment for divorce giving her custody of Bumby. The final decree, having still several final steps to go through in the French court system, would not come until sometime in March.
Hadley enclosed several Christmas cards that had arrived for them as a couple, and plenty of mail was being forwarded by Hemingway's Paris bank. Some came from almost forgotten friends like Frances Coates in Oak Park, who found the novel heart-breaking. Lincoln Steffen's wife, Ella Winter, wrote that after reading The Sun Also Rises she now understood what Gertrude Stein was trying to say in Composition as Explanation. "You must have worked like hell at it, and when one reads it, one feels you just stuck it down between putting on your pants and your coat." Even John Dos Passos was having second thoughts about his negative review of the novel. "I've sworn off book reviewing," he joked. "It's a dirty habit....the funny thing about The Sun Also is that in sections it isn't shitty. It's only in conjuncto that it begins to smell. Of course it's perfectly conceivable that it's really a swell book and that we're all of us balmy." The part that galled Dos most was Hemingway's "rotten" tendency to use his friends full-face in his fiction. "Writers," he said, "are per se damn lousy bourgeois parasitic upperclass shits and not to be written about unless they are your enemies." And out of the blue came a letter from Sinclair Lewis, then the hottest literary property in America. The Sun Also Rises, Lewis wrote, "was one of the best books I have ever read, and I want to have the privilege of sending my great congratulations about it. I know of no other youngster...who has a more superb chance to dominate Anglo-American letters. Jesus you done a good book!" In February, Lewis hoped to meet Ernest in Paris.
Guy Hickok, his old drinking and journalist buddy, wrote from Paris that The Sun Also Rises was "a swell book.... Quite a feat to make drunks' talk sound as good to undrunk readers as this does." "I hear," he said in his next letter, "there are one or two guys looking for you with gats [guns]." Hickok and two men Hemingway did not know had been out to dinner with Hadley, whose "maternal duties" began to prey upon her late in the evening. "I got all four of us into my two place Henriette and we trembled off down the rue de Fleurus while Hadley, perched away up near the roof on a couple of laps, sang little French songs which she said the 'boys' brought back, but which I know were nicer than anybody in the A.E.F. ever learned." Hemingway read it slowly, and knew exactly which songs they were and when she had sung them to him. He did not blame Guy for feeling upset about their divorce. "Somebody looking for a degree," Guy said, "ought to trace the influence of whooping cough in history."
Not all the incoming mail was quite so friendly. In Paris, Chard Powers Smith, a sometime acquaintance of Hemingway's during his 1923 Caf du D<*_>o-circ<*/>me period, had finally read In Our Time, in which parts of 'Mr. and Mrs. Elliot' bore an uncanny resemblance to parts of his own marriage to Olive MacDonald.
<#FROWN:G39\>We respect the people who want to honor us and certainly we respect the causes they support. If we were younger, had more time, and were trying to make our way in the world, we would go out more frequently and even joyously. I will let Cronkite speak for us. I told him I was about to sail on an extended trip around South America to gather material for a book and was afraid I was going to be pestered. "I know just how you feel, Jim," Cronkite said. "Four years ago I took that trip and was scared to death I'd be pestered by everyone on board, but Cunard officials assured me: 'We're accustomed to having passengers sail with us who want to be left alone. We know how to protect your privacy.' On the third night after our departure from Miami, Betsy and I were sitting in a corner of the nearly empty bar, and I suddenly asked: 'Betsy! When are they going to start pestering me?'" In that cri de coeur he spoke for all of us.
VI
Politics
MY INTRODUCTION to politics was so shameful that I bore the scars for decades, but from it I learned a lesson of brotherhood that would dominate my adult life. In the autumn of 1917, when I was ten and in the grip of wartime hysteria focused against Germany and the Kaiser, I took a pair of old shoes to the elderly cobbler who had his shop a few doors from our home on North Main Street. This area had always been called Germany because many of the original settlers there had come from that country and their descendants still spoke that language at home rather than English. My shoemaker, of course, was German.
When I handed him my shoes I saw to my astonishment something I had not noticed before. On his wall, behind his lasts and knee-held anvils hung a large chromolithograph of the Kaiser. As as I stared at it over the old man's shoulder the glare from the hooded eyes was so menacing, the set of the jaw so cruel, that I was speechless, and fled the shop. I had seen the enemy about whom the orators ranted and he was lurking in my backyard.
Hurrying home, I brooded over the menace I had seen, and that night my worst fears were intensified, for our family went to the park before the courthouse where a fine-looking young officer from some British regiment spoke eloquently about the horrors of fighting the Boche in Flanders and striving, with American aid, to keep the Kaiser out of Paris.
I did not sleep much that night, which I spent struggling against the Kaiser, dodging his submarines and holding him back in the trenches lest he storm Paris. I left my bed the next morning in such a blaze of patriotic fervor that I marched to the cobbler's, slammed my way into his workshop, and, ripping the traitorous portrait from the wall, carried it out into the street and tore it to bits before a small crowd that had gathered.
I heard for the first time the heady sound of applause, and there were admiring cries: "He's a little hero, that one!" At the height of the celebration I looked past my applauding neighbors to the doorway of the cobbler's shop, where the old man who had so often befriended me looked on in confusion and dismay.
Someone in the crowd reported my patriotic deed to the local newspaper, and I believe that the first time my name appeared in print was as the local hero, ten years old, who had struck a blow for the cause of the Allies and against the tyranny of the Hun. But the praise I received was dampened by the look I had seen on the old man's face as the poor cobbler watched his little world being torn apart by a child.
I was inducted into local politics in a manner almost as dramatic. Our elegant rural county of Bucks, tucked in between Philadelphia and New York, and one of the few counties in the nation known widely by name, was staunchly Republican and was ruled by a benevolent tyrant named Joe Grundy. He owned a profitable manufacturing plant at the lower end of the county and had but one ambition, to keep Bucks County totally Republican and the nation safely in the hands of the G.O.P. In later years he became president of the National Association of Manufacturers and a United States senator, and he fused the two positions so completely that no observer could discern whether he was acting as a senator or as a manufacturer.
He used to come up from his bastion in Bristol in a chauffeured car wearing high-buttoned shoes and a grim smile to dictate the governing of Doylestown, our county seat. He owned the local newspaper, the Intelligencer, and controlled its policies with an inflexible conservatism which ensured that not even a whisper of liberalism or pro-labor sentiment or salaciousness raise its ugly head. One issue of his paper has gone down in history as a notable example of his arch-Republicanism, for on the morning after a crucial national election in 1940 the front page consisted of a banner headline proclaiming that Bucks County had once more voted Republican, while in an obscure bottom right box appeared a small notice to the effect that some Democrat had won the presidency. Joe Grundy played hardball and was so able that he kept our town and county completely under his control.
I first became aware of his power in the fall of 1916, when I was nine years old and he was laboring desperately to keep Pennsylvania in the Republican column in the great presidential fight between the flabby Democratic incumbent, Woodrow Wilson, and the stalwart Republican challenger, Charles Evans Hughes. My family, obedient as always to the urgings of Joe Grundy, was ardently Republican on the solid grounds voiced by my mother: "You can see that with that dignified beard Mr. Hughes looks like a president." (In the next election she would tell me: "James, you can see that Warren Harding with that handsome face and reserved manner looks like a president" but in the election after that she made no comment about her man Coolidge.)
The election was hard fought and Grundy marshaled his forces with wonderful skill so that on Tuesday night after heated balloting we were overjoyed to hear that Hughes had won and, following orders from Mr. Grundy's local henchmen, we traipsed into the middle of town to cheer an impoverished Republican victory parade, and I went to bed that night satisfied that with Charles Evan Hughes in charge of the nation as a whole and Joe Grundy in command locally, the republic was on an even keel.
Of course, by midmorning on Wednesday we learned that a disgracefully wrong vote in California had delivered the presidency back into the hands of that pitiful man, Woodrow Wilson, and black despair settled over Bucks County. But the entire affair culminated for me on Friday night in a distasteful way, because a ragtag handful of Democrats gathered from various unsavory corners of the county convened in our town for a victory parade, and as my mother and I stood in the shadows in the alley beside the Intelligencer office, she delivered her contemptuous summary of the Democrats, a phrase that still rings in my ears: "Look at them, James, not a Buick in the lot."
My next incursion into politics was in the presidential election of 1928. I was then in college, and was so distressed by the virulent anti-Catholicism of the period that in a public rally attended by townspeople, I gave extemporaneously a rousing defense of freedom of religion. After the meeting the community's leading Republican, Frank Scheibley, was so impressed by my speech and its manner of delivery that he collared me, offered me a job, and later wanted to adopt me as his son. I was thus at an early age co-opted.
In rapid order, as I shall explain in more detail later, I was invited to sample socialism, fascism and communism, and learned a great deal about each. But I was not impressed with any of them and remained essentially one of Joe Grundy's boys, although the Great Depression did cause me to wonder why, if he and his buddies were so everlastingly smart, they had allowed this financial disaster to happen not only to me but also to themselves. But I remained a Republican.
At a critical point in my life I moved to Colorado, which was one of the best things I ever did, for the grand spaciousness of that setting and the freedom of political expression that was not only allowed but encouraged converted me from being a somewhat hidebound Eastern conservative into a free spirit. Colorado was an unusual state in that its voters rarely, and never in my time, awarded all three of its top political positions -governor and two senators -to the same party; the citizens preferred to have the power split among various factions, which meant that the political life there was wildly different from what I had known in Bucks County, where Joe Grundy told us how to vote and we obeyed. In Colorado a man or woman could be a member of any party or any faction within a party and still enjoy a serious chance of being elected to high office. In Pennsylvania I had learned to respect politics; in Colorado I learned to love it.
But most important was something there that helped me develop an intellectual strength I had not had before. There was in the town an informal but most congenial small restaurant named after the widow who ran it, a Mrs. Angell, and there in 1936 a group of like-minded men, two-thirds Republican, one-third Democrat, but all imbued with a love of argument and exploration of ideas, met twice a month for protracted debate on whatever problem was hottest at the moment. We had two clergymen -one liberal, one conservative -an admirable lawyer who had pleaded major cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, two scientists, one of the cantankerous leaders of the Colorado Senate, a wonderful school administrator, a fiery newspaper editor and a healthy scattering of businessmen, mostly on the conservative side. Because I had access to a gelatin duplicating pad, I was designated executive secretary in charge of finding speakers and convening the meetings. We paid, I remember, fifty-five cents a meeting in depression currency, and that covered a free meal for the invited guest. The meetings became so precious to all of us that we would go far out of our way to attend. Discussion was rigorous, informed and relevant, with ideas from the nation's frontier whipping about in grand style.
I think that any young person in his or her thirties who wants to build both character and a grasp of social reality would be well advised to either form or join a club like our Angell's, where hard ideas are discussed by hardheaded members, where ideas that the general public is not yet ready to embrace are dissected, and where decisions are hammered out for the welfare of the community. Sensible men have participated in such discussions from the beginning of time: in the wineshops of antiquity, the baths of ancient Rome, the coffeeshops of England, and town meetings of New England, the Friday-night meeting of the kibbutzim in Israel, the informal clubs of California and Texas and Vermont. Thoughtful people seek these meetings because they need them, and had I not stumbled into mine in Colorado I would have been a lesser man.
One summer a fiery evangelist, Harvey Springer, came into town and pitched his big tent near the college where I taught. There in nightly sessions of the most compelling nature, with frenzied speeches, haunting choral music and wild-eyed young women screaming while coming down the aisles to be saved, Reverend Springer launched a virulent attack on the two clergymen in our group and on me as a disruptive, liberal, atheistic professor.
<#FROWN:G40\>
ONE
THE IVESES OF DANBURY
April 27, 1854, was one of the great days in the history of Danbury, Connecticut. On that day a monument was dedicated to a hero of the Revolution, General David Wooster, long beloved by the town that had been the scene of his finest hours and of his death seventy-five years earlier. In its account of the event, the Danbury Times aptly called it "The Monumental Celebration."
The citizens of Danbury met the day with a sense of solemnity mixed with restlessness and optimism, for the occasion was not only patriotic and historical but funereal as well. The recently completed Wooster Cemetery, where the monument to the fallen champion had been erected near his grave, was already a showplace of the town; however, if some of the five thousand or so Danbury residents were pondering whether this would be their own final resting place, there seemed little evidence of such melancholy. The town was secure and growing, and the future seemed as bright as the Thursday morning sunshine. The turnout was far greater than that for the militia training days of a decade earlier or even the Fourth of July festivals. The newly completed Danbury and Norwalk Railroad made it possible for people to travel to the celebration from every part of the state. The train pulling into the depot at the north end of Main Street brought many dignitaries: the governor and former governor of Connecticut, several generals, the editors of the state's leading newspapers (the Palladium and Gazette of Hartford), and the noted poet Mrs. Lydia Sigourney (1791-1865), who distinguished the occasion with a commemorative poem. It was estimated that the swell of people who attended the event had effectively doubled the population of Danbury. It would long be remembered in the town as one of the finest and most important spectacles of the century.
Danbury, of course, made its own contribution to the color and dignity of the occasion. The growing American appetite for local organizations of every variety was in evidence throughout. The exercises of the day were organized and conducted principally by the masonic fraternity. Its exotic ritual commingled curiously with the patriotic fervor of the other participants, the simple Protestant ceremonial of the Congregational Church, where some of the speeches were heard, and the obligatory military exercises and parades. It was American eclecticism at its most vivid, yet on a scale appropriate to the small town.
It was a day for oratory and music. Danbury provided its own indoor variety of music in the Congregational Church, where following the procession and dedication of the monument those who were fortunate enough to find a place could hear an inspiring oration. However, the resources for outdoor band music were not yet developed on a scale for such an occasion and had to be bolstered by visiting groups.
The procession was dominated by officials and members of the numerous Danbury fraternal organizations. There were also, of course, clergymen, whose function was to anchor the occasion within a long New England tradition of linking the secular with the sacred and to remind the participants that there was, after all, a God. The handful of Revolutionary soldiers who attended, now in their seventies, were accorded an honorary position, marching immediately behind the highest officials. Pacing the parade were military organizations from every part of the state - the Hartford Light Guards, the New Haven Blues, and the German Rifle Company of Bridgeport - and from New York, with five marching bands interspersed among them. The new immigrants from Europe were also well represented, for the most part in the form of church and fraternal groups. The firemen of Danbury, including many Irish, marched along with those of Bridgeport and Norwalk. Danbury Fire Company Number 2 had thrown an ornate arch of evergreens and flowers across White Street in front of their engine house, under which the procession passed on its way to the cemetery. The rich regalia of the Odd Fellows competed with that of the Masons and the military while contrasting with the modest garb of the Sons of Temperance. In democracy made manifest, no group visible in town was omitted and even unaffiliated individuals could form ranks at the end of the parade to march with the "Citizens of Danbury, the Citizens of Fairfield County and Citizens of this and other States who desire to join in the Procession."
The lengthy procession assembled at Wooster House, an inn in the north part of Main Street, and wound through the town to Wooster Cemetery, where a thirty-foot platform had been erected. Following a prayer, Masonic ritual prevailed as the "chief stone" of the monument was laid by the Grand Master and the Master Architect under the honorary direction of Governor Pond. Before the sealing of the stone, a box was enclosed within the monument to preserve certain articles for future generations. These included copies of the Bible, the U.S. Constitution, and the Connecticut state constitution, American gold and silver coins, Continental bills, and a daguerreotype of General Wooster. Copies of the day's editions of the New York Tribune, Herald, and Times were included as well as of the Danbury Times.
Looking toward the future, the people of Danbury still keenly felt the past and revered it. At the same time, they hoped that future generations would come to respect them and their efforts of this day. The Revolutionary War had generated a musical legacy consisting largely of patriotic tunes, some of which were played on this day by the bands of the grand procession. But the Revolution had also produced heroes who had by now become an important part of American life. The unquestioned leader in national popularity was George Washington, but first in the hearts of his Danbury countrymen was General David Wooster, whose historical presence was nearly palpable to the boys and girls of Danbury in the first half of the century. The final object inserted into the memorial stone was the bullet that had been the cause of Wooster's death.
General David Wooster, a Yale graduate and a distinguished soldier, was sixty-eight when he was summoned to Danbury in April, 1777. The preceding year, the village had had the misfortune of being designated a depository for Continental army supplies. Inevitably, it was attacked, sacked, and burned, but Wooster and his troops drove the British out. Wooster pursued them to nearby Ridgefield, where he was mortally wounded on April 27, 1779. In the late morning, as Wooster led the attack on the retreating British, he drew heavy fire. Rallying his troops, who were frightened by the grapeshot whistling through the air, Wooster turned in his saddle shouting, "Come on, my boys! Never mind such random shots!" At that moment, a musket ball, said to have been fired by a Tory, struck him obliquely in the back, splintering his spine and lodging in his stomach. He was brought back by carriage to Danbury, where he lay for several days in a House on South Street before he died. This house, at the foot of Main Street, was only a short distance from the point where the memorial procession began.
After the chief stone was laid at Wooster Cemetery, the procession continued to the Congregational church for the oration, a lengthy eulogy delivered by the Honorable Brother Henry C. Deming. Those who failed to participate in the church program, whether by choice or circumstance (it was quite crowded), might have found some solace at the Wooster House: on the green in front of the inn, a sumptuous banquet had been spread for all who wished to partake.
A prominent participant in Danbury's great day was George White Ives (1798-1862), father of George Edward Ives (1845-1894) and grandfather of Charles Edwin Ives (1874-1954). This occasion would not have been possible - at least not in this grand manner - were it not for Ives and several others of his generation who were developing, indeed transforming, the town. For these few and their families - Ives, Tweedy, White, Hoyt - public spirit and private benefit appeared to be inextricably entwined. Even in civic endeavors such as the advancement of the railroad line or the introduction of gas lighting, where motives of private profit might seem to predominate, there could be no question as to their salutary effect on the growth of Danbury in the 1850s. Other projects, like the organization and development of Wooster Cemetery, of which George White Ives was treasurer, were more traditionally in the line of community welfare. Romanticizing economics, this small cohort of contemporaries and neighbors saw themselves as a second wave of pioneers. The first wave, a group of eight men, had made their way from Norwalk along a Paquioque Indian path in 1684 and founded Danbury. Returning shortly thereafter with their families, they formed the rudiments of a settlement - homes, farms, a meeting place, a blacksmith's. The homesteads of the 'original eight' occupied little more than a few hundred yards along Main Street (the old Indian trail) starting at what would become South Street and extending north.
A century and a half later, a new thrust was taking place, this time economic, not geographic. On the one hand, it reflected the times, the post-Jackson era of laissez-faire business expansion; on the other, Danbury's very survival depended on it. Although Danbury was a small town in the days of George White and George Edward Ives - and even, to a lesser degree, during Charles Ives's boyhood - it could not remain static. For industry had come to Danbury and committed it to progress, like it or not. A small inland town could not survive otherwise, and there was no going back. Despite the amenities of small-town life, the changes that would at length transform it were taking place even in its heyday. As was the case in smaller communities, it was a handful of men who spearheaded change. Occasionally they made fortunes and great names for themselves, but more often the result was a degree of 'being comfortable' and a respected name in town.
Ives had been such a name in Danbury since the days of Isaac Ives, George White Ives's father, who came to the town in the 1790s. His sojourn there was characteristic in some ways of many ambitious New Englanders of the time: the striving, the economic fits and starts, the ultimate success, and the comfortable establishment of self and family in tranquil retirement. Typical too were the social and family networks in which all this took place and the resultant family tradition. Isaac was the strong, singular root of the Danbury Iveses. Born in 1764, he was an adolescent at the time of the Revolution. He went to Yale College, the first of the Iveses to be associated with Yale, studied law there, and received the degree of bachelor of arts. According to one account, he came to Danbury via Morristown, New Jersey, where he may have tried his hand at teaching. Another suggests that he had rather limited success practicing law in Litchfield before moving to Danbury.
Perhaps his best fortune there was to board with a member of an already prominent family, the Benedicts, who not only could claim both heroes and villains in the recently fought Revolutionary War but could trace their own Danbury origins to the original eight of 1685. Isaac married their daughter, whose death within two years climaxed a series of misfortunes: by then Isaac had failed in several business ventures. Left with a daughter, Jerusha, and again unsuccessful (this time in the tanning business), Isaac married again. His second wife was Sarah Amelia White, of another well-known Danbury family. Their son, George White Ives, was born in New York City in 1798.
Pressed by the need to support a growing family, Isaac attempted to set up business in New York, this time as a wholesale grocer in Pearl Street. The job eventually required travel to New England and the South. On one such trip Isaac wrote to Amelia, "How unpleasant, indeed how painful, to be absent and to not know conditions."
<#FROWN:G41\>
6
The Coming of Age
Pym's struggle with cancer in 1971 made her realize that she was growing older and needed to reassess her prospects for the future. Needless to say, forging a novel out of illness and the threat of approaching death was not easy. To do so involved an emotional as well as literary effort, and her plot mirrors the painful steps of her journey. The central theme of Quartet in Autumn is retirement, which is viewed quite differently by retirees and observers. In the novel, observers would like to believe that stopping work represents a liberation, but retirees, like Letty, experience it as an abandonment. As the novel progresses, however, Letty discovers that the truth lies somewhere in between. Although never fully confident, at the end, she believes that she has a future.
Letty's experiences test three current theories about retirement: abandonment, liberation, and what sociologists call "diachronic solidarity." The last one is based on the idea that each generation in turn will help their predecessors, the underlying principle of social security legislation. Letty, however, has no one to rely on, and developing trust in herself is no easy matter. Along the way, she suffers, and even more important, Marcia, her coworker in the office, dies. Marcia's death represents Pym's recognition of the dangers of aging.
Ultimately, the novel becomes a coherent and controlled elegy to the city and to office life, but before Pym began taking notes for it, her thoughts were sorely troubled. She saw death and decay everywhere she turned, partly because such signs existed to be observed. For example, for some time she had been aware of declining membership in the Anglican church. Although she skirted that problem in An Academic Question, as early as September 19, 1969, she wrote Philip Larkin that she would write about these matters in her next novel (VPE, 251). In 1970, when Pym's I.A.I. office was rearranged, she wondered if all the attendant unpleasant emotions might contribute to the plot.
But at that point, she had no time to begin anything new. Also she was preoccupied with the possibility of radically altering her characteristic style. Realizing that gothic novels were immensely popular, on August 31, 1970, she considered writing an update of Jane Eyre, which might express the protagonist's sense of being an outsider (VPE, 258-59). (Four years later, after the second hospitalization for a stroke, Pym started a romantic novel about a young woman recuperating from illness and unrequited love but quickly abandoned the effort.) As it turned out, Quartet in Autumn is neither gothic nor romantic. Ironically, all Pym's attempts to alter her style merely led her back to her old habit of vicarious observations of the lives of others, and to her life-long preoccupation with spinsters. When completed, the novel provided a new synthesis of all the ideas and themes that had enthralled her for a long time.
Meanwhile the mastectomy made Pym feel completely alone in the world for the first time in her life. On May 1, 1971, she wrote Robert Smith that even her sister, Hilary, was out of the country when she was hospitalized (VPE, 261). Although many friends rallied around, the event forced Pym to accept her inner solitude. Then the plight of lonely spinsters, companions, and governesses ceased to be the subject of anxious fantasy but an important new literary topic.
The bleak observations found in Quartet in Autumn are not surprising when one considers the problems that Pym faced. The threat of cancer was the most important. But that discovery was reinforced by signs of aging among her friends and acquaintances. The years brought news of the deaths of many old friends and raised the specter of a lonely demise. Pym was well aware that reading obituary notices of her friends heralded her own mortality, whereas in youth she had assumed that seeing death notices of friends would make the old feel triumphant. November 15, 1970, about six months before the surgery, Robert Smith wrote that his friend Joan Wales, of the furniture depository episode, had been found in a diabetic coma. Although she survived, in a later literary notebook entry on December 8, 1972, Pym started wondering if a solitary character could die of starvation in her novel (VPE, 272). In 1977 Richard Roberts recognized that Marcia was very like Joan Wales. In that letter he wrote that Wales was dying, but later reported her to be alive.
Not only was the health of some of Pym's contemporaries beginning to deteriorate, but London was as well. Between 1970 and 1972, several places that were part of Pym's private landscape closed or were torn down. July 3, 1970, the Kardomah was shut where Hazel Holt and she had shared so many companionable lunches (VPE, 256). Pym wrote Philip Larkin on November 7, 1971, that St. Lawrence's, her church home, had become a victim of redundancy (VPE, 266). The disappearance of personal landmarks aroused mixed feelings. Pym was inclined to mourn their loss, but her sharp eyes also recorded the ensuing conflict, which she felt would make good material for her novel. February 4, 1972, she wrote gloomily in the notebook that Gamage's, a store she patronized, was about to close, and her old haunts near her office were being torn down, "Oh unimaginable horror!" March 6, a month later, she noted "change and decay," while predicting that old buildings would be supplanted by characterless replacements (VPE, 266). Even her office building was to be eliminated.
In fact, the period of Pym's discontent was quite short. Although her notebook complaints sound similar to E.M. Forster's in Howards End, her grief for lost places did not last long. By March 20, 1972, she had found new places to eat and the impending office move had enriched her ideas for a novel (VPE, 267). At the same time she became increasingly preoccupied by a much greater problem, that of her own approaching retirement.
Pym had resisted the idea of retirement for many years. Even before completing An Unsuitable Attachment, on February 6, 1961, Robert Smith had urged her to leave her job. After the novel's failure, September 4, 1964, Richard Roberts encouraged her to work part time and devote herself to her novels. On March 8, 1965, Smith reiterated his plea. Pym appreciated the concern of both men, but her job represented independence to her, and she was loath to give it up. After all, it had taken her years to become truly independent. Moreover, like many women, her meager salary made her feel insecure about her earning power. Throughout most of their lives, Hilary Walton's larger salary had provided most of their financial resources. For all these reasons, Pym wanted to continue to work, and never did entirely give up her connections with the I.A.I. She finished her last index for them in October 1979, three months before her death.
Thus in 1971, when breast cancer made retirement an obvious step, she was still fearful. Hilary Walton, who was more independent by nature, decided the time had come to mover to the country, an idea the two sisters had long planned. Pym agreed in principle, but when Mrs. Walton sold their London house, she wrote Philip Larkin on May 29, 1972, that she planned to work for another year (VPE, 268). Of course, the decision to remain at the I.A.I. meant that she had to find a room to rent in someone else's house, a necessity that aroused the same feelings she had described years before in Something to Remember.
The irony did not escape Pym's notice. In the same letter to Larkin, Pym facetiously suggested that she might advertise herself in the Church Times, as the ideal renter, nonsmoking, genteel, and quiet (VPE, 268). The humor covered up real distress at her unaccustomed situation. Traveling to Finstock on weekends was exhausting for her, even a year after her surgery. On July 6, 1972, she reported feeling very ill and alone. As it happened, things worked out much better than she had feared. By October 24 of that year, Pym had written Larkin that she was lodging comfortably in a house where she had kitchen privileges. She declared that the office move had created "great staff dramas," which she considered to be "fruitful novel material" (VPE, 271). Pym's new rental provided another opportunity to collect material for her novel. Her status was that of a paying guest. She paid rent for the room but referred to her landlady as "my hostess" (VPE, 270-71). Although her situation was pleasant, Pym was quite aware that such arrangements could be most ambiguous socially. She understood exactly what a woman in Letty's position would feel, having shared Letty's anxiety about finding a room and her social discomfort in adjusting (QA, 77).
Charles Burkhart has commented on the prevalence of death in the published version of Quartet in Autumn. Death plays an even larger role in the manuscripts. For several years Pym thought of her female characters as victims and imagined that one of them would die. Marcia's death seems to have been planned by the end of 1972, and at two points in the manuscripts Pym contemplated having Letty die. Hints that she desires to give up the struggle appeared in Pym's notebook as early as November 5, 1972 (VPE, 272).
Making a decision to move had always been much harder for Pym than for Hilary Walton. At every stage in life, the writer invested a great deal of herself in her immediate environment and often appropriated her surroundings for the landscape of her novels. As a result, she felt more intensely rooted than did her more practical sister. For a time, even the idea of leaving London for the country seemed a kind of death. February 4, 1972, Pym recorded in her notebook that "now that the possibility of being 'buried' in the country looms," she was trying to absorb as many impressions as possible. At the same time she observed regretfully that London no longer provided the necessary stability she craved (VPE, 266). Indeed, for a time the divided venue merely gave her two places in which to notice signs of death and decay. When she walked in London, December 8, 1972, Pym worried about the plight of street people (VPE, 272). When the previous July she had walked in the country or nearby towns, she had lamented that she alone seemed to find the dead animals (VPE, 269-70). Even a pleasant stroll in old haunts of Oxford on November 5, 1972, elicited the observation that Addison's Walk seemed "a good place to lie down waiting for death covered in leaves by the still streams" (VPE, 272).
On the whole, however, Pym was aware that her sister's decision was sensible, and she wanted to cooperate as much as possible. Instead of grumbling, she used her notebooks to confront her worries at some remove. Also she could justify the entries to herself on the grounds that they provided material for her novel. Indeed, most of these thoughts were attributed to Letty. They also captured Pym's melancholy mood as she approached her sixtieth birthday. March 13, 1973, she wrote Philip that sixty was "the age." Of course, the feeling of obsolescence that Pym noted was not altogether personal. In the same letter she added that the I.A.I. might have already outlived its function. On the other hand she mused, its decay could make "a rich subject for fiction" provided that one brought to it "a novelist's cruelly dispassionate eye, as I fear I sometimes can" (VPE, 273).
Through this period Pym observed that breast cancer had made her feel powerless. In the first draft of Quartet in Autumn she commented that when she saw eccentric people, they reminded her of herself or of long-ago friends. She did not attempt to review her own past to discover why she felt so vulnerable. According to Robert Butler, a psychiatrist who specializes in treating older patients, many elders begin reviewing their lives at just such moments.
<#FROWN:G42\>
ONE
F<*_>U-umlaut<*/>RTH
Coming of Age
in Nazi Germany, 1923-38
"The point of departure is order, which alone can produce freedom." - METTERNICH
THE KISSINGERS OF BAVARIA
Among the Jews of Rodelsee, a small Bavarian village near W<*_>u-umlaut<*/>rzburg, Abraham Kissinger was known for his piety and profound religious knowledge. Because he was successful as a merchant, he was able to honor the Sabbath by closing before sunset on Fridays. But he feared that his four sons might not have that luxury if they, too, went into trade. So he decreed that they should all become teachers, as his own father had been, and thus always be able to keep the Sabbath.
And so it was that Joseph, Maier, Simon, and David Kissinger each went forth from Rodelsee and founded distinguished Jewish schools in the nearby German villages. Of their children, at least five, including David's eldest son, Louis, would also become teachers. And years later, at a famous college in a faraway country, so would Louis's elder son, a studious and introverted young man who, until his family fled to America, was known as Heinz.
The Jews of Bavaria had suffered recurring onslaughts of repression since they first settled in the region in the tenth century. As merchants and moneylenders, they were protected in many Bavarian towns because of the contribution they made to the economy, only to find themselves brutally banished when the mood of princes and populace changed. They were expelled from upper Bavaria in 1276, beginning a wave of oppression that culminated with the persecutions following the Black Death in 1349. By the sixteenth century, few significant Jewish communities remained in the region.
Jews began returning to Bavaria, mainly from Austria, at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Some were bankers brought in to help finance the War of Spanish Succession; others came as traders and cattle dealers. Despite occasional outbreaks of anti-Semitism, they gradually regained a secure place in Bavarian society, or so it seemed. A series of laws between 1804 and 1813, during Napoleon's reign, allowed Jews to attend state schools, join the militia, and enjoy full citizenship. In addition, they were accorded the right to be known by family surnames.
The first member of the family to take the name Kissinger was Abraham's father, Meyer, who was born in Kleinebstadt in 1767. As a young man, Meyer went to live in the resort town of Bad Kissingen, a popular spa north of W<*_>u-umlaut<*/>rzburg. At the time, Kissingen was home to approximately 180 Jews out of a population of just over 1,000. Later he moved to Rodelsee, where Meyer of Kissingen legally adopted the name Meyer Kissinger in 1817. Abraham was born the following year.
Abraham was the only one of Meyer's ten offspring to survive childhood. He lived until he was eighty-one and became the patriarch of a family that included the four sons who followed his wishes and became teachers, four daughters, and thirty-two grandchildren. Although they were all Orthodox Jews they were a solidly middle-class German family, one that felt deep loyalty to a nation that treated them well.
David Kissinger, the youngest of Abraham's sons, was born in Rodelsee in 1860 and moved to Ermershausen where he founded a small school and served as the cantor in the local synagogue. Later, he taught in the Jewish seminary in W<*_>u-umlaut<*/>rzburg. Always somberly dressed, he was referred to by friends as the "Sunday Kissinger," to distinguish him from his brother Simon, a more casual dresser, who was known as the "weekday Kissinger."
David and his wife, Linchen, known as Lina, were sophisticated and well read, the type of Germans who would give their first son, born in 1887, a French name, Louis. Louis was the only one of their seven children to take up teaching, but unlike his father, he decided to do so in secular rather than religious schools. After studying at Heidelberg University, he enrolled in the teachers' academy in F<*_>u-umlaut<*/>rth, a town on the outskirts of Nuremberg.
Because Germany needed teachers, Louis was exempted from service during World War I. He took a job at the Heckmannschule, a bourgeois private school. Directed by gentiles, but with half of its students Jews, it typified the extent of Jewish assimilation in F<*_>u-umlaut<*/>rth, a city with a history of religious tolerance.
F<*_>u-umlaut<*/>rth had flourished in the fourteenth century, when Jews were denied entry into Nuremberg and settled instead in the riverbank village just outside the walls of the fortified city. Traders, craftsmen, and metalworkers, they turned F<*_>u-umlaut<*/>rth into a vibrant commercial center and one of Bavaria's few undisrupted seats of Jewish culture. By 1860, F<*_>u-umlaut<*/>rth had a population of 14,000, about half Jewish.
During the industrial revolution, many of the Jewish business-men built textile and toy factories. The most prosperous formed a Jewish aristocracy, led by such families as the Nathans and the Frankels. Their large sandstone villas overlooked the town, and they endowed a wide array of philanthropies, including an orphanage, hospital, school, and orchestra. The town's seven synagogues were crowded around a large square, which was dominated by that of the most liberal congregation, patronized - at least on the High Holy days - by the more socially prominent Jews.
Louis Kissinger, who joined the most Orthodox of the town's synagogues, the Neuschul, was not part of the world of the Frankels and Nathans. But teaching was a proud and honorable calling in Germany, and Herr Kissinger was a proud and honorable member of the German middle class. In his politics, he was a conservative who liked the kaiser and yearned for him after his abdication. Despite his religious faith, Zionism held no appeal for him; he was a German, patriotic and loyal.
When the kaiser's government shut down most private schools, the Heckmannshule was dissolved. But Louis was able to find a new job as a 'Studienrat' - a combination of schoolmaster, teacher, and counselor - in the state-run system. First, he worked at a girl's junior high school. Then, he taught geography and accounting at a secondary school, the M<*_>a-umlaut<*/>dchenlyzeum, which soon merged with a trade school, the Handelsschule.
Louis Kissinger took great pride in his status as a Studienrat, an eminent position in German society. Years later, after he had lost his job at the hands of another German government and fled his home-land, he would write to old acquaintances, signing himself, in his neat handwriting, "studienrat ausser dienst," retired schoolmaster. He was strict but popular. "Goldilocks," the girls called him, sometimes to his face, and also "Kissus," which amused him even more. He had a slight paunch, a faint mustache, a prominent jaw, and a deferential manner. "He was a typical German schoolteacher," according to Jerry Bechhofer, a family friend from F<*_>u-umlaut<*/>rth and later New York City. "He was professonial and stern, but wouldn't hurt a fly."
When Louis first came to the M<*_>a-umlaut<*/>dchenlyzeum, the school's headmaster told him about a girl named Paula Stern who had graduated the previous year. The headmaster knew how to entice the sober new teacher: he showed him Paula's grades. There were enough A's to kindle Louis's interest. But those marks were a bit misleading. Instead of having the same scholarly demeanor as Louis, Paula was sharp, witty, earthy, and practical. It was a fine pairing: Louis was the wise and somewhat aloof teacher, Paula the energetic and sensible decision-maker.
The Sterns lived in Leutershausen, a village thirty miles east of Nuremberg. Paula's great-grandfather had gone into the cattle trade in the early nineteenth century. Her grandfather, named Bernhardt, and her father, named Falk, built the business into a healthy enterprise.
Falk Stern, a prominent figure among both the Jewish and gentile communities in the area, was far more assimilated than the Kissingers were. His imposing stone house, with its large courtyard and carefully tended garden, was in the center of the village. Yet he remained a simple man: he went to bed every evening shortly after nine P.M. and took little interest in politics or scholarly subjects. His first wife, Beppi Behr, also from a cattle-dealing family, died young. They had one child, Paula, born in 1901. Though her father remarried, Paula remained his only child.
When Paula was sent to F<*_>u-umlaut<*/>rth for school, she stayed with her aunt, Berta Fleischmann, wife of one of the town's kosher butchers. Berta helped encourage the match with Louis Kissinger, even though he was thirty-five and Paula only twenty-one. The Sterns also approved. When the couple married in 1922, the Sterns bestowed upon them a dowry large enough to buy a five-room, second-floor corner apartment in a gabled sandstone building on Mathildenstrasse, a cobbled street in a Jewish neighborhood of F<*_>u-umlaut<*/>rth. Nine months later, on May 27, 1923, their first child was born there.
Heinz Alfred Kissinger. His first name was chosen because it appealed to Paula. His middle name was, like that of his father's brother Arno, a Germanicized updating of Abraham. From his father, Heinz inherited the nickname Kissus. When he moved to America fifteen years later, he would become known as Henry.
YOUNG HEINZ
By the time Heinz Kissinger was born, the Jewish population of F<*_>u-umlaut<*/>rth had shrunk to three thousand. A new period of repression was under way: in reaction to the emasculation Germany suffered in World War I, a nationalism arose that celebrated the purity of the Teutonic, Aryan roots of German culture. Jews were increasingly treated as aliens. Among other things, they were barred from attending public gatherings - including league soccer matches.
Nonetheless, Heinz became an ardent fan of the Kleeblatt Eleven, the F<*_>u-umlaut<*/>rth team that had last won the German championships in 1914. He refused to stay away from their games, even though his parents ordered him to obey the law. He would sneak off to the stadium, sometimes with his younger brother, Walter, or a friend, and pretend not to be Jewish. "All we risked was a beating," he later recalled.
That was not an uncommon occurrence. On one occasion, he and Walter were caught at a match and roughed up by a gang of kids. Unwilling to tell their parents, they confided in their family maid, who cleaned them up without revealing their secret.
Kissinger's love of soccer surpassed his ability to play it, though not his enthusiasm for trying. In an unsettled world, it was his favorite outlet. "He was one of the smallest and skinniest in our group," said Paul Stiefel, a friend from F<*_>u-umlaut<*/>rth who later immigrated to Chicago. What Kissinger lacked in strength he made up in finesse. One year he was even captain of his class team, selected more for his leadership ability than his agility.
The Jews in F<*_>u-umlaut<*/>rth had their own sports club. "My father once played for the city team," said Henry Gitterman, a classmate of Kissinger's. "When the Jews were thrown off, they formed their own teams at a Jewish sports club." The field was merely a plot of dirt with goalposts, and the gym was an old warehouse with a corrugated roof. But it served as a haven from roving Nazi youth gangs and an increasingly threatening world.
Young Kissinger could be very competitive. In the cobblestone yard behind their house, he would play games of one-on-one soccer with John Heiman, a cousin who boarded with his family for five years. "When it was time to go in," Heiman recalled, "if he was ahead, we could go. But if he was losing, I'd have to keep playing until he had a chance to catch up."
Kissinger was better at Vlkerball, a simple pickup game, usually played with five on a side, in which the object was to hit members of the opposite team with a ball. Kissinger liked being the player who stood behind the enemy lines to catch the balls that his teammates threw. "It was one of the few games I was good at," he would later say.
It was as a student rather than as an athlete that Kissinger excelled.
<#FROWN:G43\>
Seeking Mother, Marrying Daddy:Summer
Wharton's ultimate paternal interventionist is, of course, the Levantine Palmato who had coopted his daughter's sensual nature so effectively as to eliminate future competitors. If we use Wolff's date, 1919-20, for the incestuous fragment, Palmato's precursor among Wharton's published works is Lawyer Royall, the adoptive father of Charity Royall in Summer (1917), who not only displaces his daughter's lover but succeeds in marrying her as well. Unlike the enraptured Beatrice, this daughter tries to resist the incestuous pull, to put emotional and physical distance between herself and her father, but finds herself caught in his almost ubiquitous web. Fighting to break away but unable to formulate a realistic strategy, she becomes entrapped by her very act of separation - taking a lover and becoming pregnant. Needing to be cared for in this condition and wanting a home for her baby, she submits to marriage with her father. This joyless union represents the final defeat in her struggle for autonomy.
Charity had been informally adopted in childhood by Lawyer Royall and his wife. Following his wife's death, the lonely and somewhat seedy Royall reared the child alone. She grew up haunted by her shadowy, indeed shady, origins. She knows that she had been born of an unknown woman on The Mountain, a place thought to be inhabited by primitive folk of savage and promiscuous habits. According to Royall's story, the girl had been offered to him by her father, a man whom Royall had helped convict of manslaughter. Charity believes herself to be the child "of a drunken convict and a mother who wasn't 'half human,' and was glad to have her go" (73). Although she was taught to be grateful to Lawyer Royall for bringing her down from the mountain and saving her from her shameful origins, she hates their constrained life in North Dormer. Seen through the eyes of this sensuous but untutored and restless adolescent, North Dormer is a trap, a place she must flee if she is to have a full life.
As Charity blossoms into lusty adolescence, neighbors who sense a potential problem in her living alone with her bachelor father urge him to send her away to school. First Royall and then Charity decline this option even though the girl feels hemmed in by the physical and cultural limitations of the town. Charity especially resents her aging surrogate father, who had propositioned her when she was seventeen (Wharton's age at her debut) and subsequently asked to marry her. She fights off her feelings of affinity to him by cultivating disgust, but her insults and rebuffs fail to destroy his possessive love for her. Wishing to earn money so she can escape from him and from North Dormer, the scarcely literate Charity maneuvers to get herself a job as town librarian.
In the library she finds love in the form of a handsome young stranger, an architect named Lucius Harney. He represents the outer world of which this valley-bred girl has had only rare glimpses - a world of grace, manners, and culture. In the sensuous summer of her young life, Charity's love quickly flowers into passion, which Wharton renders in fiery language. Very quickly, Charity becomes pregnant, but her social inferiority makes marriage to Lucius unlikely. In her heedless and inarticulate relationship to vital forces, Charity is reminiscent of Sophy Viner, who also seizes love without asking the price or the consequences.
Lawyer Royall sniffs out the growing passion between Charity and Lucius Harney even before they themselves recognize it. Despite his fondness for Lucius, Royall is determined to intercept this love. At a high point of entrancement, when Lucius and Charity have just witnessed a thrilling display of Fourth of July fireworks in Nettleton and hope to slip home undetected, they are spotted by Lawyer Royall, drunk and disheveled in the company of a prostitute.
He stood staring at them, and trying to master the senile quiver of his lips; then he drew himself up with the tremulous majesty of drunkenness, and stretched out his arm.
'You whore - you damn - bare-headed whore, you!' he enunciated slowly.
Such sexual insults are designed to alienate Charity's genteel young lover, so that he will not want to marry her. They also serve to establish the girl's connections to the whole realm of primitive lusts lurking behind this father-daughter relationship. Royall's appearance in the company of a prostitute suggests that he may have had a similar connection to Charity's mother, that Charity may be his daughter, and that he regards the child of such a union as innately corrupted and therefore fair game.
Throughout the novel, Lawyer Royall's image falls between the lovers - in doorways, at moments of embrace - always he is aware of her sexual activities and contaminates them. He looms over thresholds and outside windows, haunting the girl with his unceasing vigilance. Hoping to evade this surveillance, the lovers meet secretly at a deserted cabin outside of town. There Charity is sensuously watching a fiery sunset over The Mountain and anticipating the arrival of Lucius, when she becomes "aware that a shadow had flitted across the glory-flooded room. ... The door opened, and [in] Mr. Royall walked." He declares that he has come to prevent Charity from getting into trouble, or to help her evoke a marriage proposal from Lucius, but he concludes the episode by saying in front of Lucius that Charity is a promiscuous "woman of the town" just like her mother. "I went to save her from the kind of life her mother was leading - but I'd better have left her in the kennel she came from" (203-4).<*_>three-black-diamonds<*/>
The action of Summer takes place within a symbolic moralized landscape. Charity is poised between the Mountain, a primitive realm of unbounded impulse (though scarcely a gratifying place), and the Town, the rigidly proper and fully encircled village of North Dormer. Charity's only knowledge of the normal world is through brief visits to the nearby town of Nettleton, a place where there are shops, circuses, even an abortionist. Had Charity been capable of escaping to Nettleton she could have moved outside the realm of extreme choices and found alternatives to both her claustrophobic world of inexorable laws and the primitive, promiscuous world of unrule. Lying outside the symbolic landscape, Nettleton represents a more flexible sort of human life, in which compromises and accommodations are possible. Like other Wharton protagonists such as Lily Bart and Newland Archer, Charity Royall seems caught between lawlessness and rigid superego demands, unable to move into the middle world of accommodation.
When we map the affective lines of force within this dream-like novel, we find all the major characters radiating out from the central figure of Charity. Her motherless state calls forth the nurturant father Lawyer Royall, along with his incestuous impulses. Her libido, overstimulated by having her father entirely to herself, seems to have generated The Mountain, a place of origin that would explain or justify her sense of innate pollution. Believing herself born of a degenerate mother into the morally unbounded world of The Mountain, she quite naturally accepts her instinctual nature and feels free to satisfy it. But having also been reared in prudish North Dormer, she can be persuaded that such actions are whorish.
Brought up under the Law, she is too ethical to choose abortion to solve her pregnancy crisis or to use the pregnancy to coerce Lucius into marriage. Like Sophy Viner, she is faithful to her love and refuses to corrupt it by pragmatic considerations. Torn between such polarities as the unbounded and the overly circumscribed, Charity cannot make a worldly adjustment to her situation, such as moving out of North Dormer and working to support her child. She drifts into a very bizarre solution indeed.
Charity had often felt a strange affinity to Royall, "as if she had his blood in her veins" (118). Thus Wharton deliberately inserts a hint that the adopted father may have been the biological one. By introducing this ambiguity, she fudges the incest issue, allowing readers to entertain the more piquant possibility of real incest while neutralizing it through the technicality of adoption. But either way the story is incestuous; an adoptive father is perceived as a father psychologically.
Charity's hostility toward Royall recalls Lily's toward Rosedale, a way of fending off dangerous desires. Furthermore, the author draws another line of affinity, one connecting the formerly gifted lawyer to his daughter's cultured lover, so that Lucius seems to represent Royall's spiritual son or his youthful self, the potential that has been thwarted by life in North Dormer. The relationships among characters in Summer are unrealistically close, all spawned by the same central imagination, which seems to have been an incestuous one.
Longing for her unknown mother begins with Charity's sexual maturation. When she first discovers her love for Lucius, she begins to yearn for her mother, no matter how disreputable this woman may turn out to be. When she finds herself pregnant and abandoned by Lucius, she fights her way through storm and weariness up to The Mountain to find her. She arrives just moments after her mother's death on a borrowed bed in a wretched hovel heated by a borrowed stove, covered in a borrowed coat. That night she sees her mother buried without even a coffin. The longed-for mother, when found, was dead, disreputable, a revolting sight - of no possible help to any daughter, much less to a pregnant one. Nonetheless, Charity had to touch the maternal base before assuming motherhood herself.
With the mother dead and Lucius engaged to someone else and unaware of her pregnancy, Charity is without resources or support. She is alone in a dangerous place, cold and hungry. Knowing all this, Royall follows her to The Mountain in a carriage, protects her from the cold, and secures food for her. He behaves tenderly enough but immediately lures her into marriage. In her shocked and vulnerable state she lacks the strength to resist him. Submitting passively, this once-fiery girl is set up to fulfill the oedipal fantasy of bringing her father a child, the child born of her youthful passion, so that her child's step-parent will be her own adoptive father. With grim fatality she surrenders for the sake of security her youth, her passion, her hopes for a fuller life. The morning after the wedding, she realizes what she has sacrificed; "for an instant the old impulse of flight swept through her; but it was only the lift of a broken wing" (280).
Social Conformity as Refuge: The Age of Innocence
Like The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence is a novel of sexual inhibition that has long been read as a novel of manners. It was published in 1920, about a decade after the Fullerton affair. In it Wharton depicts a New York society of inflexible rules and rituals, an inhibitor of the instinctive life, yet a source of civilizing decencies. Like a good operatic overture, the opening scene introduces the novel's motifs, which emanate from the central question of the ambivalence of love, memorably proclaimed by Marguerite's aria, 'M'ama ... non m'ama ... M'ama.' Within Newland Archer's range of vision at this moment are representatives of his entire world - completely conventional people like the Wellands, the power networks of cousinship, social arbiters, successful challengers of the rules, arrivistes, spotless maidens, men frankly enjoying the double standard, and, above all, indicators of imminent change. The scene plunges us into a critical moment in old New York society, which was cresting just before its downward turn, a moment that is also the turning point of Archer's life.
Archer, about to end a comfortable bachelorhood in which he had never questioned the values of his class, contemplates his artfully innocent fiance and his erotic hopes for a marriage that will miraculously reconcile "fire and ice." Almost simultaneously he receives his first impression of wider possibilities as embodied in the europeanized person of Ellen Olenska.
All this wonderfully compact exposition falls within the realm of Edith Wharton's recognized gift for social observation and satire.
<#FROWN:G44\>
Epilogue: Science and Subjectivity
My 'story' of Virginia Woolf's manic-depressive illness ends here, but its implications do not. Her most profound insight into her disorder - that the unity of consciousness is a tidy fiction with which to build our "comfortable cocoons" of consistent identity - continues to challenge how we write histories of the mind, because it has been reinforced by recent advances in neuroscience. This intersection between literary and scientific inquiries may eventually lead us to a new model of the human psyche, one that integrates the valuable insights of psychoanalysis and neuroscience, mind and brain, Freud and Woolf. Indeed, some convergence of the 'hard' and 'soft' sciences must be an inevitable step if psychoanalysis is to survive through the next century. And it would be a fitting sequel to a neurobiography of Virginia Woolf (certainly more rewarding than lingering over her suicide), for she left us a legacy that extends beyond her personal tragedy. She can be more than a Freudian lesson on how not to cope with trauma. She stands at the crossroads where art, science, biography, and biology meet.
Woolf's "ensemble psyche" in The Waves lives on in Michael S. Gazzaniga's theory of the brain's "modular-type organization." Gazzaniga's famous experiments with split-brain patients have led him to conclude that the human brain is organized into "relatively independent functioning units that work in parallel. The mind is not an indivisible whole, operating in a single way to solve all problems," but a confederation. Most of these modules, which are capable of their own actions, moods, and responses, remembering events and storing affective reactions to those events, operate in nonverbal ways apart from the conscious verbal self and so are unavailable for introspection. A sudden impulse to act, a shift in emotion or mood, may arise in one module. The 'ego' of the dominant hemisphere will then evaluate that impulse and mediate it (a hallucinating patient may even 'hear' this module's intent as a 'voice'). If one part functions in isolation and displaces the ego's program to integrate other, counterbalancing modules, the resulting 'impulsive' behavior can be catastrophic and/or psychotic.
Gazzaniga's modules are not necessarily "unconscious" in the Freudian sense (although some probably are); most are "co-conscious but nonverbal." We are unaware of our multiple selves because our brain has a special program in the dominant hemisphere that Gazzaniga calls the "interpreter", a Bernard-like spokesperson who instantly makes inferences and constructs a theory, or narrative, to explain why a behavior or thought or emotion has occurred. But too often the left hemisphere strives for subjective consistency (like old Professor Sopwith twining "chaos" into a neat thread) at the expense of right hemisphere sensitivity to inconsistent data; consequently, ignored modules may act independently. Perhaps, then, manic-depressive mood shifts produce misbehaviors and chaotic self structure because they impair the usually seamless integration of these modules. They certainly heightened Woolf's sense of the mind's innate program to fight chaos with narrative order as opposed to its potential for perceptual plasticity, out of which she created a 'modern' view of subjectivity. In this sense, postmodern science has finally caught up with her.
What can biology offer psychoanalytic theory besides blank opposition? Intriguing possibilities. In Chapter 8 I spoke of how each hemisphere mediates perceptions and thinking differently, contributing various styles and insights that successful interhemispheric processing integrates, and how events in the nondominant (usually right) hemisphere often go unnoticed or unacknowledged by the dominant (usually left) hemisphere, which presumes that it is the only seat of authority and knowledge. Inadequate integration may thus constitute a functional 'invisible deficit.' I borrow this term from neurology, where it is used to describe the inability of a patient to be aware that, due to brain injury, he is lacking a prominent feature of consciousness. If, for instance, certain visual areas of the right hemisphere are damaged by a stroke, patients will not see or attend to any object situated on their left, and they will be unaware that they are so blinded. When asked to draw the face of a clock, they will accurately recreate only the right side, with numbers 12 through 6 dutifully noted, but 7 through 11 will be missing. Oliver Sacks reports on a patient, Mrs. S., who had suffered a massive stroke in her right cerebral hemisphere and lost her ability to perceive objects on her left: when served dinner, she ate only from the right half of the plate; when applying lipstick, she covered only the right side of her mouth. She could not look left, or turn left, so she learned to turn right, in a circle, until she found what she was looking for. The object on the left (indeed, the direction 'left') did not exist unless her 'right looking' left hemisphere perceived it. Another patient's right-hemisphere stroke damage extended into visual imagination and memory: when asked to imagine himself walking through his town square, Dr. P. listed only those buildings that would have appeared on his right side, none on his left. When asked to imagine himself walking in the opposite direction, he listed only the previously missing buildings, those that would have appeared on his right, which he had failed to remember moments before. His subjective world was exclusively right-handed.
The nervous system is arranged to build a spatial map of the body and its environment. Disturbances within the system can have profound effects on the individual's sense of what constitutes his body and his mind - in effect, his identity. If a stroke impairs afferent and motor neurons, the patient may become unaware that he has an arm or leg; when it is pointed out to him, he will report that he "feels" or "believes" that it belongs to someone else, not him. One of Sack's patients threw himself out of his hospital bed trying to rid himself of what looked like someone else's leg, "a severed human leg,a horrible thing" that he could only assume a prankster had surreptitiously attached to his body. He called it a "counterfeit" because it did not feel "real" - at least, not really his. When asked to locate his own left leg, the patient became pale and claimed that it had "disappeared." His identity no longer included a left leg.
Dr. P., Mrs. S., and the young man without a leg all suffer from a psychic dissociation because of their neurological deficit. They do not know about the dead limb or the blind or numb side; indeed, they do not desire to know. It is as if the circuits that mediate particular perceptions also generate or process the specific desire to perceive them, what a Freudian would call an object-cathexis. They literally do not know what they are missing, that they are missing it, or that they might have wanted not to miss it. The desire has disappeared along with the cognitive capacity. The implications of the 'invisible deficit' present psychoanalytic theorists with intriguing challenges. Is the origin of desire limited (like Freud's id) to certain areas of the mind, or is it spread across all neural networks? In what ways are desire and cognition the same thing differently perceived? Will it be possible to chart a "map of desire" in the same way we now map areas of the brain that handle sensory data from the arms or legs? Can interhemispheric integration be affected by a functional invisible deficit, a structural dissociation that does not involve a physical injury or the censorship of forbidden content responsive to introspection and psychoanalytic insight? In what way do we all suffer from invisible deficits? Brain damage is apparent to us because we compare the patient's disability to our abilities, but even we who enjoy intact brains cannot perceive or desire to perceive that we are missing something lying beyond what our brain structure allows us to think about.
In other words, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's linguistic model may not be the only way to describe the limitations of thought. Future interdisciplinary research may shift the burden of postmodern psychoanalysis from a Saussurean linguistic base of self-referential signs and signifiers to a neurological one. For cognitive science and neuroscience also suggest that we do not perceive, interpret, or 'know' reality referentially but, rather, in terms of thousands of feedback loops supporting internal theoretical models that occur on both conscious and unconscious levels, and that operate binomially, amassing and organizing differentiated units (hot/cold, rough/soft, love/hate). Just as postmodern psychoanalytic theory depicts the underpinnings of thought as a chain of signifiers whose meaning exists only in relation of each other, epitomized by opposition of polar opposites, so too neural circuitry and brain structure seem to be arranged to deal with sensory information and behavior by opposing pathways - paired hemispheres, modular processing (discrete areas of the brain handling specialized tasks which must be sorted out at higher levels of functioning), feedback circuits, paired/opposed neurotransmitter systems, the splitting off of linguistic skills from visual skills.
The import of brain research throws up a kind of Lacanian bar between the left and the right hemisphere, making self-insight, or even self-awareness, a matter of interpretation, a guess or approximation based on inadequate data fed from one hemisphere to the other. The dominant hemisphere, a specialist in linguistic signifiers, may be barred from direct knowledge of the nondominant hemisphere, the signified, where a separate self - equally developed and reality-oriented - processes many important perceptions and feelings. Perhaps the Other we most struggle to know (or whose mute gaze haunts our every look) is not the unconscious part of one self but another conscious self, co-existing in our shared body, mute and unavailable to language, yet responsible for processing the visual and emotional cues which the dominant hemisphere may misunderstand, for mistranslations are inevitable between two minds that do not speak the same language.
Can inadequate interhemispheric relations be the physical basis for Lacan's observation that patients' utterances and writers' texts undercut their own ostensible meaning? Does the right hemisphere make itself known by surreptitiously sliding signifiers through metonymy (a useful procedure for a hemisphere good at recognizing widely scattered details and individual words but not at generating sustained, intentional sentences of its own) and metaphor (the right hemisphere is skilled at nonlinear modes of association and converging multiple determinants rather than at forming a causal or logical chain)? What would emerge, then, is not a composed structure of meaningful elements but Lacan's discomposed discourse in which elements are substituted and recombined, leaving seemingly mute traces or absences to litter our left-hemisphere-dominated narratives. If that is the case, then the robust left hemisphere, unaware that it is speaking the unrecognized and unrecognizable 'truth' of the repressed right hemisphere, might also be one source of the Imaginary Subject created in the misreading of the infantile mirror-stage, and the Subject would be a misreading not only of the Other who is its mother but of the Other who is its hemispheric psychic partner, against which it has defined itself. Doubled selves, one of whom is a mute voyeur gazing upon the other, may create the uncanny duality of all Lacanian looking (every recognition at once a finding and a failure to find, every gaze a being gazed at), in which we are perpetually caught. Does transference originate here in the relationship between these two selves, with the right hemisphere playing the Lacanian dummy, the smoothly mirroring and mute Other (like Tansley, Lily Briscoe's whipping boy), who reveals nothing but what we project upon him? Is the left hemisphere thus burdened, defeated, and frustrated by its own mastery, its too-successful subordination of the right hemisphere, because silencing Otherness only increases the power of its haunting and inscrutable gaze? If the Lacanian unconscious includes this other thinking, witnessing, and responding self, then the old phrase about being "of two minds" will someday seem ironically profound and profoundly inadequate. Biological science now offers psychoanalytic and literary scholars promising evidence that a brain/mind integration will have enormously important theoretical implications - if we open ourselves up to them.
<#FROWN:G45\>
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Top Soviet Spy
Until 1950 Owen Lattimore was a typically inner-directed, iconoclastic scholar. The constraints on his independence were self-chosen and only mildly inhibiting. No organizational bureaucracy stifled his creative thought, neither the Institute of Pacific Relations, nor John Hopkins, nor even the Chinese Nationalist government. He said what he thought, and it was often unconventional.
In 1950 all this changed. He found his life taken charge of by lawyers, his privacy invaded by reporters and government sleuths, and his formerly freewheeling discourse forced to conform to the end of proving that he was not a tool of the Kremlin. For five and a half years the inquisition ran his life. The Lattimore story became a part of America's anti-Communist pathology.
The year began happily enough when President Truman announced disengagement form the struggle in China on January 5. The White Paper had exacerbated Republican dissatisfaction with China policy; Asia-first senators were pressing for a commitment to the remnant Nationalist regime on Taiwan. Truman wanted to put a stop to this talk. Disregarding the advice of his staff and of Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson (but agreeing with Secretary of State Dean Acheson), Truman read a statement at his morning press conference January 5: the United States had no predatory designs on Taiwan and would not establish military bases there, nor would it interfere in the Chinese civil war.
Lattimore was pleased. He knew that American policy in Asia had to be built on the reality of nationalism and that continued support of a discredited regime could only increase Asian resentment at American meddling.
A week later, in Acheson's famous 'defense perimeter' speech, the administration clarified its Asian policy further. Military authorities, including MacArthur, had drawn a defense line in the Pacific that included Japan, Okinawa, and the Philippines, but excluded Taiwan and Korea. This defense line had been reported in the world's press; the Russians already knew well what American plans were. Acheson merely restated them on January 12 in a speech to the National Press Club; but in the heightened tension of 1950 his speech attracted a great deal of attention.
Lattimore also approved of the defense perimeter. He thought South Korea was a loser under Syngman Rhee, who was as out of touch with his people as Chiang had been. He believed, as did the Department of State and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that South Korea was not a viable government and could not defend itself against a Soviet-supported attack from the north. And, like official Washington, he felt that American defense dollars were better spent elsewhere.
Republican pique at Truman's hands-off stance toward China was intense. The China bloc in Congress, egged on by General Chennault, William Bullitt, the right-wing press, and Chiang's various representatives in the United States, began a long and powerful campaign to support Chiang for an effort to retake the mainland. This campaign was reinforced on January 21, when Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury.
The Hiss case had been dragged through the courts all during 1949. A first trial, ending in July with a hung jury, was followed by a second. In both trials Whittaker Chambers was the crucial witness against Hiss. The second jury believed Chambers; and the conspiracy theories of Alfred Kohlberg, up to then generally ignored, received powerful reinforcement. There were traitors in the government conspiring to promote Soviet plans for world conquest. Hiss had been at Yalta, where China was "sold down the river." Hiss had been the assistant to Stanley Hornbeck, head of the Far Eastern desk at the State Department. Hiss had been general secretary of the United Nations Founding Conference at San Francisco. Now it was proved to the satisfaction of a jury that Hiss had been a Communist, working all along to deliver China into the hands of the enemy.
It is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance of the Hiss conviction to the developing witch-hunt. If this pillar of the foreign policy establishment could be a traitor, treason could be anywhere. Worse still, Secretary Acheson, who presided over the whole conspiratorial apparatus, refused now to disown Hiss. At a press conference January 25 Acheson was asked if he had any comment on the Hiss case. He refused to discuss legal aspects of the case but said friends of Hiss had to make a personal decision. His own decision had been made: "I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss." The standards that impelled him to this position "were stated on the Mount of Olives and if you are interested in seeing them you will find them in the 25th Chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew beginning with verse 34." Congress, according to Acheson, flew into a tantrum. However motivated Acheson was by Christian charity, his words served as gasoline to the fires of Asia-first resentment.
All writers on the McCarthy years acknowledge that the Hiss verdict convinced a vast constituency that treason in the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt was widespread. It also showed that ex-Communists such as Whittaker Chambers were perceived as credible, and it demonstrated that politicians pursuing subversives could achieve national status, as Nixon did. All of these outcomes were salient for Owen Lattimore.
The tempo of traumatic events early in 1950 continued unabated. It was front-page news for every paper in the country when President Truman announced on January 30 that the United States would develop a hydrogen bomb. And on February 3 Klaus Fuchs, who had worked on the American atomic bomb project during the war but was now in England, confessed that he had passed atomic information to the Russians. Three days later the Republican National Committee announced 'Liberty against Socialism' as the major issue of the 1950 congressional elections. The party statement declared: "We advocate a strong policy against the spread of communism or fascism at home and abroad, and we insist that America's efforts toward this end be directed by those who have no sympathy either with communism or fascism." No one realized, that early in the campaign, how many thousands of people would be charged with sympathy for communism.
Lattimore's attention to these events was distracted by a request from the United Nations that he head a technical assistance mission to Afghanistan, exploring the kinds of economic aid appropriate for that country. The timing of this request was awkward. His lecture schedule in 1949 had kept him away from Baltimore more than normal, he had just returned from a three-week trip to India, and the Johns Hopkins Mongol project needed his attention. On the positive side, he strongly supported the UN, and Afghanistan was a part of the Sino-Soviet border he had never visited.
The Afghan mission would require that he be gone the month of March on an exploratory trip and then for the period from June to September to negotiate final agreements with the Afghan government. This was a big chunk of time. He was uneasy about accepting this assignment and wrote John W. Gardner of the Carnegie Corporation, which supplied the major funding for his Mongol project, that he would not go if Carnegie thought he would be slighting the Mongols. Gardner replied that he thought the Mongol project well enough organized that it could safely be left in the hands of Lattimore's associates while he went to Afghanistan. Lattimore therefore accepted and prepared for this new venture. He was to leave March 6.
There was another project to be attended to before he left. The rapid advances of the Chinese Communists into Tibet suggested that that area would be under their control in a year or two. Lattimore believed this overthrow would mean loss to the scholarly world, perhaps permanently, of the priceless manuscripts in Tibetan monasteries. Lattimore talked about prospects for rescuing these manuscripts with Dr. Arthur Hummel of the Library of Congress. Hummel, an orientalist, was convinced that Lattimore was right and suggested that the matter be put to Luther Evans, the Librarian. Lattimore wrote Evans on February 26, 1950: "As country after country comes under communist control it is cut off from the scholarship of the world, as well as from other contacts. There usually follows a scramble in which a few refugee scholars are brought to the United States or other countries and a few books, manuscripts, and other materials are salvaged. Such salvage is, however, just that - unplanned salvage. Tibet is clearly doomed to come under control of the Chinese Communists. There is, however, time for a planned salvage operation...a wealth of material never yet worked on by Western scholars could be brought out during the next few months."
Lattimore then described to Evans the major sources of manuscripts and what might be found; recommended that the Dilowa Hutukhtu be used to negotiate with Tibetan authorities; explained how Indian cooperation could be obtained; and urged prompt action before the curtain was rung down on Tibet. It was a prescient effort. Perhaps, had the United States not contracted inquisition fever, Luther Evans and the Library of Congress might have acquired the treasure trove of Lama Buddhist lore later destroyed in Mao's Cultural Revolution. As it happened, doctrinal purity took precedence over any kind of scholarship, especially esoteric orientalia.
While Lattimore was wrestling with a decision on Afghanistan, the FBI was wrestling with the problem of keeping up with Lattimore. Lacking a wiretap, the Baltimore office had trouble knowing where and when he was traveling. His home in Ruxton was like the farm in Bethel, Vermont: poor cover for spies. As SAC McFarlin complained to Hoover on February 16, "The peculiar location of the Lattimore home eliminates any possibility of successful physical surveillance without the aid of a technical surveillance."
The Baltimore office had other troubles. McFarlin was worried about the local vigilantes. After the American Legion put Lattimore on its black-list, ultrarightists in Baltimore began their own 'investigations'. Two of them were serious threats to the bureau.
One of the vigilantes was a woman whose name the FBI will not divulge. She had been to the Baltimore FBI office several times, alerting them to Lattimore's subversive influence on impressionable Hopkins students and protesting his alleged role in formulating American China policy. McFarlin told headquarters in his February 16 letter that there was "the ever-present possibility that she will present the matter to the House Committee on Un-American Activities or other persons placed in high political positions in Washington, D.C., in which event there might be undesirable repercussions on the Bureau."
Subsequent serials in the Lattimore file show that the bureau had trouble deciding how to handle the female informant. The matter was serious enough to wind up in the hands of Assistant Director D. M. Ladd. Writing to Hoover on February 17, Ladd recommended that the woman not be contacted again; her charges against Lattimore were trivial. But Hoover reversed Ladd; he did not want HUAC to get potentially important information from an informant directly. His embarrassment at Nixon's getting information from Chambers still rankled. Baltimore was therefore instructed to contact the woman, make sure that she had no new information, and convince her that the bureau was on top of the case. Baltimore found nothing new, and the woman apparently did not go to HUAC.
A more serious private crusade against Lattimore was conducted by Kenneth Hammer, Maryland American Legion commander and chair of its Americanism Commission. According to Daniel H. Burkhardt, who was closely associated with Hammer as adjutant of the Maryland department of the Legion, Hammer was an attorney-investigator who had learned the trade as a military intelligence agent during the war. Burkhardt thought Hammer brilliant; the bureau thought him dangerous. Hammer's activities included efforts to get the Baltimore police to tap Lattimore's telephone, amateur surveillance of Lattimore and the Mongols, and frequent calls to SAC McFarlin. The bureau wanted none of this freelancing. Headquarters Security Division dispatched Lee Pennington, a midlevel bureau official, to dampen Hammer's vendetta against Lattimore.
Pennington and McFarlin called on Hammer at Baltimore headquarters of the Legion February 23, 1950.
<#FROWN:G46\>
SEVEN
Beyond Hitchcock
I have explored how reputations emerge and change in the art world of film using Hitchcock and the thriller genre to illuminate the process. In this, the final chapter, I will assess the broader significance of the reputational patterns reported in the book. Using the method of controlled comparison (see Smelser 1976), I will extend the discussion beyond Hitchcock and the thriller case to other film directors whose reputations have also fluctuated dramatically over the years. As described by sociologist Neil Smelser, the technique of controlled comparison is an analytical strategy in which the selection of additional 'case histories' is guided by the logic of experimental design. "[P]otential sources of variation are converted into parameters by selecting cases that resemble one another in significant respects. The resemblances can then be regarded as 'ruled out' as explanatory factors, and explanations based on other variables can be generated within the framework provided by the resemblances"(Smelser 1976, 215). By comparing the reputational careers of directors who resemble one another in significant ways, I can both further check on the reasonableness of my interpretation of Hitchcock's reputational trajectory and gain further insight into the process of reputation building.
The sixties and early seventies marked a watershed for Hitchcock as well as for other directors of his generation. It was during the early sixties that Fran<*_>c-cedille<*/>ois Truffaut, Andrew Sarris, Peter Bogdanovich, Robin Wood, and other auteur critics actively sought to elevate Hitchcock's stature as a serious artist. While their efforts eventually succeeded, the transformation of his reputation from 'master of suspense' to serious auteur proceeded slowly. The campaign to improve Hitchcock's reputation was part of a general movement to promote directors who fit the new criteria for filmmaking. In advancing their views, the auteur critics constructed a new pantheon of directors wherein certain directors were singled out for special praise while the rest were demoted or ignored (see Sarris 1986a; cf. Wollen 1969, 166-67).
For the old-guard intellectual critics (e.g., Bosley Crowther [1967], Dwight Macdonald [1969], Arthur Knight [1957], Hollis Alpert [1962a], and Richard Griffith [1950]), the major dividing line for directors was American versus European or, more precisely, Hollywood directors versus the Europeans they favored - Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean Renoir, and others. Among the relatively few American directors singled out as significant by the critical establishment were John Huston, George Stevens, Billy Wilder, William Wyler, and Fred Zinnemann (see, e.g., Alpert 1962a, 130; Knight 1957, 188-88; and Griffith 1950). "In January 1956," reports film historian Robert Ray, "Newsweek offered a mid-decade appraisal of the American popular film occasioned by John Huston's about-to-be-released Moby Dick. Including Huston, the article named 'the top five directors in the industry' as William Wyler, George Stevens, Fred Zinnemann, and Billy Wilder" (Ray 1985, 141-42).
The young American auteurists of the sixties, as we have seen, countered the established pantheon with one of their own choosing, reflecting their belief that there were directors such as Hitchcock, Hawks, Ford, Lang, and Welles who, despite having worked within the old Hollywood studio system, had somehow managed to maintain in their work a personal vision not entirely limited by space and time. On the other hand, Huston, Wyler, Stevens, Zinnemann, and Wilder were all dismissed as second- or third-rate by the auteurists, and, as Ray has pointed out, "all but Stevens [were] eventually included in American auteurist Andrew Sarris's most damning category, 'Less Than Meets the Eye'" (1985, 142). In contrast to these directors, Hitchcock was an ideal showcase for the American practitioners of auteur theory. Not only did his work span forty years, it also traversed two continents - Europe and North America. As we have seen, according to the critical establishment circa 1955, Hitchcock's British films were superior to those he made in Hollywood. To many veteran critics, Hitchcock had sold out to Hollywood - selling his artistic soul for the commercial dollar. By contrast, the auteur critics, believing that they could demonstrate that his Hollywood films actually surpassed those he made in England, saw Hitchcock's career as a perfect vehicle for illustrating their conviction that great cinematic art could flourish within the Hollywood studio system.
In spite of support from the auteur critics and Hitchcock's own massive efforts at self-promotion, the campaign to elevate his artistic reputation required over ten years to achieve success. The evidence reported in this book strongly indicates that it was the prevalence through much of the fifties and sixties of a critical discourse favoring 'realism' over the artificiality of Hollywood genre films that was principally responsible for delaying his reception as an artist. In addition, I would suggest that Hitchcock's deeply entrenched celebrity status as master of suspense also worked against him. That is, the very success of Hitchcock's self-promotional activities during the fifties may have actually hurt the later campaign initiated by the French auteur critics to enhance his reputation. Perhaps, had Hitchcock not cultivated a public reputation and not been perceived by critics as a master of self-promotion - in other words, had he maintained a relatively low profile - his reputation as an important artist probably would have advanced more quickly. As a check on this interpretation, I turn to the filmmaking career of Howard Hawks.
Virtually unknown outside the film industry before 1960, Hawks came to be regarded by the late 1960s and early 1970s as one of Hollywood's greatest directors. In fact, my strong impression is that by the late 1960s, the critical consensus on Hawks' stature as a significant artist even surpassed Hitchcock's (see, for example, the clippings file on Howard Hawks and the reviews of what proved to be his last film, Rio Lobo [1971], MOMA). Today, while critics might still debate the elements of Hawks' artistry, few would question applying the artistic label to his work. Why did Hawks' reputation advance more smoothly and quickly than Hitchcock's during the early sixties? Before answering this, I will establish the extent to which Hawks' filmmaking career is comparable to Hitchcock's.
Like Hitchcock's, Howard Hawks' career spanned over forty years. One of Hollywood's most successful directors, he had worked, unlike Hitchcock, in a variety of popular genres - gangster films such as Scarface, crime stories such as The Big Sleep, comedies such as Bringing up Baby, musicals such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and westerns such as Rio Bravo. Like Hitchcock, Hawks presented himself publicly as a popular director, never as a serious or significant artist. However, unlike Hitchcock, Hawks maintained a low profile through most of his career; rarely did he publicly discuss his views on filmmaking. Indeed, before 1960, no one had asked him to do so. Nor did he have the audience recognition that Hitchcock had enjoyed throughout his career. For established critics, Hawks went practically unnoticed. Rarely did they mention his name when reviewing one of his films. As Sarris put it in 1962, "Howard Hawks is the least known and least appreciated giant in the American cinema" (Sarris 1962b, 20).
Many of the early French, English, and American auteur critics who embraced the view of Hitchcock as a serious artist also crusaded on behalf of Hawks. The French auteurs who sponsored both directors came to be known as the 'Hitchcock-Hawksiens.' Jacques Rivette wrote a ground-breaking essay on Hawks for Cahiers du Cinma which appeared in 1953. Three years later Cahiers du Cinma published an extended interview with Hawks conducted by Truffaut, Rivette, and Jacques Becker. While Hawks' films were frequently reviewed and discussed in French newspapers and periodicals from the early 1950s on, it was not until the early sixties that American critics started to write seriously about his work. In the summer of 1962, roughly a year before Bogdanovich organized the Hitchcock retrospective for the Museum of Modern Art, he put together a similar one on behalf of Hawks for which he also prepared a monograph consisting of an introductory essay and a lengthy interview touching on many on Hawks' films. Later that summer, Andrew Sarris published a two-part essay on Hawks for the British film journal Films and Filming. At the end of the year, another British journal, Movie, devoted an entire issue to Hawks with articles by several critics including Robin Wood and V.F. Perkins. And in early 1963, Cahiers du Cinma put out a special issue on Hawks which included abridged versions of Rivette's original essay and Bogdanovich's monograph along with essays by other critics. Robin Wood also published a book-length study of Hawks in 1968 (see also Poague 1982 and McBride 1972).
Much of the early scholarship on Hawks resembled the critical scholarship on Hitchcock's work during the sixties. Champions of Hawks raised the question: why was Hawks invisible to the public and why did he receive so little attention from the media? As Gerald Mast pointed out, Hawks had a tremendous reputation within the film industry, enjoying great freedom from the power of the individual studios (and he worked for all the major ones). Says Mast, "no other Hollywood director - not Ford, not Capra, not Hitchcock, not Lubitsch (the directors with whom Hawks liked to be compared) - enjoyed greater freedom from the power of an individual Fox, Paramount, or MGM than Hawks" (1982, 116).
While honoring Hawks with favorable contracts, the film industry withheld from him any artistic awards, at least until late in his career. Hawks was not even listed on Who's Who until 1971. Why was a film-maker who today is acknowledged as one of the great masters of the cinema so neglected throughout most of his career? One reason, according to the Hawksians, was that he worked in so-called minor genres such as adventure films, gangster films, private-eye melodramas, westerns, musicals, and screwball comedies, "the sort of things," said Sarris, that "Hollywood has done best and honored least" (Sarris 1962b, 20). While it may have been true that Hawks had made possibly the best film in each of the genres he had worked in, wasn't it also true that these films were simply vehicles for entertaining audiences rather than for edifying them as serious art might? (See plate 36.)
As Wood, Sarris, and other auteristsauteurists have pointed out, earlier film critics tended to view art and entertainment as distinct and unbridgeable provinces, analogous to those assigned to high art and popular culture. Rejecting this critical bias, Wood argued in the introduction to his book on Hawks that "A work is 'entertaining' in so far as we spontaneously enjoy it and 'art' in so far as it makes intellectual and emotional demands on us" (Wood 1986, 7). Applying this distinction between entertainment and art to music, Wood argues that many of Mozart's works, for example, a number of his divertimenti and serenades, " were composed for social gatherings at which the listeners wandered about and conversed during the music: 'art' or 'entertainment'?" (1968, 7). When Mozart's operas were first performed, most notably The Marriage of Figaro and The Magic Flute, audiences were entertained right from the beginning. Arias became popular hits of the day. Turning to Elizabethan theater, Wood maintains that Shakespeare enjoyed the same kind of rapport with audiences that Mozart enjoyed. According to Wood, the works of both Shakespeare and Mozart represent "conservative" as distinct from "revolutionary" art. Revolutionary art, such as works by Joyce and Beckett, says Wood, "deliberately breaks with the immediate past, inventing entirely new forms and new methods of expression," while conservative art "develops out of the immediate past, using forms and language already evolved" (1968, 8). For Wood, Hollywood genre films belong to this latter category and Hitchcock and Hawks are two notable examples of genre filmmakers. While Hitchcock concentrated on thriller films, Hawks worked in a variety of genres. Though not originating any of them, Hawks did produce, says Wood, "probably the best work within each genre he ... tackled" (1968, 12). Hawks, like Hitchcock, in Wood's view, lacked the excruciating self-consciousness of most modern artists. Two years earlier, in Hitchcock's Films, Wood had made much the same point about both directors, "It seems clear that the relationship of a Hitchcock or a Hawks to his art is much more like Shakespeare's than is that of a Bergman or an Antonioni; the sense of communication on many levels precludes the self-consciousness of the artist that besets the arts today and fosters true artistic impersonality" (Wood [1965] 1977, 32).
<#FROWN:G47\>
Soon after Sara and Charles Eldredge moved to Brighton, Charles's parents moved there also. Hezekiah Eldredge had begun buying property in Brighton in 1833 and by 1838 had acquired a number of parcels of land. In 1839, he, like his son, was no longer listed in the Boston City Directory. As in Ruth Hall, the old couple moved to a house in the country to be near their son and his wife.
In Ruth Hall the life of Ruth and Harry in their home in the country before the death of their daughter is idyllic except for only one factor: the interfering in-laws. In real life, however, there was another blight upon the young couple's happy existence: the unsuccessful financial dealings of Charles Eldredge. In the novel this is a subtext that does not surface until Harry's death, when Ruth finds herself penniless. And it seems that in real life, too, Sara Eldredge was not aware of the true state of her family's financial affairs until her husband's death. In her marriage, as was the accepted custom in her class and period, money was the man's business; women signed papers if necessary, but left decisions to their husbands and fathers. In fact, the handling of money was thought to be so abhorrent for women that professional women were often paid by checks made out to their husband or father rather than to themselves. A consequence of this convention was that a man was often in a position to invest his own and his wife's money without the knowledge or consent of his wife, and in many cases, to invest it unwisely to the extent of losing it.
Six months after Sara and Charles bought the house in Brighton, Charles obtained a mortgage from a Richard Fay for $4,000. Sarah P. Eldredge signed the agreement to repay the money in five years at six percent interest. Three months later Charles Eldredge obtained an additional mortgage of $3,000 from the Merchants' Bank to be repaid in one year. This agreement was also signed by Sarah P. Eldredge. One wonders why Eldredge needed the money so soon after the purchase of the house. Had he borrowed the money privately to pay for the house, from his father perhaps? Or did he need the money for additional expenses? Another possibility is that he wanted the money to make other investments. His father was continuing to make real estate investments in Brighton, and Charles may have felt this was a good way to make money. On October 10, 1840, Charles purchased approximately twelve acres of land which adjoined his own land. He paid $750 initially, but over the period of the next year he paid an additional $1,000 to six other claimants - which suggests that Charles, who must not have had the title searched adequately to determine that it was clear before making the purchase, was not as careful or astute in his investments as he should have been. Within eight months of the initial purchase, he had sold his land to his father in two parcels for a total of $2,250. That this may have been a transaction necessitated by Charles's lack of funds is suggested by the fact that in August 1841 the Merchants' Bank assigned the $3,000 mortgage on his home (which was to have been paid by July 1840) to his father, Hezekiah Eldredge. The other mortgage, for $4,000, was still outstanding.
At the same time that Sara and Charles were living their blissful - though financially shaky - existence at Swissdale, Charles became involved in another real estate transaction that intensified his financial need. In April 1839 Joseph Jenkins, the father of Sara's brother-in-law Joseph Jenkins, Jr., who was married to her sister Mary, had begun building a large brick structure on property on Tremont Street in Boston, which was to become the Boston Fine Arts Museum. Jenkins ran out of money and credit, and, unable to pay the owner of the land, Elizabeth Deblois, he was threatened with the loss of his investment. After Jenkins had made a number of unsuccessful attempts to obtain the money, he approached Charles Eldredge, who agreed that he would raise the money to purchase the property and complete the edifice.
On August 25, 1840, Eldredge purchased the property from Elizabeth Deblois, paying her almost $6,000 and agreeing to pay her the balance of approximately $15,000 within a year. Sarah P. Eldredge signed her name to the documents. On February 12, 1841, Eldredge paid $1,000 for a triangular piece of property adjoining the larger property. The construction of the building continued, and in April 1841 he took out two $10,000 loans and over the period of the next few years borrowed money from various sources to pay for the property and the construction costs. In the spring of 1841, when the building was completed, Eldredge offered to sell the property to Joseph Jenkins for what it had cost him, retaining a small profit for himself: the agreed-upon profit was $3,500. When Jenkins was unable to raise the money by September 1, 1841, the date agreed upon, Eldredge, for whom the liability had become much greater than Jenkins had originally led him to believe it would, advertised the property for public sale. Jenkins took out an injunction to prevent the sale.
On March 1, 1842, Eldredge, pressed by his creditors and under pressure from the officials at the Merchants' Bank where his involvement with Jenkins's speculation was causing his business reputation to suffer, sold the now-completed museum and surrounding property to David Kimball, treasurer of the Corporation of the New England Museum and Gallery of Fine Arts, for $55,000. Of that sum over $40,000 were in outstanding mortgages in Eldredge's name; the purchaser signed an agreement that he would pay the mortgages and other debts and then pay Charles Eldredge $10,000. Jenkins, crying fraud, filed a bill preventing the sale of the property and brought Eldredge and Kimball to court, maintaining that Eldredge was only acting as his trustee and had no right to sell the property. Eldredge claimed that he was in fact the owner of the property and denied that he had ever been simply a trustee. He said that he originally took over the property with the hope that he could help Jenkins's family, particularly his wife's sister, Mary Jenkins, and that he also sought to make a small profit for himself. But he maintained that it had always been his intention to give any surplus money to Jenkins and his family, not because of any prior agreement but at his own discretion.
The court case lasted from 1842 to 1846, and Justice Joseph Story found in favor of Jenkins and against the defendants, Eldredge and Kimball, concluding that it was not reasonable to suppose that Jenkins would ever have agreed to sign over the property to Eldredge unless it was clear that Eldredge was acting only as his trustee. Eldredge petitioned for a rehearing, maintaining that at the time of the agreement Jenkins's right of ownership had already expired. Eldredge cited contradictory evidence given by Jenkins's witnesses at the Master's hearing regarding the date at which the original agreement was reached, and pointed to evidence that proved that those witnesses, including his brother-in-law, Joseph Jenkins, Jr., who had died in November of 1843, had made false statements about the date. Eldredge's petition was denied. The judge ruled that since the testimony before the Master was without a special order of the court, it could not be admitted, and he also said he did not wish to malign a dead man (Jenkins, Jr.).
In his petition Eldredge claimed that the decision was unfair and based on perjured evidence and that he would "suffer ruinous loss both of property and reputation." The decision was allowed to stand. Eldredge was ordered to pay court costs and to repay, with interest, all the money he had received from Kimball for rents in addition to the purchase money. In addition, he had contracted other debts and had maintained in his petition that he was in danger of bankruptcy and that the sum he had been awarded would not cover all of his debts and payments. When he died four months later, he was insolvent, leaving Sara an impoverished widow with two children.
What must have been the effect of this long litigation and financial night-mare for Sara and Charles Eldredge? For one thing, family relationships must have been strained. Eldredge had entered into the business originally, he said, because he wanted to help Jenkins's family, particularly his wife's sister. He had come to the aid of Jenkins, Sr., when Jenkins was threatened with foreclosure, and he had assumed a debt of $2,000 that Jenkins, Jr., could not repay. He had taken over the Fine Arts building to help Jenkins when no one else would do so, and he had ultimately gotten into a financial muddle because of it, assuming more than $50,000 dollars in debts and jeopardizing his financial reputation and his position at the Merchants' Bank. Yet Jenkins had done everything to force him to retain the building when he could not do so without declaring bankruptcy, and Jenkins, Jr., he believed, had lied about him in court in order to strengthen his father's claim to the property. Eldredge in his petition claimed that Jenkins was guilty of "unjust and ungrateful conduct." What was the relationship between Sara and her sister Mary while their husbands were involved in this financial name-calling? In later years Sara and Mary and their children were on friendly terms, but for many years the relationship between the two families must have been uncomfortable at the very least.
What of the rest of the Willis family? Did they take sides? One wonders if the family's attitude toward Sara after her first husband died and then toward her when she left her second husband resulted in part from the strain caused by Charles Eldredge's feud with Jenkins. When Eldredge died and left his wife with debts, Nathaniel Willis blamed him, telling the young widow that she wouldn't be in such dire straits if her husband had been a better businessman.
It was unkind and insensitive of her father to criticize Eldredge to his grieving widow, but the evidence suggests that Nathaniel Willis - who, according to his son, was himself a careful businessman - was right. Eldredge took on the museum property when all other speculators regarded it as a very poor risk: Jenkins had approached a number of other businessmen, and they all, upon "mature consideration," had refused to become involved. As the Master of Chancery said in his report, "The nature and hazard of the under-taking were such that the said Eldridge [sic] was the only person in the City of Boston who, with reasonable probability of being successful in the under-taking, could be induced by the Complainant [Jenkins] to render the services required." Eldredge may have been somewhat naive, or perhaps too eager to help his in-laws - or he may have mistakenly thought the venture would provide an easy profit for himself. Whatever his motivations, they were ill-guided, and, as he commented in his petition to the court in 1845, he never would have undertaken the speculation had he "foreseen the difficulties and embarrassments" that it would involve.
What did Sara Eldredge think of the way in which her husband had conducted his affairs? She apparently never criticized him to her relatives, and she seems to have loved and supported him through all of the long ordeal. Although Ruth Hall was merciless in its criticism of Fern's father-in-law, brother, brother-in-law, and the newspaper editors who had exploited her, there is no suggestion of criticism of her first husband in her positive portrayal of Harry Hall, who was based on Eldredge, the beloved husband who died in financial ruin, leaving his wife and children without resources. When Hall dies, the author tells us that his hands are folded "over as noble a heart as ever lay cold and still" (RH,58).
<#FROWN:G48\>
By the time I got home that summer, I hadn't had my period in about six months. In a rare moment of sanity, I decided it might be a good idea to find out why. Of course, it never occurred to me that it could have something to do with the fact that I looked like a skeleton with my skin stretched over the bones.
"I think maybe I need to go for a checkup," I told my mother.
"Why? What's wrong?"
"Well, I - uh - haven't gotten my period for a long time."
I read the thoughts that raced through her mind. Or rather, one thought - pregnancy. I was still a virgin, but I knew she probably doubted that.
"For how long?" she asked.
"Six months." Which ended the pregnancy concern, because nothing could have been growing in my emaciated body for six months.
There was something unusual about that summer - my mother and I had this nice sort of easiness between us. At the time, I thought it was because I had removed myself as a threat, at least in the realm of sexual rivalry, by starving and drugging myself into a completely unsexual-looking person. I'd starved away my breasts, my hips; from the back, I could have been a boy. But I think there was something else going on in this warm summer air that seemed to hang over my mother and me - no storms, no hard winds, just the lull of smiles and kind words. I think that because I was rail-thin, I no longer stirred up memories of a time when my mother was unhappy with her own appearance. The year before, when she called me fat, her anger wasn't aimed at only me. Memories came back up for her, old insecurities. Anger was her first response to this unwelcome tide.
By that summer, I was thin as she was, and perhaps that was easier for her to take.
But I think there was something else, too. In our use of pills, we had converged. Even though we chose opposite drugs, even though we didn't admit to addiction, we shared a common secret.
One evening, I was watching television with my mother. We were in Pacific Palisades and my father was in Sacramento. The news program we were watching had a segment about withdrawal from Valium. It showed someone having convulsions and seizures. If you didn't know, you'd think you were watching someone in the throes of an epileptic seizure. I turned to my mother and said, "You should pay attention to this." She glanced at me and didn't answer. Of course, I should have paid attention, too, but neither of us thought we had a problem. Even if the program had shown someone withdrawing from diet pills - zombie-like, disoriented, desperately depressed - I wouldn't have seen it - not with any clarity of vision.
I noticed that Miltown hadn't been entirely discarded. We flew back and forth between Los Angeles and Sacramento a few times that summer. On one plane trip, my mother shook two Miltown into her hand and asked the stewardess for a glass of water.
"Do you have a headache?" the stewardess asked, thinking they were aspirin.
"Yes," my mother lied.
I thought about the pills hidden in my suitcase in an empty shampoo bottle, and wished they were white and could be mistaken for aspirin.
On another plane trip, my mother complained of indigestion, so she pulled out two Miltown.
"That helps indigestion?" I asked.
"Yes."
To determine why I hadn't had my period in so long, my mother said she was going to make an appointment for me with her doctor, since I didn't really have one of my own. But it was said matter-of-factly, with no hint of judgment or suspicion.
She drove me to the doctor for an examination. I remember lying on the table, my feet in the stirrups, thinking, "Oh God, all these years I've been riding horses ...what if the stories are right? What if riding horses can break things and make it look like you're not a virgin?"
But the doctor completed his examination, turned to my mother, who had stayed in the room, and said, "Well, everything seems to be fine." We all knew what that meant.
The next day, mysteriously, I started my period.
<*_>three-bullets<*/>
We flew up to Sacramento, planning to stay there for the remainder of the summer, but as soon as we arrived at the leased house which had become the official governor's mansion, we were told that Robert Taylor had died. It wasn't wholly unexpected; his body was ravaged by lung cancer from years of smoking, and he'd been hospitalized for months. We turned around and flew back to Los Angeles.
I remember that week like a dream - Ursula Taylor's face transformed by grief, my mother trying to comfort her, unable to hold back her own tears, my father's eulogy for a man who had been one of his best friends. I remember Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Taylor's first wife, so shaken by sobs she had to sit down in the entryway and gather her strength. I remember the confusion of children who didn't quite know how to fit death into their lives. We moved through the hours with bewildered faces and questions we didn't dare ask because we knew no one had the answers.
A few days after the service, we flew back to Sacramento. My father came home from the Capitol every day at around five, but he didn't seem part of those months. What I recall most clearly of that summer is spending time with my mother, sunbathing, sitting by the pool, exchanging books, laughing. Emotionally and physically, my mother and I have been at war for a very long time, but spiritually, we've understood each other in ways that we wouldn't admit, even to ourselves. Both of us have used drugs, anger, and defensiveness as a buffer against pain. And both of us have been capable of truces, of reaching out to one another for periods of time until some event, some source of pain, would again wrench us apart. That summer was one of our rare cease-fires.
When I went back to school that fall, I'd put on a little weight. I still looked like I'd been in a prison camp, but I looked as if some kindly guard had been giving me extra rations.
When my grandparents picked me up at the airport, my grandmother was the one who finally noticed my weight loss.
"You must have to run around in the shower just to get wet," she said.
But my grandfather didn't seem to notice, which was a bit unusual because his surgeon's eye generally recorded everything.
The first night back at school, after dinner, I helped clear the dishes from my table and on my way through the kitchen I noticed a new addition. A young man in his twenties, lean, with sandy hair and blue eyes, looked up from the stove where he was cooking; he smiled at me. I dropped a plate and had a vision of the rest of the year as one long obsession, which turned out to be pretty accurate.
A couple of months later, I had an opportunity to put myself right in his path. I and four other girls were crowded into the bathroom one night, smoking with the shower on hot so the steam would mask the smoke, and the window open so both the steam and the smoke would pour out. We also had a can of Right Guard in case a teacher came by.
A teacher did come. I had just left the bathroom, so according to what she saw, I was innocent. But I was guilty and more important, I wanted to be found guilty because punishment would mean working off 'hours' in the kitchen. So, the next day, I turned myself in, confessed, and got exactly what I wanted: one hundred hours of kitchen duty.
Because I knew the school would notify my parents about my crime, I decided to write my father myself and tell him that I had turned myself in (although I omitted my ulterior motive). It was also part of my continuing effort to get my father's attention.
He wrote back and told me that turning myself in was the right thing to do, but that punishment was necessary because I'd broken the rules. He then went on to describe how important honesty was, how there would be chaos and anarchy in society if dishonesty were tolerated. He said that I would undoubtedly be disturbed if I felt that he wasn't honest in his job as governor, and if the news reported that he had broken the laws and lied.
My father and I exchanged very few letters; they always had to do with a specific subject, never casual news or inconsequential updates. One subject I was informed of, through letters, about this same time, was the sale of our ranch. The ranch was the sweetest memory of my childhood and I was heartbroken to see it go. I was made to feel a bit better, though, by the fact that my father had sold it to Twentieth Century-Fox, which owned a large piece of land next door and promised not to develop the property.
My mother's letters came more often and just gave me news of our dog, descriptions of the weather, and assorted bulletins. It was through one of her letters that I learned that Ron, who was then going to school in Sacramento, had been beaten up by three boys because he was "the governor's son" and rode to school in a state car.
I wasn't sure that the car really was the reason, but I didn't argue. These were volatile times. There was a war in Vietnam, a war in everyone's living room - right there on television. And there was a war on college campuses, like Berkeley; my father wasn't holding back on his rhetoric. He said that if Berkeley students wanted a bloodbath, they'd have one. I'm sure that not everyone at Ron's Sacramento school came from a Republican family, and that more than a few people were opposed to my father's disdain for anti-war protesters. Much later, Ron told me about the incident and said the boys were saying things like "warmonger" as they were punching his face and giving him a black eye.
I was definitely far from the fray, being out in the middle of the Arizona desert. My political feelings were still fairly undeveloped. I fantasized about being in Haight-Ashbury, plaiting flowers in my hair, or at Berkeley, protesting the war. Instead, I was sneaking poetry books into geometry class, riding horses, and getting up at five every morning to work off 'hours' in the kitchen.
Chapter 13
Diet pills came in handy on my new schedule. The night watchman would rap on the window to wake me up at five so I could start working in the kitchen at five-thirty. The kitchen man's name was Don and it didn't take long before we were making out on the stairway in back of the kitchen, in the walk-in freezer, the trash can area, and eventually his room. The room part got a little tricky; I had to get a nurse's excuse to get out of the evening study hall. The I would sneak across campus. That's where I finally got careless.
It was probably starting to look suspicious that I was coming down with illnesses at night, but would be racing between classes the next day and galloping around on my horse in the afternoons. One night, when the nurse decided to check on me in my room, I wasn't there. I was in Don's room, and it was the night I'd decided that we'd taken foreplay about as far as we could. I wanted to lose my virginity. I thought: "I'm sixteen, I'm old enough."
<#FROWN:G49\>In recent years there had been little opportunity for games or the competitions that the Shawnees so much enjoyed and very quickly all the males of the village fell into the spirit of it and encouraged Tecumseh to participate, which he finally, with some reluctance, agreed to do. The competition was to be a three-day deer hunt, using only bow and arrows, with each hunter dressing, skinning, and hanging his take at the close of each day, the meat to be picked up by the women after the hunt and brought back to the village for a feast and for curing into jerky. Word of the projected hunting competition spread and soon men from other villages were coming to take part in it and a sense of happy excitement filled them all at the prospect of at last having a good hunt where they needn't fear running afoul of hostile whites.
At the end of the three-day hunt, the men brought in the proofs of their skill - the hides of the animals they had killed. Many of the warriors brought in three or four skins apiece and a fair number had killed five or six. Perhaps a dozen had taken ten each and three men had each downed twelve. Tecumseh returned pulling a makeshift sledge of bark behind him, on which were tied the hides of the deer he had killed - a total of thirty of them.
It was the custom at the feast following the hunt for each man to tell of his own experiences and there was much laughter and admiration as one after another they told their tales. When it came to be Tecumseh's turn, a respectful silence fell over them all and they clung to his every word. Unlike the boastful way in which those who had preceded him told of their exploits, Tecumseh spoke softly, simply and with an appealing eloquence that captured his audience completely and left them marveling at his oratorical abilities as much as over his hunting skill. Once again the news of the great prowess of Tecumseh filtered throughout the Indian nations. And a glow of pride and expectation filled Lowawluwaysica. One day, he was sure, the time would come for his older brother to take up the reins of leadership and when that time came, he was certain to have many followers. And, thought his one-eyed brother, at his right hand would be Lowawluwaysica.
However, despite the therapeutic benefit of the hunting competition and the pleasure in the accolades that followed, Tecumseh remained depressed and pessimistic about what lay ahead for all the Indians.
[May 1, 1795 - Friday]
If there lingered any trace of hope among the Indians with Tecumseh or elsewhere that the British would finally rise and thrust the Americans out of the Northwest, it was dashed when word swept through the tribes of the new treaty of peace with the United States that the American special envoy, John Jay, had negotiated with the British in London. That treaty had been signed last November 19, and though it covered many aspects of international trade and other matters, the provision that struck home with the Northwestern Indians most directly dealt with the strong British posts at Mackinac, Detroit, and Niagara.
The grave nebulosity in the Treaty of Paris over eleven years ago that had enabled the British to so disruptively retain their hold on these vital western posts in American territory had finally been resolved by the astute Mr. Jay. By the new terms to which the British had agreed, all British posts anywhere in the territory of the United States would be evacuated by the first day of June next year. At councils held with the Indians in the Detroit area, assurances were quickly given by the British that this did not mean they were actually leaving. In point of fact, they said, they were only moving across the Detroit River to Canada where, at Amherstburg, hardly fifteen miles from Detroit, they were building a very large fort, much bigger and better than the Detroit fort, and calling it Fort Malden. From here, they promised, they would continue to provide the Indians with the gifts and annuities and supplies they were accustomed to receiving. The explanations and plans did little to instill any rejuvenation of confidence in the Indians for the British.
In the Deer Creek Village, Lowawluwaysica, utilizing the Indian medicine training he had been receiving from the old Shawnee medicine man, Penegashega - Change of Feathers - now carried with him wherever he went a pouch filled with herbs, bits of bone, symbolic and mystical objects, and other paraphernalia and passed himself off as the village doctor. He had even learned a number of the healing chants from old Penegashega and used them now in treating those afflicted with illness. In the majority of cases the patients got better, though they no doubt would have done the same without any treatment. For payment of his services, the one-eyed youngest brother of Tecumseh most often, when it was available, would take liquor in lieu of anything else. As always, in everything he did, Lowawluwaysica constantly looked for short-cuts to success. Most often he did not find them and relied then on his inherent weasellike craftiness to carry him through and remaining, as in the majority of his undertakings, abysmally average and taking refuge in his close blood relationship to Tecumseh. Where Tecumseh declined to boast very much of his own accomplishments, Lowawluwaysica would boast all the louder on his behalf and there was certainly much to boast about.
At twenty-seven Tecumseh was a most formidable warrior, an unparalleled hunter and tracker, a remarkable tactician and logician, a gifted linguist in English as well as in a number of Indian dialects, and most definitely an accomplished leader of men. He continued to be temperate, never again having tasted alcohol in any form following his pledge to Chicsika eleven years earlier. He had become even more strongly handsome with the character lines that time and experience had etched on his features and he remained, in most circumstances, very gentle and good-natured. The only avenue in which he seemed to do less than excel was in his choice of a mate.
Shortly after the Deer Creek Village was established, an attractive, slender and strong young woman of twenty-three summers decided that Tecumseh needed a wife. Named Mohnetohse, she was the daughter of one of the older Peckuwe warriors among them. With her naturally aggressive way she impinged herself upon his life and it came as a surprise to no one when she and Tecumseh were soon married. As a married woman, however, her character changed considerably - or, more likely, revealed its true nature - and she became domineering, accusatory, berative, and demanding, constantly railing at Tecumseh and finding fault in all he did. Were it not that she was pregnant, no one in the village had any doubt he would have sent her away long before now.
News had come to the Deer Creek Village over the past few months that General Wayne, still quartered at Fort Greenville, was continually being visited by chiefs declaring for peace. Most disheartening was the fact that two such chiefs were Blue Jacket and Michikiniqua, who visited with Wayne before the winter was quite over. After that visit, Wayne had magnanimously sent word to the displaced Shawnees under Catahecassa, as well as to other Indians, that if they wished to do so, they could resettle, at least temporarily, at their old village sites, provided they remained peaceful and quiet. As a result, Catahecassa had returned to the site of Wapakoneta and had reestablished the principal village of the Shawnees there, reinstituting the name Wapakoneta. Blue Jacket's Town had also been reestablished when the war chief returned there, and Wapatomica was being rebuilt with a good msi-kah-mi-qui, but the nearby ruins of Mackachack, McKee's Town, and others remained uninhabited. Numerous other small new villages of both Shawnee and Miami Indians similarly were springing up again in the valleys of the Maumee, Auglaize, Blanchard, Ottawa, and little Auglaize. Another surprise came with news that Michikiniqua, accepting the commanding general's invitation, had reestablished a moderate-sized village at the Kekionga site quite close to Fort Wayne. Also, though Chief Five Medals of the St. Joseph River Potawatomies had made an armistice with Wayne and had agreed to attend the Greenville council, the Milwackie and Illinois River Potawatomies under young Siggenauk and Chaubenee were following Tecumseh's lead and not committing themselves to anything.
[September 22, 1795 - Tuesday]
That the war chief of the Shawnees should specifically pay a visit to Tecumseh at his Deer Creek Village and spend long hours explaining to him all details of the Greenville Treaty, so recently concluded, was a real honor. It underlined the level of prestige Tecumseh now had among the Indians even though he was himself, in the eyes of Shawnee chiefs, still merely a warrior.
Blue Jacket had arrived this morning with a contingent of chiefs and warriors that included Chiuxca, Chaubenee, Spemica Lawba, and a bright, seventeen-year-old half-breed Potowatomi named Sauganash, whom the English called Billy Caldwell.
Tecumseh had been overjoyed to see his old friends once again, warmly shaking hands with Blue Jacket and Chiuxca, embracing his nephew, Spemica Lawba, enfolding his huge friend Chaubenee in a great bear hug, and cordially greeting young Sauganash. The latter gazed at him with something almost akin to reverence and it was clear that he was as smitten by Tecumseh in this first meeting as Chaubenee had been those years ago.
Laden with pots and dishes heaped with good food, Wasegoboah and Tecumapese had joined them, along with Kumskaka and Lowawluwaysica, and all had eaten heartily at Tecumseh's table, smoked their pipes and spent the first hour or so in pleasant reminiscences and in the sharing or news of less than monumental significance, saving the most important matter of discussion - the Greenville Treaty - for last.
Because he was a stranger in their midst and more than a little over-awed at being included in this august company at the insistence of Chaubenee, Sauganash was invited to speak first and tell them something of his background. A sinewy but well-built young man of erect posture and animated expression, he was embarrassed at first but quickly warmed to the matter and spoke swiftly, succinctly, and very intelligently. His father, he said, was an Irishman who was a great admirer of both Blue Jacket and Tecumseh and was the officer who had brought the fifty-three Canadians from Detroit who, dressed and painted as Indians, had fought under Blue Jacket at the Battle of Fallen Timbers.
As he continued with his narration, it was apparent to everyone present that Sauganash was an extremely nimble-minded and accomplished young man with a keen memory, a well-developed sense of humor and considerable education. He had been born in Canada in 1778 just across the river from Detroit and at an early age had been presented by his father to the Jesuits in Detroit to be educated. Possessed of a pronounced flair for languages, he spoke English and French fluently and could read and write in both languages equally well. In addition to his own native Potawatomi, he spoke seven other Indian languages and many dialects within those languages. He was skilled in mathematics and geography and had begun learning cartography when he left the Jesuits to be on his own, not in full accord with the Catholic beliefs of his mentors, which were so in variance with his tribal religious beliefs. His Potawatomi name was Tequitoh - Straight Tree - but practically everyone addressed or referred to him by his nickname, Sauganash - The Englishman. From Chaubenee he had heard a great deal about Blue Jacket and Tecumseh and both, along with Chaubenee, had more or less become his personal heroes.
They welcomed him with genuine warmth to their inner circle, if such it could be called, and then went on to other matters. Spemica Lawba was next to speak and the twenty-year-old proudly announced that he had just gotten married.
<#FROWN:G50\>
8
PURLOINING GERMANY'S ATOMIC SECRETS
The early twentieth century was a revolutionary epoch for physics. And no nation dominated scientific advance in this field as did Germany. For there it was, in 1900, that Max Planck laid the groundwork for all of modern physics by formulating his quantum theory of energy transfer. It was there, too, that Albert Einstein was born and first schooled, and where, at the height of his international fame, he returned, at Planck's urging, to assume a prestigious post at the University of Berlin. And it was the scientifically progressive Weimar Republic that spawned, or nurtured, most of the century's most illustrious physicists: Max von Laue, who devised a way of measuring X-ray wave lengths; Wolfgang Pauli, 'father' of the neutrino; Werner Heisenberg, formulator of the 'uncertainty principle'; Max Born; Lise Meitner; Edward Teller; and, as a graduate student, J. Robert Oppenheimer. With its peerless Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft (boasting 15 Nobel prize winners), Prussian Academy of Sciences, and illustrious university, Berlin occupied center stage in German physics.
To these elite scientific bastions Erwin Respondek enjoyed a privileged access. Through a variety of personal connections, he was able to keep abreast of German experimental progress - knowledge shared with few persons outside the scientific community. After 1939, this knowledge would extend to war-related projects. Those would include research relating to an atomic bomb. From Respondek, the Americans would receive news about German progress in the race to produce the most devastating explosive device the world had ever seen.
Respondek's oldest and principal scientific tie was to Max Planck. His brother, Georg, was one of the few students selected to study and earn a Ph.D. under the bald-headed, reserved classical physicist at the University of Berlin. He introduced Erwin as a young schoolboy to the famous scientist and his family. When Respondek was working for the Finance Ministry immediately after the First World War, he lived for nearly two years in Planck's spacious Grunewald villa. He also served as a surrogate son during a time of tragic personal loss for Planck. (One of the physicist's sons was also named Erwin.) Their friendship would endure until Planck's death in 1947. Through the world-famous physicist, Respondek came to know other eminent German scientists, including Otto Hahn and Werner Heisenberg, who were deeply involved in atomic research. But it was from Planck himself that he first heard about German advances in this area.
Hermann Muckermann was a second valuable source. From his years at the Kaiser Wilhelm Society prior to 1933, the onetime Jesuit knew numerous scientists all over Germany. Many of these colleagues he may well have introduced to Respondek before the Nazis came to power. Now semiretired, Muckermann participated in the resistance activities of Respondek's circle. (Once the Gestapo nearly caught him with some highly sensitive papers. Muckermann had received a list of the persons slated to take over ministerial posts after a successful coup against Hitler. That same day secret police came calling at his home in Frohnau. Luckily, Muckermann's Scotch terrier began barking at the approaching Gestapo agents, and his housekeeper was able to toss the papers into the furnace just in the nick of time.)
But Respondek's most valuable confederate in purloining German atomic secrets was Herbert (Rainer) M<*_>u-umlaut<*/>ller, one of his few close friends. To this day M<*_>u-umlaut<*/>ller remains a mysterious, shadowy figure. Little is known about his life and career, other than that he was born, a Protestant, on August 29, 1907, studied law at the University of Berlin, and then married and established a home in Charlottenburg. He was an easy-going, quiet, intelligent man with a love for literature and music and something of a romantic temperament. He was also crafty and duplicitous, a person who could easily blur his loyalties, both personal and political. (During the war he and Charlotte Respondek carried on an affair, more or less under their spouses' noses. Many years later his secretary would remember M<*_>u-umlaut<*/>ller as a person who could easily have worked "for both sides.") In June 1934, at the age of twenty-six, M<*_>u-umlaut<*/>ller joined the Institute for Foreign and International Civil Law, a center for legal research affiliated with the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Subsequently, M<*_>u-umlaut<*/>ller served as temporary director of this institute while advising the central administration on legal matters. He published papers on such topics as German administration of justice in the context of international civil law and reform of guarantor law in Switzerland. In his administrative role M<*_>u-umlaut<*/>ller was well positioned to stay in touch with scientific progress in many fields, including atomic physics. After 1938 he also took advantage of his Kaiser Wilhelm Society posts to shield politically suspect scientists from attacks and dismissal. In addition, M<*_>u-umlaut<*/>ller endeavored to erect obstacles for those German scientists working on an atomic bomb, while he passed on details about their research to Erwin Respondek.
On top of these sources, Respondek could count on his long-standing professional ties to such scientist-industrialists as Carl Duisberg, Hermann B<*_>u-umlaut<*/>cher, Wilhelm Kalle, and Carl Bosch for privileged information concerning German weaponry. And as was noted earlier, his anti-Nazi son-in-law, Friedrich Hoffmann, was fully informed about German experiments involving poison gas.
Earlier Respondek had made use of these ties to prepare for Sam Woods a synopsis of scientific work inside the Reich, which touched upon ongoing experiments in nuclear fission. But there was one sensational piece of news he kept from his American friends. It concerned two of the largest and most powerful industrial firms in the world - one German, the other American - and their secret pact to exchange scientific findings. It was an agreement that would stay in force until the final months of the war and remain concealed long thereafter.
The Delaware-based chemical giant Du Pont had long sought a co-operative arrangement with German companies. As early as 1919 Du Pont executives had broached such a proposal on dyestuffs with Carl Bosch, the inventor of synthetic ammonia, future founder of IG Farben, and then chairman of the board of Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik. But the wily Bosch, who saw little advantage in sharing German expertise with the Americans, rebuffed this bid. Undaunted, Du Pont persisted in its attempts to acquire German technical know-how after IG Farben was created in 1925. The following year, in Hamburg, Du Pont officials signed a secret "gentlemen's agreement" with two Farben subsidiaries, Dynamit Aktien Gesellschaft and K<*_>o-umlaut<*/>ln Rottweiler - both major explosives manufacturers - granting each party a first option on new processes and products, such as black powder and safety and powder fuses.
Although unable to achieve the same kind of comprehensive cartel arrangement it had already signed with the British Imperial Chemical company, Du Pont did invest some $3 million in the German armaments industry in the 1920s, thereby gaining a large lead over its U.S. competitors. In 1929, quite possibly as the result of a hush-hush Mediterranean cruise its top executives took with counterparts from IG Farben and Imperial Chemical, Du Pont signed another pact with the German conglomerate. In 1933, with Hitler now in power, officers of the American company went so far as to agree to sell the Germans "military propellants and military explosives" - in clear violation of both the Versailles Treaty and the peace treaty between the United States and Germany. This happened despite a warning from a Du Pont executive in Germany that it was "common knowledge" that IG Farben was bankrolling the Nazis. Lammot Du Pont, the company's president, wisely scrapped this agreement before it was formally signed, even though he continued to hope he could circumvent these legal restrictions.
Reports of Du Pont's secret cartel pacts with IG Farben and other European firms were aired at the Senate's munitions hearings in 1934. A solemn and dignified parade of Du Pont family executives - Lammot, Felix, Pierre, and Irne - flatly denied the existence of any such arrangements until documents were introduced in evidence that described a cartel pact on explosives with Imperial and several German firms. These embarrassing revelations notwithstanding, Du Pont cultivated further ties with IG Farben during the Nazi years, making available licenses in acrylates and nitrogenous products, and then, in 1938, giving the German chemical manufacturer important processes necessary for the manufacture of buna rubber - an important, newly developed synthetic substance for making tires. These exchanges of strategically important industrial know-how continued even though they violated U.S. neutrality laws and even though President Roosevelt was warned about them by his ambassador in Berlin, William Dodd. Despite the outbreak of war, Du Pont went on negotiating trade agreements with Farben until 1941, when its board finally voted to sell its stock in the German firm and "suspend" patent exchanges until "the present emergency has passed."
But it was soon revealed that IG Farben had kept a toehold in the lucrative U.S. market through its 90 percent ownership of the New York-based firm General Aniline and Film Corporation. This "dummy" front controlled $11.5 million of assets in American firms, including Du Pont. This news caused quite a stir in the press and in Washington and led to both seizure of General Aniline's assets, under the Trading with the Enemy Act, and to a 1943 indictment of Du Pont, along with two other American companies, for engaging in a worldwide conspiracy to control strategically important metals. (Du Pont was eventually convicted.) The Delaware firm was brought back into court in January 1944 charged as a co-conspirator in cartel agreements governing explosives. (All told, 15 separate legal actions were brought against Du Pont for its cartel ties. The company lost eight cases and was fined a total of $323,000, out of a possible $4 million.)
According to Respondek, it was in this context that Du Pont's best-concealed pact with IG Farben was forged. At some point shortly before Hitler came to power, the leadership of Du Pont worked out an agreement with their peers at IG Farben whereby the two firms would regularly exchange the results of experiments conducted in their laboratories "so that in this regard no secrets would exist between the United States and Germany." In Germany this pact was known only to Carl Duisberg, chairman of IG's Aufsichtsrat; Carl Bosch, then chairman of the board; Geheimrat Hermann Schmitz, Bosch's chief financial advisor and the person who set up Farben's 'camouflaged' control of companies in the United States and elsewhere; Dr. Wilhelm Kalle; three or four other top IG directors; and the trusted financial advisor who had helped draw up the agreement, Erwin Respondek.
The outbreak of hostilities between Germany and the United States in December 1941 did not affect this pact. As Respondek explained after the war, IG Farben "supplied Du Pont with information, in the greatest detail, before the war and during the German-American conflict up until January/February 1945, by means of a secure route through Basel."(In all likelihood the Basel connection was IG Chemie, a Farben 'cloak' for its worldwide interests, established in Switzerland in 1929 and headed by Hermann Schmitz.) The highly confidential papers IG Farben sent to Du Pont - and received from it - were kept "locked in a special safe, to which no one in the company had access other than three or four special directors."
This purported industrial alliance raises some disturbing questions about German knowledge of U.S. military secrets. For Du Pont and IG Farben were heavily involved in extremely sensitive war-related research and development. During the First World War, a German chemist by the name of Walter Heldt had perfected a poison gas known as Zyklon B for use as a delousing agent. Production of this gas was now in the hands of the Deutsche Gesellschaft f<*_>u-umlaut<*/>r Schaedlungsbekaempfung (DEGESCH, or the German Society for Pest Control), which was 42.5 percent controlled by IG Farben. When the Nazis began to carry out their 'Final Solution' by setting up gas chambers in 1942, it was to DEGESCH they turned for the deadly Zyklon B.
For this, Farben executives were indicted by a Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. Ultimately they were exonerated on the grounds that it was impossible to prove the German directors had known how the gas was being used.
<#FROWN:G51\>I was shocked to hear Louis Kronenberger, who wrote for The Nation, say angrily that she was a charlatan. "Kronenberger is a fop," declared Farrell, without pronouncing on Gertrude Stein.
John and I read Malraux's Man's Fate, in English, without noticing that it had a Trotskyite slant on the Chinese revolution. We read Cline (I never liked him), and one Sunday afternoon the two of us read The Communist Manifesto aloud - I thought it was very well written. On another Sunday we went to a debate on Freud and/or Marx - surely a Communist affair. More hazily I remember another debate, on the execution of the 'White Guards' in Leningrad in 1935; this may have been a Socialist initiative, for the discussion was rancorous. Actually, that mass execution was a foreshadowing of the first Moscow trials in the summer of 1936, which ended with the execution of Zinoviev and Kamenev.
The eternal fellow traveler Corliss Lamont, son of a J. P. Morgan partner, persistently tried to seduce me when John was working or away. This pawky freckled swain sought to suborn me by invitations to dance at the new Rainbow Room, at Ben Marden's Riviera on the Palisades, and at a place in the West 50s that featured a naked girl in a bottle. But, as we danced, while I reminded him that I was married, he tried to gain his end by reasoned argument: "You wouldn't want to have just one picture, would you?" Fifty years later, he was taking my friend Elizabeth Hardwick to the Rainbow Room, still up to his old tricks. "Transitory phenomena," he said of the Moscow trials.
Besides going to the Savoy Ballroom on Friday nights, John and I had black friends, who used to come to our apartment, nervously ushered by us past the elevator boys: Nella Larsen, the novelist (Passing), Dorothy Peterson, the actress (she played in the Negro Macbeth), and her brother, who was a doctor. They were high up in the black bourgeoisie. Nella Larsen told stories that always contained the sentence "And there I was, in the fullest of full evening dress." She lived downtown, near Irving Place. The Petersons had a house in Brooklyn - we liked them, not simply because they were black, and were proud of the friendship. We also liked Governor Floyd Olson, Farmer-Labor, of Minnesota; Selden had taken us to a nightclub with him. Then he died rather young of cancer of the stomach. Probably I would have approved of his working with the Communists in his home state in 1936. In Washington, where we went with a play of John's, we saw Congressman Tom Amlie, of Wisconsin, the secretary of the bloc of Progressives in the House; he got us visitors' passes to the House and had drinks with us in our hotel room, where he told us that his committees were "Patents, Coins, and Public Buildings - that's bottoms in committees." A sad, nice man, who, unlike Olson, could not agree to working with Communist factions.
For The Nation, I was reviewing a number of biographies, which taught me some history - I had not taken any at Vassar. From Hilaire Belloc's life of Charles I, I learned that inflation, which entailed a shrinking of the royal revenues in terms of buying power, was the cause of the martyred king's fall. Of all the books I reviewed I was most enthusiastic about I Claudius; the sequel, Claudius the God, I liked somewhat less. Another enthusiasm was Vincent Sheean's Personal History, which gave me my line on Borodin and the Communist failure in China. I was greatly excited by a historical novel, Summer Will Show, by Sylvia Townsend Warner, which ended with the heroine sitting down in revolutionary Paris to read The Communist Manifesto. "Book Bites Mary," Joe Krutch quipped in a telegram on receipt of my copy from Reno. Writing that review was the closest I came to a conversion to Communism (as indeed may have been the case of the author, for whom the book seems to have been a mutant in a career whose norm was one of wild, apolitical fancifulness - Lolly Willowes, Mr. Fortune's Maggot).
As is clear from Krutch's telegram, the Warner book reversed my ordinary practice with fiction. Usually I was rough. Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle, Stark Young's So Red the Rose, Marching, Marching by Clara Weatherwax, February Hill by Victoria Lincoln - I laid about me right and left. My standards were high - higher for fiction than for biography, which could justify itself by instructiveness - as my still Latinate style seemed to attest, nay, to vaunt. I am embarrassed to recall (textually) a concluding sentence that spoke of the lack, in current fiction, "of bitter aloes and Attic salt." Oh, dear. At least I was forthright and fearless, and I was gaining a certain renown for it; I think I can say that I was truly hated by a cosy columnist in Herald Tribune Books who signed herself "IMP" and doted on the books I attacked.
It was this reputation, evidently, that led Charles Angoff of The American Mercury, a disciple of Mencken, to invite me to lunch one day. It was a business lunch; he was working as a consultant to liven up The Nation, and he had an idea for me: to take on the entire critical establishment in a five- or six-part series, to be called 'Our Critics.' Would I want to try it? Obviously I would. The state of reviewing in the United States was a scandal, far worse than today. Book-review pages, daily and Sunday, and periodicals like The Saturday Review of Literature (edited then by Henry Seidel Canby) were open adjuncts of the best-seller lists, book clubs, and advertisements of the publishing industry. Among the dailies and big weeklies, the one exception was the young John Chamberlain, in the daily New York Times, but he rarely reviewed fiction, and I doubt that he reviewed every day. Moreover, his tenure was brief.
Margaret Marshall, Joe Krutch's assistant, had come to lunch, too. We talked excitedly for a couple of hours and before we separated it was agreed that I would take on the job. Later, there were second thoughts. Freda Kirchwey, who was running the paper under Villard, decided that I was too young to be entrusted with a series of such importance; knowing what I know of her, I suppose she was afraid of me, that is, of what I might write. So a compromise was worked out: Margaret Marshall would be assigned to work on the articles with me. We would divide the research equally; then she would write half the articles, and I would write half. For instance, she would do The New York Times Book Review, under J. Donald Adams, while I would do New Masses, under Granville Hicks. There would be five articles; the first, or introductory one, we would write together. For all five articles, both our names would be on the cover.
We had fun in the New York Public Library reading-room, doing our research in back issues of magazines and newspapers and using lined cards to copy out quotations, some of them unbelievable. Peggy Marshall came from a Mormon family in Utah or Montana; she was about ten years older than I, around thirty-three, and was divorced from her husband; they had one little girl, whose custody they shared. Peggy, I soon discovered, did not have much energy; she was having an affair with a labor writer named Ben Stolberg, and both of them would lie on a sofa or daybed in her living-room, too tired to do anything, apparently too tired to go to bed and make love. Nor can I remember her ever cooking a meal.
Neither was very attractive; she was blond, grayish-eyed, and dumpy, with a sharp turned-up nose, and Stolberg was blond, blue-eyed, and fat and talked, snorting, through his nose, with a German accent. I don't know what view Stolberg took of himself, but Peggy, to my horror, saw herself as seductive. Once, when we were talking of Ben and whether he wanted to marry her, I saw her look in the mirror with a little smile and toss of her head; "Of course I know I'm kinda pretty," she said.
Not long after this, on a weekend when we were starting to do the first piece, we decided to work on it in the Nation office, dividing it in two. I typed my part and waited for her to do hers, so that we could turn our copy in and leave. But she could not get it written; on the sheet of paper she finally showed me, there were a few half-finished sentences. She was giggling and making a sort of whimpering sound. This was the first writer's block I had witnessed, if that is what it was. At length I took her notes and the sheet of paper from her and sat down and wrote what I thought she wanted to say. She thanked me a bit weepily, and I assured her it was O.K. I guessed that she was having a nervous breakdown, from the tension of the divorce, which was quite recent, and living with Judy, the little girl. Stolberg was probably no help.
That was how it was, for five weeks, except that soon she stopped trying and just let me write the pieces, using her notes and mine. She did manage to do half of one - the one on The New York Times Book Review - and made no further effort, though we talked about what would be in the articles and perhaps she suggested small changes of wording. I told Johnsrud of course but nobody else. When the pieces started coming out, the only other person to know that Peggy was not really the co-author was Freda Kirchwey. Peggy had had to tell her something to account for the fact that she was asking for more money for me, but I never knew what Freda knew exactly. They did pay me more money, and after the first week our names, at Peggy's prompting, were reversed on the cover and in the headings: my name now came first.
John did not approve of any of this. He thought I should make Peggy take her name off the whole series; he did not trust her, he said. One could not trust a woman who was as weak as that. They were buying my silence, he said. It all chimed in with things that had happened to his father when he was principal of that Minnesota high school. I said I could not demand full credit because I was sorry for Peggy. I felt sure that she had not told Freda everything. If the truth came out, when our names were already on the articles, Freda might feel she was too compromised to keep her job. That I was not getting complete credit for work I had done was less important than the fact that Peggy was on her own, with Judy, and barely able to perform. I cannot tell even now whether those were my true feelings. I was sorry for her certainly, but not very sorry, possibly because of that self-satisfied smile and "Of course I know I'm kinda pretty." Self-deception always chilled me. But I was the stronger, and she was the weaker, so I could not expose her. John said I would see how she repaid my generosity. I am not sure it was really generosity, but about re-payment he was right, as the reader will see. She has been dead for years now; there is no reason for me to keep silent. And yet I feel guilty, like somebody repeating a slander, as I write this down.
The series on the critics was an immense succ<*_>e-grave<*/>s de scandale. It was time someone did it. Peggy and I, our names now linked together for what looked like eternity, were a cynosure. Seeing her respond to the compliments that came to both of us at the parties we were invited to, I was annoyed, I found. I felt that she was preening.
<#FROWN:G52\>
10
Czanne Country
1924-1928
HARTLEY'S STAY in the United States in 1924 was only three months long, hardly enough for him to settle down. He visited relatives in Cleveland, made arrangements about the paintings he had shipped back from Berlin, and completed two informal essays that he submitted to Vanity Fair. The magazine's editor, Frank Crowninshield, rejected one, about the French Riviera, but accepted the other, 'The Greatest Show on Earth: An Appreciation of the Circus from One of Its Grown-Up Admirers.' In mid-June Hartley sailed for England, where he went immediately to London after landing at Plymouth. He delighted in the life-style of Britain - its leisurely pace, its manners, and its dress. He was, in fact, thoroughly pleased to be back in Europe.
After spending several weeks in London he crossed the Channel to Rotterdam and from there visited The Hague, where he was impressed by a large collection of van Goghs and several fine post-impressionist works by van Rysselberghe, Signac, and Seurat, especially the latter's large canvas of a music hall, Le Chahut. Hartley next traveled south to Antwerp, where he met a sailor friend stationed aboard the battleship New York. The two of them visited Brussels, and then Hartley continued on to Paris, arriving near the end of July and at once encountering "the entire world so it seemed - Duchamp - Varese - Man Ray - Leo Stein - and many less conspicuous play-mates." Instead of settling down to paint right away, he took the time to journey out of Paris to visit such places as Rouen and Chartres - "such grace dignity-power-repose-splendour-and simply not to believe - the glass," he remarked about the cathedral at Chartres. And he spent some time looking about Paris as well, getting a sense of it as never before.
He expected to move to the South of France during the autumn, but Paris life was too stimulating, and he was offered exhibition opportunities, so that it would be the following July before he would actually take up residence in Vence. Meanwhile he enjoyed the city, its cafs, and the splendid variety of people with whom he could be close or not so close, as he chose. Hartley recalled the character Fougita, a Japanese artist who was the most flamboyant foreigner among the "terrace life" - except perhaps for "the debonair pink and white Bosshard, who might be superficially called the Swiss Modigliani, since he then painted thin female nudes usually lying down with a faint lyrical mountain landscape in the distance of the same hue as his own skin." Hartley saw something of Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson, who was close to her then, and of Ernest Hemingway and Edna Saint Vincent Millay at the Rotonde, one of the 'literary' cafs. At the Caf Royal he chatted with an English group, among whom were Augustus John, sporting an earring or two, Wyndham Lewis, and Jacob Epstein, and more than once he drank with James Joyce at the Caf des Deux Magots. And though he had little use for surrealism, he enjoyed the company of Andr Breton, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, and "the irrepressible Tristan Tzara."
But it was not only the caf life that diverted him from traveling south; more important, he believed, was the chance to exhibit in Paris with several other Americans. The artists George Biddle and John Storrs approached him during the summer about exhibiting at a new gallery, the Briant-Robert, in November. Hartley agreed, and on that basis Biddle offered him his studio for most of August. Within three weeks Hartley had fifteen canvases that were either finished or prepared, of which six - five landscapes and one still life - would go into the show, whose opening was delayed until January 1925. So Hartley remained in Paris, using Biddle's studio daily while thriving on the city's busy life, of which he felt very much a part.
Two days after the show of American painting opened, he sat in the Caf de l'Univers, across form the Comdie Fran<*_>c-cedille<*/>aise, and wrote Stieglitz a long letter about the exhibition and about French art in general. In a good mood because of the show and because he was to meet some American friends and see the Comdie, he discussed the exhibition, which was interesting "in the novelty of its precedent - it being the first time the French have actually invited Americans to show." He was critical of the other artists selected, who were "quite hopeless in view of what might have been accomplished," but felt that it had gone as well as it could under the circumstances. Jules Pascin, whose inclusion was "a bit far-fetched as there is nothing whatsoever American in his sensations and methods of expression," was represented by three paintings of nudes, which had an Oriental flair about them. Paul Burlin's suffered from not being "passionately endowed" and lacked an "undying conviction." His work and that of George Biddle and John Storrs seemed to him the most essentially American.
His was being called the best, he claimed, and he cited the critic in the European edition of the Chicago Tribune, who had written that "for sheer, sincere modernism...the prize at the exhibit is carried off by Marsden Hartley, whose vigorous, sweeping strokes - devoted to the depicting of abstract ideas - have almost terrifying power, though sometimes reminding one rather more of a bad dream than a picture." His six paintings had the best wall, and they drew responses such as "apocalyptic - inevitable - unquestionable personal." He described the paintings as being an almost monochromatic "black white umber or venetian red and green - the first time in my life I've ever done what I've always aspired to - a black & white painting." Of the four of this sort, two were "large rearrangements of the Maine landscapes of former years." He called them an "attempt to attain true dramatic scale in subject with a sculptural method of treatment."
John Storrs had complimented Hartley's ability as a sculptor, which pleased him because in fashioning these paintings he had had in mind "the Courbet sense of truth and reality - and the Maillol sense of form and sensibility." Hartley's concept was interesting, but few would judge these somber paintings among his better works. Most intriguing about them, perhaps, is the fact that Hartley, as content as ever he could be with his life, chose that moment to confront Maine, translating the rolling curves and expanses of his New Mexico reminiscences into dark - even nightmarish - form and a near absence of color. As he approached his fiftieth year, a milestone he did not take lightly, he was in some ways beginning to come to terms with his birthplace, though the process would take a decade more to complete.
While most of the viewers at the show's 'vernissage' were American, several French artists also appeared, among them Chagall and Mondzain, whose opinion Hartley did not hear, and Fauconnier, a cubist, who declared that Hartley's paintings showed a "fine temperament but 'confused orchestration,'" a term Hartley chose to dismiss. He did not feel overwhelmed by the French and thought the new interest in American art promising. He had been invited to exhibit in another show in May, this one to include artists such as Elizabeth Nourse, Alexander Harrison, Mary Cassatt, and Frederick Carl Frieseke, among others. Although he was slightly scornful of the group and eventually decided not to show with them, at that point he wanted to and as a result planned to remain in Paris at least until May. He had been given an atelier all to himself near Montmartre and knew he ought to take advantage of it.
Whatever the importance of the projected exhibition in May, the time generally was a propitious one for art. There were numerous small shows displaying the major artists, though none of them, in Hartley's opinion, was doing striking new work: "Utrillo - Chagall, Pascin...Utrillo attractive in its way - Chagall most distressing to me - a kind of expression of altogether bad judgement in painting - Pascin well - it's Pascin better but no deeper." Paul Rosenberg's gallery was having a show of the 'great' moderns, in which Matisse was "tamed to propriety," Braque was "quietly returning to the figure," and Picasso had "nobly returned to cubism." At the Grand Maison de Blanc - "Shades of John Wanamaker," Hartley scoffed, referring to the mass-market quality of that exhibition - Utrillo, Vlaminck, and a subdued Morgan Russell were on display, while elsewhere was a retrospective of the Section d'Or group of 1912-13, so "caviar" then and "so sort of calm rice pudding now." The fauves, Hartley thought, domesticated themselves by repeating their work; now they were "painting flat patterns," but these were inane. French art, in other words, had lost its momentum.
Unfortunately, Hartley's work would not seem to many to be the sort of dramatic innovation he had hoped it would. His paintings did not draw great attention in France, and in a show of seven American artists organized by Stieglitz at the Anderson Galleries in New York, his twenty-five canvases were received lukewarmly. Although his friends praised the works, the critics were less than enthusiastic. One wrote of Hartley's New Mexico reminiscences that many of them had little color and a "great deal of pose." The paintings that failed might collectively have been called "Studies in Liver," he declared, but half a dozen worked, and this made up for the rest. Deogh Fulton, the critic, was more taken by the paintings of Arthur Dove and John Marin. Georgia O'Keeffe, who was never fond of Hartley's work for long - she had been able to live with one of his early Maine landscapes for only three or four days - and always ambivalent in her feelings toward him, wrote to the critic Henry McBride that she had found his review of the show amusing and was going to send a copy of it to Hartley so that he might see what McBride thought of American painters living abroad. Describing Hartley's work as "old world, old souled, and awfully fatigued," McBride sounded a criticism that he would continue until after Hartley returned to America in 1930.
But in 1925 Hartley was not ready to be discouraged; Europe still seemed to hold promise. In addition, for the moment he felt reasonably secure financially, due to an arrangement that had come about through a visit with Louise Bryant the previous fall in Paris. He had known and liked Bryant since his summer in Provincetown, in 1916. Jack Reed, her first husband, had died in Russia after World War I, and she was now married to the wealthy American diplomat William Bullitt. They were living in the ornate home of Elinor Glyn, a British novelist, in Boulogne-sur-Seine, near Paris, where Hartley went to see them. During the course of their time together Bullitt asked him about his financial situation. Hartley explained his wish for a steady income over the next years, and Bullitt told him of William V. Griffin, a friend who he believed might be interested in arranging a regular income for Hartley. The result was an agreement whereby Griffin and three friends would pay Hartley $2,000 per year in exchange for ten paintings, the agreement to last four years. In November 1924 Hartley received his first check, for $500. Although he would come to feel burdened by the need to produce ten paintings on others' terms, in early 1925 he was happy with the arrangement.
A siege of carbuncles during the spring lessened the pleasure of Paris for Hartley. They required daily dressings for three weeks, as well as serum injections, and even though he was later able to work comfortably at the Bullitts' in Boulogne-sur-Seine, he yearned to move to the South of France. In July he traveled to Cannes, where he remained for five weeks, sunning himself and enjoying the relative quiet after Paris. He was convinced that he needed a home, warmth, and isolation for his well-being, and the small town of Vence, in the hills behind Nice, seemed an ideal place for him to settle for the next few years.
<#FROWN:G53\>O'Neill had his effort to save the boy go wild, for it triggers the sacrifice of the girl and the boy's suicide. O'Neill knew that his father's own effort to save him had brought on the sacrifice of Kathleen and his own suicide attempt. By working it all out in the play, he came out with an understanding of what his father had actually meant for him. Dynamo as produced carried O'Neill from his unconscious images of his father as Pan-Dionysus, the male life principle, to a firm conscious identification and alliance with him. Although O'Neill cut it all from the published play, he kept the alliance itself, and he showed it at once in response to the attacks of the critics. He told Robert Sisk of the "doleful tenderness" with which people broke the reviews to him, and declared, "Me that was born on Times Square and not in Greenwich Village, and that have heard dramatic critics called sons of bitches - and, speaking in general, believed it - ever since I was old enough to recognize the Count of Monte Cristo's voice!"
He was still hacking away at Dynamo right through the galleys, and he told Liveright, "Am sorry to say I have again cut and revised hell out of it but now, finally, I really feel 'Dynamo' is cleared of its rubbish, simple and direct - and a damned good play." But all that work to make the critics understand a psychology unfamiliar to them was naturally in vain. When the book appeared on October 5, 1929, no one understood it any better. By this time he himself was doubtful, and he told Joseph Wood Krutch, "I like it better now, but not enough. I wish I'd never written it - really - and yet I feel it has its justified place in my work development. A puzzle." For a while, he talked of writing a third Dynamo for the definitive edition of his works. But for him there was no going back. He gave up this "crippled child of the storm and stress period," and only long afterward did he question whether its debacle might have been undeserved. In 1941 he wanted to convince the Guild that his early play Anna Christie was a bad choice for revival. It was written, he said, around characters and a "situation." He would not compare it with his best plays, he said, but with one of his flops - Dynamo. Maybe it stepped on its own feet dramatically - and he was not sure even of that, for 1929 criticism had been ready to attack any play that mentioned God - but Dynamo had been, he thought, "about characters plus life." And life - seen through no glory of gods or heroes - was what he had gone on with in the superlative play that followed Dynamo.
7
MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA
"Life is growth - or a joke one plays on oneself!" O'Neill decided. Dynamo had been a step back. He felt it wronged his love for Carlotta, and he told her that his next play would "make the world see how much you have done for me." He had battled the forces of hatred and death within himself, and he wanted a theme to fit that struggle. When he found and plunged into it, he exulted to Saxe Commins: "It's the sort of thing I needed to come to me - one that will call for everything I can give it - a glorious opportunity to grow and surpass everything I've ever done before!" He did not know whether he had the "stuff" to do it, but he did know "I'd rather fail at the Big Stuff and remain a success in my own spiritual eyes, than go on repeating, or simply equalling, work I've done before." It would be "the biggest and hardest I have ever tackled."
The first idea had come to him in the spring of 1926, when he thought of "a modern psychological drama using one of the old legend plots of Greek tragedy" - the Electra, or the Medea. The Electra story would set him in direct rivalry with the great Greek dramatists, for Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides had all treated it. He would make it a real trilogy, like theirs, with three plays treating the same characters. Through it he could achieve - what he had always striven to arrive at - a sense, like the Greek sense, "of the Force behind" life, whatever one called it, "Fate, God, our biological past creating our present." It was to be "primarily drama of hidden life forces."
On his voyage to China this play of hidden forces took life, and so the sea washes through it from beginning to end. His fated family became shipbuilders and shipowners, and he had them long for liberation by sea, just as he had felt on the Charles Racine that he could "at last be free, on the open sea, with the trade wind" in his hair. The sea chanty 'Shenandoah' sounds throughout his play, for he thought that it "more than any other holds in it the brooding rhythm of the sea." Although he set the play in the family house, haunted by the family past, he put one act aboard the Flying Trades and very deliberately placed it at the "center of whole work" to emphasize "sea background of family and symbolic motive of sea as means of escape and release." In this act the two lovers, Adam and Christine, plot in vain to escape by sea after the chanty 'Shenandoah' ("Way - ay, I'm bound away") has reached an ironic crescendo of longing.
The sea and O'Neill's recall of the white sails of the Charles Racine determined his choice of time: He wanted to make this play American, and so he needed an American war to match the Trojan War from which the Greek hero Agamemnon had triumphantly returned to be murdered by his wife and her lover. O'Neill thought World War I was too close; his audiences would not see beyond its surface to the real drama of hidden forces, and he was sure that the American Revolution would also blind them with its "romantic grammar-school-history associations." The "only possibility" was the fratricidal Civil War, which fit a "drama of murderous family love and hate" and provided a detached "mask" for the timeless struggle beneath. It allowed him to make the ships of his play Clippers and to use his old thrill at white sails and his old longing to reach China on his voyage out of Boston to Argentina, for the Clippers had all been bound for China by way of Argentina in the tea trade. He made a China voyage the heart of this play, which began to grow in him on the "Arabian Sea en route for China" and on the "China Sea."
He set his investigation of family fate where his own family's fate had worked itself out, in the small New England "seaport, shipbuilding town" of New London. He actually called it "N.L." in his notes. New England, with its "Puritan conviction of man born to sin and punishment," was the "best possible dramatically for Greek plot of crime and retribution," he thought, and he could reexamine his own guilts through all five members of his New England family. He called his Agamemnon 'Ezra Mannon,' and 'Mannon,' suggestive of 'Man,' became the name of his tragic family, whose struggle would reveal the larger struggle of life-and-death forces within the soul of man.
O'Neill hoped the play would have a "strange quality of unreal reality." He wanted to show that the surfaces of life - which are taken for reality - are meaningless and that the great realities, the "hidden life forces" beneath the surface, are so overwhelming when perceived, as to seem unreal. (He who sees Pan, dies.) So he built his penetration through surfaces into the three plays of his trilogy. Each one has the curtain rise to reveal a painted backdrop of the Mannon house as it looks to the townspeople from the street, set in a splendor of orchards and gardens behind a white picket fence. Then this obviously artificial surface lifts to bring the audience directly before the reality of the house and all the embattled forces within the family. O'Neill had seen at once that he could make his house "Greek temple front type that was rage" at the time and that it was "absolutely justifiable, not forced Greek similarity." He remembered the Greek Revival houses of his boyhood New London, but he took care to buy Howard Major's Domestic Architecture of the Early American Republic: The Greek Revival, in which he found just the severe tomblike house he wanted for Ezra Mannon's father, Abe, to have built as a "temple of Hate and Death" after expelling his brother David from the family, supposedly in outraged morality but actually in jealous revenge. O'Neill took for it Marshall House at Rodsman's Neck, New York, with its cold stone base, its pagan portico with six tall columns, its central doorway with a "squared transom and sidelights flanked by intermediate columns," and its arrangement of windows - only he changed its eight steps to four in mercy to the actors and added the shutters he needed for his final catastrophe. This house, like the house in Desire Under the Elms, was to participate in the drama. The family is torn between pagan joy in life, and Puritan condemnation of pleasure as sin, and their conflict appears in the facade of the house, where the pagan temple portico is stuck on "like an incongruous white mask" over the "sombre gray ugliness" of its stone walls. In the first play 'Homecoming,' all the windows of this outraged house reflect the sun "in a resentful glare," and as the murder is planned the inside of the house is stained with the crimson of the setting sun. Whether the columns are bathed in sunlight, haunted moonlight, or bloody sunset, they throw their shadows in black bars against the wall, suggesting the imprisonment of the fated family.
Each of the three plays moves from the embattled exterior of the house to its haunted interior, dominated by the family past in the portraits of the dead Puritan Mannons. Most of the indoor scenes take place at night, and in "the flickering candlelight" the eyes of the portraits take on "an intense bitter life." They glare so "accusingly" at the Electra character after all her crimes, that she justifies herself to them as if they were living judges. O'Neill knew that this haunted interior came out of his deepest self, "whom the past always haunts so persistently." As soon as he had written these plays and had returned to America, he went to New London with Carlotta to "revisit Pequet Ave. old time haunts," and right after that visit he got "Idea play - house-with-the-masked-dead and two living intruding strangers," so much had his own family past in the house at 325 Pequot Avenue haunted him when he designed the haunted interior of the Mannon house.
He even dared to give the same penetration through surfaces, the same sense of "unreal reality" to his characters. Each of the plays begins with a group of townspeople, looking upon the Mannons in a prying, gossiping way as the New Londoners of O'Neill's youth had once looked upon the O'Neills. O'Neill gave them purely "exterior characterization," each with a few emphatic mannerisms. He also made the two fiancs of the tragic young Mannons "almost characterless" - embodiments of simplicity, goodness and health. All these external people set off the entirely "inner" characterization of the fated Mannons. He wanted to avoid for the Mannons, "as far as possible and consistent with living people, the easy superficial characterization of individual mannerisms." Because they speak directly out of the passions engendered in the family past, O'Neill found that any experiments with asides or stylized soliloquies - and he tried both in the course of rewritings - only got "in the way of the play's drive."
<#FROWN:G54\>
Two-Headed Janus
REHEARSALS and out-of-town tryouts were over and in 1594, when this curtain goes up, Shakespeare stood before his public fully fledged. Though only thirty that year, he thought his days past the best. Sonnets, mostly youthful work, picture him 'as I am now,' crushed by time's hand or 'beated and chopped' with age. For this precocious old man, the world-weariness has its share of literary posing. But his people on the average lived shorter lives than we do and 'hagggish age' stole on them early.
London when he lived there was a pesthouse, Stratford too. Country air carried death, like the air they breathed in cities. Sanitation mocked itself and his contemporaries sickened from typhus, dysentery, and bubonic plague. His brothers and sisters, seven in all, dropped off one by one, only Joan surviving past middle age. He himself died at fifty-two. Poverty waited at the lane's end, especially in the nineties, a time of worsening inflation. Some of his acquaintance, like Tom Nashe, went to debtors' prison and came out to die in straits. Many didn't have enough to eat or what they ate wasn't good for them. The Irish of their day, they were often 'cup-shotten.' If tradition has it right, a drinking bout finished off Shakespeare. Politics, a subtler scourge, afflicted high and low. One of his fellow playwrights, Thomas Kyd, felt the scourge. A caution to the rest, he fell foul of the thought police. Loyalty today was disloyalty tomorrow and the up-and-down wore them 'out of act' or strength.
But 'old,' meaning decrepit, also means the real thing, veritable Shakespeare. Romeo, an 'old' murderer, is practiced in killing, and Shakespeare at thirty, old or expert in craft, towered over the others, satellites to his pole star. Naturally, he made a target for envious gossip. Robert Greene, a jealous rival, seeking to account for Shakespeare's ascendancy, compared him to the provident ant. Greene himself was a grasshopper, fiddling the summer out, but his reading, though partial, includes a piece of truth. Shakespeare, his poet's eye 'in a fine frenzy rolling,' had a cold eye when this was wanted.
As success stories go, his seems unlikely. Late in the 1580s he had come up from Stratford, penniless and anonymous. He left behind a wife who had snared him at eighteen, also three children, doubtful assets. The Shakespeare family's fortunes had to be entered on the debit side too. John Shakespeare saw to that. Once Stratford's bailiff, he was well along on the road to the poorhouse. Shakespeare's father liked to litigate and hoped something would turn up. His mother, one of the Ardens, an ancient name in Warwickshire, had her name to console her. For Shakespeare, starting out, the auspices weren't good. But this through-and-through professional showed them how the career belongs to the talents and by 1592 had ten plays to his credit. Some brought in record returns.
Like a scenario for one of these plays, Shakespeare's story has its checks and reversals. Plague broke out in London in 1592, closing the theaters, his livelihood, for almost two years. Actors like Will Kempe, the time's famous comic, and Edward Alleyn, its great tragedian, fled the city, going on tour. If Shakespeare went with them, his travels were abridged. Plague destroyed some acting companies, Pembroke's Men among them, and likely young Shakespeare belonged to this fellowship. "As for my Lord Pembroke's," Henslowe the theater manager wrote Alleyn, his son-in-law, "they are all at home and have been this five or six weeks, for they cannot save their charges [expenses] with travel...and were fain to pawn their apparel." Evidently the playbooks went the way of the apparel and certain plays of Shakespeare's, once the property of Pembroke's Men, turn up later in the repertory of a rival company.
But Fortune had better things in mind for this playwright. When plague slackened in the spring of 1594, London's theaters reopened, the companies returned, and Shakespeare got back in harness. Though Alleyn's company, the Admiral's Men, dominated his theater world, other companies competed for popular favor. Shakespeare the apprentice didn't mind which one he wrote for. In June, Strange's Men performed two plays of his at Newington Butts, south of the Thames. Before the year was out, the company lost its patron but found a new one, Lord Hunsdon, High Chamberlain of England. In 1594 Shakespeare entered Hunsdon's service. He remained with this company for the rest of his career.
Pleasing the multitude, he pleased the cognoscenti too. His first attempt at comedy, farce mixed with other things and perfection of its kind, enlivened the Christmas revels in 1594 at the largest of the Inns of Court, London's law schools. This same December he received a higher accolade, performance before the Queen in her palace at Greenwich. By then pirate publishers had snapped up three of his plays, an index of their growing appeal. The first was Titus Andronicus, dismaying to Bardolaters but a rousing success with the crowd.
A snobbish view held that plays were insubstantial pageants, here today, gone tomorrow. Shakespeare may have concurred (the best in that kind were shadows). But poetry appealed to the ages. "I have built a monument more lasting than bronze," said Horace, one of his teachers. The pupil hoped to emulate the teacher and by 1594 his skill as a poet was widely acclaimed. Not long after, a contemporary hailed him as the modern Catullus. His two famous poems of the early 1590s, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, established his credentials as a serious writer, also helping feather his nest. Each carried a dedication to Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, a young notability at Court. He was Shakespeare's patron, perhaps for some years the 'master-mistress' of his passion. A patron was expected to reward the poets who flattered him and likely Southampton did this. One way or another, young Shakespeare built a stake.
In 1594 he 'staked down,' as in their card game of primero. Formerly a hireling in theater, he bought a partnership in his business enterprise, the Chamberlain's Men. A 'composition' or deed in return for his bond entitled him to share in the company's proceeds. The 'sharer' was an actor too, known for kingly roles and old man's roles. It takes a special kind of young actor to play old men successfully, and Shakespeare's facility says something of the man he was.
With all this, he found time to write plays. For roughly twenty years, he served his company as its 'ordinary poet,' i.e., principal writer, turning out the wares others brought to market. "Make it new," his fellows said, their eye on the box office. That he did, supplying whatever was called for: "tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical," etc. Polonius, reciting these different genres or kinds, meant to distinguish one from another. But Shakespeare wasn't simon pure and most of his plays make a hodgepodge.
Like the 'singing men' or clerks who rejoiced the hearts of English in the older time, he absorbed himself in his function. Some of his fellows, previewing modern times, lived lives of notoriety, not he. Peele, a hellion, became the subject of a popular jest book. Lodge, before respectability overtook him, made a freebooting voyage to the New World. Jonson was 'rare' Ben, toper and bullyboy. Shakespeare, self-effacing, kept his head down. On this side, he looks backward to his medieval forebears, most of them names in the catalog, little more. If you want to make their acquaintance you must listen to their music, true for Shakespeare too.
Medieval men, deferring to the ancients, called themselves dwarfs who stood on the shoulders of giants. That way, they saw further. This giant of modern times stood on the shoulders of the proximate past. His first tutors who were also his competitors did him good service, notably Lyly and the 'University Wits,' Marlowe, trailed by others. Anonymous playwrights in the generation before him gave him sketches for his Jew of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, and Oberon, king of the fairies. A quick study, he outpaced all his teachers. But if he was sui generis, the greatest maker in 'the tide of times,' he was also his time's product. For him the past is prologue when the sinews of his art were developed. This past that intimates the future is young Shakespeare's story. It ends in 1594.
The competition had scattered, another way of explaining Shakespeare's early preeminence. Lyly, his first master, once all the rage for 'Euphuistic' comedy, fell silent in the nineties except for begging letters. Greene, his envenomed rival, died in 1592, detractors said of a surfeit of Rhenish wine and pickled herring. Kyd went soon after, like Greene still in his thirties. Marlowe, the greatest of Shakespeare's early contemporaries, caught an assassin's dagger in 1593. He was twenty-nine.
Shakespeare, learning his trade from these playwrights, didn't forget them. In the miraculous years to come, he paid tribute to Kyd in Hamlet and Lodge in As You Like It, imitations with a difference. Toward the end of his career, writing The Winter's Tale, he reached back in memory to Greene. He never stopped learning, from others, not least from himself. But by 1594 his apprenticeship was over, and this year he struck out on his own.
MOVING into the city proper from lower-class Shoreditch, he took lodgings in St. Helen's parish, Bishopsgate, on the northern perimeter of London Wall. Playdays, he walked out along Shoreditch High Street to the Theater and Curtain. These first public playhouses, erected in the 1570s, stood in open fields outside the city. Each day they changed their bill of fare, and providing a new one kept Shakespeare busy. He left no calling cards in Bishopsgate but remembered this early residence in plays.
Not the only entertainer in his neighborhood, he shared the spotlight with famous Ned Alleyn. Two years Shakespeare's junior, Alleyn grew up in St. Botolph's parish on the bank of London Ditch. Nashe called him the modern Roscius, after a celebrated Roman actor. But he had no rivals, ancient or modern. "Others speak," Jonson said in a poetical tribute, "only thou dost act." Among his star roles was that of Barrabas in Marlowe's Jew of Malta, a great triumph of the typecaster's art. This play stimulated Shakespeare when he saw it at the Rose on Bankside. Later, though, writing The Merchant of Venice, he found it wouldn't do as a model. The energy, unexampled in Marlowe, seemed amazing, but typecasting was never for him.
When plague closed the theaters, Alleyn's company disbanded, some members quitting London for a Continental tour. Alleyn, joining Strange's company, went into the provinces. As in our modern despotic states, he needed permission to do this. Bureaucracy, a storehouse of paper, has its uses, and the warrant licensing his travels names the actors who went with him, all, subsequently, Shakespeare's fellows in the Chamberlain's Men.
Barnstorming in the country, Alleyn wrote letters home, making it easy for posterity to track him. The letters, thick with life, show an amiable man and affectionate husband. Plague is on his mind, and he wants his Joan to throw water "before your door" every night "and have in your windows good store of rue and herb of grace." But his "Mouse" doesn't write him. "Send me of your domestical matters," he tells her, "as how your distilled water proves, or this, or that, or anything what you will. And Jug, I pray you, let my orange-tawny stockings of woolen be dyed a very good black against I come home to wear in the winter." Reproachfully, he notes no word of his garden. His wife ought to remember "that all that bed which was parsley in the month of September, you sow it with spinach, for then is the time." Later Henslowe wrote Alleyn that the spinach bed was sown.
Shakespeare posted no letters in plague time. He had his poems to write or perhaps his Anne couldn't read.
<#FROWN:G55\>Unable to afford a farm or factory of his own until the experiment had proved successful, David began by leasing an acre or so of rich alluvial soil and planting a small crop of sugar beets. Maria wrote Louisa Loring that they would often get up before dawn and go out together to weed the rows of beet plants when "all the world, except the birds, are asleep."
For a time the beauty of the scenery and the prospect, however distant, of eventually having a place of their own filled Maria with a sense of domestic contentment. She told Louisa that she had "more of a home feeling than I have had since we left Cottage Place." She even found the stern Calvinism of their landlord, Enos Clark, and the "quiet religious refinement" of his family reassuring. She and David had rented a pew in the Unitarian Church where the pastor, Mr. Stearns, was both a good preacher and a member of the Northampton Anti-Slavery Society.
The first weeks passed pleasantly enough. David went out to his field several times a day to weed and Maria often accompanied him. The remainder of her time she devoted to keeping David's clothes in order (she was making him a frock coat) and promoting the antislavery cause. At first, the Childs were warmly welcomed by the citizenry of the town, most of whom were of old Yankee stock. Northampton's reputation as one of the most beautiful spots in New England had attracted a number of retired business and professional people who contributed to its refined and cultivated tone. Maria was amused by the ease with which she befriended these gentlefolk. "Once more," she wrote Louisa, "I have it in my power to be the favorite of the class denominated first."
One Northampton woman who seemed "the very embodiment of aristocracy" was Anne Lyman, the wife of the sheriff of Hampshire County. The Lymans occupied the adjoining pew in the Unitarian Church, and Maria felt instantly drawn to this learned woman who, like herself, was outspoken and firm in her convictions and with whom she could indulge the "poetical" side of her nature. Anne Lyman's opinions on most subjects ran strictly counter to Maria's. Nonetheless, the two spent many happy hours together. "I like her notwithstanding her distorted view of men and things," wrote Maria somewhat patronizingly of her new friend. "If she can manage to like me, anti-slavery, rights-of-woman, and all, it must be because she respects the daring freedom of speech which she practices." Maria hoped to convert both Anne Lyman and her husband to abolitionism. She never succeeded, but the two women remained firm friends. Years later Maria described their relationship to Anne's daughter, Susan Lesley: "Both of us were as direct and energetic as a loco-motive under high pressure of steam; and, coming full tilt from opposite directions, we sometimes ran against each other with a clash. But no bones were ever broken. We laughed and shook hands after such encounters, and indulged in a little playful raillery at each others' impetuosity."
Underneath all their high-spirited disputatiousness these two friends understood one another. Aristocratic as Anne Lyman was, Maria remembered with delight the "lofty disdain" with which she rebuffed any sign of social pretension. She recalled particularly Anne's account of a visit she once paid to a very wealthy family whose members were "exceedingly careful of their dignity." During the course of her visit, Anne was informed that "a friendship of questionable gentility" had formed between one of the relatives of this family and Maria Child. "Mrs. Child is an abolitionist, you know," the rich folk informed their guest, "and she does not belong to the circle of our visitors." At this Anne Lyman exploded: "Visit you indeed! I should like to have you try to get her here! Send a carriage and six horses, and see if you can get her here!"
Although the Childs had been led to believe that Northampton was a stronghold of antislavery, they soon observed that all but a few reputed sympathizers kept it wonderfully to themselves. Maria reported back to her Boston friends that Christian orthodoxy " has clothed most of the community in her straitlaced garments." If the Childs witnessed plenty of praying and preaching and concern with saving souls, they could discern little of what they considered true charity among the townspeople. After living in Northampton for two months they were only willing to claim two people as "real abolitionists."
Northampton's conservatism on the slavery question was buttressed by the arrival each summer of a number of prominent Southern families. The Childs' closest neighbor, for example, was Thomas Napier, a former slave auctioneer from Charleston, South Carolina. Maria and David quickly discovered that despite his shameful profession, Napier was a respected member of the Northampton community. Like their landlord, Enos Clark, Napier was a deacon of the Congregational Church. He also taught Sunday school, informing the children under his charge that God had officially consigned the blacks to perpetual slavery.
Disagreeable as it was to live so near someone who had made his living "trafficking in human beings," even more irritating to David and Maria were the pious posturings of this man who called himself a Christian. It happened that the south wall of Napier's house rose only a few feet from the Childs' single window, and on warm summer evenings the sound of the man's prayers carried easily into their room. David did his best to drown out the offensive noise by singing and playing his accordion.
Anne Lyman asked Maria soon after her arrival in Northampton if she had made the acquaintance of her Southern neighbor. When Maria observed that a slave auctioneer and an abolitionist were not "likely to find much pleasure in each other's society," Anne Lyman accused her of being as bigoted as Napier himself. Maria responded by insisting that it was one thing for Mrs. Lyman to disagree with the tactics of the abolitionists and quite another for Mr. Napier to promote his slave-trading as a God-given good. There was a difference, she insisted, "between errors of opinion and sins in actual practice."
If Maria found it hard to tolerate the "fiery irascible" Mr. Napier, she had better luck befriending some of the other Southerners in town. Challenged by the opportunity to try her argumentative skills on genuine slaveholders, she willingly sought them out and, with what she described as a careful mixture of "candour and courtesy," spent many hours in hotel lobbies and private parlors discussing the issue of slavery. At first Maria was encouraged by the Southerners' friendliness and hoped her powers of persuasion would convince them of the sinfulness of the "peculiar institution" and of the need to regard Negroes as fellow human beings. But she quickly discovered her job would not be an easy one: "By education and habit they have so long thought and spoken of the colored man as a mere article of property, that it is impossible for them to recognize him as a man, and reason concerning him as a brother, on equal terms with the rest of the human family. If, by great effort, you make them acknowledge the brotherhood of the human race, as a sacred and eternal principle, - in ten minutes, their arguments, assertions and proposed schemes, all show that they have returned to the old habit of regarding the slave as a 'chattel personal.'"
Relations between Maria Child and Northampton's Southern visitors cooled visibly when it became clear that she and David not only opposed slavery in theory but were actively pursuing its extinction. Thomas Napier was particularly annoyed by their proselytizing and countered with missionary tactics of his own. Thus in July when his sister from South Carolina arrived for a visit accompanied by her slave Rosa, he urged Rosa to befriend Mrs. Child and show this Yankee woman how well slavery agreed with her. The colored woman passed frequently under Maria's window, looking sleek and contented. When engaged in conversation she would "boast of her happy slavery" and laugh at Maria's efforts to persuade her to take her freedom. Maria, refusing to be taken in by such subterfuges, sent Rosa's mistress a long letter decrying the evils of slavery and comparing the happiness of slaves "to that of well-fed pigs" and their destiny to dogs who were sold to one buyer while their puppies went to another. Accompanying the letter were several antislavery tracts.
If Maria hoped this barrage of antislavery literature would convince Rosa's mistress of the error of her ways she was sadly mistaken. Within two hours the letter was angrily returned, followed shortly by an indignant Rosa. The Napiers had informed their slave that their abolitionist neighbor had called her a pig and her children puppies. Maria quickly set matters straight by reading Rosa a copy of the letter, and, encouraged by this Yankee woman's sympathetic manner, Rosa was soon disclosing her life's story. Although she'd been promised her freedom by a previous owner, the document granting it had been lost. Maria, who feared that once back in the South Rosa would lose all chance of obtaining her freedom, tried to persuade the woman to remain in Northampton. But Rosa could not bear the thought of living apart from her children and other close relatives and friends, and in the end she returned home with her mistress. Maria's failure to coax Rosa into remaining in the North was a source of delight to Mr. Napier and his family, who boasted that for all of Mrs. Child's efforts to persuade Rosa to take her freedom she had preferred to stay with her beloved mistress. Here was positive proof that slavery was a benevolent institution after all.
More discouraging than the intransigence of Southerners was the behavior of Northampton's Yankee natives, who showed more concern with not offending those in their midst who were pro-slavery than in combating Northern prejudice against Negroes. The owner of the Mansion House, a favorite resort for Southern travelers, became very annoyed with Maria when she asked a colored man staying in the hotel if he were free. "I dislike slavery as much as you do," the hotel keeper assured her, "but then I get my living by slave-holders." Maria also discovered that Margaret Dwight, the principal of the Gothic Seminary for Young Ladies, five or six of whose pupils were Southerners, was strongly prejudiced against the abolitionists. By the end of her first year in Northampton Maria was even upbraiding the tenants in her own boardinghouse for their "narrow and bigoted spirit."
Most disheartening of all was the attitude of the clergy, whom Maria accused of valuing the peace of the church more than moral principle and sectarian doctrines more than the brotherhood of man. She reported to her abolitionist friends in Boston that Mr. Mitchell, the pastor of the Congregational Church, would not permit antislavery lectures in his meetinghouse for fear of driving Mr. Napier out of town. From her observation post next door she watched as almost every day baskets of fruits and vegetables were carried from Napier's garden to Mr. Mitchell's rectory and dismissed this neighborly generosity as "part of the price for which the Judas betrays his master."
During the first year in Northampton both Childs were active in the organized antislavery efforts of Hampshire County. In addition to the tedious and often unpleasant ordeal of obtaining signatures to congressional petitions, they also faithfully attended antislavery meetings. Once, having traveled twenty miles to Greenfield for a Franklin County antislavery convention, Maria found the atmosphere considerably chillier than Northampton's. As she seated herself among the delegates she was at first unaware that her presence was causing any uneasiness, and she ignored the implicit hostility in the announcement that all the gentlemen present were welcome to join the convention. Then she overheard one man whisper to another, while gesturing in her direction, "I hope she doesn't come to introduce Boston notions . ...I trust she is not going to advocate women's rights!"
<#FROWN:G56\>
Definition of Feminist Art or Feminist Definition of Art
Selma Kraft
My title is more than a play on words: it states a distinction critical in determining how to bring about overdue recognition of women's art. A feminist definition of art is better suited to this goal than a definition of feminist art.
The call for a feminist definition of art arose in the context of explaining the problem of undervaluing past and present women artists on the basis of the male bias of traditional criteria used to attribute artistic value. This approach does not apologize for the art of women, explaining away their 'lack of greatness' in inequitable social conditions. Instead, it locates the problem of women's exclusion from serious recognition as artists not in their art but in the very definition of art. According to this view, the problem does not reside in the art women have created; it lies in the conditions of viewing visual works as art in the Western tradition.
A successful feminist definition of art would replace the traditional definition of art. Philosophers, however, have increasingly questioned whether it is possible to locate a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for calling something art, i.e., for defining art. More than thirty years ago Morris Weitz established the framework for this questioning when he stated: "'Art,' itself is an open concept .... The very expansive, adventurous character of art, its ever-present changes and novel creations, makes it logically impossible to ensure any set of defining properties." Because of this, "If we actually look and see what it is that we call 'art,' we will find no common properties - only strands of similarities." Since that time a new way of defining art, George Dickie's institutional theory of art, has become widely accepted. In 1974 he wrote: "A work of art in the classificatory sense is (1) an artifact; (2) a set of the aspects of which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld)."
The kind of definition Weitz found impossible is a normative definition - one which provides a criterion, or criteria, for aesthetic judgment. As Weitz puts it, any evaluation of the statement, "'This is a work of art' implies 'This has P', where 'P' is some chosen art-making property." Without the belief that not only is such a definition possible but is, indeed, in use and biased against the art of women, there would be no need to seek a feminist definition of art.
The kind of definition that Dickie provides, however, is descriptive rather than prescriptive. It provides no standard for including or excluding anything as art. It states a fact upon which there is widespread agreement, i.e., that the determination of art is a social process. It is the social process that needs change, not the definition.
Despite Weitz's objections to the contrary, art historians, museum curators, gallery owners, critics, and collectors use a criterion that is agreed upon for making value judgments about art every day, a criterion not the subject of argument or discussion but simply assumed: stylistic originality is the definitive characteristic of art. Visual works that do not meet this standard are taken to be craft, 'motel art,' commercial art, or anything considered to be less than art.
Stylistic originality is not a quality found in any work per se. Looking at a Roy Lichtenstein comic strip painting and a newspaper comic strip frame, or an all-over painting by Lee Krasner and another by Jackson Pollock, one could not tell by any perceptible qualities which one or ones are formally innovative. The determination of stylistic originality can only be made by knowing something about the background of a work, which is the historical circumstances of its creation. One must know to what tradition it belongs and how it is connected in time to the elements of that tradition. No amount of looking, even of sensitive looking, could reveal whether Lichtenstein's or the newspaper's comic strip frame, Krasner's or Pollock's painting, were more stylistically original or even stylistically original at all. Without knowing the circumstances of the creation of, say, two identical-looking Brillo boxes, it would not be possible to differentiate between one that is a mere object found in a grocery store and a work of art by Andy Warhol. Stylistic originality is, then, an attribute added to a work of art from other information, not one derived from it.
A paradigmatic assumption of stylistic originality as the definitive characteristic of art is made by H. W. Janson in his immensely influential art history textbook: "Originality, then, is what distinguishes art from craft. We may say, therefore, that it is the yardstick of artistic greatness or importance." It is clear that what Janson means by originality is innovation in style, not meaning. For example, when he evaluates the Nike of Samothrace as "the greatest masterpiece of Hellenistic sculpture," he speaks of the formal element of space: "There is an active relationship - indeed an interdependence - between the statue and the space that envelops it, such as we have never seen before."
It is this assumption that is implicitly agreed upon by art critics. The particular aesthetic characteristics they refer to in evaluating art (e.g., powerful, deliberate, complicated, motionless, authoritative, intense, beautiful, seductive, potent, eerie, visionary, gorgeous, severe, forceful, perishable, vulnerable, ghostlike) may be seen as positive, negative, or neutral attributes by different critics or even by the same critics regarding different works. Depending on context, any of these words can be and are used with different evaluative meanings. A work of art may be interpreted, for example, as overly complicated or interestingly complicated; as flashily gorgeous or sublimely gorgeous; as fancifully perishable or incompetently perishable; as boringly motionless or breathtakingly motionless. The attribute of stylistic originality, however, is always positive and that of stylistic derivativeness is always negative.
This distinction is true even in our postmodern era, when stylistic originality seems threatened to suffer the fate of other earlier valued attributes of art, that of being outmoded. Artists currently are doing blatant copies of earlier artists' works or unabashedly replicating their styles. These kinds of gestures, however, are considered to be manifestations of originality by virtue of their turning away from the originality of modernism. For example, the reviewers of a recent show by Mark Tansey in a New York gallery remark that what Tansey is involved with is "rejection of formalist strategies". Thus the fact that his "figures are redolent of Eakins in their academic realism, the space and dramatic lighting borrowed from the Baroque," does not diminish their appreciation of his art, because "Originality is everywhere denied."
Tansey, in other words, is not unoriginal; he is stylistically original in denying formalistic originality. This denial is, of course, not to be found in the work itself. It is attributed to the work, on the basis of the place of the work in the tradition of formalist art. When compared to formalism, the stylistic characteristics of academic realism and Baroque art are formal innovations. Therefore, this artist is worthy of having his work shown in a prestigious New York gallery and of being reviewed in Artnews.
So pervasive is the acceptance of stylistic originality as the defining characteristic of art that even feminist art historians use this criterion of artistic value. In evaluating the work of Lavinia Fontana, Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin remark: "Her major handicap ... is being one of the last representatives of a conservative maniera ... Thus her work has an old-fashioned air that is unfortunately not redeemed by either a novel personal interpretation of maneria or by a consistently high level of quality." The clear implication here is that a novel personal ointerpretation of style, whatever the deficiencies of her art, would have been sufficient to redeem Fontana's artistic reputation. In another book compiling past women artists, Wendy Slatkin states that the artists she includes are not "women artists of mere competence", and the first criterion for inclusion she lists is "technical or formal innovations".
Among aestheticians, too, there are those who have explicitly taken the position that originality is a necessary condition for something to be called art, or as Arthur Danto puts it, "an analytical requirement of being a work of art." David Goldblatt deduces from this belief that an artist repeating his own style is guilty of self-plagiarism, i.e., ceases to count as an artist. What is even more revealing about the deep belief of the connection between art and originality, however, is the implicit assumption that originality is a sufficient condition for art. Some aestheticians interested in defining art, such as Weitz, Dickie, and Danto, do not start with definitive characteristics of art which can account for works that are original. Instead, they start with the notion of originality and try to find definitions that can include a wide variety of original works. Instead of using prevailing conceptions or their own definitions of art to question the artistic legitimacy or value of such works as the most famous example of all, Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, they use such works as unquestioned examples of art that their definitions must meet. Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes, Claes Oldenburg's filled-in hole-in-the-ground, Chris Burden's locking himself in a footlocker for seven days - what common quality do these disparate items have in common that makes it necessary to account for them in any definition of art, before any definition of art is forthcoming, other than their novelty in how they are done?
Counterexamples to stylistic originality as art's assumed central defining feature are to be found in artistic traditions outside Western art. When looked at from within these cultures, as opposed to looking with Western aesthetic expectations, the aesthetics of African, Chinese, and American Indian art, to name some examples, do not require originality. This is not to say that these cultures don't require creativity or individualized expression for their art, simply that stylistic innovation is not assumed to be a sufficient or necessary condition for art, or even held in high esteem at all. Of course, the artworks produced by these cultures are generally excluded from consideration by traditional Western aesthetics.
The exclusion of women from the canon of Western art also stems from this assumption. In historical terms the visual works women have made have not met this requirement. Although those women artists who have been valued most highly in Western culture have been creative and highly personal in their individual expressions, they made no significant stylistic innovations. Artemisia Gentileschi worked in the style created by Caravaggio; Mary Cassatt's style was derived from the Impressionism developed by Claude Monet et al.; Georgia O'Keeffe's style was influenced by that of Arthur Dove. The fact that no woman artist has been recognized for having made a stylistic breakthrough in and of itself does not mean, however, that the very notion of stylistic originality is inherently exclusionary toward the art of women.
A closer look at the radical innovativeness involved in achieving significant stylistic originality indicates that it has not been a goal for women artists. To replace intentionally an accepted style with one significantly different requires a certain antagonism to what exists, aggressiveness in overthrowing it, and a willingness to take risks in destroying what stands in the way. While men in Western culture have been socialized to these qualities, women have been taught to be accepting, docile, and passive. This is not to imply in any way that these differences are biological in origin or inevitable for the future, In the past, however, women have stressed the need to connect to the past and to accept life as it is given to them. No male artist has been known to have said, "I try to see through the eyes of many others," or, "[My art] is the thread of my connections which makes the world intelligible to me." No woman artist has been known to have talked about art as "a difficult feat of bravado," or "the love of danger," or to have said, "I feel no tradition ... I'm disconnected."
<#FROWN:G57\>What is less clear is whether the rise of conservative evangelical movements has reached its modern-day peak. Are these movements destined to decline and lose power as the West proceeds to the Third Millennia? Perhaps an understanding of the ties between evangelical Protestantism and school Policy in the American past may illuminate these issues.
The connection between various Protestant groups and education and schooling has been an intimate one throughout the course of American history. Public schools as we recognize them today were unknown before the American Revolution, yet the ties between religion and education were strong. The Puritans of New England, like other Protestant groups in the colonies, emphasized the importance of literacy and especially reading, largely though not exclusively for religious purposes. Reading the Bible, in addition to the catechetical instruction provided by ones parents and minister, promoted a more godly life and hopefully led one along the path to personal salvation. The town schools of eighteenth-century Massachusetts and the district schools of the hinterland often used the Bible as a basic reading text and taught the principles of Protestantism through successive editions of the ubiquitous New England Primer In Adams Fall, We Sinned All, many children quickly learned as schools reinforced the lessons of parents and ministers.
But even in the colonial period, no consensus existed over the propriety of a particular brand of religion in education. Quakers, Catholics, Puritan - and many other groups, including atheists - brought enough diversity to public discussions to preclude any easy agreement on important educational matters. Puritan Boston, for example, saw the emergence of a strong commercial class in the late seventeenth century that often eschewed orthodox Calvinist values in their lives. Secular public reading and writing schools for boys, for example, were founded in towns such as Boston that challenged the monopoly of older Latin grammar schools, as middle class families pressed for more attention to more practical, somewhat less religious, education. Private schools for boys and even some girls whose parents could pay for the tuition opened in response to this secular demand. Navigation, penmanship, foreign languages, and dancing were available for whatever prices the market might bear.
Thus, there was more to education than Puritan ministers even in historic Boston might have desired. By the early eighteenth century, religious leaders there lamented the decline in the spirituality of the people, reflected in the presence of more luxury goods, finer homes, and often more secular instruction than seemed common in the previous century. A strong Protestant tone informed the Anglo-American world of colonial America, and prayer, Bible reading, and the like shaped the consciousness of generations of settlers and their children. Controversy was nevertheless always present, elders generally thought the new generation somewhat insolent, and the preservation of sound religious influence upon educational practice problematic. The so-called Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s spread across the land as a testimony to the perception among many that the place of religion in life had to be restored and redefined.
The success of the American Revolution did not necessarily produce a completely harmonious educational and religious state. The commercial middle classes that helped to finance the American Revolution hardly turned their backs on profits after the victory at Yorktown. The values of Yankee traders threatened still further the pieties of religion and the power of local ministers; the expansion of the country westward opened new avenues to material and not necessarily spiritual gain; and the popularity of the ideas of the Enlightenment hardly seemed propitious to the faithful. The skepticism of a Voltaire, the scientific views of a Jefferson, the radicalism of a Paine, and the continued power of secularism in life led to a decline in church membership and attendance. The stage was set for another Great Awakening.
By the early 1800s, evangelical awakenings emerged that had lasting effects on American culture and education. It is not an exaggeration to say that evangelical movements became part of the mainstream of American Protestantism. The rise of faith in human reason, progress, and the perfectibility of humanity proved attractive to groups such as the Unitarians, but overall more familiar and conservative themes received greater public recognition among older and newly expanding groups such as the Methodists and Baptists. To many evangelical Protestants, the terror of the French Revolution sufficiently countered the assumptions of the Enlightenment about humanitys inherent nature. Evangelicals were unable to prevent the gradual, formal separation of church and state - the established Congregational Church of Massachusetts was the last to fall in 1833 - yet they still left a visible, and quite controversial, imprint of basic American institutions such as the emerging public schools.
Protestant ministers - best remembered for their camp meetings and urban revivals - played a seminal role in the establishment of Sunday schools and the creation of public schools in nineteenth-century America. All of their actions were controversial and their successes obvious though incomplete. Like previous religious activists, however, they were an essential part of all dialogues about the fate of American education. Religious denominations had always been interested in the formal and informal instruction of children and youth. What was new in the early 1800s was the growing interdenominational Protestant support for common, public school systems. The success of interdenominational Protestant groups such as the American Bible Society (1816) and the American Sunday School Union (1824) heralded the coming of even greater things by mid-century.
In startingly rapid fashion, most Protestant groups after the 1830s began to promote the establishment of common, state-controlled public schools. Early in the 1800s, many philanthropic Protestant reformers had banded together to build free charity schools in major urban areas to educate the children of the unchurched poor. Within a few decades, however, as Catholic immigration increased and the revival movements intensified, a broad-based Protestant effort to build state-sponsored schools triumphed. The majoritarian Protestants saw the public schools as a bulwark of mainstream values, a defender of a common faith against infidels, atheists, agnostics, Catholics, Jews, and others. Historian Timothy Smith has succinctly written: "An evangelical consensus of faith and ethics had come to so dominate the national culture, that a majority of Protestants were now willing to entrust the state with the task of educating children, confident that education would be 'religious' still. The sects identified their common beliefs with those of the nation, their mission with America's mission."
Anti-Catholicism served as a unifying belief among most Protestant denominations throughout the 1800s. The links between Protestant leadership and school policies in the early years were numerous. For example, the earliest state school superintendents were often ordained Protestant ministers. Countless teachers were devout 'Christians,' meaning Protestants who had had a religious conversion. Many single women served as teachers beginning in the nineteenth century, often recruited by religious organizations hoping to save the West for God, or to convert manumitted slaves. Many of these teachers often saw their role in essentially religious terms. More due to custom rather than legislation, teachers often began school days with a non-denominational Protestant prayer and a reading (often without comment) from the King James version of the Bible. Anti-Romanism ran riot.
The successful linkage of Protestant values with the new public school system could be seen in the teaching staff, curriculum, and attitude of ministers toward the enhanced role of the state in the educational sphere. Wrongly assuming that Protestants would long remain dominant, these reformers could not foresee that the state might become more secular and ultimately might infect schools with irreligious beliefs. Most Protestant groups - except for some Lutherans, Seventh Day Adventists, and some small denominations - supported the state system and thus lacked strong systems of denominational schools to counter this possible development. And, as the nineteenth century progressed, the Industrial Revolution added even higher levels of materialism to the American scene, adding further possibilities that secular, worldly values would undermine the power of religion and shape basic social institutions.
Besides Protestant holdouts from the broadly Protestant state system of schools that emerged, Catholics, Jews, non-believers, and other dissenters often attacked the development of public education. Opponents supported education and schooling but often denounced the state systems of instruction that emerged. Catholics slowly built a competing system of parochial schools after their efforts to share the tax fund were defeated in the 1840s. They condemned the public school texts that disparaged the culture of immigrants and Catholics and that openly ridiculed the papacy. That all 'Christians' were Protestants struck Catholics and others as ludicrous, just as it would to many citizens in the next century. But the allegiance of evangelical Protestants to the public schools remained powerful, and the easy equation of Protestantism, Americanism, and public schooling was understandable given the power of majorities to define reality.
The early twentieth century witnessed a continual struggle by evangelical Protestants to control the destiny of American education. As prescient observers sometimes predicted, the belief that the state would remain tightly bound with Protestant values was an overly optimistic one. That is, secularism and materialism were strongly nourished by the intensification of marketplace values in the late nineteenth century, and the religious complexion of the country grew as millions of immigrants, especially Catholics and to a lesser extent Jews, came to America in the new century. Protestants still were dominant on school boards, in much of the teaching force, and especially prominent in shaping school policy in small towns and villages across the country. But professional administrators in the growing schools, especially in cities, while usually Protestant, increasingly supplanted the ministers so influential in state government and local school control in the nineteenth century. Like an echo from the past, Protestant ministers and lay activists condemned the decline of school and society.
Efforts were continually made, of course, to guarantee that a set of homogeneous, pan-Protestant values still dominated schools serving an increasingly heterogeneous people. But the Scopes Trial, which discredited fundamentalist ideas among many citizens, undermined Darwin's theory of evolution about as successfully as Prohibition ended the drinking of bourbon. Yet the fight over evolution was part of a larger crisis facing the faithful. Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians even before the 1920s well understood that a creeping secularism grew larger in the wake of America's emergence as an industrial and world power. Evangelist Billy Sunday attacked the rise of vocational education programs in the schools in the early 1900s, since he realized that material gain was increasingly becoming an important motive behind the expansion of schools in general and the high schools in particular. Despite these complaints against what were seen as dangerous features of modern education, destined to obscure the moral mission of the schools, vocational programs became common and often flourished. How to prepare for the world of work came to define for many the goals of public schools.
Evangelical Protestants won the battle in Tennessee in the 1920s over the teaching of evolution in the schools, since the U.S. Supreme Court did not reverse bans against the teaching of evolution until 1968. Early in the century, prayers in schools were increasingly mandated by law to ensure compliance with the older Protestant faith. But these individual victories did not constitute any ultimate winning of the war. The early twentieth century witnessed a continual movement of mainstream Protestant churches toward liberalism. Some Protestant ministers who advocated the social gospel even became prominent Christian Socialists, calling for various forms of public ownership of the means of production. Such liberalizing tendencies reflected changes within Protestantism itself as certain leaders confronted the challenges of immigration, urban and industrial growth, and the problems of poverty in metropolitan areas.
Evangelical Protestants countered all this by leading impressive revivals, passing legislation requiring prayers in the schools, and fighting atheists and evolutionists wherever they found them. The essential beliefs of anti-modernist sentiment surfaced between 1910 and 1915 in a remarkable set of writings called The Fundamentals, whose sixty-four contributors reemphasized the basic evangelical creed: the divinity of Christ, the inerrancy and infallibility of the Bible, human depravity, and the life, death, and resurrection of the Lord.
<#FROWN:G58\>
A Confucian Boyhood in Gratitude County
JUNE 15, 1981. "Were it not for war and revolution, I would have never strayed from my home in the North China plain. I am a native son of Gratitude County [Xian Xian], in Hebei province, you know. Our hometown of Xiaoduokou was located about a hundred miles from China's imperial capital. Even with all the upheavals of the revolution, I have managed to spend most of my life in the two cities closest to my childhood home: Beijing and Tianjin. Only nine years out of my ninety did I spend away from these cities, and then only because of the war against Japan. Those years were the most difficult ones for me."
The burdened voice of the old man testifies to the truth of his words. Yet he is one of the most cosmopolitan intellectuals of his generation. Why this melancholia about his native place now?
"Yes, yes, I have lived in other cities, too. Paris, Berlin, then Shanghai and Guangzhou. But whenever I had a choice, I stayed close to Beijing. Not out of nationalism, mind you, but out of old cultural habit. This is hardest to shake. Even when I quarreled most intensely with China's traditional values, I liked to stay close to its historical terrain."
He catches traces of disbelief in my eyes and goes on: "You probably think it odd, this attachment of mine to native place. It certainly cost me a great deal, especially during the political turmoil of 1948-49 when I refused to leave Beijing to go to Hong Kong....But the pull of my origins has been great....I have always been interested in the history of Gratitude County and its most famous native son, Ji Yun, a Qing dynasty scholar. I have collected as many of his poems and essays as I could, you know. In my library, even now, I have a nearly complete collection of works by this fellow provincial of mine."
The name of Ji Yun keeps coming up in our conversation. Here sits Zhang Shenfu - a cultural rebel, a modern scholar interested in mathematical logic and dialectical materialism. Yet he has spent months, "indeed years," he says, correcting me, finding and collecting the works of Ji Yun. What lies behind Zhang's attachment to this eighteenth-century Confucian? Compensation for his own injured pride?
Zhang Shenfu himself did not become a famous native son of Gratitude County. His family's intellectual genealogy stretched no further than his grandfather, a wealthy peasant who had saved enough to hire Confucian tutors for his sons. Zhang Shenfu's uncle, his father's older brother, had been the first family member to take the imperial examination. Zhang Shenfu's father, Zhang Lian, was the second.
But the more we talk about Ji Yun, the more he grows in stature in Zhang's eyes. And in my own. In Ji Yun, it appears, Zhang has found a kindred spirit. In the years when Zhang Shenfu had difficulty balancing internal convictions and outer obligations Ji Yun provided him with some precedent, some way out of the thickets of a cultural tradition obsessed by politics.
Before I leave today, I ask to borrow one of Zhang's books by Ji Yun. From the introduction I learn that Ji Yun first attracted national attention in 1747, when he came in first at the provincial-level examination. Within a few years Ji rose to the top of the central bureaucracy, so high in fact that he became exposed to charges of bribery and favoritism. Whatever the basis of these charges, Ji Yun never contested them. Instead, he accepted exile to the farthest north-western corner of the imperial realm. On his way to and from Urumchi, Ji wrote the collection of poems that Zhang Shenfu quotes to me today. Then he adds, "Whenever I was cast out from the center of political revolution, Ji Yun's poems gained new meaning for me."
Zhang Shenfu's parting words as he hands me the volume of poetry at the door make his attachment to this eighteenth-century Confucian clearer. "Ji Yun, too, had to learn how to walk the public tightrope. But he was more successful than I. He came back from exile to become an important official. He managed to thread his path between politics and scholarship more gracefully than I did. He was a close friend of the philosopher, Dai Zhen. Together they took on many battles against the moralists who pretended to be the true heirs of Confucian tradition....For us twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals, the battle was not so clear, nor so easily won. We could no longer claim to be the true heirs of Confucianism. Though at times I was tempted to try."
JUNE 16, 1981. I try to bring our conversation back to Zhang Shenfu's childhood. I want to learn more about his father and his uncle, not just Ji Yun. But Zhang Shenfu's parental world stays opaque. Though his account is clothed in formalities, I sense pain buried beneath the genealogical recitation: "My eldest uncle had taken and passed the zhuren examinations at the provincial level. This opened the path for my father, Zhang Lian. He passed the highest examination for the jinshi [the metropolitan degree] in 1906. The next year, my father was sent on an official visit to Japan to oversee the educational progress of government students there. He returned convinced of the practical value of a modern education. So my father promptly enrolled me in a modern style primary school in Beijing."
I am not ready to jump over the first thirteen years of Zhang's life, and I ask more about what happened at home in Gratitude County, before the new schooling in Beijing.
"Before that? Well, before that I had a thoroughly Confucian upbringing, I suppose. My father was the overseer of my education, but he left the details to the family tutor. My father, I remember, was very strict with me. Here, take a look at these old photographs. They were taken right after my father passed the jinshi examination."
Two small portraits are laid out on the table - the father and the son, a stiff, thoroughly Confucian pair. Zhang Lian, wearing his official robes and cap, looks out with a severe gaze and sports the long mustache of a military official. In fact, as Zhang Shenfu tells me, most of his father's assignments for the Qing dynasty revolved around the military. In 1906 Zhang Lian began to serve as tutor at the Manchu military academy. During the next five years, the men who became Zhang Lian's closest associates were military officials: "Foremost among these was Feng Guozhang, the Chinese general who took over the Manchu Nobles' College in 1906. My father and Feng Guozhang remained close throughout the upheaval of the 1911 revolution. Zhang Lian went on to share a brief moment of glory when Feng came close to suppressing anti-dynastic rebels in the late fall of 1911."
The other little portrait shows Zhang Shenfu at thirteen. The boy's face is as severe as that of the father. The child's gaze projects the kind of seriousness expected of the eldest son of an official who just passed the jinshi examination. Dressed in a silk gown with fur collar, the boy wears his little scholar's cap with awkward dignity over protruding ears. His eyes are unflinching, as if he has just won a battle against an inner foe.
"Were you afraid of your father?" I ask softly. I may be transgressing on protected domain, but the portrait of the fierce father coupled with the overserious boy edges me on. Zhang Shenfu stops in mid-sentence. He had been rambling on about the open-air market that took place in his native village every four days or so. He interrupts the story of how his great-grandfather started this village after running into trouble with his own clan just a few miles away. He looks at me with pained eyes:
"I was six or so when my father beat my head into the kang - you know, the kind of North China stove that also serves as bed and oven for village families....He came into the room in which I was supposed to be memorizing my daily lessons and caught me playing idly with the pages of a classical dictionary. This was a big book, a huge compendium of classical learning that served as a reference work for officials. For my father, this was a sacred text. For me, a boy, it was a toy. Without warning, my father smashed my head into the kang. Blood pumped from the wound a long time. To this day you can see the scar on my forehead."
I lean closer to look for some visible sign of the wound. There is none. But the withdrawn look of the old man in front of me lets me know that the little boy inside is still smarting from the father's violence. The silence between us stretches on longer than usual. Then Zhang Shenfu goes on to assimilate this momentary recollection into the broader picture that he is painting for me. "You see how early I exhibited my pleasure in playing with books. I always liked books, but I didn't like to study."
Zhang leans back and tries to let a smile wash away the gloom hanging over the memory of his father's beating. "By the time I was fourteen, playtime was over. I was sent to Beijing to study under my uncle's supervision. I went there alone, in a small, horse-drawn cart." Zhang's voice trails off, leaving me no way now to return to the subject of his childhood pain. Clearly he has locked most of it in a place words cannot reach. He wants to go on to talk about himself as an easygoing (buzaihu) man.
Toward the end of this afternoon's conversation, however, one more trauma slips through the net of selective remembrance. We are talking about other members of his family. Zhang starts listing his various siblings, adding a few more to the two younger brothers, Zhang Dainian and Zhang Congnian, whom he had mentioned before (and whom I have met). A couple of sisters now enter Zhang's world, "uneducated, as all women were at the time." Then, another cloudy look: "My youngest brother drowned when he was five years old. He was much younger than I was. Still, his death shook my deeply."
Again, the conversation moves on. Another subject, another time. A brief gaze of pain and loss lingers in spite of Zhang's chatty voice. I realize that I have seen the same look come over Zhang's face whenever he speaks about the death of his Paris-born son in 1924. At such times, part of Zhang slows down to countenance old aches. But the conscious, rational, storytelling voice moves on. His losses, unlike the 'mistakes' that thread through his marriages and political life, do not hold Zhang Shenfu's interest for long.
Although he allowed the pain of the kang beating and the loss of his brother's drowning to enter our conversations, Zhang Shenfu really wants to tell me about something else today. He finally comes around to his mother, that vague character whose first name he can never quite recall. He always refers to her by the family name, Zhao Zhang. Though illiterate herself, this daughter of a renowned scholar-official brought considerable prestige to the recently educated Zhang household.
The story of Zhao Zhang takes up a bit more time than usual, mostly because her son Zhang Shenfu is counting his blessings. "My mother," he recalls, "was only twenty-two when I was born. Because she was so young and healthy, I benefited both within and outside of the womb. She continued to bear children every three years or so. None of them was as strong or as healthy as I."
This boast does not quite fit the picture of Zhang Shenfu's younger brothers, with whom I shared a table at the birthday celebration last week. Zhang Congnian, the physicist from Shandon, is a tall, vigorous man of seventy-five.
<#FROWN:G59\>You shouldn't go to sleep on the job, you must be able to move with some alacrity when necessary, you must not get too bored standing around in the hot sun and, most important, though no one said anything about it, you must be able to get along with the other members of the survey crew.
At the Highway Department just off Don Gaspar Street in the state capitol building, I started by asking questions about where to go to apply for a job. After the usual false leads, I was directed to the appropriate desk. An Anglo male in a white shirt recorded my name, address, age, education, and answers to questions concerning my experience and why I wanted a job with the Highway Department. Then he looked up at me, bobbed his head, and said, "That will be all. Check back with us when school is out and we will see what we can do." I thanked him and said goodbye. I was now a certified job applicant with the New Mexico State Highway Department. The pay was ample and you were paid for your own keep. The workweek was five days with the weekend off but you might be almost anywhere in the state, up to two hundred miles from Santa Fe. It sounded fine to me. Not too stimulating, but then given my age and experience, what did I expect? The main thing was the job - a real job and real pay. Driving home to tell the Bakoses I mentally reviewed what I would say to Dad and how glad I was to be able to relieve him of the load of my upkeep, even if it was for only three months.
In person and by pen (people weren't used to telephoning long distance then, except in emergencies, and even then they were more apt to send telegrams) Dad had showered me with laments of poverty and how pressed he was with having to support us children and what a difference it would make if he didn't have the expense of our upkeep.
By then I had begun to realize that my father was inconsistent in his drives and motivations and was pulled in at least two opposite directions. I had to take into account his own need to control and to keep me dependent, counterbalanced by his deep-seated penuriousness which took the form of a fantasy in which he was rid of all responsibilities, especially those inescapable ones associated with raising a family. I think there were times when he simply felt sorry for himself because Mother had left him. The result, regardless of motives (conscious or unconscious), was to emphasize that I was a burden. Proving that I could work and be on my own for a while was therefore important to me.
There was also the question of how to deal with Theresa. My strategy, developed from past experiences, was to shut myself off and to involve her in my life only when absolutely necessary. This was one of those times, since I had to tell her about the job. As I entered the house, she came out of the kitchen and placed herself in the doorway between the kitchen and living room with her hand on the frame, effectively barring the entrance to the kitchen and the room where I kept my things. I had wanted a little more time but since she wanted to know where I had been, I had to tell her. As my story unfolded she expressed more and more dissatisfaction. But why? Wasn't she delighted that I had taken the initiative and applied for a summer job? Apparently not. I couldn't remember Theresa ever complimenting me on anything so there was no way of judging where I stood with her at any given moment.
In the two years I spent with the Bakoses I was unable to detect, at any time, even a modicum of enthusiasm from Theresa about me. So I was not surprised when her reaction to the news of my summer job plans was far less than enthusiastic. Her negative response didn't bother me too much, as there had been little tendency on her part to interfere in the past. Nevertheless, the unexpected chill in the air and a hint of distress at the thought that I might actually get the job should have told me something.
Sure enough, the next week I received a letter from Dad saying that he didn't approve of what I was doing, adding in very uncharacteristic terms that I would be associating with rough construction types and that after all I was young and didn't know the score and could be led astray by associating with unsavory characters. Just how this was to be accomplished was not specified. I realized I had never heard Dad, under any circumstances, use arguments of that type before. His letter sounded more like something originating from an overly protective woman than a man. At that time, I had neither the insight nor the inclination to devote time to psyching out my parents (it would have been a full-time job), so I said nothing. I did not reply to his letter. From past experience I knew it would be useless to try.
I don't remember whether the news came from Dad or Theresa, but I was told I had been enrolled in Cyril Kay Scott's art class. I didn't know Cyril personally but I knew that he was part of the Santa Fe scene. I had seen clutches of art students with their easels - they all seemed to be women - wearing cotton dresses and straw sun hats, hunched over, dabbing paint from a watercolor box, painfully constructing washed-out versions of adobe houses with hollyhocks along sun-drenched walls. And there I was, freshly imprinted with a cowboy's image of what a man should be. A superabundance of energy and restlessness made me unsuited to sitting around on a canvas stool all day surrounded by middle-class women. I was dismayed, but then I hadn't been consulted and, never having been able to resort to the open rebellion of some of my more normal peers, it never crossed my mind that there were other options.
So how did I end up in Cyril's class instead of working as a rodmanroadman? It seemed that Theresa had done some quick calculating and had seen that she stood to lose the money my father was giving her for board and room (and a maid who seldom appeared). She had to have some way of keeping me at home and not in the field where I would be paid a per diem. She wrote - or possibly even telegraphed - my father, giving reasons why he should squelch my plans to work and at the same time suggesting the great advantages of having me enrolled in Cyril's class. I am not certain of the details but there were enough of her tracks and they were easy to follow. It was one of the many times in my life when things worked out for the better, but for the wrong reasons.
Cyril Kay Scott was a smallish, energetic man with grayinggreying sparse hair, a goatee, and small potbelly. If he had been an authoritarian, take-charge type he would have placed himself differently in the studio than he did. A take-charge type sets up rows of chairs and then puts himself at the head of the class facing the students. Instead, Cyril placed himself in the northeast corner of the room so he could refer to his notes and keep an eye on things. The rest of us scattered ourselves and our easels in a double semicircle catty-corner to the main axis of the room. As a silent tribute to the master, I don't think that there was anyone closer to him than twelve feet. Cyril's voice was clear and relaxed and carried with it the right amount of reassuring authority, the kind that knows but doesn't have to tell you so.
Since his son Creighton (Jig) and I were the same age, we grew to be good friends over the years. As a result I learned a good deal more about Cyril than I might otherwise have known. An Englishman, he did not speak with the upper-class public-school accent which was so characteristic of the other Englishmen I had known, nor do I remember his having any noticeable class or ethnic dialect. He had started professional life as an engineer and later switched to medicine. Clearly as a young man he had been searching for something, because he gave up medicine and received training as a psychoanalyst (it was rumored that he had been analyzed by Freud), which, in the 1920s, was an unusual thing to do.
The analysis, I assume, and a restless spirit deflected his interests from medicine to art. Paris at the beginning of the century was roiling with change and Cyril was the type who would have been in the middle of it. He told us he had studied with one or two of the better-known Impressionists, and since the names didn't mean much to me then I didn't pay much attention to which ones. From his art it would have been impossible to tell, because his painting was unlike that of any Impressionist I can think of. At the time of our art class Cyril had just moved to Santa Fe, bringing his two wives with him, one of whom was Jig's mother. This mnage <*_>a-grave<*/> trois occupied an old adobe house on upper Canyon Road just below the reservoir.
My mother had always painted, as had her sister Blanche (a nervous wisp of a woman married to a sculptor). Heinz Warneke, my stepfather, was a sculptor of some note. Josef Bakos painted, as did everyone else on the Camino del Monte Sol: Will Shuster, Willard Nash, William P. Henderson, Andrew Dasburg, Fremont Ellis, Datus Meyers, and others, so that the activity of painting was not new to me. Even the paint-covered studio floors were part of the familiar scene. It had just never entered my head that I might be doing it. I already knew I had no talent and couldn't draw, though I could make the very fine-grained stippled renderings of bones and protozoa like those in biology textbooks.
Our class was held in an ideal studio, an unused chapel on lower San Francisco Street. The only adaptation in the shift from chapel to studio was to replace the north wall with a large, clear glass window so there was plenty of light. The chapel was suffused with an aura of the particular comfort associated with pleasant, totally absorbing work. Years later I was to work there for Martha Field, Catherine Gay, and Ann Webster, who were sculpting and needed someone who could do their casting for them and pose for figure studies from time to time. Prior to Cyril's time, my mother had taken classes in that same chapel from B. J .O. Nordfeldt, a Norwegian painter who had studied with and was deeply influenced by Czanne. It seemed that everyone who had anything to do with the art scene in Santa Fe had held classes or studied or worked in that studio. I don't know exactly when the chapel was demolished, but when I tried to find it in the 1950s it was gone, replaced by a cheap imitation adobe structure, and with it a very real part of Santa Fe's past had vanished. It was far from a public landmark, but there are places that don't need public recognition because their memorial is in the hearts of people.
With a minimum of fuss Cyril taught us the vocabulary and the grammar on which the Impressionists' system of painting was based: the isolates, sets, and patterns, an analytic method and classification system that I was to explain thirty years later in my first book, The Silent Language.
Cyril's method was to lecture from a voluminous set of notes in the morning and to allow the afternoon for painting.
<#FROWN:G60\>Although he wanted to see parts of the 'Kaddish' narrative compressed even further, Ferlinghetti offered a favorable response. "It's right, will be great huge book," he said.
Even with a new book going to press, Allen had a large supply of leftover poems on his hands. He had yet to include 'Siesta in Xbalba' or 'The Green Automobile' in a poetry collection, and he still had poems dating back to his San Francisco/Berkeley days, as well as from his post-Howl, pre-Europe period, that he wanted to collect. 'Aether' still required work, plus it was too long for inclusion in Kaddish. In short, he had enough poetry for another volume at least as long as the one about to be published. That, Allen decided, would be his next City Lights collection.
In addition, his friend Ted Wilentz was interested in publishing Empty Mirror as a part of his Corinth Press. Wilentz had recently published The Beat Scene, an anthology of Beat writings accompanied by the photographs of Fred McDarrah, and in the near future his list of authors would expand to include Jack Kerouac, Diane Di Prima, LeRoi Jones, and others. Allen, who had wanted to publish Empty Mirror for the better part of a decade, and who already had an introduction for the volume written by William Carlos Williams, could not have been happier with this turn of events and he went right to work on assembling the collection.
Thus went one of the most active periods in Ginsberg's publishing history, finding him putting the finishing touches on two volumes of poetry (Kaddish and Empty Mirror) and beginning the assembly of a third (Reality Sandwiches). These works, along with the recordings of his poetry and a movie, assured him of a name and reputation that superseded anything the critics could say about the Beat Generation's being a temporary fad or social movement making a few poets rich. Allen's star continued to rise.
2
Jack Kerouac, however, was in a period of personal and professional decline, stemming more from the toll public life had exacted upon him than from his own creative inability.
Kerouac was a mess, a punch-drunk fighter who had spent the best of his healthy years in training, only to suffer later by taking on too many opponents in too few years. His lifestyle had been knocked about in public, his literary ideals punished. By nature, he was more inclined to internalize his problems than to counterpunch, and by late 1960, it was obvious to those who knew him that Jack was in serious trouble.
From an artistic perspective, it should not have been a bad year. Tristessa, Kerouac's novel about his love affair with a Mexican prostitute, had been published as a paperback original, and LeRoi Jones had published The Scripture of the Golden Eternity at his Totem Press, Lonesome Traveler, a collection of Kerouac's travel essays, was scheduled to be published in late fall, and Ferlinghetti had purchased Book of Dreams for City Lights. Most writers would have been thrilled to see four books in publication within a year's time, but Kerouac, who could be as tough on himself as his harshest critic, was not about to gauge his literary success solely by the number of volumes published or money earned. None of these books was as good as - or offered the exuberance and impact of - an On the Road or Dr. Sax or Visions of Cody, and Kerouac knew it. He was looking to publish another big book - one that would be properly published and distributed, extensively reviewed, and widely accepted by readers.
He could no longer anticipate the response to his books. Two of his finest works, Dr. Sax and Mexico City Blues, had been published a year earlier, in 1959, as was Maggie Cassidy, his novel about his great teenage love affair. To Jack's horror, the books had been largely panned (or ignored) by critics, as if in backlash to his 'sudden' success. To make matters worse, a Hollywood film version of The Subterraneans, starring George Peppard and Leslie Caron, had been released; the film was a slick, embarrassing contrast to the free-spirited Pull My Daisy and threatened to immortalize Kerouac as a caricature of himself.
Depressed, Jack drank until he became bloated and red-faced. His health began to fail. In an effort to get him away from his problems and back to creative work, Lawrence Ferlinghetti offered Jack the use of his Bixby Canyon cabin. With Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso all out of the country, Jack was feeling isolated anyway, so some time alone in Ferlinghetti's Big Sur cabin could not hurt.
Or so he thought. Jack arrived in California in late July, but with the exception of the composition of a Joycean poem written about the sounds of the ocean, his trip was a disaster. Never one to sit by himself for too great a period of time, he was driven to the brink of a nervous breakdown during his stay in Bixby Canyon. The first few weeks went well, with Jack reading and writing and communing with nature on his long walks through the rough, wooded terrain. After a while, however, onsetting boredom and his need for a drink drove him back to the city, and by the time he made his way back to San Francisco, walking a good percentage of the way because he, the author of On the Road, could no longer get drivers to pick him up, Jack was ready for a full-scale bender. Although he had such friends as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, and Lew Welch to look after him, he was too far gone to do anything but sink into alcoholic depression. Even a brief reunion with Neal and Carolyn Cassady failed to bolster his spirits. His return to the cabin was followed by bouts of the d.t.'s, loneliness, and more drunken sessions with whoever stopped by to visit. His depression disarmed his sensibility, leading him to paranoid distrust of his friends. He had a brief fling with a girlfriend of Neal Cassady's, but he was in no condition to pursue it. By the time Jack's stay was winding down in early September, Ferlinghetti was so concerned about Kerouac's mental well-being that he suggested he consider checking into a sanatorium.
It was Jack's last big road trip. Still, for all his problems, Kerouac was far too gifted to let the experience lie fallow. He would turn it into Big Sur, the stunning book about mental decline that became one of his finest - and most underrated - novels. Big Sur would be compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up, and while Kerouac would have shuddered at the thought, he and Fitzgerald had more in common than anyone might have predicted. Both were romantics whose most enduring novels were about controversial, if not antiheroic, characters; both were depicted by the media as spokespersons for their respective generations. Both were tormented about the relationship between money and art, and both suffered through severe bouts of alcoholism and depression.
There was another similarity that Kerouac's friends probably suspected, though they were helpless to do anything about it and would never have dared to mention it out loud: Like Fitzgerald, Kerouac was pushing himself headlong toward an early death. His star was burning out.
3
Hearing of Kerouac's problems, Allen sent Jack a flip, newsy letter intended both to cheer him up and goad him into some kind of action. The three-page letter was a masterwork of its kind, a nonstop stream-of-consciousness rap in which Allen gave the details of the composition of 'Kaddish' and included a sizable excerpt; spoke of his conclusions from his yage experiments ("realized I AM the emptiness that's movie-projecting Kali monster on my mindscreen, projecting mindscreen even. So not scared anymore. But I still can't stop the appearance of the fucking mindscreen, I mean I can't quiet my organism to total silence. I'll have to study yoga or something, finally..."); reported the comings and goings and mental conditions of mutual friends; and hinted at plans for the future. He was still interested in Cuba in the aftermath of its revolution, he told Jack, and if he could make the arrangements, he hoped to travel there to see firsthand what was going on in that country.
Jack replied with a sober letter that announced he was living a quieter life now; he was back in Northport, staying away from liquor, losing weight, and spending his hours reading a recently purchased vintage twenty-nine-volume edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He downplayed his problems at Big Sur, preferring instead to remember the good times and his composition of 'Sea.' He had begun a new novel, he mentioned to Allen, but it had been a false start. As for Ginsberg's talk about Cuban politics, Kerouac was hearing not one thing: "What Logia Jesus said about astonishment of paradise seems to me much more on the right tracks of world peace and joy than all the recent communist and general political hysteria rioting and false screamings."
It was a presidential election year, and Allen was as interested in politics as ever. In his opinion, the position of the United States as a major player in international politics was absolutely critical to any hope of world peace, and he was particularly interested in the country's relationship with Cuba. Castro's takeover had rekindled U.S. preoccupation with communism as the destroyer of freedom, but Allen continued to believe that Castro, even if a dictator, was far less involved in "hysterical mind control" than the United States. As if to prove his point, he made an effort to meet Castro when the Cuban leader visited the United Nations in September, and at a press conference afterward, Allen caused a stir when he asked Cuban delegates about their country's attitudes about marijuana. Neither Cuba nor the United States was prepared to accept Allen's theory that marijuana was prohibited because national leaders believed it invited its users to think clearly and rebel against oppression.
As impertinent as Ginsberg's question might have seemed, it represented his strong belief that the world - and the United States in particular - needed a radical change of consciousness to avoid self-destruction. Throughout that fall, Allen raged about politics in his journal, filling its pages with manifestos condemning the United States, the FBI, the CIA, academic institutions, international politics, middle-class life, critics, and the news media:
<O_>poem<O/>
Although he conceded that most of his political poems were angry ravings unworthy of publication - and, in fact, none of the poems from this period was ever pulled from his journals and published separately, though some were presented at readings - Allen fully intended to write a grand-scale political poem. He had seen enough of the world to feel that he could hold the United States publicly accountable, directly or indirectly, for many of its miseries:
<O_>poem<O/>
Allen had little reason to be optimistic. He liked neither of the presidential candidates. He saw Kennedy as just another pretty face and Nixon as a continuation of the odious practices instituted during the Eisenhower administration. For all her paranoid ravings about the government, Naomi Ginsberg had been judged to be insane, but now, in light of what he was witnessing, Allen wondered whether she might have been more prophetic than she was given credit for. What was he to think when he saw J. Edgar Hoover get up at the Republican National Convention and proclaim that "communists, beatniks, and eggheads" were America's greatest enemies; or when he read that Eisenhower had been given a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover, with dirty passages underlined, only to agree with the postmaster general that something had to be done about such smut? Were these indicators of the 'fall' Whitman had prophesied?
Ginsberg seethed while he watched the Nixon-Kennedy debates - the first time in history that U.S. presidential candidates had debated on television. As far as Allen could tell, Nixon was playing up to the national paranoia about communism, but both Kennedy and Nixon seemed ready to take action against Cuba.
<#FROWN:G61\>
Self-Disclosure in Men's Friendships
Variations Associated with Intimate Relations
HELEN M. REID
GARY ALAN FINE
What does a man want - to talk about? How much will he reveal of himself? Does it make a difference if he is talking to a woman or a man? To a spouse, an intimate other, or a platonic friend? Does it matter if he is married, single with an intimate other, or single and unattached?
We explore these issues by studying platonic cross-gender friendships. Surprisingly, perhaps, there is little research on this topic, and this project, small and provisional though it is, sheds light on an important area of male friendships. In order to understand the dynamics of platonic friendships, we interviewed 32 white middle-class adults between the ages of 25 and 50 years, living in a large metropolitan area in the Midwest. Subjects were recruited through a random telephone survey and were interviewed during the spring of 1983. The interviews elicited data on topics discussed between male and female associates; additional data on self-disclosure were collected using a modified version of Jourard's (1971b) Self-Disclosure Questionnaire (SDQ). The focus of this chapter is on the responses by 16 heterosexual men about their friends, lovers, and spouses.
Self-Disclosure and Friendship
Self-disclosure has been defined by Derlega and Grzelak (1979, p. 152) as including "any information exchange that refers to the self, including personal states, dispositions, events in the past, and plans for the future." Interest in self-disclosure has burgeoned in the past two decades with the publication of volumes on this topic. Notable among these are Sidney Jourard's The Transparent Self (1971a) and Self-Disclosure (1971b), which generated interest by social psychologists, sociologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists (e.g., Chelune, 1979; Derlega & Berg, 1987). Jourard's (1971a) classic interpretation of the "lethal aspects of the male role" in which men suffer physically, psychically, and socially for their reticence was a launching pad for much research on disclosure throughout the seventies and eighties. Friendship as a topic of study has also produced considerable research, and the behavior of men in friendships is increasingly under scrutiny as researchers examine the implications of social support and interpersonal behavior for health and well-being.
Aspects other than an individual's physical or psychic health have captured the interest of sociologists and social psychologists. Among the major findings of interest to scholars in these areas are gender differences with respect to friendship and self-disclosure in same-gender and cross-gender dyads. Gender-role norms have been cited as mediating factors in self-disclosure (Hill & Stull, 1987). Other factors affecting friendship maintenance or disclosure within friendships are related to location within social structures. These factors include social class, occupation, mobility, stages in the life circle, and marital status (Allan, 1989; Booth & Hess, 1974; Fischer & Oliker, 1983; Hacker, 1981; Pogrebin, 1987). Opportunities and normative constraints vary with structural factors, affecting the availability and depth of friendships.
After reviewing some of the literature on gender effects in self-disclosure, we will focus on the structure of interpersonal relations surrounding friendship dyads, in particular the effect of intimate relationships on the level of self-disclosure in friendships. Finally, interview data will be discussed in an effort to elucidate the variations observed among men in their disclosure with friends.
Disclosures Within Same-Sex and Cross-Sex Friendships
Women are generally credited with more expressive and intimate disclosures than are men and spend time talking with same-gender friends rather than doing activities with them, the preferred mode of interaction for males (Aukett, Ritchie, & Mill, 1988; Crawford, 1977; Rubin, 1985; Sherrod, 1987; Wright, 1982). The tendency of women to trust a same-gender friend with sensitive personal information is frequently compared with the tendency men exhibit toward discussion of issues external to themselves, such as sports or politics (Aries & Johnson, 1983; Davidson & Duberman, 1982; Haas & Sherman, 1982). Men's reliance upon each other for companionship (Sherrod, 1987) is consistent with the conceptual framework of Wright (1982), who claims that male friendship, alleged to be superior to female friendship (Tiger, 1970), is not so much 'better' as it is qualitatively different. Wright (p.8) contrasts the characteristic "side by side" nature of male friendships with the "face-to-face" relationships found between women, highlighting socialization and gender role themes: Men exhibit instrumentality, activity-centeredness, and task orientation, whereas women emphasize personalism and interpersonal sensitivity oriented to the socioemotional aspects of the friendship.
Men reportedly disclose more intimate and personal information to their female associates than they disclose to other males (Auckett et al., 1988; Komarovsky, 1974), and derive therapeutic benefits from cross-gender friendships ; for women, these benefits were found within same-gender friendships (Auckett et al., 1988). Hacker (1981) finds no gender effect in same-gender disclosures, but men confide more in their female friends than women confide in their male friends. When marital status is introduced, conflicting results emerge. While married men and women reported more confiding behavior with same-gender friends, Booth and Hess (1974) found single people, regardless of gender, more likely to disclose to members of the opposite gender.
A comprehensive review of gender effects in self-disclosure can be found in Hill and Stull (1987). Contradictions across studies are noted that highlight the lack of definitive results for the association between gender and self-disclosure.
We suggest two ways to improve consistency of results. First, the level of intimacy within a cross-gender relationship should be controlled. It is necessary to distinguish disclosure within a sexually intimate cross-gender relationship from disclosure within a cross-gender friendship in which there is no sexual contact. We expect the level of disclosure within a cross-gender relationship to increase with sexual intimacy within that relationship. Second, the presence or absence of an intimate relationship external to the friendship dyad must also be controlled. Accessibility to a spouse or lover may serve disclosure needs; at the same time, normative pressures to limit disclosure outside the intimate relationship are expected to surface.
Relational Considerations for Self-Disclosure
The balance of this chapter highlights the two relational dimensions that are of primary importance in self-disclosure and talk between friends: relation of subject and target, and relations of the subject with significant others outside the friendship. Early studies by Jourard and Lasakow (1958) and Komarovsky (1974) analyze cross-gender disclosure patterns, but fail to adequately distinguish these dimensions.
Jourard and Lasakow found no overall differences between married and single subjects in disclosure to opposite gender associates. We find it problematic that the spouse and opposite-gender friend were not distinguished from one another but were "treated as equivalent target-persons" (Jourard & Lasakow, p. 96). Identifying a spouse with whom a subject is expected to share intimate feelings would seem to be critical.
Komarovsky's study was conducted with a male-only subject pool. Unfortunately, Komarovsky did not distinguish between the platonic female friend and the lover/girlfriend; they were lumped together as opposite-gender targets. She found that the female target receives higher levels of disclosures than the male friend, mother, father, sister, or brother - especially in sensitive aspects of self such as the personality and body dimensions of Jourard's SDQ. But this finding is based on a pooled average, rather than separate scores for lovers and platonic female friends.
We must distinguish between an intimate other and a platonic target to address the claim that men disclose at lower levels to other men than they do to women. If it can be shown that levels of self-disclosure to different targets vary by the intimacy of relations, we may infer that earlier failures to adequately identify these dimensions produced results erroneously ascribed to gender.
Aside from the relationship between the subject and the target of self-disclosure, intimate others in the relational domain of the subject must also be taken into account when reporting self-disclosure results. Jourard and Lasakow found that married subjects, while not differing in their overall disclosure to the opposite gender, differ from single subjects in that their disclosure becomes more concentrated toward the (opposite gender) spouse, to the relative exclusion of parents, siblings, and same-gender friends. This relational dimension is as important to distinguish as is the relation to the target. Whether a subject is married or intimately involved affects his or her level of disclosure to friends. Komarovsky (p. 679) hints at a possible correlation between the relational status of her male subjects and their disclosures to male and female friends: "In the sensitive area of Personality...for only 17 men was the closest friend a male. Of the latter 17 men, 12 were virgins." Komarovsky's subjects confide in other men when they are not in intimate sexual relationships with women. Rubin (1985) came to a similar conclusion regarding the few men she interviewed who reported intimacy (as opposed to her distinction with "bonding") in male friendships: Most of them were neither married nor living with a woman. We pursue this line of inquiry with our sample.
Self-Disclosure Questionnaire Results
The Self-Disclosure Questionnaire (SDQ) has been used by social scientists to explore, analyze or depict aspects of social interaction. We modified the scale and compared mean disclosure scores within each of the following aspects of self: personal opinions and views, tastes and interests, work, money, personality, and body and health. The discussion that follows is based upon trends observed in preliminary data analyses. The limited size and lack of diversity of the sample, however, preclude reliance on the tabulation of statistical tests. We acknowledge the small size of the sample and present these data as a provocative basis for further research.
Relational dimensions that served as independent variables were target of disclosure (cross-sex platonic friend, best friend of the same sex, and spouse or lover) and intimate relations of the subject. We distinguished between married men (n=8), single men in intimate relationships (n=4), and unattached single men (n=4). We refer to this variable as relational status.
Target of Disclosure
In comparisons across targets, a male friend and a platonic female friend receive equivalent levels of disclosures, but a platonic female friend is the recipient of far less disclosure than a spouse or intimate other, in all six aspects of self. In comparisons between disclosure to a male friend and to a spouse or lover, a divergent trend for married men and single men begins to emerge. A wife receives more disclosure than a male friend, but the presence of a lover does not eclipse male-to-male disclosure to the same extent. Single men in intimate relationships appear not to differ in disclosures to their lover and their male friend in the areas of work, money, views, and tastes. However, in the sensitive areas of personality and body, the lover is the recipient of greater disclosure.
The level at which men reveal themselves to their associates seems to depend upon whether they are engaged in an intimate relationship, and to what degree they are committed to that relationship. The most significant trend is the attenuating effect that marriage has on disclosure to persons outside the marital relation, including other men. An emerging pattern of variation among men in differing categories of intimate relationship appears in disclosures to a male friend. Married men seem to disclose the least, while unattached single men disclose the most to their male friends in the areas of views, money, and personality. This trend is repeated in disclosure to the platonic female friend in the areas of views, personality, and body. Single men, regardless of relational status, appear to maintain some same-sex friendships in which they share relatively more of themselves than do married men. Unattached men exhibit the highest levels of disclosure to friends of both sexes, and appear to utilize other men as targets of disclosure to a greater extent than do men in intimate relations.
Variability among men in their disclosure patterns indicates that gender by itself cannot explain differential levels of disclosure. Knowledge of a man's intimate relations provides insight to disclosure patterns. To some extent, our findings address the fact that men may be predisposed to reveal themselves differentially, depending on the definition of the situation. Preliminary analysis of mean disclosure scores on the SDQ suggests answers about what the differences might be; we turn to the interview results to examine why they are so.
<#FROWN:G62\>
5
Climbing (and Learning) the Ropes
I began studying for the sergeant's exam a year and a half before I had to.
According to departmental regulations, an officer needed four years on the force before he or she could attempt to move up a rung to sergeant. Because I had joined LAPD mid-year, and because they only gave the exam every two years, I couldn't take the test until my sixth anniversary. The wait seemed interminable. By then I had decided I would climb the LAPD ladder as fast as I could. Not that I had committed to a life as a police officer; I was always open to opportunities from the outside. But as long as I was carrying a badge, I wanted it to be the highest-ranking badge I could manage.
This, I knew, would present problems. By nature of my relationship with Parker, I was branded the fair-haired boy, someone who had a direct pipeline to the chief. I didn't. I would never pick up the phone and call him; I mean, I wouldn't do that. And he wouldn't have respected me if I had. But this was the rap. As a result, I always had trouble with officers holding me at arm's length. Each time I had a new assignment, I would have to break down this impression of me, and let the others know I was a regular guy, that I didn't have anything special going for me, that I worked hard and was a damn good police officer.
Knowing that I would be held suspect at every promotional step, I set out to move up the chain of command in a way that would leave no doubts. To be promoted to each new rank - sergeant, lieutenant, captain, inspector (now known as commander), and deputy chief - you must take a written exam, which accounts for 60 percent of your score, and an oral exam for the other 40 percent. To avoid the favoritism label, I knew that I could not be promoted on the basis of an outstanding oral score alone. I needed to do well on both.
So I worked my butt off. I sat in my bedroom for hours every night and studied for the better part of a year and a half. When I took vacation time, I studied ten hours a day. On the bus to work, I read. Having had courses in teaching, I understood the learning process, how you use every one of your faculties. At dinner I would talk a blue streak, lecturing my wife and two daughters, aged four and five, on forgery and its famous cases while they all just sat there and looked at me. I talked to the people at work. "Say, did you know...?"
This helped me put what I read into my own words, and it became a pattern for my promotions: read and talk. As the time neared for the sergeant's exam, I became more determined than ever. It was important to finish as high on the list as possible, because promotions were awarded only when a vacancy occurred, and then according to position on the list. If they hadn't dipped down to your number within two years, you had to take the test again. No way I was going to do that.
The written portion of the sergeant's exam was a grueling all-day test, 180 questions in the morning, 120 more in the afternoon. But it was the oral that I dreaded. And there was no clear-cut way to prepare for that.
Several weeks after I had taken the written exam, I was summoned to an interview room on the second floor at City Hall. Who would be awaiting me, I didn't know. Because two hundred officers were taking the sergeant's test, they had assigned three panels to handle the load, each panel consisting of one inspector and two captains. We knew who these officers were, but not to which panel we would be assigned. One of the inspectors had the reputation of being an impossibly tough grader. If you were Jesus Christ, the rumor went, he'd give you a 90.
Just my luck, I thought, I'd get the panel with that guy. Sure enough, I did. There he was, seated behind a long table, flanked by the two captains. I gulped and sat down.
The purpose of the oral is to judge a candidate's ability to express himself or herself. It's also designed to make the candidate as uncomfortable as possible to see how he or she handles it. I was expected to start out with an opening statement. For several minutes I told them how I'd prepared myself to be a sergeant - what books I'd read and issues I'd studied, what experience I had that would make me a good sergeant, and why I believed I would make a fine supervisor.
On the table in front of me I noticed a quarter. It had been put there, I knew through the grapevine, to see what I would do with my hands. I ignored the coin and kept my hands in my lap.
For the next half hour they fired questions at me, trying to put me on the defensive. If this situation came up, one captain would say, what would you do?
Answer.
But suppose ...
Answer.
Really? But what if ...
This went on until they had backed you into a corner - or tried to.
When they finally finished, they asked me to make a closing statement. You were supposed to tell them, I knew, what a mature, stable person you were, always in control, a shining model for those you would supervise, capable of giving sound advice, and so on.
"Oh, I am all those things," I cockily assured them - reciting my husbandhood, fatherhood, high arrest accord, exquisite manners and courtesy to scumbags of all kinds - "and more." I left the room, grateful that the tough inspector hadn't shredded me alive, and waited anxiously for the results to be posted.
My hard work paid off. I finished with the highest written score of anyone and the highest score overall. My name appeared number one on the list.
After that, I came out first on every exam I took all the way up to chief, not through favoritism or because I was smarter, but because nobody worked harder at preparing for exams than I did.
There would be no way, I vowed, anyone could ever say I moved up because I was Bill Parker's boy.
Overnight, I transmogrified from an order-taker to an order-giver. This took some getting used to. Police officers who had been friends since the Academy looked at me a little differently. Some spoke to me not at all. Even though I was twenty-nine, I still lacked the kind of judgment that arrives only with age and experience. Therein lies one of the most significant problems in any police department. Generally, officers younger than twenty-seven or twenty-eight have the desire, energy, and enthusiasm to do the job, but not the maturity. As a boss, I still wanted to jump on my horse and go every time a call came in.
A sergeant is like a coach. You spark enthusiasm among your officers and make sure they know and abide by the rules. If they're deficient in some skill, you must train them. In addition to the reports you seem always to be writing up, you spend a good deal of your time in the field, in uniform, driving alone, supervising the officers assigned to you. I was one of three sergeants operating out of Central Division nightwatch and among the things I supervised were the drunk wagons and foot beats. I also oversaw two or three F cars, or felony cars.
Detectives would alert us to felons operating in our territory. Because detectives carry such a huge workload, and because many of their days are spent testifying in court, they would ask us to locate the felon and bring him in for questioning. I would tell the officers in the F cars which felons to track down. If they needed advice or guidance, they would contact me over the car radio. I was also there to provide backup. If a call went out about a robbery in progress, a sergeant was expected to arrive on the heels of the patrol officers to make sure the situation was handled properly. I, in turn, reported to the watch commander, who was a lieutenant. Sometimes I would fill in for him.
Once a month this particular lieutenant delivered a talk on ethics. It was an important ritual for him, and frankly, his lectures always impressed me. He was a tough taskmaster and a real stickler for regulations.
One evening, when I was still trying to make a good impression, I went to change into my uniform. I opened my locker and found, to my dismay, that my hat was missing. Baffled, I looked around. And there was my hat in the wastepaper basket.
When I saw this lieutenant later, I said, "The funniest thing happened - did you see anybody go into the sergeant's locker room?"
"No."
"Well somebody went into my locker and dumped my hat in the wastepaper basket."
"That was me."
"You're kidding.", I said.
"One thing you better learn, Gates. My sergeants don't have frayed hats. Get a new one."
Chastened, I bought a new hat. Soon after, we were both on morning watch, and around 2:00 or 3:00 A.M. this lieutenant invited me to join him for 'lunch.'
I drove. He directed me to a warehouse area on the east side of town. At this hour it was deserted. "I thought we were going to eat," I said.
"We are. Turn left."
We pulled up in front of a warehouse and he jumped out of the car and banged on a sliding metal door. A man peeked out, opened the door, and motioned us inside. It turned out to be the warehouse for Thrifty Drug Stores.
Somewhat confused, I followed them to a cavernous refrigerator. In those days, Thrifty had soda fountains and lunch counters in its drugstores, and inside this refrigerator hung great big hunks of cheese and slabs of lunch meats. I stood there wondering as I watched my lieutenant pull out bread and cheese as if he owned the place.
"Hey, come one, Gates. Make yourself a sandwich."
And I'm thinking, But this is crazy. Here is a guy who lectures on ethics once a month, and he comes to a warehouse to get a damn sandwich?
I fixed something to eat and didn't say anything. But after that, whenever he said, "Let's get lunch," I'd say, "No. I've got something to do." I just couldn't get over this stickler for ethics who was blinded by those big baloney sandwiches he'd gorge himself on.
What to accept and what not to is a universal problem all police officers must face. Free meals always present a dilemma. People like to make jokes about cops and free meals. They especially make jokes about cops and free doughnuts. They say, "You need a cop? Call the local doughnut shop."
And there's a certain amount of truth in that. Often the owner of an establishment is quite willing to provide the police with a doughnut, a cup of coffee, or a meal, just to have officers present. This may make good business sense for the owner, but it creates a disturbing problem for a police administrator. How do you make it clear that your officers are not on the take?
To categorically outlaw all gratuities under all circumstances isn't feasible or fair. At Christmas a little old lady goes up to an officer who has walked a beat for years and hands him a pair of socks she has knitted. You can't have that officer say, "Sorry, ma'am. I can't accept a gratuity." We're not that cold. Often, it becomes a judgment call.
<#FROWN:G63\>
If we move from Italy to Germany, we find that the story of the kind and unkind girls moves in the same key. The Grimms' 'Mother Holle' tells of a widow who has a dutiful and beautiful stepdaughter and an ugly, lazy biological daughter. In addition to doing "all the housework," the stepdaughter also has to spin until her fingers bleed. One day, she leans over into a well to rinse her bloodied reel and lets it fall into the water. Prodded by her stepmother to jump in after it, she descends into the well and awakens in a beautiful meadow. There she must carry out one household chore after another. An apple tree full of ripe fruit asks to be shaken, and the heroine not only shakes the tree, but gathers up the apples and puts them in a pile. Finally, the girl arrives at a small cottage, where an old woman tells her: "Stay with me, and if you do all the housework properly, everything will turn out well for you." In the end, the heroine is showered with gold as a reward for her industrious domesticity; her lazy counterpart gets a bath of pitch that sticks to her for the rest of her life.
A British version of the tale is also driven as much by the opposition between hard-working/lazy and dutiful/disobedient as by the contrast kind/unkind. Here one girl's unloading of an oven, milking of a cow, and shaking of a tree pay off, for the oven, cow, and tree all help her out when she flees the house of a witch, taking with her a sack of money. Her sister, in too much of a hurry to acquire the rest of the witch's wealth to do any work, is chased away and returns home empty-handed. In a Russian tale, the kindness of the heroine secures the assistance of animals, who discharge the task assigned by the bony legged Baba Yaga. The heroine returns home in triumph and inspires her stepsister to serve Baba Yaga. But this selfish girl never accomplishes the tasks set forth, for instead of sharing her food with animals, she scolds them and hits them with a rolling pin. Baba Yaga is enraged by the girl's failure to do the chores: she breaks her into pieces and sends the bones home in a basket.
Like many other versions of 'The Kind and Unkind Girls,' 'Baba Yaga' probably served as a cautionary tale for girls, who were often sent away from home at an early stage to go into service at other households. Like Baba Yaga and her folkloric cousins, the mistress of a household was a fearsome, threatening presence, yet also the one person empowered to reward a girl, if not as generously as Mother Holle or Baba Yaga. The lesson about the rewards to be reaped from hard work, humility, modesty, and kindness while in the service of an all-powerful female figure was surely pertinent, if not always valid, for the many girls whose household apprenticeships formed the basis for their livelihoods.
Much as the tale variants described thus far all emphasize the redemptive power of hard work, there are many versions of the story that celebrate a good character. When the heroine of Perrault's 'The Fairies' gives a drink of water to a fairy masquerading as a thirsty old woman, the fairy tells her: "You are so pretty and so polite that I am determined to bestow a gift upon you." Each time the girl speaks, a flower or precious stone falls from her mouth. Her sister, "ill-mannered," "disagreeable," and "arrogant" hopes to win the same prize, but for her "lack of courtesy," a snake or toad drops out of her mouth whenever she speaks. The heroine of the Italian 'Water in the Basket' also does not toil for her salvation, but displays an unerring sense of tact and extraordinary modesty. When an old woman asks her to inspect her back to get rid of what is biting her, the girl kills vermin "by the hundreds." To avoid embarrassment, she tells the old woman that her back was covered with pearls and diamonds. Later, faced with the choice of a silk gown or a cotton dress as reward, she offers evidence of her unassuming nature by asking for the cotton dress. Her callous stepsister expresses disgust at the sight of the fleas on the crone's back, chooses a silk gown as her reward, and ends up with a donkey's tail on her forehead. Whether a tale exalts the value of hard work or praises any of a host of virtues ranging from kindness to politesse, it imparts specific lessons by instituting a system of rewards for one type of behavior and punishments for another.
Not all renditions of 'The Kind and Unkind Girls' as explicitly didactic as the ones cited here. If we look at the various versions of the story available to the Grimms, we find that they chose to anthologize the one that had a pedagogical agenda. One version of the story, recorded in the Grimms' annotations, tells of two girls - one beautiful, the other ugly. The beautiful one falls into a well and lands in the same lush meadow described in 'Mother Holle." But rather than discharging various chores assigned to her, she is the one who gives the orders and who engineers a happy ending for herself. She tells a tree to shake itself; she directs a calf to bend down; and she asks an oven to bake her a roll. Later she comes across a house made of pancakes, louses the old womenwoman who lives in it, and flees with a dress of gold when the old woman falls asleep. Her unattractive companion duplicates her every deed, but finds herself wearing a dress covered with dirt when the old woman catches up with her. In this story it does not help to be kind, modest, hardworking, or polite. Beauty, bossiness, and deceit are rewarded; ugliness is punished.
It is easy to understand why the Grimms, who openly acknowledged the educational value of their collection, favored a story that commended the virtues of hard work over a tale that credited beauty with winning all the prizes. The story of the girl who is rewarded because of her looks rather than her good conduct simply could not be harnessed into service for indoctrinating children with the right values. It is more difficult, however, to reconcile the Grimms' striving for folkloric authenticity with their choice of 'Mother Holle' over other tales. The oldest tales, and hence those probably most faithful to folk traditions, tend to reward those endowed by nature with desirable qualities rather than those who cultivate specific virtues.
Beauty proves to be a great advantage in fairy tales, but - oddly enough - it also helps to be a stepchild or a child abused by one parent or another. Ludwig Bechstein's 'Garden in the Well' mounts the contrasting fates of two boys - one a stepson, the other the biological child of the tale's villain. Both boys fall into wells and find themselves in beautiful gardens with flowers and trees. The stepson gets fruit and gold when he orders apple trees to shake themselves; the other boy gets sour apples with worms and has pitch poured over him, even though his conduct conforms to the letter of his brother's behavior. The fate of the stepson, who lives happily ever after with his father, contrasts sharply with that of his brother. That boy's mother scolds him and beats him when he returns, then tries to remove the layer of pitch covering his body by putting him in the oven. But when she forgets to take the boy out, she finds that he has "suffocated and burned to death." There is nothing in this boy's character or looks that warrants such a punishment; he has merely had the misfortune of being born to the wrong woman.
Early versions of 'The Kind and Unkind Girls' (Bechstein's tale is one of a very small number featuring boys) tend to take a fatalistic view of the world - some children are privileged, others deprived. Basile enunciated this outlook on life through one of his narrators, who tells of a mother with three daughters, "two of whom were so unlucky that everything they did turned out badly, all of their plans went awry and all their hopes came to nothing." The third is lucky, "even in her mother's womb" and "all the elements combined to endow her with the best of all things." Good fortune was seen as a basic fact of life, and fairy tales show us again and again how those favored by fortune do well no matter how flawed their character and regardless of the odds against them. The attempt of a parent to overturn this 'natural' order of things by favoring one child over another always backfires. And no matter how the children conduct themselves, the one privileged by nature and deprived by a parent always wins out in the end.
All of this changed as fairy tales reached print and came to be placed in the service of acculturation and education. Storybooks emphasized the way in which toil leads to salvation. Kindness and good manners can also do the trick, as in Perrault's 'Fairies' where these qualities bring the heroine pearls and diamonds. It is noteworthy that even as reward-and-punishment tales celebrate kindness and compassion, they are notoriously uncharitable when it comes to fixing the fate of their unkind protagonists. In one such tale, a girl sits in a room waiting for a sack of gold to come flying in (as it had for her sister), when a little gray man whisks into the room and "lops her head off her body." That punishment must have gone a long way toward discouraging the cruelty to animals practiced by the unkind sister. Another story is even more graphic in illustrating the consequences of a girl's failure to share her porridge with a little old man: "When the girl finished eating, the little man took her, tore her into a thousand pieces, and hung them up in the trees." We are treated not only to a description of her punishment, but also to the mother's reaction to the sight of her daughter: "When she got to the place where the pieces of her daughter were hanging, she thought that her daughter must have hung her wash there. But imagine her shock and horror when she got closer and saw what had happened. She fainted dead away, and I have no idea whether she ever got back home again." The scene is so extreme in its grisly detail that it begins to shift into the mode of surreal comedy rather than grim horror. Still, there is something odd about the way in which reward-and-punishment tales advocate kindness toward animals and strangers in a context that champions violent retaliatory punishments for members of the hero's immediate family. This incongruity forms the basis for the suspicion that reward-and-punishment tales began as retaliatory stories (based on sibling rivalry) and became, only later in their development, didactic tales.
There are other serious inconsistencies in the messages sent by these tales. Consider, for example, the way in which rewards for kind heroines nearly always come in the form of gold and precious stones. One girl is showered with gold; another gets a sack of gold; a third receives gowns and jewelry. With their notoriously frank drive toward gold, jewels, and wealth, fairy-tale plots begin to resemble blueprints for enterprising young capitalists rather than for self-sacrificing do-gooders. Yet the tales repeatedly emphasize and enshrine the importance of indifference to wealth and worldly goods: The heroine who chooses the cotton dress over the silk one is rewarded; the one who elects to leave by the gate of pitch rather that the gate of gold is showered with coins; the girl who chooses to eat with the cats and the dogs rather than with her prosperous host wins in the end.
<#FROWN:G64\>However, we cannot deny that, as a marketing ploy, the memoirs worked. They sold the novel. A number of eighteenth-century readers, in fact, felt it to be the only interesting thing in the book; they did not question its presence in Peregrine's history so much as its propriety in general. What has been for us a structural irregularity seemed to the first readers of the novel a violation of manners. Lady Luxborough wrote to William Shenstone: "The thing which makes the book sell, is the History of Lady V - , which is introduced (in the last volume, I think) much to her Ladyship's dishonour; but published by her own order, from her own Memoirs, given to the author for that purpose; and by the approbation of her own Lord. What was ever equal to this fact, and how can one account for it?" How indeed, we have continued to wonder, but less in regard to Lady V - than to the author of Peregrine Pickle. And yet, I would suggest, the answer is the same for both Smollett and the lady. It has to do with celebrity, the comic carnival of notoriety.
As we have seen, Sterne's approach to celebrity was to don the masks of Tristram and of Yorick in antic celebration of the parody of identity fame necessarily involves. Smollett courts it more cautiously, shifting the locus of authority and defining celebrity as a fusion of consciousnesses upon a single entity, that entity being largely defined by all the conflicting attitudes - stories and character assessments - that make up the moment of attention. Yet for Smollett this fusion is a violent one, a wrenching of consensus from disparity, and while consensus may be the basis of social cohesion, the fact that it emerges from the clash of competing individualities documents its momentary nature. Celebrity is a kind of caricature - a violently reductive image - and it is fitting that this novel, which so exploits the famous and the infamous, should also be centrally concerned with the art of satiric reduction.
The eighteenth century itself tended to regard caricature with a disparaging eye. Novelists and critics alike reserved the word for literary or artistic portraits that departed from nature - certainly not a practice to be condoned, though occasionally, in an otherwise rich and 'natural' landscape, one to be tolerated. Caricature was popular during the eighteenth century, but it was regarded as a satiric tool, as it is still used, and no one argued for its elevated status on aesthetic grounds. Yet caricature is not simply a low form of portraiture. Strictly speaking, it is not a form of portraiture at all but an overdetermined response to cultural uncertainty. In its distortion it is violent and tendentious. It wrenches a partial truth from a landscape of doubt, and, in doing so, it both honors and derides the means by which it communicates, the satiric victim whose image is distorted not so much for his sake as for the sake of the community to which he belongs.
Ernst Kris has said that "whenever caricature develops to any great extent as a form of artistic expression, ... we are invariably able to discover the use of effigy magic at some point in its development" (179-80). In fact, the roots of caricature in such magic, he says, account for our hurt at seeing our gestures or features exaggerated in imitation. In other words, part of us still responds to the imitation as magical substitution, and we are wounded by the symbolic disfigurement. Residual response to effigy magic may also account for our more positive reactions to some forms of image distortion (such as celebrity roasts and the New York Review of Books's caricatures); for, as Sir James Frazer notes, although effigies in primitive cultures often represented pain, illness, and evil, they offered the possibility of not only harm but also salvation. Effigies used for the "beneficent spirit of vegetation" were burned or buried as sacrificial victims to ensure a bountiful harvest (755). According to Frazer, the same idea lies behind the use of effigies during a time of illness. Many communities afflicted by illness constructed effigies in hopes that the demons of death and sickness would mistake them for or good-naturedly take them in the place of the people they represented (569-71). Again, the idea is beneficence; therefore, the effigy is honored, not despised. Image magic, from which caricature developed, retains the notion of the communally honorific and beneficent, and caricature itself, which often provokes the sympathetic, rather than the derisive, smile, many times reflects tribute in the act of critical distortion.
Caricature can be seen as the art of sudden compromise that grows out of the momentary awareness of conflict. As a satiric act, it is aimed less toward the exclusion of the victim than toward the inclusion of others in a shared value or system of values. Smollett's own use of the exaggerated image suggests as much. Peregrine Pickle's portrayal of Garrick serves as an example. Presented secondhand, through the observations of one of Peregrine's acquaintances in the College of Authors, the description nevertheless bears the stamp of Smollett's own resentment: "I cannot approve of his refinements in the mystery of dying hard; his fall, and the circumstances of his death, ... being, in my opinion, a lively representation of a tinker oppressed with gin, who staggers against a post, tumbles into the kennel, while his hammer and saucepan drop from his hands, makes diverse convulsive efforts to rise, and finding himself unable to get up, with many intervening hiccups, addresses himself to the surrounding mob" (651). On the surface, this passage does not suggest either compromise or the honoring of the satiric victim as the locus of communal accord. Certainly, Smollett's intention was to humble Garrick, not to raise him. The ridiculous comparison to a drunk tinker distorts the image of the actor with regard to both his outward appearance and his skill of interpretation. It is true, Peregrine tepidly comes to the actor's defense, objecting mainly to the use of a grotesque figure (the drunk tinker) to describe an already grotesque figure (Garrick), but it is not therein that compromise and honor lie. They lie, instead, in the shared reverence for the moment of death and, more particularly, in the belief that such a moment should be artistically represented with appropriate decorum and restraint.
Of course, 'decorum' and 'restraint' are words that hardly describe Smollett's own style. In fact, the moment of death is treated as grotesquely by Hatchway as it ever could have been by Garrick or any actor. The difference is that, in the Garrick episode, we are expected to step outside the fiction, to agree with or to take exception to the opinions of the speakers with reference to our own experience, our own awareness of the celebrated Garrick style. Hatchway's similarly grotesque language we understand within the fictional construct - a part of his linguistic habit that adds poignancy to the event described. The values are not set but episodic, occasional, momentary, and circumstantial. If we follow the logic of the fiction, what we learn is to accommodate ourselves to the exigencies of the moment, to laugh at something that in another circumstance, at a different time, might have moved us to tears.
Smollett's surrogate spokesmen in this novel, like Smollett himself, are all masters of the tendentious art of caricature. Hatchway, Peregrine, and Cadwallader Crabtree forge stability from the momentary and in doing so bring a temporary (or, we might say, a temporal) order to a chaotic (or, we might again say, temporal) world. Hatchway and Crabtree are mentors to Peregrine, whom Smollett describes in an early chapter as having "a certain oddity of disposition for which he had been remarkable even from his cradle" (51-52), a satirical impulse that vents itself primarily against his uncle and his aunt, the commodore and the former Mrs. Grizzle, his wife. Interestingly, although Trunnion is usually Peregrine's preferred target, the old sailor maintains for his nephew an affection that increases as the boy begins to manifest his peculiar talents. With Hatchway as tutor, Peregrine performs such satirical exploits as stepping on his uncle's gouty toe, picking his pocket, calling him names, tweaking his nose, and emptying a snuff box into his ale - all of which Trunnion tolerates, and most of which he enjoys. The society of the garrison is cemented by a recognition - indeed, a celebration - of individual foibles, which are pointed out, not for the purpose of correction, but for the purpose of connection. While Hatchway and Peregrine do undermine Trunnion's dignity, they also yield to his authority. In fact, their art of satirical caricature, aimed as it is at the authoritative presence of Trunnion, anatomizes even as it establishes the community of values by which the initial chapters of the novel are defined.
In the beginning, through the tutelage of Hatchway, we and Peregrine learn to laugh at superstition (the captain's fear of lawyers and ghosts), at personal eccentricity (the captain's house built and maintained as a ship), at bodily functions or misfunctions (the captain's gout, his wife's false pregnancy), and at secret vices (Mrs. Trunnion's fondness for brandy); but through it all we are encouraged to maintain a kind of sympathy for the satiric victim. The community is small, intimate, and bound together by recognition of individual limitations and by mutual respect for one another in spite of these limitations. In a sense, the moment of caricature, the narrative moment, is again revealed to be the eternal present, repeated and ritualistic, cyclical and perennial. But as Peregrine moves from the intimate community of family into the impersonal world, we find caricature and narrative called upon to play a different role in a skeptical and disjunctive society.
It is Cadwallader Crabtree, not Hatchway, who is Peregrine's chosen mentor. Both caricaturists are important to Peregrine and, like all satirists, they share certain techniques of exposure and exaggeration. When they finally meet, however, there is conflict, and Peregrine must choose between them. Their differences arise from the context in which the caricaturists function. Hatchway works in a closed, personal environment: his targets are those whom he knows well, and his satire is directed upward, designed to celebrate the infirmity of those with authority over him, an act that is completely creditable in psychological terms. Crabtree, on the other hand, works in an impersonal environment peopled with such recognizable types as the would-be wit, the fickle coquet, and the cowardly braggart: he targets acquaintances whom he does not know well, and his caricature exposes the reality beneath the appearance, not in a celebratory fashion, but in an accusatory one. He adopts a mask to strip others of their disguises in protection of himself and (later) Peregrine. For Crabtree, caricature is an act of alienation that confirms the inimical nature of the world in which he lives. It does support communal standards, but they are standards that must be articulated because constant violation is wearing them away. The caricaturist again usurps authority, but it is not an authority of 'position' in a well-structured, stable social system; rather, it is an urban authority born of the confusion and corruption of social relationship in the modern world.
Crabtree's satire belongs to the destabilized modern world, which must reestablish the terms of its authoritative structures and which cannot depend upon the bonds of affection to hold society together. This kind of world is ephemeral, with success today being followed by failure tomorrow - reality exists only in the current moment. In this context, caricature exposes the lack of stability, the threat of extinction by insignificance, the possibility, even probability, of change so drastic as to change identity altogether.
What fuses in the figure of Crabtree is the cultural expression of this destabilization, and his significant features include his participation in all kinds of underground identities, his antisocial, misanthropic personality, and his status as 'keeper of the narrative.' In the chapter in which we meet him, all of these qualities are emphasized.
<#FROWN:G65\>She follows the plot of heterosexual romance, the only plot in which culture allows her a leading role. Her very helplessness becomes the means through which she achieves acknowledgment, whether loving or punitive. As Karen Horney argues in 'The Overvaluation of Love: A Study of a Common Present-Day Feminine Type,' "The function of this masochistic attitude is therefore a neurotically distorted means of attaining a heterosexual goal, which these patients believe they cannot reach in any other way" (Feminine Psychology 211). Furthermore, the apparently abject masochist seeks vicarious gratification of the active drives through her idealized other. Her self-sacrificing ethics are potentially her entre to a larger world. Benjamin's comment on masochistic women's goals is to the point here: "in ideal love, as in other forms of masochism, acts of self-abnegation are in fact meant to secure access to the glory and power of the other" (117).
In Sigmund Freud's discussion of how women and men exalt the other, strangely different mechanisms seem to be at work. According to his reasoning, women introject prized qualities of men - attributes that can be theirs no more than can the penis. When men overvalue women, however, they project their own strengths. In both instances, then, the construct of the male ego assumes plenitude and power, while that of the female marks inadequacy. In his lecture 'The Dissection of the Psychical Personality,' for example, Freud notes, via common opinion, that women are particularly influenced by their object choices, who represent the capacities they themselves have lost or never had. "It is said that the influencing of the ego by the sexual object occurs particularly often with women and is characteristic of femininity ....If one has lost an object or has been obliged to give it up, one often compensates oneself by identifying oneself with it and by setting it up once more in one's ego, so that here object-choice regresses, as it were, to identification" (63). Although libido is diverted from the ego to the object, it is restored to the woman through the narcissistic mirror, Freud argues. In presenting this process as "characteristic of femininity," Freud again naturalizes psychic processes to buttress gender differentiation. The process he describes basically leaves women in a permanently melancholic position, but it is themselves they mourn.
According to Freud, though, overvaluation occurs mostly in men; one can only assume as a corollary that the value women attach to male objects or subjects is true currency. For example, in the early Studies on Hysteria, Freud is startled by his own "blindness." "I was afflicted by that blindness of the seeing eye which is so astonishing in the attitude of mothers to their daughters, husbands to their wives and rulers to their favourites" (117n). Here, and in fact throughout much of Freud's work, overvaluation is a mistake the dominant make about the subordinated. The reverse possibility - that the subordinated may ascribe strengths to the dominant that the latter don't have, or may even define the dominant through their fealty - is hardly considered as a possibility, particularly within a heterosexual frame.
To a feminist reader, Freud's definition of overvaluation in 'Sexual Aberrations' seems to describe culture's inscription of masculine authority if the passage is read using 'she' as universal pronoun. "The subject becomes, as it were, intellectually infatuated (that is, his powers of judgement are weakened) by the mental achievements and perfections of the sexual object and he submits to the latter's judgement with credulity. Thus the credulity of love becomes an important, if not the most fundamental, source of authority" (150). The pattern of behavior Freud outlines is precisely that found in every naive Gothic protagonist who suspends her own judgments in deference to her beloved's authority. Astonishingly, the overvaluation Freud describes is the man's of the woman - a fatuous adoration most extensively set forth through the famous whore/madonna splitting of 'Contributions to the Psychology of Love.'
The asymmetrical valuation of the other sex that Freud posits is crucial to how society and Gothic fiction represent and regulate 'normal' adult heterosexual relationships. A woman must 'look up to' her man: unless she is carefully trained to do so, patriarchy falters. Every girl, and every Gothic heroine, learns that it is only in the mirror of his regard that she exists, only in the plenitude of his subjectivity that she is whole. Her assignment of subjectivity to and overvaluation of the other is, however, an analytic and cultural con game in which she's asked to believe that she's a winner. An economic metaphor best describes the transaction. A worker is told her labor has wage-value, the amount she is paid. The labor also generates the surplus value we call profit, which is reaped by others. The woman in conservative analytic and Gothic fictions is such a laborer emotionally. Love is her wage; the surplus value of her nurturing and self-abnegation funds the autonomy of the idealized other. She, like the wage-laborer, does not recognize the product as her own and remains alienated from the power so 'naturally' appropriated by others. In order to maintain this system of subordination, it is imperative that girls learn proper passivity. My argument, then, is that women's devaluation enables and maintains men's overvaluation, a transaction shielded behind Freud's emphasis upon the overvalued woman.
Freud's analysis of object choice for girls and boys highlights the key significance of active and passive choice. Like a docile job applicant, the girl must be ready to accept any offer without pointing to her own qualifications; her getting a job is luck, not merit. All power resides in the employer/lover, and unions, which suggest another locus of power, are an abomination. She must choose to identify with that which is not like herself.
The small boy, according to Freud, has two choices: to love his mother (anaclitic object choice) or himself. Although choosing the former primes the boy for adult heterosexuality, it also leads him to overvalue his adult mate, as he once did the woman who cared for him. The small girl also has two choices: to love her mother (or the person who cares for her) or to love herself. Both sexes can have elements of both choices in love (and an individual of either sex can make predominantly anaclitic or narcissistic object choices).
The girl clearly has a problem or, to put it more accurately, Western culture has a major problem whose symptom is the girl. Her narcissism, so often discussed pejoratively, is nonetheless the adolescent girl's consolation prize for passivity. "This is unfavourable to the development of a true object-choice with its accompanying overvaluation. Women, especially if they grow up with good looks, develop a certain self-contentment which compensates them for the social restrictions that are imposed upon them in their choice of object" ('On Narcissism' 88-89). The passage's struggle with logic, seen in the unreconciled conjunction of "unfavourable' and compensatory narcissism, points to the impasse in which culture places the girl. If, however, she aspires to "true object-choice" rather than narcissism and makes a fully anaclitic choice, she will choose another woman or a man who has her mother's attributes. Ergo, as a woman seeking a woman's qualities, she will have made a narcissistic object choice. Furthermore, if she thinks she can choose and somehow evade "social restrictions," she strays too far into activity.
Thus, the eighteen year old in 'The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman' is masculine in her assumption of the role of courtly lover to older women. Her "acuteness of comprehension and her lucid objectivity" (154) are the first tip-offs, followed by clues indicating "that she must formerly have had strong exhibitionist and scopophilic tendencies" (169). Of "greater importance," however, is her behavior toward the beloved. "She displayed the humility and the sublime overvaluation of the sexual object so characteristic of the male lover, the renunciation of all narcissistic satisfaction, and the preference for being the lover rather than the beloved" (154). She is the exception that proves the rule: 'real' heterosexual women love narcissistically and so in "feminine" ways. Freud is careful to distinguish the sex of one's object choice from one's own attitude of masculinity or femininity; finally, though, the least plausible combination is for a woman to love a man in the "sublime" masculine mode ('Psychogenesis' 170).
For Freud, overvaluation is, in the end, an almost exclusively male phenomenon in love, a sentimental overestimation of the mother by the boy that carries over to his eventual mate. "The significance of the factor of sexual overvaluation can be best studied in men, for their erotic life alone has become accessible to research. That of women - partly owing to the stunting effect of civilized conditions and partly owing to their conventional secretiveness and insincerity - is still veiled in an impenetrable obscurity" ('Sexual Aberrations' 151). Freud's own wishful suppositions create some of that obscurity. Adult women, secretive and insincere, never quite love men enough - certainly not as much as the idealized, adoring mother of his own narcissistic stage, the mother who, at least in the son's nostalgic reconstruction, finds her own apotheosis in his perfection. "In typical cases women fail to exhibit any sexual overvaluation towards men; but they scarcely ever fail to do so towards their own children" ('Sexual Aberrations' 151n [added 1920]). The value women attach to men is left in the realm of the real: it is what men are actually worth. And women's worth, devalued so ruinously and early, can only be measured as collateral to men's. Women's worth is generated through the men to whom they are attached, just as we are to understand that poor governesses "become somebody" through the love of wealthy men.
The overvaluation of men that Freud implicitly accepts as real value and, finally, a "natural" determinant of the order of things is itself a cultural construct, as Horney so cogently argues in 'The Overvaluation of Love.' Here, as elsewhere, my interest is not in the analysis of male motives or of the often self-evident benefits that accrue to the male through this structuration. Instead, my concern is what it means to be a woman who must define herself through such a system. The boy's possession of great wealth during the anal stage becomes rarefied into his great value as an adult. The girl, reduced to a beggar during the first major commodities exchange, must find her own adult value through what an other is willing to dower her with.
By signing over subjectivity to another (whether or not the endorsement is coerced), she achieves some vicarious satisfaction of her own active drives, which are directed both to the outside world and herself. Forbidden from exercising the 'mastery' of sadism and the will to knowledge that epistemophilia and scopophilia provide, she ekes out what pleasures she can from the reversal of these instincts. She lives out the catch-22 Foucault calls the "cycle of prohibition": "Renounce yourself or suffer the penalty of being suppressed; do not appear if you do not want to disappear. Your existence will be maintained only at the cost of your nullification" (History 84). She values the knowledge and power she cannot hold and invests them in an other. Like the nameless protagonist of du Maurier's Rebecca and numerous others, she enviously watches the idealized other, whose unfettered existence is so unlike her own, and forlornly hopes that a magical look or word from him will make her 'somebody.'
Repression and Sublimation
The masochistic woman's active drives, inhibited and channeled in an exclusive course early on, continue to express the raw, unreformed aggression of the anal stage, augmented by her own rage. Repressed, these drives remain gargantuan, according to "Repression." "This deceptive strength of instinct is the result of an uninhibited development in phantasy and of the damming-up consequent on frustrated satisfaction" (149). She defends against this formidable instinctual energy. Sadly and inevitably, she abets the system that forbade instinctual expression in the first place: the energy she must expend just to maintain repression is not free for use elsewhere, she uses it to monitor herself (thus freeing others for alternate forms of surveillance), and she employs it actively only in preparing another generation of girls for divesture.
<#FROWN:G66\>Just as Error ceases to overwhelm Redcross as soon as he grasps and sees it, so Spenser manifests the covert logic of the episode -pastoral -only when that logic has been relegated to a comparison with the scene it originally constituted, when pastoral, that is, can be visualized in and as a single stanza. Yet, if the stanza does in some sense retrospectively clarify the episode, the battle it depicts between a gentle shepherd and some gnats nevertheless disrupts our sense not only of the other fight's ferocity but of its stakes -now the human seems the offender. For the sweet eventide, the sunset, the hasty supper, and the marred soft song all evoke an elegiac spirit to which the shepherd stands opposed: he is high on a hill, his star is ascendant, he takes Phoebus's place. When we discover that John Dixon glosses the stanza by referring it to Matthew 4.8, a stage in Christ's temptation -"The devil showeth him all the delights of the world to entice," Dixon says, "but can not deceive" (First Commentary, 3) -the tonality of this truly Spenserian stanza comes to seem so mixed and peculiar as to warrant longer inspection.
Though it is difficult to see how the details of the stanza might coalesce into the allusion Dixon finds there, the temptation on the mount, the culmination (in Matthew) of Christ's own wandering, has a certain dramatic propriety in relation to the Error allegory. A passage from More's translation of the Life of Pico (1510) automatically connects the two struggles: "Remember how cursed our old enemy is: which offereth us the kingdoms of this world, that he might bereave us the kingdom of heaven, how false the fleshly pleasures: which therefore embrace us, that they might strangle us" (Works 1:17). To such temptation Christ responded, "Avoid Satan" (Matthew 4.10); Petrarch atop Mont Ventoux found himself remonstrated by Augustine's lament that men go abroad to wonder at nature and yet leave themselves behind; but what in the shepherd's action recalls either Christ's repudiation or Petrarch's turning inward? Only, perhaps, his brushing gnats away, whose foremost iconographic association, ephemerality, does fit the contemptus theme: in the part of his contemptus litany immediately before the passage I quoted, Pico reminds his nephew that "the death lieth at hand. Remember that all the time of our life is but a moment, and yet less than a moment." The gnats also iconographically embody, and therefore distance and reduce, similarly worldly attributes of Error such as heresy, lechery, and even wandering, and so suggest the possibility of at least a kind of Cynic contemptus in the stanza, the philosophy of Erasmus's Folly:
If one (as Menippus did) looking out of the moon, beheld from thence the innumerable tumults, and businesses of mortal men, he should think verily he saw a many of flies, or gnats, brawling, fighting, beguiling, robbing, playing, living wantonly, born, bred up, decaying, and dying: So that it is scant believable, what commotions, and what Tragedies, are stirred up, by so little, and so short lived a vermin as this man is. (Praise, K3V)
Yet, while such pagan contemptus may find its counterpart in the bathetic side of the shepherd's battle, the "noyance" from which "he no where can rest," the same features of the scene that weaken the suggestive connection between it and Christian virtue baffle this allegory also. Though high on a hill, the shepherd views neither gnatlike men nor worldly kingdoms but his flock; the gnats themselves, if comically miniaturized glories of the world below, are nevertheless atop the hill also; and their tender wings and murmurings generate a pathos that counters any repudiation of them. In sum, what blocks these allegorical readings, what keeps the stanza, for all its contemptus yearnings, earthbound, is the 'lowly' character and setting Spenser and Redcross set out to leave behind them -the pastoral.
It looks misguided for a poet who announced his turn from pastoral and then proceeded to figure pre-epical modes as potentially deadly now to regret the loss of pastoral worldliness; but this final reduction, dislocation, and clarification of pastoral into a simile, the facing off of pastoral with its erroneous image, seems for Spenser to justify such nostalgia. The stanza's elegiac tone bespeaks more than the coming end of the episode itself. In the previous simile the characterization of father Nilus as old anticipated a turning back of the clock here also, the introduction of another old character: the gentle shepherd with his clownish hands recalls the clownish young men both Redcross and Spenser had been until only recently. Surrounding the shepherd, circumscribing this old identity, the gnats refigure the collapse of Redcross into Error and therefore also the spectatorial distance granted Una and then Redcross himself. Indeed, they turn the discarded pastoral in upon itself, for their "tender wings" invoke E. K.'s company of pastoral poets, whose prior flights on "tender wings" Spenser in The Shepheardes Calender set out "every where" to emulate. The bizarre Circean reduction of these poets to insects looks less surprising in the context of Virgilian poetics, which takes for granted that a poet should proportion his choice of subject to himself: if he is a fledgling, then his subject should be diminutive also, like the Culex Spenser translated as Virgils Gnat. In representing pastoral poets as one of these small subjects -as gnats - the simile literally collapses an already metaphorically collapsible relation, and so substitutes the shepherd surrounded by gnats, and the gnats themselves, as a diffracted image of the strangulation Redcross just suffered. What the pathos of the stanza would seem to register, then, is Spenser's desire to hang onto a scene that he believes liberates both Redcross and himself by staging their erroneous past and so differentiating them from its constraint.
The thwarted contemptus of the stanza indicates how pastoral can go so far as to be divided against itself, as in The Shepheardes Calender, and yet fall short of transcendence. The simile begins hopefully. The Error episode introduced a pastoral-like grove, we recall, as a shelter from heavenly wrath, from the hideous storm; pastoral's far more typical reason for shelter is only the heat of the sun, and, in the simile, with the sun sinking in the west, the shepherd escapes even that slight inconvenience. Yet, though free now to leave the shade for a lofty hilltop vision of his world, the shepherd still labors under the pressure of a temporal "tempest" (FQ 1.1.7, 8), even when, or rather because, heavenly power seems to absent itself from the world. The vision comes only at this "hasty" moment, only when day is nearly done; the shepherd can contemn his world only, that is, when it is being eclipsed. And in favor of what would he despise it? The only other world to desire, heaven, the sun, is what's becoming absent; and if the shepherd's flock represents the paltry, fleeting vanities he might despise, appropriately metamorphosed into gnats, they, like a new grove, still encumber him, because until the death all shepherds ought to long for ('November,' 182-92), he has no other place but his diminished world in which to live.
Redcross and Spenser, on the other hand, have only to discard pastoral in order to enact their own little apocalypse, sacrificing one kind of worldliness in order to save another. When Redcross severs Error's human head from her animal body, he explodes pastoral's strangling proportionment of human to natural, of self to place; with Error's head the trees of her grove (metonymically) fall as well, no longer required for shade but for the kind of use to which, say, the first tree mentioned, "the sayling Pine" (FQ 1.1.8), should he put. The death of Error even provides a final "sight" (26) of collapse: combining in themselves the shepherd's two cares, both the hungry sheep and the gnats "striving to infixe," Error's "scattred brood" have "flocked" (25) about their unhumanized mother and now "devoure" (26) her. As Error's blood and then her children's overstuffed bowels gush forth (24, 26), a constraint or implosion once more turns outside, to the spectatorial freedom of Redcross simply watching his foes defeat themselves, or of "his Ladie seeing all" now approaching "from farre" (27). The microcosm that dies enemy to God -"cursed" Error and her "unkindly Impes of heaven accurst" (16, 26) -opens a worldly space, the "long way" Redcross travels, in which he can have "God to frend" (28) as well, as roominess subject only to the "happy starre" Redcross was "borne under" (27), distant in both space and time.
ERROR AS TRIFLING
Error appears to represent a mistake, however, that not just Spenser but England as a whole had recently escaped, a delusive ideal more clearly embodied in the second monster Redcross meets, though Archimago at first protests himself only a "silly old man," who, because he "lives in hidden cell, / Bidding his beades all day for his trespas," knows nothing of "worldly trouble" (FQ 1.1.30). In his youth Erasmus, of all people, spoke of monastic life in De Contemptu Mundi (1521, trans. 1532?) as a pastoral retreat, a covert to fend off the hideous storms of worldly existence: "Who (but he that is stark blind) seeth not that it is far more surer, more pleasant, and more commodious to journey through the pleasant green meadows without dread, than among so many images of death to be turned and went with perpetual vexation and trouble" (13r-v). Adapting passages from Virgil's Eclogues, Erasmus celebrates the monastery "like to Paradise of pleasure," where, among "orchards and greaves," "within these dens," "groweth the pople tree, to shadow us from showers" (13v-14r). In Renaissance English versions of the Old Testament, however, "groves" figure as the idolatrous shrines that God repeatedly commands the Jews to cut down" (e.g., Exodus 34.13); and Greene lauds the day England's "woodman" Henry VIII wounded the "Monster" Antichrist by demolishing its monastic hiding places: "flying to the text, whatsoever my father hath not planted, shall be rooted up by the roots, he suppressed their Abbeys, pulled down their sumptuous buildings, & scarce left one stone upon another" (Works 5:251). The shattering of such pleasances "seeldom inward sound" (FQ 1.1.9) produced what many Protestants must have considered liberating catalogues of the rottenness and insubstantiality, the "pelting trash" (e.g., Derricke, Image of Irelande, 22), at their core: supposedly "holy relics" disgorged into the light as "stinking boots, mucky combs, ragged rochets, rotten girdles, pilled purses, great bullocks' horns, locks of hair, and filthy rags, gobbets of wood, under the name of parcels of the holy cross, and such pelfry beyond estimation."
Spenser establishes the relation between the Catholic worldliness and the pastoral ideal of proportion, and then reduces this subverted ideal to a literal trifle, first of all in The Shepheardes Calender's tale of the fox and the kid. According to E. K.'s commentary on "Maye," the eclogue in which the tale appears, the interlocutors Piers and Palinode represent "two forms of pastors or Ministers, or the protestant and the Catholic." Piers wants to explain to the papist Palinode, "a worldes childe" (73), why Protestants would be foolish to make friends with papists, and so tells him a fable. The kid's mother leaves him at home for a while, warning him to keep his door locked. The "false Foxe" then comes to the kid's door disguised "as a poor pedler ... / Bearing a trusse of tryfles at hys backe, / As Bells, and babes [i.e., dolls], and glasses in hys packe" (236, 238-40); "by such trifles," says E. K., "are noted, the relics and rags of popish superstition, which put no small religion in Bells: and Babies .s. Idols: and glasses .s. Paxes, and such like trumperies." Pretending to be sick and lame, the fox lures the kid to unlock his door by presenting him a glass -the kid "was so enamored with the newell, / That nought he deemed deare for the jewell" (276-77).
<#FROWN:G67\>Then the following year, Collier had included McNickle in the delegation to the Inter-American Indian Institute in P<*_>a-acute<*/>tzcuaro, Mexico. By 1942, when the Heads suggested his transfer to Sells, Collier was relying heavily on McNickle's presence in the Washington office as McCaskill's assistant. But McNickle had, on occasion, expressed an interest in field work, and he could be useful in Arizona, as well. Collier apparently gave him the choice.
The seminar in Santa Fe that McNickle attended after leaving Sells was primarily a training session for those BIA teachers, nurses, soil conservation experts, clerks, and administrators who had volunteered as researchers for the personality study. Many of them were initially skeptical about the value of what they would be doing. Laura Thompson and the project's advisors, however, had worked through the pilot study on the Papago Reservation and were able to define the goals and techniques to be applied in the field. The volunteers learned the theories behind the various tests they would be using, which were the most sophisticated yet developed for analyzing personality development, and they had a chance to perfect their interviewing techniques by practicing on each other. Incredible as it seems, many of the volunteers had had little personal interaction with the people whose affairs they administered. They had never been inside an Indian home, where much of the testing was to be done, or attended an Indian ceremony. The initial prospect of having the intimate contact required by the testing procedures was frightening to many, but as the volunteers familiarized themselves with the techniques to be used, they became increasingly enthusiastic about the possibility of genuine community involvement.
W. Lloyd Warner, who read the evaluations submitted by participants when the seminar was over, reported to Collier that all the volunteers were enthusiastic, and some were "positively lyrical." "It became clear that what had happened was that a lot of these people had been stirred emotionally by gaining insight into their own lives and feeling somehow or other they had got a new grip on the kind of life they wanted.
McNickle, too, was caught up in the excitement of the seminar, and he returned to Washington to write an article entitled 'Toward Understanding' for Indians at Work about what had happened in Santa Fe. "There is always the chance," he began apologetically, "that one will speak or write with a naive enthusiasm about what one has felt and seen and lived through.... Nevertheless, there are occasions when one must make the effort to speak deeply and truly. The Seminar held at Santa Fe from May 17 to June 5 ...has been such an occasion, a time of profound experiences." Then he explained the purpose of the personality study itself. It was an attempt first, he said, to learn how human personality was formed, and then to gather data that would make Indian administration more effective.
Even that data, however, would be a by-product. In his summary he reflected some of Collier's mystical perception of human potential. "The research, in actuality, is projected on the assumption that there are in human personality certain primal, earth-old powers which, if understood and developed and used, can make for that mastery of the soul which men have longed for but have lacked the skill to achieve." He wrote as if he were talking about a religious experience, one not unlike Myron Begay's "passion in the desert" that he had described in his review of La Farge's Enemy Gods. He was obviously one of those who had been moved by the seminar experience. If he stayed in the nation's capital, he would have an opportunity to observe the full spectrum of the research and help evaluate its results. He decided to stay in Washington.
From his Chicago vantage point, Collier was able to maintain even closer contact with the University of Chicago and the personality study. The field work for the project was completed within the year, as expected. The University of Chicago then sponsored two seminars, in March and June, to begin the preliminary analysis of the data that was to be incorporated into the various tribal monographs. McNickle attended both sessions, then once again in Indians at Work he described the next phase of the project. He explained how the tribal monographs, written on each of the five tribes included in the study, were to be followed by a major publication dealing with the application of the research to problems of Indian education and administration. Such application, he reminded his readers, was the ultimate goal of the project.
The contract between the BIA and the University of Chicago for the first phase of the study expired in late 1944 and for a variety of reasons it was not renewed. Instead, the BIA negotiated a new contract with the Society for Applied Anthropology to complete the second phase of the study. The SAA appointed a Committee on Administrative Research, which included John Provinse as chairman; Paul Fejos, director of the Viking Fund (later the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research); Alexander Leighton; Edward Spicer; and D'Arcy McNickle, to complete the work. Laura Thompson stayed on as project coordinator. At D'Arcy's suggestion, his wife Roma served as publications editor and was also a member of the committee. The Viking Fund agreed to contribute six thousand dollars toward the completion of the project.
At that point the first of the tribal monographs, The Hopi Way by Laura Thompson and Alice Joseph, was ready for publication, while the others were in various stages of preparation. Collier, who by then was thinking seriously of resigning, became increasingly impatient with the inevitable delays in making the other studies available. Since the project was his legacy, he wanted the final analysis and policy recommendations printed and in the hands of Bureau personnel before he left office.
Despite the committee's impressive roster, however, the impetus for completing the project spent itself with Collier's resignation. John Provinse, in writing to Laura Thompson about the committee's final report in 1947, admitted that the research had not been implemented anywhere "except in the attitudes of a few individuals who have taken time to read the reports." Nevertheless, as the historian Lawrence Kelly has since pointed out, Collier's insistence on using the insights of the social sciences to develop administrative policies was catching on, and other government activities became the beneficiaries of his foresight during the war.
Although McNickle's specific contribution to the personality study remains difficult to assess, his unique position probably made him the most knowledgeable person in Washington on all aspects of the project. He and Roma spent much of 1944 and 1945 preparing the various manuscripts, and despite cutbacks in funding that followed the end of the war, all of the tribal monographs were eventually published. Only one volume of the second phase of the study was completed, however. That was Laura Thompson's Culture in Crisis, which was published in 1950. Meanwhile, the Committee on Administrative Research had disbanded. Although D'Arcy's and Roma's names appear in the acknowledgments, McNickle's labor on behalf of another publication perhaps provides a better indication of the nature of his involvement.
Before their involvement with the Indian Bureau projects, Dorothea and Alexander Leighton had prepared a manuscript, based on their pre-war studies of Navajo healing practices, that described the problem of crossing cultural barriers in health education. They had shown the text to Edna Gerkin, a health education supervisor for the Bureau in Colorado, and Gerkin in turn had recommended it to Collier. She was obviously impressed with the Leightons' work, much of which was concerned with how to make modern information concerning health and hygiene relevant to the still-isolated and uneducated Navajos. A book such as the Leightons had written, she told Collier, would provide invaluable assistance for all Indian service workers in the health field, not just those on the Navajo Reservation, and she urged him to assist in its publication.
After reading the manuscript Collier agreed with Gerkin's assessment. As he would write in the book's foreword, the authors' study was the product of people who had, without being inhibited by cultural preconceptions, "moved into the center of the Navajo's world view." As a result, their discoveries and generalizations about the problems of cross-cultural health education had far-reaching implications not only for the Indian service but for colonial administrations wherever they happened to be. He wanted the book published, and he assigned to McNickle the task of preparing the manuscript.
McNickle was involved with the Leightons' book for over a year, and without his assistance it probably would not have been published. His editorial skill helped him identify and correct some of the problems of its internal organization, and he offered to rewrite the chapter on administration. The Leightons were more than happy to have him do so. His attention extended even to the end papers, which replicated a map prepared by the Bureau's Navajo Human Dependency Survey of the 1930s. He edited Collier's foreword as well. Unfortunately, commercial publishers who examined the manuscript thought that it lacked general interest and were reluctant to publish it. McNickle therefore decided to try various university presses, and when Duman Malone at Harvard expressed interest, he was delighted. He forwarded Malone's letter to Alexander Leighton, who was still at Poston, with a brief comment: "Attached is a copy of a letter from Dumas Malone which should be cheering, in case everything else at the moment is going to pot."
The letter from Malone was indeed cheering, but it was far from a contract. Harvard Press wanted a definite commitment from the Bureau as to how many copies it would buy, and McNickle patiently acted as go-between while Collier tried to avoid giving a specific answer. The negotiations with Harvard took months, but McNickle's efforts finally paid off. When The Navajo Door: An Introduction to Navajo Life was published, Collier was pleased with every aspect of the book, from its content to its cover. He wrote to the publishers, "The 'Door' is a most beautiful piece of book-making throughout. The cover is perfect. I believe that this book ought to have a really good market if it can be brought to people's attention, and I shall do what I can to help." McNickle's work on The Navajo Door was patient, detailed, and effective, but, typically, he received little credit except for a line in the author's acknowledgments.
Despite the lack of specific information about McNickle's contribution to the personality study, there is little doubt that his work on that project, as well as on The Navajo Door, played a major role in his education as an applied anthropologist. Although he never studied the subject formally, research on the project and subsequent work with the Committee on Administrative Research provided a unique opportunity for him to learn from those scholars who were most committed to work among American Indians. Parallel to those efforts, his various activities with the Indian Bureau had required intimate contact with individuals and tribes who were trying to make new adjustments to the modern world. His job offered a superb opportunity for his own field work. Although he never lost his self-consciousness about not having earned a college degree, those who were familiar with his background knew that a piece of paper could add nothing to his already profound and growing knowledge of social and cultural anthropology.
The war years, especially from April 1942 through December 1943, were inevitably hectic, and were made more so by the Bureau's involvement with the War Relocation Authority. Milton Eisenhower, who had worked out the initial cooperative agreements with Ickes and Collier, had soon found that he had no stomach for the heart-wrenching job of dispossessing and relocating more than a hundred thousand people. By June 1942, just three months after his appointment, he became ill from the stress and he asked President Roosevelt to reassign him. As his successor he suggested Dillon Myer, a self-assured midwesterner who had been employed by the Soil Conservation Service since 1933.
<#FROWN:G68\>Mitterrand also prepared his audience for future change by insisting that his government would pursue just social, economic, and fiscal reforms and would combat what he called "the wall of money" that had prevented reform in the past. The president also asked the French to mobilize themselves against unemployment and inflation. Yet Mitterrand did have something to say to private employers. He told them that as a result of the nationalizations, the economy would simply be a "little more mixed" than before and that a large majority of production would still remain in private hands. Mitterrand even told the business community that the government would exempt industrial profits from the wealth tax if employers spent the saved amount on investments to create jobs. The president's Gaullist-like image at this first press conference and his strong emphasis on future reforms served him well as a politician seeking some links with the past and at the same time trying to legitimize the reforms that the Socialist government intended to carry out. All in all, his initial meeting with the press attempted to ensure that the state of grace would continue.
Also attempting to maintain support for his government as economic indicators revealed the pitiful state of the economy, Mitterrand traveled to Gascony and Aquitaine where he gave a speech at Figeac that surprised many. In this small town in the southwestern part of France, after the press office at the Elyse announced that the president would be making an important speech there, Mitterrand declared, "What I have called socialism is not my Bible." He tried to give the impression that he was not simply a Socialist president but the president of the entire nation. "It is my duty to express the wishes of the entire nation," he said. "How firmly I hold to that pluralism! And how I want France to remain profoundly diverse and different, without being divided." In this speech Mitterrand also indicated that his government would be more sympathetic to the demands of French business. From this time forward, the word 'socialism' all but disappeared from the president's public discourse.
A few days after the Figeac speech, the Council of Ministers, with Mitterrand presiding, adopted a nationalization plan. The government divided the targeted companies into four groups. First, the Dassault aircraft company, maker of the Mirage fighter-bomber, and the arms production division of Matra, a large diversified electronics firm, were scheduled to fall under state control. The Socialist government agreed that the production and sale of weapons should not be controlled by private industry. The second group included two large steel producers, Usinor and Sacilor, which were already heavily indebted to the state. The third group included five large industrial concerns - CGE (electrical equipment), Pchiney-Ugine-Kuhlmann (an important chemical company), Rhone-Poulenc (a textile-chemical firm), Saint-Gobain (a diversified industrial group), and Thomson (a huge electronics company). The fourth group comprised Honeywell Bull (a French-U.S. computer company), ITT's French interests, and Roussel-Uclaf (a chemical and pharmaceutical firm). In addition to these industries, the government planned to nationalize a number of banks and holding institutions to maximize the state's control over credit and investment.
The nationalization plan divided the government. The nationalized industries were theoretically to be used as 'motors' for reindustrialization, research, and development, but this motor would be controlled by state technocrats. What provoked disagreement in government circles was not the 'motor' role of the nationalized sector, but the extent of the takeover within each industrial group. Finance Minister Delors and Minister of Planning Rocard, for instance, argued that the government only needed to take over 51 percent of the targeted industries to gain control; this would save the government billions of francs that could be spent elsewhere. Other ministers, such as Chev<*_>e-grave<*/>nement, argued that the government had a mandate to fully nationalize the targeted industries and that problems would emerge within the ranks of the industries if they were not completely nationalized. The nationalization plan set off the first real debate between two Socialist factions that the president would have to listen to: the 'minimalists' like Delors, Rocard, Minister of Foreign Trade Michel Jobert, and Minister of Industry Pierre Dreyfus, and the 'maximalists' comprising some Mitterrandists, Chev<*_>e-grave<*/>nement and his supporters, and the four Communist ministers. Mitterrand himself arbitrated this debate and decided that the targeted industries would be nationalized 100 percent. After a passionate session in the National Assembly where numerous amendments were offered, the deputies approved Mitterrand's version of the nationalization plan. The president's desire to nationalize 100 percent of the nine industrial groups was based mainly on his attempt to keep the pledge made in the Common Program and ensure left-wing unity within his government, especially from the Communist side. With this decision, which would cost at least 44 billion francs, the maximalists won a key battle with their adversaries, but they eventually lost the war over control of French economic policy.
In late September the government approved a spending program that reflected the maximalist position. Drawn up by Fabius, who was in charge of the budget, and negotiated with the Elyse staff, the new budget included a 23 percent increase in public spending, now set at 135 billion francs. The projected deficit for the 1982 budget was expected to be about $16.7 billion, a postwar record for a French government. The government hoped partially to offset the deficit with a new wealth tax under consideration and the abolition of special tax privileges. Although Delors initially refused to countersign the 1982 budget as minister of the economy, the expansionist budget of Fabius was adopted, a budget that reflected many of the dreams and illusions of the Socialists at the outset of their experiment with power.
With pressure still heavy on the franc, Mitterrand decided it was now time to devalue. While he flatly rejected devaluation immediately after taking office because of the political damage that might be incurred, in early October he had little choice. On October 4, after Delors had consulted with the Germans, the government announced that the members of the European Monetary System (EMS) had agreed that the franc would be devalued 3 percent while the mark would be raised in value by 5.5 percent. This meant that the franc fell in value 8.5 percent vis-<*_>a-grave<*/>-vis France's major trading partner. The day after the devaluation, Delors announced a price freeze on basic products and said he would discuss with the unions the necessity to moderate pay increases. The 14 percent inflation and a higher rate projected for 1982 worried the minister of the economy. The devaluation and Delors's October 5 actions were too little and too late.
On October 12 and 13 Mitterrand visited an area in eastern France hard hit by unemployment, Lorraine. Between May 1979 and May 1981 this region alone had lost 30,000 jobs in the steel industry. Mitterrand hoped that this official visit would allow him to explain the government's economic and social policy as outlined in his September press conference and to stymie any opposition effort to capture a foothold in this area. In the May 10 presidential elections 51.6 percent of the voters in Lorraine had voted for Mitterrand, but only one of the four departments in Lorraine had given Mitterrand a majority of votes. In the June legislative elections the Left had captured thirteen of twenty-five seats in this region. In terms of political calculus, Mitterrand knew that Lorraine was a key area of concern for the Socialist government.
During his visit to Lorraine the president was accompanied by several members of his government: Delors, Defferre, Brgovoy, Andr Henry (minister of leisure), and Jean Auroux (minister of labor). The president and his entourage visited all four departments in Lorraine where they talked with mayors, heads of companies, union leaders, and workers. Among other themes, Mitterrand told the citizens of Lorraine that a powerful popular movement was galvanizing national unity around his government and that the nationalization program would permit the "structural reforms necessary to reverse the decline in Lorraine." He also said that he hoped Lorraine would become a symbol of "hope" and not a "symbol of political setback." This tour was followed in the coming months by a solo trip by Prime Minister Mauroy to various areas of France to explain further the government's economic and social policies. Like Mitterrand, Mauroy wanted to sensitize French citizens to the difficult problems of unemployment, the "priority of priorities" for the new government, at least during its first year.
The dreams and illusions of the new Socialist government were clearly revealed in the October 14 meeting of the Council of Ministers where this body adopted what it termed an 'Intermediate Plan' for 1982-83. According to this plan, the government's first objective was to stabilize unemployment and then to reduce it by creating 400,000 to 500,000 new jobs a year beginning in 1983. It also said that the government wanted to create conditions for economic growth (3 percent projected for 1982-83) and investment, to improve productive capacity, restore social solidarity, and establish an effective dialogue with various social groups. Like other leftist governments in the past, such as Blum's Popular Front in 1936 or Harold Wilson's government in Britain after 1964, Mitterrand and the Socialists forgot how quickly inflation erodes confidence in a newly elected progressive government.
These campaigns in the provinces by the president and his prime minister were followed by the Socialist congress at Valence between October 23 and 25, a meeting dominated by radical rhetoric echoing 1789. After the 1981 victory, Mitterrand's strength within the PS jumped from about 47 percent of the party's membership to approximately 51.1 percent, while Rocard's support fell from 21 percent to 15 percent. Fearing a further reduction of his strength in the euphoria of 1981, Rocard did not present a countermotion at the Valence congress, despite Jospin's effort to encourage Rocard to draw up a set of counteraims for the party. The motion presented at Valence called on the government to work toward "a complete break with capitalism." With debate in the government brewing over a new wealth tax and with some bankers, notably at Paribas (Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas), resisting a government takeover, some PS members sensed a clash with the 'wall of money' that Mitterrand had referred to earlier. One PS delegate at Valence, Paul Quil<*_>e-grave<*/>s, even resorted to quoting Robespierre by declaring, "It is not only necessary to say that heads are going to fall, but it is necessary to say which ones." Another delegate said now that the banks had been nationalized, it was "necessary to nationalize the bankers." The prime minister himself, referring specifically to the resistance of some banks, stated, "The government will not yield to any intimidation."
In essence, the Valence congress was a victory celebration for the PS, especially for the more radical representatives. In a message to the delegates, Mitterrand attempted to moderate the rhetoric by telling his confreres, "We have a long period ahead of us [and] it is necessary to know how to manage it." One right-wing Parisian newspaper dubbed the Valence meeting 'La terreur tranquille' (the calm terror). Valence may have been a victory celebration for the Socialists, but the extreme rhetoric contributed to mobilizing right-wing opinion.
In November, Mitterrand's economic dreams and illusions began to confront a harsh reality, not from the right wing, but from his own finance minister. In a TV broadcast on November 29 Delors called for a "pause in the reforms." Just as startling to Mitterrand and others in government, Delors stated: "The responsibility of the Socialist government is to create a climate more favorable to business." Delors also said that he did not believe that there was a 'conspiracy' on the part of big business to subvert Socialist reforms. Delors's pronouncement attracted considerable attention in the French and international press and got the attention of Prime Minister Mauroy, who proceeded to discount it, because Delors's statements contradicted official government policy. Traveling in the provinces at the time, Mauroy told the press that the government would continue its reforms "without accelerating or slowing down."
<#FROWN:G69\>
The struggle for the bottom rung
BLACKS VS. BROWNS
BY JACK MILES
Behind the Los Angeles riot lay a grim economic competition between Latinos and African-Americans, which is intensifying and which poses a stern challenge to U.S. domestic and foreign policy, as well as to sentimental cultural attitudes about immigration
DURING THE 1980S, ACCORDING TO CENSUS figures released last May 11, the United States admitted 8.6 million immigrants. In the context of U.S. immigration history this is a staggering number - more than in any decade since 1900-1910. Worldwide, half the decade's emigrants had made the United States their destination. Of them, 11 percent - more than three quarters of a million - further specified their choice as Los Angeles. By the end of the decade 40 percent of all Angelenos were foreign-born; 49.9 percent spoke a language other than English at home; 35.3 percent spoke Spanish. This is the city where, two weeks before those figures were released, the most violent urban riot in American history broke out: fifty-one people were killed, and property worth $750 million or more was lost.
Though the occasion for the riot was the acquittal of four white policemen on charges of assaulting a black traffic offender, Latinos as well as African-Americans rioted. Why? What was Rodney King to Latinos? Did a race riot, once begun, degenerate - or progress - into a bread riot? Was it a vast crime spree, as devoid of political content as the looting that followed the 1977 blackout in New York City? Of those arrested afterward - of whom more than half were Latino - 40 percent already had criminal records. Was the riot a defeat of the police? If it was a hybrid of all these, was it, finally, an aberration from which, by hard work, America's second-largest city could recover? Or was it the annunciation of a new and permanent state of affairs?
I work at the Los Angeles Times, writing a column for that newspaper's book supplement and unsigned editorials three or four times a week for its editorial page. On the day after the first night of the riot, one of my colleagues said to me, as we left to hunt for a still-open restaurant, "When the barbarians sacked Rome in 410, the Romans thought it was the end of civilization. You smile - but what followed was the Dark Ages." Think of what follows here as the voice of a worried Roman - in front of a television set, watching the Goths at their sack.
Meeting Latino Los Angeles
I CAME TO LOS ANGELES IN 1978, TO WORK AS AN editor in the branch office of the University of California Press at UCLA. The first home I owned here was a house trailer in Malibu. In 1981 a Santa Ana - one of the notorious local windstorms - ripped off the carport attached to the trailer and did some further damage to the roof. My wife and I had some insurance, but not enough. To help me complete my do-it-yourself repairs, I hired two Mexican boys from the pool of laborers who gathered daily near a shopping center just off the Pacific Coast Highway. One of the two, Ricky Rodr<*_>i-acute<*/>guez (not his real name), just fifteen years old when we met him, would become almost literally a member of our family.
One Sunday afternoon, after Ricky had been working with me part-time for several weeks, a Coast Highway landslide cut Malibu in half, and we invited Ricky to stay overnight. The buses weren't running. His alternatives, both illegal, were sleeping on the beach and sleeping in some neglected patch of brush along the road. He accepted the invitation and on the morrow brought my wife and me a breakfast in bed consisting of fried eggs and peanut butter sandwiches. In the sudden, unforeseen intimacy of the moment, a kind of conversation began different from any we had yet had. We began to learn something about his family.
Ricky, his mother, two sisters, and a brother were living in City Terrace Park, a neighborhood in East Los Angeles, as the permanent houseguests of another sister, her husband, and their two small children: nine people in a two-bedroom cottage. Ricky's brother-in-law, at the time the only American citizen in the family, was a cook whose generous employer had bought him this cottage. (Later, Juan Jos - called Juanjo for short - would open his own burrito shop.) Ricky invited me to visit his family, and I did so. I had never been in the barrio before.
Ricky continued working for us over several months. Relations remained friendly, and he eventually asked if we would adopt him, purely for legal reasons: to make him a citizen. His mother and I visited a sympathetic Chicano immigration lawyer, but Mexico's laws protecting its children made the move legally complicated. I did agree, however, to tutor Ricky through his remaining two years of high school - and here we return to the riot as an event in a mecca for immigrants.
As a taxpayer, I was surprised - not that I wasn't happy for our young friend - to discover that his status as an illegal immigrant was no bar to his attending high school at state expense. He did have to show a birth certificate; but, interestingly, his mother, a short, stout, indomitably cheerful woman who had crossed the border as a single mother with four children, of whom the youngest was a toddler at the time, had brought birth certificates with her. She had had education on her mind from the start, and a Guadalajara certificate was certificate enough for Wilson High School, which received money from the state on a per capita basis and would have lost money had illegal immigrants been denied admission.
Another surprise came in Ricky's senior year, when he asked if I would accompany him to the Department of Motor Vehicles and permit him to take a driving test in my car. (My presence and signature may have been required in some other capacity as well; I can no longer quite remember.) I knew by then that illegal immigrants commonly drove the streets and freeways of Los Angeles without any kind of driver's license. Ricky wanted a license mainly because it provided an identification card and a degree of cover for someone seeking work. He took and passed the test in the Lincoln Heights DMV office not far from downtown Los Angeles.
But here again I was surprised that no proof of legal residency was requested for the receipt of a California driver's license. On the Coast Highway, I had witnessed hair-raising 'sweeps' by Immigration and Naturalization Service agents on the very corner where I had hired Ricky. Such cases farther south, at an INS checkpoint on Interstate 5, north of San Diego, led with grim frequency to traffic deaths. Why did the INS not simply come to the DMV office in Lincoln Heights and arrest applicants? As we waited in line to deliver Ricky's completed written test, we overheard the clerk administering the same test orally - in Spanish - to a short older man with a coppery Amerindian face. He would have fallen one answer short of the passing grade had she not given him a broad hint.
The DMV office had as foreign a feel to it as the correo in Mexico City. One heard almost no English at all. Ricky took his test not long after Election Day that year. The contrast between the two populations - the one in the polling station, the other at the DMV - was overwhelming. The DMV office seemed to be a part of the American administration of some foreign - or indigenous but subject - population.
A Latino Riot?
BACK TO THE RIOT: WAS THERE A POLITICAL motive for the Latino rioting? There is a radical fringe of Chicano activists with a political agenda for the land they call Aztl<*_>a-acute<*/>n: northwest Mexico and the southwest United States. They claim, not without reason, that Chicano farm workers now sweat on land stolen from their ancestors. But Ricky and his family take a different view. I learned in passing that as an eighth-grader Ricky had donned a feather headdress and a loincloth and danced in a 'folkloric' group organized by one of his teachers, but the Aztecs meant no more to him than the Illinois did to me as a Boy Scout in Chicago. Ricky's older brother, Victor, once asked me in puzzlement why Americans gave Spanish names to their houses and boats. Why not English names? A rich and interesting question, perhaps, but not one that betrayed a political agenda.
We learned later that in fact many if not most of the Latino rioters were either Central Americans or very recent Mexican immigrants, and that what the riot might have been to us Anglos, it was also, to some considerable extent, to the established Mexican-American political leadership. They, too, were wondering about a huge, strange, possibly angry, Spanish-speaking population in their midst. Who were these people, and what did they want? If they had no political agenda, if they were common criminals, well, that, too - given their growing numbers and the demonstrated inadequacy of the police - was news, wasn't it? The population of South Central Los Angeles had doubled since 1965. For every black in the area there was now at least one Latino. That had to make a difference. But what kind of difference?
In the weeks following the riot, Latino leaders from East Los Angeles were concerned that the sudden spot-light on South Central Los Angeles would rob them of scarce government funds. They were on guard against the possibility that South Central Los Angeles would be rewarded for its violence and East Los Angeles punished for its good behavior. "Just because we didn't erupt in East L.A., does that translate into us being ignored or missing out on the funds that are funneling into the communities?" asked Geraldine Zapata, the executive director of the Plaza Community Center. But the more immediate challenge to Mexican East Los Angeles was coming to terms with Central American South Central Los Angeles.
The Watts II Paradigm: Blacks vs. Whites
THE MAINSTREAM INTERPRETATION HAD little to say about either Mexicans or Central Americans. It took the riot to be Watts II, a repetition of the 1965 black riot, touched off by the verdict in the King case but growing out of the deeper frustrations of the black population over rising unemployment, institutionalized police brutality, and eroded public assistance. That interpretation was surely right as far as it went. Those who mentally bracketed the riot between the videotaped beatings of King by a gang of white policemen and of Reginald Denny, a white trucker, by a gang of black rioters were not altogether wrong to do so.
And this interpretation was reinforced during the weeks following the riot by the competing rhetoric of black rappers on the one hand and the police on the other. On June 26, Police Chief Daryl F. Gates's last day on the job, Amnesty International released a report, 'Police Brutality in Los Angeles,' claiming that the department used its Taser guns and turned loose its dogs on suspects who were not resisting arrest or had already been taken into custody. LAPD brutality, the report claimed, "has even amounted to torture." Gates replied by denouncing the organization as "a bunch of knucklehead liberals" who "attack everything that is good in the country ... and good in the world."
Earlier, Sergeant Stacey C. Koon, the commanding officer in the King beating, had discussed his unpublished memoir, 'The Ides of March,' with reporters, apparently in an attempt to sell it. The manuscript includes the following description of Koon's treatment of a Latino said to be under the influence of the drug PCP (the same was said, wrongly, of Rodney King):
My boot came from the area of lower California and connected with the suspect's scrotum about lower Missouri. My boot stopped about Ohio, but the suspect's testicles continued into upper Maine. The suspect was literally lifted off the ground.
<#FROWN:G70\>
The Trouble with
Adam Smith
THOMAS K. McCRAW
THE BATTLE between Adam Smith and Karl Marx is over. By a late-round technical knockout, Smith and capitalism have won. But now a second championship fight is under way, a contest between different kinds of capitalism. In one corner stands a relatively laissez-faire consumer variety represented by the United States. In the other corner is a more nationalistic, producer-oriented capitalism epitomized by Germany, Japan, and the 'Little Dragons' of East Asia (Korea and Taiwan).
The theoretical split that underlies this competition is best exemplified by Adam Smith on the one hand, and on the other by the two great prophets of activist national developmental policy. These are the American Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804) and the German Friedrich List (1789-1846). So far, in the realms of ideology and academic theory, Smith is ahead on points. But there is reason to believe he will fade in the middle and late rounds, and in this essay I want to explain why. I will do this not through an extended comparison of Smith with Hamilton and List, but by looking mostly at Smith alone - at his intellectual strengths and weaknesses, his preferred units of analysis, and especially his hostile attitude towards organizations.
I
Ever since its publication in 1776, The Wealth of Nations has been regarded as the most influential book on economics ever written. Ronald Coase, the 1991 Nobel laureate in economics, called it "a work that one contemplates with awe. In keenness of analysis and in its range it surpasses any other book on economics. Its preeminence is, however, disturbing. What have we been doing in the last 200? years?" Joseph Schumpeter, though no particular admirer of Adam Smith, described it as "the most successful not only of all books on economics but, with the possible exception of Darwin's Origin of Species, of all scientific books that have appeared to this day."
The influence of The Wealth of Nations has always been high, but of course higher at some moments than others. When it was first published, it received a fair amount of attention but did not have a sensational success. In the first two or three decades after publication, its powerful messages about free trade and minimal government seeped slowly into the consciousness and everyday vocabularies of British and American citizens. Soon its translation into French, German, Spanish, and other languages spread Smith's influence to Europe and Latin America. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its message penetrated Japanese, Chinese, and other Asian circles.
Every fifty years since 1776, as the economist R. D. Collison Black has noted, The Wealth of Nations has been memorialized in formal ceremony. In 1826, the author had been dead for only thirty-six years and had not yet attained the status of sainthood. Accordingly, David Ricardo and others of that generation threw reverence to the winds and criticized some of Smith's technical errors. On the other hand, both they and numerous politicians had long since embraced Smith's system of "natural liberty" and its free-trade implications. By 1846, the Corn Laws had been repealed and the era of free trade and international British economic hegemony had begun.
Thirty years later, in the centennial celebrations of 1876, the policy side of Adam Smith, as distinct from the analytical, received even greater emphasis in both Britain and America. Having witnessed Britain's rise to unmatched prosperity under its free-trade regime, celebrants were ready to proclaim Smith the prophet of political economy. Economic theory, however, was now in turmoil. The classical system was being challenged by Marx and the socialists and also by Lon Walras and the marginalists. By the late nineteenth century it had come under relentless attack by popular critics of industrialism - writers such as Carlyle and Dickens in Britain, Victor Hugo in France, Henry George and Henry Demarest Lloyd in America. Adam Smith's laissez-faire system seemed linked to an ominous polarization of wealth and to the horrifying industrial squalor that plagued European cities.
By the 150th anniversary of The Wealth of Nations in 1926, enlightened capitalism and the emerging welfare state had eliminated some of the squalor, though little of the maldistribution of wealth. On the theory side, the neoclassical reconstruction was nearly complete, and the economies of Alfred Marshall ruled the academy alongside marginalism, to which it was tied. Yet doubts about Adam Smith had again become rife. For a world trying to recover from the Great War, the merits of free trade and laissez-faire were far from self-evident. Perhaps in consequence, 1926 was the least joyous, though most intellectually interesting, of all the anniversaries.
Fifty years later, in 1976, conditions had become uniquely propitious for celebration of Smithian policy as well as theory. With the triumph of capitalism over its rivals finally in sight, with deregulation and privatization on the lips of economists and politicians all over the world, and with American bicentennial hoopla at full throttle, Adam Smith had reached the highest pedestal. The Chicago economist Milton Friedman had just won the Nobel Prize. His colleague George J. Stigler, an equally ardent Smithian, was about to win one of his own. The Wealth of Nations had become more fashionable than at any other time in its history. Inexpensive paperback editions proliferated. A huge project to edit and republish all of Smith's works was under way, sponsored by the University of Glasgow and Oxford University Press. By 1981, the young Washington commandos of the Reagan Revolution were sporting neckties decorated with Smith's profile. (Their identification of The Wealth of Nations with Reaganite principles had a certain logic, but they should also have known that Smith despised conspicuous consumption and favoritism toward the wealthy.) By 1989, with the collapse of socialist regimes in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, Smith reigned as intellectual king of the economic hill.
II
In person, Adam Smith seemed the unlikeliest of guides to the practical world. He was, hands down, the most absentminded economist in the history of the discipline. Once he put bread and butter into boiling water and complained that he had never tasted a worse cup of tea. Bumbling and ungainly, he was forever talking to himself, sometimes in a loud voice. "His absence of mind was amazing," wrote Walter Bagehot. "On one occasion, having to sign his own name to an official document, he produced not his own signature, but an elaborate imitation of the signature of the person who signed before him; on another, a sentinel on duty having saluted him in military fashion" [doing the 'Present Arms' movement with his rifle], Smith "astounded and offended the man by acknowledging it with a copy - a very clumsy copy no doubt - of the same gestures."
Altogether, he represented an easy target for future critics. Schumpeter liked to ridicule Smith's "sheltered and uneventful life" as "a professor born and bred." He noted with relish that Smith's understanding of human nature was circumscribed by the fact "that no woman, excepting his mother, ever played a role in his existence: in this as in other respects the glamours and passions of life were just literature to him." This comment reveals less about Smith than about Schumpeter, the self-styled world's leading economist and greatest lover; and it is not quite accurate. Smith did lead the quiet life of a scholar, but his cousin Jane Douglas kept house for him over many years, and during a sojourn to France in the 1760s he made lasting friendships with several women who presided over Paris salons.
Smith (1723-1790) was born and raised in Kirkcaldy, a town of about fifteen hundred on the North Sea side of Scotland, just across the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh. His father, several other relatives, and eventually he himself were employed by the Scottish civil service, an ironic circumstance given his future reputation as an anti-government man. As a child, he was delicate and dreamy, subject, as his biographer John Rae puts it, to "those fits of absence and that habit of speaking to himself which he carried all through his life." Kidnapped by gypsies at the age of three, he was returned to his mother in short order. "He would have made, I fear, a poor gipsy," Rae avers. As an adult, Smith once went out for a nocturnal stroll wearing his dressing gown and, deep in thought, walked all the way to Dunfermline, fifteen miles west of Kirkcaldy.
After a local elementary education, Smith entered the University of Glasgow at the age of fourteen. In his three years there, he earned an M.A. and became excited by the philosophic teachings of Francis Hutcheson, the likely source of Smith's powerful economic ideas about the division of labor. He then spent six years at Oxford on a scholarship, one of a tiny number of Scots among the total of one hundred students enrolled at Balliol college. Little is known of his years at Oxford except that, judging from the evidence of his later writings, he detested it. He found no new Hutchesons to inspire him, and he came to regard the English university system as generally corrupt and inferior to that of Scotland.
Smith returned to his mother's home in Kirkcaldy in 1746. Now twenty-three years old, still studious and unprepossessing, he felt no attraction to either the ministry or the law. For a couple of years he did nothing, at least nothing that was recorded. Then came a sudden opportunity. He was invited by some prominent men of Edinburgh to give a series of public lectures on rhetoric, belles lettres, and jurisprudence. In his presentations that followed, he proved such an able scholar and speaker that in 1751 he was elected to the chair of logic at the University of Glasgow. Later in that same year he moved up to the more prestigious chair of moral philosophy, once held by his own teacher, the 'never to be forgotten' Hutcheson.
Smith remained at Glasgow for twelve years, lecturing and writing. In 1759, at the age of thirty-six, he brought out the first of his two great books. This was The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which soon made him moderately famous in Britain and throughout Europe. Six English editions were published during his lifetime. Three French and two German translations appeared before the end of the eighteenth century.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments is a long, engaging treatise on human nature and ethical systems. Written in the 'plain style' Smith cultivated, it flows so easily that one suspects it originated as a series of oral presentations to undergraduates. "It is rather painting than writing," waxed Edmund Burke in his review. The book combines in approximately equal parts what today would be taught in departments of ethics, psychology, and sociology. The unit of analysis is the individual. The theme is the evolution of moral structures and the mixture of motivations that govern human behavior. There is much criticism of the pursuit of wealth and of undue admiration for "the rich and powerful," which Smith finds "the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments." The analytical emphasis is on "sympathy" (what we would call empathy), "self-love" (self-interest), and the "impartial spectator" (one's conscience, reinforced by a desire to be well regarded by others and to deserve their high regard). The opening sentence of the book suggests both its concentration on human nature and its appealing tone: "How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it." The book is much less preoccupied with "the invisible hand" of beneficent market forces than is The Wealth of Nations, which appeared seventeen years later.
Among contemporary admirers of The Theory of Moral Sentiments was the English statesman Charles Townshend, stepfather of the young Duke of Buccleuch. Townshend had visited Glasgow not long after reading the book. (The ever-distracted Smith, conducting him on a visit to a local tannery, fell into a vat of evil-smelling liquid and had to excuse himself.)
<#FROWN:G71\>
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
First Person Singular
The best time to write one's autobiography, surely, is on one's deathbed. Leaving aside the technical problem of getting the job done - all those interruptions from medicos, clergymen, florists, relatives - just before death, assuming one isn't squirming in pain, is likely to provide one's best shot at understanding one's own life, if not, granted, life itself. Writing one's autobiography at the very close of one's life would also give the story a nice rounded-off quality - a sense, as Dr. Kermode has it, of an ending. Before the end, after all, one is likely to have too much to defend and too much to hide, likely to be too worried about tact and about the tactics of one's own little career. But there, on one's deathbed, one can at last say - the hope is, with easeful breath - oh, screw it, let 'er rip, I shall tell the truth at last.
Until that time, though, truth about one's self and one's relationships with the people close to one is not usually freely expressed. Freud said that biographical truth was unavailable. Henry James thought that biography tended to flatten out life and make it thinner than in reality it is. And this, recall, is biography they were talking about. As for autobiography, Orwell, whose specialty was never that of putting things gently, said that "autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from inside is simply a series of defeats."
Yet, theoretically, writing autobiography ought not to be so horrendously difficult. The autobiographer, as Leslie Stephen long ago pointed out, has "ex officiotwo qualifications of supreme importance in all literary work. He is writing about a topic in which he is keenly interested, and about a topic upon which he is the highest authority." Autobiography, according to Stephen, also allows one to give way to "an irresistible longing for confidential expansion," which was that very superior late Victorian's elegantly euphemistic way of referring to the pleasure of spilling the beans. True, not everyone has the same quantity of beans to spill, and then, too, not all beans are equally delectable. Yet the urge at some point to spill them doubtless resides in most of us. All this being so, one would think there would be a great deal of first-class autobiography around.
There isn't. Nor has there ever been. The problem of lying by way of moral self-aggrandizement that Orwell alluded to plays a role here. The knowledge that one has been a miserable failure, and probably a creep into the bargain, is not easily made public and this is part of the problem. (All autobiographies, it has been noted, tend to grow dull at exactly the point where the autobiographer has achieved success.) Withholding evidence is a more serious part of the problem. But even this might be surmounted, or so one might think, if one didn't often withhold evidence even from oneself. Dostoyevsky, that perpetual drag on optimism, put the matter with damnable perfection when he wrote:
Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even himself, and every man has a number of such things in his mind.
As if this weren't troublesome enough, one recognizes that the cards dealt one in life present further obstacles on the Damascene road to truth. The cards I have in mind are called parents (face cards, those), one's sex (low clubs), social class (diamonds), religion, nationality, toss in geography within one's nationality (hearts all). Add to this the distinct prospect of getting one's own story confused with other people's stories, a prospect perhaps greater than at any other time in the past, since there appears to be a vast quantity of such stories afloat just now. By other people's stories I mean the competing stories put forth by psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, you name it, many of which are there to be adopted by the pliant-minded as their very own. Every psychoanalysand is, after all, merely a prone autobiographer, with the main themes of his story having already been foretold by that dogmatic, cigar-smoking gentleman from Vienna. Fresh stories of this generic kind are put into play with fair regularity. A psychiatrist of my acquaintance tells me that nowadays, owing to the publicity that child-abuse stories have received on television and in the press, a large number of patients under psychiatric care are combing their pasts searching for child abuse in their own lives. Surprise, surprise, with only a little stretch of the imagination, a little twist of personal history, not a few find it.
The cards one is dealt in life have a way of occluding, channelling, shaping the facts of one's life to the point where it is not always certain they can any longer be called facts. The potential motives for writing autobiography - ranging from the need for vengeance, to setting down for the record what a winsome fellow one is, to being a writer with nothing else in mind to write at the present time - are as great as those for going on with life itself. Alas, despite one's belief in objective truth, one has to allow the distinct possibility that there may be no autobiographical truth but only a handful of splendid autobiographies.
Odd, but very few of these really splendid autobiographies have been written by novelists, poets, and playwrights. Saint Augustine, Cellini, Rousseau, Gibbon, Franklin, Mill, Alexander Herzen, Henry Adams, the men - and there have thus far been almost no women - who wrote the monumental autobiographical works were none of them primarily imaginative literary artists. Henry James, that consummate artist, botched his two volumes of autobiography, A Small Boy and Others and Notes of A Son and Brother - botched them insofar as they have no real standing as discrete works of art, but are of interest chiefly as Jamesian curiosities. How strange that Henry James, surely the greatest master of introspection the world has known, should fail at autobiography, which, at its best, is primarily the art of introspection.
Perhaps there is something about autobiography that discomfits literary artists. Literary artists, it has been said, use up their autobiographical experience, in more or less transmuted form, in their poems and plays, stories and novels. But the truth is that, in the use of experience, artists have been great recyclers long before the term recycling was invented. Why not run the same material through once more this time non-fictionally or non-poetically, in one's autobiography? Many a literary artist has tried, but not generally with impressive results. Vladimir Nabokov's lovely autobiography, Speak, Memory, seems to me a notable exception, though it is a work driven by a deep nostalgic yearning for a lost country. But so overwhelmingly is this the case that one is inclined to think that perhaps autobiography and pure art are if not antithetical then less than compatible, and the better the artist the poorer the autobiographer he is likely to prove. To cite only two fairly recent examples, Anthony Powell, whose novels can be so greatly pleasing, wrote four volumes of autobiography that, for dullness, could bring sleep to an insomnia ward. Evelyn Waugh, who hadn't an uninteresting sentence in him, wrote, in A Little Learning, a single, most disappointing volume of autobiography.
My own two-cent theory holds that artists don't finally believe in autobiography; deep down they don't hold with it, as an earlier generation used to say, as a sufficiently worthy vessel of truth-telling. They don't hold with it principally because they sense, if they do not absolutely know, that there is a higher truth than that offered by the pedestrian but necessary factuality demanded by autobiography. Or, as Goethe wrote in Fiction and Truth: "A fact of our experience is of value not insofar as it is true, but insofar as it has something to signify." Only in arts do all facts signify.
Not all but a fair part of the pleasure of reading autobiography is in catching the autobiographer out in suspicious reticences, self-serving misperceptions, cover-ups, and, of course, delightfully clever deceptions. What's he hiding, what's he withholding, why doesn't he talk about his first wife, who's he kidding leaving out his children, odd he never mentions money - such are the questions that roam randomly through the mind of your normally licentious reader of autobiography. An intelligent person reads autobiography for two things: for the facts and for the lies, knowing that the lies are often more interesting than the facts. From the other side, that of the writer, if you make yourself look good in your autobiography, you seem a hypocrite; own up to being a swine, you will have no difficulty finding people who will readily enough believe you. Not a game at which it is easy to win, autobiography.
This is not to say that the appetite for reading autobiography isn't very strong. Certainly it is with me, so much so that autobiography is the only kind of book I should rather read than write. (I have myself long ago decided never to write an autobiography, preferring to spend my own autobiography, in nickels and dimes, in essays, memoirs, and anecdotes.) The appetite for autobiography reaches quite across the brows, from high to appallingly low. Hence the vast sums laid out by publishers for the life stories - "self-biographies," Isaac D'Israeli called them - of such men and women far on the other side of the literary divide as Norman Schwartzkopf and Magic Johnson, Katharine Hepburn and the Mayflower Madame. Which reminds me that a friend of mine, who works on celebrity autobiographies, was simultaneously writing the autobiographies of Tip O'Neill, former Speaker of the House, and the Mayflower Madame, speaker of a house of another kind. I worried for him throughout these projects, fearful that he might mix up his galleys.
I have just read six autobiographies - one of these of two volumes, together running to more than 850 pages. Three of these are by Englishmen, three by very different sorts of Americans. One of the latter is a woman and two among them are Southerners and set in the South, which, one sometimes feels, is another country unto itself. I have the feeling that none of my six autobiographers would at all wish to spend much time in the company of any of the others. As a reader, I can say that all have stepped into my little confessional, and, having now heard them out, I don't know what penance ought to be assigned to them. A wise guy might say that it was I who served the penance, having to read all these pages filled with disdain, chagrin, outrage, and petty vengeance. Still, reading autobiography, while it does not increase one's hope for the race, does lend vast amusement in watching it all pass in review from the rail.
What also emerges - though perhaps my selection of autobiographies has an oddly skewed bias in this direction - is that one is never too old to express resentment against one's parents. Not many kind words for parents here; very few parents in these books come off at all handsomely; grandparents, too, take a few good shots. It's almost as if their authors all subscribed to Philip Larkin's view in 'This Be The Verse,' a version of which perrhaps needs to be rewritten for parents:
You tick them off, your son and daughter.
You may not mean to, but you do.
In old age and even death, except from them no quarter,
Nothing but resentment, and all aimed just at you.
National differences might be the best place to begin. Auberon Waugh offers an interesting throw-away sentence in his autobiography, Will This Do?, which seems to me nicely to distinguish the differences between English and American autobiography in our day.
<#FROWN:G72\>
Michael Mandelbaum
COUP DE GRACE:
THE END OF THE SOVIET UNION
On August 24, 1991, three days after the collapse of an attempted coup by a group of high Soviet officials in Moscow, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev killed himself in his Kremlin office. Mikhail Gorbachev's special adviser on military affairs left a suicide note: "Everything I have worked for is being destroyed."
Akhromeyev had devoted his life to three institutions: the Soviet army, in whose service he had been wounded at Leningrad in 1941 and through whose ranks he had risen to the position of chief of the General Staff (1984-88); the Communist Party, which he had joined at 20 and on whose Central Committee he had served since 1983; and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics itself, officially founded a year before his birth in 1923. In the wake of the failed coup all three were disintegrating.
The armed forces were divided and disgraced. Entire units had refused to take part in the coup. A number of the troops sent to besiege the Russian parliament building - where a crowd that ultimately numbered 100,000 had gathered to defend the Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, and his government - defected to Yeltsin's side. After the coup had failed Defense Minister Dimitri Yazov and his deputy, Valentin Varennikov, were arrested. Yevgeny I. Shaposhnikov, the newly appointed minister, announced that 80 percent of the army's officers would be replaced because they were politically suspect.
The Communist Party was shattered. As jubilant crowds cheered, statues of communist heroes were pulled down all over Moscow. Gorbachev, shortly after his return from his ordeal in the Crimea, resigned as leader of the party, dissolved the Central Committee, ordered an end to party activity in the military, the security apparatus and the government, and told local party organizations that they would have to fend for themselves.
The union of 15 republics was itself dissolving. In Moscow people began to wave the blue, white and red flag of prerevolutionary Russia. The republics scrambled to declare their independence, the Ukrainian parliament voting for full independence by 321 to 1. For 75 years the vast stretch of Eurasia that was the Soviet Union had been tightly, often brutally controlled from Moscow, which had come to be known as "the center."The president of Armenia, Levon Ter-Petrossian, declared that "the center has committed suicide."
II
The coup might have been expected to succeed. The ranks of the eight-man junta that on August 19 announced it was assuming power, proclaiming a state of emergency, banning demonstrations, closing newspapers and outlawing political parties, included the leaders of the most powerful institutions of the Soviet Union: the government, the security apparatus and the military-industrial complex. Yet they failed completely. Two minor episodes during the three dramatic days of August 19-21 exemplify the reasons for their failure.
On August 20 Yelsin dispatched his foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, to Paris to prepare a government-in-exile should that become necessary. The junta learned of the trip and sent word to Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport to detain Kozyrev. He succeeded in leaving, however, because the order to stop him went to the airport's VIP lounge while Kozyrev simply stood in the departure lines with ordinary passengers. It apparently did not occur to the plotters that a high official would fail to take advantage to the privileges available to him.
In short, the men who launched the coup were incompetent. They did not send troops and tanks in to the streets of Moscow until a full six hours after declaring the state of emergency. They neglected to seize Yeltsin immediately, thus making it possible for him to become the focal point of resistance. They failed to cut the Russian parliament's communications with the rest of the world.
It was, to use a phrase familiar under the old regime, "no accident" that the coup-plotters bungled so badly. The people at the top of the communist system were not the best and the brightest of the society they governed. That system did not encourage or reward initiative, imagination or decisiveness. It valued, instead, dull conformity and slavish obedience to authority. Several members of the junta were later reported to have spent most of the 72 hours of the coup drunk.
The other exemplary episode took place on Monday afternoon, August 19, the first day of the coup. The junta called a press conference. Gennadi Yanaev, the vice president who had assumed Gorbachev's duties because, he said, the president was "ill," made a statement and fielded questions. One journalist asked whether he had sought "any suggestion or any advice through General Pinochet." The question evoked laughter. It was meant to be sarcastic and belittling by associating the coup-plotters with the conservative Chilean dictator who had overthrown Marxist President Salvador Allende in 1974 and had thus been routinely reviled by Soviet propaganda.
The event, the question and the response were all telling. When Lenin seized power in Petrograd in November 1917 he did not feel it necessary to call a press conference to explain and justify what he had done. Nor were his successors in the habit of entertaining questions from the press. And when they did offer their thoughts in public, no one had ever dared to mock them. In Stalin's day failing to applaud the leader vigorously enough was cause for being sent to prison - or worse.
Since Stalin's day, however, things had changed. The Soviet Union in which Yanaev was attempting to seize power was a very different country from the one that Lenin and Stalin, indeed that Khrushchev and even Brezhnev had ruled. So different was it, in fact, that each of the three great institutions to which Marshal Akhromeyev had devoted his life was already in an advanced state of decay by August 19.
Well before it balked at the junta's orders the army had been severely battered. In 1988 it had withdrawn from Afghanistan after nine years and 15,000 deaths without having pacified the country. The next year the revolutions in Poland, Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia ended the Cold War, depriving the Soviet armed forces of what had been, for four decades, their central mission. Troops stationed in those countries had to leave; many had no homes to which to return.
Draft evasion became rampant, especially outside Russia. The army was divided politically by rank, age, region, and ethnic group. Junior officers began criticizing their superiors; several were elected to all-union and republican parliaments, where they expressed dissenting views on military questions. The political leadership committed itself to substantial reductions in military spending, and proposals were floated to abolish conscription and rely instead on volunteers to fill the army's ranks.
In all, the military suffered from a severe loss of status. In the Brezhnev era, in particular, official propaganda had glorified the mighty Soviet army as the stalwart defender of socialism. By 1991 it was despised outside Russia as an agent of imperial oppression and had come to be seen in the Russian heartland as a self-serving bureaucracy whose endless appetite for resources was bankrupting the country.
The Communist Party was similarly reeling from blows to its privileged standing before Gorbachev effectively closed it down. It was subject for the first time in six decades to open criticism, which turned into an avalanche of denunciation. Far from being the champion of the toiling masses and the vanguard of the just society, as it had always portrayed itself, the party came to be seen as a criminal conspiracy dedicated to preserving its own position. The elections of 1989 and 1990 to the national and republican supreme soviets humiliated the party, as people voted in droves against communist officeholders even when there was no opposing candidate.
Members deserted the party in enormous numbers. By one estimate four million people, fully 20 percent of the membership, had quit the party in the year immediately preceding the coup. In some places the local party apparatus simply disintegrated. Gorbachev renounced the long-standing and fundamental communist claim to a monopoly of power, and the month before the coup he pushed through a party charter that virtually abandoned the formerly sacred precepts of Marxism-Leninism. After his election as Russian president, Yeltsin ordered party cells in workplaces throughout Russia dissolved, challenging the basis of the communist grip on the everyday lives of the people of the Soviet Union.
As for the union itself, it was well on the way to becoming a hollow shell even before the republics began to declare independence in the coup's wake. The republican elections had brought to power governments determined not simply to take orders from Moscow, as had been the rule in Soviet politics for decades. Each of the 15 republics had proclaimed itself "sovereign," meaning that its own laws took precedence over those of the center. Ukraine, the second most important of them after Russia, was moving to recruit its own armed forces and issue its own currency.
On the eve of the coup nine republics were preparing to sign a new union treaty, which would have deprived Moscow of virtually all economic power and left the republics with the right both to challenge any powers the center retained and to secede if they were dissatisfied with the new arrangements. The prospect of this new union treaty probably triggered the coup attempt, for it would have eliminated most of the functions of precisely those organizations that the plotters headed. The coup was a last-ditch attempt to preserve their own power. But that power had already been severely eroded. As the political scientist William Taubman put it at the time: "The coup occurred because of all the changes that have taken place, and it failed because of all the changes that have taken place." The coup-plotters struck to restore the old order; the result of their failure was to put it out of its misery. What began as a coup d'tat to preserve it turned out to be the coup de grace for the Soviet Union.
III
How did all this come about? How did it happen that a mighty imperial state, troubled but stable only a few years before, had come to the brink of collapse in 1991? Who and what were responsible?
The chief architect of the Soviet collapse was Mikhail Gorbachev himself. During the coup, as a prisoner of the junta in his Crimean villa, he was the object of a struggle between the partisans of the old order and the champions of liberal values. But it was Gorbachev who had, in the period between his coming to power in 1985 and the fateful days of August 1991, created the conditions that had touched off this struggle.
The Soviet leader had created them unintentionally. His aim had been to strengthen the political and economic systems that he inherited, to strip away their Stalinist accretions and make the Soviet Union a modern dynamic state. Instead he had fatally weakened it. Intending to reform Soviet communism he had, rather, destroyed it. The three major policies that he had launched to fashion a more efficient and humane form of socialism - glasnost, democratization and perestroika - had in the end subverted, discredited and all but done away with the network of political and economic institutions that his Communist Party had constructed in Russia and surrounding countries since 1917.
The policy of glasnost relaxed bureaucratic controls on information, broadened the parameters of permitted discussion and thereby enabled the people of the Soviet Union to say more, hear more and learn more about their past and present. Gorbachev's purpose had been to enlist the intelligentsia in his campaign to revitalize the country and to generate popular pressure on the party apparatus, which had resisted the changes he was trying to make. He plainly wanted to encourage criticism of his predecessor, Leonid Brezhnev, and to resume the campaign against Stalin that Khrushchev had launched but that Brezhnev had ended.
Glasnost, however, did not stop there. The sainted Lenin, and even Gorbachev himself, came in for critical attention. Gorbachev wanted to foster a reassessment of some selected features of Soviet life.
<#FROWN:G73\>
Schlegel's sense of the poetic voice or presence of the poet, as that which "hover[s] at midpoint between" the portrayer and the portrayed, positions this voice on a vertical axis, running down between poet and poem, both between these two terms, and also hovering above them; between and above. For Olson, however, between the 'I' of the phrase, 'I have this sense,' and the 'I' who is one with his 'skin,' there is not, or for him ought not be, any difference: there is only a singular, compact identity. If there is transcendence for Olson, it would not be a mere disembodied voice hovering above and/or between bodies, as for Schlegel, but the entire embodied individual, hovering in space. Such a theme, as R.W.B. Lewis shows in The American Adam, is hardly foreign to American writers.
Olson's line is of course susceptible to a reading in which the voice of the poet hovers just at that midpoint between the 'I' (the portrayer) and the 'I am one/ with my skin' (the portrayed). That midpoint, not above or below, but somehow right between, is a non-transcendent place. This reading would put the poetic voice in the place of that difference which ought to make no difference, that space which is not supposed to be a space, and must be denied as a significant space if identity is to be achieved. Olson might endorse a transcendent voice which presides from above as it yokes the portrayer and portrayed together, but he would no doubt resist the notion of a voice 'between,' for it would threaten to undo the identity which that same voice nonetheless seems to desire.
Olson is one of the great readers of Melville. He seems to have had an uncanny relation with the author: at times, in reading Call Me Ishmael, one is not sure whose voice is being heard. Olson's sense of being at one with his skin has many echoes in Melville's works, which begins to complicate the very self-identity being asserted. The Melville who wrote of self-identity in terms of being at one with one's skin was a young Melville; not the Melville who wrote Pierre, or anything after. Even before Pierre, when Melville was writing his fifth novel, White-Jacket (1849-50), the possibility of being at one with one's skin was being both posed and explicitly put into question. The narrator-protagonist of this novel is named White Jacket because of a white jacket he so continuously wore that it seemed to become his second skin. Towards the end of the novel he finally divests himself of this jacket, saying I "ripped my jacket straight up and down [with a knife], as if I were ripping open myself. With a violent struggle I then burst out of it, and was free" (404).
White Jacket does not, however, liberate himself from a mere jacket, for a strong analogy holds between clothing and language as exterior forms of material signifiers. Melville apparently had not read Carlyle's Sartor Resartus when he wrote White-Jacket, but he didn't need to have read it; the analogy Carlyle suggested between language and clothing, in his philosophy of clothes, had currency then as now (see Barthes's The Fashion System). Melville clearly thought of language by drawing on an analogy between language and clothing. In White-Jacket, such an analogy is quite explicitly thematized. How, then, are we to read that moment when White Jacket strips himself of his white jacket? Does he strip himself from language itself, or does he remove a level of false signifiers which then allows the true signifier, the true voice, now unencumbered by a material signifier, to be revealed?
On the one hand, Melville had, as did his age, a na<*_>i-umlaut<*/>ve sense of the relation he felt ought to exist between language and being. He believed and desired that language ought, somehow, to be co-extensive with self. As Emerson said, expression or language is the other half of man, and the link between those halves is unproblematic. Those links became problematic for Melville, however, and the strategies he developed to deal with the problems arising from this na<*_>i-umlaut<*/>ve sense of language are themselves far from na<*_>i-umlaut<*/>ve. To examine Melville's sense of the identity which he felt ought to have held between language and self is to examine Melville's struggle with his flesh - his materiality - and his desire to be at one with, identical to, his skin.
I
Some nine years after Melville's death, Peter Toft, an otherwise little-known American artist, published an account of his friendship with Melville which developed during the author's later years. Of particular interest is what Toft tells us of Melville's attitude towards his writings, an attitude no doubt determined by Toft's apparently insistent questioning. Toft writes that Melville "seemed to hold his work in small esteem, and discouraged my attempts to discuss them. 'You know,' he would say, 'more about them than I do. I have forgotten them.' He would give me no information about the old whaling tradition of the fiendish White-Whale ('Moby Dick') ... and [he] was almost offended when I inquired so curiously about his falling from the maintopgallant yard of the frigate - ('White Jacket') ... " (Leyda 799).
For Toft, the value of literature lay in its relation to truth. He doesn't hesitate to identify the 'true' identity of a character like White Jacket: he was obviously Melville himself. If one assumes that Melville's struggle with language turned precisely on questions of and the desire for identity, then Melville's irritation with Toft's questions becomes understandable. If Melville defers, perhaps ironically, perhaps bitterly, to such a reader, suggesting that that reader must always already know more than the author, it is because the problem of the very possibility of knowing remained for Melville a complex issue.
Toft's explanation of why Melville was "almost offended" when he "so curiously" asked him about his fall from the yardarm, as told in White-Jacket, was that Melville "was abnormal, as most geniuses are, and had to be handled with care" (Leyda 799). That answer is hardly satisfactory, as Howard Vincent shows in his book, The Tailoring of Melville's 'White-Jacket.' According to Vincent, who retells Toft's story, Melville's irritation in this instance was due to the fact that Melville had lied, and Toft's inquiries had touched precisely upon those lies he had told. Not only had Melville not fallen from any maintopgallant mast, but he had not even made it up; rather, he had stolen the entire episode of the fall from someone else's text, that of the sailor Nathaniel Ames, as given in his personal narrative entitled A Mariner's Sketches (1831) (Vincent 202). An apparently shocked Vincent writes:
So open, so barefaced is the character of Melville's theft that one must wonder whether he did not feel a twinge of guilt. Perhaps he did, but it can be argued that he erased that guilt by strategic placement of his borrowed passages, so giving each a new and different significance. (Vincent 219)
One wonders whether Vincent himself felt a "twinge of guilt" about his delight in having discovered the father naked, although he mainly succeeds in exposing himself. It is not surprising that Vincent's attempt to cover for the Melville whom he exposed does little credit to Melville's abilities as a writer: "[Melville] erased that guilt by the strategic placement of his borrowed passages" (219). Moreover, Vincent's efforts to salvage Melville from his devious theft are misplaced. According to the passage above, Melville redeems his literary theft through a "strategic placement of ... [the] borrowed passages" from Ames's text, which gives "each a new and different significance." Yet Vincent's own painstaking labor - setting side by side passages from Ames's text and Melville's - shows Melville's relation to Ames's text never was one of "strategic placement of ... borrowed passages," to give "each" borrowed passage, each stolen piece, a new significance. Vincent implies that Melville lifted intact entire pieces, chunks, or chains of signifiers from Ames's text, placed them in his own, and simply arranged their order. This is not the case. One cannot find any evidence of what we could call plagiarism. At the level of the signifier, there is no immediate similarity between Melville's text and that of Ames. Without a repetition at the level of the signifier, one can no longer talk in any strict sense of borrowing, nor of Melville's mode of writing as "strategic placement" of "borrowed" passages.
If we assume for the moment that there was a case of literary theft, even if not word-for-word, and if we likewise assume that the theft was as obvious, open, and barefaced as Vincent claims, the question that forces itself upon us is that if the theft is so apparent and so easy to trace, in what sense was it really a theft? Vincent doesn't refer to Benito Cereno which repeats, almost entirely, the text of another author, Amasa Delano, who is never explicitly acknowledged as author, yet whose name, along with others from the original text, Melville retains in his text. Much rides on this 'almost.' What becomes significant in such a case are the differences that are introduced in the near-repetition - differences which, because they are and can be marked as different only on the surface, as signifiers, come to be ignored in the haste to identify an essence, beyond the mere surface. Vincent reads at the level of content, finding the only slightly differing surface signifiers of each text. This mode of reading finally rewrites that surface level, for mere surface differences of the signifier are differences which make no difference. A difference remains, however, which can potentially disturb not only the notion of theft, but likewise the ideas that make the claim of theft possible: the belief in and protection of private property. The proper, truth as interior essence, 'original' artistic creation - these beliefs stand behind and make possible Toft's curious questions and Vincent's exposures, both of which depend on the structure of and desire for identity. Ultimately the question of a theft from Ames's work is itself irrelevant, while the questions inadvertently raised by the accusation - those of repetition, the problem of ownership given repetition, or the very possibility of identity - remain at the heart of the matter.
2
Critics generally agree that the description of the fall of the sailor White Jacket from the topmost spar of the mast is, as Alfred Kazin writes "the most famous single scene" in the book (ix). Its fame has persisted in spite of the claims that the scene was lifted. This single scene, however, is divided into two moments: a kind of prelude which describes the complications which lead up to and set the scene for - but do not cause White Jacket's fall, and then a description of White Jacket's plummet into the ocean and his subsequent rise to the surface. Kazin, Vincent, and other critics make no explicit reference to this first moment, which I have called the prelude; they focus exclusively on the second moment, that of the actual fall, when they refer to this scene. As a result, this prelude seems to have a curious history of going unread. This passage goes as follows:
Having reeved the line through all the inferior blocks, I went out with it to the end of weather-top-gallant-yard-arm, and was in the act of leaning over and passing it through the suspended jewel-block there, when the ship gave a plunge in the sudden swells of the calm sea, and pitching me still further over the yard, threw the heavy skirts of my jacket right over my head, completely muffling me. Somehow I thought it was the sail that had flapped, and, under that impression, threw up my hands to drag it from my head, relying upon the sail itself to support me meanwhile. Just then the ship gave another sudden jerk, and, head foremost, I pitched from the yard. (402)
Vincent's claim of plagiarism is irrelevant to this passage since Ames's text contains nothing resembling this description of what makes the fall possible, either at the level of the signified or signifier.
<#FROWN:G74\>
MALCOLM LITTLE UNDERSTOOD hunger. In many ways it defined his childhood. Certainly it taught him lessons he would never forget, and years later Malcolm X would be lecturing his assistant minister Benjamin Karim on hunger as the most basic of human drives.
Not only did Malcolm in his boyhood suffer the pangs of physical hunger for want of food; he also sharply experienced hunger for affection, acceptance, guidance, encouragement. The Littles lived meagerly, and more and more the economic hardships of the Depression drained Louise Little's emotional and spiritual reserves. She became despondent, withdrew from harsh realities. By 1937 the Little family was rapidly deteriorating. Malcolm had begun stealing. He was twelve when he found himself in the first of what would be numerous foster homes. In January 1939, following a severe nervous breakdown, Malcolm's mother was declared legally insane and committed to the state mental hospital at Kalamazoo. Still, Malcolm himself clung to his diminished pride and his ambitions, continually battered though they were. As he relates in the Autobiography, one day he confided to his favorite eighth grade teacher that he wanted to be a lawyer, only to be told that "that's no realistic goal for a nigger" - even though Malcolm at the time was ranked near the top of his otherwise white class. That day marked a turning point for Malcolm, then thirteen. Within months he would be exploring the street life of Boston.
More than miles separated the childhood experience of Malcolm Little in the bleak northern suburbs of Lansing from that of Benjamin Karim in rural Suffolk, Virginia. Suffolk lies about eighty miles south of Richmond, and when Benjamin Karim was growing up in the 1930s, it was that small you could see from one end of the town to the other in an easy glance. By then Suffolk was feeling the economic pinch of the Great Depression, but still trade continued at the general store where townswomen bartered fresh eggs or homegrown poultry for provisions. In the barbershop men gathered for easy gossip or talked idly of the weather, crops, hard times. Kids kicked up the dust in quiet streets or played in the shade of fruit-bearing trees, or they helped to weed the vegetable patches planted in the backyards of small clapboard houses.
In one of those houses, on July 14, 1932, a midwife delivered the first, and only, child of young Mary Goodman in her mother Sarah's bed. The child was baptized Benjamin and given his mother's family name. (Not until 1978 did he take the Muslim name Karim.) In private Mary called him Dickie-boy, a term of affection that would survive nearly twenty years, as would the inviolable bond forged by Mary with her son in his early childhood. It was a "good childhood," as Benjamin Karim remembers it, and he describes the small-town boy who grew up in the meager thirties as being "absolutely content." He recalls the simplicity of daily life then, and the sense of community that prompted people to help their neighbors and enabled them to rely on friends. And no matter how much his family may have wanted for material goods or a dollar's pleasures, they never wanted for food.
Everybody had gardens, Benjamin Karim remembers. We would grow corn and beans and onions and radishes, whatever, and in the summer the fruit trees would bury us in pears and apples. We'd pick wild berries, too. Then the women would put the fruit up in jars. They'd have big pots bubbling on the stove, all the fruit smelling as sweet as the season, and while they were cooking, we boys would be out back chopping wood to feed the stove. For days we'd keep the fire going, until we'd have hundreds of jars of fruit preserves and other home-canned goods - vegetables and sauces and relishes - stored out in the pantry. So in the wintertime nobody would have to worry about going hungry. We also had pigs, three of four of them, and we raised chickens, so we always had fresh eggs.
We didn't really need a lot of money. If we ran out of flour or sugar, say, we would gather up a few eggs and take them to Mr. Nichols's general store. Two or three eggs might bring us enough pennies to buy a pound of flour or as much of sugar, and that's a nice taste of sugar. One of our chickens, dressed, would get us both the flour and the sugar and maybe some rice or potatoes as well as a nickel soda for me. We bartered like that quite a bit. Or we borrowed. Neighbors helped each other out with a scoop of flour or cup of milk; what we had we shared. We've lost communal values like that, like we've lost our fruit trees and farming land to real-estate developers. You'd have to search hard to find the Suffolk I knew as a child.
Suffolk was divided by railroad tracks. White people lived on one side of the tracks and on the other lived the blacks. For a time we lived right by the railroad tracks. Day and night the trains would be running past my grandmother's house, where we lived, but they really didn't bother us; they just told us what time it was. On either side of the railroad tracks lay a drainage ditch, and sometimes some of us black kids would cross the near ditch and the railroad tracks and then the ditch opposite, or else the white kids would cross from their side - they'd be the poor white kids, the ones who lived near the tracks - and we'd play together. We'd play childhood street games or run wild in the woods. We had fun, and I don't remember a single fight ever between us, not when we were little kids.
My grandmother worked for a family in the poor white neighborhood. In fact she ran their house. She told everybody what to do and what not to, including the man of the house - he owned a service station that was losing more money than it was making - and everybody in that household listened. She commanded a ton of respect, so much so that when she died in 1952, not a member of that family missed the funeral. Often I would visit the house with my grandmother. The service station owner had a son about my age and sometimes we would play together the whole day. If we'd get ourselves into any sort of trouble, my grandmother would give both of us alike her what-for. Also, if she'd give the two of us some chore, like it or not, he'd do it, although he might first look to his father for some signal that he could disobey - same way that I would do to mine - but his father would just look away. I enjoyed those days we spent together in his house. Then we reached the age when black kids and white kids no longer associated with each other. Society, it seemed, forbade it; it was something that happened before you actually realized it, something you felt. Only when you got older did you know why.
Of course, once we started school we never saw white kids day to day. That our schools were segregated never entered our minds. Nor did it bother us. It seemed natural, normal; the white kids went to their school and we went to ours. They were corn and we were rutabagas. I first went to school at Easter Graded in the black community of Saratoga. The large, white frame building housed four classrooms, two on either side of the principal's office, and it was heated by a big potbelly stove. When the weather turned cold, each morning two or three of the older kids - the school went up to the fifth grade - would get up early and trudge off to Easter Graded to build a fire in that big potbelly stove; it was their chore. To have the heat jumping in that big iron belly by nine, you'd have to get up as early as five o'clock in the cold and dark, but you took your turn, you shared the chore. Lessons like that never caused me any harm.
When the school term ended, I would sometimes spend the whole summer, often into harvest time, out in Windsor, Virginia, with my Aunt Martha and her sixteen children. They worked as sharecroppers on a white man's farm. Like many freed plantation slaves before them, they had no choice but to hire themselves out as tenant farmers to white landowners in order to survive after the federal government reneged on its promise to provide each black family with forty acres and a mule. For what did the freed blacks know but working the land? For their white masters they had seeded the earth and tended the crops and harvested the peanuts, tobacco, and corn, the indigo, hemp, alfalfa, and cotton. So sharecropping had become the norm in the South. When I was seven, though, I wasn't so much seeing injustices as I was enjoying the company of my cousins. We had our fun, of course, but I liked working with them, too, out in the open fields under a summer's sky. I especially remember the sky. In rural Virginia in the thirties and forties the only light we had at night came from the moon and the stars and out on the farm the night sky seemed to lie so close to the earth that I'd think you could just reach right up and with your fingers rake the firmament.
In town I lived with my mother and grandmother. My father lived just down the street. Although he and my mother deeply respected each other always, they never actually married, as my mother felt he was too old for her. He was maybe twenty-six when I was born; my mother was sixteen. All her life she lived with my grandmother, Sarah, except for one year, when I was eight or nine, that she spent in New York. She stayed with a cousin there - in the early forties, the war years, it seemed that everybody down in Suffolk had a cousin or some relative in New York - but after one year she came back. She had worked in a factory packing gefilte fish. Cooped up for long hours in a stifling gefilte fish factory where the workers were not even allowed to speak to one another, my mother, a young woman with a free spirit from a small southern town of friendly, outgoing people who'd think nothing of hollering their greetings from one side of the street to the other, found the conditions unbearable. One thing she said I'll never forget. She was talking to my grandmother, and she told her that for so long as she lived she would never ever again work for a white man.
And she never again did. My mother was strong; she inspired me. She went to Apex Beauty School to learn how to treat and style black woman's hair. She bought chemistry books, which she studied diligently, and she began making her own hair creams and beauty aids. I used to watch her at her work in the kitchen with oils and powders and scents and gelatin. I'd watch her as she'd combine her mysterious ingredients, worry them, and it seemed to me magic the way they would begin to congeal, become viscous and then thick, like Vaseline. Her beauty treatments made her famous among black women in the county. Even today you could go to the south of Virginia and ask any of the older women there about Mary Goodman, and they would tell you that woman could do some hair.
Like my mother, I, too, went to New York for a year. In 1947. I was fourteen then, and I had started feeling that I'd outgrown Suffolk. Night and day I dreamed of living in New York with my uncle.
<#FROWN:G75\>
ALICIA OSTRIKER
THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS
And they said one to another, Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now therefore, and let us slay him, and cast him into some pit, and we will say, Some evil beast has devoured him; and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
Genesis 37.19-20
All dreams are dependent on the interpretation given to them.
Midrash Rabbah
Take me, take me, I am coming down to you. Yes, all our arms are outstretched, we almost have you, just a little farther. Come on, our brother. A trail of bubbles above me, I pull myself hand over hand - weeds thicker than a father's arms, rooted somewhere in the invisible silted floor, offer themselves swaying. I gather strength and kick straight downward. Am I there yet. Are you enclosing me. Yes, it is so enjoyable here, heated, bowel-like, golden, shimmering, green.
When you arrive and join us we will begin our journey, we are all going to be rich, we are only waiting for you.
Our first fathers are alive in dream-time. There they are naked. There they are, naked. We can almost touch them. We ourselves can feel our identity with their bodies, which are their real selves. They are most fundamentally biological beings, family men, those who produce the next generation, the next link. They bless, but they have to beget before they can bless: their paternity is their deepest existence.
God creates. The patriarchs beget. (Although Toledot, begetting, in Genesis 4.2, obliquely almost suggests that God generates the cosmos through a sexual act.)
We can feel this. We remember their movements and gestures, their journeyings, the fine comedy of their family relations, living each other's lives, dying each other's deaths, as performances we ourselves have performed. Almost no separation yet. I practically was or am all these men and women, who are or were me. The presence of El Shaddai, the Breasted One, the Mountain, brings them forward, makes them large, making the borders between them, and between them and me, traversible, and preventing the intellectual distinction between life/dream, or myth/reality, or here/there, or conscious/subconscious, or yes/no from crystallizing. They fill up all the space, like the large, eyes-breathing classical drawings of Picasso.
Among the dream patriarchs nothing is yet repressed, everything is deep yet transparent, like a sea in motion, its tides and currents, and the way it rises up against the cliffs at its shoreline, reaches over boulders, rushes into caves, embraces the rock's least indentations. These patriarchs in their rising-up are always already falling and yet heaving forward again. Theirs are the ceaseless human rhythms, which we recognize as such only when we have already lost them.
With Joseph and his brothers, reality has imperceptibly changed. Without a break in the narrative, something has been broken. The sign of this is the "coat of many colors" to which a mysteriously romantic quality is attached. Why has this "coat of many colors" reiterated itself through a thousand puzzle interpretations yet remained a puzzle, like a bright square of embroidery appearing at a congress of international bankers? It is the dream-garment, materializing in consciousness at the very moment when 'reality' and 'dream' part company. Like all such signs it faces two ways. A sign of loss - parallel to the garments God makes for Adam and Eve, or the covering with which his two cautious sons cover the drunken Noah, or the hairy glove Jacob wears to defraud his father - yet at the same time a sign of love and a sign of luxury, "so light and delicate," say the rabbis, "it could be crushed and concealed in the closed palm of one hand." Rich colors for a spoiled son, his father's favorite.
We are approaching civilization as we know it. That is to say, recognizable family life as we know it. Joseph is the penultimate son born to a formerly barren wife in the book of Genesis. God has removed (asuf) my reproach, says beautiful Rachel, and may God add (yosef) another son to me. Joseph is the darling, a pretty boy, "fair of form and fair to look at." Those same words having been used to describe Rachel. Joseph is Rachel, somehow, his father's pet: the rabbis say he painted his eyes and walked with mincing step. Showing off the coat of many colors which old Jacob made him. Twirling, hugging himself. A young Hebrew Narcissus. No wonder his brothers hate him. No wonder they catch him in the field, strip him of his little coat and throw him into the pit, and sell him into Egypt, and rip the coat and dip it in goat's blood: exhibit A to show the father - do you recognize this coat, Dad? A torn veil, a bloody show, a lost innocence.
Joseph dreams - what? Ten sheaves will bow down to one sheaf. The sun and moon and eleven stars also bow to him. He runs to tell the brothers; no wonder they want to get rid of him, the intolerable brat, the A student - nobody has a problem interpreting dreams like this. Later when Potiphar's wife tries to seduce him he is the exemplary servant of his master, purer than the pure, so that she is enraged and rips his garment off. Claims he tried to rape her, that familiar tale of the insulted woman who fails to understand the purity of the pretty young man. Another veil gone, another false deflowering.
Now Joseph the tease goes to prison. But he comes out again. Potiphar likes him and puts him in charge, the jailor likes him and puts him in charge. Pretty young man makes good, pleases the bosses, gets the job, God makes his hand prosper in all things and he is also unfailingly respectful to his superiors .... No doubt with all sincerity, unlike the tale of the rabbi who insisted on saying the Sabbath prayer for the ruler with great ardor, explaining that one should always wish long life to the czar, since the next one was sure to be worse ...
Finally Pharaoh likes him very well and puts him in charge of the kingdom.
So the outsider/insider Joseph becomes Prime Minister, and not for the last time. He obtains this position of power and influence despite his background, and over the protests of certain well-placed gentlemen who argue that if you let one of them in you'll be drowned in a sea of them before you turn around. An accurate assessment, as it eventuates; but the truth is that Joseph has efficiency and integrity in his favor. Nobody catches him with his hand in the till. Moreover, consider his impressive capacity for assimilation: he has excellent manners, dresses well if a bit austerely, marries his old employer's daughter (Potiphar's daughter! so much for Potiphar's wife, that old she-bear). You would never take him for one of ... well, you know what I'm talking about ... if it were not for the slight accent, which many of the ladies in any case consider superlatively charming. Above all is his brilliance in an area people really care about. Dreams. What does my dream mean? What does my life mean? What will happen next? Oh, you'll be promoted. Oh, you'll be hanged. Oh, your kingdom will have seven fat years followed by seven years of famine so it would be a good idea for you to put someone competent in charge of the granaries. Who do you suppose that should be. No, don't thank me, thank the Holy One who lets me know these things, explains Joseph modestly.
Finally the day arrives for which we have all been waiting. Joseph's brothers come down to Egypt during the famine. They are here to buy grain. Everyone at home is on the verge of starvation. The officials send them with all the other petitioners to make their request of the Prime Minister, sitting in all his magisterial robes. Do they recognize this Prime Minister? No. Does he recognize them? What do you think. Does he tease them? What do you think. Torment them? What do you think. Heap grain on them, feast them, refuse to take their money, accuse them of theft, refuse to release them unless they bring their youngest brother Benjamin to court - while the old father at home laments that if he loses Benjamin, Rachel's only other son, it will bring down his gray hairs with sorrow to the grave - and when Joseph sees the boy Benjamin does he hide himself in an antechamber to weep? What do you think. In the end he reveals himself, and joyously restores the family unity. And morally as well as materially generous? The brothers are feeling guilty, and understandably anxious about Joseph's possible future behavior. So Joseph reassures them: you thought you were doing me harm, but you see it was all God's plan. By this time the family is greatly expanded, so full of begats that "all the souls that came out of the loins of Jacob were seventy souls," not to mention wives and servants, all of whom will now live happily ever after.
I have a family, you have a family. Some of our brothers are princes, some not so princely. And the children? They're well, they're in good health, they graduated college already, they're getting married? To have children is a blessing, sometimes not such a blessing. Vey iz mir, God willing, we should all be so lucky as Jacob, such a good son he had, such a smart boychik.
Nonetheless the coat of many colors materializes at the moment of loss. A symbol of something else. A symbol of symbolism. The material object evoking the maternal subject: matter for pride and arrogance on the part of the innocent showoff child, matter for the mutter on the part of his jealous brothers, patchwork of Israel's sensuous love for Rachel-Joseph, fabric for another kind of story, a new velvet moment.
Good-bye, good-bye to the family; when one adaptable brother can leave the backwoods - but we do not know they are the backwoods until he leaves, we thought 'home' was the world - for the big city, where he will become rich and powerful. Where his family will become his pathetic dependents and he their magnanimous protector. Does the mysterious bond of the family fail? No, but we see now that it might fail, it is susceptible to failure, the advent of the individual such as Joseph destroys the powerful biological balance of the mythic family. In the successions of brothers, Cain and Abel are bonded forever, Abraham and Lot are balanced, Isaac and Ishmael are balanced, Jacob and Esau are balanced - although one in each pair is the chosen link in God's chain, the brothers remain inhabitants of a shared world. But in the generation of Joseph and his brothers the filial bond becomes a matter of human choice. The brothers choose to reject it. Joseph chooses to restore it.
(Please feel free to use my limousine, boys. I'll send my tailor over in the morning. Charge it on my card. Listen, here's the key to the liquor cabinet. Just don't worry about a thing - you'll be looked after, your children also. What can be more precious to a man than his family. He unbends, he chokes back the tears, he embraces them. At the moment of intimacy he weeps unreservedly.)
The biological family belongs to dream-time and myth-space. The brothers, acting on personal resentment, break the magic circle. Joseph is ejected out of dream-time into the practical world of a complex society. A class structure. A wealthy household, keeping the books and overseeing the estate, sexual novelty surrounding him (which he rejects, but it must be educational), jail, the pharaonic court, political maneuvering, imperial economic policy. Clean as a whistle, pure as a lily, smelling like a desert rose, Joseph rises like a cork - from foreign slave to headman in three easy lessons. Nothing succeeds like success. But the secret of his success is that Joseph brings with him a piece of dream-time.
